Gideon Rachman in “We cannot go on eating like this” in the Financial Times, points out the increasing heated discussion between advanced and emerging economies over resource issues, particularly food. The positions of the two camps are fairly easy to set forth: the West says, “You can’t have what we have, it’ll ruin the planet,” […]
Read more...Ooh, just when you though you had your had a pretty complete list of Looming Problems, the officialdom goes and increases it. An article in the current issue of Science reports that nitrogen is a significant culprit and environmental degradation. Nitrogen pollution is a serious matter because there isn’t at the moment any obvious way […]
Read more...Dear readers, I will give more measured impressions of the Milken Conference in a day or so, when I it is over (we have another day, but the last day is far thinner in terms of offerings) and have had a day or so to reflect. However, to give a highlight, a subtext was was […]
Read more...There’s a good article at the New York Times, “Movable Feast Carries a Pollution Price Tag,” on the issue of CO2 emissions resulting from the delivery of foodstuffs around the world. The article discusses at some length how international fuel tax breaks have facilitated this trade. Let’s face it, many foods are low value per […]
Read more...Consider this example: In 1997, British Petroleum decided to lower its carbon emissions below the 1990 level by 2010. It achieved the goal in 3 years rather than 13 at a cost of $20 million. Oh, and it happened to save $650 million. With that sort of calculus, you’d think that every big corporation would […]
Read more...Paul Krugman, commenting on a Wall Street Journal article that invoked, then tried to dismiss, concerns about resource scarcity, defended Malthus: Malthus was right about the whole of human history up until his own era. Sumerian peasants in the 30th century BC lived on the edge of subsistence; so did French peasants in the 18th […]
Read more...Clever, but also surprising (at least for those of us who don’t ponder these matters deeply). Hat tip Gristmill: Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc. Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered […]
Read more...Fresh water is increasingly scarce, particularly in China. The average annual supply, per capita, is 348 cubic meters. The UN defines anything below 1000 as a water shortage. Beijing residents have only 250 cubic meters. Plans to divert water from the northeast provinces to Beijing and some hydropower projects will have dire consequences for millions […]
Read more...Jeffrey Sachs, in an article for Project Syndicate (hat tip Mark Thoma), argues that private sector efforts alone won’t yield sufficient progress in achieving needed progress on the environmental and anti-poverty fronts. Part of this, of course, is the classic problem of externalities: carbon emissions are free to the perps, but impose costs on everyone. […]
Read more...This is not cheery news. So far, this story seems to be running only on BBC: UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica. If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea […]
Read more...This story, reporting on work by an international group published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warned that human induced change could push the climate to certain tipping point as early as the current century. This research is getting little coverage in the US. According to a search in Google News, it […]
Read more...Perhaps my memory is failing me, but the insistence by three major Wall Street firms, that utilities prove that their new coal-fired plants are economically viable, is at a minimum highly unusual (I’d say unprecedented). Normal Wall Street practice is simply “disclose and sell.” Under securities laws, if the issuer presents its financial situation and […]
Read more...Since the market meltdown ’round the world is pre-empting a lot of other programming, I thought we’d turn to other important topics. A study looking over 40 years led by UC Berkeley researchers concluded that first world environmental degradation of third-world countries cost them more, in aggregate, than their foreign debt. Indeed, the researchers argue […]
Read more...It seems the more we learn about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the more we discover that warming processes are self-reinforcing. Melting of Arctic ice means that white polar surfaces, which reflected heat back into the atmosphere, are replaced with open ocean, which absorbs heat well and accelerates warming. As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, […]
Read more...This article from Daniel Gros, Director of the Centre for European Policy Studies at VoxEU argues that high priced oil will worsen CO2 emissions, because it will encourage greater use of coal, which releases more CO2 per unit energy than gas. and Once that infrastructure is in place, the switching costs are high. From VoxEU: […]
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