G8 Expectations

Bush gets the watered-down G8 climate statement he wanted President Bush got exactly what he wanted on climate change during...

Readers talk back about lawns, eco-vandalism, labor/enviro alliances, and more

  Re: The Terror of Our Ways Dear Editor: Thank you for putting the difficult topic of eco-vandalism up front....

Will hard-won environmental and social gains survive China’s economic rise?

The way China has catapulted itself onto the Monopoly board of global capitalism has caught most Western leaders on the...

White House to greens: We should totally do this again some time

Say anything. Uncle Sam wants you … to cooperate on conservation. Not only that, he’s willing to listen. At least...

Apollo Alliance now shooting for the statehouse instead of the moon

By now the mission of the two-year-old D.C.-based Apollo Alliance — to mobilize a grand-scale federal commitment to energy independence,...

More on selective libertarianism

I stand by the sentiment expressed here, but acknowledge that Jerry Taylor was entirely the wrong target. (Something I'll acknowledge at greater length in a post I have brewing about libertarianism, energy, and environmental policy. Every time I try to write it it metastasizes to a length more appropriate to epic poetry. Concision, alert readers will have noticed, is not my forte. So ... stay tuned.)

Consider, for instance, the following two responses to the just-passed energy bill.

A View to a Killing

Silicon Valley investors putting big bucks into clean-tech start-ups Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are seeing green in clean energy —...

Five developing nations a presence at the G8 summit

Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa -- some of the world's most dynamically growing developing nations and up-and-coming greenhouse gas emitters -- have been invited to attend this week's G8 summit as informal participants. I've been digging through the international press this morning, looking for perspectives on Gleneagles absent in much of the Western news media.

India's New Kerala reports (via the Indo-Asian News Service) that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived in London today. Singh will ask the G8 nations to transfer green energy technologies to the developing nations, removing "non-tariff barriers," i.e. international protections for intellectual property rights to these technologies, as The Indian Express explains with a tad more clarity. Singh wants relaxed international IPR protections on clean energy technologies, to make them more affordable for the developing nations to use in place of dirty energy.

Below the fold, more G8 perspectives from the presses of China, Mexico, and South Africa.

Reasonable people largely agree about what we should be doing

There's a short-but-great exchange today in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of peak oil. You have to subscribe to read it there, but PeakOil has reprinted it in full.

It's a conversation between James Hamilton, an economist at UC San Diego (blog here), and Robert Kaufmann of Boston U's Center for Energy & Environmental Studies (what, no blog?!). Generally speaking, Kaufmann favors government intervention in markets to prepare for peak oil, and Hamilton favors letting the free market sort it out. But neither is dogmatic or shrill, and the exchange is quite enlightening, ending in a surprising degree of agreement.

Below the fold is a play-by-play.