Articles by Joseph Romm

More on carbon trading

August is a time to catch up on reading. A good place to start is "National Climate Policy: Choosing the Right Architecture" [PDF], by Yale's Robert Repetto, one of the country's leading experts on environmental and resource economics. He argues for an upstream cap-and-trade system, and against a safety valve. Other views can be found here, here, and here. This is Repetto's conclusion:

If you only read one book, pick this one

For years I've been looking for one book to recommend to people who want to get up to speed on what's happening in clean technology. I have finally found it: The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity, by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder.

It is the only book I've seen that covers the whole gamut of the latest in clean energy -- including such cutting-edge areas as concentrating solar power and microalgae -- and isn't swept up in fads like hydrogen cars.

I was a bit worried when the index didn't have an entry for either "hybrids" or "plug-in hybrids," but that is only because the index is quite lame. In fact, the book "gets" plug-in hybrids, which I consider the acid test of any clean-energy book today.

Again

Kind of a good news, bad news story:

President George W. Bush has invited the European Union, the United Nations and 11 other countries to the September 27-28 meeting in Washington to work toward setting a long-term goal by 2008 to cut emissions.

Yet it turns out just to be a meeting full of sound and fury, signifying nothing: "But a senior U.S. official said the administration stood by its opposition to mandatory economy-wide caps."

A meeting aimed at (1) developing voluntary or aspirational targets, (2) for the long-term, (3) by 2008 [i.e. Bush's last year in office]. Three strikes and you are out.

Bush's last chance to be a small part of the solution rather than a large part of the problem came and went at the G-8 meeting, where Bush nixed an effort to set realistic and binding long-term targets.

The only interesting question that will be answered by this meeting is whether the media will be suckered into giving the President the one outcome he truly wants -- positive press coverage on climate change, an area of such catastrophic failure by this administration that it will probably ensure (even more than Iraq) that history judges Bush a failure.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Climate plan is unveiled

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) -- does this make him an icon? -- and John Warner (R-Va.) unveiled their long-awaited climate plan. It looks pretty good to me because:

• It is bipartisan -- indeed, it follows the strategy recommended by moderate senators, such as Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.)


• It starts quickly -- by 2012 we must return to 2005 levels.


• It has a credible 2050 target -- and requires regular reports from the National Academy of Sciences on the "extent to which the emissions reductions achieved under the Act no, together with actual steps taken by other nations, stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at a level adequate to forestall catastrophic impacts of climate change."


• It does not have a safety valve, but instead has banking and borrowing.

This plan will be the starting point for legislation from Sen. Boxer (D-CA). Here is a detailed summary from Greenwire (subs. req'd):