Category Archives: Global warming

Guest Post: Any Climate Treaty Which Does Not Dramatically Reduce Soot Is Not Worth the Paper It’s Written On

Note to NC Readers: This essay deals with cost and benefit. As such, it is relevant to business and economics. Preface: I studied global warming at a top university in the early 1980’s. I was taught – as Al Gore was taught in college – that temperatures are directly correlated with CO2 levels. This essay […]

Guest Post: Head of California’s Cap and Trade Offsets Program: Cap and Trade Won’t Work for Climate, It’s a Scam

Paul Krugman argues that cap and trade worked to reduce sulfur dioxide and stop acid rain, and so it will work to reduce C02. However, two EPA lawyers with more than 40 years of cumulative experience – including the guy who has been head of California’s cap and trade offset programs for more than 20 […]

Guest Post: Woman Who Invented Credit Default Swaps is One of the Key Architects of Carbon Derivatives, Which Would Be at the Very CENTER of Cap and Trade

As I have previously shown, speculative derivatives (especially credit default swaps or “CDS”) are a primary cause of the economic crisis. They were largely responsible for bringing down Bear Stearns, AIG (and see this), WaMu and other mammoth corporations. According to top experts, risky derivatives were not only largely responsible for bringing down the American […]

Soros to Put $1 Billion in Clean Energy

The famed hedge fund investor George Soros has decided to make a serious push into clean energy, not only investing in projects but also forming an organization to weigh in on policy issues. From Bloomberg: Billionaire George Soros, looking to address the “political problem” of climate change, said he will invest $1 billion in clean-energy […]

Is Cap and Trade Dead on Arrival?

At some point in 2009, the government may get past managing the crisis du jour and turn to those nasty, seemingly intractable problems we nevertheless have to address. such as greenhouse gas emissions. One idea that had been bandied about is the idea of cap and trade, which would allow big bad carbon emitters to […]

Big Investors Call for Action on Climate Change

The idea that reducing carbon emissions is bad for investors is in at least in part an urban legend. In an earlier post, we noted: In 1997, British Petroleum decided to lower its carbon emissions below the 1990 level by 2010. It achieved the goal in 3 years rather than 13 at a cost of […]

Some Qualified Good News on the Oil Front

Nick Butler, in “The falling oil price is a lull in the storm,” argues that the break in oil prices is likely to persist for a bit due to improvements on the supply side, but that falling into complacency would be a mistake. The bad thing about the volatility in oil prices is that it […]

Massachusetts Sues Merrill Over Auction-Rate Securities

The auction rate securities market seize up has found more and more firms accused of less than upright behavior. The state of Massachusetts contends that Merrill misled investors about the risks of the instruments. A common complaint is that brokers presented the ARS as being as safe as money market funds. From Bloomberg: Massachusetts Secretary […]

International Energy Agency Calls for Much Higher Carbon Prices

The International Energy Agency has determined that for greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced to the level recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and some contend that report was too conservative), carbon prices would need to be $200 a ton, more than four time the price now in effect for the EU carbon […]

The Rich Under Attack I: "Food Democracy"

Gideon Rachman in “We cannot go on eating like this” in the Financial Times, points out the increasing heated discussion between advanced and emerging economies over resource issues, particularly food. The positions of the two camps are fairly easy to set forth: the West says, “You can’t have what we have, it’ll ruin the planet,” […]

Another Environment Worry: Nitrogen, a Worse Greenhouse Gas Than Carbon

Ooh, just when you though you had your had a pretty complete list of Looming Problems, the officialdom goes and increases it. An article in the current issue of Science reports that nitrogen is a significant culprit and environmental degradation. Nitrogen pollution is a serious matter because there isn’t at the moment any obvious way […]

Wolf, Becker, and Posner on Oil (With a Shocker From Posner)

There are some interesting cross currents in the day’s offerings on oil. What a difference a year makes. Not so long ago, the peak oil crowd was seen in much the same light as the discredited Club of Rome: worrywarts about a bad future that would probably take a long time to arrive. Now everyone […]

Is Your Salad Bad for the Environment?

There’s a good article at the New York Times, “Movable Feast Carries a Pollution Price Tag,” on the issue of CO2 emissions resulting from the delivery of foodstuffs around the world. The article discusses at some length how international fuel tax breaks have facilitated this trade. Let’s face it, many foods are low value per […]

Why Companies Aren’t Fighting Climate Change

Consider this example: In 1997, British Petroleum decided to lower its carbon emissions below the 1990 level by 2010. It achieved the goal in 3 years rather than 13 at a cost of $20 million. Oh, and it happened to save $650 million. With that sort of calculus, you’d think that every big corporation would […]

New Study: Seas Will Rise Up to 1.5 Meters by 2100

New research presented at a European Geosciences Union conference projects that oceans will rise as much as 5 feet by the end of this century. This forecast is three times hgher than the scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report. If it pans out, it will wreak havoc with low-lying countries such […]