Foreign Policy Blogs

Climate Change

"The Climate for Renewable Energy"

"The Climate for Renewable Energy"

If you’re going to be around NYC next Tuesday night, do yourself a favor and come to this event, organized by NYU’s Center for Global Affairs (where I teach) and the state of Navarra (in Spain).  It’s free and should be compelling.  Register here.

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Why Not Meat?

Why Not Meat?

I’m a Paul Krugman devotee.  (How can you not be?)  His column from this past Monday, Droughts, Floods and Food, had nothing but good sense:  rapidly rising food prices have mostly to do with bad weather, namely the fires and drought in Russia and Ukraine this past summer and the floods in Queensland this winter.  […]

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Hendrik Hertzberg on Climate Change Politics

Hendrik Hertzberg on Climate Change Politics

I’m an old New Yorker man from way back.  I’ve noted any number of terrific New Yorker stories here, from George Packer and Ryan Lizza on the failures of the Senate on climate and energy legislation, to the authoritative Betsy Kolbert on nearly anything and everything relative to sustainability and the environment. Hendrik Hertzberg is […]

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“Say What?” – Biofuels Division

“Say What?” – Biofuels Division

(Sorry to have been a while away from the blog, but last week was pretty busy and then we got away for some lovely skiing.  Snow can be a wonderful thing.  My sympathies, of course, do go out to those of you who are suffering at home, or in your travels, from the very heavy […]

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Gas, Renewables and Fracking

Gas, Renewables and Fracking

(Here’s a great graphic from DOE’s Energy Information Administration that shows how we deploy energy in the US.  Gas is a big factor.) I caught this comprehensive but succinct item at the NYT recently:  Time to Tap the Bounty of U.S. Natural Gas.  It lays out the fact of the astonishing ballooning of new, proven […]

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State of Play – January 2011 Edition

State of Play – January 2011 Edition

(For more on this graphic, go here.) The venerable Matt Wald at the NY Times reported the other day that CO2 emissions in the US peaked in 2005 and, according to the latest estimates, we’re not going back to those numbers until ten years down the road.  How come?  In part – and in part […]

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Positive Feedback

Positive Feedback

As a phenomenon like the continuing production and growing stocks of greenhouse gases by our industrial societies intensifies, it creates a warming effect that thaws the cryosphere – that part of the planet that is frozen.  So, more melting gives more dark surfaces which leads to the earth absorbing more solar radiation which makes it […]

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EPA Stops Mountaintop Removal at Spruce Mine

EPA Stops Mountaintop Removal at Spruce Mine

Invoking a rarely used feature of the Clean Water Act that allows EPA to bar actions that would cause “unacceptable adverse effects” to the environment, water quality, or water supplies, the agency halted a major mountaintop removal mining project.  The EPA release quotes EPA Assistant Administrator for Water Peter S. Silva:  “The proposed Spruce No. […]

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Temperature 2010

Temperature 2010

I gave a lesson, Temperature 101, about a year ago.  It garnered a lot of comments – for this blog anyway.  It is truly astonishing, I thought then, how obtuse the Denialists are, and how marvelously blithely indifferent they are to the sources of their Flat Earth thinking:  the paid shills of the fossil fuel […]

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Hydrogen Buses

There’s a video today from Reuters describing how London is piloting an advanced hydrogen hybrid bus, complete with a waste-to-energy hydrogen production facility. This reminded me of a really great little TV show from Nova that I flagged to you a few years back:  Car of the Future.  Nova visited Iceland for the segment of […]

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World Resources Institute Looks Ahead

World Resources Institute Looks Ahead

On New Year’s Eve, I took a look back at 2010 and a look ahead too.  Jonathan Lash and the venerable World Resources Institute are pretty clued in, so you might like to have their perspective too.  His presentation covers the gamut, from EPA’s authority, to food and water issues, to transportation, deforestation, and the […]

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Climate Progress – Surprise Guest Appearance

I saw yesterday that an item I wrote in early December, Nuclear Power: Running on fumes?, was re-posted the other day at Climate Progress.  If you don’t know Joe Romm and his and his colleagues’ important writing at Climate Progress, do yourself a favor and get over there and subscribe.  Joe is a senior fellow […]

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Climate and Energy in 2010 – Science, Politics, Money and Technology

Climate and Energy in 2010 – Science, Politics, Money and Technology

– Overview – The Met Office in the UK reports that 2010 is on track to be the warmest or second-warmest year in the instrumental record.  Other science, based on massive data, supports that view.  (See graphic above and NOAA’s annual State of the Climate report.)  Meanwhile, the Post-Copenhagen international climate negotiations continued and culminated […]

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More Progress on GHG Regulation

More Progress on GHG Regulation

It’s been a busy week.  I hope you didn’t get caught in any of the massive travel snafus in Europe or the US that have made holiday travel a nightmare for hundreds of thousands.  If you did, then I hope you survived with most of your sanity intact.  It’s a cold, windy morning here in […]

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The Golden State

The Golden State

That’s what people call California.  If you’re thinking about the glitter and the shine of that precious metal and how California reflects it in its forward-thinking, economically smart and environmentally sound approach to climate and energy, then you see what I see.  The clean tech vision and environmental ethic are embraced all along the political […]

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