Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Companies Learn the Value of Being a Step Ahead of the Law

June 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
cap-and-trade

In 2003, as the human role in warming the planet was being widely accepted, it was pretty obvious which way the wind was blowing on efforts to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. There would be regulation, sooner if not later, and businesses that trod with a large carbon footprint had to decide how to respond. Should they fight new rules, accept them as inevitable, maybe hedge their bets with a little greenwashing while mostly standing pat, or start adopting some of the likely new rules to prepare for the inevitable and perhaps even influence the regulatory outcome? A handful of businesses, ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Why Can’t Obama Articulate His Energy Strategy?

October 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
energysources

When President Obama says his energy strategy is “all of the above,” I cringe. The statement is hardly inaccurate: pushing every kind of energy from nuclear to natural gas and oil to solar, wind, energy efficiency, and grid upgrades is exactly what he’s done during his term. What I dislike is that the president is missing an opportunity to tie all the stuff he’s doing into a grander strategy to decrease carbon emissions, give Americans control over their energy spending, and sustain long-term economic growth. “All of the above,” is using a lame-ish crutch where Obama could be ... Read More

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Climate Change: A Moment of Species Pride

December 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The world is getting warmer, and we have to figure out what to do about it. By "we" I mean all of us humans: we are literally all in this together. The onset of our very own "anthropocene" geological era presents the biggest practical challenge that humanity has faced. How we respond to it will define our place in cosmic history: it is a golden opportunity. In 2010, Miller-McCune magazine published a remarkable piece of data visualization ("Tracking Climate Change") to try and help answer the question: who is responsible for climate change? A year on, and it's still the main topic of the ... Read More

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Climate Optimist Revisits Failures of His ‘Wedges’ Paper

October 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Perhaps the most famous blueprint for slowing and reversing carbon emissions was the 2004 “wedges” paper by Princeton researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow. While the resulting project’s optimism, innovative approach — it includes a “Stabilization Wedges Game” and a musical lecture — and frequent citation have captured imaginations worldwide, policymakers continue to scuttle away from the hard choices it suggests for addressing climate change. As Matt Jenkins described for in the April-May 2008 issue of Miller-McCune, (“A Really Inconvenient Truth”) "... Pacala and ... Read More

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Pricing Carbon to Reduce Emissions, Create Dividends

May 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Cap and trade is dead — long live the Green Dividend. That was the consensus of a conference on pricing carbon held late last year at Wesleyan University that produced the "Wesleyan Statement," a kind of working manifesto on carbon-pricing principles. According to the resulting statement, an effective pricing strategy would be "upstream" (i.e. paid by the supplier), calibrated to reach emissions levels recommended by climate scientists, and steadily rising so that businesses and individuals can plan. Speakers advocated a direct, transparent price on carbon as an economic incentive ... Read More

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Australians Have Learned to Drive Less

March 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

With turmoil raging near Middle Eastern oil fields and December’s Cancun climate summit failing to produce any binding agreement even though the Gulf of Mexico had suffered from the world’s worst offshore oil spill, perhaps it’s time to consider how America might honestly address its oil dependency and global warming issues. Transportation, not industry or commerce, is the prime factor in the nation’s consumption of petroleum and emission of greenhouse gases. American driving consumes over half of the nation’s daily burn of 19 million barrels of oil and produces 45 percent of the ... Read More

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The Social Cost of Carbon

February 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

While federal climate legislation ground to a halt in July, the U.S. government began regulating carbon dioxide through the Environmental Protection Agency's mandate to uphold the Clean Air Act. CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas, was declared an "air pollutant," which therefore fell within the EPA's regulatory reach. Whether this has any meaningful impact turns on a little-known data point called the "social cost of carbon." It is, says economist Frank Ackerman, "the most important number you've never heard of." The social cost of carbon, or SCC, is the value in today's dollars of the ... Read More

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Air Conditioning Using 90 Percent Less Power

September 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

We often take air conditioning for granted as we escape from the sweltering summer heat in our climate-controlled homes, but it is an expensive, energy-intensive technology. By some estimates, it accounts for about 14 percent of the electricity consumed by American households. That current comes largely from coal- and gas-fired power plants — bad news as we look for ways to cut carbon emissions to soften the impact of global climate change. Now, engineers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., have developed an innovative air conditioning concept that promises to ... Read More

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The Price to You for Modest Climate Action

June 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The fate of climate legislation in Washington has largely been bound up in the fear that putting a price on carbon will also levy a heavy cost on middle-class families. Your monthly energy tab and gas bill will go up, politicians warn, as major industries tasked with cleaning up their smoke stacks pass the added costs straight down to consumers. "I think there's a fairly strong finding that people want clean energy legislation, they want climate legislation, they want legislation that deals with this problem and gives them a more secure and safe planet for their children and grandchildren," ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Understanding Pyrodiversity

March 2, 2010 • By • 3 Comments

Ah, climate science. What a messy and divisive subject. And with events like "snowmaggedon" and "climategate" taking the media by storm, there seems to be no shortage of controversy to fuel the fire. A new study from Oregon State University does just that. Researchers suggest that previous calculations of forest fires' carbon dioxide contribution grossly overestimate the impact of flaming foliage on the atmosphere. Previous research on the climatic effects of fires has suggested that forests, though often touted for their carbon-storage abilities, emit a significant amount of greenhouse ... Read More

More like this: CAROUSEL, Environment, Findings, Science & Environment
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