Chapter 11 · Resources
Fundamentals of Climate Change Policy
Adaptation, mitigation, externalities and geoengineering — the policy options and what each one actually costs.
Adaptation
One often hears people say, "Oh, we’ll just adapt to higher temperatures." This might sound comforting, but in practice adaptation may be a lot harder than you might realize.
Grand Designs
This Reuters article talks about how hard it is to protect the Houston/Galveston area from severe hurricanes and sea level rise.
reuters.com ↗
Why the city of Miami is doomed to drown
A similarly themed article in Rolling Stone about Miami.
rollingstone.com ↗
What Katrina tells us about adaptation
The 10th anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina was accompanied by a lot of analysis of the climate implications of that event. Here is a great analysis about what that event tells us about adaptation as a policy response to climate change.
vox.com ↗
Mitigation
Population and climate change
In assessing our options for reducing emissions, people rarely talk about trying to regulate population because it conflicts with many social and religious conventions. However, here’s a good discussion of how we can use population to help us solve climate change.
sciencemag.org ↗
Solar, wind and nuclear have amazingly low carbon footprints
Nuclear energy is one of the most difficult aspects of mitigation. It’s a terrific energy source that has life-cycle emissions not too different from wind and solar. It also generates power all the time, so it could help solve the problems introduced by intermittency of wind and solar.
carbonbrief.org ↗
The case against nuclear, in the WSJ
But it has a lot of disadvantages. This article gives a good overview of the issues.
gwagner.com ↗
Decarbonising Economies
This short book/long paper describes how economies can decarbonize.
cambridge.org ↗
Externalities
The Hidden Costs of Energy
The U.S. National Research Council have put out a thorough assessment of the externalities of energy (2010). It’s a bit old now, but still has a lot of good info in it.
nap.edu ↗
Energy’s deathprint
This Forbes article lists "deaths per kW-hour" of various types of fuel. Unsurprisingly, coal is the most dangerous. This article also has a good bibliography of sources for this kind of information.
forbes.com ↗
Geoengineering
Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal
One of two comprehensive NAS reports.
nap.edu ↗
Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth
The companion report on solar radiation management. There is also a 4-page summary.
nap.edu ↗
Royal Society report on geoengineering
The U.K. Royal Society has written a report on geoengineering.
royalsociety.org ↗
Terraforming Planets, Geoengineering Earth
Nice historical perspective on geoengineering by James Fleming.
academia.edu ↗
Six ideas to limit global warming with solar geoengineering
A good review of how we might implement solar radiation management.
carbonbrief.org ↗
A Case for Climate Engineering
David Keith, 2013. See also this article, which describes Keith’s view of a moderate geoengineering approach that might be more palatable than maximum efforts.
amazon.com ↗
Can Science Fix Climate Change: A Case Against Climate Engineering
Mike Hulme, 2014. The opposite view.
amazon.com ↗