Poll: Make gas guzzlers pay higher fees
A telephone survey of 1,500 Californians, dialed randomly, found support for green transportation taxes and fees – charges that rise and fall with the amount of pollution a vehicle emits.
– 63 percent supported doubling the vehicle registration fee, now an average of $31, and charging higher rates for polluting [...]
Archive for the ‘climate change’ Category
gas guzzlers should pay
Posted in cars, climate change on April 3, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Bangkok climate talks to begin
Posted in climate change, sustainability, world politics on March 28, 2008 | 1 Comment »
AFP story by Charlie McDonald-Gibson:
Meeting for the first time since marathon talks in December on the Indonesian island of Bali, members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will try to thrash out differences that almost derailed their last gathering.
The five-day meeting, beginning on Monday in Bangkok, aims to set out a detailed [...]
zero carbon required
Posted in carbon regulation, climate change, sustainability, world politics on March 12, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say in the Washington Post:
The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease [...]
link heaven (or hell)
Posted in climate change, sustainability on March 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
A Few Things Ill Considered, a blog by a Gristmill contributor Coby Beck who wrote the outstanding How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic guide, has an extensive weekly roundup of global warming news.
See also H.E.Taylor’s page of links (a main source for Beck’s roundup) on a variety of topics many of which are about [...]
media and climate change reporting
Posted in climate change, media on March 9, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Joseph Romm of Climate Progress engages with Andy Revkin of Dot Earth in this recent essay about the media’s ability (or lack thereof) to report accurately on climage change. Look for Revkin in the comments of that post.
Charles Siegel of the Preservation Institute Blog summarizes the dire climate projections.
Age of Consequences
Posted in climate change, reports, world politics on March 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) was reviewed last December by Dave Archer, a climate scientist as the University of Chicago.
Excerpt from the reveiw:
The “expected” scenario calls for 1.3 °C of warming globally above 1990 levels, by [...]
UNEP Year Book 2008
Posted in biodiversity, climate change, oceans, reports, sustainability on February 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The United Nations Environment Programme’s annual report, UNEP Year Book 2008 (PDF, 62 pg, 7 MB), “documents some of the many insights, events, and issues that have emerged during 2007 and, not surprisingly, it is dominated by the theme of climate change.” (See here for translations and individual sections.)
Excerpt:
If average global temperatures increase 3.4° [...]
a climate for conflict
Posted in climate change, population pressure, sustainability, war on February 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history, D.D. Zhang et al., December 4, 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (open access). [See Emmett Duffy's review: A climate for conflict.]
Abstract:
Although scientists have warned of possible social perils resulting from climate change, the impacts [...]
population and climate change, a discussion
Posted in climate change, population pressure, sustainability on February 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A useful roundtable discussion of population and climate change. From the introduction:
A larger global population means a larger demand for everything–most urgently, energy. And although Earth’s resources have apparently stretched further than Paul Ehrlich infamously predicted four decades ago in his book The Population Bomb, the mounting climate problem suggests that the consequences of [...]
Sustainability & Moral Disengagement
Posted in climate change, economic justice, population pressure, sustainability, world politics on February 21, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Here is one of the most thoughtful articles you’ll find on sustainability and the reasons we don’t address it: Impeding ecological sustainability through selective moral disengagement by Albert Bandura, David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology, Stanford University.
Environmental degradation of human origin stems [...]
mitigation in 5 steps
Posted in climate change, economic justice, sustainability on February 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Steve Salmony writing in a comment on GIM, summaries how to mitigate damage to Earth and its residents:
1. Implement a universal, voluntary, humane program of family planning and health education that teaches people the need for setting a limit on the number of offspring at one child per family.
2. Establish an upper limit on the [...]
catastrophe in Africa?
Posted in agriculture, climate change, economic justice, failed states, population pressure, sustainability on February 18, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Paul Chefurka in Africa in 2040: The Darkened Continent:
All in all, the future of Africa is beyond grim when one looks out just a decade or two. Declining food production, rising food prices, shrinking economic activity and a continuation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic paint a picture of human distress that is beyond endurance.
The scale [...]
Acidic seas killing coral reefs
Posted in climate change, oceans on February 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Acidic seas may kill 98% of world’s reefs by 2050 by Ian Sample, science writer for the Guardian.
The majority of the world’s coral reefs are in danger of being killed off by rising levels of greenhouse gases, scientists warned yesterday. Researchers from Britain, the US and Australia, working with teams from the UN and the [...]
CBO: carbon tax vs cap-and-trade
Posted in US politics, carbon regulation, climate change, reports on February 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released a report, Policy Options for Reducing CO2 Emissions (13 pg summary, 25 pg report), comparing a carbon tax to cap-and-trade schemes.
A tax on emissions would be the most efficient incentive-based option for reducing emissions and could be relatively easy to implement. If it was coordinated among major [...]
UNDP Human Development Report 2007/2008
Posted in climate change, reports, sustainability, world politics on February 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Published in November 2007 by the United Nations Development Programme, the full report is a 384 page PDF. A summary is also available. See this page for links to both and a brief introduction. From the introduction:
FACT: Most wealthy countries, specifically OECD countries, are failing to meet their targets for cutting greenhouse [...]
not just the tailpipe
Posted in cars, climate change, sustainability, urban design on February 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
My Other Car is a Bright Green City by Alex Steffen
Our vehicle emissions are a major climate change contributor, but what comes out of the tailpipe is only a fraction of the total climate impact of driving a car, and the climate impact is in turn only a part of the environmental and social damage [...]
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