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Articles by Jason Anderson

Jason Anderson is a senior fellow and head of the climate change program at the Institute for European Environmental Policy in Brussels.

Featured Article

When I visited Bali 20 years ago, the beaches teemed with people offering any manner of products and services, and the most abundant seemed to be blowguns. Lying in the sand with your eyes closed, you could just hear, above the rhythmic lapping of the waves, the repeated murmur of “Blowgun? Blowgun? Blowgun?” What the connection with Bali was, I couldn’t make out, but I can’t help but think they could come very much in handy to defend your own patch of beach over the coming two weeks as 20,000 people descend on the tranquil isle for the U.N. negotiations on climate change.

Hopefully the meeting won’t descend into the kind of rancor that involves air-powered weaponry — unless you count speechifying and hot air, of which there is certain to be an abundance. But there should also be plenty of significant discussions, as this conference marks an important milestone in the process of deciding a successor to the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period, which ends in 2012.

Specifically, Bali could deliver a mandate or roadmap toward the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009 (via Poznan, Poland, in 2008), where a deal on p... Read more

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  • What to expect from the U.N. climate-change negotiations in Montreal

    “Conference of Parties” sounds like a contradiction in terms: conferences are dull talkfests punctuated by free booze, and parties are free boozefests punctuated by dull moments of trying to talk over loud music. More of the former than the latter is likely to go on later this month in Montreal, during the Conference of Parties […]

  • Does the World Cup hold the key to climate policy?

    The Maritim Hotel. Photo: IISD. The Maritim Hotel in Bonn, Germany is the regular site of the bureaucrat-level United Nations climate change meetings that take place between the ministerial sessions known as Conferences of the Parties. The building has the air of the showpiece hotel in an impoverished third-world capital: a chandelier and mirror quotient […]

  • Are higher temperatures the price of saving the ozone layer?

    After 15 years as the poster child for international environmental agreements, the Montreal Protocol has slipped into the relative anonymity of a well-functioning accord. As Kyoto Protocol negotiations grab headlines before even yielding a ratified deal, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are quietly on their way to oblivion, through unprecedented, concerted efforts worldwide. That was some of the […]