climate change

How Cool is This? Accelerated Geologic Weathering by Creating Rocks from Carbon Dioxide

Geologic weathering is an important, but slow, part of the carbon cycle in which rocks essentially absorb carbon dioxide. A research team in Iceland has invented a method of creating rocks using carbon dioxide, water, and basalt rock. A chemical reaction among them enables the basalt to absorb the carbon dioxide. A Washington Post article …

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The Federal Government Wants to Help Trucking Companies Save Money

The EPA and the U.S. Department of Transportation think trucking companies in the United States are not smart enough to understand that fuel expenses are worth managing carefully. Despite industry analysis identifying fuel costs ranging from 30 to 40 percent of variable costs per mile, so it is no secret in the trucking business, the federal …

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How Green is Your Ev?

Lynne Kiesling On Monday the Union of Concerned Scientists released an analysis estimating the MPG equivalence of electric vehicles. The point of the analysis is this: taking as given an objective of greenhouse gas emission reduction, how do electric vehicles compare to internal combustion vehicles in that dimension? To do such an analysis requires comparing …

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New Atmospheric Research on Contrails

Lynne Kiesling When I think about climate, greenhouse gases, carbon policy etc., I always worry about the certainty that people (typically politicians) want to attach to models (actually, that statement holds for macroeconomic models too, for the same reasons). The global climate is an incredibly complex system, comprising many individual agents and local systems that …

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Sarewitz/thernstrom La Times Op-ed on Leaked Climate Research Documents

Lynne Kiesling I am blissfully on vacation this week in Maui (biking, diving, snorkeling, swimming, and not spending time on the Internet), but did check in briefly this afternoon. For those of you interested in keeping up with the “politicization of science” and bastardization of the scientific method aspect of it that angers me the …

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The Devil’s Dictionary Meme Applied to Climate Politics and to Financial Markets

Lynne Kiesling Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a true literary gem. Also known as the “cynic’s word book”, it complies witty and biting definitions that Bierce contributed to magazines starting in the 1880s, with all of the bluntness and prejudices that you would expect (in other words, if Bierce were writing today he’d certainly offend …

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Those Leaked Emails, and the Politicization of Climate Science

Lynne Kiesling If you have not been following the story of leaked emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit after their computers were hacked, Maggie Koerth-Baker’s Boing Boing post provides an overview with lots of supporting links. A couple of good overview stories are from the Economist’s most recent issue …

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A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud, and Policy Toward Devices That Emit Carbon Dioxide

Michael Giberson Just because someone is professionally qualified to discuss a tree, a rock, or a cloud does not make them expert on what makes good public policy toward trees, rocks, or clouds.  Need an example?  Here is a clip from an interview with climate scientist Ken Caldeira on Yale Environment 360.  Caldeira is currently …

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Bootleggers and Baptists and Carbon Policy

Lynne Kiesling In today’s Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg has one of the clearest articulations of the bootleggers and Baptists dynamic in carbon policy, and nails one of the fundamental reasons why the Waxman-Markey bill is bad policy: Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to …

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Can Congress Be Trusted to Design Effective Carbon Policy? I Doubt It

Lynne Kiesling Friday’s Wall Street Journal editorial on cap and trade and the Waxman-Markey bill has prompted me to come out of the closet and say something publicly that I’ve been thinking for a couple of months: although I think that the most effective and economically efficient carbon policy is one that directly reflects the …

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