A Couple of Interesting Climate Change Articles

Lynne Kiesling

I found a couple of interesting climate change articles over the weekend. First, this Foreign Affairs article discusses the geopolitical implications of Arctic ice cap melting; it creates and destroys territory in ways that various Arctic (and non-Arctic) nation-states are responding to by trying to stake property claims to the territory. Hmmm … I haven’t heard of any of that happening in places in the Southern Hemisphere where the ice is accumulating … hat tip to Marginal Revolution for the article link.

Second, Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing post and notes on Saul Griffith’s presentation on energy consumption at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies conference last week. In particular, I think I’m in line with commenter #7 on Cory’s post — anthropogenic or not, reversible or not, actual or not, a lot of the kind of research and innovation in non-carbon-based energy technologies is a good thing to pursue for a lot of reasons. Of course, I’d drop the other shoe that Cory doesn’t — if we had retail pricing of electricity that better communicated the true cost of our consumption choices, that would go a long way to optimizing our energy use.