Maybe international treaties do send perfectly good jobs overseas after all; it’s just that these treaties do so by regulating commerce at home rather than facilitating it abroad. The Kyoto Protocol is evidence of this fact. Less than a week ago, as the European Environment Agency was celebrating reducing carbon production by close to 17%, the Guardian reported that, based on consumption of carbon rather than production of it, European greenhouse emissions actually increased significantly over the past decade: The original 15 EU member states who signed Kyoto have dropped …
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is never afraid to make headlines when it comes to his stance on climate change. In 2007 he likened the war on climate change to actual war saying, “”The majority of the United Nations work still focuses on preventing and ending conflict. But the danger posed by war to all of humanity and to our planet is at least matched by the climate crisis and global warming.” More recently, in defense of his position after Climategate, he emphasized, “Climate change is happening much, much faster …
From the New York Times Green, Inc Blog: The banking giant HSBC removed two companies involved in carbon trading from its Climate Change Index on Monday because they had lost too much value. Analysts from HSBC said the cause was mainly that governments had failed to come up with a timetable for a global climate deal at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen in December. “Carbon trading was the major loser from Copenhagen,” HSBC analysts said in their March 2010 Quarterly Index Review. ‘Cap and trade needs hard targets and …
Yvo de Boer, climate chief of the United Nations for four years, unexpectedly announced his resignation today. Although he officially won’t leave his post until July 1st, it marks another turn for the worse for those hoping to see action on climate policy. De Boer, who led the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali (2007) and more recently in Copenhagen (2009) said, “Copenhagen did not provide us with a clear agreement in legal terms, but the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming. This …
Data show 2009 was a record year for lobbying on energy issues. 1747 clients (firms and groups) hired lobbyists to work in the area of energy and nuclear power. This is a stunning 93 percent increase from 2006. This increase may be stunning, but it isn’t surprising. With literally trillions of dollars put into play by various cap-and-trade bills over the last three years, it would have been surprising if lobbying hadn’t grown by leaps and bounds. Though initially offered as legislation to fight global-warming, the justifications for cap and …
President Obama has lavished time and attention on Europe in spades. He made Europe his first foreign port of call after his inauguration and since then has visited at least eight European countries (plus Russia). His popularity ratings in most of Europe, especially in Western Europe, would make the average Hollywood A-lister blush. He has even been referred to in some quarters as “the first European President of America.” And some in Europe – the utopian European elites and chattering intellectual classes of Brussels – are pretty pleased. President Obama …
The world needs American leadership. In the interwar years, we saw that the enemies of freedom advance when the great liberal and democratic powers of the day failed to lead. We saw it again in the dark years of the Cold War under President Carter. The alternative to an America willing and able to lead is not a paradise of peace through engagement. It is a world where the undemocratic, the unsatisfied, and the illiberal powers of the world advance at the expense of American ideals, American interests, and America’s …
Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who made the trip to Copenhagen to tell delegates the American public is rejecting a national energy tax, opined that the UN climate change conference was a failure in USA Today. The market agrees with him. As expectations for a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fell, so did the price of carbon: “European and United Nations carbon prices fell the most since February after the Copenhagen climate accord didn’t set targets that would boost demand for permits. European Union carbon-dioxide allowances for …
FIFE, Scotland—The White House, the U.S. mainstream press and other assorted Obama defenders are giving the impression that the President salvaged a good outcome at Copenhagen, or so I’ve heard while spending Christmas in Scotland (the holidays being what the locals call vacation, something they spend in Europe, which is a place not here but across the Channel). The narrative of Obama sweeping in and eking out good outcomes is not at all the reading here in Great Britain, where papers on both the left and the right have denounced …
In his speech at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, President Obama told leaders from around the world that “the time for talk is over.” Obama pushed for all major economies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but admitted some doubt as to whether a collective agreement would be reached. He could offer no concrete plans and nothing more than confidence that cap and trade legislation would be signed into law next year in the United States. While the focus of his speech was primarily on what actions the United States government …
