As the hoopla around the latest annual UN climate summit begins to die down, it seems appropriate for healthy climate advocates to set aside a moment to ponder what just happened. The long runup to the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP28), and the two-week meeting itself, generated some clear breakthroughs yet … Read more
This Fall, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality released an apparently routine notice requesting comments on a proposal to sell ethanol into the state. Like everywhere in the US, almost all commercial gasoline in Oregon is blended with 10-15% ethanol to raise the octane level and (according to the Department of Energy) improve “drivability.” The … Read more
In the past few years, industrial-scale atmospheric carbon removal has moved from the fringes of respectable discourse to a mainstream part of the climate policy conversation. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, with its tax credits of up to $180 per ton for directly captured and safely sequestered carbon dioxide, was a key driver of this … Read more
All eyes in the climate world are preparing to turn toward the UN’s annual two-week Conference of the Parties, which begins on November 30 in Dubai. This is the 28th such meeting under the 1992 international treaty known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which coordinates the worldwide response to global warming. … Read more
Accelerated melting of sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets is among the most immediate consequences of global warming. An important benchmark for assessing these changes came two years ago, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offered its latest synthesis of observations and computer modeling on how melting of Earth’s ice (the cryosphere) may progress … Read more
Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy requires mobilizing large amounts of money. This is a basic principle that has been executed with remarkable efficiency by the Biden administration. Within nineteen months of taking office, and with a unified Democratic Congress behind him, President Biden signed three major pieces of legislation that have greatly accelerated … Read more
Earlier this month, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, made a provocative statement to accompany release of the agency’s latest World Energy Outlook, perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of the state of the global energy system and where it is heading. Looking at the data, Dr. Birol concluded that “…the transition … Read more
International concern is growing over the rising level of atmospheric methane, a greenhouse gas second in influence only to carbon dioxide, and responsible for 25-30% of global warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Methane is a naturally occurring trace gas in Earth’s atmosphere that was present at a preindustrial concentration of 700 parts … Read more
Over the last few weeks, a new scholarly term has appeared in the lexicon of climate science: gobsmackingly bananas. The phrase was coined by a leading climate scientist, Zeke Hausfather, to describe the outcome of a new analysis of global warming by him and his colleagues at Berkeley Earth. The work reveals a sharp global … Read more
Ask climate policy specialists about the best approach to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, and it’s a good bet that many will offer carbon pricing as the answer. Innumerable economic studies bear this out, but the powerful effect of a carbon tax is also pretty intuitive. As long as comparably priced clean alternatives exist, using … Read more
