If you care about the climate, climate economics, or how economists in general are portrayed in the media, read this piece from Slate: “Surprise—Economists Agree! A consensus is emerging about the costs of containing climate change. So why is no one writing that?”
Enter Eric Pooley: good thing someone is. Here’s a longer blog post about Pooley’s eminently readable academic paper on the same topic.
Originally posted on Environmental Economics.
EDF has been saying for years that the best way to invent new, greener energy technology is to put a cap on carbon pollution. That approach worked to combat acid rain in the 1990s, and a new study provides the best evidence yet that it’s working for climate policy, too.
The study compared countries that ratified the Kyoto Protocol and ones that didn’t, and guess which group had more new green tech patents?
I posted an overview of the findings, including a couple more charts and additional analysis I got from the authors, over at Environmental Economics.
What do you get when you give a respected journalist an academic fellowship? A new species entirely: a readable academic paper.
Eric Pooley, former managing editor of Fortune and a writer for Time magazine spent his fall semester at Harvard. The result is an eminently readable report on “How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change.”
The conclusions are sobering. Most reporters treat the story as stenographers, engaging in “he said, she said” reporting, instead of serving as honest referees of the issues. As a result:
The thought of revitalizing the economy with green jobs is inspiring, but how will it actually work? What will those jobs look like? Duke University just released a study that starts to answer that question. It looks at five industries, including LED lighting and concentrating solar power. For each, researchers asked what the value chain is and how jobs could be created.
And right on the heels of that study is this story from CBS News: Former Maytag employees in Iowa are finding new manufacturing jobs making parts for windmills. It’s a great example of the connection between climate solutions and U.S. jobs.
Jackie Roberts is our director for sustainable technologies.
In a video message delivered this week to a bipartisan group of governors at a global warming summit in California, President-Elect Obama made it clear that his climate change priorities start with a cap and trade system to reduce America’s global warming pollution and unleash a clean energy revolution.
My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process. That will start with a federal cap-and-trade system. We’ll establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020, and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050. Further, we’ll invest $15 billion each year to catalyze private-sector efforts to build a clean-energy future.
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It’s a momentous statement that lights the fuse for climate change legislation in 2009. This is exactly what America and the world needs now – a strong cap-and-trade bill will jump-start job creation in new energy industries, and take a huge step toward solving climate change.
This post is by Tony Kreindler, media director for the National Climate Campaign at Environmental Defense Fund.
There’s a lot of buzz right now about the potential for "green" economic stimulus – policies and investments that grow the economy, create jobs, and protect the planet at the same time.
Investing in projects to repair and update our aging infrastructure would pay off in new jobs and a more efficient America. But where will the money come from? Stuck between pay-as-you-go rules and no new middle-class taxes, Congress doesn’t have a lot of options. One could be the auction of pollution allowances under a national greenhouse gas emissions cap. Estimates are that an auction could generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion per year.
