The Pew Charitable Trust’s fourth annual report on “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?” doesn’t give the United States much to celebrate on this Earth Day. The report, released last week, finds that the United States is no longer the global leader in renewable energy investment. China is. From 2011 to 2012, China attracted $65.1 [...]

The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a new Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative. This initiative is about both manufacturing clean energy products and manufacturing using advanced techniques to drive energy efficiency. Both will help make American companies more competitive in the world economy. At the Energy Blog, David Danielson, Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and [...]

Congress and the media paid homage to the agenda of the billionaires and Wall Street, with the manufactured “fiscal cliff” PR campaign frenzy that just ended. So now can we get back to the country’s priorities? Can we talk about jobs now?

The public looked at the stories about Solyndra and Sensata and voted. They voted for clean energy jobs IN the US, not for vulture capitalism that ships our jobs and industries OUT of the US. They voted to act as a united country instead of a leaving everyone on their own, in it only for [...]

So, let’s get this straight: A Republican President is re-elected in 2004 with 284 electoral votes, and the pundits tell us he has the “political capital” to push an extreme right-wing mandate. A Democratic President gets re-elected in 2012 with 303 electoral votes, and they’re telling us he needs to “unite a divided country.” Nonsense. [...]

Mossville, Louisiana is an historic African American community in the southwest part of the state. Like too many similar communities around the country, it is surrounded by 14 industrial facilities that release millions of pounds of toxic chemicals annually. Mossville residents point to studies by governmental and private sources linking the pollution from these facilities [...]

Last week President Obama used a strategy that should become an important part of his leadership going forward. On February 18, he issued an executive order creating a bipartisan commission on addressing the budget deficit, after the Senate failed to enact legislation that would have done so. Whatever one thinks of the commission’s mission or [...]

My Fellow Americans: I speak to you tonight at a crucial moment in our nation’s history. When you elected me president almost one year ago, you voted in favor of hope, and in favor of change. You voted for the idea that we are all in it together, and that we share a common responsibility [...]

Article 1 of the International Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment provides, in simple terms, that “torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or [...]

By an overwhelming bipartisan margin, Congress has passed what sponsors are calling the first civil rights act of the 21st century: the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. The Act, which President Bush is expected to sign, prohibits employers and insurance companies from denying people jobs, benefits, or health coverage because of their genetic make-up. Past attempts [...]