Another in a series from the Triple Crisis Blog and the Real Climate Economics Blog on the Cancún Climate Summit.

Frank Ackerman’s comprehensive book on climate economics: Can We Afford the Future: Economics of a Warming World
Frank Ackerman et al., “The Economics of 350”
James Boyce, “Cap and Dividend, A State By State Analysis”
Climate-L, a knowledge base of UN and intergovernmental activities addressing climate change policy
Earth Negotiations Bulletin
IATP series on Climate and Agriculture: Cancun 2010
ICTSD on trade and climate change
IFPRI on the impacts of climate change on agriculture
IISD Reporting services
Official UNFCCC website
Official Mexico’s COP16 website
Nalin Kulatilaka, “Green Revolution 2.0: A Sustainable Energy Path”
South Centre, “Addressing Climate Change through Sustainable Development and the Promotion of Human Rights”
The UN on Development and Climate Change
The World Bank on Development and Climate Change
UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2010: Investing in a low-carbon economy

Martin Khor
Another in a series from the Triple Crisis Blog and the Real Climate Economics Blog on the Cancún Climate Summit.

Triple Crisis Blogger Martin Khor published the following South Centre policy brief on what to expect from the Cancún climate negotiations on issues like the global climate regulatory regime, proposed obligations for developing countries, and others.

Key Issues in the Cancún Climate Conference

A year after the chaotic Copenhagen summit, the 2010 UNFCCC climate conference begins in Cancún.  Expectations are low this time around, especially compared to the eve of Copenhagen.

That’s probably both good and bad.  The conference last year had been so hyped up before hand, with so much hopes linked to it, that the lack of a binding agreement at the end of it and the last-day battle over process and text made it a near-disaster.

Few expect this year’s meeting in the seaside resort of Cancún to produce anything significant in commitments either to cut Greenhouse Gas emissions or to provide funds to developing countries. Thus if Cancún ends with few significant decisions, it won’t be taken as a catastrophe.  It will however be seen as the multilateral system not being able to meet up to the challenge.  And that system will be asked to try harder, next year.

Eban Goodstein, Guest Blogger
Another in a series from the Triple Crisis Blog and the Real Climate Economics Blog on the Cancún Climate Summit.

The elections earlier this month saw the breaching of the 2016 deadline set by NASA’s Jim Hansen for global CO2 stabilization, and also moved us well beyond IPCC Chair Rajendra Pauchuari’s statement that action beyond 2012 “will be too late”. So where does this leave us? For what are we now, officially, too late?

Until this year, one could envision, just barely, a “politics as usual” scenario that set us on track to stabilizing C02 concentrations at 450 ppm.  The 450 goal would, according to the IPCC’s best guess, have held global temperatures to 2.1 degrees C above pre-industrial levels—a further 1.5 degrees C warming this century. Getting there would have required US policy that initiated cuts in 2012, and delivered 80% reductions by 2050. These would have had to have been coupled with Chinese and Indian commitments to stabilize emissions by 2025, and then start down their own aggressive emission reduction pathways.

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Kevin Gallagher and Frank Ackerman

Triple Crisis bloggers Kevin Gallagher and Frank Ackerman published the following opinion article in the Guardian on the economic case for tackling climate change and why it has the potential to persuade US policymakers to take action.

Cancún and the new economics of climate change

The failure of US climate legislation, following last year’s disappointing negotiations at Copenhagen, casts a pall over the round of climate talks in Cancún this week. And the global recession and budget-cutting crisis makes this seem like the worst time for new climate initiatives. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of delaying action: the laws of physics don’t need 60 votes in the US Senate to continue making the world’s climate less and less liveable.

There are two battles over climate change. The legitimacy of climate science has been challenged in the media, but repeated reviews have found only scattered typographical errors in IPCC reports and other assessments. Last year’s theft of emails from climate scientists revealed the shocking news that leading researchers can be rude and competitive – but not much else. While science-deniers remain prominent in US politics, most of the world has moved on.

What the debate has moved on to, though, is concern about the costs of climate policies. Bjorn Lomborg, the poster child of climate scepticism, is no longer attacking the science; instead, he now claims that the damages from climate change would be small, while the costs of doing anything about it would be enormous. The new Lomborg (“Scepticism 2.0”) relies heavily on a few conservative economists, notably Richard Tol and William Nordhaus, to suggest that we can’t afford real climate solutions.

Read the full article at the Guardian.