Month: September 2009
Rising Seas: Doing the Math
Real Climate has a very interesting if occasionally highly technical post on sea level rise. There’s considerable disagreement about projections. Some projections rely on detailed modeling of the dynamics; others are based on fitting a model to past changes, more or less the way economists do modeling. The latter, “semi-empirical” projects are also in some …
Continue reading “Rising Seas: Doing the Math”
CONTINUE READINGOil Speculators, Land Use Planners, and Those Sticky Tar Sands
Three separate items in the news, this past week, underscore the fact that we still have much work to do before we can claim to have a viable plan for reducing fossil fuel use, and the related environmental damage. Energy Daily reports on a new paper from Rice University’s Baker Center for Public Policy showing …
Continue reading “Oil Speculators, Land Use Planners, and Those Sticky Tar Sands”
CONTINUE READINGMaking Offsets Transparent
Solve Climate has posted a letter from five state Attorneys General expressing concerns about several provisions of Waxman-Markey (a/k/a ACES). One suggestion they made, in particular, struck me as very persuasive: [T]he House bill does not require public disclosure of all offset project documentation, including project eligibility applications, monitoring and verification reports for agricultural or …
Continue reading “Making Offsets Transparent”
CONTINUE READINGMisinformed Attacks on the Law of the Sea
Objections to the Law of the Sea Treaty are based on specious arguments about sovereignty.
CONTINUE READINGDuke Energy Leaves ACCCE But Who Remains?
Duke Energy, one of the largest electric utilities in the midwest and southeast and a prominent memeber of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, announced this week that it has quit the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. ACCCE, as it is known, is a trade group recently exposed as the front group that sent bogus letters on …
Continue reading “Duke Energy Leaves ACCCE But Who Remains?”
CONTINUE READINGExploring Climate Change and the Law
Looking for a way to pass the time over the long Labor Day weekend? Want to learn more about the legal and policy dimension of climate change? Check out Berkeley’s course on climate law, now available here on YouTube. Scholars discuss everything from the economics of climate change to WTO issues raised by biofuels ,and …
Continue reading “Exploring Climate Change and the Law”
CONTINUE READINGWildfires Continue
The California wildfires are still going strong, with serious environmental consequences. As the L.A. Times reports, the effects on wildlife are devastating: Federal wildlife authorities said biologists and environmental rehabilitation specialists were expected to begin inspecting the damage and developing recovery strategies in the near future. Nearly every firefighter had a heartbreaking story to tell …
Continue reading “Wildfires Continue”
CONTINUE READINGSacramento debates renewable energy, jobs
With Ken posting about California’s renewable energy goals and ways to meet them, I’ll point out the battle waging this week in the state legislature over SB 14, a bill that would legislate and broaden the 33%-RPS-by-2020 Ken discussed here (currently derived from an executive order). This from the LA Times: Under the measure, by Sen. …
Continue reading “Sacramento debates renewable energy, jobs”
CONTINUE READINGOne Step Backward, One Nano Step Forward. . . Maybe
The action on nanomaterials continued at the federal level in August, advancing forward in one area (tentatively) and faltering in another (perhaps temporarily). First, on August 4, the Interagency Testing Committee (ITC) issued its 64th report. (The ITC is an independent advisory committee charged with identifying potentially toxic chemicals for which there is inadequate testing …
Continue reading “One Step Backward, One Nano Step Forward. . . Maybe”
CONTINUE READINGThe Royal Society’s geoengineering report
We had a flurry of posts on geoengineering a while back (see here, here, here, and here). If you want to learn more about geoengineering, a great resource is this report, just issued by the Royal Society. It clearly explains the background, the approaches being proposed (which divide broadly into technologies for removing greenhouse gases …
Continue reading “The Royal Society’s geoengineering report”
CONTINUE READING