By James Hansen
    YaleGlobal Online

    Wednesday 23 April 2008

    Fifty years ago, Yankee Stadium had about 70,000 seats. It seldom sold out, and almost any kid could afford the cheapest seats. Capacity was reduced to about 57,000 when the stadium was remodeled in the 1970s. Most games sell out now, and prices have gone up.

    The new stadium, opening next year, will reduce seating to about 51,800. This intentional contraction is aimed at guaranteeing sellouts, increasing demand, allowing the owners, in short order, to triple prices or more. The owners have learned that scarcity will fatten their wallets. The plan may discriminate against the lower middle class, but as long as the owner is footing the bill without public subsidies, there may be little grounds for complaint.

    Now fossil-fuel moguls are intent on hoodwinking the entire planet with an analogous scheme.

    The basic trick is oil producers overstating fossil-fuel reserves. Government "energy information" departments parrot industry. Partly because of disinformation, the major efforts needed to develop alternative energies have not been made.

    The reality of limited supply forces prices higher. Eventually, sales volume will begin to decline, but fossil-fuel moguls will make more money than ever. They'll continue to assert that there's plenty more oil, gas or coal to be found, aiming to keep the suckers on the hook. Indeed, they may find somewhat more in the deep ocean, under national parks, in polar regions, offshore, and in other environmentally sensitive areas. They don't need much to keep the suckers paying higher and higher prices.

   
    By Bill McKibben
    Mother Jones

    May/June 2008 Issue

Greed has helped destroy the planet - maybe now it can help save it.

    Since I spend most of my time haplessly battling global warming, I encounter a fair number of climate-change skeptics. They're usually clutching some tattered study about tropospheric temperatures from six years back, or muttering about sunspots, but they're almost never carefully weighing the actual current science. The wellspring of their skepticism lies not in chemistry or in physics but in ideology, and their syllogism goes something like this:

Markets solve all problems;
Markets are not solving global warming;
QED, global warming is not a problem.

    This proof has certain logical shortcomings, beginning with the fact that it's illogical. But it is emotionally comforting. For those who wanted to stop thinking about politics and responsibility and morality and science and all that stuff, the advent of Reagan-era market fundamentalism was a godsend, and anything that threatens to disrupt it is an identity-challenging tilt of the psychic pinball machine.

    So what I tend to say to these people is, I hear you. Markets are powerful. Let's think about why they've failed here and how to make them work.

    And there's a one-word answer: information.

    
    By Adrianne Appel
    Inter Press Service

    Sunday 20 April 2008

    New Haven - U.S. state governors say they are fed up with the George W. Bush administration's foot-dragging on climate change and will go ahead - and around - the White House to reduce greenhouse gases.

    On Friday, 18 states signed a declaration committing themselves to "the effort to stop global warming" during a series of discussions and a ceremony at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

    "In the absence of federal leadership the states have stepped up," said Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who spoke at the ceremony with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.

    The U.S. is the world's number one greenhouse gas polluter, and the 18 states emit as much greenhouse gas as the biggest nations in Europe combined. Any reduction would be significant for the health of the planet, said Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy.

    Many of the states, like New Jersey and Massachusetts, have acted on their own, without federal encouragement or support, and put in place plans to significantly reduce greenhouse gases by 2020, through tougher controls on power plants, financial incentives to encourage more green power, grants and discounts for businesses and consumers who use alternative energy and changes in land use.

   
    By Peter Asmus
    The Christian Science Monitor

    Tuesday 22 April 2008

Greener energy in your community depends on strong grass roots.

    Stinson Beach, California - The success of the environmental movement in calling attention to the dangers of global warming has led to an ironic outcome: It's become easier for the public to adopt a passive approach as we wait on world leaders to sign emissions treaties or huge corporations to "go green." This Earth Day, stop waiting! There are new ways for you to fight climate change in your own backyard.

    One of the most promising models is called "Community Choice Aggregation." CCA is the legal term for an innovative way for cities and counties to purchase electricity by votes of local governments.

    Previously, the only way for a local government to have a say in where the community's power came from was to establish a municipally owned utility. The CCA process provides an easier way to switch to an earth-friendlier power supply without taking on the burden of managing the power lines, collecting bills, and the divisive politics involved with the expensive process of bringing energy under municipal control.

    This type of community energy planning is happening in a big way in California's Marin County, where I live. Granted, this is an area just north of San Francisco that's heavily populated with tree huggers. But other parts of California, from the Central Valley to Los Angeles, are investigating CCA models. (Massachusetts and Ohio have already enacted CCA programs, but the motivation in these states was more for local control and cutting costs, not saving the environment.)

    
    By Randolph E. Schmid
    The Associated Press

    Sunday 20 April 2008

    Washington - Planet Earth continues to run a fever.

    Last month was the warmest March on record over land surfaces of the world and the second warmest overall worldwide. For the United States, however, it was just an average March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday.

    NOAA's National Climatic Data Center said high temperatures over much of Asia pulled the worldwide land temperature up to an average of 40.8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.9 degrees Celsius), 3.2 degrees (1.8 C) warmer than the average in the 20th century.

    While Asia had its greatest January snow cover this year, warm March readings caused a rapid melt and March snow cover on the continent was a record low.

    Global ocean temperatures were the 13th warmest on record, with a weakening of the La Nina conditions that cool the tropical Pacific Ocean.

    Overall land and sea surface temperatures for the world were second highest in 129 years of record keeping, trailing only 2002, the agency said.

   
    By Marc Gunther
    Fortune

    Friday 18 April 2008

Why a Wall Street firm wants to save a forest in Sumatra.

    The business of "carbon farming" is growing fast - and Merrill Lynch is the latest big company to bet that it will become profitable.

    What's carbon farming, you ask? It's a business designed to recognize the value created when trees store carbon dioxide and prevent global warming. So people who plant new trees or prevent existing trees from destruction can get paid for doing so.

    That doesn't mean that the tree in your backyard or mine will help pay college tuition or fund a 401(k). For now, the payments are going to villagers in the developing world who agree to protect endangered forests. Starbucks, Marriott and Rio Tinto, among others, have all agreed to finance projects designed to deter deforestation.

    This week, Merrill Lynch announced that it will invest $9 million to help save a tropical forest in Aceh, Indonesia. It's the first time a Wall Street firm has invested in carbon farming, and let's be clear: this isn't philanthropy of public relations; it's strictly business.

    In fact, the man who put the deal together to save the 1.9-million acre forest, called Ulu Masen, believes it could be a very big business. "It will be the biggest carbon project in the history of the world if we can pull it off," says Dorjee Sun, the 31-year-old founder of an Australian startup company called Carbon Conservation.