Latest Articles
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New campaign plans to relocate polar bears to Antarctica
[UPDATE: This post is a joke, as is the Polar Bear Conservancy website. Happy April Fools’ Day!] While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dawdles over whether or not to list the polar bear as a federally protected endangered species, a nonprofit group is ready to act to save the fast-disappearing mammal. The Polar Bear […]
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More on Roger Pielke, Jr.
In Part 1, we saw that ...
- Adaptation as primary strategy for dealing with climate change is widely oversold.
- This is especially true as atmospheric CO2 concentrations approach 800 to 1,000 ppm, a likely outcome if we listen to either the delayers or deniers.
- A leading adaptation advocate and apparent delayer-1000, Roger Pielke, Jr., "labels adaptation what is in fact mitigation, and his idea of mitigation is apparently research into adaptation."
Let me elaborate on these points. The day before the dubious pro-adaptation L.A. Times piece, one of Pielke's fellow Prometheus bloggers, Jonathan Gilligan, pointed out, "if our political system stinks at managing floods, coastal storm risks, and fresh-water resources in the absence of anthropogenic climate change, why would it manage better if climate change does turn out to significantly increase the mean severity and/or variance of the distribution?"
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Farmworker Awareness Week is a chance to recognize the people whose labor means we can eat
This is Farmworker Awareness Week, a time to support the millions of farmworkers whose labor puts food on every American table, and who work and live in some of the worst environmental conditions in our nation.
It's estimated that 2 to 3 million farmworkers plant, tend, and harvest American crops every year. Many farmworkers in the U.S. are migrants who move from place to place following the harvest. Where I live, in North Carolina, migrant farmworkers are the majority. The average annual income for a farmworker in the United States is about $11,000, or about $16,000 for a farmworking family (though pay on the East Coast is lower than the national average). Farmworkers live in overcrowded housing and very few receive health care or unemployment benefits. Here in North Carolina, about half of our farmworkers cannot afford enough food for themselves and their families.
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NYT op-ed: pesticides wiping out songbirds
When the little bluebird Who has never said a word Starts to sing Spring … It is nature, that is all, Simply telling us to fall in love. — Cole Porter, “Let’s Do It” The immortal refrain of an old Cole Porter chestnut — “birds do it; bees do it” — has taken on an […]
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A roundup of news snippets
• A U.S. EPA program that evaluates the effect of chemicals on children is basically defunct. • Strip-mined Appalachian mountains are being planted with chestnut trees. • A Montana dam is breached to clean up toxic sediment. • Snorting cocaine is bad for the environment. • Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, and Costa Rica race to […]
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Measuring additionality has clear benefits — and also some obvious costs
The second in a series of posts on additionality.
In his post criticizing the design of carbon markets, Sean correctly notes that additionality is a pain to measure -- an ever more expensive pain, as the industry matures and quality controls become more stringent.
To take an example I know well, at TerraPass, we spend tens of thousands of dollars per project helping dairy farmers validate their methane digesters under the Voluntary Carbon Standard. It's a complex process, requiring a fair amount of domain expertise, outside consultants, site visits, and ongoing monitoring. The process is meant to ensure additionality, but the cost carries some clear downsides. For example, we can't consider any projects that are below a certain size. Even if they're great projects, they won't generate enough carbon reductions to justify the effort.
So Sean and I agree that additionality in the carbon world is expensive and tricky to measure, and that the cost of doing so drives some worthwhile projects out of the system.
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Spots vs. strips
This is the fourth post in five-part series on the details required to get carbon policy right. See also parts one, two, and three.
We now get into an issue that will seem a bit arcane, because no one's talking about it, at least not explicitly. But it's a real choice, and in many conversations about carbon policy we are implicitly getting it wrong.
Should we price carbon in spots, or strips? Or, to take it out of financial jargon, should we:
- set up markets such that people who are selling or buying emissions credits have to go to the market with each incremental ton to determine what the price will be (a "spot" market), or
- set up markets such that buyers and sellers can enter into long-term contracts for the emissions they will produce/reduce (a "strip" market)?
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Land swap would allow drilling in Alaska wildlife refuge, two huge solar projects slated for Califor
Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Like a Bat Out of Help An Offer We Can’t Refuge Go Toward the Light We Detect a Seal Change Law & Order: Species Victims Unit Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Garbage, Man Different Beasts All the World’s a Shag
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EPA announces new lead standards for renovation of older buildings
Contractors will have to train workers to follow “lead-safe work practice standards” when renovating or repairing older dwellings that house children or pregnant women, according to new standards introduced Monday by the U.S. EPA. The new requirements are an attempt to keep lead out of the bloodstreams of babes, as structures built before 1978 are […]
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