Via Dessler and Revkin, an interesting interview with economist Gary Yohe that gets to the heart of the puzzle about gasoline consumption this year. Gas prices soared over the summer, but consumption dropped only a bit (on the order of 3-5 percent year-over-year). The question posed by critics of a carbon tax as a greenhouse …
Continue reading ‘Elasticities in the Short and Long Term’ »
John Whitehead’s jihad against the green jobs argument continues: The implication of this type of study is that environmental policy creates net positive green jobs. The jobs lost as a result of environmental policy are never mentioned. You’ve really got to follow the comment threads on these. And to be clear – John is not …
What’s the full carbon footprint of buying X on line, versus driving to a store to get it? (Pick your own values for the variables. I’m just curious about the sensitivity analysis.)
In the Guardian, David Appell begs us to accept the grim reality: Not one of us – you, me, Obama or the greenest activist anywhere in the world – is willing to live without the comforts fossil fuels provide us – heat, light, instant hot food, convenient transportation, modern agriculture and airplane travel.
The search for a solar-climate link continues. James Annan reports: [T]he field basically consists of little more than people data-mining for correlations that usually fail to hold when tested on out of sample data, and for which there is no real evidence or even plausible modelling to support the hypothesis that there may be a …
This week’s episode of coal-to-liquids watch involves Shell and Anglo American Plc., which were planning a coal-to-liquids plant in Australia, incorporating carbon capture. Now? Not so much, says Bloomberg: Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Anglo American Plc have delayed plans to develop a A$5 billion ($3.2 billion) project in Australia to convert coal into clean …
So says EIA: The increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2007 resulted primarily from two factors: unfavorable weather conditions, which increased demand for heating and cooling in buildings; and a drop in hydropower availability that led to greater reliance on fossil energy sources (coal and natural gas) for electricity generation, increasing the carbon intensity …
Continue reading ‘US greenhouse gas emissions up 1.4 percent in ’07’ »
Alex Steffen: Since we know the single best way of bringing down high birth rates is to empower women by giving them access to reproductive health choices (including contraception and abortion), education, economic opportunities, and legal protection of their rights, empowering women ought to be one of our highest priorities. (As Kim Stanley Robinson puts …
Continue reading ‘Women’s Rights as a Climate Change Strategy’ »
In preparing for a talk I’m giving Monday to a couple of classes at the University of New Mexico, I went looking for examples from the BlogoWorld of people citing the old “’70’s global cooling consensus” canard. It’s a version of my usual talk on the science->media->public brain interface, but I wanted to add the …
Dieter Helm, writing in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, offers the counter-argument to the point made recently by Andy Dessler that the peak and inevitable decline of fossil fuels may put some sort of upper limit on our ability to to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: Some argue that, however intense the dash-for-resources, …