Longtime Skeptic Changes His Mind
Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and economics professor, once considered global warming a minor threat. But now he's calling for a $150 billion annual investment to combat global warming and proposes a global tax on carbon dioxide to subsidize that cost. Lomborg's most recent book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits, is very different compared to his 2001 tome, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg's recent work with the Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC), a Danish think tank comprised of economists who decide the best way to spend for aid and development, helped change his mind. The CCC upgraded climate change to a higher priority -- it used to be dead last.
Lomborg has been quoted by many climate skeptics over the years and has frequently appeared on Fox News to represent "the other side of the climate debate." Conservative pundits used his credibility to bolster their anti-global warming argument; even Glenn Beck called him an "expert on the economic impacts of global warming." Lomborg, however, has always said he believed in warming; what he argued against were the catastrophic weather scenarios and energy investments, saying "we can do very little good at very high cost.”
Now Lomborg is changing his tune: "If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming."
California Under Siege
California's milestone global warming bill, AB 32, is threatened this fall by Proposition 23. The proposition would suspend the global warming bill until the state’s unemployment rate drops below 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters, something that's only been achieved three times during the past three decades. Prop 23 is funded by out-of-state oil companies. The most recent contribution was $1 million from the Wichita, Kansas oil company Koch Industries (owned by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch). So far, the Prop 23 campaign "has raised $8.2 million with 97 percent of that coming from oil interests and 89 percent from out of state."
Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown, US Senator Barbara Boxer, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger all strongly oppose Prop 23. Republican candidates Meg Whitman (gubernatorial) and Carly Fiorna (US Senate) have been much hazier on their stances: Fiorna refuses to take a position yet says she'll probably vote for it, calling it an "imperfect solution." Whitman says she’ll suspend AB 32 for at least a year if elected.
Colorful Map Tracks Carbon in Amazon
The UN's REDD, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation proposal, made a breakthrough in carbon emissions tracking. Through technologies like satellite mapping and airborne lasers, REDD was able to create a 3D map that shows the amount of carbon sequestered in Peruvian forests. This is extremely useful for monitoring and curbing deforestation and forest degradation, which, according to UN estimates, currently account for one-fifth of all human caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science, lead author of a study that produced the map, said: "What we're showing here for the first time is an ability to not only map the carbon...that is in the forest, but also use a technique that allows us to estimate the emissions. In terms of an international climate treaty, that's the big one."