The Paradise Papers are a wake-up call: now Congress must act on tax havens
Appleby Global Group Services Limited is a very old law firm with a very old mission – helping wealthy people and corporations avoid scrutiny. Beginning on Sunday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists began releasing findings from a trove of 13.4m documents from Appleby and its subsidiaries. The media has dubbed these the “Paradise Papers”, […]
The Auto Industry Needs To Keep Its Word On Fuel Economy Standards
In 2012, the major automakers told Americans that they had agreed with the Obama administration on new fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks. Under this agreement, which the automakers enthusiastically endorsed at the time, vehicles will average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, or CAFE standard, will reduce U.S. oil consumption […]
Congress and Climate Change
Re “It’s Not Too Late to Learn From Our Mistakes,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, Sept. 3): The answer to why Congress doesn’t act on climate change is simple political hydraulics. The Supreme Court let unlimited money into politics. The fossil fuel industry has unlimited money and, according to the International Monetary Fund, a multi-hundred-billion-dollar subsidy to protect. […]
Maximizing value
Many may think us an unlikely pair – Republican Representative from Nebraska, in the heartland of America, and a progressive Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, the Ocean State. However, we have come together as Co-Chairs in the United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus because we share a conviction that good natural resource management is fundamental […]
Business must lobby Congress in order to get action on climate change
President Trump has decided to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change — a decision that may be one of the worst foreign policy blunders in our nation’s history. There is no denying the mounting threat of climate change. We observe rising seas, warming global temperatures, and melting glaciers and ice sheets. Yet the […]
Sea level rise could fragment Rhode Island’s coastline
Early explorers found Rhode Island’s coastline looking much like it does today. Before then, it looked much the same for centuries to the Narragansetts and Wampanoags who lived here. That’s going to change. While the Industrial Revolution that began in Rhode Island in the eighteenth century brought our nation great wealth, it also created manmade […]
Unraveling Obama’s climate legacy may not be as easy as Trump thinks
President Trump recently fired off an executive order aiming to wipe out many Obama administration climate change measures, directing federal agencies to take or unwind various actions. Typical for this insider-friendly administration, it’s a polluter’s wish list. As recently as 2009, Donald Trump and his children signed onto a full-page New York Times advertisement urging climate action, because the […]
Unprecedented and Unprincipled Adversary
America’s universities are home, more than any place else in our country, to the enterprise of science. That has been an important and proud role for our great universities, and it has produced wonderful discoveries. Besides providing technical progress, science gives our society its headlights, warning us of oncoming hazards. As the pace of change […]
Closing the Saltwater Gap
To put it bluntly, our oceans are in peril. From the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic ice sheet to remote beaches on Midway Atoll in the middle of the Pacific, there is no longer a place in our oceans untouched by the hand of man. A few numbers quantify the harm humans […]
An Open Letter To President-Elect Donald J. Trump
This is an open letter to President-elect Trump. I want you to know that America expects better of you as president than what it saw in the campaign you ran. You are now to be our president, and that brings new responsibilities. I hope you feel the call of history to live up to them. […]