Indian Country Today Media Network reports: Elders and chiefs of at least 10 sovereign nations walked out of a Keystone XL pipeline tribal consultation meeting with U.S. State Department officials in Rapid City, South Dakota, on May 16, calling the meeting ‘invalid.’ The Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association Statement Against the Keystone XL Pipeline concludes: “If [...]
We discussed the UN climate change conference in Doha on Al Jazeera English TV November 26, with questions about the U.S. role in the treaty negotiations and fairness in the relationship between the U.S. and developing countries in meeting climate policy goals. […]
“If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground; if we want an 80% chance, we have to leave 80% of those reserves untouched,” write climate activist leaders Bill McKibben, Nnimmo Bassey, and Pablo Solon in an [...]
A global network of institutional investor organizations responsible for roughly $22.5 trillion in assets has released a letter calling for a new dialogue between investors and “the governments of the world’s largest economies on climate policy and the development of workable frameworks that will reduce climate risk and support low carbon investment.” […]
How to move forward with progress on sustainability following Rio+20 – the short name for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development that was held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 – was the subject of discussion by a panel of experts at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, on September 12. The [...]
Multinational corporations are well-represented at the Rio+20 conference in Brazil this week. We talked with Al Jazeera English TV’s Inside Story Americas, which asked, “whether in the push to attract so-called corporate stakeholders to the environmental cause, the UN summit has become less about the future of the planet than about the future of corporate [...]
China’s reported CO2 emissions show a 1.4 gigatonne (20%) discrepancy between national and provincial-level totals, a new study in Nature Climate Change reports. That is 5% of the global total and is equivalent to Japan’s annual CO2 emissions. It is due mainly to discrepancies in reporting of coal-related emissions. Accurate reporting of emissions is an important [...]
Representing the Obama Administration at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Jonathan Pershing, senior US climate negotiator at the State Department, took a more positive view of the 17th Conference of the Parties in Durban, South Africa, than CSW has in our earlier posts (here and here). The outcome of the Durban climate summit may [...]
In response to our post on The Occupy Movement and the Climate Movement, we received two comments that raise issues suggesting a need to expand the discussion. We argued that the climate movement has much to learn and potentially adopt from Occupys 99% vs. 1% framing of corporate power and its influence on government policy. One [...]
US environmental groups and analysts in the movement for a stronger climate policy have focused on energy technologies, carbon pricing, and other technical issues without, for the most part, coming to grips with the elements of the climate change international policy problem that involve socioeconomic justice and distributional equity. But it is such issues that [...]