Region: International
U.C. Davis Professor Dan Sperling Awarded Blue Planet Prize
Kudos to my U.C. Davis faculty colleague, Dan Sperling, this year’s recipient of the prestigious Blue Planet Prize. The Prize, awarded by the Asahi Glass Foundation, is often referred to as the Nobel Prize for environmental science. Dan Sperling is one of the most influential transportation scholars and policymakers in America. A professor of engineering …
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CONTINUE READINGWill House Republicans Save Food Aid Reform?
These next 48 hours are critical for advancing reform of US international food aid, which I have blogged about previously. Short version: because current rules essentially demand that we provide aid in food grown in the US via government subsidy, our current aid regime wastes money, delays delivery of aid by weeks, lines the pockets …
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CONTINUE READINGCan We Replace HFCs?
What was supposed to be an informal meeting between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping has yielded something substantive: an agreement to include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) under the Montreal Protocol, and thus an agreement by both nations to reduce their use: As some environmental analysts had hoped, President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China found room to maneuver on global warming …
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CONTINUE READINGNEPA Saves the World!
Well, not really. But in some circumstances it might have helped. Consider the civil unrest now roiling Turkey. It began over protests against the government’s plan to turn a much-beloved, historic urban park into a mosque and shopping mall. But as many news reports have indicated, the point was not simply the plan, but the high-handed …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Market for Lemon Solar Panels
George Akerlof won the Nobel Price for his work on the market for lemons and the role that asymmetric information and adverse selection plays in mucking up markets. His favorite example is the used car market. The seller knows more than the buyer about the vehicle’s true quality. Used vehicle owners are more likely to …
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CONTINUE READINGThe NY Times Publishes a Strange Anti-Geoengineering Op-ED
I encourage this blog’s readers to skim Clive Hamilton’s piece on Geoengineering which was published in the NY Times today in its Opinion section. His piece is so strange that it is worth a carefully read. Here I provide some direct quotes; “We can imagine a situation 30 years hence in which the …
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CONTINUE READINGFood safety in China, or is that rat meat in my lamb?
I posted a short piece at Chinafile.org last week on China’s food safety challenges. The occasion for the post was the arrest of 63 people in China for selling fake lamb meat made of rat, fox, and other meats. The “conversation” includes comments/responses from Isabel Hilton (ChinaDialogue.net), John Balzano (BU Law), Alexa Oleson (formerly of …
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CONTINUE READINGWaiter, What’s This Fly Doing In My Soup?
This is the sort of thing that gives environmentalism a bad name: The UN has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now: edible insects. The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of …
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CONTINUE READINGSome Overdue Environmental Justice In Time for Shavuot
The Jewish festival of Shavuot, which begins at sundown this evening, commemorates the Israelites’ receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Shavuot is thus the paradigmatic lawyers’ holiday given its focus on law and justice. This connects nicely with the other two great pilgrimage holidays found in the Jewish Bible, giving us a trinity (so …
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CONTINUE READINGAlberta, Open Sewers and the Keystone Pipeline
Al Gore raised the hackles of the Canadian government this week when he criticized the country’s large scale extraction of oil from the Alberta tar sands. The tar sand oil reserves are among the world’s largest but are particularly energy intensive to extract. That means that extracting oil that will then be burned will emit significantly …
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