Leaders from more than a dozen U.S. environmental groups stood beside Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in solidarity Wednesday when she announced that the Senate will have a good chance in June to strengthen and pass a landmark bill to slash greenhouse-gas emissions.
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Criticisms of Environment Minister John Baird for the vagueness of the moves announced this week to force oilsands to sequester CO2, and prevent construction of "dirty" coal plants reflects the Alice in Wonderland quality of the climate-change non-debate. Opposition parties brayed that he had not been "tough" enough. Media headlines suggested that big emitters had "won."
Until his Damascus moment, Miklos Zagoni, a physicist and environmental researcher, had been touted as his nation's "most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol." But then this activist saw the work of a fellow Hungarian scientist. His world was rocked. "I fell in love" with the theory, he told DailyTech.com.
Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist at NASA's Langley Research Center with three decades of experience, had found that researchers have been repeating a mistake when calculating the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on temperatures.
The world's top greenhouse gas polluters will try to work out ways to curb carbon emissions from industries and fund cleaner energy projects for poorer nations when they gather in Japan from Friday.
The G20, ranging from top polluters the United States and China to Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa, emit about 80 percent of mankind's greenhouse gases.
European politicians at a carbon conference today in Copenhagen had an 800-pound gorilla on stage with them.
Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Denmark’s Minister for Climate and Energy Connia Hedegaard both hail from Scandinavian countries that have taken aggressive measures to fight climate change. They both made passionate pleas for the world to join together to cut emissions. But the gorilla remains—how to get developing countries and major emitters like India and China to join in?
America and China face trade protection measures from Europe if they fail to join a global climate deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, EU leaders will caution at their summit in Brussels today.
Nations that refuse to curb greenhouse gases will be told that they face “appropriate measures” — code for trade sanctions — if they try to gain a competitive advantage by continuing to allow cheap, high-pollution production.
Will Wilkinson had a very nice comment on NPR's Marketplace Morning. I once had an economics professor who started off his course by explaining that economics is the science of happiness, how to maximize happiness, and this comment reminded me of this.
I also thought about the argument from Vaclav Klaus at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change where he said:
"I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries. This ambition goes very much against the past human experience which has always been connected with a strong motivation to go ahead and to better human conditions."
But back to Wilkinson, here is an excerpt from his speech, but spend the five minutes to listen to his entire commentary. It will be a feel good moment worth 5 minutes of your day.
"Now, if you're forced to choose between a rewarding job and a lot of money, choose the rewarding job. Happiness research doesn't say you should aim to be wealthier. What it says is that, if you hold everything else constant — the richness of your relationships, the joy of your work — a little more money tends to makes us feel a little bit better.
But the corollary for politics is that economic growth and public happiness tend to move in the same direction. The political choice to put a brake on growth is not the social equivalent of choosing a lower-paying, but more meaningful job. It's the choice to make tens of millions of people slightly less happy than they otherwise might have been.
Maybe something is worth that cost. I just can't imagine what it might be."
The Danish Energy Department paid a researcher to promote their climate policy strategy in debates with Bjørn Lomborg. Peter Laut billed about 500 hours of work to the Energy Department a year during the previous administration in Denmark. The other member of the Energy Department's climate advisory group was sued for libel after he accused a documentary film maker of being "paid for by the oil industry."
It is not unusual for scientists to be paid advisors to the government, but Laut wrote commentaries for the Minister of the Environment and promoted the government's climate policy in the media and in public debates. After a debate in Aalborg in 1999, he wrote in his invoice for the 80 hours of preparation time, that "the project was a succes, for once Lomborg was the one that looked like a fool." He presented himself as an engineering professor from The Technical University in Denmark during the debate and did not disclose his ties to the Energy department.
Two key U.S. representatives on Tuesday introduced a bill to prevent federal or state regulators from approving new coal power plants without greenhouse gas emission controls.
Around half of the country's power is generated from coal-fired stations. But investment in coal power plants is waning in the face of potential federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
In a report published today by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, researchers analysed flooding trends across England for the last four decades and found there appears to be a trend for less summer flooding, but more rainfall in winter. Last July's floods were highly unusual, the researchers said.
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