climate

U.S. negotiating team in Poznan dodges questions on Bush’s climate inactivism

Below is another dispatch from the climate talks in Poland by CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light, first printed in WonkRoom. —– In one of the more surreal moments of this year’s U.N. climate change talks, Bush’s chief environmental adviser blamed Russia for the Bush administration’s climate change obstructionism. The U.S. negotiating team featuring James Connaughton, […]

Why carrots and sticks are not interchangeable

David Roberts challenges carbon tax advocates. He says GHG policy should “penalize the emission of GHGs and reward the prevention of GHG emissions. Sticks and carrots.” As someone who thinks neither a carbon tax nor cap-and-trade can be the primary means to solve global warming, I’ll take on Roberts’ challenge just because it offers an […]

After Poland talks, a new reality starts to set in, says McKibben; 350 ppm must be the goal

I spent the last few nights of the recent Poznan climate conference sleeping in the By the Way youth hostel, an excellent accommodation filled with excellent young people who had done excellent work at the negotiations. After the final day of deliberations, many of these young people visited the doubtless excellent discotheques of Poznan, returning […]

IYD: Next global climate agreement must safeguard survival of all countries, all peoples

This is a guest post from Poznan by David Sievers of SustainUS, an organization for 18-26 year-olds from the United States who are interested in engaging with global processes on sustainability. —– I am writing in the midst of a dramatic shift in global climate policy. The official President’s Summary of COP-14 bears witness to […]

Amusing, in light of recent events

(thanks LL!)

Fossil fuel moguls inflate reserve estimates to prevent efforts to move beyond their products

When I was young, Yankee Stadium had ~70,000 seats. It seldom sold out, and almost any kid could afford the cheap seats. Capacity was reduced to ~57,000 when the stadium was remodeled in the 1970s. Most games sell out now, and prices have gone up.

The new stadium, opening next year, will reduce seating further, to ~51,800. This intentional contraction is aimed at guaranteeing sellouts, increasing demand, allowing the owners, in pretty short order, to hike prices to double, triple, and more. The owners know that scarcity will fatten their wallets, even though it reduces the number of sales.

This is more than a bit distasteful, as it discriminates against the lower middle class. Nevertheless, it should be a great stadium and as long as the owner is footing the bill without public subsidies for the stadium itself, we may have little grounds for complaint.

The reason that I draw your attention to this practice is that fossil fuel moguls are intent on hoodwinking the entire planet with an analogous scheme.

The basic trick is this: fossil fuel reserves are overstated. Government "energy information" departments parrot industry. Partly because of this disinformation, the major efforts needed to develop energies "beyond fossil fuels" have not been made.

Scaling back our energy-hungry lifestyles means more of what matters, not less

The work of recent Nobel Peace Prize winners Al Gore and the IPCC, along with a veritable mountain of other evidence, clearly lays out the reality and potential costs of human-induced climate change. Most analyses have concluded that we can and must keep our economies growing while addressing the climate challenge; we need only reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we produce. We can do this, they say, by using more efficient light bulbs, driving more fuel-efficient cars, better insulating our homes, buying windmills and solar panels, etc. While we agree that these things need to happen (and the sooner the better), it is clear that they will not be enough to solve the big problems the world faces.

The inconvenient truth is that to ensure quality of life for future generations, the world's wealthiest societies cannot continue our current lifestyles and patterns of economic growth. Further, the large proportion of humanity living in poverty must be able to satisfy basic human needs without aspiring to an overly materialistic lifestyle.

Does this inconvenient truth mean doom and despair? Absolutely not. Indeed, we think this seemingly inconvenient truth is actually a blessing in disguise, for our high-consuming lifestyles and western patterns of economic growth are not actually improving our well-being: they are not only unsustainable, they are undesirable.

Scientists are discovering a convenient truth: our happiness does not depend on the consumption of conventional economic goods and services, but instead is enhanced when we have more time and space for socializing, for nature, for learning, and for really living instead of just consuming.

Humanity faces the fight of a lifetime against heavyweight climate change

Suppose you’d been invited to go into the ring with Muhammad Ali at his prime, for a 15-round bout. You’d almost certainly have said, “No thanks.” Climate change: down for the count. Photo: iStockphoto But what if you had no choice? Say someone had a gun to your head, and you’d be killed if you […]

Wildfires are raging — why isn’t concern about climate change?

Earlier this month, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert delivered a provocative Los Angeles Times op-ed explaining why the public is more scared of terrorism than global warming. Gilbert’s basic premise was that human beings are conditioned by evolution to react most strongly to situations that have certain characteristics: they must be personal (have a face or […]