A perturbed Joshua Green at The Atlantic pushes back at Brad DeLong. Green’s rejoinder seems convincing to me, except for this line: Unlike, say, health care reform, climate issues generally break down by geographic region rather than by party. That’s too sweeping a statement to make, especially with respect to specific legislation like the dead…Continue Reading…
It starts. I’m convinced that Joe Romm will not go down without a fight. He will, to paraphrase a famous term from a far more socially divisive chapter in American history, destroy the climate debate to save it. You think I exaggerate? Check out his post today, in which Romm finally acknowledges that enviros are…Continue Reading…
In 2008, it was shaped by Copenhagen and the proposed U.S. congressional cap & trade legislation. That makes sense, since major political events (especially protracted ones) tend to propel narratives. (Ordinarily, climate science drives the global warming narrative, but 2008 was akin to a presidential election year for climate change.) Sure there were new public…Continue Reading…
David Roberts is first out of the box to note the obvious, after reading this story in today’s Times, which quotes Republican Lindsey Graham: Realistically, the cap-and-trade bills in the House and the Senate are going nowhere. They’re not business-friendly enough, and they don’t lead to meaningful energy independence. Graham then drives the nail in…Continue Reading…
Looks like there’s an important new voice in the climate change debate. As Roger Pielke Jr. notes, Bill Gates recently offered some refreshing thoughts on climate policy, starting with this: Conservation and behavior change alone will not get us to the dramatically lower levels of Co2 emissions needed to make a real difference. We need…Continue Reading…
And you thought the the whole cap-and-trade debate surrounding the U.S. climate bill was already hopelessly politicized. What’s that, you’ve become a bit numbed to it all? How about we throw in a juicy free speech angle to spice things up a bit. Remember those two EPA lawyers that wrote a critical op-ed of cap-and-trade…Continue Reading…
Play along with me for a minute. Let’s say this economist from the London School of Economics is right when he asserts: The American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009 is worse than nothing: it is a con and a fraud. It pretends to be a vehicle for reductions in CO2E emissions. In…Continue Reading…
As the mind-numbing debate over Waxman-Markey grinds on, we should be thankful for the unintended entertainment provided by Joe Romm’s rants and contortionist logic. Upset that some critics have accused him of “cheerleading” the WM bill, Romm is now flailing away, lashing out in typical, unseemly asides at all his usual bogeymen. More bizzarely, Romm…Continue Reading…
Earlier this week, Curtis Brainard at CJR’s The Observatory wrote an excellent appraisal of the cacophonous debate over the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Brainard neatly summarized the two contradictory narratives and the main protagonists. To help navigate what Andy Revkin recently called “the fog of climate policy,” Brainard suggests that newspaper editorial boards should be weighing…Continue Reading…
The indispensable one, boxed into a corner by Roger Pielke, Jr., and The Breakthrough Institute, does something rare: Yes, my thinking on rip-offsets has evolved, primarily because I have spent the last few months talking to leading experts, domestic and international, including the chief climate negotiator for a major European country. As one reader to…Continue Reading…