Looks like I’m not the only one who sees a scary similarity between the messages in their respective books, Cool It and Break Through.

The San Francisco Chronicle just ran a double review by Robert Collier, a visiting scholar at the Center for Environmental Public Policy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. The review ends pointedly:

[T]he arguments of Nordhaus and Shellenberger attain an intellectual pretense that could almost pass for brilliant if their urgings weren’t so patently empty. The closing chapter calls for “greatness,” but, like the rest of the book, it offers little in the way of substantive proposals to back up its rhetorical thunder.

Perhaps that’s for their next book. Or perhaps real solutions, rather than pretentious sniping, are not the authors’ purpose. Nordhaus and Shellenberger, like Lomborg, will get plenty of attention in Washington from those who want to preserve the status quo. But for those who recognize the urgent need to transform the national and world economies and save the planet as we know it, they are ultimately irrelevant.

Precisely.

Read more

Presidential candidate Barack Obama has released his energy and climate plan — and it is first-rate (PDF here and HTML here). The plan will:

• Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the level recommended by top scientists to avoid calamitous impacts. [Obama will require carbon emissions to be "80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050" through cap & trade (with 100% allowance auction!) starting with a mandate "of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020."]
• Invest $150 billion over the next ten years to develop and deploy climate friendly energy supplies, protect our existing manufacturing base and create millions of new jobs.
• Dramatically improve energy efficiency to reduce energy intensity of our economy by 50 percent by 2030.
• Reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reduce oil consumption overall by at least 35 percent, or 10 million barrels of oil, by 2030
• Make the U.S. a leader in the global effort to combat climate change by leading a new international global warming partnership.

I wonder if Shellenberger & Nordhaus endorse it — they get their huge clean energy fund, but they have to swallow all those mandates and high carbon prices they claim are politically untenable.

Obama definitely understands that you need smart regulations and government mandates to get clean energy technologies into the marketplace — and to stop traditional coal plants from being built. His plan includes:

Read more

We have already seen that British Conservatives “get” global warming — both the danger of inaction and the economic opportunity of a “green revolution.”

Now the right wing cheese-eating surrender monkeys are also putting their American political counterparts to shame. As Nature reports about the new conservative French President:

Sarkozy made the greening of France a major plank of his election campaign this year. He has since created a superministry for ecology, biodiversity and sustainable development, with responsibility for the powerful sectors of transport, energy and construction — a first in France, where ecology was previously off the political radar.

Yet it seems inconceivable a U.S. conservative politician could take such action, or agree to the following remarkable proposals now under active consideration in France:

Read more

On Sunday, Bj¸rn Lomborg wrote:

And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat — perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

But is it? I questioned this claim — and asked readers for the relevant citation, which they provided. The key article he is drawing this claim from is “Rapid Changes in Ice Discharge from Greenland Outlet Glaciers” from Science in March of this year. The article begins by noting ominously:

The recent, marked increase in ice discharge from many of Greenland’slarge outlet glaciers has upended the conventional view that variations in ice-sheet mass balance are dominated on short time scales by variations in surface balance, rather than ice dynamics. Beginning in the late 1990s and continuing through the past several years, the ice-flow speed of many tidewater outlet glaciers south of 72° North increased by up to 100%, increasing the ice sheet’s contribution to sea-level rise by more than 0.25 mm/year. The synchronous and multiregional scale of this change and the recent increase in Arctic air and ocean temperatures suggest that these changes are linked to climate warming.

The article’s key conclusion about Kangerlussuaq (KL) — based on a study of ice dynamics from 2000 to 2006 — hardly justifies labeling it an “inconveniently growing” glacier:

Read more