Latest Articles

A titillating* new column on corporate carbon reporting

Imagine that you are upper management at a large corporation, and you’re told that you need to start comprehensively disclosing your outfit’s CO2 emissions in your financial reports. Sounds like an unbelievable hassle, no? Especially since there’s no legal mandate to do so. And yet hundreds of companies are doing just that. Why? I offer […]

Belief in free lunches, tooth fairy still strong

Once in a while a pundit will say something quite revealing without intending to do so. You'd think a newspaper in a state that was recently looking down the barrel of a 72 percent electric rate hike might have beamed onto the fact that power doesn't come from wishes, and often requires difficult choices:

Greening public housing

The Clinton Global Initiative is arranging to have banks finance green retrofits of NYC public housing. CGI is, for my money, one of the most interesting groups figuring out practical, post-ideological solutions to climate change.

U.S. government wants to boost fish-farming industry

Eighty percent of American fish dishes are imported, and the federal government is eager to get the U.S. seafood market on equal footing (finning?) by kicking off industrial-scale fish farming in the Gulf of Mexico. Under regulations to be considered next month, fish born in laboratories would be transported to gigantic underwater cages capable of […]

Henry Waxman weighs in on Bush admin. efforts to suppress climate science

The House Oversight committee has released its official report (PDF) on White House efforts to interfere with climate change science, and its conclusions are ... well, totally predictable. To wit:

The Committee's 16-month investigation reveals a systematic White House effort to censor climate scientists by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress. The White House was particularly active in stifling discussions of the link between increased hurricane intensity and global warming. The White House also sought to minimize the significance and certainty of climate change by extensively editing government climate change reports. Other actions taken by the White House involved editing EPA legal opinions and op-eds on climate change.

The sheer volume and magnitude of chicanery, when laid out in nearly 30 pages of detail, betrays a remarkably fastidious program of misinformation.

I suppose it's in the nature of things that many of the sub rosa efforts to tamper with the findings of real scientists would leak to the press and the Congress. After all, it's only Bush appointees who take an oath -- explicit or otherwise -- to uphold the president. The scientists who work in those appointees' agencies, on the other hand, were apparently pretty upset about all of this.

What the fate of two old turtles says about China’s future

Having spent two summers researching amphibians and reptiles, I have a poster of endangered frogs and salamanders on my wall what one might call a healthy fascination with these endearing ectotherms. Being thus inclined, my eyes lit up when I stumbled on The New York Times’ latest feature, “China’s Turtles, Emblems of a Crisis.” It’s […]

Canadian outdoor-goods retailer won’t sell plastic water bottles

Mountain Equipment Co-op, Canada’s largest outdoor-goods retailer, has yanked Nalgene bottles and other polycarbonate plastic containers from its shelves, concerned about toxic bisphenol A leaching from the plastic. MEC — the Canadian equivalent of U.S.-based retailer REI — has been one of Canada’s largest sellers of the bottles. Canada’s health agency is currently studying the […]

On Lieberman-Warner, long-term emissions targets, and picking a trajectory

I’ve heard quite a bit of protest about the fact that the Lieberman-Warner climate bill’s long-term target — 70 percent emissions reductions by 2050 — is too weak. In particular, there was much outcry that Sanders’ amendment No. 4, which would have raised it from 70 percent to 80 percent, was rejected (and cries that […]

The only way to a soft landing is down

The only way to a soft landing is down.

In a brief article on DeSmog by Emily Murgatroyd, a Cato Institute type, Jerry Taylor, is quoted as saying

Scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change. Scientists can lay out scenarios, but it is up to economists to weigh the costs and benefits and many of them say the costs of cutting emissions are higher than the benefits.

Can we consider this claim, or is it somehow protected by a taboo? Is one a Marxist or even a Stalinist for pointing out that economists are not, themselves, necessarily right about everything?

Economists, meanwhile, claim to have the key to rationality. Their claim is based in their own definition of their field, which is about "how people collectively make decisions", but they proceed very quickly from there to the marketplace via a number of dubious assumptions.

The marketplace is real enough, and the fact that it affects the decisions we make is inescapable, but that doesn't prove a claim that economics is uniquely placed to resolve our differences.

A claim in more desperate need of challenging I cannot imagine -- yet on it goes, essentially unchallenged in circles of power.

Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life's work, unfairly labeling him "The Merchant of Death" because of his invention -- dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken -- if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, "We must act."

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures -- a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: "Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live."

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency -- a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst -- though not all -- of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."