Get Energy Smart! NOW!

The EPA has issued its analysis of the financial and economic impacts of the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act.  The bumper sticker summary of their (fundamentally flawed) analysis: action to mitigate climate change is affordable.  Sadly, however, the EPA has continued the strong economic tradition of robust analysis of costs of action with dramatic understating of [...]

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Friday, the Center for Climate Strategies released a study showing that making national policy of 23 measures already in play in Red and Blue and Purple states across the nation would lead to millions of additional jobs and significant carbon reductions.
This study shows, quite clearly, that serious climate mitigation efforts should not be [...]

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Rewarding those who come up with innovative approaches, who prove that they have winning teams, who can show demonstrated success is a thematic within the Obama Administration. Of course, this is not ‘abandon those who fail’ and thus the more appropriate summary might be: “Reward those who show success, help those who struggle reform toward [...]

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“The Social Cost of Carbon may be the most important number you’ve never heard of” according to Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth Stanton in a recent publication from the Economics for Equity and the Environment Network.
The Social Cost of Carbon (pdf) analyzes the efforts within the U.S. government to develop a value of the economic impact [...]

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This guest post by the very thoughtful BruceMcF focuses on the public transit / rail version of the need to look beyond stove-pipes to full values for a true cost-benefit analysis. Just like so many fossil fuel costs are externalized (pollution, whether causing cancers or climate change), so too are many transit benefits. [...]

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Economy versus the Environment. This is a slogan for many when they consider the challenges of dealing with Climate Change and the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
In 2007, McKinsey issued Reducing US Greenhouse Gas Emissions: How Much at What Cost? that provided a a significant contribution to this discussion. McKinsey’s conclusion: [...]

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The global economy’s life-blood (even if it has been on life support) truly doesn’t flow through the CAC 40 or Wall Street, but is pumped from the ground and into our chemical plants, manufacturing processes, and transportation. We should, as a global society, be working to “keep the grease in the ground” for a variety [...]

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My father-in-law has brain cancer.  He is a good man. He is the type whose hands are (sadly too often) filled at the end of a stroll with trash he picked up on the way. He has helped others in need, whether friends (doing all too many renovation and repair projects) to strangers (a pencil [...]

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Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago Geosciences, has published An Open Letter to Steven Levitt, the nation’s Super Freakiest Economist. To put it simply, Pierrehumbert owns Levitt.
By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of [...]

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There are many things being lost in the discussion of the cost-benefit equation when it comes to mitigating global warming.
When doing cost-benefit analyses, organizations like the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are constrained to consider just one quadrant of what could be considered (in simplified form) the four-quadrant cost-benefit analysis structure:

Cost [...]

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