Political Ecology

Many Washington observers have been wondering what’s happening to the Obama Administration’s greenhouse gas (climate change) agenda. In order to unravel all of this I have prepared a few tables that illustrate the problem. I think most of us understand that the Congress, and more specifically the Senate, has thus far been unable to send [...]

In 1990 a sovereign wealth fund was founded in Norway in which the country invests surpluses from oil and gas industry sales. The fund is designed to secure the state’s ability to act in a post-petroleum era. At the end of the 1990’s the voice of Norwegian civil society insisted that the sovereign wealth fund [...]

Dagobert Brito, the George A. Peterkin Professor of Political Economy, and Robert Curl, the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor Emeritus of Natural Sciences and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, made this recommendation in a paper published by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. A PDF of the paper can be viewed at: [...]

While the uncertainty in climate change predictions are often given as a reason by those skeptical of climate change to ignore the problem because of the wide range of model results, the study’s authors take a point of view more common to insurance companies.In insurance, Backus said, greater uncertainty means greater risk. In such cases, [...]

The science of global warming has reached a consensus on the high likelihood of substantial warming over the coming century. Nations have taken only limited steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions since the first agreement in Kyoto in 1997, and little progress was made at the Copenhagen meeting in December 2009. The present study examines [...]

The valuation of ecosystem services such as drinking water provision is of growing national and international interest. The cost of drinking water provision is directly linked to the quality of its raw water input, which is itself affected by upstream land use patterns. This analysis employs the benefit transfer method to quantify the economic benefits [...]

Here, we propose the concept of greenhouse gas value (GHGV) of ecosystems, which accounts for potential GHG release upon clearing of stored organic matter, annual GHG flux, and probable GHG exchanges resulting from disturbance. It treats these ecosystem–atmosphere exchanges in a time-sensitive manner, thereby providing an appropriate framework for computing of the GHG consequences of [...]