United Nations
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Can barcodes enforce sustainable logging in Liberia?
Liberia, semi-miraculously, is still covered in rainforest, even though at one point in its history, warlord Charles Taylor was more or less giving arms traffickers logging tracts in exchange for weapons. The U.N. eventually noticed this problem and ended up saving the country's forests by putting an embargo on the country's "logs of war.” But […]
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Critical List: U.N. is optimistic about renewables, U.S. studies ‘safe hydrofracking’
The U.N.'s climate change panel reports that, by 2050, 80 percent of the world's energy could come from renewables. The panel also issued this reassuring news: As long as we fulfill the most ambitious of renewable build-out plans and cut one-third of greenhouse gas, it is possible to keep the planet from nosediving into life-altering, […]
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Inaction on climate change is risky business
Even Tom Cruise thinks some risky business should be avoided.Like a family that has no homeowner’s insurance, no fire detectors, a gas leak in the basement, and a bad case of denial, the global community remains unprepared for irreversible and potentially catastrophic changes to the Earth’s climate. What’s needed — quickly — is an international […]
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Rising commodity prices and extreme weather events threaten global stability
Get ready for a rocky year. From now on, rising prices, powerful storms, severe droughts and floods, and other unexpected events are likely to play havoc with the fabric of global society, producing chaos and political unrest.
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Why Cancun trumped Copenhagen: warmer relations on rising temperatures
During weeks of discussions in Cancun that wrapped up on Dec. 12, the world's governments achieved consensus on a set of substantive steps forward.
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Hey, Obama: You can't bargain with the climate
There's one place where Barack Obama's reasonable compromises simply won't work. That place is the climate.
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What happened (and why): an assessment of the Cancun Agreements
Despite the gloom-and-doom predictions that dominated the weeks and months leading up to Cancun, the talks must be judged a success. The Cancun Agreements represent a set of modest steps forward.
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World Bank President Zoellick on the need for REDD: "We don’t want silent forests"
Robert Zoellick has been pushing hard on a REDD agreement, primarily as a vehicle to fund impoverished programs to preserve biodiversity.
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Forests poised for major progress in Cancun — if Hugo Chavez and U.S. don't get in the way
The Cancun climate summit may be turning into a surprising opportunity for progress towards saving the world’s forests and other ecosystems.