Political Ecology

I’ve been seeing a good deal of defeatist thinking lately along the lines of this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100824092408.htm.  This line of thought posits that the amount of warming already in the pipeline is unavoidable….so therefore we might as well give up trying and just deal with the consequences. This is a very dangerous and fallacious line [...]

“Our computer simulations allow us to predict what impact the timing and rapidity of emission reductions will have on future acidification, helping to inform policy makers” said Tyrrell.Global mean ocean surface pH has already decreased from around 8.2 in 1750 to 8.1 today (remember than a decrease in pH corresponds to an increase in acidity). [...]

The paper notes that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by constructing dams for hydropower generation can cause substantial damage to key freshwater ecosystems as well as to the flora and fauna in the flooded valleys. It also notes that the generally bogus concept that biofuels reduce carbon emissions is still being used as a [...]

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 [...]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated projected temperature changes for various scenarios in 2007 and researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg have now gone one step further: they have developed a new model that specifies the maximum volumes of carbon dioxide that humans may emit to remain below the [...]

Based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) generated forty carbon production and emissions scenarios. In this paper, we develop a base-case scenario for global coal production based on the physical multi-cycle Hubbert analysis of historical production data. Areas with large resources but [...]