A perturbed Joshua Green at The Atlantic pushes back at Brad DeLong. Green’s rejoinder seems convincing to me, except for this line: Unlike, say, health care reform, climate issues generally break down by geographic region rather than by party. That’s too sweeping a statement to make, especially with respect to specific legislation like the dead…Continue Reading…
In 2008, it was shaped by Copenhagen and the proposed U.S. congressional cap & trade legislation. That makes sense, since major political events (especially protracted ones) tend to propel narratives. (Ordinarily, climate science drives the global warming narrative, but 2008 was akin to a presidential election year for climate change.) Sure there were new public…Continue Reading…
David Roberts is first out of the box to note the obvious, after reading this story in today’s Times, which quotes Republican Lindsey Graham: Realistically, the cap-and-trade bills in the House and the Senate are going nowhere. They’re not business-friendly enough, and they don’t lead to meaningful energy independence. Graham then drives the nail in…Continue Reading…
Looks like there’s an important new voice in the climate change debate. As Roger Pielke Jr. notes, Bill Gates recently offered some refreshing thoughts on climate policy, starting with this: Conservation and behavior change alone will not get us to the dramatically lower levels of Co2 emissions needed to make a real difference. We need…Continue Reading…
And you thought the the whole cap-and-trade debate surrounding the U.S. climate bill was already hopelessly politicized. What’s that, you’ve become a bit numbed to it all? How about we throw in a juicy free speech angle to spice things up a bit. Remember those two EPA lawyers that wrote a critical op-ed of cap-and-trade…Continue Reading…
If you are honest about the proposed climate change legislation in Congress, you have to be asking yourself this too: It’s such a colossal compromise from a scientific point of view that one wonders why industry is mobilizing elaborate and dishonest astroturf campaigns against it.
The nascent field of environmental security better be ready for prime time, because this front-page NYT story on Sunday is sure to inject the national security/climate change nexus into the public debate. It’ll be interesting to see how the leading environmental security advocates respond to John Broder’s NYT article. (Keep an eye here and here.)…Continue Reading…
Play along with me for a minute. Let’s say this economist from the London School of Economics is right when he asserts: The American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009 is worse than nothing: it is a con and a fraud. It pretends to be a vehicle for reductions in CO2E emissions. In…Continue Reading…
Over at Foreign Policy, Daniel Drezner offers a tutorial on international relations theory as it applies to international climate change negotiations: China has supplanted America as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. From an economic perspective, we are witnessing a transition from a bipolar world (the US + EU) to a multipolar world (OECD +…Continue Reading…
As the mind-numbing debate over Waxman-Markey grinds on, we should be thankful for the unintended entertainment provided by Joe Romm’s rants and contortionist logic. Upset that some critics have accused him of “cheerleading” the WM bill, Romm is now flailing away, lashing out in typical, unseemly asides at all his usual bogeymen. More bizzarely, Romm…Continue Reading…