Posts Under ‘climate policy’ Category

Shale Gas: Game Changer = Planet Breaker?

With stories such as this and this becoming more common, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone would show why energy security is no longer a winning issue for climate change advocates. Today, Michael Lind makes the case in Salon: As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in…Continue Reading…

Why U.S. Climate Policy is Radioactive

Below is a guest post from Jonathan Gilligan, an associate professor in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Vanderbilt University. He is also the associate director of Vanderbilt’s Climate Change Research Network. Gilligan works at “the intersection of science, ethics, and public policy with a focus on the ways in which scientific knowledge and…Continue Reading…

Climate Bait

Michael Levi sounds almost bemused as he’s filleting the authors of this argument for a carbon tax: These are very smart guys. The puzzle for me, then, is why they believe what they’ve written. I can’t help but think that there’s a case of climate change myopia at work. A big slice of the political spectrum…Continue Reading…

The Margin of Victory for Climate Legislation

So it’s been interesting to read Matthew Nisbet’s Powershift report alongside the Spring issue of Sociological Quarterly, which contains a series of themed essays in a special section called, “Symposium on the Politics of Climate Change.” I’ll be discussing one of the pieces at length in a post that will go up tomorrow at the…Continue Reading…

Simplifying the Climate Debate

Can we all agree on this statement from Penn State geologist Richard Alley? I think it’s important to say that the interaction between radiation and gases in the air is not red or blue. It’s not Republican or Democrat, or libertarian or anything else. It’s physics. That’s from an interview that Alley does with the…Continue Reading…

Congressional Climate Chum

Via Judith Curry, I see  there is an announcement for a new round of Capitol Hill-sponsored theatrics. The scheduled hearing is titled: Climate Change: Examining the processes used to create science and policy That’s going to be quite a show, given the deliberate bundling of science and policy. Roger Pielke Jr. should be able to…Continue Reading…

A Climate Stalemate

I suppose this story qualifies as news, in the technical sense: A legally binding accord to combat climate change “is not on the cards” at a December summit, because developing countries such as China, Brazil and India won’t commit to it, according to U.S. negotiator Todd Stern. What follows sounds more like fantasy: With developing…Continue Reading…

When Up is Down in Romm World

Huh? Is Joe Romm trying hard to convince himself that he’s not swimming against the current? If truth serum existed, and you gave it to Romm just before he sat down to write this post, you can be sure it would have turned out differently. Even one of Romm’s fiercest loyalists concedes the obvious (at…Continue Reading…

The Lines are Being Drawn

Joe Romm is highlighting this extraordinary assertion from Robert Brulle, a prominent academic who writes often about environmental affairs: By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action. This broadside follows on the heels of the State…Continue Reading…

The Bipartisan Climate Project

The overwhelming consensus is that President Obama hit all the right notes in his Tucson speech earlier this week. I know I was moved and inspired by it. On the one hand the President said, “let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not,” but…Continue Reading…