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With all good intentions, the climate talks in Copenhagen illicited less than they might have. There's a non-binding deal to fight global warming, but there was no agreement on binding limits of greenhouse gases linked to climate change. The process is moving forward in long-term goals just enough to enable the president to characterize the talks as not a total loss. He admited it was......read more
COP16 kicks off in Cancun, Mexico today, and expectations are low. It seems like not that long ago that the Copenhagen talks failed in such spectacular fashion. We can still taste the defeat. Tastes bad. Despite the dreary outlook, there is potential that something good can come from the meetings. But any chance at success will require that leaders shift their approach. In a recent NYT op-ed......read more
The annual United Nations meeting on climate change convenes in Durban, South Africa on Monday. The talks are officially known as, ahem, the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 7th Session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties (CMP7) to the Kyoto......read more
My, what a difference three years makes. In November 2008, then president-elect Barack Obama spoke to a conference of U.S. governors, saying in no uncertain terms that the U.S. was ready to join the world in the fight against global warming. Now, three days into COP17 in Durban, the U.S. is being lambasted by negotiators and eco-advocates for stonewalling progress on climate change. In a......read more
They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades. Nicholas Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to......read more
As nearly 200 countries meet in oil-and-gas-rich Qatar for annual talks starting Monday on slowing global warming, one of the main challenges will be raising climate aid for poor countries at a time when budgets are strained by financial turmoil. Rich countries have delivered nearly $30 billion in grants and loans promised in 2009, but those commitments expire this year. And a Green Climate Fund......read more
I recently met Beth Terry, the author of a great blog on plastic pollution called Fake Plastic Fish (the definitive resource on our culture’s obsession with plastics) at a very sobering event – the return from an expedition to Midway Island with photographer Chris Jordan, who traveled there with a film crew to document the “plastic graveyard.” Midway is literally “midway” from......read more
When not producing hard-hitting journalism from the front lines of COP15 (yaawwwn), or suing the pants off the other WWF (pardon me, WWE), the World Wildlife Fund occasionally drops a great little animated video, like this one here. ...read more
SHFT animator extraordinaire Liz Klein creates a moving message about the environment and climate change, using the tried and true technique of stop motion animation. Just in time for the holidays. Watch this before they run Rudolph....read more
