A few weeks ago Paul Rogers of the Mercury News wrote that despite the general perception that the current administration having accomplished relatively little Obama has in fact made major strides in national environmental policy. Some examples not included in the article are: the significant tightening of the previously weak regulations surrounding non-conventionally raised livestock, and the FTC’s stepping up efforts to address greenwashing amidst increasing complaints
and problems such as the bogus “bamboo” textiles.
According to the NYTimes, the EPA announced that it will designate the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, one of the most contaminated waterways in the nation, a Superfund site. This designation paves the way for a federally-funded clean up process of decades of pollution; the 1.8 mile canal was shown to have pesticide pollution as well as PCB cancer-causing pollution. The EPA estimated that the cleanup would last 10 to 12 years and cost $300 million to $500 million.…
From last week’s Wall Street Journal comes news that despite the best of intentions from the local government and residents of Boulder, CO significant energy savings are yet to be realized.
Beyond the usual justifications on the whys and why-nots of any local initiative, the really interesting thing is that energy audits have not been terrifically successful in getting people to move forward on retrofits, despite understanding exactly where savings can be realized.…
Last week I wrote about the post-COP15 emissions target deadline that whizzed by for most of the planet, and tried to put it into context. Of course, the larger question of what the resulting cuts would mean with regards to future warming remained unanswered, due to it being written during the wee hours of the morning. Fortunately, someone else also crunched the numbers and compared them to model predictions, New Scientist reports, arriving at a most unfortunate (but unsurprising) answer.
It appears the Obama Administration is starting to eerily resemble the Bush Administration, at least when it comes to energy policy. In last week’s State of the Union address, President Obama touched on—albeit briefly—clean energy standards and climate change.…
There’s a lot of press today about the fact that 55 countries have submitted emissions reduction pledges to the U.N. as the deadline drew passed; note that 27 of them are in the EU.…
by congress planning committee member Joanna Herlihy:
The second session of the Climate Emergency congress was even livelier that the first. Delegates found that prioritization of their recommendations had not progressed much beyond the ‘laundry list’ categorization of the ‘Draft Recommendations’ issued a few weeks earlier.…
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is the first mandatory, market-based effort in the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Ten Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states haved capped and will reduce CO2 emissions from the [electric] power sector 10% by 2018.
States sell nearly all emission allowances through auctions and invest proceeds in consumer benefits: energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other clean energy technologies. RGGI will spur innovation in the clean energy economy and create green jobs in each state.
Science Daily has a nice summary of a recent research paper published in Psychological Science about people’s willingness to pay for higher environmental quality. A particularly well-known theory in this area is the environmental Kuznets curve, which relates increased wealth to increased acceptance of costs for a higher quality environment. These researchers instead looked at the acceptance of these costs across individuals of different political leanings.
For those of you who enjoy academic papers, or are otherwise interested in the nitty-gritty, you can read the paper itself at the principal author’s website.
From a record-breaking freeze threating an entire crop of citrus in Florida to significant snowfall in England, many are wondering just how “real” global warming actually is…considering how cold it’s been lately.…
