As (some) Americans focus their attention on addressing climate change and energy security, it’s easy to forget that a quarter of the world (about 1.6 billion people) have absolutely no access to electricity. That situation undermines pretty much every aspect of development, from health to education to personal safety. A new UN report (PDF), released today (on what organizers have called “Energy for Development Day“), admirably draws attention to the issue, and to some options for addressing it. (For a non-PDF news account, take a look here.) Read more »

Most of what can intelligently be said about the breakdown this past weekend of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate talks has already been said. I suspect, though, that the news isn’t quite as bad for many climate bill supporters as they think. Read more »

I got hooked on blogging last winter during the Copenhagen climate negotiations, when I contributed to a group blog at Politico. Pretty soon after that, I decided to make it a permanent thing. I started test-driving a new blog at the Council on Foreign Relations a few weeks ago. Now its time to take the training wheels off. Read more »

I like labeling schemes, like Energy Star, that help consumers make more energy-efficient choices. But sometimes policymakers slip up. In California, they’ve just started offering a $200 rebate on new refrigerators whose efficiency exceeds Energy Star requirements by a substantial amount. What could be wrong with that? Read more »

Daron Acemoglu, Philippe Aghion, and two of their colleagues (MIT and Harvard) posted a fascinating working paper last October that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves in the policy world. (After I wrote this, I spotted a blog post on it over at the World Bank, which apparently hosted one of its authors for a talk last month.) It’s a fairly technical piece of economics (though the summary is nice and clear), so I’ll try to explain a bit about what it says. Read more »

Oh, “linked fee”, we hardly knew you. For the last few months, conventional wisdom held that the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham climate bill, due out next Monday, would tackle emissions from transportation in a novel way. The bill was reported to leave transportation outside its emissions cap, and levy a fee on refined oil products (gasoline, petroleum, jet fuel) instead. That fee (call it a tax if you must) would have been indexed to the price of permits that power plants would have had to purchase under the cap. During its brief life, there was basically no serious public analysis of the fee’s wisdom. Now all signs say that it’s dead. Read more »

Slate has a provocative pair of stories on climate change and intellectual property. One of them seems to completely miss the point; the other has some good insights but then takes things way too far. Read more »

Bill McKibben has a piece in the new issue of TNR arguing that the Cantwell-Collins “cap-and-dividend” bill is vastly superior to whatever the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman effort will produce. I’m not buying it. Read more »

Joyce Dargay and Dermot Gately have a new paper out that projects 134 mb/d global oil demand in 2030, which is far higher than the standard projections (IEA, EIA, OPEC), all of which are in the neighborhood of 105 mb/d. It got a good bit of attention about a month ago (see here, here, and here, among others). I have a few questions about its conclusions. Read more »