Everyone will have to pay more for the effects of climate change than we would have to pay to prevent climate change. This is the alarming message revealed in the American Security Project's 50 new reports, "Pay Now, Pay Later" (PNPL), revealing the costs of unchecked climate change. Why 50 reports? Because every single state in the U.S. will have to pay for its own specific problems. PNPL shows how tourism, agriculture, and the defense industry will all be hurt by climate change. "The exciting thing for me about this report is it's the first time I have seen a reasoned breakdown, state by state, as to the cost of doing nothing relative to climate change," former EPA administrator and former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman said (Huffington Post, 4/20/11).

Experts say the first wave of electric vehicles (EVs) is upon us and municipalities across the continent are feverishly adding charging stations, expanding the number of EVs in municipal fleets, and speeding up the permitting required for installation of home chargers. EV technology is finally catching up to gas-powered standards as some vehicles can travel up to 300 miles on a single charge and high-performance models can go from 0 to 60 mph in under four seconds. Meanwhile consumer demand far exceeds supplies as EV manufacturers remain cautious despite long wait lists (Sustainable City Network, 4/27/11).

What Americans believe about climate change depends almost entirely on their political affiliation and not their scientific understanding, according to a new national study. Democrats who claim knowledge of the issue appear to be in firm agreement with the nation's leading scientific organizations - that human activity and greenhouse gas emissions have become the main drivers behind an accelerating global climate shift. But Republicans don't buy it. While most do agree that the climate has begun to change, they mostly blame the phenomenon on natural forces that lie beyond human control. One of the most partisan divides found anywhere in the country appeared at the northern end of the Southeast Alaska panhandle (Alaska Dispatch, 4/25/11).

California officials announced that the state will expand its new carbon-trading program to three Canadian provinces, British Columbia, Quebec, and Ontario. The program is aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial plants and transportation fuel, allowing companies to buy and sell emissions permits among themselves to cut their costs. Quebec is expected to join the program when it is launched this January, with British Columbia and Ontario joining within a year, creating the largest regional cap-and-trade system in North America. Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon, Utah, and Montana were originally part of the initiative but withdrew (LA Times, 4/13/11).

The Department of Agriculture will soon be helping gasoline stations install new pumps that can dispense fuel with higher ethanol content, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said. The USDA will soon offer grants and loan guarantees for the installation of costly new "blender pumps" so drivers can purchase fuel with a higher ratio of corn-based ethanol. Most gasoline sold in the U.S. is 10% ethanol, but a growing fleet of flexible-fuel vehicles can run on an 85%-ethanol blend, or E85. However, there are fewer pumps available to dispense it. The USDA goal is to increase the number of flexible-fuel pumps across the nation by 10,000 over the next five years, in accordance with President Barack Obama's pledge to cut U.S. dependency on foreign oil by one-third by 2025 (The Wall Street Journal, 4/9/11).

Climate change has become a household term in America, but that doesn't mean most people grasp the science behind it. The Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) hopes to plug the gap. Founded in 2009, the California nonprofit visits high schools across the country to give assembly presentations on climate change. Any teacher can request an appearance. The group has reached nearly 750,000 students in 1,300 schools. "[It's the] Superbowl experience of climate," ACE's head of marketing told Solve Climate News. "We try to present something that stands out and energizes [students] around science, and to find creative ways to solve [climate change]" (Solve Climate News, 4/11/11).

The U.S. Senate knocked down a series of attempts to kneecap the Obama administration's climate policies, but the White House isn't out of the woods yet. The U.S. Senate rejected legislation proposed by Sen. McConnell (R-KY) that would strip the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The amendment, which was attached to an unrelated small business bill, received 50 votes but needed 60 votes to pass. The Senate also rejected three more restrictive EPA amendments that were offered to the small-business bill. These votes sends a strong signal that the Senate won't endorse efforts to roll back the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act (Politico, 4/6/11).

The American Forest and Paper Association (AFPA) announced a new strategy called "Better Practices, Better Planet 2020", that states they will increase the paper recycling rate to over 70 percent and pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent before the year 2020. Georgia-Pacific, one of the world's largest pulp and paper companies, announced on March 29 that they also will participate in AFPA's "Better Practices, Better Planet 2020" initiative (Georgia-Pacific News, 3/29/01).

Fast food chain KFC announced they would no longer fry their chicken in palm oil, in an effort to reduce climate change and heart disease. KFC stated, "The global expansion of the palm oil industry has been a contributor to the destruction of tropical rainforests and peat lands to make way for palm oil plantations, which has inadvertently caused large amounts of greenhouse gases [to be] pushed into the atmosphere." The company will instead begin to use a form of rapeseed oil to fry their chicken (The Independent, 4/7/11).

Today, solar panels might just outnumber cowboys in rural Pendleton. The cowboy town is blazing an unlikely renewable energy trail, offering no-interest loans to spark interest in solar power and a group-buy philosophy to get better prices. More than 50 residents installed systems last year, and the program was expanded to more residents and to include businesses this year. "We're a Western community, and we're proud of that, but we're also in the 21st century," the city manager said (AP, 4/9/11).

The vice-director of the climate change department at the National Development and Reform Commission announced that China will launch pilot emissions trading programs in the cities of Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Tianjin and the provinces of Hubei and Guangdong before 2013, as well as set up a nationwide trading platform by 2015. China has pledged to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 40-45 percent by 2020, compared to 2005 levels. The government plans to cut energy intensity by 16 percent and carbon intensity by 17 percent in the 2011-2015 period to meet this goal (Reuters, 4/11/11).

It's difficult to imagine how a guy who spends most of his time looking at endless columns of temperature records became a "fucking terrorist," "killer," or "one-world-government socialist." Mann and his colleagues became a target for climate change skeptics after constructing a chart that plotted historical climate data, spanning from 1000 to 1980. "Climate science has basically been at the receiving end of the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known - that's the bottom line," Mann said (Mother Jones, 4/21/11).

For decades, scientists have warned that humans may be ushering in a sixth mass extinction, and recently a group of scientists tested the hypothesis. They found that the current rate of extinctions is far above normal. If endangered species continue to disappear, we will indeed experience a sixth extinction over just the next few centuries or millennia. The scientists expect that as the planet's temperature rises, global warming will push more and more species toward extinction. "The current rate and magnitude of climate change are faster and more severe than many species have experienced in their evolutionary history," said the lead author of the study (New York Times, 4/4/11).

Increased tourism is threatening to exacerbate coastline erosion and loss of wetlands in poorer countries already suffering from global warming hazards. But a rising number of eco-conscious travelers are forcing some in the tourist industry to change their ways. In popular ecotourism hotspots like Belize, where tourism accounts for 20 percent of the economy, the issue of greener tourism has become so prominent that a state policy is underway (Solve Climate News, 4/12/11).