Arguments over global warming often have a moralistic or even religious cast. But a cold assessment of risks and how to ensure against them would doom the anti-carbon campaign.
Bleak judgments about stimulus spending in the U.S. miss the main point of it, which was to funnel a substantial share of the money to unionized, dues-paying, Democratic-voting government employees. In this way, the stimulus succeeded.
One could find himself tugged in two directions by the latest ruling in the defamation suit filed by climatologist Michael Mann, who has long been an object of ire among climate-change skeptics. Now it seems the skeptics have let their ire get out of ...
There are no global institutions even remotely capable of getting the world to reduce its energy consumption. So, unless we get a cheap, clean renewable, we're probably all going to be getting hotter.
National debates over environmental issues are sometimes derailed by two kinds of extremists: eco-doomsayers and techno-optimists. Noisy, headline-grabbing dogmas are an impediment to progress.
Hard-to-predict sudden changes to Earth’s environment are more worrisome than climate change’s bigger but more gradual impacts, a panel of scientists advising the U.S. government concluded last month. The 200-page report by the National Academy of Sciences looked at warming problems that can occur ...
The upshot for Japan from the just-ended Warsaw conference on climate changes is that it must come up with a new longer-term emissions reduction plan within 16 months.
The chief of the U.N. Environment Program urged Japan to keep playing a leadership role in the fight against global warming, although it faces a challenge caused by Fukushima nuclear disaster, which left most of its atomic plants offline. “The world has in a ...
The typhoon in the Philippines is a useful reminder that we need to think more about what can be done, both on climate mitigation and on disaster preparation.
“We’ve been telling the rest of the world we don’t want what’s happening to us to happen to everyone else,” said Lucille L. Sering, the vice chair of the Philippines’ Climate Commission,, as the country struggled to cope with the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. ...
A carbon tax could not only cut emissions but also reduce budget deficits and enhance energy security.
The process of setting a new goal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions was marred by a standoff between the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Environment Ministry. METI, long a champion of nuclear power, was reluctant to set the target and the ...
