Posts filed under “Environment”
More New York
Kevin Drum has an email conversation with someone who thinks I’ve got this all wrong. I think he or she has mostly missed my point. Let’s take this a bit at a time. It is true that people living in NY have much much lower carbon footprints than those who live in lower density areas. [...]
Liberal NIMBYs
I see that the New York Times ran a piece over the weekend pointing out lefty hypocrisy on a handful of green issues. Residents of liberal enclaves like Brooklyn, Berkeley, and Cape Cod proclaim to worry about the environment, but when bike lanes, or bus-rapid transit, or wind farms are planned for their own backyards, [...]
Of Laws and “Laws”
Readers, I should note that Roger Pielke Jr has commented on the previous post and emailed me to complain that I am misrepresenting the view he presents in his book. In fact, he supports a slowly increasing carbon tax and he thinks there need not be a trade-off between economic growth and the environment. He [...]
Growth and Climate
The Economist’s review of Roger Pielke Jr’s new book reads: The dilemma is that policies to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions have so far been singularly unsuccessful. Mr Pielke expresses the essence of this failure as what he calls the “iron law†of climate politics: “When policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reduction, [...]
America’s Shame
Ron Brownstein pointed out, over the weekend, that the Republican party is almost unique among major political parties across the world in its overwhelming skepticism of the science of global warming. As an American living in America, I counted this as one of the pieces of knowledge I held in my possession, but not one [...]
Taxes and Innovation, again
Megan McArdle has weighed in on the debate over fuel taxes and innovation, in a post that I don’t find particularly persuasive. She begins by arguing that, hey, Europe is different: I am not going to extensively rehash the ways in which the US is simply different from Europe:Â the number of children and the [...]
Ideas
I have in mind a fairly detailed set of policy ideas that fit into the package I’d label “ideal climate policy response.” I also have in mind changes I’d accept to this package that would correspond to “second-best”, “third-best”, “fourth-best” policies, and so on down the line. And at this point, we’re well down the [...]
Heat Warning
My buddy Matt Yglesias wrote an underappreciated book on foreign policy a few years ago, called Heads in the Sand. It was an insightful look at the knots into which Democrats tied themselves trying to outflank President Bush on national defense issues. One of the key points Matt made in that book was that good [...]
Storming and Warming
I realize that if the people who think winter snow storms undermine the science of global warming were the sort who could be influenced by things like evidence and data, then they wouldn’t think winter snow storms undermined the science of global warming. And obviously, there have been some nice explanations elsewhere about just why [...]
On Geoengineering
Brad DeLong links to an interview with Ken Caldeira. It includes this: e360: Right. Well, a lot of people think of geoengineering as a quick and cheap fix for global warming. Is it? Caldeira: Let’s pretend for a moment that putting dust in the stratosphere is easy to do and works reasonably well… and that [...]