In The News

Project Syndicate: Stop Insuring Climate Disaster

Bill McKibben May 11, 2017
As alternative energies become more competitive, the transition from fossil fuels would go much faster if the insurance industry accounts for the challenges of climate change and does not give coal and other fossil fuels a free ride. “While insurance industry representatives declare their intent and passion to rein in climate change and ensure a livable planet, in the back rooms their agents are...

Stratfor: Changing the Scientific Climate in the United States

April 26, 2017
Throughout history, experimentation and science have delivered comfort and prosperity – electricity, road and air transportation, cures for disease, satellites and weather forecasting, communication technologies and more. US scientists are alarmed by political leaders who reject policy recommendations based on evidence – notably the near unanimous agreement among climate scientists that reliance...

CNBC: The Costs of Dumping Obama’s Clean Power Plan

Jason Bordoff March 29, 2017
Despite polarization among US lawmakers, the president can accomplish much with executive orders. Donald Trump is dismantling his predecessor’s climate legacy, explains Jason Bordoff, a professor and founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Orders announced today “direct agencies to rewrite regulation...

Financial Times: Sharp Drop in US Emissions Keeps Global Levels Flat

Pilita Clark March 18, 2017
The world has kept emissions that cause climate change in check for the third year in a row during a period when the prices of fossil fuels were low and global economic growth averaged about 3 percent per year. Natural gas has quickly replaced coal as an energy source, seven nuclear power plants went on line in China and renewable energies are becoming more affordable. The trends suggest “a shift...

Project Syndicate: The Geopolitics of Environmental Challenges

Giulio Boccaletti March 8, 2017
Crises with immediate impact, including economic downturns or war, distract governments from the steady and creeping dangers of climate change. “Environmental degradation and natural-resource insecurity are undermining our ability to tackle some of the biggest global issues we face,” writes Giulio Boccaletti for Project Syndicate. “Environmental insecurity is a major, though often underestimated...

Independent: Investors With $2.8 Trillion in Assets Unite Against Climate Change Denial

Ben Chapman February 16, 2017
Taking steps to end reliance on fossil fuels and curb climate change is on the agenda at the meeting of foreign ministers of the world’s 20 largest economies in Bonn, Germany. “But as G20 foreign ministers meet on Thursday to prepare for a climate change summit in Hamburg in July, managers of funds with assets totalling more than $2.8 trillion - more than the entire annual GDP of the UK - called...

MIT Technology Review: Hotter Days Will Drive Global Inequality

David Rotman February 6, 2017
Extreme heat reduces labor productivity and will drive inequality among nations and regions. “The average global income is predicted to be 23 percent less by the end of the century than it would be without climate change,” reports MIT Technology Review on work by researchers from Stanford and University of California at Berkeley. “But the effects of a hotter world will be shared very unevenly,...