Changing Climate, Stagnant Politics

So, we haven't posted in a while, which of course means that nothing important happened in the past nine days.

Except the brief life of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. The act, which I first heard about on Monday, would have (1) created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases--in my opinion, the best way to limit such pollution--and (2) allowed states to have tougher environmental regulations than the federal government, which California tried to do, but the Bush Administration's EPA denied California this right last December.

And now the bill has been filibustered to death. The supporters of the bill were 12 votes shy of the 60 necessary to invoke cloture and end debate. (Both Sens. Levin and Stabenow voted for cloture.) Senators will now wait until next year, when they will have a more supportive president and hopefully a more favorable legislature, until they try again.

Also on the climate change front, the NASA inspector general released a report stating that "political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years." Shock.

On a lighter note, there's a wolverine in Michigan's thumb!

The '01E Wolverine, North Campus, U-M, munching on the head of an Easter Bunny. (4/5/08)