Climate Change
Ocean Acidification and the Clean Water Act
Dan’s post today on ocean acidification discusses findings by an international scientific panel that ocean acidification is a very serious problem. This week, according to the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), the U.S. EPA just agreed to review whether and how the federal Clean Water Act can or should be used to address ocean acidifcation. …
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CONTINUE READINGJody Freeman to White House
According to press reports, Jody Freeman, a Harvard Law School professor, will be the counselor for energy and climate change in the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change — in other words, a senior advisor to Carol Browner. Jody is well known to all of us, having been a long-time member of the …
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CONTINUE READINGGobama Bounce?
Two days ago, the Emmett Center hosted what we thought would be a tidy, manageable panel and “roundtable discussion” on SB 375, California’s new anti-sprawl law and the state’s latest legislative attempt to tackle GHG emissions from passenger vehicles. In line with turnout to similar past events, we booked a room that holds 90 people …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Bathtub Effect: A sobering assessment of where we are on climate change (but what does this mean for adaptation efforts?)
Andrew Revkin of the New York Times has posted an important essay discussing implications of the recent report by Dr. Susan Solomon and others documenting the profoundly serious impacts that will result from letting GHG concentrations in the atmosphere get too high before they are stabilized (the subject of this post below by Dan and …
CONTINUE READINGGHG Emissions and Meat Production
This article in the new issue of Scientific American has an important discussion of the ways in which animal-based food production contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. From the article: Most of us are aware that our cars, our coal-generated electric power and even our cement factories adversely affect the environment. Until recently, however, the …
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CONTINUE READINGEnergy and Environment Issues in the House
According to Energy and Environment Daily, House members have organized to promote energy and climate legislation “Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) are co-chairmen of the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, a new caucus designed to push for policies that promote renewable energy and domestic manufacturing, create “green collar” jobs, help curb global …
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CONTINUE READINGGetting U.S. Automakers Real
One footnote to yesterday’s historic announcement by President Obama on national climate change policy: in signaling that the federal government will reverse course and support California’s pioneering efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicular sources, the role of the American auto industry in this debate deserves renewed scrutiny.
CONTINUE READINGA Wavering Federal Policy on Climate Change?
President Obama yesterday made official (sort of) his plan to fulfill a campaign pledge to grant the State of California authority to adopt pioneering greenhouse gas emission controls for vehicular sources. That announcement, while expected, is a breath of fresh air when it comes to state-federal environmental policymaking. It comes after eight frustrating years in …
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CONTINUE READINGDust Bowl Redux
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqiblXFlZuk]According to a story in Tuesday’s New York Times: The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects that if carbon dioxide concentrations peak at 600 ppm, several regions of the world — including southwestern North America, the Mediterranean and southern Africa — will face major droughts as bad or …
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CONTINUE READINGEngaging India on Climate
Via the Times of India, along comes the news that the state of Himachal Pradesh, just south of Kashmir, says that it will present a plan to become a carbon-neutral state. I’ll believe it when I see it, although the state seems to have a reasonable business strategy: reforest thousands of acres and sell carbon …
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