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Real talk: when it comes to dealing with climate change—and reducing carbon emissions, the top man-made cause of warming—the international community is doing a crap job. The U.N. process is bogged down, with ambitions that seem to shrink each year even as the summits themselves grow longer and longer. Europe’s emissions trading scheme (ETS)—the biggest [...]
I was fortunate enough to have the chance to lead a symposium on the future of climate policy back in April for the progressive periodical Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The transcript has just been published. I had great panelists: Joe Aldy, an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the former White House adviser [...]
One of the most pressing predictions that must be made in climate science concerns the rate of polar melting. As they warm—and the Arctic and Antarctic regions have heated up faster than most of the rest of the planet—the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are melting and flowing into the ocean, which then raises sea [...]
As we survey the results of last night’s Canadian federal election, I’ll spare you the jokes about how completely boring Canada is. It’s actually a fascinating, vast nation that I lived in for a year (Scarborough!), one with a mix of cultures and language, a welcoming attitude towards immigrants, a sober banking sector, a fully [...]
I’m in Abu Dhabi right now, attending the World Future Energy Summit and getting a chance to check out the first finished buildings in Masdar City. I’ll have more on the summit and the city tomorrow, but I wanted to focus on something else today. I often write on this blog about rapidly the planet [...]
I’m not down in sunny, congested Cancun yet—I’ll be arriving next week for what’s become an annual holiday season trip to the U.N. climate summit. (At least this year won’t be as cold as Copenhagen, though I’ve heard that the food is just as bad.) I’ve already written a preview of the major issues on [...]
It’s the most wonderful time of the year once more for environment reporters: the UN climate summit. Last year’s affair in Copenhagen was a frigid disaster, mostly a failure for the climate—but at least the food was terrible. Beginning on November 29, diplomats from more than 190 countries will spend two weeks (plus overtime) trying [...]
I’m back from vacation (I’m sure I was missed), but I didn’t go home. I’m out in rather lovely Sacramento today and tomorrow, to moderate a couple of panels at the third Governor’s Global Climate Summit. The meeting is outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s annual gathering of governors and other subnational leaders from around [...]
Over at the Curious Capitalist blog–which I admit has both a better name and logo than Ecocentric—my TIME colleague Stephen Gandel looks at the common assumption that carbon pricing is bad for the economy. We hear rhetoric about carbon pricing being a “job-killing national energy tax” (thanks, House Republican leader John Boehner), but Gandel examines [...]
