Suchergebnisse

Part I: Incentives -- Not if, but when -- What could possibly go wrong? -- The drive to research -- Part II: Scenarios -- 'Rational' climate policy -- A humanitarian cyclone crisis -- Millions of geoengineers -- Part III: Governance -- Green moral hazards -- Research governance -- Epilogue: The inevitable gamble.

Climate change is both high-impact and high-probability. Probabilities matter. Take strangelets as one extreme. They are particles with the potential to trigger a chain reaction that would reduce the Earth to a dense ball of strange matter before it explodes, all in fractions of a second. That's a high-impact event if there ever was one. It's also low-probability. Really low probability. At the upper bound, scientists put the chance of this occurring at somewhere between 0.002% and 0.0000000002% per year, and that's a generous upper bound.

What we know about climate change is bad enough. What we don't could make it even worse. Adapted from Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman's book, Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet.

Economics is largely just organized common sense, and it doesn't get much more common sense than benefit-cost analysis. Published on Ensia.com on April 10th, 2014.

Climate change, in the end, is a risk management problem. A lot of it has to do with buying insurance against worst-case outcomes. Published as Letter to the Editor in the Financial Times on April 3rd, 2014.

The solution to global warming — the only real solution — starts and ends with making polluters pay. The prices don't have to be high to show effects.

Carbon pollution is. Air conditioners account for around 5 percent of electricity used in the U.S. The need for more air conditioning is one of the costliest effects of global warming. Its use, in turn, leads to more warming, which leads to a greater need for air conditioning. Published on Ensia.com on August 8th, 2013

No president, and no country, can stop global warming singlehandedly. President Obama isn't going to halt the rise of the oceans in his second term. And with Congress hostile to cap and trade and most other ideas for slowing, let alone rolling back, global warming, it will be difficult for him to do what's necessary. If Obama wants to make real progress, he's going to need to use every rhetorical skill in the playbook to tell Americans that this issue matters for their lives. Published in Foreign Policy on January 4th, 2013.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is broken. Still, we shouldn't scrap GDP and start over. Up to a point, GDP does tell us important facts about people's lives, livelihoods and aspirations. Living on a dollar a day is miserable no matter how you look at it. Choking on economic growth, of course, is equally bad. There are a few simple, well-established steps we ought to take to bring GDP closer to where we should be. That, by the way, isn't "Green GDP" or "green accounting." It's honest accounting.

Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy and a Nobel laureate, has argued that what the world needs is a handful of Nobel-level breakthroughs in energy technology. They sure would come in handy in the fight to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. But counting on breakthroughs is a crapshoot. We cannot rely on a miracle to navigate away from our current head-on collision with the planet. Published by Yale Environment 360 on March 12th, 2012.

When it rains, it pours. First came Sandy, the incarnation of the Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns." Then came the political hurricane, with three-term New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsing Barack Obama for his second. Published in Foreign Policy on November 2nd, 2012.

Has the EU found a way to get consumers to bear more of the environmental costs of flying? Summer travel season is upon us, with all the joys and travails that come with spending a perfectly fine vacation day stuck in an airport somewhere. Nevertheless, travel is fun and has plenty of positive sides to it. They range from increased cultural understanding to helping otherwise marginalized regions of the world get a slice of the global vacationer's (or business traveler's) pie. Published by The Globalist on June 16, 2012.

Naomi Klein's interview in Grist this week is smart, insightful, and half right. Her assessment of the obstacles to solving climate change — from ideology to misplaced faith in green consumerism — are exactly right. And she's right that fixing this problem means changing how the world does business.But Klein is wrong in her more serious assertion, first articulated in her "Capitalism vs. the Climate" article in The Nation, that we can save the planet only if we abandon capitalism. Published on Grist on March 14th, 2012.