Archive for the ‘policy’ Category
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 4: Political-economic context
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
Prerequisite posts:
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Overview
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 2: Communication
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 3: Personal perceptions, values, and behaviors.
People often disengage from environmental issues because of a sense of disenfranchisement: “What kind of difference can I make? Not much, so why bother? We need big changes and soon. The power to do this is controlled by politicians, who are influenced (financially and otherwise) by Big Business often intent on blocking change.”
In a series of provocative articles in Energy Policy1, Gregory Unruh posed two questions to help us unravel forces at the root of this problem:
- If [renewable energy] technologies exist, are cost effective, and help minimize climate-forcing emissions, why aren’t they diffusing more rapidly?
- Furthermore, why aren’t government policies to promote them, about which there is substantial scientific and social consensus, more aggressive or effective?
The answer he suggests is carbon lock in. What is it? How has it become major inertia to change by reinforcing power structures in society, business, and politics?
Tags: carbon lock in
Posted in behavior, climate economics, policy, social science, technology, transportation | 5 Comments »
In this week’s issue of Nature: Solving deforestation in Madagascar by first solving social challenges
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
In another Nature article (subscription required), Anjali Nayar highlights the R.E.D.D. strategy of wealthy countries buying carbon offsets in developing countries by paying to prevent deforestation.
One of the big challenges is the issue of permanence–making sure the forests remain intact so that they serve as an effective carbon sink. Doing so in Madagascar will take more than money; it will require dealing with poverty and political instability.
An excerpt:
Non-governmental organizations such as the WCS and Conservation International are working through the turmoil. But even they are worried. “We could have a very difficult time selling carbon if this political situation becomes the norm,” says Lisa Gaylord, head of the WCS in Antananarivo, the country’s capital. “Why would an investor want to come here?”
The potential:
- 30-yr R.E.D.D. projects will prevent the release of 9 million tons of CO2e, similar to the emissions of 2 million cars in the US.
- Money from R.E.D.D. projects could total $5 million/yr, funding health and development projects to reduce poverty.
The challenges:
- 85% of the population lives below $2/day
- Slash and burn agriculture is common to cultivate rice, but rapid productivity declines means that farmers must carve deeper into the forests every few years.
- Forests had declined form 90% to 15% of Madagascar’s land area by 2005.
- The recent military-backed coup led to an increase in illegal logging and wildlife harvests. Government police are doing little to stop what’s being called a logging free-for-all.
- R.E.D.D. is at risk of losing funding because international donors are not convinced illegal harvests can be controlled. Loss of funding further impedes the ability to patrol against illegal harvests.
- Without R.E.D.D. funding, more people are returning to slash and burn agriculture.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wggyfrog/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in nature and culture, policy, sustainable development | 1 Comment »
In this week’s issue of Nature: Brazil hopes to lead developing nations by example
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
In this week’s Nature (subscription required), Jeff Tollefson describes how Brazil is talking big greenhouse gas reductions—possibly as much as 40% by 2020:
- 2/3 coming from reducing deforestation by 80%.
- 1/3 coming from the energy, agriculture, and reforestation.
- Brazil is also warming up to the idea that foreign countries can offset their greenhouse gas emissions by investing in forest conservation.
One outstanding question is how forest conservation projects and carbon markets like R.E.D.D (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries) might affect indigenous land rights.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/visionshare/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
Posted in nature and culture, policy, sustainable development | No Comments »
Economists agree on climate warming but are still stuck on how much it costs
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
A new policy brief, Economists and Climate Change: Consensus and Open Questions, from the Institute for Policy Integrity (NYU School of Law) is getting a lot of headlines today.
Most reports are picking up on the statistics:
- 84% or economists surveyed agree that global warming represents a serious risk to the U.S (7.6% are neutral, 5.6% disagree, and 2.8 % have no opinion).
- 86% believed that agriculture would be the sector most at risk.
- 92% preferred market-based solutions like a cap-and-trade or carbon tax.
This is significant because it shows that most economists have aligned with the natural scientific consensus of the IPCC. Questions of whether climate is warming and its potential seriousness are over. The current problem is how we deal with it.
Today’s report shows there is still a point of contention with the economics of climate warming…
Posted in climate economics, policy | 1 Comment »
Why don’t people engage climate change? Overview
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
Last week, Pew published a new poll suggesting a declining number of Americans believe there is solid scientific evidence of climate warming and that warming is a serious problem.
In the next several posts, I’m going to address the question of why it appears that people don’t seem to engage climate change. This work is based on research for a talk I gave a few days ago.
Helping people understand and become active in dealing with climate change is challenging, but it’s also an incredibly fascinating interdisciplinary enterprise. You’ll see that disciplines across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities are needed for this conversation.
And you’ll see some things that are counterintuitive and may surprise you.
I’m going to consider five major problems contributing to this challenge, shown in order of what I consider to be increasing difficulty to deal with:
Posted in behavior, climate change science, climate skeptics deniers and contrarians, environmental literacy, higher education, nature and culture, policy | 4 Comments »
Calling out and discrediting climate change contrarianism
Friday, October 30th, 2009
Several folks have asked me about climate change skeptics/deniers/contrarians. Why does the media give them air time, and why are they considered legitimate sources of information?
Many have argued recently that Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new book, SuperFreakonomics, is the most recent version of contrarianism disguised as balanced analysis of climate change.
I almost feel bad for Levitt and Dubner because rather than adding to the serious discourse of climate change as intended, SuperFreakonomics is turning out to be an instruction manual for how to call out and discredit contrarian arguments (I say almost because they are probably raking in a ton of royalties from this controversy):
(1) Eric Pooley, a columnist with Bloomberg, was one of the folks to make the initial call out the day the book hit store shelves.
