Climate Change

The Climate Changes for the Insurance Industry

ThinkProgress reports: Following the most damaging year of climate disasters in the United States in history, the insurance regulators in three states – California, Washington, and New York – announced that all major insurance companies operating in their states will be required to assess and publicly disclose the climate-change related risks they face, both in …

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Can Incomplete Information Still Be Cause For Alarm?

How much comfort should people take from the remaining gaps in our knowledge of climate change.  Not much, is the answer. Scientists have learned a lot about climate, but there are still pieces of the puzzle that are yet to be filled in.  Here’s a nice picture that Nobel Laureate Mario Molina uses to show …

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California’s New Clean Car Rules: How Can They Succeed?

Yesterday, the California Air Resources Board significantly toughened the state’s regulations on carbon emissions from automobiles: The package of Air Resources Board regulations would require auto manufacturers to offer more zero- or very low-emission cars such as battery electric, hydrogen fuel cell and plug-in hybrid vehicles in California starting with model year 2018. By 2025, …

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The Wall Street Journal Publishes Quite a Piece on Climate Change

This piece is worth reading.  It doesn’t have that much new content but it does take up a lot of the page.  I must admit that I’m envious.  It appears that the WSJ has rejected my OP-ED submission.  In my piece, I discuss how the rise of charter cities in developing countries could offer individuals …

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Rebound Redux

I’ve posted  previously about the rebound effect.  Improving energy efficiency frees up money, which can be used to purchase more of the same product or different products that use energy.  This “rebound” cuts away at the energy savings and correspondingly at the carbon reduction achieved through energy efficiency.  Everyone seems to agree that the rebound …

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Attention K-Mart Shoppers! Get With the Program

I’ve blogged before about Asia Pulp & Paper, which has one of the worst records on destroying critical species habitat in its logging operations and abusing human rights in the process.  (Not surprisingly, it also has a fake certification from greenwahser Programme for the Endorsement of Forestry Certification).  Well, the tigers (and humans) have some …

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A Subtle New Paper; “How Not to Save the Planet” by Thom Brooks

Thom Brooks has written a thoughtful new paper.  Here is his abstract: Abstract. Climate change presents us with a pressing challenge. A global consensus accepts that human activity is responsible for climate change and its associated dangers. However, there is disagreement on how best to address this challenge. The essay argues that leading proposals are …

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Obama Administration Rejects Keystone XL

Here: Obama laid the responsibility for the rejection of the pipeline on political gamesmanship by Republicans. “As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our …

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Bain and the Environment

We’ve been hearing a lot about Bain Capital because of the Romney connection.  I thought it would be interesting to see what I could find about Bain and the environment.  I thought I might find that Bain shared Romney’s (current) anti-environmental views, but apparently not.  Here’s what it says on Bain’s webpage: We have worked …

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Guest blogger David Pettit: In the Weeds with GHGs

This post, by David Pettit of the Natural Resources Defense Council, is part of an occasional series by guest bloggers. As Ann Carlson and Rick Frank have previously blogged, on December 29th 2011, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence J. O’Neill ruled that California’s low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) violates the Commerce Clause of the U.S. …

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