China
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‘Transparency’ is a hot issue in Copenhagen — but what does it mean?
Sergio Barbosa Serra. Photo courtesy Brazilian governmentCOPENHAGEN — I just had a cappuccino with Sergio Barbosa Serra, Brazil’s ambassador of climate change and one of the country’s top delegates at the Copenhagen talks. We discussed what’s going to get hashed out over the next 36 hours of the U.N. climate conference. He boiled the challenge […]
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Two moves by the U.S. and China that could unlock the Copenhagen chess game
Co-authored with Barbara Finamore, NRDC’s China Program Director The Copenhagen climate summit is coming to its moment of truth, and all eyes will be on the United States and China. Together these two countries account for 42 percent of world CO2 emissions. One is responsible for the largest share of past emissions; the other for […]
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The one real story out of the first week of Copenhagen
Reading about the Copenhagen climate talks has been like tuning into a telenovela: Crossed signals! Secret betrayals! Tempestuous threats! The entire UNFCCC climate framework has seemed to teeter continually on the brink of implosion. But for all the noise and fury, the there was, in my opinion, only one genuinely new story of significance and […]
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Heading into the second week of Copenhagen … the arc of the negotiations
Wow! Has it really only been a week of the international global warming negotiations in Copenhagen? Based upon the intensity of the debate you would think that we are down to the wire in the second week of the negotiations. After all, these negotiations often only get finalized in the wee hours of the final […]
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China Challenging the United States for World Wind Leadership
This Eco-Economy Indicator is written by my colleague J. Matthew Roney, a staff researcher at the Earth Policy Institute. It stresses the importance of wind energy development. Leadership of the global wind market is about to change hands. The United States—the birthplace of the modern wind industry—has held the top spot in new installations since […]
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Roberts, take 3: New energy sources are cheaper than trying to clean coal
This is the last entry in a series of six email exchanges between two climate-change experts on the future use of coal. The series was originally posted here. Editorial note: The price of energy should reflect its “true” cost, Roberts argues. Non-renewable dirty sources like coal should be priced to take into account their real […]
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Roberts, take 1: Coal is in short supply, expensive, and cannot be made clean
This is the second entry in a series of six email exchanges between two climate-change experts on the future use of coal. The series was originally posted here. Editorial note: Roberts argues that the key question is not “how can we best reduce carbon dioxide emissions?” Rather, we need to confront a more fundamental question […]
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Shared fate under the ‘fault lines’
We hear plenty about the divisions that make reaching a global climate agreement in Copenhagen daunting. “Negotiators at Climate Talks Face Deep Set of Fault Lines,” as the New York Times put it on Sunday. Indeed, the opening salvos from the negotiators confirm that they have a long way to go in less than 2 […]
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As Copenhagen kicks off, a Good News roundup
The fashionable narrative about climate politics in American media is deflationist: nobody cares about climate any more because of some emails, the Senate clean energy bill is doomed because of the economy, and the Copenhagen climate talks will end in failure because of intractable differences between developed and developing nations. It gets old. Just for […]
