COP15: DOA?

Developments over the past few weeks have all but confirmed what many had already suspected: There will be no global agreement in Copenhagen. Officials from the UK have been floating warnings for the past few weeks that a new climate treaty would no be possible by December but this weekend President Obama publicly conceded that [...]

Looking ahead to Copenhagen, seeing REDD

Here at ecociety we are paying close attention to developments in the run up to COP 15. One of the most important areas of negotiation involves the issue of deforestation. The UN established the Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing countries (REDD) to encourage developing nations to reduce deforestation through [...]

Green Technology as a Public Good?

At the last week’s conference on “Climate Change: Technology Development and Transfer,” Indian PM Singh proclaimed that green climate technologies should be considered global public goods (GPG). Although Singh’s statement failed to grab headlines in the Western press it a remarkable and important idea that will surely receive increasing scrutiny.

It’s the economics stupid!

Sometime in the past few years the battle over the science of climate change was won. A few contrarian dead-enders remain but the world (read: the US) now accepts that climate change is real, is happening, and is a serious threat to the planet. Despite dire warnings from the scientific community there remains significant political [...]

A Garbage Dump Twice the Size of The US

Somewhere off the coast of California, between Hawaii and Japan lies a vortex of “plastic soup” twice the size of the continental United states. Held together by underwater currents, 100 million tons of “flotsam,” as floating trash is known, “moves around like a big animal without a leash,” according to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. It seems [...]