Jennifer Pinkowski's articles

Bill Fraser’s decades-long research on the impact of climate change on the Antarctic Peninsula's decreasingly icy ecosystem—and, most famously, its tuxedoed inhabitants—is the subject of a new book.
 
Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica (Henry Holt and Co., $26) details the five months Yale Environment 360 senior editor and author Fen Montaigne (Reeling in Russia) spent in Antarctica with the ecologist studying thousands of Adélie penguins during their breeding season.

“It’s the tale of how Fraser came to believe—and I think it’s widely accepted now—that warming is the main cause behind the drop in the penguin populations,” Montaigne told SolveClimate News.

California voters defended their landmark climate law by rejecting Proposition 23 yesterday, ending questions over whether the state's 2006 legislation aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions would be suspended until the state unemployment rate fell by more than half.

While election results in the rest of the nation make the outlook for federal climate legislation dim, yesterday's vote in California solidifies the position of the state as the country's bastion of the clean energy economy, whose outsized GDP will unavoidably influence policy and commerce across the nation as its climate law gets implemented.

Some 61 percent of voters rejected Prop. 23. While pre-election polls indicated they were likely to turn down the controversial ballot measure, which was largely funded by out-of-state oil interests, the overwhelming defeat has advocates thrilled.

“It’s clearly a strong victory for clean energy in the face of scare tactics in a weak economy,” said Steven Maviglio, a spokesperson for No on 23, the coalition that campaigned heavily against the referendum. The defeat, Maviglio told SolveClimate News, indicates voters believe California can have both “a strong economy and a clean environment.”

Yesterday outside Koch Industries’ headquarters in Wichita, Kan., in front of local media, a California college student, ex-Marine and student leader got on a cell phone and called CEO Charles Koch.

“This is Joel Francis,” he told Koch’s secretary. “He knows who I am.”

If that’s true, it’s because the national media does as well, thanks to a YouTube video released on Oct. 20 in which Francis, a 31-year-old senior and former student president at California State University-Los Angeles, challenges Charles Koch to a debate: “I say, if you are going to try to hurt the economy in a state that you don’t even live in, that you ought to have the courage to explain yourself in person."

In the lull between United Nations climate talks in Tianjin, China, and Cancun, Mexico, another international body is hosting a cross-border dispute over energy and the environment: the World Trade Organization. That’s because in one Canadian province, clean energy is replacing coal, and some foreign governments say they’re entitled to a piece of the clean energy action.

Since Oct. 1, in Ontario four more coal units have been shuttered, and the world’s largest solar PV farm began production. It’s all part of the province’s aggressive plan to completely eliminate coal-fired power plants, which provide about 20 percent of its energy production, by 2014. Since the Liberal government of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty came into power in 2003, coal use in the province is down 70 percent, while 8,000 megawatts of cleaner electricity have been added, according to the province’s Ministry of Energy.

But countries that lead the world in clean-energy R&D, policy and manufacture aren’t exactly embracing these successes. Japan, the United States and the European Union say Ontario’s green energy policies violate international trade agreements because of local requirements, and they’ve taken their case to the Geneva-based body that handles such disputes.