China watchers around the world are alarmed at the significant fall in Chinese stock markets. But Beijing may have a few tricks up its sleeve.
China watchers around the world are alarmed at the significant fall in Chinese stock markets. But Beijing may have a few tricks up its sleeve.
The Arab Spring awoke people to the power of social media in a political context. Of course, you would have to be living under a rock to think it was the first time Twitter was ever used to coordinate mass protests — it was hugely prominent in Iran during the 2009 protests, Moldova, and the Greek riots in […]
I went down across the street from the United Nations in New York a couple of Saturdays ago and took part in a medium-sized but interesting demonstration of concern about climate change. It was part of the “Moving Planet” series of demonstrations all over the world, organized by 350.org, that produced over 2,000 events in […]
There was a very important bit of reporting in the NY Times yesterday: A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself. Among the most important things it does is illustrate quite clearly how the extremes of temperature and precipitation that are becoming the norm are negatively affecting agricultural production. Productivity losses generate higher prices which, in […]
You know the EPA made its endangerment finding on greenhouse gases for a reason: There are a number of ways in which human health is now being harmed or threatened by climate changes including steadily rising temperatures and temperature extremes. An article just out in a peer-reviewed journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health […]
Here’s a terrific book from the sustainability pioneer Lester Brown that I used in my Clean Tech class last Fall. It touches on everything that needs examination. It shows the state of the climate system and the impacts we’ve been experiencing, and it looks closely at all the other environmental insults we’ve been visiting on […]
I’ve never been more proud to be a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. I spent a few happy years in Madison way back when. It was just past the days of the anti-war demonstrations, and I was generally apolitical about things for a brief time in my early 20s, but it’s a great little […]
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. […]
I might more accurately call this post The Catastrophe of the Senate, but that won’t get us anywhere – for the moment. In any event, as you know by now, the concatenation of Republican anti-environmentalism and fear (and no doubt loathing), plus intransigence from Democratic Senators from states where coal and oil are king, has […]
I would be remiss if I didn’t point you in the direction of this thoughtful and impassioned column today by Paul Krugman: Drilling, Disaster, Denial. Krugman is eloquent about our complacency. He attributes this, in part, to our many successes in fighting the visible manifestations of pollution: smog-enveloped cities, burning rivers, garbage barges, etc. He […]
I’ve been looking at energy and environmental policy for many years and I’m usually happily surprised when things take a smart turn. Even thoughtful, progressive policymakers like Barack Obama, though, wind up making bone-headed calls. Obama offers nuclear plant loan guarantee, as the FT reports, is one good example. I’m, to put it politely, less-than-sanguine […]
If you know me or have been reading this blog with any regularity, you know I’m a skeptic. Not about climate change but about China. I made an analysis several years back that, in retrospect, seems mistaken. I perceived that the economic and political pressures of the liberal democracies would push and pull China toward […]
The announcement of Elinor Ostrom as a co-winner, along with Berkeley economist Oliver Williamson, of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics came both as a surprise and a breath of fresh air. None of the participants of Harvard University’s (informal) annual betting pool for the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics staked their claim […]
Paul Krugman had a couple of columns, today and Friday, with some complementary posts at his blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” on the economics of cap-and-trade as well as the dire situation in which we find ourselves relative to warming and its impacts. To refute some of the nonsensical – and false – claims […]
We were away for several days (see post below), otherwise I would’ve further deluged you with information on the passage of the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), aka ACES, beyond what you may already have been experiencing. I should, of course, weigh in with my humble opinion. My first impulse, given […]