(2) Next came Paul Krugman’s NY Times blog, further calling out Levitt and Dubner as contrarians with a series of hard-hitting blog posts, including this one.
(3) David Roberts at Grist then added comparisons to the longstanding climate warming skeptic, Freeman Dyson, taking some serious shots at the media (sorry Jon Stewart fans, you may not like what you hear).
(4) In one of his longest posts ever, Joe Romm at ClimateProgress (who was also one of the vocal folks initially calling out Leavitt and Dubner) picked up Roberts’ and Krugman’s analyses yesterday and examined further the two questions above, showing how and why the media often enables these folks (with more bad news for Jon Stewart fans).
(5) In a letter yesterday at RealClimate, scientist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (one of Levitt’s colleagues at the University of Chicago) shows how easy it would have been to get the science right in SuperFreakonomics.
Related post: SuperFreakonomics ignites a SuperStorm of criticism
Posted in climate change science, climate skeptics deniers and contrarians, policy | No Comments »
Milbank: A change of climate in the Senate?
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post today suggests that the tide of opinion in the Senate may be turning against climate change naysayers.
An excerpt:
Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, committed climate-change denier, found himself in just such a position Tuesday morning as the Senate environment committee, on which he is the ranking Republican, took up legislation on global warming. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was in talks with Democrats over a compromise bill — the traitor! And as Inhofe listened, fellow Republicans on the committee — turncoats! — made it clear that they no longer share, if they ever did, Inhofe’s view that man-made global warming is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
“Eleven academies in industrialized countries say that climate change is real; humans have caused most of the recent warming,” admitted Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). “If fire chiefs of the same reputation told me my house was about to burn down, I’d buy some fire insurance.”
Tags: Senate
Posted in policy | No Comments »
Climate adaptation: We have no choice, and it’s not enough
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
Our global environment is changing in ways that we are beginning to observe in our lifetimes:
- Climate is warming by as much as a degree centigrade per decade in parts of the Polar North.
- Permafrost is thawing.
- Species ranges are shifting northwards in latitude and upwards in altitude.
- Sea level is rising.
- Sea ice is shrinking.
- Polar ice is thinning.
- Pervasive droughts are beginning to grip parts of the world.
- 50 and 100 year rain storms are happening multiple times in a decade.
- Warming is wreaking havoc on cultures around the world. Inuit communities are losing their villages and traditional hunting grounds. Bangladeshi farmers are losing their coastal fields to saltwater incursion. Pacific islanders are poised to lose their atolls. This week, Nature published a story about how the thawing of the Thorthormi Glacier in the Himalayas threatens the nation of Bhutan.
Tim Killeen, head of Geosciences at NSF, once said that if you look at model projections of climate, they all say the same thing up to the year 2030: Based on the gases we have already emitted, and the inertia in the ocean-atmosphere system, we are committed to climate change at least to this point, and there’s little we can do about it. This means we have no choice but to start adapting to things like changing seasonality in temperatures and precipitation, food production, sea level rise, and species distributions. The most recent IPCC synthesis report echoes this.
After 2030, however, models diverge depending on which socioeconomic path we choose. How fast we de-carbonize the economy will determine the extent to which we mitigate warming and how much further adaptation we will need.
There is vigorous debate about the role of adaptation in a world where mitigation is clearly needed. Adaptation has long been assailed by the environmental community as giving up. And now that we need it, old thinking is hard to break.
In a recent article in Yale 360 (Learning to Live With Climate Change Will Not Be Enough), David Orr argues strongly for mitigation over adaptation, although he recognizes that adaptation strategies in the near term are prudent to meet the changes to which we are already committed.
Today, Bowdoin College’s Environmental Studies program, in partnership with the The Nature Conservancy and the McKeen Center for the Common Good, hosted a symposium, “Changing Environments, Changing Societies: Community Responses to Environmental Uncertainty.” It included a mix of international and regional scholars and practitioners, social and natural scientists, and issues like biodiversity, water, food, public health, and infrastructure/urban planning.
What were some of the main outcomes this group synthesized about adaptation?
Posted in behavior, climate adaptation, climate change science, environmentalism, food and agriculture, nature and culture, policy | 2 Comments »
In this week’s issue of Nature: Copenhagen
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
The focus this week is on the Copenhagen climate talks coming up in December. Here are some excerpts from a few articles:
Tags: China, Copenhagen, India
Posted in policy | No Comments »
SuperFreakonomics ignites a SuperStorm of criticism
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
A few years ago, authors Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner wrote the bestseller, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
Their follow up—out yesterday– is called SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. As the provocative title suggests, they are wading into climate change.
Early response to chapter 5 on climate change has been hostile. The book is being widely panned for scientific and economic inaccuracies, repetition of discredited ideas about global cooling, as well as false portrayals of the lead scientists interviewed.
Here’s the low down:
- Joe Romm at ClimateProgress (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8)
- RealClimate (part 1)
- Paul Krugman (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)
- Union of Concerned Scientists (part 1)
In their defense, Levitt and Dubner argue they are not contesting climate warming, only considering possibilities for how to cool it with geoengineering.
Here’s their response (part 1, part 2).
Update (10/23): Not surprisingly, Climate Change Skeptics Embrace “Freakonomics” Sequel.
Update (10/24): Paul Krugman (part 5)
Tags: geoengineering, superfreakonomics
Posted in climate change science, policy, sustainability | 1 Comment »
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