Progressive lawmakers Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) teamed up on Thursday to introduce legislation designed to stop subsidies to the oil, coal and natural gas industries, preserving an estimated $110 billion over the next ten years. [Huffington Post]
The Australian National University has released a series of abusive and threatening emails which were sent to its climate change scientists. [ABC News]
Of a possible $1.4 billion dollars in proposed spending cuts in the Departments of Commerce and Justice for 2013, the U.S. House Representatives voted to approve none of them. None of them except a piddly $542,000 for a NOAA climate website. [Washington Post]
According to a peer-reviewed paper James Hansen has submitted to a leading scientific journal and made available to Time.com prior to publication, scientists can now state “with a high degree of confidence” that some extremely high temperatures are in fact caused by global warming, simply because they occur much more frequently than they used to. [Time]
In California, May typically marks the beginning of a warm and dry summer season. This year, however, things are different. Not only has it been warm and dry for the past couple weeks; it’s been warm and dry for months. [Climate Central]
A proposal by California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey to change the way that “net metering” is calculated is the latest skirmish in the war between the state’s largest utilities and the fast-growing rooftop solar industry. [Mercury News]
They seldom meet on the cricket or football fields, but the world’s small island developing states are informally competing with each other to be the first to ditch fossil fuels and embrace clean energy. [Guardian]
Ottawa has waged a concerted lobbying campaign against Brussels’ proposal to rate the carbon content of tar sands. An examination of hundreds of pages of documents obtained under access to information legislation in both Brussels and Ottawa, some dating back to 2009, as well as interviews with leading officials in both Canada and Europe show just how extensive that effort has been. [Reuters]