Representatives from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are meeting in Vienna this week and the looming threat of Copenhagen is clearly on their agenda. I wrote “threat of Copenhagen” because OPEC states are primarily devoted to selling a commodity that is a significant source of climate change.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change dates to the June 1992 Earth Summit. The overwhelming majority of nations are parties to this agreement — even the United States, which did not ratify the followup Kyoto Protocol. Essentially, for 20 years the world has been negotiating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions based on reductions from a 1990 baseline.
To understand climate politics, one really needs to study both international and domestic factors. My field is international relations and I’ll likely be blogging here a good deal about national interests and state bargaining power. However, it is important to keep in mind internal actors and their interests.
Mohamed Nasheed, a former journalist and political prisoner who was elected president of the Republic of Maldives last fall, is relatively pragmatic (and pessimistic) about the future prospects of his nation constituted by 1200 small islands in the Indian Ocean.
Believe it or not, two weeks before Labor Day in the U.S., classes started today at my university. I’m teaching an undergraduate course for nearly 50 students on “Global Ecopolitics” — a term used by Dennis Pirages, a professor at Maryland when I was in graduate school.
It may be August, when many policy wonks take vacation in Washington and other capitals, but Bjørn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center is in the midst of releasing a series of papers analyzing potentially affordable solutions to global climate change.
If you didn’t read Matt Taibbi’s piece “The Great American Bubble Machine” from Rolling Stone, then this is a good time to check it out. The article, which argues that the investment firm Goldman Sachs has been behind a series of disastrous speculative bubbles in recent years, has received a great deal of attention.
This past weekend, The New York Times ran an interesting story, “Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security.” The entire article was obviously provocative as it created a bit of a stir in the blogosphere.
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