Foreign Policy Blogs

Climate Change

Central Asia & Climate Change: Overview

I want to send you to my colleague Bonnie Boyd's terrific article on climate change in Central Asia. Bonnie is the FPA's blogger on Central Asia and has got some really interesting posts going up. 

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"Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability"

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its second report of the year yesterday in Brussels. (I referenced this in "Headlines" below on April 3.) The IPCC Report is titled "Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" , that's a mouthful. Go to the IPCC website for all the material relevant to this including the […]

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Renewable Energy

I've been looking at renewable energy , we used to call it alternative energy , for a long time. When I went, as a high schooler, to the first Earth Day in 1970, I said, "Yeah, great. This is the future." When I read Barry Commoner's The Politics of Energy, published in 1979, I said […]

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Headlines

Supreme Court – As of noon Eastern time today, Google listed 1,127 news articles reporting on yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court decision, 5-4, in favor of the plaintiffs in probably the most important climate change case to be adjudicated anywhere in the world.  Here's the story from "The Guardian" and from "The Online NewsHour."   See this excellent analysis […]

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Bits and Bobs

As I've noted before, there is a lot going on!  What follows is another smattering of items like my "Smorgasbord" post below.  Politics – There is much to be discussed regarding the politics of climate change, internationally, between various stakeholders, and, of course, within countries. Two pieces from "The Economist," for instance, illustrate the intense […]

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The Ayes Have It , Part Deux

In my post from March 19 on some international polling results, one of the salient findings was that Americans' consciousness and concern regarding climate change has risen dramatically in the past few years.  Two new polls confirm that. The first, released March 12 from the Yale Center of Environmental Law and Policy's Environmental Attitudes and […]

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Activism!

I've got a lot for respect for activists and what they do.  I was one, and I like to think this blog is a form of activism.  Today I will spare you the call to the barricades but I do want to flag some important programs that are going on and that merit your attention.  First […]

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Al Gore

Let's presume you have not just returned from an interplanetary expedition and have been unable to access any Earth media over the past several years.  Then you know that former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has been leading a very public fight to apprise people of the reality and dangers of global warming.  The documentary […]

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Smorgasbord

I've been looking at energy and environmental issues for nearly 40 years and I've never before seen the proliferation of big news stories that I've been seeing for the past year or so, particularly, of course, on climate change.  Maybe it was "An Inconvenient Truth," released on May 24 last year; maybe it was the 72° […]

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The Ayes Have It

As I said in my inaugural post on March 5, the good news on climate change is that " the recognition of the terrible problem we've created is deepening and solutions are being actively sought."  People everywhere are tuned in to the issue.  Recent polls indicate that this is very much the case.  "Poll Finds […]

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EU Summit Agreement

The big news last week was from Brussels.  The European Union Summit meeting produced a truly historic agreement on greenhouse gas reduction, renewable energy, and energy efficiency, among other things.  We'll get to some of the specifics in a moment.  First, consider what we're talking about when we talk about the European Union.  It is […]

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"The importance of the Montreal Protocol in protecting climate"

A stunning report came out in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS):  "The importance of the Montreal Protocol in protecting climate." The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987 by virtually every nation on the planet, including the U.S., sought curbs on the production of stratospheric ozone-destroying chemicals such as the chlorofluorocarbons that […]

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"The Business of Green"

I will touch on the economics of climate change a lot in the coming months, and also how businesses, large and small, are driving so much of the action.  For openers, I want to refer to a really terrific special section of the "NY Times" that came out on March 7:  Business of Green.  What […]

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Welcome to the FPA on Climate Change

I've got bad news and I've got good news.  The bad news is that we have managed over the past 250 years or so to begin to dangerously overheat our planet, primarily by the burning of fossil fuels:  coal, oil, and natural gas. What's worse is that we have accelerated this process as industrial civilization […]

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