Washington Post (December 27)
“On climate change, curb your enthusiasm. It’s not that the recent international conference in Paris didn’t take significant steps to check global warming. It did. Nearly 200 countries committed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from preindustrial times was reaffirmed. The trouble is that what’s being attempted is so fundamentally difficult that even these measures may be wildly unequal to the task.”
Tags: Climate change, Difficult, GHGs, Global warming, Paris, Preindustrial
New York Times (November 29)
“Paris will almost certainly not produce an ironclad, planet-saving agreement in two weeks. But it can succeed in an important way that earlier meetings have not — by fostering collective responsibility, a strong sense among countries large and small, rich and poor, that all must play a part in finding a global solution to a global problem.”
Tags: Agreement, Climate change, Collective responsibility, Global solution, Ironclad, Paris, Planet saving
USA Today (November 9)
“Innovation is the key to moving from dirtier fuels to cleaner ones.” To the joy of environmentalists, President Obama rejected the proposed Keystone pipeline to carry oil from Canadian tar sands to the U.S. “The main factor behind Obama’s decision is something environmentalists hate even more than Keystone: hydraulic fracturing, or fracking,” which has added over 3.5 million barrels per day to U.S. domestic production. “The lesson for climate change is obvious… If we want to keep oil (and coal) in the ground, we need to make other forms of energy cheaper. That means nurturing technologies such as natural gas extraction. It also means promoting another technology that environmentalists love to hate: nuclear energy.”
Tags: Canada, Climate change, Coal, Environmentalists, Fracking, Fuel, Innovation, Key, Keystone, Nuclear energy, Obama, Oil, Pipeline, Tar sands, Technologies
Washington Post (August 20)
“If you care about climate change or air pollution, you cannot casually write off nuclear power, which produces virtually no carbon dioxide emissions while generating a tremendous amount of reliable power.” Renewables simply can’t fill the gap quickly enough. Without nuclear, burning additional fossil fuel is the alternative. “No one concerned about climate change should be willing to take it off the table…. The right response to Fukushima is to make sure reactors meet high safety standards, not to make the fight against global warming much harder.”
Tags: Air pollution, Climate change, CO2, Emissions, Fossil fuel, Fukushima, Global warming, Nuclear power, Renewables, Safety
Financial Times (June 14)
“The slow pace of the shift away from fossil fuels is evidence of their compelling advantages in terms of cost and convenience. Tackling the threat of catastrophic climate change cannot rely on wind and solar power alone but requires multiple changes, including a shift within fossil fuels away from coal towards gas.”
Tags: Advantages, Climate change, Coal, Convenience, Cost, Fossil fuels, Gas, Shift, Solar, Wind power
New York Times (June 7)
“In a welcome development, businesses are asking world leaders to do more to address climate change. This week, the top executives of six large European oil and gas companies called for a tax on carbon emissions.” Implementation will face stiff resistance, but “world leaders, who will meet in Paris later this year to negotiate a climate change agreement, cannot give up in the face of this opposition. Carbon taxes are one of the best policies available to solve this global problem.”
Tags: Businesses, Carbon emissions, Carbon taxes, Climate change, Climate change agreement, Oil and gas, Resistance
Washington Post (April 6)
“Climate-change deniers are in retreat.” Funding is being cut off for groups that once tried to justify the increasingly untenable position that human activities are not causing climate change. “For politicians and climate-denial groups, the elixir of life is money. Now that corporations are becoming reluctant to bankroll crazy theories, the surrender of climate-change deniers will follow.”
Tags: Climate change, Corporations, Deniers, Funding, Money, Politicians, Retreat
Los Angeles Times (January 25)
We mustn’t forget that any solution to climate change is centrally linked to limiting population growth. “It is not a sustainable scenario to keep producing larger young populations. Our finite planet cannot host infinite growth. It’s already showing the strain.” Family-planning programs can “make a real difference, both in slowing the rate of warming and in helping vulnerable nations adapt to its effects.”
LA Times (December 22)
“At the latest round of international climate talks this month in Lima, Peru, melting glaciers in the Andes and recent droughts provided a fitting backdrop for the negotiators’ recognition that it is too late to prevent climate change…. They now confront an issue that many had hoped to avoid: adaptation.”
Tags: Adaptation, Andes, Climate change, Climate talks, Droughts, Glaciers, Lima, Negotiators, Peru, Prevention
Financial Times (November 12)
An unexpected announcement at the summit in Beijing may jump start efforts to combat climate change. “China and the US have set aside nearly 20 years of discord over how to combat climate change and laid out their respective plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions.” The breakthrough may “galvanise efforts to seal a global climate pact at the end of next year in Paris.”
Tags: Beijing, Breakthrough, China, Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Paris, Summit, U.S.
