The New Republic

The Senate has basically given up on passing a climate bill. So where does that leave us? Yesterday, I noted on Twitter that the action is going to shift to the states and federal agencies. Remember, the EPA is obligated to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and Lisa Jackson is moving ahead with those rules. READ MORE >>

Compare and contrast: On the same day that the climate bill quietly dies in the Senate, the Chinese government announces plans to put a price on carbon in the next five years. READ MORE >>

So the big winner of the climate-bill fiasco could turn out to be… T. Boone Pickens. That's right, the billionaire who financed the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in 2004. READ MORE >>

The odds of a climate bill passing this year look increasingly bleak. Harry Reid and John Kerry confirmed this afternoon that they are only going to release a very modest energy bill before the August recess. How modest? Here's Reid's (vague) description: READ MORE >>

Andrew Restuccia passes along an update on the ever-elusive energy bill. It looks like Harry Reid is going to introduce a very pared-back bill next week that will include: READ MORE >>

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For years, the coal industry's strategy for dealing with climate change has gone something like this: 1) Fight off caps on carbon pollution for as long as possible. 2) Convince politicians to throw gobs of money at fancy low-carbon technologies like carbon capture and sequestration. 3) Pray that those fancy technologies actually work. The strategy has succeeded so far. Seeing as how half the electricity in the United States comes from coal, there's never a shortage of members of Congress willing to do whatever the industry wants. READ MORE >>

Via The Hill, a research note from FBR Capital sums up everything you need to know about where the energy-bill talks stand: "Senate scheduled to debate something next week." Yup, something. No one knows what will be in the bill yet. READ MORE >>

Over at Foreign Policy, Joshua Keating writes about a little-known natural disaster—underground coal fires in northern China: READ MORE >>

BP is currently the oil company everyone loves to hate, but there was a time, not too long ago, when ExxonMobil attracted a lot more scorn—in part because it was funding so many different climate-change denier groups. (See Chris Mooney's old but excellent Mother Jones piece that followed the money trail.) Then, in 2007, the company announced it would quit donating to anti-science groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the bad press mostly went away. Until now, that is. READ MORE >>