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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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • A global perspective on U.S. climate emissions

    To mark the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, I’m trotting out some maps I made a while back. This one has states labeled with the names of countries that are their greenhouse gas equivalents. In other words, Oregon is responsible for the same level of climate emissions as Ireland; Wyoming is the greenhouse gas equivalent of Vietnam, and so […]

  • Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets

    Todd SternAs Dave lamented last week, most of the predicting and posturing preceding the Copenhagen climate talks amounts to little more than Some Person Guessing. You might consider the weekend news from the UK Observer — which reported the Obama administration’s intention to set a provisional target for U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions — to be more […]

  • The Climate Post: You heard it here first — Copenhagen a success

    First things first: A week of anticlimaxes saw President Barack Obama conducting a less-than-exuberant swing through China, the international community conceding a binding climate treaty at the COP-15 negotiations in Copenhagen, and U.S. lawmakers postponing to the spring of 2010 consideration of climate policy — even as talk of a legislative “plan B” surfaced. A […]

  • Copenhagen panic is premature

    As resurrections go, it was a speedy one. On Monday, much of the world’s media declared that the chances of a worthwhile deal being reached at next month’s international climate talks were as dead as the proverbial dodo. By Tuesday, however, the conjectured corpse was clearly still alive, if not exactly kicking. President Barack Obama […]

  • Subtle but important shifts in global warming positions announced by U.S. & China

    China and the U.S. announced on Tuesday a Joint Statement (available here) and a package of agreed actions on clean energy. This meeting between these two countries that account for around 40 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels couldn’t come at a more critical time in efforts to secure a strong international […]

  • The assumption of inconvenience

    Cross-Posted from Streetsblog. Early this week, I noticed a number of my favorite bloggers linking to this Elisabeth Rosenthal essay at Environment 360, on the mysterious greenness of European nations. The average American, as it happens, produces about twice as much carbon dioxide each year as your typical resident of Western Europe. Rosenthal attributes much […]

  • U.N. climate chief: $300B needed each year in global climate fight

    Yvo de BoerThe global community should be investing $300 billion annually to combat global warming, according to U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer. De Boer, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, says the world needs to be spending $100 billion annually to help vulnerable communities adapt to the impacts of climate […]