Climate Change

Climate Change Lesson #2: Watch Out for Those “Unknown Unknowns”

This is the second in a short series of homilies on the lessons we can learn from climate change. Donald Rumsfeld famously distinguished between knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.   He didn’t take the occasion to provide sharp analytical distinctions, but the difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns is very much like a difference …

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David Nawi Appointed to High-Ranking USDOI Post

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has named a respected California environmental lawyer to serve in a key, newly-created Department of Interior post. Salazar appointed David Nawi as his Senior Advisor to the Secretary for California and Nevada. In his announcement selecting Nawi, Secretary Salazar stated, “The current water crisis and land management challenges …

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Climate Lesson #1: It’s a Small World After All

This is the first in a short series of homilies on the lessons we can learn from climate change. Thirty years ago, in the early days of environmental law, it seemed that most environmental problems were local.  Pollution came from cities and bedeviled the residents of those same cities.  Wilderness areas suffered from human incursions, …

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A third is a third is a third?

On the last day of its term, the California legislature did wind up passing SB 14, the hotly debated bill to boost the state’s renewable energy supply requirement to 33% by 2020.  But its prospects don’t look good — the Governor announced within hours that he would veto (SacBee story here).  Presumably in its stead, …

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It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

Since opponents can’t seem to come up with any new arguments against climate change legislation, they seem determined to recycle the old, discredited ones. Here’s today’s example, straight from the GOP press release: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif, today urged the Environmental Protection Agency to include several relevant studies in its …

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In Defense of Impact Men (and Women)

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the new film documentary opening this weekend in LA and NY, “No Impact Man,” based on the nonfiction book of the same title, by Colin Beavan, that depicts his urban family of three trying — impossibly, of course — to shrink to nothing its environmental footprint, even going as far as to give up …

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Rising Seas: Doing the Math

Real Climate has a very interesting if occasionally highly technical post on sea level rise.  There’s considerable disagreement about projections.  Some projections rely on detailed modeling of the dynamics; others are based on fitting a model to past changes, more or less the way economists do modeling.  The latter, “semi-empirical” projects are also in some …

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Making Offsets Transparent

Solve Climate has posted a letter from five state Attorneys General expressing concerns about several provisions of Waxman-Markey (a/k/a ACES).  One suggestion they made, in particular, struck me as very persuasive: [T]he House bill does not require public disclosure of all offset project documentation, including project eligibility applications, monitoring and verification reports for agricultural or …

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Duke Energy Leaves ACCCE But Who Remains?

Duke Energy, one of the largest electric utilities in the midwest and southeast and a prominent memeber of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership,  announced this week that it has quit the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.  ACCCE, as it is known, is a trade group recently exposed as the front group that sent bogus letters on …

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Sacramento debates renewable energy, jobs

With Ken posting about California’s renewable energy goals and ways to meet them, I’ll point out the battle waging this week in the state legislature over SB 14, a bill that would legislate and broaden the 33%-RPS-by-2020 Ken discussed here (currently derived from an executive order).  This from the LA Times: Under the measure, by Sen. …

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