How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Global Warming | Anatoly Karlin

I recently drove to the beach with a hipster chick who majored in something involving the environment (nothing technical) and recently found a marketing job with a clean energy start-up in SF. She went on and on about how important it is to buy local, observe Earth Hour, the fucking works. Only problem? She drove a four wheel drive. In one of the very few places in the US where you can get by without a car. ...Furthermore, even individual interventions and lifestyle changes are irrelevant, as the Parable of the Beer Yeast demonstrates.

 In an article for Forbes, Roger Kay analogizes our global sustainability predicament to that of a beer yeast in a sugar solution. You gobble up the delicious sugars, giving you the energy to reproduce. The only downside is that in the process you shit out alcohol, and so do billions of your fellows. Eventually you will all perish in a booze-drenched bed of your own making… So being morally upright, you refrain from eating the sugars. You live a horrid life, become impotent, and shrivel away and die. Unfortunately, your fellows don’t get the memo, and things turn out just the same as they otherwise would have.

CO2 Credit Exchange Opens in Texas · Environmental Management & Energy News · Environmental Leader

The Texas Climate & Carbon Exchange, which allows companies to voluntarily offset emissions by buying credits, opened Thursday in Austin through a partnership with Australia-based Carbon Trade Exchange.

TCCX opened with one client, the city of Beppu, Japan, Dallas Morning News reported. The exchange doesn’t yet have any customers who want to sell carbon credits, DMN reported.

UN Reaps Sustainability Pledges Worth $513 Billion in Rio - Bloomberg

The record of governments delivering on promises like the ones they’ve made this week is “very poor,” said Bjorn Lomborg, a professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” He said the pledges reflect efforts of companies to take advantage of government incentives they expect to flow due to the recommendations set out in Rio.

“The reason lots and lots of businesses are in Rio is they’re rent-seeking,” Lomborg said in an interview. “They’re looking for huge potential subsidies for everything they produce.”

The UN pledges also cover a Dutch cycling campaign, Bank of America Corp.’s $50 billion plan to stimulate lending for sustainability and the UN’s $50 billion program to bring cleaner forms of energy to the world’s poorest nations.

Generators cry foul over carbon tax perfect storm | News | Business Spectator

The combination of not knowing whether the carbon tax will be repealed with a change of government nor what impact a long-term carbon tax will have on the future price of emissions is causing widespread concern in the coal power sector, the AFR reported.