Does the Fossil Fuel Industry Support Geoengineering?
A misleading new report from Center for International Environmental Law and the Heinrich Boell Foundation demeans the discourse
Geoengineering is controversial in the climate change community, and understandably so. Proposed interventions like negative emissions technologies (a.k.a. carbon dioxide removal) and solar geoengineering (a.k.a. solar radiation management or SRM) -- which some writers group together as "geoengineering" -- involve large-scale intervention in the climate system that could have adverse physical or social impacts. At the same time, some geoengineering methods could substant...
CONTINUE READINGI’ll Just Be Over Here In My Fallout Shelter
The Green New Deal may be ambitious, but it’s not alarmist.
It would be impossible to react to every piece of misinformation or poor reporting about climate change—let alone every misguided opinion editorial—that lives online today, but Bret Stephens’ February 15 piece in the New York Times strikes me as warranting a response. That’s not because of the clickbait title (“Is Nancy Pelosi A Climate Skeptic?” You guessed it, she’s not.) or the now oft-repeated criticism of the Green New Deal (it’s too pie-in-the...
CONTINUE READINGCannabis Research Center
New UC Berkeley Research Center Focuses on Issues Around State Legalization of Cannabis
Over the past couple of years, California has moved into the brave new world of fully legalizing (as a matter of state law) recreational and medical cannabis. That transition was premised in part on promises that legalization would reduce the negative environmental impacts from illegal cannabis cultivation, and would facilitate the development of a sustainable cannabis industry. However, the new regulatory system has had growing pains. Relatively low percentages o...
CONTINUE READINGThe Carbon Emission Upanishad
Can Pseudoscience Be Used To Foster Climate Action?
The new issue of Science has a disturbing but unsurprising report on science under India's Hindu nationalist government: The most widely discussed talk at the Indian Science Congress, a government-funded annual jamboree held in Jalandhar in January, wasn’t about space exploration or information technology, areas in which India has made rapid progress. Instead, the talk celebrated a story in the Hindu epic Mahabharata about a woman who gave birth to 100 children,...
CONTINUE READINGWhat I Wish The Green New Deal Hadn’t Left Out
Greening our infrastructure is part of the solution, but so’s city planning.
While there’s certainly been no shortage of criticism of last week’s Green New Deal resolution, the common line hasn’t been that the resolution doesn’t try to cover enough ground. On the contrary, it’s been called an everything-but-the-carbon-sink approach; even Trevor Noah devoted a few minutes of the Daily Show to gaping at the proposal’s efforts to tackle not just greenhouse gas emissions, but social and economic inequality as well. Others have done a...
CONTINUE READINGDonald Trump Creates the Green New Deal
Emergency Powers Can Be Very....Flexible
Mitch McConnell announced on the Senate floor today that Donald Trump will sign the new border compromise, then declare a National Emergency at the border, and use Presidential powers under the Emergency declaration to fund at least part of his border wall. Demonstrating his central philosophical principle -- party over country -- McConnell announced his support for the move, meaning that the Senate will most likely not override Trump's veto of any Congressional resolu...
CONTINUE READINGMore Tree-Huggers, Please
The Anti-Environmentalist Epithet Actually Derives From India's Great Environmental Justice Movement
If you want to insult an environmentalist, the standard go-to is to dismiss them as a “tree-hugger.” But where does the term come from? The answer might surprise you: The term ‘tree-hugger’ originated not as an insult but as a protest tactic. It is said to date back to 1730, when a village of Bishnois in India sacrificed their lives to save their sacred and resource-rich trees from being cut down to build a new palace for the king. This act of hugging a tree...
CONTINUE READINGOne Cheer For “Corruption”
New Public Lands Bill Is A Triumph For The Environment -- and an Attack on American Public Philosophy
Some unanticipated good news: The Senate on Tuesday passed the most sweeping conservation legislation in a decade, protecting millions of acres of land and hundreds of miles of wild rivers across the country and establishing four new national monuments honoring heroes from Civil War soldiers to a civil rights icon. The 662-page measure, which passed 92 to 8, represented an old-fashioned approach to dealmaking that has largely disappeared on Capitol Hill. Senator...
CONTINUE READINGGovernor Newsom Retreats On High Speed Rail
Revised Merced-Bakersfield vision in "State of the State" speech indicates reluctance to spend political capital
Governor Newsom's "State of the State" speech today offered an abrupt scaling back of the state's vision for its signature infrastructure project, high speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco: [L]et’s level about high speed rail. I have nothing but respect for Governor Brown’s and Governor Schwarzenegger’s ambitious vision. I share it. And there’s no doubt that our state’s economy and quality of life depend on improving transportation. But let’s be...
CONTINUE READINGIs the Green New Deal’s Ambition Smart Policy?
Some Lessons from Environmental History
At the the heart of the Green New Deal -- which demands slashing U.S. carbon emissions by 2030 by shifting to 100 percent clean energy -- is a major conundrum. Even the most enthusiastic proponents of ambitious climate policy don't believe the goals are achievable, technologically let alone politically. Stanford Professor Marc Z. Jacobsen, for example, among the most ardent advocates for decarbonizing the electricity grid completely, believes that we can achiev...
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