The Current U.S. Energy Pathway is Paved with Coal, Oil and Natural Gas
How well are we doing, in our efforts to strip fossil fuels from our energy mix? If you want to believe the most recent estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the answer is: not so well. As EIA prepares its 2013 report on the impact of various proposed policy changes, it asks itself: what will the energy mix look like if current law and policy stay in place? EIA has released its answer, and it looks like this: In 2011, the U.S. met 82% of its ...
CONTINUE READINGMayans! Apocalypse! Climate Change!
Mayan apocalypse: panic spreads as December 21 nears Fears that the end of the world is nigh have spread across the world with only days until the end of the Mayan calendar, with doomsday-mongers predicting a cataclysmic end to the history of Earth. That's from a British newspaper, the Telegraph, but you only have to Google "Mayan Calendar" to find lots of similar items. There seems to be no basis at all for the idea that the Mayans thought the world would end at thi...
CONTINUE READINGInternational Trade in Renewable Power Equipment
In the absence of global carbon pricing, how will the growing world economy decarbonize? We all hope that emissions per dollar of GNP will decline faster than GNP grows but how does this happen when explicit incentives to decarbonize aren't embraced? The magic of international trade offers one possibility. In this recent Energy Policy paper, Aparna Sawhney and I argue that one quite optimistic trend is the major growth in exports of wind turbines and solar panel...
CONTINUE READINGShould Environmentalists Oppose Susan Rice for Secretary of State?
My RBC colleague James Wimberley thinks so -- and not because of the fake, nothingburger scandal over Benghazi that the Right has cooked up. Instead, James' argument centers on climate change. As we all know, NRDC's OnEarth broke the story a couple of weeks ago that Rice and her husband hold fairly massive investments in fossil fuels in general, and tar sands in particular: Rice owns stock valued between $300,000 and $600,000 in TransCanada, the company seeking a f...
CONTINUE READINGThe Economist Magazine’s Feature on Climate Adaptation
After a two year delay, I'm excited that reasonable people in the mainstream media (including this week's The Economist Magazine and the Huffington Post ) are willing to talk in a calm intellectual spirit about the ideas presented in my 2010 Climatopolis book. When the book was published, many environmentalists dismissed it as nutty free market stuff that would unintentionally sentence the world's poor to more suffering. You might be surprised to learn t...
CONTINUE READINGSurviving on a Changing Planet
[youtube=http://youtu.be/O5h02Yc6lfA] As this video explains, the Arctic is entering a new state, quite different from the Arctic regime that we have long known. Over a somewhat longer time frame, much the same is happening with the climate and ecology of the world as a whole. It’s a bit like a science fiction cliché: explorers leave home on a journey of interstellar exploration, only to return home to an altered world. The world is now about to experience somet...
CONTINUE READINGIs a rider an earmark?
Environmentalists have long bemoaned appropriations riders -- where Congress inserts a matter of substantive law into a budget appropriations bill. For instance, EPA gets a budget, but may not use any funds to enforce or promulgate a controversial regulation. Sometimes Congress just changes the underlying law, permanently or temporarily. Appropriations bills are enormous, so it's often hard for even members of Congress to know what is in the entire bill, let alone ...
CONTINUE READINGChanukah as an Environmentalists’ Debate
The other day I suggested that Chanukah might be considered a paradigmatic environmental holiday because God's central miracle essentially entailed energy conservation: The Temple Menorah as Prius. A teacher of mine (an Orthodox rabbi who moonlights as a professional photographer), said that he could accept that, but that he sees Chanukah as a demonstration of what can know and what we cannot know. Some miracles are really miracles: they cannot be explained through t...
CONTINUE READINGGuest bloggers from Berkeley Law Environmental Law Society: Contextualizing Secretary Salazar’s Recent Decision on Oyster Farming at Point Reyes
NOTE: This post is by Legal Planet guest bloggers Nell Green Nylen, Heather Welles, Dan Carlin, Elisabeth Long, and Mary Loum, all members of UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Society during the 2011–12 academic year. (See more details about the work of these law students and new lawyers at the end of the post.) If you have been following the controversy surrounding oyster farming in Drakes Estero, part of California’s Point Reyes National Seashore, you might ha...
CONTINUE READINGChanukah: The Ultimate Environmental Festival
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell. Every now and then, something hits you right between the eyes, and you wonder why you didn't see it before. Thus it is that I realized this morning that Chanukah, which begins this Saturday evening, is the paradigmatic environmental holiday. Consider the miracle that is said to be the touchstone for Chanukah: the Temple's oil, which was only enough for one day, actually lasted for eight...
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