Articles by Adam Stein

New financial instruments may one day plug cities’ building codes into global carbon market

The William J. Clinton foundation has arranged billions in financing to help a coalition of sixteen cities cut urban emissions by applying a range of energy efficiency measures to aging buildings.

Efficiency measures tends to get lumped in under the heading of conservation, but they really deserve to be their own full-fledged category of solutions to global warming. If conservation is simply doing less of a polluting activity, efficiency is doing the same activity with less energy. Turning off the lights is conservation. Screwing in a compact fluorescent light bulb is efficiency.

Efficiency measures deserve their own category because they are among the most important strategies for reducing emissions. Emissions reductions from efficiency projects are immediate (which is good), they are often cheap or even free (which is great), and they don't require individuals to make significant changes to behavior (which is important to quick adoption, no matter how much we might wish otherwise).

Planktos may be a bad idea, but innovation is good

The green blogosphere generally reacted with chuckles or consternation to Planktos' announced plans to dump tons of iron into the ocean to, you know, see what happens. Gar Lipow took the article as another excuse to bash carbon offsets.

To follow the logic, you first have to know why anyone would want to dump several tons of iron into the sea. Planktos hopes to demonstrate that seeding the oceans with certain nutrients is a credible way to stimulate plankton blooms. It further hopes to demonstrate that these blooms are a credible way to sequester atmospheric carbon. Carbon markets provide the incentive for this quixotic undertaking. If the experiment is successful -- a big if -- Planktos could one day tap into the many billions of dollars available for carbon reduction projects.

Why are environmental activists so clueless at marketing climate change solutions?

Virgin Blue, the Australian extension of Richard Branson's airline empire, recently launched a program to allow passengers to purchase carbon offsets when they book a flight.

That's nice. But what struck me was this quote from Greenpeace's energy campaigner, Ben Pearson:

Virgin should not be criticized out of hand for this scheme, but it promotes the idea that dealing with climate change is easy and cheap rather than being about the difficult task of changing consumer behavior, government policy and investment.

Carbon offsets make for strange bedfellows

I sometimes joke that the one environmental topic that unites the far right and far left is a distate for carbon offsets. This, I should stress, is a joke -- overly broad, unfairly general, etc., etc.* But it is the case that the topic of carbon offsets occasionally makes for strange bedfellows.

The fake controversy over Al Gore's carbon footprint is a case in point. TerraPass recently had the pleasure of being featured on Glenn Beck's CNN program (Glenn Beck of Al Gore = Hitler fame).** We were declared a crock by Sean Hannity, and we were denounced by none other than Rush Limbaugh.