China and to a lesser degree India have been forcefully asserting the right to pollute as much per capita as the US in the pursuit of economic development. However, the signs of climate change are already sufficiently advanced in their countries that, despite the combattive posturing, officials recognize that these countries too will have to […]
Read more...Environmentalists have been cheering that, to win approval of the proposed leveraged buyout of Texas utility TXU Corp., acquirers KKR, Texas Pacific Group, and Goldman Sachs have agreed to drop plans to build 8 of 11 coal-fired electricity plants that TXU had aggressively pursued. According to a story in CNN Money, “Green Groups Strut Their […]
Read more...An article by Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books, “Warning on Warming,” gives background on the process that led to the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, provides a precis of the report issued this February, and discusses the current political state of play. McKibben stresses that most media stories […]
Read more...Paul Krugman, in his New York Times op-ed column, “Colorless Green Ideas,” uses a surprising example to illustrate the point that energy conservation need not come at the expense of growth. It’s a widely-held, damaging belief that cutting energy consumption and other carbon emission reduction strategies are a zero sum game, that the money spent […]
Read more...An interesting story by David Leonhardt in the New York Times, “Amid Ivy, a Battle About the Climate,” on a bit of dueling among economists about the Stern Report. By way of background, the Stern Report was prepared by Sir Nicholas Stern for the UK government, and was the first attempt by an economist to […]
Read more...Australian Prime Minister John Howard is beginning to sound green. He has put forward a program to spend A$10 billion to conserve water in the face of a multi-year, no-end-in-sight drought, and now has announced a plan to phase out the traditional, highly inefficient incandescent light bulb with florescents (see Syndey Morning Herald and the […]
Read more...As we’ve noted, Wall Street firms have been investing in various means of profiting from likely future regulation of carbon emissions, particularly carbon trading. A study by Dr. Robert Shapiro, undersecretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration (which we found thanks to Greg Mankiw’s blog), concludes that carbon taxes would be more effective than emissions […]
Read more...A nice piece, Global Smarming, by Ian Williams in The Guardian, on some of the jockeying on the issue of climate change. It contrasts the actions of British Petroleum with those of Exxon Mobil. BP in 1997 decided to lower its carbon emissions below the 1990 level by 2010. It achieved the goal in 3 […]
Read more...Here we’ve had a few months of favorable oil prices, and as a result, oil has taken a back burner to other stories. It’s beginning to come to the fore, mainly in not-positive ways. We have two items today, one a very good post on Econbrowser, “Saudi Oil Production Cuts,” and what they might say […]
Read more...Roland Piquepaille has a very good post on his Technology Trends blog, “Creating energy from wasted heat.” Although much of the news about climate change has been grim (both the severity of the situation and the lack of political willingness, at least in the US, to even admit there is a problem), it is important […]
Read more...Barry Ritzhold of the Big Picture has had a run of posts lately on topics near and dear to my heart. He has written before on the subject of prediction markets, and his latest comment, on a particularly wrongheaded story in the New York Times, makes some important observations about markets in general. This topic […]
Read more...A reader comment on Angry Bear on the climate change and environmental degradation was sufficiently articulate and well argued to be featured as a separate post. The writer Stormy makes a number of important points: 1. The IPCC Report is actually conservative; it doesn’t touch the issue of species die-off, already occurring at alarming levels […]
Read more...This comment, “Climate is Changing. Now What?” by Marcelo Riensi on Global Economy Matters, discusses the types of actions available to deal with global warming: reducing emissions via conservation and improved energy efficiency; managing the costs and disruption as efficiently as possible; and finding replacement sources of energy: [T]he IPCC report can be summarized thus: […]
Read more...Below is a comment, On Climate Change and Good Sense,” from Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times on the UK’s Stern Report, which estimated the economic costs of global warming. The report has been criticized for using too low a discount rate, which would have the effect of making the financial impact look larger. Brittan […]
Read more...A good post by Aapo Markkanen at Global Economy Matters on the effect of global warming on migration and how that might interact with demographics. And he also points out that migration can exacerbate existing conflicts: The UN-backed panel on climate change released its latest report on climate change last Friday… [T]here wasn’t much that […]
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