Kumar Venkat
Kumar Venkat is a technologist and carbon footprint analyst based in Portland, Oregon. As the founder of CleanMetrics Corp., he helped companies quantify and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. @kumarvenkat
Articles by this author
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Views Sunday, September 20, 2020 Climate Science Is Vulnerable to Politics As the U.S. West Coast struggled to contain unprecedented wildfires, Donald Trump maintained that science really doesn't know the root cause of this devastation. Before we dismiss this as another off-the-cuff Trumpian comment, the pandemic has shown that a president's beliefs—however illogical and... Read more |
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Views Monday, May 18, 2020 Emerging From the Pandemic With a Climate Plan As most of us stay hunkered down at home, we can already see a clearing of the air. There are reports of dramatically lower air pollution and smog around the world. Los Angeles saw a 29% drop in air pollution in March, and the nitrogen dioxide in the air from Boston to Washington is at the lowest... Read more |
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Views Thursday, November 28, 2019 Eating Well Without Destroying the Climate As you sit down to eat a holiday dinner with family or friends this year, the Earth’s climate may be the farthest thing from your mind. But if you are looking for a good New Year’s resolution in a few weeks, you can’t go wrong with climate-friendly eating. The links between food and climate are... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, March 29, 2017 Reframing the Here and Now: How to Fight Back on the Climate Front Climate change programs are up for elimination with the proposed 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and the dismantling of the Clean Power Plan . While environmentalists are protesting this, we are not seeing a grassroots uprising to fight this in the way that Obamacare... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 01, 2004 What Kind of Productivity Do We Need? On my last visit to India, I walked into a restroom at the airport in Bangalore, the high-tech capital of India, and was greeted by an attendant whose job was to dispense liquid soap and paper towels. The work was, of course, superfluous, but he clearly needed the job and the tips he occasionally... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 08, 2004 Free Trade: Benefit or Peril for the Environment? One of the most contentious issues surrounding globalization is the concern that free trade hurts the environment, both locally and globally. The classic argument for free global trade is that it is efficient for countries to specialize in producing goods where they have a comparative advantage,... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 11, 2003 Global Trade = Global Warming Recent news that Russia is unlikely to ratify the Kyoto Protocol -- which would deliver a deathblow to the world's first climate change pact -- comes at a time when the need for a comprehensive international agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions has never been greater. One of the reasons is the... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 18, 2003 Globalization's Unanswered Questions During the run-up to the World Trade Organization's failed meeting in Cancun, most editorial writers around the world called for an end to unfair farm subsidies and tariffs in rich countries. After all, who could be against an open global market in agricultural products that might offer farmers in... Read more |