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Climate and Clean Energy
Permitting Reform Splits the Left Between Builders and Protectors Why the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting bill divided climate advocates, what faster reviews would gain and risk, and how a deal could serve both clean power and frontline towns. The Grain Belt Express and the Fifteen-Year Fight to Build One Power Line The story of a Kansas-to-Indiana power line proposed around 2010, the landowners and states that fought over it, and what its canceled federal loan guarantee says about building anything. Eunice Foote and the 1856 Experiment That Found the Greenhouse Effect In 1856 an amateur scientist from upstate New York showed that carbon dioxide traps heat. Her paper was read aloud by a man, credited to others and forgotten for 150 years. EV Subsidies and the Evidence From Norway to California Norway sells almost nothing but electric cars now. Did tax breaks, chargers or fuel prices do the work, and what does the evidence mean for American buyers after 2025? How the Inflation Reduction Act Became the Biggest US Climate Law How a bill declared dead in late 2021 passed the Senate on a tie-breaking vote in August 2022, and what its tax credits, grants and loans were built to do. How the Paris Agreement Actually Works, From the Gavel at Le Bourget Why the Paris climate deal runs on national pledges, a five-year ratchet and public scrutiny instead of penalties, and what that design can and cannot do. James Hansen's Hot June Day Before the Senate in 1988 On June 23, 1988, a NASA scientist told senators global warming had begun. Here is what that hearing changed, what Washington did and failed to do next, and why it took decades. Leaving Paris Twice and What the US Withdrawals Changed The United States has quit the Paris climate deal twice. Here is the case that states, cities and markets limit how much a presidential walkout can actually do. The 1973 Oil Embargo and the Fuel Economy Rules It Produced How the gas lines of 1973 led Congress to write the first federal fuel economy standards in 1975, why they stalled for decades, and what that history says about today's car rules. The 95-0 Byrd-Hagel Vote That Doomed Kyoto in the Senate In July 1997 the Senate voted 95-0 against any climate treaty that bound only rich nations. How that vote sank Kyoto and shaped every US climate agreement since, including Paris. The Keeling Curve, Measured on Top of Mauna Loa Since 1958 How a young chemist's obsession with measuring carbon dioxide precisely, on a Hawaiian volcano starting in 1958, became the single most important record of a warming world. The Montreal Protocol, the Treaty That Began to Mend the Ozone Hole How a 1987 treaty backed by the Reagan administration and ratified without dissent by the Senate set the ozone layer on the path to recovery, and what climate diplomacy can borrow from it.