Don’t bet on it. Sure, this AP story about the 2010 global emissions spike is quite the shocker. But as I discuss at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, it should not be surprising. And while the news may hang over the upcoming COP talks in South Africa, it won’t change the near…Continue Reading…
In his 2010 book, The Climate Fix, Roger Pielke Jr. writes: The view that decarbonization of the global economy is a political problem and not a technological problem has been strongly influenced by a 2004 analysis by two Princeton researchers, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, that was published in Science. The analysis is often referred…Continue Reading…
This one is from the left, and it was laid out last week by Bill McKibben in a Washington Post op-ed, in advance of the climate protests now underway in Washington DC: The issue is simple: We want the president to block construction of Keystone XL, a pipeline that would carry oil from the tar sands…Continue Reading…
At the NYT Green blog, Justin Gillis writes (my emphasis): Climate scientists have long called for steps to limit the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and they are growing more and more worried about the slow pace of action. Yet their sense of urgency has not permeated society at large, and it certainly does…Continue Reading…
Last week, this provocative interview with Sir David King, who the Guardian calls “one of the most respected figures in climate change policy,” seemed to register not more than a blip. That’s too bad, because here’s some of what he said: I can’t see the Kyoto protocol making any headway – there are enough blocks…Continue Reading…
An intellectually bankrupt, marginalized social movement with an expired shelf life is at a crossroads. (Metaphor mix alert!) On Saturday, a Guardian article asked: Has the green movement lost its way? True, we have heard this tune before. This time, however, there is mounting evidence that more charter members of the club are at last recognizing that…Continue Reading…
Is Mark Lynas, the author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, downgrading global warming in his hiearchy of environmental concerns? In a recent post, he writes that biodiversity may well qualify as a more important planetary boundary even than climate change itself. By way of reminder, the “planetary boundary” concept was laid…Continue Reading…
So Mitt Romney is the latest high profile Republican to believe that global warming is real. With apologies to Buffalo Springfield, There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. Indeed. As New York Magazine notes: Denying that human activity is making the Earth warmer, despite the opinion of people who spend their lives studying these…Continue Reading…
Michael Levi at his Council on Foreign Relations blog has an interesting take on a recent decision by New Jersey’s Governor: People who care about climate change are understandably upset with Chris Christie’s announcement that he’s pulling New Jersey out of the Regional Greeenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first-of-a-kind cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide emissions in…Continue Reading…
I’m confused. We have this news: Worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels reached a record 30.6 billion metric tons in 2010, an international energy group reports. And this admission: The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius ““ which scientists say is the threshold for potentially…Continue Reading…