Climate Politics update

I haven't been providing links to the blog I started in August: Climate Politics: IR and the Environment. So, here's a list of my most recent September posts, complete with opening sentences. You can find half a dozen posts there from August as well.

Dirty energy subsidies 
September 26, 2009 |

Last August, the UN Environmental Programme reported that “around $300 billion or 0.7 per cent of global GDP is being spent on energy subsidies annually.” These subsidies are particularly important because most are devoted to fossil fuels. They artificially reduce the price of those fuels, thereby increasing consumption and

The Problem of China: As viewed from the USA 
September 20, 2009 |

For more than a century, the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gases have been emitted by advanced industrial states. Recently, however, China has assumed the top spot in annual emissions. On a per person basis, of course, China still trails the global leaders by a good distance.

Those statistics highlight the related problems of scale (China is really big) and inequality (mu…

Weep for OPEC? 
September 10, 2009 |

Representatives from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are meeting in Vienna this week and the looming threat of Copenhagen is clearly on their agenda. I wrote “threat of Copenhagen” because OPEC states are primarily devoted to selling a commodity that is a significant source of climate change. The U.S. Energy Information Administration…

What’s the baseline? 
September 4, 2009 |

The Copenhagen conference starts in three months and this blog will cover key negotiation issues. Let’s start with the framework for negotiation, OK?

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change dates to the June 1992 Earth Summit. The overwhelming majority of nations are parties to this agreement — even the United States, which did not ratify the fol…

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