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“There is a lot of speculation of how much it will actually cost,” he said, with estimates from $20 a ton to as much as $2,000. “We won’t know for sure until someone builds a pilot plant.” (An average passenger vehicle generates about five tons of carbon dioxide a year.)

Dr. Keith says he thinks it may be possible to lower the cost of capture toward $100 a ton as the company grows.

Gas capture would be extremely important in developing a rational price for carbon emissions, said Dr. Fox of the British mechanical engineering society. “Whatever it costs to take it out of the air and store it away,” Dr. Fox said, “that’s the price polluters would pay if they want to put carbon into the air.”

the Green New Deal.)

The non-binding resolution, as Oliver pointed out in the segment, has been especially polarizing, and is regularly ridiculed in bad faith by Republicans, despite the scale of the climate-based issues it merely suggests might be a good idea to address, such as carbon-pricing.

After explaining the idea being carbon taxes, and the difficulty politicians have getting people to accept the idea of a new tax, Nye returns for another experiment to cut through all the talk.

A lot of young conservatives are frustrated by the false choice between no climate action and a big government regulatory scheme.

“Adult leaders have not acted efficiently or effectively on this issue, and we are stepping forward to fill the void,” said Alexander Posner, the founding president of Students for Carbon Dividends and a 22-year-old American history major at Yale University.

But the centrism that annoyed Washington insiders turned out to be perfect for college politicos. Posner was inspired by the plan when he first read about it in the press. He contacted the Climate Leadership Council and ultimately interned there over the summer. When he returned to campus this fall, he was determined to recruit more college conservatives to their cause.

As a starting point, I’ve accepted the prevailing scientific view that man-made greenhouse gases contribute to global warming.

ut I’ve been routinely pessimistic and skeptical that we can do much about it. That is, we can’t easily control the forces that worsen global warming.

We have yet to discover or create some low-cost fuel that would replace fossil fuels

“Change is coming, whether we seek it or not.” So declares a remarkable document titled “Preserving Coal Country,” released Monday by the United Mine Workers of America, in which the union — which at its peak represented half a million workers — accepts the reality that coal isn’t coming back.

Instead, it argues, the goal should be “a true energy transition that will enhance opportunities for miners, their families and their communities.”

The union, however, understands that it isn’t. What killed the mines wasn’t a “war on coal”; it was technological progress, first in the extraction of natural gas, then in solar and wind power.

Among the first things you likely heard about the Inflation Reduction Act was its size.The bill, signed into law by President Biden on Tuesday, makes $369 billion in climate and energy investments — by far the largest such investment in American history.

But there are several ways to measure the size of a bill, and given how high the country’s emissions targets are, even many of the I.R.A.’s supporters will openly concede that it is, on its own, inadequate

it is ultimately how much carbon we put into the atmosphere and not how much solar power we produce that determines the future of warming. But the power of carrots also just reflects some new realities: To simplify radically, a 90 percent reduction in the cost of solar power over the last decade means that the same amount of money now goes ten times as far.

“How do we deal, as a global civilization, with a problem that is decades in the making and is caused by everything we do?”

“It’s the challenge of our time, and there is no road map.”

total emissions of carbon into the atmosphere must be kept below one trillion tons if global warming is to be held to tolerable levels. More than half that amount has been emitted since the beginning of the industrial era, and at the rate emissions are going up, the limit will be reached in 30 years or less.

For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats can approach climate policy with a sense of imagination. They can also approach it with a sense of humility, because their last two strategies didn’t work particularly well. When the party last controlled Congress, in 2009, Democrats tried to pass a national cap-and-trade bill, a type of policy that allows polluters to bid on the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It failed to pass in the Senate. Starting in 2011, President Obama tried to use the EPA’s powers under the Clean Air Act to fight carbon-dioxide emissions. After President Trump was elected, he terminated that effort by executive order.

Economists tend to prefer policies that work across the entire economy at once by integrating the costs of climate change into the price of gas, food, and other consumer goods. But voters—who have more quotidian concerns than optimally elegant economic policy—don’t always feel the same way. They don’t want gas prices to go up. And that means they support policies that remake one sector of the economy at a time, usually by mandating the use of technology. Economists like to disparage these policies as “kludges” or “command and control.” But Americans like them

climate policy’s Boring as Dirt problem: the BAD problem. The BAD problem recognizes that climate change is an interesting challenge. It is scary and massive and apocalyptic, and its attendant disasters (especially hurricanes, wildfires, and floods) make for good TV. But the policies that will address climate change do not pack the same punch. They are technical and technocratic and quite often dull. At the very least, they will never be as immediate as climate change itself. Floods are powerful, but stormwater management is arcane.

