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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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,” […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...Jeffrey Sachs, in an article for Project Syndicate (hat tip Mark Thoma), argues that private sector efforts alone won’t yield sufficient progress in achieving needed progress on the environmental and anti-poverty fronts. Part of this, of course, is the classic problem of externalities: carbon emissions are free to the perps, but impose costs on everyone. […]
Read more...This is not cheery news. So far, this story seems to be running only on BBC: UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica. If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea […]
Read more...This story, reporting on work by an international group published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warned that human induced change could push the climate to certain tipping point as early as the current century. This research is getting little coverage in the US. According to a search in Google News, it […]
Read more...Perhaps my memory is failing me, but the insistence by three major Wall Street firms, that utilities prove that their new coal-fired plants are economically viable, is at a minimum highly unusual (I’d say unprecedented). Normal Wall Street practice is simply “disclose and sell.” Under securities laws, if the issuer presents its financial situation and […]
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