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Depending on the calculations, air travel accounts for perhaps 3 to 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions, far below sources like deforestation, coal-fired electricity and automobiles. Yet I’ve always thought that airplanes play an outsized symbolic role in climate change—and in the challenge of actually stopping it. You can substitute coal for renewables or nuclear, and [...]
I spent a year in Canada as a teenager in 1993 and ’94, living in the metro Toronto neighborhood of Scarborough, which for some reason Canadians think is hilarious. Aside from the unfortunate 1993 World Series — damn you, Joe Carter — I loved it. I was from white-bread suburban Pennsylvania, and Toronto was one [...]
PETER KENT, Canada’s environment minister, announcing the country’s formal withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. Canada—unlike the U.S.—signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which required the country to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 6% below 1990 levels by 2012. But successive Canadian governments did little to cut emissions as the oil and gas industry exploded, and today [...]
There are deals and then there are deals. That’s my takeaway from the U.N. climate negotiations in the South African city of Durban, which finally concluded early Sunday local time — more than a day after the talks had been scheduled to end. Exhausted negotiators — seriously, look at these poor guys — managed to reach an [...]
However you slice it, the scientific news has not been good on the pace of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The weekend saw a pair of new studies that confirmed the fact that—far from curbing greenhouse gas emissions—we’re warming the atmosphere faster than ever, even as the slow-moving U.N. climate talks underway now at [...]
Update [3:28 AM CST 12/11/10]: That’s it. Over the strenuous and highly verbal objections of Bolivia, the more than 190 countries at Cancún adopted a compromise deal that points the way towards a new system fo climate diplomacy that will include complementary actions by both developed and developing nations. The Cancun Agreements “mark a new [...]
In a briefing for reporters before the Cancún climate summit began, World Resources Institute president Jonathan Lash summed up is expectations for the meeting in a made-up work: “CopenCun.” He meant that much of the work of the Cancún summit would involve tying up the many loose ends of last year’s meeting in Copenhagen, with [...]
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 [...]
