United States
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Global CO2 emissions fall in 2009, but the past decade still sees rapid emissions growth
The temperature’s rising; can the big carbon-emitting countries take the heat? In 2009, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in China — the world’s leading emitter — grew by nearly nine percent. At the same time, emissions in most industrial countries dropped, bringing global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use down from a high of 8.5 billion […]
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A clean energy competitiveness strategy for America
By Jesse Jenkins and Devon Swezey Accelerating U.S. clean technology innovation, manufacturing, and market creation has become not just an environmental necessity but an economic imperative. A recent Pew study showed that the global clean energy industry has experienced rapid investment growth over the last five years. New clean tech investments in 2009 reached $162 […]
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Wind Power Soared Past 150,000 Megawatts in 2009
This piece was written by my colleague J. Matthew Roney at the Earth Policy Institute. Even in the face of a worldwide economic downturn, the global wind industry posted another record year in 2009 as cumulative installed wind power capacity grew to 158,000 megawatts. With this 31 percent jump, the global wind fleet is now […]
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Turning the Copenhagen Accord into action on global warming
In December 2009, more than 120 Heads of Government attended the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, the largest meeting of world leaders in history (the previous largest one was the funeral of the Pope according to Wikipedia). Many of the leaders came to Copenhagen with new commitments to actions on global warming pollution (as I discussed […]
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Where things stand on the Copenhagen Accord and international climate politics
After the Copenhagen Accord was “noted” by the UN in December, there was a great deal of insta-analysis. In truth, there was no real way to evaluate the Accord because the meat of it — the emission-reduction commitments from participating countries — was blank. Literally: The deadline for participating countries to submit their commitments was […]
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U.S. slips in Environmental Performance Index
Researchers at Columbia and Yale released a new Environmental Performance Index ranking 163 countries on a broad variety of indicators—basically, how well they protect their people’s air, water, natural resources, and ecosystems. Surprise, surprise, Scandinavian and Northern European countries do well. So does Costa Rica, the country that shut down its military in 1949 and […]
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Did China block Copenhagen progress to pave way for its own dominance in cleantech?
You hear it all the time, one of the most frequently voiced excuses for Western countries failing to radically cut carbon dioxide emissions: Taking any such action would hand a massive competitive advantage to fast-industrializing China. Yet evidence is piling up that the very opposite is the case. The main challenge from the world’s new […]
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America's Century-Long Love Affair with the Car May Be Coming to an End – Data Highlights
Between 1950 and 2008 more cars were added to our roads virtually every year as the total fleet expanded steadily from 49 million to 250 million vehicles. In 2009, however, 14 million cars were scrapped while only 10 million cars were sold, shrinking the fleet by 4 million vehicles, or nearly 2 percent. With record […]
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Copenhagen revealed a new dynamic between the U.S. and China
This week, Seed magazine hosted a discussion on the Copenhagen climate talks — the outcome and the lessons learned — called Good Cop, Bad Cop. Contributing were K.C. Golden, environmental non-profit policy director, Mike Hulme, climate change scientist, Michael Levi, energy security expert, and yours truly. Click over to Seed to see all the contributions. […]