This post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense. Also see his previous dispatch from Bali and background on the meetings.

As I prepare to send this account to New York by email, we know how it all ended.

But I had to suffer through 40 hours of nearly sleepless sturm, drang, chaos and emotional suspense to find out. I’ll take you through some of that, too.

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This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense.

Sex and the Socket - Hilarious video on why CFLs are better. View below, or click link for hi-res version.

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This post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense. Also see his previous dispatch from Bali

The ministers have arrived - environmental ministers, energy ministers, finance ministers, ministers ordinary and plenipotentiary, and ministers who will one day wind up in the penitentiary. They are driving to and fro in limos with police escorts, blaring their horns at those of us on bicycles.

What this means is that we are entering the last 72 hours of the conference. The nights are getting longer, and the strokes shorter.

But measured even against the background experience that large international conferences frequently undergo a moment of dark despair before dawn brings some sort of last-minute agreement, the last two nights of discord have been dismaying.

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This post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense. Click here for his previous dispatch from Bali.

In the second and final week of climate talks here in Bali, wisps and patches of a larger fabric are beginning to appear.

An informal non-group, with unofficial non-co-chairs from South Africa and Australia, has given birth semi-anonymously to a text which issued from an informal non-meeting and has been widely circulated as a non-paper. It addresses tentatively, with conflicting opinions on some key points, the major open issues facing this conference. These include the touchy questions of what the developing countries should be expected to do, and how to advance the talks on incorporating deforestation into the broader climate framework from which they were excluded a decade ago.

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This post is by Fred Krupp, President of Environmental Defense.

A federal judge in California today rebuked the auto industry's attempt to block California and 16 other states from setting tough new limits on global warming pollution from automobiles, calling these efforts "the very definition of folly."

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This post is by Nat Keohane, Director of Economic Policy and Analysis at Environmental Defense.

In his December 11 post on Grist, Ross Gelbspan argues that we've already passed the point of no return with global warming, and climate activists are full of "hollow optimism".

There's no doubt we're already seeing signs of global warming. In our Climate 411 blog, we post signs of it all the time (see here, here, here, and here, for example). But just because the boat has started to leak doesn't mean it can't still get much worse. Our most dangerous response to climate change is despair. Now, more than ever, we need to act.

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This post is by Jon A. Anda, President of the Environmental Markets Network at Environmental Defense. A version of this post was published in the Financial Times on December 4, 2007.

A November 28 column by John Kay in the Financial Times, "Climate Change: the (Groucho) Marxist approach", starts with a quote from Groucho Marx: "Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?" Groucho's position may be morally indefensible, Kay says, but "[t]he problem of weighting the present and the future equally is that there is a lot of future." From an economic standpoint, valuing future people equally would require unrealistically great sacrifices by those living today.

There's a problem with this argument. It's based on a rather totalitarian belief in net present value (NPV) as the means to evaluate policy - a simple calculation of the benefits of action (the cost of doing nothing) minus the costs of action. If a 5 percent discount rate applied to base-case cost and damage estimates yields a negative NPV for policy, does that mean we reject it?

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This post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense.

We are coming to the close of the first week of the Bali climate talks - spring training, you might say, before the major league coaches and star players arrive next week. These closing days of warm-up week were punctuated by several trumpet blasts coming in from overseas.

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This post is by Steve Cochran, National Climate Campaign Director at Environmental Defense.

Yesterday, with the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House passed legislation that will reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and promote energy efficiency. The bill is now in the Senate, where procedural votes are underway.

Speaker Pelosi has previously said that the energy bill passed yesterday by the House "will lay the groundwork for the Congress to move forward next year with comprehensive action to address climate change."

The Speaker is showing that she has the will - and the power - to produce real results in the House on issues important to the American people. We're pleased that she has pledged to use that same focus to pass a comprehensive climate bill in 2008.

This post is by Carol Andress, Economic Development Specialist at Environmental Defense.

Climate Vote 2007

This post is part of a series on the work of the Environmental Defense Action Fund to enact an effective climate law. You can help by writing to Congress.

Last night's committee passage of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (CSA) means that the bill now can be considered by the full Senate - an important step towards enacting national climate legislation. But for a bill to become law in this country it has to be passed by both the House and Senate, and the House is lagging behind. (See our previous post for more on the legislative process.)

So while we celebrate last night's Senate victory, we still have our work cut out for us in the House. The House Energy Commerce Committee has been tied up with the energy bill, and has not yet circulated a proposal on climate legislation. Now that a vote on the energy bill is imminent, it's time for House leaders to turn their attention.

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