Climate Change
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.
CONTINUE READINGShow 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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CONTINUE READINGAnd 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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CONTINUE READINGAnd 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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CONTINUE READINGMeat 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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CONTINUE READINGMore on reengineering – what about the oceans?
Regarding Dan’s post on reengineering the planet, one more shortcoming of the commonly discussed geoengineering solutions (even assuming they work exactly as designed and have none of the unintended consequences Dan, and others, fear) is that they are far from complete, leaving out entirely any remedy for ocean acidification, the “other” greenhouse gas problem. More info on …
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CONTINUE READINGShould We Reengineer the Planet?
RealClimate has an interesting, detailed posting about geo-engineering as a response to climate change, mostly emphasizing the areas that would require more research before it could be seriously considered. Here’s the conclusion paragraph: The real consensus, as expressed at the National Academy conference and in the AMS statement, is that mitigation needs to be our …
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CONTINUE READINGChina, Congress and Climate Change
This week brings two related and interesting stories on the prospects for domestic climate change legislation and progress in Copenhagen when the international community gathers in December to try to hammer out a post-Kyoto treaty on climate change. The first is that China’s top climate negotiator is “optimistic” that the international community will reach agreement on …
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CONTINUE READINGThe need for, and challenges of, climate adaptation
When it comes to climate change, lawyers and policymakers (and scientists too) have been guilty of emphasizing greenhouse gas emission reduction, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Adapting to climate change has taken a distant back seat, even as it has become increasingly clear that the world is already committed to some pretty dramatic …
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CONTINUE READINGNoah’s Art
Having just made my first trip to the Art Institute in Chicago, I was primed for this feature in Grist on the state of climate art. If one can judge a movement by its artists, it seems we still have a fair ways to go–though I like this Venus. Also like this slideshow of climate activists around …
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