climate change

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Time to break the low-meat barrier

By Ann Vileisis / On December 10th, 2008
At climate talks in Poland last week, delegates considered the issue of farm emissions. Globally farm animals generate 18 percent of greenhouse gasses—that's more than cars, planes, and buses. According to The New York Times ("As more eat meat, a bid to cut emissions"), delegates considered some technological solutions, such as converting waste methane gas into an energy source. This elegant approach has already shown great promise.
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Cities Must Adapt or Face Collapse

By Peter Newman / On December 2nd, 2008
In my first blog post, I suggested that we need to respond to the present economic crash in ways that do not undermine the basic cause of our dysfunctional global urban economy. The issues of peak oil and climate change are exposing the weakness of building our cities with growing car dependence.
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What the stock market and environmentalists could learn from each other

By Frank Ackerman / On November 24th, 2008
It's no surprise that financial disaster has pushed environmental problems out of the news of late. But it's too bad that they can't get together somehow; the two areas of crisis, and the needed solutions, have a lot in common. The common thread is that both involve risks of rare, catastrophic events. In both cases, the prudent response is to focus on insurance against worst-case risks, rather than cost-benefit analysis of the most likely outcomes.
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What comes after *Yes, we can!*

By Jonathan Isham / On November 18th, 2008
So what next for climate activists swept up in ‘Yes, we can!' mania?  Perhaps we first must acknowledge how hard this is going to be.  As a friend wrote to me in reaction to last week's blog post, "I share your enthusiasm about the long-term, but the near term is going to be very challenging.  Obama needs to convince the public that some pain is required immediately in order to clean out the problems in the financial system, mortgage markets, and budget deficit." My friend is right of course, and so-far-so-good
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Resiliant cities and the crash

By Peter Newman / On November 12th, 2008
The financial crash is developing a whole industry of responses that can tell us where we went wrong and what we must do to make our future more resilient, especially in our cities where so much of the crash is hurting. Finance and economics dominate this discussion. We believe that a better understanding of what makes cities work will help in this debate, especially how urban transport and energy are fundamental to how the urban economy works or doesn't. What caused the crash?
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Yes, we can!

By Jonathan Isham / On November 5th, 2008
Yes we can! - That unforgettable call-and-response, heard again last night in Barack Obama's stunning acceptance speech, echoes today around the world.  And I and my fellow climate activists are happy to take all the credit for the President-elect's use of this phrase.
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Solar, the benefits are big but the funding is not

By Walker Wells / On November 4th, 2008
In the green world, the "benefits of solar" is bandied about as dogma. But exactly what kind of benefits are we talking about? Economic? Environmental? Social? All of the above?
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Jay Inslee: Agreement with India on climate change

By Jay Inslee / On August 14th, 2008
With the dead weight of one hundred years of petro chemical consumption paired with the overwhelming wave of development in the Indias of the world, how can we turn the tide of global warming? As mentioned last week, I went to Mumbai with a congressional delegation in March 2008 in search of a way to build an international agreement on climate change with today's Indian leaders.

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