Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ highly regarded economics editor, looks at a fundamental and troubling issue in his latest article, “The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy.” From the Industrial Revolution onward, the world has enjoyed economic growth, producing rising living standards and making possible an extension of democracy (Wolf argues that the […]
Read more...Peter Mumby has an article today in the Guardian which discusses an underreported consequence of rising CO2 levels, namely, ocean acidification, which wrecks havoc with the the formation of calcium-based structure. Bye bye shrimp, lobster, and coral reefs. An article in the New York Times, “Before It Disappears,” discusses “the tourism of doom,” for people […]
Read more...Oh frabjous day! America appears finally to be getting on the climate change bandwagon, rather than taking a page from the Japanese negotiating handbook and playing obstructionist at every turn. BBC reports this as breaking news; I’m sure we’ll have better analysis in a few hours. So far, this merely looks like an agreement to […]
Read more...It falls to an uber economist like Nobel Prize winner Ken Arrow to look at climate change and make the economic case for prevention work without resorting to smoke and mirrors. This is a non-trivial accomplishment. For those who have not followed this aspect of the debate, one Sir Nicholas Stern prepared the so-called Stern […]
Read more...An article at VoxEU, “Climate change negotiations PLC?” by Ralf Martin gives a nice recap of some prediction markets on climate change just launched at Intrade. I wish he had gone a bit more into the limitations of prediction markets; while they aren’t a panacea, they have their uses. Big caveats: the markets need to […]
Read more...Just to be clear, the US is not at the dead bottom of the Climate Change Performance Index; Saudi Arabia has the dubious distinction of being #56 on a list of 56. The US is 55, down from 53 last year. The report is worth reading; it has a detailed methodology and looks at emission […]
Read more...I saw this story yesterday on the BBC, which reports on the danger of collapse of bluefin tuna stocks, and didn’t cover it then because I thought it was the sort of thing that would get plenty of media attention. The fact that the not-terribly-environmentally-minded US is supporting a 3-5 year ban on tuna fishing […]
Read more...The fourth and final installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth, summary report is to be released later today. As with earlier versions, certain elements have already been passed on to the press, but there seems to be far less anticipatory chatter than with the previous installments. I hope this isn’t a sign […]
Read more...This blog is not for the fainthearted, but even I found this item sobering. Mark Thoma at Economist’s View featured an interview with Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Note that one commentator at Thoma’s site disputed Diamond’s argument that the genocide in Rwanda was caused by competition for […]
Read more...The BBC conducted a large-scale survey of 22,000 people in 21 countries and found widespread support for curtailing lifestyle in to fight global warming. Note that this survey was conducted before the news of the extraordinary Arctic summer ice melt, which could have shifted opinion further in the direction of taking action. Of course, the […]
Read more...A good article from the Associated Press, “World’s Coal Dependency Hits Environment,” doesn’t appear, at least according to Google News, to have been picked up elsewhere, which is a shame. While the title refers to “world’s,” the story is largely about China. We’ve discussed the environmental damage done by coal-fired electrical plants, yet China and […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ highly regarded economics editor, has an usually blunt article today, “Biofuels: a tale of special interests and subsidies.” While the main target is the way special interests are turning biofuels into yet another agricultural pork barrel, he makes a number of important observations: biofuels are only marginally cleaner than conventional […]
Read more...This blog generally features less than cheery news on the environment/species loss/global warming front, mainly because there isn’t a hell of a lot positive to report. So we wanted to pass along a wee positive development about wee creatures, namely frogs. As readers may know, frog populations have been falling, and one of the culprits […]
Read more...Ozone is getting increasing attention as a greenhouse gas, and the findings are not pretty. We reported earlier on research that found that ozone interferes with plant photosynthesis, which both reduces its effectiveness as a carbon sink and reduces plant productivity. A new MIT study (hat tip Mark Thoma) reports that rising ozone levels are […]
Read more...A report by the World Conservation Society reports that one third of the world’s primates are under threat of extinction due to habitat loss and being hunted for food and use in medicines. Twenty-five species are particularly imperiled. As the BBC tells us: The report focuses on the fate of the world’s 25 most endangered […]
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