I never much
liked the idea of arms control. During the Cold War, we managed our nuclear
arsenals rather than reduced them. We treated our nukes like huge, dangerous
animals. We restricted their movements but gave them ample care and feeding.
Until recently, getting rid of the animals altogether wasn't part of the
political agenda. After all, our leaders believed that these beasts were
useful. They scared away the covetous neighbors.
The
global discussion on climate change has quickly degenerated into a north-south confrontation, for perhaps obvious reasons. On average, carbon emissions per capita in the developed world are about five times those in developing countries.
It's no coincidence that most of
those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive
wealthy white men: it's about the only environmental issue for which
they can't be blamed. The brilliant Earth systems scientist James Lovelock,
for instance, claimed last month that "those who fail to see that
population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are
either ignorant or hiding from the truth.
If you do something good for the environment, does it make any sense
that you should then be entitled to do something bad to the environment?
Of
course it doesn’t. And yet that is basically what corporate polluters
are pushing for as climate legislation makes its way through Congress.
Rather than making required pollution cuts, they want to use “carbon
offsets,” which would essentially allow them to continue their dirty,
polluting business as usual while outsourcing green jobs and cleaner
skies elsewhere…mostly overseas!
MONTREAL - A new report from Greenpeace says oil production in Alberta's tar sands has made Canada into a "global carbon bully."
Little has been done to tackle climate change in Canada, and the federal government has actively tried to block international agreements and laws targeting climate change, says the report, called Dirty Oil: How The Tar Sands Are Fuelling the Global Climate Crisis.
Until a few months ago, government
targets for cutting greenhouse gases at least had the virtue of being
wrong. They were the wrong targets, by the wrong dates, and they bore
no relationship to the stated aim of preventing more than 2C of global
warming. But they used a methodology that even their sternest critics
(myself included) believed could be improved until it delivered the
right results: the cuts just needed to be raised and accelerated.
SAN FRANCISCO - U.S. biotechnology company Codexis, which
is partly owned by Royal Dutch Shell Plc, is expanding its product
offerings to target the emerging market for carbon capture and storage,
President and Chief Executive Officer Alan Shaw said on Tuesday.
Coal-fired power plants provide about half of the electricity in
United States, but account for about 80 percent of carbon dioxide
emissions from domestic power generation, making them top targets for
environmentalists.
It's funny. People really believe that nuclear power is emissions free.
Powering cities with nuclear, they propound, is the panacea to climate
change. And yet, if you really take a look at the fuel cycle, it is
obvious nuclear energy is, in fact, emissions intensive.
First off the ore needs to be mined. This involves drilling,
explosions, heavy equipment. Even at the EPA standard of 15 grams of
carbon per break horsepower engine hour, this translates to a lot of
carbon. Then the ore needs to be shipped to a processing facility, or
mill.
The two papers on carbon emissions published in Nature last week
were ground-breaking: they show us how much carbon dioxide we can
produce if we're to have a reasonable chance of preventing two degrees
of global warming. It's a completely different approach from the UN's
and national governments'. They set targets for reductions by a certain
date but have nothing to say about the total amount of carbon we can
release.
