Comments Marianne Lavelle has made

Phil's own words

There was no more articulate spokesman for climate concern than Phil Clapp. I've thought often of this since hearing the terrible news yesterday, so I thought I'd share some of his best quotes from my many interviews with him when I was energy writer at U.S. News and World Report:

On the 2007 kickoff of U.N. negotiations to replace the Kyoto treaty at Bali: "The world has one shot at getting an effective mechanism in place, and this is it. The future of millions of people and the climate hinge on this."

On the money being poured into Canadian oil sands, the efforts to exploit the oil shale of Colorado and elsewhere in the West, and the proposals for coal-to-liquid projects: "We're fundamentally scraping the bottom of the oil barrel. Every dollar we put into recovering more oil weds our economy more and more firmly to oil as an energy resource and actually makes us more dependent on the Middle East."

On the reasons behind the U.S. energy stalemate: "Energy is the most special-interest-driven field that the federal government wrestles with. The U.S. has been absolutely paralyzed on energy policy because of the power of coal, oil, auto, and utility industries on the Republican side and [unions] on the Democratic side."

And my personal favorite, from my notebook though it somehow never made it into a published story, on policymakers who say that a technology breakthrough is needed to address climate: "For every administration, not just this one, "technology" has always been another way to say, "mañana."

Marianne Lavelle, energy and climate writer, The Center for Public Integrity http://www.publicintegrity.org