Should Obama Go To Copenhagen?
President Obama has, of course, already been to Copenhagen once this year -- in his quest to bring the Olympics to Chicago -- and brought nothing home to show for it. The stakes for the December United Nations Climate Change Conference are obviously much higher: the negotiation of an international agreement to govern greenhouse gas emissions when the Kyoto Protocol expires. But the first Copenhagen trip makes the question of whether Obama should go back to att...
CONTINUE READING101 (Or So) Useful Responses to Climate Skeptics
I know a lot of people who have occasion, for one reason or another, to deal with climate skeptics. Sometimes this happens at public events, sometimes at Thanksgiving dinners. There are a lot of arguments that skeptics use, and it's hard to carry around the responses to all of them in your head. I've just stumbled upon a website that may be helpful -- though admittedly it's awkward to pull out your iPhone or Blackberry at the dinner table or in front of a crowd and...
CONTINUE READINGClimate and Energy Research @ Berkeley
Berkeley, like UCLA, is on the forefront of research on climate change and energy policy. There's a lot going on here -- ranging from breakthroughs in climate modeling to new energy technologies to improved analysis of economic impacts. It's hard, even for those of us on the campus, to keep track of all of these developments. A new website, Cal Energy and Climate, provides a roadmap and details about the work of individual faculty members and programs across campu...
CONTINUE READINGCommon Sense is Bipartisan
The WaPo story speaks for itself: "Eleven academies in industrialized countries say that climate change is real; humans have caused most of the recent warming," admitted Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). "If fire chiefs of the same reputation told me my house was about to burn down, I'd buy some fire insurance." An oil-state senator, David Vitter (R-La), said that he, too, wants to "get us beyond high-carbon fuels" and "focus on conservation, nuclear, natural gas and new t...
CONTINUE READINGPaying for Those Transmission Lines to Promote Renewable Energy
Even people who could not care less about renewable energy development have heard the plea: in order to deliver big bunches of power from central station renewable sources, we need lots of new transmission lines. If so, then who should put up the money to get the lines built? In a decision issued a few days ago, federal regulators made the answer to that question a little less certain. When one utility company provided everything from power generation to the meter, the ...
CONTINUE READINGCorporate Law and Climate Change
In an important but under-reported development, the Obama has shifted policy on corporate reporting of climate risks. According to Greenwire, In a policy reversal long sought by shareholder advocates, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ruled yesterday that investors can directly call on public companies to describe the financial risks they face from global warming. A staff bulletin, issued a month before the start of the 2010 corporate proxy season, reversed ...
CONTINUE READINGNews on the Political Front
Both the NY Times and the Washington Post had lead stories on the politics of climate change legislation. The Post's story centered on the increasing focus of the debate on the economic impact of climate legislation and on the difficulty of establishing the facts: In anticipation, groups on the left and the right -- as well as government outfits such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Congressional Budget Office -- have issued a spate of analyses projecting the...
CONTINUE READINGOdds Are that Energy Technology Will Advance Faster Than Expected
In a post yesterday, I discussed a point that Sam Savage makes about climate change in his book, The Flaw of Averages. He makes another point that I think is very important: . . . if we continue developing sources of renewable energy at our current average rate, we may indeed be doomed. But we won't continue at this pace because there will be a distribution of success rates, with some technologies evolving faster than others. The technologies that do evolve faster ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Nuisance Suits Heat Up: Fifth Circuit Follows Connecticut v. AEP
Well, I didn't expect this one. The Fifth Circuit, in Comer v. Murphy Oil Co., has agreed to follow the Second Circuit by construing Massachusetts v. EPA's standing holding very broadly. It has allowed a class action by private plaintiffs on a common-law public nuisance claim, for damages occurring from greenhouse gas emissions, to move forward. More to come on this one when I have a chance to finish the opinion. But a couple of points: 1) Comer represents a c...
CONTINUE READINGWhy You Should Worry About Climate Change Even If You Don’t Think It Is Going To Happen
Sam Savage's book, The Flaw of Averages, talks about the ways that we are misled by focusing on averages rather than considering the full range of possible outcomes. It's a fun read that makes some very important points. One of his illustrations is climate change, which is the subject of chapter 37. Savage asks the read to consider a hypothetical in which, on average, we expect no sea level rise -- perhaps because our best estimate is that climate change won't hap...
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