Everybody’s always talking about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What you don’t hear so often is a suggestion to clean up what’s already there. How would you do that? Good question! And it’s the question that Virgin Earth Challenge is posing to the world. Come up with a commercially viable way to remove a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year, and win $25 million.
Newsweek is running an article by George Will titled “Inconvenient Kyoto Truths“. Will says, “It is time to call some bluffs … President Bush should give the world something amusing to watch. He should demand that the Senate vote on the [Kyoto] protocol.” He then goes on to say that America is not disproportionately responsible for global warming, that global warming isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, that we don’t know how to stop it anyway, and that any efforts to do so could cost “tens of trillions”. And for all these reasons, he says, the Kyoto protocol was correctly rejected by the U.S.
In my post last Friday, I mentioned “cap-and-trade” as a good strategy to control greenhouse gas emissions. If you’d like to learn more about cap-and-trade, take a look at a post I wrote for the Gristmill Blog. It describes what cap-and-trade is, and why it’s a more effective strategy than a federal “carbon tax”.
There was an interesting Op-Ed in the Washington Post Wednesday titled “Global Warming and Hot Air,” by Robert Samuelson.
Samuelson is a smart guy who gets the science and asks the right questions on economics. And we do agree on the need for new technologies and clean energy options. The question is how to accomplish this.
If you live in the Northeast or upper Midwest of the United States, it’s cold outside – very cold. I did a series of radio interviews on global warming yesterday, and I kept getting the same question: “How can there be global warming when it’s so cold outside??” Indeed, some talk radio hosts are now proclaiming that global warming is clearly a myth, given the current cold snap.
The science skeptics are at it again, so let’s go over the facts. Read More
Reports about the new 2007 IPCC assessment on climate change have been all over the news. The findings are sobering – the globe is warming largely because of human activities, the effects are already being felt, and if we don’t curb greenhouse gas pollution soon the consequences could be catastrophic.
But some folks are not so sure about this IPCC thing. They want to know: “What is the IPCC anyway, and why should I trust what they have to say?” Our good friends at the Wall Street Journal tell us not to trust the IPCC, it’s written by a bunch of “policymakers.” (See the editorial.)
Not so fast. Here’s what the IPCC really is. Read More
