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...There are some interesting cross currents in the day’s offerings on oil. What a difference a year makes. Not so long ago, the peak oil crowd was seen in much the same light as the discredited Club of Rome: worrywarts about a bad future that would probably take a long time to arrive. Now everyone […]
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...New research presented at a European Geosciences Union conference projects that oceans will rise as much as 5 feet by the end of this century. This forecast is three times hgher than the scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report. If it pans out, it will wreak havoc with low-lying countries such […]
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...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: […]
Read more...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 […]
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