Word: carbonization
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Others would argue there's value in getting giant corporations on board with carbon caps, even if it means offering them a watered-down proposal. But even that may be onerous: As difficult as it was convincing the public that climate change was a clear and present danger - and a majority of conservatives are still doubtful - the political fight to really cut carbon emissions will be knottier. Although Obama has surrounded himself with scientists who believe that global warming is our biggest threat - including Nobel Prize-winner Steven Chu as Energy Secretary, and Harvard's John Holdren as White House...
...Federation even dropped out of the alliance rather than endorse the blueprint. The problem is that USCAP would allow industry to pay for offsets of around 2 billion metric tons of CO2 a year, to ensure that business has plenty of time to make the transition to a low-carbon economy. (Offsets are projects in which companies pay to reduce carbon emissions more cheaply elsewhere, often by funding energy efficiency programs or through forestry, rather than cutting their own emissions.) But as the blogger and former Clinton Administration Energy Department official Joseph Romm has pointed out, total U.S. greenhouse...
Worse, many experts consider the offset system deeply flawed. A 2008 Stanford University study found that between one-third and two-thirds of carbon offsets under the U.N.'s Clean Development Mechanism - which oversees offset projects under the Kyoto Protocol - do not represent actual emission cuts. In addition, the USCAP proposal recommends that many of the initial carbon emission allowances under a cap-and-trade system should be given to industry free, rather than auctioned - even though auctioning would push carbon reductions faster. (President-elect Obama has said he's in favor of auctions.) "The proposal is a dead...
Meanwhile the science on climate change grows more dire. James Hansen, NASA's climate expert, reported in a recent paper that the world needed to stabilize carbon in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million (ppm) to avoid the worst effects of warming - a more stringent goal than earlier estimates, which had a target of 450 ppm. (The current concentration is 385 ppm and rising fast, up from a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm.) That would require action that is far more ambitious than currently seems possible - both in the U.S. and in the developing world, where the bulk...
...that the layer of haze - which many have blamed for the world's increasingly extreme weather patterns - makes rain both more rare during the dry season and more intense during monsoons. And in South Asia, the cloud's net effect on climate change, says the study, rivals that of carbon dioxide...