World’s largest banks ranked on their climate commitment

The world’s banks are starting to recognize the threat of climate change, but could certainly do more, says a new...

Forest Service official threatened with jail time over fish-killing fire retardant

Mark Rey, the undersecretary of agriculture in charge of the U.S. Forest Service, has been threatened with jail time or...

Urban issue virtually absent from campaign; mayors speak up

Ed Glaeser asks the presidential candidates: "What about the cities?" Last month, Clyde Haberman wondered the same thing. It’s a...

Two solutions to global warming

Will reducing or stopping carbon dioxide emissions stop global warming? Not according to the IPCC. The Fourth Assessment FAQ, section 10.3, notes that "complete elimination of CO2 emissions is estimated to lead to a slow decrease in atmospheric CO2 of about 40 ppm over the 21st century." By going cold turkey on fossil fuels, we only get down to about 1985 levels in 92 years. The oceans will continue to heat up.

In other words, we might as well try to drive a big wood screw into hard oak with a hammer. Yet the belief that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will have some leverage on the problem is widespread.

To examine our beliefs, which are often hidden from us, I offer two solutions to global warming. Both will likely work, but they are very different.

1. The Earth Bag. Many elaborate and expensive geoengineering proposals have been made, but here is the most practical.

The earth's overall temperature depends in part on albedo, or reflectivity to solar radiation. Change this by a few percent, and we change the climate.

We manufacture 5 trillion plastic bags each year. All we need to do is to make them all white and bright, and get them into the dark tropical oceans, where they will reflect huge amounts of solar radiation back into space.

Grist puts a green eye to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll

Photo: iStockphoto “Sex and drugs and rock and roll are very good indeed.” — Ian Dury Green may be the...

Scientist says biofuel boom endangers world’s largest rainforest

A fifth of the Amazon rainforest — the world’s biggest carbon sponge — has disappeared since the 1970s. The Brazilian...

As economic indicators trend downward, the clean-tech sector is still looking up

As one key economic engine after another -- housing, finance, autos, retail -- sputters and stalls out, the fledgling eco-economy is purring right along, fueled in no small part by venture capital firms hungry for new opportunities in industries that promise outsized returns on their investments. In the first three quarters of 2007, VCs poured $2.6 billion into alternative energy and clean-tech firms, more money than they invested for the whole of 2006. The new year promises to be another record breaker.

And it's not only the Silicon Valley sharpies that are on the prowl: GE is promising to plow $6 billion into renewable energies by 2010, double what they were projecting only last year; Germany's Schott Solar is plunking down $100 million to build a plant in New Mexico, and predicts its investment will grow to $500 million when the facility is completed; and as 2007 drew to a close, Morgan Stanley made a $190 million investment in a clean-tech venture. Morgan, by the way, estimates the global renewable energy industry has a market cap in the neighborhood of $170 billion.

Certainly not all is rosy in the clean-tech patch. Tesla Motors and Imperium Renewables, once considered high fliers, have been dealt setbacks -- and as a result, have trimmed employee rolls. And alternative energy stocks are starting to look positively bubble-ish to some on Wall Street (the subject of a future post).

Recessions don't play favorites, for the most part. When U.S. consumers snap their pocketbooks shut, it creates a drag on the overall economy and everyone -- including governments that depend on tax receipts -- feels the pinch. The eco-economy probably won't be immune. But with the hundreds of millions of dollars streaming through the doors almost weekly, it's not a bad place -- and better than most -- to ride out the storm.

E.U. considers pollution charges on imports from U.S. and other climate scofflaws

U.S. failure to enact limits on global warming emissions could cost American companies that export to the European Union.

E.U. President Jose Manuel Barroso on Sunday said the European Commission is considering a charge on importers from nations without carbon limits. Companies from those countries may be required to buy carbon emissions allowances on exports into the E.U. This is intended to level the playing field with European companies who are already part of the European Emissions Trading System instituted to meet E.U. obligations under the Kyoto climate treaty.

Barroso said the Commission could "require importers to obtain allowances (emissions permits) alongside European competitors ... There would be no point in pushing EU companies to cut emissions if the only result is that production and indeed pollution shifts to countries with no carbon disciplines at all."

With all the upbeat talk about an environmental labor boom, is rhetoric running away from reality?

Someone help me puzzle this out:

Proposition 1: A shift to renewable energy and energy efficiency will result in a boom in green-collar jobs -- good service-industry work that can't be outsourced. This proposition is attractive because it holds forth the promise of a grand alliance between greens and the labor movement. See, e.g., Tom Friedman and everyone who posts on Grist.

Proposition 2: The optimism over green-collar jobs is a classic example of the make-work bias, a widespread economic fallacy that mistakes amount of work for wealth creation. The actual effect of greenhouse-gas reductions on labor markets is unclear, so environmentalists should stick to environmental policy. See, e.g., various environmental economists.

I don't have a clever opinion here, although I will say that the case for a positive labor impact from energy efficiency measures seems decently solid. Efficiency is, after all, an unambiguously good thing for the economy as a whole. If it costs us less to get the same amount of stuff, we're all richer. Certainly this is a nice thing for consumers, and because energy industries tend not to be labor-intensive, we can expect that wealth creation at the expense of energy producers will be a net benefit for employment as well. I think.

The impact of renewable energy, on the other hand, is more difficult to suss out. More to the point, it's not clear that anyone has sussed it out. Discuss.