Here’s another observation from my recent visit to Nicaragua: poverty is the worst polluter. In a country where one half of the population lives in poverty and 25 percent of its 5.5 million people struggle to survive on less than one dollar per day, environmental protection is not a high priority. I wonder how Roger, […]

A Climate Change Caucus in the Montana legislature has been formed by Bozeman Representative Mike Phillips and his colleagues. One of their goals is to explore policy options to address global warming. The Caucus has consulted with local experts, including MSU’s Susan Capalbo, an economist who directs the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Project. This effort […]

Those pressing for immediate reductions in carbon dioxide emissions face big problems. Here’s one; the prospect of cooling the planet through geoengineering. The people working on this are serious scientists and analysts, not lackeys of Senator Robert Byrd’s (D-WVA) mountain-top removing, coal industry cronies. Rather, they include Paul Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize […]

I find it interesting that green activists and their political allies uniformly favor dramatic and draconian action to avert climate change. Serious policy analysts are different; they generally favor less dramatic action applied over the long term. What explains this difference? Perhaps it’s because the analysts understand long-term adjustments are much cheaper and easier than […]