From today’s newspaper, a look at Jeff Bingaman’s approach to climate legislation: [A]s we sat down for lunch last week to talk climate and energy policy, the first thing out of Bingaman’s mouth was an explanation of “the Byrd rule.” The topic helps illustrate the delicate way Bingaman prefers to play the legislative game. The …
Henry Brean, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, caught something remarkable in the latest monthly reservoir operations plan published by the Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado River region office. By next month, Lake Mead will drop below 1,100 feet above sea level in surface elevation – the first time it has dropped below that …
A team at the University of Arizona has a neat piece of work in PNAS this week isolating the temperature variable in the tree mortality we’re seeing in the West. The scientists put piñon trees from northern New Mexico (I’m so parochial) into Biosphere 2 down by Phoenix, using the facility’s ability to control temperature …
Nothing like a little George Will action to draw traffic to one’s wonky disquisitions. The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Consensus remains number 1 on the AMS web site for the second month in a row, edging out such big hits as “A Surrogate Ensemble Study of Climate Reconstruction Methods: Stochasticity and Robustness,” and …
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a look at the difficulties in Congress as greenhouse gas regulation becomes real rather than an abstract exercise: Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., was one of 26 Democrats who joined Republicans last week in voting to make it harder for the Senate to act quickly on President Barack Obama’s greenhouse gas …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Realities of Cap and Trade’ »
Last week, I wrote a piece for the newspaper (adwalled) about the difficulties faced by greenhouse reduction advocates in New Mexico in getting their Western Climate Initiative legislation moving: The difficulty in passing legislation here is mirrored in other states. Efforts in Montana, Arizona, Utah and Washington, which are also part of the Western Climate …
Continue reading ‘Is the Western Climate Initiative tanking?’ »
Pietro Nivola at Brookings has a new discussion paper that provides, among other things, a useful discussion of where the American public is on climate change. Superficial polling suggests relatively strong support, but when you probe deeper, the cracks show: Majorities, in sum, dutifully nod at abstractions-for example, “doing more” to combat climate change. They …
Continue reading ‘People Seem to Favor Action on Climate Change Until….’ »
Sat down with my favorite search engine’s news goober this evening to see what’s up with cap-and-trade, and I can report that the sweep of coverage had a certain consistent flavor. Some representative headlines: US Might Not Benefit from Cap-and-Trade Cap-trade on carbon may push up costs Cap and Trade: A Huge, Regressive Tax Cap-and-trade …
Continue reading ‘My Random and Totally Unscientific Cap-and-Trade Headline Survey’ »
Coming November 2009, from the University of New Mexico Press, The Tree Rings Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate, by John Fleck. It’s the story of western weather and climate, told through the work of a series of vignettes about some of my favorite scientists, written for middle school-aged kids. A little climate change, a lot …
New Mexico’s cap and trade bill failed. What happens next?