Anyone who follows climate change politics knows that China’s coal consumption is a huge concern. As this chart from the U.S. Department of Energy reveals, Chinese production has doubled in the last decade (click to see full-size image).

In addition to the implications for global warming, that increased production is associated with all sorts of other negative externalities. For example, Chinese coal mining is an incredibly dangerous occupation:
5,000 of China’s 5 million coal miners are killed on the job each year, a death rate of one in 1,000 on average. By comparison, an average of nine of the 83,000 miners in the U.S. die each year, a death rate of one in 10,000.
Jasper Becker, an award-winning journalist and consultant who has covered China for many years, says that even this estimate is wildly off-the-mark:
Chinese coal is cheap to buy but the human cost is high. Officially, China…

In a review of Jeff Goodell’s new book on geoengineering, How To Cool The Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate, Grist’s David Roberts notes that the topic raises a variety of “big questions about progress, responsibility, [and] the future of humanity.” Roberts:
To begin with, consider that by some estimates a large-scale, controlled scientific experiment with solar radiation management could take up to 10 years. In the meantime, who controls the research? Who funds it? Who has access to the information it reveals? Will it take place behind closed doors in the Department of Defense or in public, in a transparent, open-source spirit?
If it does become possible to alter the climate by design, who decides who does it, and when, and how much?
I’ve previously noted, and Roberts acknowledges, that wealthy entrepreneurial individuals (a modern-day “Greenfinger”) or any number of determined states might pursue geoengineering…

At my home institution, I’m involved in a project to reduce carbon emissions via individual behavioral changes. A relatively small group of scholars and administrators have been looking at some interesting theoretical and empirical social science research to bolster our efforts.
To understand what I have in mind, consider an example of behavioral change mentioned earlier this year by David Roberts of Grist. Roberts noted that an energy consulting company had devised a simple chart about home energy consumption that could be placed easily and cheaply on utility bills. Do this, Roberts notes,
“and you get about a 2 percent average drop in energy use. And it hardly costs the utilities anything! They already have the data. It’s just a different way of presenting information, informed by good social science.”
We’ve already tried something similar on my campus. A colleague on the “Green Team” directed a group of students to…

The May/June 2010 Utne Reader has a brief piece on science versus religion that reframes classic tensions in terms of climate change:
Everyone needs to remember, however, that “not all of the religious have a problem with science,” Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, tells Free Inquiry (Feb.-March 2010). An atheist (and one-time atheist activist), Mooney finds fault in pitting science against religion. While he advocates for defending science education, in order to do so “it is critical that we mobilize the pro-science moderates…”
In other words, Mooney wants athiests (and Gaia-ists?) to tone down their attacks on religion. Environmentalists worried about climate change need believers to embrace scientific literacy too:
“The new atheism, as a strategy, flies in the face of this, since it is often about attacking and alienating the religious moderates.” More than any other field, science plays a starring role…

Just over a year ago, Obama’s climate negotiator Todd Stern gave an important speech at a U.S. Climate Action Symposium. He’d been on the job for fewer than three weeks, but he nonetheless offered 10 fairly detailed principles that he said would underpin U.S. participation in the Copenhagen process.
This blog has previously discussed some of those principles, but I want now to draw attention to the last (10th) point Stern offered as his conclusion:
the countries of the world need to recognize the threat, pull our oars in the same direction, and do whatever it takes to succeed. Tired orthodoxies and endless reruns of north/south debates are not going to get us anywhere. We need a little less preaching about who is to blame and a little more of that old comic book sensibility of uniting in the face of a common danger threatening the earth. Because that’s what…

The Copenhagen conference occurred during the final days of my fall semester. Then came the holiday break and several paper deadlines. Hence, I’ve been quiet here. Sorry about that.
This past week, however, I participated in a campus “Teach-In” on climate change. I offered an international perspective and covered many points familiar to readers of this blog.
Additionally, I found a way to mention California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s R20 initiative:
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and subnational leaders from Canada, Nigeria, France and Algeria today announced they have agreed to advance the concept of a new regional coalition to fast track the results of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference and push their respective national governments into more rapid actions and stronger commitments to fight climate change. These founding members will develop the coalition’s principles, formulate a shared vision of global security and prosperity and recruit other subnational members for an official launch…

The ongoing negotiations in Copenhagen, which are slated to end Friday, are apparently at a “critical juncture” according to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The United States inched closer to the views of its European allies today by agreeing that it is “prepared to work with other countries toward a goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year to address the climate change needs of developing countries.”
Whether the money would be used for reparations or adaptation, this is a positive development. After reading pessimistic reports all week, I’ll take what good news I can get.
If the negotiators reach a deal, it will likely allow for (or even encourage) a global “cap and trade” system. The bill passed earlier in the year by the House of Representatives includes a U.S. cap and trade system and any forthcoming Senate bill is likely to include this plan too.
Want to…

Should environmentalists and other progressives get worked up over the recently leaked “Danish text”? Todays Guardian summarized the key concerns raised by this alleged draft agreement among the rich states:
• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;…
• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.
The Danish text would also abandon Kyoto and transfer most climate-related development assistance to the World Bank.
In many ways Kyoto is already dead. US Climate Envoy Todd Stern basically acknowledged as much earlier this year. The US never joined, even the EU nations have not met their emission reduction targets, and the reductions were far too modest to make much of a difference in the long run.
Eventually, environmentalists might even come to…

One of the critical issues facing Copenhagen negotiators is the amount of money (and technology) that will be transferred from wealthy states (who are responsible for the lion’s share of past and current greenhouse gas emissions) to developing countries so that the latter won’t burn fossil fuels and thereby create future emissions that could effectively cancel out any reductions achieved by rich states.
The same problem was faced (successfully) in the 1980s during the bargaining related to the Montreal Protocol, which essentially phased out CFC production in relatively short order. The Multilateral Fund has transferred billions of dollars over the years.
However, in the case of climate change compensation, developing state requests and affluent state offers are separated by a vast gap. Bolivian President Evo Morales has called for affluent states to transfer 1% of their GDP to developing states for what some activists call “climate reparations.” That would amount…

Will a new climate agreement require developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (ghgs)? Will developing states agree to make reductions? In this post, let’s consider the prospects for Brazil agreeing to such reductions.
First however, keep in mind the history. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, noted the special circumstances faced by relatively poor countries:
[Convention parties note] that the largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries, that per capita emissions in developing countries are still relatively low and that the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs
As a consequence of these special circumstances, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (which entered into force in 2005), made no requirements that developing states reduce emissions.
The United States Senate unanimously passed the…