The third installment of this year’s series of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes’ reports is due out Friday. Each successive report becomes more and more politicized, with the upshot that they are less and less valid as scientific pronouncements. China is the heavy in the effort to water down and distort the findings, […]
Read more...Larry Summers, in a Financial Times comment “We need to bring climate idealism down to earth“, takes up “the best is the enemy of the good” theme as it applies to global warming. He argues that the Kyoto accords haven’t accomplished much because neither the targets nor the penalties are binding, that carbon markets run […]
Read more...The Financial Times, in a series of articles published today, probes the workings of the carbon trading business, and uncovers widespread fraud: buyers paying for reductions that don’t occur, organizations extracting large carbon reduction payments for programs they were going to implement regardless, clueless or complicit brokers, offset programs that are shams. We have been […]
Read more...Count on the Financial Times to make a clear, compelling argument. From its editorial “CO2 needs a price but taxes are the best way to set it:“ The Kyoto protocol to fight climate change expires in 2012. The shape of a successor treaty is still in doubt, but one aspect seems certain: carbon trading will […]
Read more...The Financial Times has managed to be too polite. A more accurate title for this story would be “United States Again Refuses to Commit to Anything Regarding Global Warming.” Now this continuation of the US head-in-the-sand posture might be fine if the Administration hadn’t raised expectations by agreeing to a climate change summit. So its […]
Read more...Now and again, the press has reported on the disappearance of large numbers of bees, and the potentially dire implications, since a large proportion of US agricultural pollination depends on the efforts of bees brought in by beekeepers. Nattering Naybob gave us a disheartening reminder as well as a bit of useful background, which inspired […]
Read more...Usually I worry about appearing unduly Financial Times-centric; today, it’s the BBC that gets prominent billing. It looks like American’s preference for the easy way out won’t serve it very well. We reported earlier that Detroit’s enthusiasm for ethanol (so-called E85, which is 85% ethanol, 15% gas) as a way to reduce carbon emissions was […]
Read more...If you want to get a look at what the future might look like, consider Australia. A mere 3 years ago, its CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) published the results of a ten-year study, a model of the physical inputs and outputs of the country. One of its conclusions was that it would […]
Read more...Now and again, the press has reported on the disappearance of large numbers of bees, and the potentially dire implications, since a large proportion of US agricultural pollination depends on the efforts of bees brought in by beekeepers. Nattering Naybob gave us a disheartening reminder as well as a bit of useful background, which inspired […]
Read more...I am normally loath to publish someone else’s post more or less in its entirety, but Brad DeLong’s discussion of some of the more persuasive arguments for investing to arrest global warming is first rate. (And candidly, he references an article by Martin Weitzmen on the Stern Review, the UK report that was the first […]
Read more...A front page story in today’s Financial Times, “Foreign carmakers doubt Detroit’s ethanol,” report on a split of opinon within the auto industry as to which technology to pursue to reduce carbon emissions. US automakers are keenly promoting E85, which is a mixture of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline; foreign companies are investing in diesel, […]
Read more...A story on the BBC website described the results of the latest Greenpeace assessment of the “eco-friendliness” of 14 electronics firms. What is interesting is that this sort of report, which used to be a media blip at best, now appears to motivate behavior, at least among some companies. Lenovo, which came out on top […]
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