It might sound like “blaming the victim,” but The Epoch Times has an interesting piece this week about the lack of funds for sustainable development, and the idea that some of the potential beneficiaries of the program are complicit in the situation. The IMF has its own plan for funding green projects.
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.
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.…
Cambridge was fortunate to have City Councilor Henrietta Davis attend the recent United Nations conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen. Here is a report of her experiences:
Some have called the COP 15 meeting last month in Copenhagen “the environmental Woodstock of this generation.” It brought together people from far and wide with high hopes and aspirations, representatives of large countries and small, some like the Maldives, fighting for their survival.
Let’s see if we can grasp the so-called agreement reached in Copenhagan.
Many of the Developed Countries (the North) have promised to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as much as they (comfortably) can in the future.…
While we still have great expectations of the upcoming talks in Copenhagen are all fine and dandy, it’s a rather elite event about a topic that touches us all. There have been efforts to democratize the discussion, such as the Museum of Science’s, “World Views on Global Warming,” but participation is still limited to those who can be physically present.…
Imagine if I offered someone a 17% return on their investment, that would help to prevent catastrophic long-term environmental consequences and improve the comfort and value of their home. Now envision this person shrugging off this offer and spending their money instead on upgrading their car to a fancy SUV that immediately devalues over time.…
Congress will have a lot on its plate when it returns to session in approximately two weeks: health care, war/torture, food safety and of course climate change. Indeed, it’s beginning to look like, once again, the hopes of significant international effort to redress global warming are—arguably with good reason—landing square on the shoulders of Uncle Sam.…
Today was a sad day for the environment, with reports released on the safety of our rivers and oceans being at stake. It is hard to imagine that every river in the US has fish contaminated with mercury or that the plastic bags circulating in the Pacific Ocean in an area twice the size of Texas is now being found to be breaking down into a toxic soup of bisphenol-a. More than ever, we need a movement to rise up and protect this fragile blue orb that supports life as we know it.…
The controversial climate bill passed through the House on Friday and pressure is mounting for the leadership in the Senate to take up the bill. Republicans see the climate bill as too costly for for households and view the bill’s carbon reduction mandates as having a harmful effect on industry. Some environmentalists are also not in support of the house bill, raising concerns over the reduction targets being too low and giving carbon allowances away to industrial polluters.…
