Climate Change

More on today’s White House announcement re Copenhagen

Dan writes immediately below about Obama’s announcement that he’ll attend the talks in Copenhagen in two weeks, and with a U.S. emissions reduction target in the range of the 17% below 2005 levels found in the House bill.  At the press conference on this announcement, a little more was said about the kind of agreement the White House is …

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About China But Were Afraid to Ask

As President Obama heads to China, the World Resource Institute has launched a very interesting new website devoted to China, energy, and climate change.  The chart above is an example of the kind of information on the website.  Notice for example the important role of manufacturing emissions on the Chinese side versus transportation emissions on …

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More on the recent Pew poll and on debating the science

My colleague Steve Weissman writes well here about the recently released Pew poll on Americans’ beliefs about climate change.  Like Steve, I find the most troubling statistics from the poll to be the plunging numbers of people who seem to believe the underlying science.  This is from Pew’s write-up: 57% [of all respondents] think there is solid evidence that the …

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Public Focus on Climate Change Slow to Develop, Hard to Sustain

The date was August 4, 1977, and Congressman Peter Rodino inserted, in the Congressional Record, an article from the New York Times that had run a week earlier.  The Times article reflected on the Carter Administration’s effort to encourage the greater of coal as a power plant fuel.  The Times said: “The National Academy of …

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SuperFreakonomics and Climate Change

If you haven’t been following the controversy that has erupted with the publication of SuperFreakonomics:  Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, you should be.  In SuperFreakonomics — the sequel to Steven Levitt and Stephen Duber’s wildly popular Freakonomics — the authors take on climate change.  Their arguments are somewhat …

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Climate Change versus the Benzene Case

The Benzene Case — more properly, Industrial Union Dept. v. American Petroleum Inst. — is almost thirty years old, but is still the Supreme Court’s most important statement on risk regulation.  After considering mountains of evidence, OSHA issued a rule restricting benzene in the workplace.  Benzene was known to be a carcinogen; the evidence was …

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The Cost of Climate Change

According to Climate Wire, the Obama Administration is trying to come up with a reliable economic estimate of the cost of unchecked climate change.   This sounds like a great idea but is actually full of pitfalls. Many of the individual elements of the economic impact analysis are the subjects of serious debate.  For instance, economists …

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The Ghostly New Halloween Super-Villain

Warning: this thing will have more sequels than Friday the 13th!  In fact, it will still be playing in your neighborhood theater for decades to come. 

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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 …

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Why You Should Worry About Climate Change Even If You Don’t Think It Is Going To Happen

Even if you think that carbon emissions won’t cause uncertainty, you should think seriously about hedging that bet.

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