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I’ve been mulling over this problem ever since I finished this paper with Arvind Subramanian. We conclude that to deal with the climate change threat to human well-being and livelhoods as we know them today requires an extraordinary technological revolution – not just reducing carbon content but completely eliminating it, i.e. completely severing the link between burning fossil fuel and generating energy.
This year’s annual UN climate conference concluded in Cancún, Mexico, in the early hours of Saturday. It has not been a game changer in getting the ambitious action the world must take to limit the risks of climate change. Yet, it has made welcome headway in solidifying and fleshing out some of the ideas negotiated last year in Copenhagen, carved out smart pragmatic progress on transparency and institutions, and revitalized a moribund negotiation process.
As NASA reports the hottest year ever, the Cancun climate talks have concluded with modest but important steps toward transparency in carbon emissions reporting and funding for adaptation and mitigation. Mexico played an exemplary role in hosting the talks and fostering the agreements, and Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa got a standing ovation for her
Here’s a classic reductio ad absurdum: The current global population is about 6.8 billion, all threatened by climate change. The U.S.
Today’s Washington Post reports Senate passage of the food safety bill. It passed 73 to 25, despite the putative rise of anti-regulatory sentiment, because a raft of stories about food poisoning made American families anxious about food safety. On climate safety, however, Congress remains paralyzed despite clear evidence that extreme weather is hitting American families harder every year .
The Chinese Year of the Tiger will soon cede to the Year of the Rabbit and, from a climate perspective, some might view the transition as apt. Since last December, after all, the heroic agenda of Copenhagen has morphed into the timid menu of Cancun. But appearances can be deceiving in the climate game, and a tiger remains crouched in the wings. Nick Stern recently invoked it:
In this blog, I’ll let others do most of the talking. For a clear conservative position on climate change, let’s turn to last week’s address on climate and development by Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative Secretary of State for International Development in the new British government. This government, you will recall, is headed by David Cameron, another real-live conservative. Secretary Mitchell gave a gem of a speech, and it’s worth digesting in full.
With less than a week to go until the start of the next round of global climate negotiations, in Cancun, Mexico, climate policymakers see further work on ambitious finance pledges made at the Copenhagen climate talks last year as key to progress towards collective action to avert runaway climate change. Mexico’s ambassador to Washington has stressed the value of such incremental progress.
This is a joint post with Robin Kraft and Dan Hammer.
President Obama is in Indonesia today, and according to Reuters he will make forest conservation a focus of his first official visit to the country. The president is expected to pledge more than $100 million for programs aiming at a 50% reduction of deforestation and forest degradation (e.g. selective logging) by 2014. But we wonder what the benchmark will be for a 50% reduction.
Score one for climate sanity: Yesterday California’s voters overwhelmingly rejected Prop 23, a measure designed to undermine the state’s ambitious clean energy program. They also elected a governor who has pledged to accelerate the state’s green transition. This news resonates far beyond California, as the US green mantle shifts from a gridlocked federal government to the states that have supported clean energy all along.
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