An effective environmental treaty? Montreal Protocol.

by nathan thanki (march 2011) When astronauts first looked out the window of their spacecraft onto the only planet they had ever known, what they would have seen is a thin blue layer enveloping the globe. Without this layer, life on earth would probably not exist. The stratospheric ozone layer contains 90% of the world’s known ozone (Chasek et al 164), and is life giving because it absorbs...

USA v China

by nathan thanki The USA wants to be treated the same as China when it comes to responsibility for tackling climate change. Many environmental NGOs, in the increasingly panicked calls for climate action now, are also prone to saying things like "well of course the emerged economies of Brazil, India and China must also be obliged to reduce emissions." This plays quite well into...

Adaptation in Bangladesh: closer look at NAPA

by nathan thanki (Nov 2010) Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation, if not our species. The six billion and counting human inhabitants of the earth will soon be coming up against the full force of this change and the question they will ask is not ‘how can we stop it?’ but rather ‘how can we survive it?’ How can societies adapt themselves in order to be...

USA scores own goal by moving the goal posts

by nathan thanki There was quite a stink created this week when US Special Envoy for Climate Change (the big-shot who shows up late to the UN climate talks and gets interrupted by his constituents for not truly speaking for them) made a "remark" to his old College, Dartmouth. There was widespread condemnation of the apparent u-turn on US climate policy, which had previously agreed...