I saw an old map recently that showed that parts of the National Mall here in Washington were once a tidal marsh attached to the Potomac River. I like to imagine places as they were before people plowed them up, filled them in, built cities on them. That marsh must have been beautiful, with great [...]

The Nature Conservancy submitted written testimony this week to a hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources on HR 3534, The Consolidated Land, Energy and Aquatic Resources Act of 2009.  The hearing was held in the committee room along one of the long corridors of the Longworth House Office building.  Secretary of Interior Ken [...]

Believe it or not, there are environmental issues other than climate change on the minds — and agendas of — of lawmakers and regulators in Washington.
As a commentator for the National Journal Energy and Environment Expert Blog, I was recently asked to weigh in on some of the “back burner issues” currently working through Congress [...]

Here in Washington, where I work on environmental policy for The Nature Conservancy, politics often passes for actual information about the outside world.
Blogs, e-newsletters, and print dailies present a continuing stream of commentary on political alignment and conflict over issues. The energy and climate change legislation now being taken up by the U.S. Senate is [...]

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a late-night, long distance phone conversation with my daughter, Becky, and her fear that climate change might so disrupt human communities around the world that it would threaten all of our security.
Now, following weeks of working on climate and energy legislation in Washington, I was taking a [...]

On May 15, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released the text of the American Clean Energy and Security Bill, which will go to markup by the committee next week.  With the determined leadership of Congressman John Dingell of Michigan and others, the bill includes dedicated funding to, in the language of the bill:
Use all [...]

Continuing our series of blog posts on the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation debate, senior policy advisor Tom Cassidy explains the nuances of domestic adaptation funding in the proposed bill.
One of the Conservancy’s principal climate policy objectives — besides the fundamental necessity of imposing sharp reductions on carbon emissions — is to create a dedicated [...]

For the past month or so, my Nature Conservancy colleagues in U.S. government relations and I have been working hard on energy and climate legislation, as have a lot of other folks in the environmental community.
As we work through the details of this process, I sometimes worry that we are not conveying a clear and [...]

Continuing our coverage of the Waxman-Markey bill hearings on Capitol Hill, Jeff Fiedler, the Conservancy’s senior policy advisor for climate and forests, has the following to say about the debate – or lack thereof – over the proposed legislation’s forest carbon provisions:
Like many climate junkies, I’ve been following this week’s hearings on the American [...]

As Congress returns to Washington this week, climate change legislation is rising to the top of their agenda. Eric Haxthausen, the Conservancy’s director of U.S. Climate policy offers this assessment of the coming weeks:
We’re entering an eventful and exciting period for U.S. climate change policy.  On Friday, the EPA released their long-awaited “endangerment finding” [...]