Climate Technology
All Stories
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What green careers do you want to learn more about?
Last week, I answered a reader question about wind power jobs. I’m interested to know what other careers you’d like me to investigate. Take this handy poll (below the fold) to help pick my future column topics!
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Crow Tribe strikes $7 billion deal for coal-to-liquids plant on reservation
The Crow Tribe on Thursday agreed to host a massive new $7 billion coal-to-liquids plant on its reservation land in Montana. The plant would produce about 50,000 barrels a day of diesel fuel when it opens, and eventually up to 125,000 barrels a day. Coal for the plant would come from a yet-to-be-developed mine on […]
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Light truck sales drop 25 percent, Toyota screws up
Green Car Congress reports: US sales of light-duty vehicles continued their decline in July, dropping to a total 1.136 million units, a 13.2% reduction in volume compared to July 2007, according to Autodata … The year-on-year decrease came, in general, out of the light-duty truck segment. Sales of cars in July 2008 slightly increased 0.3% […]
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First recorded solar billionaire in China, U.S. billionaires persue wind
This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project. —– Hunter Lovins is one of the country’s premier prophets of the prosperity we can achieve if we move quickly to establish a post-carbon economy. Vast new markets and investment opportunities are opening worldwide for clean technologies. “Those […]
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Globalization failed, cheap oil is gone, local production is the only way forward
Bigger is always better, isn’t it? Big cars, big houses, big businesses, big farms. If you were big, you made more money. Clearly, that is the way of the world. When Europeans colonized the Americas, they wanted more land — not some of it; all of it. Napoleon wanted more land. Nothing stopped him until […]
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Wal-Mart urges Federal Trade Commission not to define ‘carbon offsets’
In comments to the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year, Wal-Mart asked the agency not to define the terms “carbon offsets” or “renewable energy certificates” in order to keep the terms flexible and to retain their “less tangible nature.” The Federal Trade Commission has been in the process of updating its green-marketing guidelines and asked […]
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Two coal plants given go-ahead by green groups after concessions negotiated
Environmental groups dropped their opposition to two different coal-fired power plant expansion projects in Wisconsin and Texas this week after the utilities agreed to a range of concessions designed to limit the environmental impacts of the plants. In Texas, power company NRG reached an agreement with Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition and the Environmental Defense […]
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Toxin-laden e-waste dumped in West Africa
European Union laws prohibiting the export of hazardous materials aren’t keeping shipments of electronic waste out of West Africa, according to a new Greenpeace report. Traders obtain e-waste in the E.U. and ship it off “under the false label of ‘second-hand goods,'” says the report, adding, “Sending old electronic equipment to developing countries is often […]
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Uncertainty, the precautionary principle, and GMOs
Even if we had perfect information on the environmental impacts of industrial chemicals and processes, determining the appropriate levels of regulation would be extremely difficult. In our modern economy, all of us are willing to accept some level of risk, some health and environmental impacts, in order to elevate our material standard of living. In essence, there is no "zero impact" equilibrium, unless we envisage some type of pre-industrial age (and even then it is debatable).
Determining the appropriate level of regulation is made exponentially more difficult in a world of tremendous uncertainty about the impacts of even the most ubiquitous industrial chemicals. Our current state of knowledge with respect to most chemicals is extremely low; even what we do know is taken mainly from questionable animal research and we know virtually nothing about the synergistic effects of hundreds of chemicals swimming around our bloodstreams and our ecosystems over decades.
Faced with this great uncertainty, different types of regulatory schemes have developed. The U.S. model puts more of the onus on those who think a chemical or process poses a risk to prove that it does, while in the E.U. the onus is more on the producers to prove that compounds of processes are safe; the E.U. model is based more on the "precautionary principle."
As Mark Schapiro's excellent work has demonstrated, the E.U. model seems to be paying dividends not only with respect to health and environmental safety, but also economically; as the E.U.'s market share grows, companies around the world are ratcheting up their environmental standards in order to meet stricter E.U. guidelines. In turn, the E.U. now is much more influential in setting world standards than the U.S., which used to be the leader. This is a great development that environmentalists and economists should take not of: high environmental standards can be compatible with increased trade, productivity, and market share.
