Newly released research on effective messaging to Americans regarding needed climate change actions points to discrete audience segments and urges careful targeting at each of six different group’s concerns, needs, and values.
The views expressed in these articles are those of the individual authors.
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media is grateful for the generous financial support of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and of individual Yale University alumni.
Newly released research on effective messaging to Americans regarding needed climate change actions points to discrete audience segments and urges careful targeting at each of six different group’s concerns, needs, and values.
Green investment insiders concede that climate change-focused and clean energy funds will get tossed around just like any other set of stocks - and are sometimes even more vulnerable.
Candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has bragged that running mate Senator Joe Biden is a down-to-earth family man who commutes by Amtrak train from Wilmington to Washington.
The Democratic Delaware Senator has been commuting by Amtrak for decades. He has long preferred train travel over driving 109 miles to work, unwittingly also choosing what is universally acknowledged to be the mode of travel with the smallest amount of carbon dioxide emissions.
Writer, commentator, news source, and most of all critic, James Howard Kunstler combines an unforgiving disdain of America’s fossil fuel-based way of life with a scalding rejection of modern architecture, suburban zoning laws, and what he sees as much of the media’s complicity in the whole thing. A news junkie and major force behind the nascent “beyond the oil age” movement, Kunstler pulls no punches with his sharp tongue and engaging prose damning Americans’ over-reliance on their automobiles. His seemingly endless cheerless scolding doesn’t make him a pessimist, however, and certainly not a shy and retiring one. It’s just that the future he sees is a lot different from the one we have and the one that so many of his fellow citizens seem unable to see beyond.
A voluntary market for carbon offsets has emerged in recent years in the United States that in many ways parallels the global compliance carbon market in countries that have signed onto the Kyoto Protocol.
In contrast to the strict regulatory framework governing offset markets under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), however, a voluntary offset market lacks consistent and universally accepted standards for offset quality.
On May 13, the date of West Virginia’s presidential primary, CNN launched what the progressive group, Think Progress, called a “coal fest”.
“ISSUE #1: MAKING GAS FROM COAL: REDUCING DEPENDENCE ON OIL” flashed across the television screen as senior business correspondent Ali Velshi expounded on the prospect of converting coal into liquid fuel.
The global market for carbon reductions is growing rapidly, having doubled in value in the last year alone to more than $64 billion.
The European Union Emissions Trading System (EUETS) comprises most of the market, with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and other various offset markets valued at almost $14 billion. These latter offset markets primarily involve project-based investments in developing countries not subject to any greenhouse gas emissions cap.
BALI, Indonesia, December 10, 2007 - “What comes next?”
It’s a question that has haunted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 13th Conference of Parties.
Will the Bali talks result in a new global framework for tackling climate change? Will they lead to new commitments for a third compliance period for the Kyoto Protocol? An extended Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)?
Journalists reporting on the United Nations Bali negotiations and ongoing plans for addressing climate change need to appreciate that the term “tradable permits system” does not imply a one-size-fits-all single strategy.
Rather, numerous and diverse policy design considerations would go into shaping a tradable permits approach. Many of them involve considerable controversy - Who pays? Who benefits? What are the costs? And more.
An emerging consensus among economists, environmental organizations, and policy makers holds that policy solutions to the climate change problem must incorporate economic mechanisms so that social costs of climate change damages are reflected in prices of carbon and other greenhouse gases.