Latest Articles
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Myth: Tackling climate change requires fundamental technological breakthroughs
No myth has done more to lull Americans into complacency or allow bad actors to fight off good policy. The American people are deeply attached to the notion that any problem can be solved with a new doohickey. It would, after all, relieve them of the terrible responsibility of saving the world. (Surely a clever […]
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Myth: Pricing carbon will destroy the economy
Legislators from dirty-energy producing states, energy-intensive business lobbies, and conservative think tanks struggle to outdo one another with apocalyptic predictions about the effects of mandatory greenhouse gas emission reductions. See, for example, the Chamber of Commerce’s video showing children shivering in the cold (really). As climate legislation evolves this year, the rhetoric is ramping up […]
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Myth: There is a “free market” in energy
To hear some people talk, you’d think the greatest danger of government intervention in the energy sector is that it will “distort the market.” Poor, tender market. In fact, energy markets would give Adam Smith the screaming willies. The world’s biggest oil companies are state-owned members of anti-competitive cabals. Half the electric utilities in the […]
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Myth: Climate policy is primarily about putting a price on carbon
Environmentalists and economists alike are obsessed with putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, and with good reason: climate pollution is a classic “externality,” a cost paid not by polluters but by society at large. Pricing carbon internalizes that cost. The policy is “market-based” because it is agnostic toward particular practices, products, or technologies; the […]
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Grammy stars unite on new campaign
Rob Perks at the Natural Resources Defense Council has just unveiled a wonderful website tribute to Grammy Award-winning country and rock musicians banding together to stop mountaintop removal in Appalachia. Featuring Kathy Mattea, Emmylou Harris, Sheryl Crow and Big Kenny Alphin, the Music Saves Mountains campaign is a great reminder of the indisputable role […]
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Memo to WSJ: You can do better than that
[You might try sending emails to the reporters below. My guess is they didn’t put a lot of thought into what they were writing and might be open to writing it differently in the future — since this isn’t the WSJ editorial page.] The media misinforms the public about climate science in many different ways. […]
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Does Pew Center’s Eileen Claussen get the dire nature of our climate predicament?
Dr. Bill Chameides is the dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He blogs at HuffingtonPost.com and his own GreenGrok.com, which is certainly worth reading. He just posted “Impressions from National Academies Climate Summit,” in which he drops a bombshell quote from Eileen Claussen, […]
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Does carbon-eating cement deserve the hype?
I am trying to identify the plausible CO2-mitigation strategies that are scalable — that can comprise at least a half a wedge (see “How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution). So when a new process gets this much hype — as in Scientific American’s, “Cement from CO2: […]
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EPA to Ethanol Lobby: Drop Dead!
For a while, I was afraid the EPA might actually bow to political pressure and raise the so-called blend wall for ethanol, i.e. the amount of ethanol that can currently be mixed into gasoline and sold at the pump.
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George Will publishes global warming lies for a third time
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me three times, shame on the media. In a move that calls into question the journalistic integrity of the entire Washington Post editorial staff — especially editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, who should be fired — the newspaper has published a third […]