Addressing climate change in a post-pandemic world

the coronavirus outbreak seems to indicate that the world at large is equally ill prepared to prevent or confront either.

By contrast, financial shocks—whether bank runs, bubble bursts, market crashes, sovereign defaults, or currency devaluations—are largely driven by human sentiment, most often a fear of lost value or liquidity.

team of economists recently analyzed 20 years of peer-reviewed research on the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the damage from climate change. They concluded that the average cost, adjusted for improved methods, is substantially higher than even the U.S. government’s most up-to-date figure.

That means greenhouse gas emissions, over time, will take a larger toll than regulators are accounting for. As tools for measuring the links between weather patterns and economic output evolve — and the interactions between weather and the economy magnify the costs in unpredictable ways — the damage estimates have only risen.

It’s the kind of data that one might expect to set off alarm bells across the financial industry, which closely tracks economic developments that might affect portfolios of stocks and loans. But it was hard to detect even a ripple.

uropean gas prices have soared in recent weeks, climbing to a high of $25 per million British thermal units (chart 1, left panel)

from Russian supply bottlenecks to a lack of wind in the North Sea, caused the spike.

Even before the recent price surge, gas was in short supply. A prolonged northern-hemisphere winter meant that European countries ran down reserves, leaving their stocks 25% below the historic average

What accounts for this remarkable collective turnaround, unique among political parties around the world, even as climate scientists have accumulated greater evidence of how humanity is dangerously altering the planet?

As it turned out, a well-financed push by fossil fuel interests to deny climate science dovetailed smoothly with the burst of anti-government anger that gave rise to the Tea Party from the depths of the Great Recession.

For the angry supporters of the Tea Party, opposed to government spending in almost any form, the prescription is anathema. “If you decide climate change is real, there must be a role for government to combat it. So the only way out is to deny it exists,” Mr. Karpinski said.

Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet's warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius — but Siberia's temperatures have already spiked far beyond that.

the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average.

The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.

On Thursday, a broad coalition called the Climate Leadership Council — backed by leading environmentalists and some of the biggest energy companies and utilities — released a plan for a carbon tax and rebate that would radically cut emissions while also leaving most people better off economically.

To win Republican and business support, the coalition also proposed cutting regulations that a carbon tax would make unnecessary.

few wrong ideas have been more persistent than the fear of too many people

In a famous 1980 wager, Simon bet an author of “The Population Bomb,” Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich, that resources would actually become more plentiful, not less, as the population grew

he won the bet: In a little more than 10 years, the price of a representative set of commodities fell by more than half — a clear signal that supply was outstripping demand.

Sadly, I get this reaction a lot. One word about my five years at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or my work in the climate justice movement broadly, and I’m bombarded with pious admissions of environmental transgressions or nihilistic throwing up of hands. One extreme or the other.

underneath all that is a far more insidious force. It’s the narrative that has both driven and obstructed the climate change conversation for the past several decades. It tells us climate change could have been fixed if we had all just ordered less takeout, used fewer plastic bags, turned off some more lights, planted a few trees, or driven an electric car. It says that if those adjustments can’t do the trick, what’s the point?

It turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined as sin or virtue, convicting those who don’t or can’t uphold these ethics.

The “second wave” of electric-vehicle buyers isn’t materializing, the Journal reported this week

To lure the first wave took thousands of dollars in taxpayer handouts to each buyer and thousands more in subsidies to encourage companies to build the EVs in the first place. And these buyers were the enthusiasts. How much more will have to be piled on the table to lure those customers who aren’t bewitched by EV cultural and technological appeal and care about having a useful car at an affordable price?

But this was always understood. In the fantasy life of greens, the next step would be to ban the sale of new gasoline cars altogether. Except Americans vote: Politicians who don’t get the votes of Americans don’t get to make policy, including the policy of denying them the choice to buy gasoline-powered vehicle

WASHINGTON — President Xi Jinping of China will make a landmark commitment on Friday to start a national program in 2017 that will limit and put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, Obama administration officials said Thursday

The move to create a so-called cap-and-trade system would be a substantial step by the world’s largest polluter to reduce emissions from major industries, including steel, cement, paper and electric power.

it is not clear whether China will be able to enact and enforce a program that substantially limits emissions.

Leaders Move to Convert Paris Climate Pledges Into Action

PARIS — Before the applause had even settled in the suburban convention center where the Paris Agreement was adopted by consensus on Saturday night, world leaders warned that momentum from the historic accord must not be allowed to dissipate.

With nearly every nation on Earth having now pledged to gradually reduce emissions of the heat-trapping gases that are warming the planet