Climate Change
Followed 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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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Adopts Low-Carbon Fuel Standard
Good. The California Air Resources Board has adopted the nation’s first mandate to lower the carbon in fuel. As these things go, it’s pretty mild: a 10% reduction in carbon footprint by 2020. That hasn’t stopped the oil industry from complaining, of course, stating that CARB is “moving too fast.” When will it not be …
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CONTINUE READINGCars, Obama and Climate Change
There’s big news coming out of Washington and Detroit this week about the fate of U.S. automakers. Rumors surfaced yesterday that G.M. will furlough its U.S. factories for most of the summer due to declines in auto sales. And the Obama Treasury Department is said to be pressuring Chrysler to prepare for bankruptcy, to be filed as …
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CONTINUE READINGFlexing Obama’s administrative muscle (& a victory on home furnaces)
Just after the election, the environmental group Earthjustice published a list of six easy things the Obama administration could do to help the environment. On the list was the suggestion that Obama back off from defending Bush-era failures to ramp up the efficiency of home furnaces–a topic that sounds narrow but has remarkable implications for saving …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Mitigation and U.S. Self-Interest
Jody Freeman and my colleague Andrew Guzman have posted an important paper, “Sea Walls are Not Enough.” The paper is particularly significant because Jody is now a senior White House advisor on climate policy. The gist of the paper is this: We demonstrate that even if one accepts that the premises of the climate change …
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