Climate 411

Bali Bulletin: Horns Are Blaring

By Peter Goldmark / Published: December 13, 2007

Peter GoldmarkThis post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense. Also see his previous dispatch from Bali

The ministers have arrived – environmental ministers, energy ministers, finance ministers, ministers ordinary and plenipotentiary, and ministers who will one day wind up in the penitentiary. They are driving to and fro in limos with police escorts, blaring their horns at those of us on bicycles.

What this means is that we are entering the last 72 hours of the conference. The nights are getting longer, and the strokes shorter.

But measured even against the background experience that large international conferences frequently undergo a moment of dark despair before dawn brings some sort of last-minute agreement, the last two nights of discord have been dismaying.

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Posted in International / Read 6 Responses

Dispatch from Bali: Week 2

By Peter Goldmark / Published: December 13, 2007

Peter GoldmarkThis post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense. Click here for his previous dispatch from Bali.

In the second and final week of climate talks here in Bali, wisps and patches of a larger fabric are beginning to appear.

An informal non-group, with unofficial non-co-chairs from South Africa and Australia, has given birth semi-anonymously to a text which issued from an informal non-meeting and has been widely circulated as a non-paper. It addresses tentatively, with conflicting opinions on some key points, the major open issues facing this conference. These include the touchy questions of what the developing countries should be expected to do, and how to advance the talks on incorporating deforestation into the broader climate framework from which they were excluded a decade ago.

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Posted in International / Read 1 Response

Breaking News: California Judge Rebukes Automakers

By Fred Krupp / Published: December 12, 2007

Fred KruppThis post is by Fred Krupp, President of Environmental Defense.

A federal judge in California today rebuked the auto industry’s attempt to block California and 16 other states from setting tough new limits on global warming pollution from automobiles, calling these efforts “the very definition of folly.”

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Posted in Cars and Pollution / Read 8 Responses

Time to Act, Not Despair

By Nat Keohane / Published: December 12, 2007

Nat KeohaneThis post is by Nat Keohane, Director of Economic Policy and Analysis at Environmental Defense.

In his December 11 post on Grist, Ross Gelbspan argues that we’ve already passed the point of no return with global warming, and climate activists are full of "hollow optimism".

There’s no doubt we’re already seeing signs of global warming. In our Climate 411 blog, we post signs of it all the time (see here, here, here, and here, for example). But just because the boat has started to leak doesn’t mean it can’t still get much worse. Our most dangerous response to climate change is despair. Now, more than ever, we need to act.

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Posted in Climate Change Legislation / Read 6 Responses

The Real Cost of Climate Policy

By Jon A. Anda / Published: December 11, 2007

Jon AndaThis post is by Jon A. Anda, President of the Environmental Markets Network at Environmental Defense. A version of this post was published in the Financial Times on December 4, 2007.

A November 28 column by John Kay in the Financial Times, "Climate Change: the (Groucho) Marxist approach", starts with a quote from Groucho Marx: "Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?" Groucho’s position may be morally indefensible, Kay says, but "[t]he problem of weighting the present and the future equally is that there is a lot of future." From an economic standpoint, valuing future people equally would require unrealistically great sacrifices by those living today.

There’s a problem with this argument. It’s based on a rather totalitarian belief in net present value (NPV) as the means to evaluate policy – a simple calculation of the benefits of action (the cost of doing nothing) minus the costs of action. If a 5 percent discount rate applied to base-case cost and damage estimates yields a negative NPV for policy, does that mean we reject it?

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Posted in Economics / Read 4 Responses

Dispatch from Bali: Week 1

By Peter Goldmark / Published: December 10, 2007

Peter GoldmarkThis post is by Peter Goldmark, Program Director, Climate and Air, Environmental Defense.

We are coming to the close of the first week of the Bali climate talks – spring training, you might say, before the major league coaches and star players arrive next week. These closing days of warm-up week were punctuated by several trumpet blasts coming in from overseas.

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Posted in International / Read 2 Responses