Climate Change
The Commerce Department Undercuts Clean Energy
The Commerce Department’s decision to levy tariffs on Chinese solar panel imports has been in the news for a couple of days, but should receive more attention for envir0nmental policy wonks than it has so far. The Obama Administration has basically decided to impair clean energy production with its decision, even if the tariffs are …
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CONTINUE READINGJeremy Bentham and Polar Bears
Over at the Reality-Based Community, my co-blogger James Wimberley rightfully takes to task a right-wing economist named Karl Smith for what Wimberley calls the dumbest blog post of 2011. Smith essentially seems to argue that it’s okay to cause hundreds of species to become extinct because it will increase aggregate wealth in the short run. In doing …
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CONTINUE READINGDeep Waters
Dean Rowan pointed me to a nifty interactive site dealing with sea level change. It covers the entire coastal U.S. You simply put in the name or zip code of the place your interested in, along with the amount of sea level rise (1-10 feet). You get a map of what parts of the city …
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CONTINUE READINGMonsieur Fouche, Meet Professor Gleick
By now, Peter Gleick’s ethical indiscretions concerning the Heartland Institute are old news. But for lawyers, they raise particularly interesting ethical issues because they highlight the question of really, whether there were ethical barriers broached at all. I initially thought that this was obviously the case: someone in my profession would get disbarred for doing …
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CONTINUE READINGDebunking the Denialists
William Nordhaus, the distinguished climate change economist, has written a response to the Wall Street Journal‘s latest exercise in climate skepticism. He does an excellent job of responding to many of the standard claims of climate skeptics. For one thing, the WSJ op-ed misrepresented Nordhaus’s own findings. According to the op-ed, Nordhaus’s research supported “a …
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CONTINUE READINGCharter Cities Offer Climate Change Adaptation Benefits
Brandon Fuller and I have published a short piece arguing that another benefit of charter cities is to increase the set of coping strategies for people who live in less developed countries and face new climate shocks due to global warming. Starting with my 2010 book Climatopolis, I have consistently argued that global greenhouse gas …
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CONTINUE READINGHeat Waves, Droughts, and the Energy System
According to the IPCC, it “is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves, and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.” For instance, by midcentury, the number of heat wave days in Los Angeles is expected to at least double over the late twentieth century, and quadrupling is expected by the end of …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate “skepticism,” ideology, and sincerity
There’s an interesting discussion about a whole lot of things — for example, the sincerity of climate scientists and think tanks, the behavior of scientists, the relative funding of “skeptics” and climate scientists and others who believe climate change is happening and is caused by human activity — between my colleague Ann Carlson and Professor …
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CONTINUE READINGObama’s Dormant Carbon Tax
In many respects, public subsidies for clean technology research and development, public investment in urban redevelopment, and elaborate cap-and-trade programs are all essentially clunky political substitutes for a carbon tax. If we priced carbon accurately to reflect its true cost to society, in terms of public and environmental health impacts (aka “externalities”), much of this …
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CONTINUE READINGPeter Gleick and the Heartland Institute Expose
Jonathan focused last week, appropriately in my view, on the ethics of the way in which Peter Gleick got documents from the climate-denying Heartland Institute. His conclusion is that as a scientist Gleick’s deceptions to get the documents were unethical. A new column in The Guardian comes out in the opposite place, arguing that Gleick …
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