Recent quotes:

Evening Must-Read: Martin Wolf: Riches and Perils of the Fossil-Fuel Age - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

The sense of the BP report… is that… obstacles are many: costs, technological limits, slow turnover of the capital stock, inability to implement policy globally and natural inertia…. If governments could agree to implement a tax on carbon, they would give a big impulse towards an energy future that is more efficient and less polluting
#Global-Warming #Martin-Wolf #Energy - equitablegrowth.org

Evening Must-Read: John Podesta: Climate Change Progress Is Possible - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

The proponents of do-nothing on global warming have now fallen back to their third line of defense. The first line of defense was to claim that the science was unsettled. The second line was to claim that it would be too expensive and that future generations would be better able to fix than we are to do our share in helping to prevent and reduce. The third line of defense is that since it is a global problem the United States should sit back and let other countries deal with it and free-ride on their efforts. And it is definitely progress that John Pedestal now feels that he can take aim at line of defense number 3: John Pedestal: Climate Change Progress Is Possible: “Many in today’s Congress are responding to the urgency of the climate threat not with action… …but with obstruction, skepticism, and outright denial. This week, the Senate held a hearing on the EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan rule, which would set the first-ever limits on how much carbon pollution power plants can put in our air and vastly improve public health as a result, averting up to 150,000 asthma attacks in children per year. Republicans criticized the proposal from every angle–including by claiming it doesn’t do enough. Since we in the United States cannot solve the complex, global challenge of climate change solely through actions taken within our own borders, their argument goes, we should do nothing. This is a fallacy. Failing to take steps today to curb carbon pollution and other greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. would endanger our economy, our national security, and our children’s future…
#Global-Warming #John-Podesta - equitablegrowth.org

Afternoon Must-Read: AFP: 'Mega-Drought' Risk in 21st-Century Western U.S. - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Increasingly, not just prairie agriculture but California agriculture looks like toast. Phoenix and Las Vegas look uninhabitable because of an unsolvable water problem. And when prairie agriculture goes and we shift away from carbon energy, there will be no reason to live between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountain Front Range… AFP: ‘Mega-Drought’ Risk in 21st-Century Western U.S.: “Currently the western United States… …has been experiencing a drought for about 11 of the past 14 years…. ‘I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be,’ said co-author Toby Ault…. ‘We are the first to do this kind of quantitative comparison between the projections and the distant past, and the story is a bit bleak,’ said Jason Smerdon…. ‘Even when selecting for the worst mega-drought-dominated period, the 21st century projections make the mega-droughts seem like quaint walks through the Garden of Eden.’… Researchers applied 17 different climate models to analyze the future impact of rising temperatures on regions from Mexico to the United States and Canada…. ‘The results… are extremely unfavorable for the continuation of agricultural and water resource management as they are currently practiced in the Great Plains and southwestern United States,’ said David Stahle… who was not involved in the study…
#Global-Warming #Regional-Economics - equitablegrowth.org