For this week and next week, the news services will focus on the Democratic and Republican conventions, respectively. From now until Election Day, observers can expect to see discussion of climate change policies and technologies attached firmly to discussion of the relative merits of Barack Obama and John McCain’s energy proposals.
In one of the [...]

It’s clear that reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a costly process. Doing so at a level that stands a chance at stabilizing atmospheric CO2 at a “safe” level amounts to a fundamental transformation in the way we produce and use energy. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps even trillions, spent over a [...]

The more I’ve studied international cooperation as it pertains to climate change, the more I’ve come to believe that a mainstay of the solution will ultimately lie with technology. Put differently, I don’t think that we can stabilize CO2 levels just by getting everyone to give up their car in favor of riding their bike [...]

Global warming will reduce the frequency of hurricanes in the Atlantic by the end of the century, reports a new study released yesterday online in the journal Nature Geoscience. A number of scientists have attributed recent increases in Atlantic hurricanes to the warmer waters resulting from climate change, yet research meteorologist Tom Knutson, one of [...]

Hundreds of scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have reported political interference in their work, according to a report released on April 23 by the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Interference at the EPA: Science and Politics at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency” draws from the anonymous responses of 1,586 EPA scientists, 889 (56 percent) [...]

The typically interesting Timothy Ferris, author of bestseller The 4-Hour Work Week, has come out with a great post about the return on investment for going green. It gets to the heart of a lot of what we talk about here, but, most importantly, it emphasizes the fact that responding to climate change is [...]

“Taking a dodgy accounting proposition, which is that you can somehow identify the amount of carbon that any given new bit of forest picks up out of the atmosphere and sequesters, and make that correspond somehow to emissions elsewhere,” is how Greenpeace sees carbon offsetting, according to its senior climate adviser Charlie Kronick. “It can’t [...]

Much as my personal politics prevent me from saying this with too much enthusiasm, I am in some ways quite happy that the Supreme Court denied Al Gore the presidency. If it weren’t for him, who would be the galvanizing figurehead for the fight against climate change? I feel like he really has the right [...]

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge at night. Now imagine it without the lights.
On March 29, inhabitants and businesses in around 380 cities—including Bangkok, Rome and Chicago—turned off their lights for at least an hour. At 8 p.m. wherever they were, various households, businesses, and governments were urged to flick the switch and to return [...]

Facing increased roadblocks to financial success and growth stateside, the U.S. coal industry is taking its business elsewhere: overseas. Coal exports jumped from a little over 49 million short tons (mmst) in 2006 to 53 million in 2007, according to the National Mining Association, and the New York Times reports that coal executives predict exports [...]