Climate Negotiations: Clouds over Cancún?

Miquel Muñoz, Guest Blogger

In the last weeks, two hurricanes have threatened Cancún. Hurricane Paula veered east, hurricane Richard southwest, both sparing the resort city and venue for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference (COP 16). If this post was about the last COP in Copenhagen, the headlines would be unmistakable: “Hurricane Threatens Climate Negotiations.” For Cancún, conversely, a better analogy can be found in Copenhagen’s winter weather: grey and overcast. This would fittingly describe the level of expectations for Cancún.

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Lessons on Climate Change from the Pakistan Floods

Martin Khor

There are many lessons from the recent floods in Pakistan.  Here are just a few.

First, when natural calamity strikes, it can be– and nowadays more often than not it is– devastating.  The tsunami that hit Indonesia and many other countries, the Haiti earthquake, and now the Pakistan floods illustrate that. In Pakistan, up to 20 million people have been affected, almost a million homes destroyed or damaged, 10 million were made homeless, and there is widespread damage to agriculture and related livelihoods.

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Going Green Gets Dirty

Jayati Ghosh

Periods of economic recession are known to foster protectionist tendencies. This has been especially marked after the global crisis, when trade openness has become a useful battering ram in the developed world, skillfully used by policy makers and employers to pass the buck on to the threat posed by foreign producers. The significantly increased threat of unemployment is then seen – even by Northern workers – not as the result of domestic macroeconomic policies that prevent employment from rising as it feasibly could, but as something determined by trade patterns, especially exports from the developing world.

Even so, the recent trade wars over the use of “green” technologies are surprising in how extreme and openly self-contradictory the positions have been. And what is most surprising – and even alarming and distressing – is how such thinking has permeated to the working classes in the North, who now openly identify their own interests with those of their employers rather than with workers in developing countries.

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Gender and Green Governance

Bina Agarwal, Guest Blogger

Environmental governance as a field is increasingly engaging economists, especially those interested in institutional analysis. The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom for her pioneering work on governing the commons is one indicator of this engagement. However, neither economists, nor typically political scientists studying environmental collective action and governance, have paid much attention to gender. At the same time, research in other disciplines which brings a gender perspective to these issues has focused mainly on women’s relative absence from governance institutions and the factors underlying that absence.

But suppose we turned this focus on its head to ask: what difference would women’s presence make in these institutions? How would that affect institutional functioning?

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Speculation and the New Commodity Price Crisis: Separating the wheat from the chaff

Steve Suppan, Guest Blogger

Wheat prices had been climbing prior to the August 5 announcement of a Russian wheat export ban. Kansas Board of Trade wheat futures contracts had gone from $4.92 a bushel on June 10 to spike at $7.95 a bushel on August 5, prompting a reporter to ask, “How could a Russian drought in the age of instant information escape the world’s notice until the country’s wheat crop was devastated?” This excellent question does not yet have a clear answer.

The wheat price crisis has led the press and even policymakers to focus almost exclusively on the traditional supply-demand fundamentals that ostensibly set prices. It’s as if the press were relieved to point to that old standby, weather, as the culprit for a 50 percent increase in wheat futures prices in a few weeks. For a change from the last three years, excessive speculation in commodities by financial institutions would not be accused of driving price volatility. Furthermore, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, unlike 2007-2008, global grain stocks were high enough to supply countries that could afford them. Maybe the specter of speculators increasing hunger might be eluded.

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How to Build a Better Climate Policy

Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton

Congress has – once again – considered a new climate and energy bill, and then blinked, instead of passing it. As in the movie Groundhog Day, they seem condemned to keep starting, over and over, until they get it right. It’s a good thing there’s not much at stake, aside from the fate of the earth’s climate, the disastrous dependence on oil, and the costs to the American taxpayers to clean up this mess.

In a recent study, released by Economists for Equity and the Environment (E3 Network), we analyzed the economic impacts of climate policies on households throughout the country. We found there are two basic principles for designing a fair and effective climate policy. First, we need to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, to send a clear market signal that these emissions need to be reduced. The higher the price, the faster the reduction in emissions – regardless of how wisely, or not, the carbon revenues are used.

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Essentials of Smart Climate Policy

James Boyce

Triple Crisis blogger James Boyce published the following commentary on E3’s Real Climate Economics blog.

“In one of the more memorable moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama explained why he rejected John McCain’s call to postpone their September debate in Oxford, Mississippi, during the negotiations on the first financial bailout package. “It’s going to be part of the president’s job,” Obama declared, “to be able to deal with more than one thing at once.””

“Something similar can be said about climate policy. A variety of proposals – for public investment, carbon pricing, regulatory standards – are cooking in Washington’s political stew. Sometimes the proponents of specific policies are tempted to oversell their merits, while dismissing other policies as unnecessary or even counterproductive. But if Congress and the Obama administration are going to get smart on climate change, part of their job is to deal with more than one policy at once…”

Read the full commentary on E3’s Real Climate Economics blog

Climate Change: Are People the Problem?

James K. Boyce

There is no doubt about it: people are changing the Earth’s climate. The evidence for what scientists call “anthropogenic climate change” is overwhelming, notwithstanding the obfuscation efforts of the climate change denial industry kept on life-support with infusions of corporate money.

But to say that our emissions of greenhouse gases are causing climate change is not to say that every extra person automatically multiplies the problem. Nor does it imply that population control is the ultimate solution – a view espoused by some on the Malthusian fringe of the environmental movement.

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Offshore Oil Drilling and Hurricane Risks

Frank Ackerman

It’s time to stop blaming BP – alone. At least four other oil companies hired the same firm to write their plans for handling spills in the Gulf of Mexico. They ended up with nearly identical plans, complete with thoughtful concern about impacts on walruses. The CEO of ExxonMobil called it “unfortunate” and “embarrassing” that the plan included walruses, which have not been present in the Gulf region for millions of years.

On the other hand, according to U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, the oil industry’s standard plan for Gulf spills never mentions hurricanes or tropical storms, which do appear in the region on an annual basis. This makes perfect sense under only one interpretation: the oil companies were certain that accidents never happen. If there are no oil spills, your spill response plan can talk about unicorns, and no one will be the wiser.

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Greening Capitalism is not Enough

Gerhard Schick

In many places, including Germany, the idea of a Green New Deal continues to be criticized from the well-known conservative angle and, more recently, from a progressive perspective as well.  For instance, in a recently published book, “Green Capitalism: Crisis, Climate Change and Unchecked Growth,” the authors — Stephan Kaufmann and Tadzio Müller — equate the Green New Deal with the idea of “Green Capitalism.”  Coming from a progressive perspective, they claim that these concepts only provide an ecological basis for perpetuating the existing and highly problematic economic system.

This new critique of the Green New Deal is not valid because it fails to understand that the Green New Deal does not entail a simple “greenwashing” of the existing system. In fact, the project would profoundly transform our economy and society.

The global Green New Deal is an imperative.  Why?

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