Climate Change

The Obama Administration’s preliminary decision to impose a 31 per cent tariff on solar panels imported from China is short sighted. The move could cause a trade war, hurt the US economy, jeopardize US security interests, and put the world further off course in terms of meeting its global climate change goals.

At the Commerce Department, I have the privilege to serve as Secretary Bryson's senior policy adviser on energy and environment issues.

In 2010 and 2011, Republicans and Democrats proposed mandating clean power generation in the electricity sector. To evaluate public support for a national clean energy standard (NCES), we conducted a nationally representative survey that included randomized treatments on the sources of eligible power generation and programme costs. We find that the average US citizen is willing to pay US$162 per year in higher electricity bills (95% confidence interval: US$128–260), representing a 13% increase, in support of a NCES that requires 80% clean energy by 2035.

"This set of studies from around the world is a wake-up call," said Rebecca Shaw, a climate scientist and associate vice president for Environmental Defense Fund. "The truth is that we have been struggling to conserve the nature we depend on for clean air and clean water without climate change. These studies show it is going to get harder and more costly to conserve nature in the future.

Moreover, adds ecologist Shaye Wolf of the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco, this analysis doesn’t account for additional factors, such as whether a migrating species’ food will exist in its newfound home or whether the animal will confront new or more aggressive predators and competitors. Still, accounting for species dispersal impacts “represents an important new contribution to evaluating whether animals will be able to keep pace with climate change,” she says. Read the full story

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“Essentially it looks like they left a pretty big mess behind,” San Jose State Assistant Professor Dustin Mulvaney told CBS 5. Mulvaney has written a white paper on solar industry waste for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Looking at CBS 5’s video, Mulvaney said it’s hard to tell how much hazardous waste is at the Milpitas facility. But he said one thing is for sure.

While this year's early warm weather has made for something of a ramp windfall, it also suggests future problems, said Frank Lowenstein, a climate scientist with the Nature Conservancy and an avid harvester of wild ramps. Since they're hearty, drought- and cold-resistant, and spend most of their year in the ground, a dry year will not hurt them, Lowenstein explained. "That’s their historical strategy: Get some leaves up and get their sunshine now." But a permanent change to weather patterns could spell disaster.

We are pleased to let you know about a new report, Monitoring Climate Effects in Temperate Marine Ecosystems: A Test Case Using California’s MPAs, which outlines a new and innovative framework for measuring climate change effects and informing adaptive MPA management.