Climate Politics
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Learning how to count to 350
Cross-posted from TomDispatch. Next month, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather. Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which […]
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Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’?
Palm-oil trees in the making, Ivory Coast.In his Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis teases out the mechanisms of famine in British-ruled 19th century India. When a drought would wipe out a grain harvest in one region of India, the price of grain would spike. People all over the subcontinent would suddenly find themselves priced out […]
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Obama administration officials grateful for early spring
“The good news is spring is coming earlier and earlier [thanks] to climate change.” — An anonymous White House official, on the prospect of the Senate debating a climate and clean energy bill in the spring of 2010.
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More NYC farmers markets accept food stamps and sales soar
The NYT’s Cityroom blog offers some hopeful news on getting more healthy food into low-income neighborhoods: Food stamp purchases at the city’s Greenmarkets have more than doubled in the last year, due in large part to publicity campaigns and the addition of more farmers’ markets to the program. Food stamp sales from July to November, […]
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Kids just say no — to fossil fuels
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…” OK, students of American History, think you know the rest of this historic American sentence? If you guessed, “… for one people to rid themselves of an energy system that may threaten their lives and liberties, it is only decent that they should declare the […]
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Making buildings more efficient: rationalizing retrofit markets
As I said in my last post, taking energy efficiency in buildings seriously means expanding our policy horizons beyond the blunt tool of raising energy prices. We have to think in creative ways about how to remove market and behavioral failures that inhibit cost-effective responses to today’s energy prices. How can we make efficiency markets […]
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Capturing the massive social benefits of fuel efficiency requires regulation
This Friday is the deadline for public comments on the stricter vehicle efficiency standards from EPA and the Department of Transportation. The docket is likely to be overrun with statements for and against the regulation that would make cars and light trucks 30 percent more efficient in 5 years. From an economic perspective, the social […]
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Copenhagen talks ready for take off: 5, 4, 3…
Will world leaders rocket at Copenhagen?Photo: jurvetson via Flickr Creative CommonsSuddenly — and just in the nick of time — next month’s Copenhagen conference is starting to gain momentum. National leaders have rushed to say they are going, elevating it to the status of a major summit. More and more commitments to action are coming […]
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Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets
Todd SternAs Dave lamented last week, most of the predicting and posturing preceding the Copenhagen climate talks amounts to little more than Some Person Guessing. You might consider the weekend news from the UK Observer — which reported the Obama administration’s intention to set a provisional target for U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions — to be more […]
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Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Enlightenment thinking
Carbon Fixated has now a exposed a far greater scandal than “Carbongate.” It is time to expose the fraudulent religion that worships Issac Newton, who was even fatter than Al Gore, and his silly assertions about gravity, not to mention the meaningless babble of incantations called calculus. If you own any shares in companies that […]
