climate change

Obama Versus Physics

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We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be terrible — all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by physics, there’s not much reason to act at all.

The considerable benefits of decarbonizing urban transport

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Cities worldwide are increasingly becoming agents in the fight to mitigate climate change, while simultaneously aiming for other goals, such as improved accessibility and clean air. Indeed, one team of researchers assert that the kind of multi-criteria assessment of social costs and benefits that they employed in their recent study  is a useful complement to cost–benefit analysis of climate change mitigation measures.

The visible hand: Manipulating market prices by influencing laws and regulations

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Recently a member of a mailing list for resource economists asked how to value endangered species given that they are not bought and sold in markets. A common method is to infer prices (“existence values”) by indirect methods such as answers to surveys (e.g., “How much would you be willing to pay to keep tigers from going extinct?”). An issue raised in the online discussion was whether species grow more valuable as they become more scarce and their numbers fall toward zero. If prices keep changing, what is the “right” price?

The sky’s the limit

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As this wild year comes to an end, we return to the season of gifts. Here’s the gift you’re not going to get soon: any conventional version of Paradise. You know, the place where nothing much happens and nothing is demanded of you. The gifts you’ve already been given in 2012 include a struggle over the fate of the Earth. This is probably not exactly what you asked for, and I wish it were otherwise — but to do good work, to be necessary, to have something to give: these are the true gifts. And at least there’s still a struggle ahead of us, not just doom and despair.

ODAC Newsletter Dec 21

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Welcome to the last ODAC Newsletter, the final news roundup from the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre…2012 saw US oil production grow to its highest level in 15 years, largely because of surging tight oil production by fracking, and many pundits such as Ed Morse of Citi are claiming “peak oil is dead”. So has ODAC been worrying its silly little head entirely unnecessarily for the last five years, and could all our energy troubles soon be over? We continue to think not…

2012 Climate Change and Permaculture

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2012: is it really the end of the world? Are the tectonic plates going to tilt, like in the movie, and dump us off? Will the earth crack open and the seas split? Unlikely. You can breathe a qualified sigh of relief. Mayan shamans and scholars tell us that the close of this great cycle of the Mayan calendar is not the cue for apocalypse but rather a new beginning, another turn of the wheel.