Climate Change

An Indian Cap-and-Trade System?

Well, here’s something potentially significant: India has approved in principle new trading plans centred on energy efficiency as part of efforts to shift to a greener economy to fight climate change, opening up a potential market worth more than $15 billion by 2015. … The plan involves creating a market-based mechanism that would allow businesses …

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News of the Day

There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there.  Not as interesting as Legal Planet, maybe, but let’s give credit where credit is due.  Here’s some of the latest: What Happened to Acid Rain? How we (partially) solved a major environmental problem. China is Taking over the Solar Energy Market. Apparently somebody thinks there’s money in …

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Recent Work in Environmental Economics

What are environmental economists thinking about these days? Mostly energy and clmate change, it would seem.  Here’s a roundup of the most significant recent papers posted at SSRN’s environmental economics journal.  I’ve included links to those with free downloads: “Airline Emission Charges: Effects on Airfares, Service Quality, and Aircraft Design” JAN K. BRUECKNER and ANMING …

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Still more on climate engineering

There’s a lot of enthusiasm in some circles for “geo-engineering” as a response to anthropogenic climate change, and a lot of skepticism about it in others. The appeal is obvious — controlling greenhouse gas emissions looks difficult, since our economies and many of our daily habits (at least in the developed nations, which are providing …

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Rep. Waxman, Sen. Pavley, and Mary Nichols talk climate change

For those of you interested in the relationship between federal climate legislation and California’s landmark global warming laws, tune in tomorrow 10am-noon PDT for a public forum at UCLA.  It will be live webcast here, and yes, we are apparently even twittering it.  Rep. Henry Waxman will talk about his work in passing the American Clean Energy and …

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Specter on Board for Climate Legislation

Grist reports that Senator Specter says that he will vote for cloture and expects to support climate legislation on the merits.  This is a shift from his position last year.  That’s one step closer to sixty votes.

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Show Me The Money!

Guess what?  The oil industry is about to launch a populist campaign against climate change legislation.  (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Why would they do such a thing? The latest statistics on executive pay may tell us something about that.  It turns out, according to Reuters,  that the top bracket of employee …

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And You Think Health Care Is Controversial?

In watching the insanity of the debate over health care reform in the past couple of weeks I can’t help but wonder what the debate over climate change legislation will bring.  Lest you think the right wing opponents of health care reform can’t be beat in their intensity and rhetorical outrage, consider the following two …

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And You Wonder Why People Don’t Respect Lobbyists?

A cap-and-trade bill was defeated in Australia yesterday.  As the New Republic points out (here), it’s not clear that this is anything more than a temporary setback. An interesting sidelight, however, concerns the sources of the opposition — some of which are U.S.-based: Incidentally, one of the largest, most influential opponents of the Australian bill …

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Meat and climate change redux

Back in January, I blogged about the link between meat production and GHGs.  Grist.org has taken up this issue recently, with an interesting article by Tom Philpott making the case that U.S. livestock production is a significant contributor to GHG emissions, and a rebuttal from farmer Eliot Coleman. As Philpott’s article notes, a U.N. FAO …

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