Word: carbonic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...real accomplishments of last year's U.N. summit in Bali was an agreement to move forward on avoided deforestation, a system that would pay rain-forest nations to protect their trees in exchange for carbon credits. (Deforestation is responsible for at least 20% of global carbon emissions.) But at Poznan, negotiations have gotten muddy. Thus far, no one can agree on what the rights of indigenous people who actually live among the trees should be in a forestry carbon market, while Brazil - home to 40% of the world's remaining rain forests - seems against the entire idea of avoided deforestation...
...climate-change negotiations can be a depressing experience - maximum rhetoric expended on minimum accomplishment. In Poznan the atmosphere seems even bleaker. For one thing, economic catastrophe has made it harder for leaders to justify cutting carbon. A recent study by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), the independent investigative arm of Congress, sharply criticized the Clean Development Mechanism, the U.N. body that oversees the Kyoto Protocol's carbon-trading practices. The GAO found that carbon offsets - whereby a company in a rich nation pays for a carbon-reducing project elsewhere in lieu of cutting emissions itself - were at best a "temporary...
...will Poznan be a waste? No - provided we put it in the right perspective. Worldwide, our way of life is so wedded to carbon that simply legislating greenhouse-gas reductions may not be possible - as rich nations like Japan, which have struggled to meet their Kyoto obligations, have discovered. Meaningful reductions will require technological advances on energy that have yet to be developed, and the U.N. can't force that process. But it can work to focus the world's attention on climate change and help map out the policy framework - including on issues like tropical deforestation - that will speed...
...Martin L. Weitzman, a professor in the economics department, argues that the impact of Harvard’s endowment on the alternative energy field would be relatively small and limited to its symbolic significance. Instead, Dr. Weitzman favors large, sweeping public policy changes, such as a stiff tax on carbon emissions, in order to check the emission of harmful greenhouse gasses...
...combining Weitzman’s solution and the willingness of many students at the College to make a real difference in their carbon footprint, it’s possible to imagine a scenario where Harvard could serve as a test case of sorts. By recording every student’s energy usage and charging them accordingly, the administration could create real monetary incentives for students to live a greener lifestyle...