Gregg Easterbrook, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote an op ed piece in the New York Times, “Al Gore’s Outsourcing Solution” that makes a few valid observations. But his central recommendation, “America needs legislation capping carbon emissions here, but Congress should allow American companies and consumers to use investments in carbon offsets in China […]
Read more...This week’s Economist discusses “Plan B for global warming,” which is to implement measures directed at cooling the earth’s temperature. It’s an idea which is pragmatic (it acknowledges that collectively we aren’t likely to take concerted enough action to stop, let alone reverse, the rising levels of greenhouse gases that are producing higher temperatures). But […]
Read more...A Reuters story, “U.S. struggles to build green homes,” describes Americans’ deep seated resistance to doing the right thing, energy-wise: Regardless of the sales pitch, energy efficiency is an opportunity that Americans shun…. While gas-guzzling vehicles draw the most criticism, homes and businesses consume even more energy — 40 percent of the U.S. total in […]
Read more...In a very interesting turn of events, Environmental Defense, the group that negotiated for some environmental concessions to win its support for the leveraged buyout of TXU, the Texas utility, by Texas Pacific Group and KKR, has engaged boutique investment banking firm Perella Weinberg. The New York Times, in the story, “Environmental Group Behind the […]
Read more...A great post, “CAFE Standards,” from James Hamilton at Econbrowser on how fuel efficiency standards (technically, corporate average fuel efficiency, or CAFE) work and their effects in practice. He in turn cites research by Marc Jacobsen, an economics PhD at Stanford. I found it useful to understand a bit more about how these standards are […]
Read more...Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, in his post “Super-green minivans possible today,” picks up on a Mercury News story that discusses what amounts to a low-emissions minivan, one that meets the stringent California requirements for 2016. Except this car hasn’t been built yet: According to the Mercury News, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has designed […]
Read more...A very good piece in today’s Financial Times, “Make greenery a part of Australia’s landscape,” by Victor Mallet on the political machinations that have ensued in Australia due to a sharp pro-green shift in prevailing sentiment. The subtext of this opinion piece is that even Australia, which is very thinly populated (20 million people on […]
Read more...This BBC story, “US CO2 emissions ‘violate human rights’,” describes how a group of Inuit made their arguments pursuant to a 2005 complaint filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, calling for limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The claim resulted from a four-year study, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, in which hundreds of scientists […]
Read more...China and to a lesser degree India have been forcefully asserting the right to pollute as much per capita as the US in the pursuit of economic development. However, the signs of climate change are already sufficiently advanced in their countries that, despite the combattive posturing, officials recognize that these countries too will have to […]
Read more...Environmentalists have been cheering that, to win approval of the proposed leveraged buyout of Texas utility TXU Corp., acquirers KKR, Texas Pacific Group, and Goldman Sachs have agreed to drop plans to build 8 of 11 coal-fired electricity plants that TXU had aggressively pursued. According to a story in CNN Money, “Green Groups Strut Their […]
Read more...An article by Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books, “Warning on Warming,” gives background on the process that led to the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, provides a precis of the report issued this February, and discusses the current political state of play. McKibben stresses that most media stories […]
Read more...Paul Krugman, in his New York Times op-ed column, “Colorless Green Ideas,” uses a surprising example to illustrate the point that energy conservation need not come at the expense of growth. It’s a widely-held, damaging belief that cutting energy consumption and other carbon emission reduction strategies are a zero sum game, that the money spent […]
Read more...An interesting story by David Leonhardt in the New York Times, “Amid Ivy, a Battle About the Climate,” on a bit of dueling among economists about the Stern Report. By way of background, the Stern Report was prepared by Sir Nicholas Stern for the UK government, and was the first attempt by an economist to […]
Read more...Australian Prime Minister John Howard is beginning to sound green. He has put forward a program to spend A$10 billion to conserve water in the face of a multi-year, no-end-in-sight drought, and now has announced a plan to phase out the traditional, highly inefficient incandescent light bulb with florescents (see Syndey Morning Herald and the […]
Read more...As we’ve noted, Wall Street firms have been investing in various means of profiting from likely future regulation of carbon emissions, particularly carbon trading. A study by Dr. Robert Shapiro, undersecretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration (which we found thanks to Greg Mankiw’s blog), concludes that carbon taxes would be more effective than emissions […]
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