Climate Change
Marketing climate change policies
Writing in the New York Times last week, John Broder reported that ecoAmerica, described as “a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington,” has been researching the best rhetoric to build political support for legislation addressing greenhouse gas emissions. I confess that this story makes me a bit queasy. As an academic, I’m committed …
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CONTINUE READINGYou do need a weatherman to know which way the political winds blow
When I was in Spain in 1993, an older man there complained to me about an unusual rain storm during the normally-dry summer. “It’s the fault of you Americans and radiation from your nuclear bomb,” he told me, half-teasingly. Little did he know that he was proving the thesis of a new study by NYU …
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CONTINUE READINGSharing the Burden of New Transmission Lines to The Sun and the Wind
The sense of urgency for building new electric transmission lines to transport large quantities of solar and wind power has spurred a national debate about the proper role for the federal government and the states in siting those lines. Although land use decisions such as these usually reside in the states, many worry that states …
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CONTINUE READINGJustice Souter and the Environment
The news that Justice Souter is leaving the Supreme Court probably means little for environmental cases. Souter has been a reliable environmental vote, joining the majority in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court’s only case on climate change. He dissented with the liberal wing in Rapanos v. United States , the convoluted decision about the extent to …
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CONTINUE READINGFollowed by a moonshadow
Referencing the Apollo Program and our country’s near-mythic success in achieving the goal of a first moon landing has become commonplace in the climate-and-energy debates. Here’s Obama doing it in his address a few days ago to the National Academy of Sciences (a great speech, btw, defending the role of government in spurring scientific advances, transcript and analysis available …
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CONTINUE READINGDo we need a weatherman to know which way the climate goes?
A new report, Climate Change in the American Mind, was just released by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. This report summarizes and synthesizes original polling research on our opinions, attitudes, and knowledge about climate change. (Statistician Nate Silver has an interesting post at Fivethirtyeight.com about some of …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard–& a Paean to Applied Scholarship
Jonathan Zasloff has previously written about the California Air Resources Board’s pioneering decision last week to mandate carbon-based reductions in state transportation fuels. These regulations, known as California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), are the first of their kind in the United States. More importantly, the LCFS is an integral part of CARB’s ambitious plan …
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CONTINUE READINGPutting a Price on Carbon: Is It Needed? Is It Enough?
The bottom line seems to be that we need to get the price of carbon right — or as close to “right” as possible — but we need subsidies for R & D and we need direct regulation of the major categories of emitters.
CONTINUE READINGShocking News About the Fossil Fuel Industry
Guess what? The fossil fuel industry has been deliberately lying to the public about climate change. According to the Washington Post: “The Global Climate Coalition, a group of representatives of the oil, auto and coal industries, spent years telling the public that the link between human activity and climate change was too uncertain to justify …
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CONTINUE READINGAre we too obsessed with climate change?
Slate has an interesting piece by Brendan Borrell arguing that the current laser-like focus on climate change may be getting in the way of effective conservation measures. As he tells it, being green today “is all about greenhouse gases,” to the point that people have forgotten about plain vanilla habitat destruction. That, he thinks, is …
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