Articles by David Roberts

Looking on the bright side

Oh good grief:

[Senior U.S. climate negotiator Harlan] Watson also said that evidence for global warming seemed to be getting stronger but that there was still great uncertainty about how a warming would affect the planet.

"In these settings there tends to be only an emphasis that 'everything is going to be worse everywhere'. There are undoubtedly going to be areas where things are going to get better," he said.

For instance, in the gated mountaintop redoubts of the super-rich, things are going to be positively Edenic!

We were NOT being reasonable!

This is hilarious. Apparently U.S. EPA administrator Stephen Johnson recently met with EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimoas. A Dimoas spokesflack subsequently told Reuters that the U.S. is showing some small signs of interest in working with the EU on a post-2012 emissions-reduction regime. (Kyoto expires in 2012.)

Well, this is intolerable. We can't have the world thinking the U.S. might want to join the international community in efforts to address the signal challenge of our time! What are we, commies?

So naturally, Johnson sent his own spokesflack out to hurriedly deny the scurrilous accusation.

EU carbon-trading market hullabaloo

You may be vaguely aware that an enormous hullabaloo has broken out in Europe over the one-year-old carbon-trading market -- the primary mechanism by which the EU plans to meet Kyoto targets. Because you are not paid to read boring stories, and I am, let me summarize it for you.

The carbon-trading market covers some 9,000 industrial facilities across Europe. Each participating government allocates a certain amount of CO2 emissions to each of its facilities. If those facilities emit less, they can sell their emissions credits. If they emit more, they have to buy credits. (The initial allocations cover 2005-2007.)

So, two things recently happened that sparked the hubbub:

Americans and Climate Change: Representative recommendations

"Americans and Climate Change: Closing the Gap Between Science and Action" (PDF) is a report synthesizing the insights of 110 leading thinkers on how to educate and motivate the American public on the subject of global warming. Background on the report here. I'll be posting a series of excerpts (citations have been removed; see original report). If you'd like to be involved in implementing the report's recommendations, or learn more, visit the Yale Project on Climate Change website.

Below the fold is short list of the most prominent recommendations yielded by the conference's working groups. I tend to think too many of the recommendations pinned their hopes on the creation of new institutions, but I'd love to hear what y'all think.