Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
-
![]()
![]()
Energy efficiency and sex
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last week strolling around Paris, eating long meals at cafes, stopping in little shops, wandering through cathedrals, sitting on park benches, and generally enjoying the aesthetic pleasures of the world’s most beautiful day-to-day culture. So it was a shock to the system to enter the cavernous Palais […]
-
![]()
![]()
Tripping over the fine print on the way to Copenhagen
Punctuation can be the greatest impediment to getting nations to see eye-to-eye on any issue.Jennie Faber via Flickr It was only a comma, albeit a hotly disputed one. For me, the single punctuation mark represents a major reason why the world may fail to get to grips with global warming in time, and why a […]
-
Oil prices and the recession
Economist James Hamilton crunched some numbers and found that the current recession can largely be explained by sub-prime mortgages financial derivatives imploding credit markets insolvent banks winged monkeys the surge in oil prices in 2007 and 2008. It’s a result so unexpected that even Hamilton claims not to believe it entirely, but perhaps we shouldn’t […]
-
Does economic analysis shortchange the future?
Decisions made today usually have impacts both now and in the future. In the environmental realm, many of the future impacts are benefits, and such future benefits — as well as costs — are typically discounted by economists in their analyses. Why do economists do this, and does it give insufficient weight to future benefits […]
-
![]()
![]()
Happy Save the Frogs Day
Hoppy Save the Frogs Day!As I’ve mentioned before, frogs and other amphibians are doing about as well as the global financial system. The good news is that even though the Year of the Frog (2008) is over, we still have the first annual Save the Frogs Day to get hopped up about the plight of […]
-
Pollution taxes work
The Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp threw down the gauntlet to carbon taxers in the Wall Street Journal last month: Environmental taxes have worked well to raise revenue, but without a cap they inevitably become a license to pollute in unlimited amounts. No air pollution problem has ever been solved except by imposing a legal […]
-
![]()
![]()
The environmental inverted pyramid, corrected
538.com’s Nate Silver noted that a recent survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication “reveals part of the problem that advocates of more aggressive measures to curb climate change may be encountering as they seek to push forward initiatives like cap-and-trade”: The survey, conducted […]
-
Deniers are just one off from the truth
I give a lot of talks on climate change and what we should do about it. Invariably, at the end, some smug white haired guy in his sixties raises his hand and says something like this: “I’m a smart guy (Phd, engineer, whatever—he lays out the credentials) and I’m a critical thinker. (of course!) and […]
-
![]()
![]()
Obama’s first 100 days of coal
“If you’re going to lead my country,If you’re gonna say it’s freeI’m gonna needa little honestyJust a few honest words” — Ben Sollee, “A Few Honest Words” With those proverbial first 100 days coming to a close, here are ten moments–some good, some confusing, some hair-raising–in the short swift time of coal in the Obama […]
-
![]()
![]()
Tidbits from the first day of the Energy Efficiency Global Forum
The problem with conferences like this is that interesting tidbits — factoids and insights — come flying at you continuously. An Official Journalist is supposed to weave these tidbits into a narrative story, but in my experiences those stories tend to be fairly boring — the only reason to read them is to pull out […]
