Climate Change

Meg Whitman Would Suspend AB 32

In a rather stunning and little-noticed op ed last week, California GOP gubernetorial candidate Meg Whitman — former CEO of EBay – called on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to suspend the implementation of AB 32.  Her rationale?  To create jobs in California.  AB 32, also known as the Global Warming Solutions Act, cuts California’s greenhouse gas emissions …

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A third is a third is a third?

On the last day of its term, the California legislature did wind up passing SB 14, the hotly debated bill to boost the state’s renewable energy supply requirement to 33% by 2020.  But its prospects don’t look good — the Governor announced within hours that he would veto (SacBee story here).  Presumably in its stead, …

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It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

Since opponents can’t seem to come up with any new arguments against climate change legislation, they seem determined to recycle the old, discredited ones. Here’s today’s example, straight from the GOP press release: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif, today urged the Environmental Protection Agency to include several relevant studies in its …

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Dunking the Big Apple

The IPCC considers it likely that climate change will increase hurricane intensity, and New York may be particularly vulnerable to flooding from hurricanes and other storms, as Climate Progress reports: Sea level may rise faster near New York than at most other densely populated ports due to local effects of gravity, water density and ocean …

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Rising Seas: Doing the Math

Real Climate has a very interesting if occasionally highly technical post on sea level rise.  There’s considerable disagreement about projections.  Some projections rely on detailed modeling of the dynamics; others are based on fitting a model to past changes, more or less the way economists do modeling.  The latter, “semi-empirical” projects are also in some …

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Making Offsets Transparent

Solve Climate has posted a letter from five state Attorneys General expressing concerns about several provisions of Waxman-Markey (a/k/a ACES).  One suggestion they made, in particular, struck me as very persuasive: [T]he House bill does not require public disclosure of all offset project documentation, including project eligibility applications, monitoring and verification reports for agricultural or …

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Exploring Climate Change and the Law

Looking for a way to pass the time over the long Labor Day weekend? Want to learn more about the legal and policy dimension of climate change? Check out Berkeley’s course on climate law, now available here on YouTube.  Scholars discuss everything from the economics of climate change to  WTO issues raised by biofuels ,and …

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Sacramento debates renewable energy, jobs

With Ken posting about California’s renewable energy goals and ways to meet them, I’ll point out the battle waging this week in the state legislature over SB 14, a bill that would legislate and broaden the 33%-RPS-by-2020 Ken discussed here (currently derived from an executive order).  This from the LA Times: Under the measure, by Sen. …

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The Royal Society’s geoengineering report

We had a flurry of posts on geoengineering a while back (see here, here, here, and here). If you want to learn more about geoengineering, a great resource is this report, just issued by the Royal Society. It clearly explains the background, the approaches being proposed (which divide broadly into technologies for removing greenhouse gases …

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Can EPA kick-start climate legislation?

The San Francisco Chronicle this morning quotes EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson as saying that her agency will soon finalize its greenhouse endangerment finding (notwithstanding the Chamber of Commerce’s absurd demand for an adjudicatory hearing).  As the story says, “Supporters of climate change legislation are hoping the threat of EPA-mandated limits will spur congressional action.” Although …

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