Don Fullerton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
So-called cap and trade may be a solution to a problem it was not intended to solve: state budget crises. Cap-and-trade policy was designed to address climate change by putting a “cap” on carbon dioxide…
Winter is coming. And the UK has a real chance of [brownouts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_(electricity) or even blackouts from lack of power. The long predicted capacity crunch in electric power…
Last week there was a bit of a hullabaloo when it was discovered that the international programme director for Greenpeace, Pascal Husting, was flying to work from Luxembourg to Amsterdam a few times a…
As delegates gather once again for climate talks in Bonn, the question has to be asked: after decades of conferences, committees, procedures and protocols, is the multilateral approach to tackling climate…
US President Barack Obama’s latest plan to reduce carbon emissions is a welcome one, and not just because it addresses climate change. In publicising the plan to cut emissions from old coal power stations…
Given that the IPCC now considers that climate change is “unequivocal”, that human influence is “95-100%” likely to be the dominant cause, and that its effects are already being felt around world, it is…
Jessica Jewell, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
With tensions running high in Ukraine and the release of the third part of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, energy security and climate change are on governments’ agendas. Specifically, how to reduce…
How much does climate change cost? What will be the impact on our wallets? The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group II has concluded that global warming…
The IPCC’s latest climate change report has made it clear that global temperature rises will be the cause of more extreme weather events around the world. Indeed, weather disasters increasingly provoke…
Sam Fankhauser, London School of Economics and Political Science
The number of climate change laws on the statue books of the world’s leading economies grew from less than 40 in 1997 to almost 500 at the end of 2013. Most leading countries now have legal provisions…
The uncertainty of the future is a universal concern. Humans have always tried to see into the future with the aid of specialist knowledge – from the days when rulers consulted haruspices and diviners…
What’s the best way to reduce the roughly half a million annual deaths from smoking in the US alone? Nearly half a million lives cut short, often with untold suffering, by a commercial product that has…
Glen Peters, Center for International Climate and Environment Research - Oslo
Is it fair that China is blamed for the carbon dioxide emissions it generates to manufacture products destined for the West? Would the West do more to reduce greenhouse gases if it had to pay for the emissions…
Erik Gawel, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research; Paul Lehmann, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, and Sebastian Strunz, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
The European Commission has presented a new climate and energy policy framework for 2030 that focuses heavily on emissions reductions. Currently the EU implements “20-20-20” targets, which require a 20…
You could be forgiven for missing it, but on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, federal environment minister Greg Hunt released the draft details of the Emissions Reduction Fund – the centrepiece of…
Medical treatments for amphibians, resurrection of extinct species, increasing temperatures in the deep oceans and trade-offs between the financial value of fossil fuels and the magnitude of climate change…
To mark the beginning of a new year, I have put together a list of some of the major issues and events expected to influence climate change policy-making in 2014. From 1 to 8, these are my top predictions…
In closing the Climate Commission, and introducing legislation to abolish the Climate Change Authority, the government has said it can instead rely on information from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology…
As the end of the Parliamentary year draws to a close, and we mark the Coalition’s first few months in power, I thought it would be useful to provide a comprehensive list of climate change and science…
Russia is the fourth largest producer of greenhouse gases, but has shown little initiative and remained quiet among the turmoil at the UN Conference of the Parties (COP) climate summit in Warsaw. The hottest…