Last week in the Huffington Post, climatologist Dr. James Hansen made an impassioned plea to President Obama to ditch cap-and-trade and instead advocate a plan to tax carbon-based fuels with 100% of the revenues returned to households. This was not the first time. Hansen made the same pitch back in December 2008 in a letter to President-elect Obama. President Obama did not heed Hansen’s advice, keeping his wagon hitched to cap-and-trade, the policy darling of Big Green, U.S. CAP, and congressional leaders. But with cap-and-trade bogged down on Capitol Hill, Hansen argues, his plan gives Obama “a second chance on the predominant moral issue of this century.”

Hansen made the case for “tax-and-dividend” in testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee on February 25, 2009. I commented on Hansen’s testimony a week later on MasterResource.…

Dr. Pierre Desrochers, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga, is the scholar’s scholar. In an age where few read all important material on all sides of their subject, this professor stands out.

Can President Obama strike a deal with the University of Toronto to make this course available to his top energy and environmental aides, even smartest-guy-in-the-room John Holdren? Energy legislation is currently stalled, and the summer might be a good time for a “time out” to learn the basics of energy and the free society.

Here is the syllabus for GGR 333H5F

The development of new energy sources has had a major impact on the development of both human societies and the environment. This course will provide a broad survey of past and current achievements, along with failures and controversies, regarding the use of various forms of energy.…

The latest peak oil news is simply astounding: a whistleblower inside the International Energy Agency (IEA) claiming that “the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.”

The fact that this report appeared in the Guardian, which has published questionable articles on peak oil, is suggestive.

First and foremost, one is tempted to conclude that this story represents poor reporting, bringing to mind an earlier Guardian story claiming that Fatih Birol, the IEA official in charge of the World Energy Outlook, acknowledged peak oil. It turns out that Fatih was misquoted. And while I might be biased, considering Fatih a friend, the nature of the present story is close to ridiculous, rather than misleading.…

The slow moving Senate debate over climate change offers an opportunity to revisit the fundamentals of climate change. While the physical science about natural and anthropogenic forcings is the place to start, the economics of climate change is highly relevant for the policy debate. In this regard,  a perfectly timed literature review in the Spring 2009 The Journal of Economic Perspectives is worth studying.

There have been 13 – count them, 13 – studies published in the peer reviewed literature that have wrestled with the economic implications of a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GhGs) on a CO2-equivalent basis.  Those 13 studies have yielded 14 estimates of what will subsequently happen to global GDP.  For those who are curious, 10 of those studies assume a subsequent warming of 2.5 C; two assume that a 1 C warming would follow; and two assume a 3 C warming would follow. …