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John McCain’s out on the campaign trail today promoting his green credentials, but its clear that his climate change proposals would put a McCain administration on collision course with many, maybe most, of its international partners.
Here’s McCain’s headline promise on climate:
By the year 2012, we will seek a return to 2005 levels of emission, by [...]

Yesterday I was at a roundtable on Europe and climate change, hosted by Jim Murphy, the UK’s minister for Europe, with his French counterpart, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, as the main speaker.
France is about to take over the EU presidency and will play a critical role on the road to Copenhagen. Two questions stand out:

Can the [...]

Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to [...]

Last night I was at Gresham College where their Professor of Commerce, Michael Mainelli, was lecturing on global risks (read his lecture here).Mainelli concluded his lecture with this neat throwaway line:
I sometimes think global risks keep us from attacking each other by providing a common enemy. So, if we get started attacking global risks collaboratively, [...]

I admit I have never heard this but will now shameless use it…  in answer to a question about what impact an individual can really have on climate change:
If you think you’re too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito

What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically [...]

Via Joshua Keating at ForeignPolicy.com, the news that German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel has issued a statement strongly criticising President Bush’s new climate change “policy” under the glorious headline,
Gabriel criticises Bush’s Neanderthal speech. Losership, not Leadership.
As Joshua so rightly comments, “With a title like that, why even bother with a statement?”

Today, I gave the closing address at the RUSI conference, Protecting the Critical Infrastructure, in a session introduced by RUSI’s head of risk and resilience, Anthony McGee. From the introduction to the conference by RUSI’s head, Professor Michael Clarke:
Protecting the Critical National Infrastructure and ensuring the continuation of political, social and economic activity is vital [...]

Yes, fresh from bringing peace to Northern Ireland and dodging snipers in Bosnia, Hillary Clinton is planning an amazing feat - she’s going to make the US energy independent, switch to renewables, and make energy prices cheaper for working class Americans.
“I told you I wanted to have a conversation so I asked you to send [...]

When I was the IPPR’s energy research fellow, I always loved working with Dieter Helm - a total iconoclaust who’d infuriate the green establishment by poking holes in their shaky claims about how cheap it would be to sort out climate change.  He could always get away with it for the simple reason that he [...]

You just can’t keep a good man down.  You might think he’d want a rest after a decade as Prime Minister.  You might suppose he’d have his hands full sorting out the Middle East.  You might reckon he’d be busy planning his impending role as the next President of Europe.  But - pah!
You need to [...]

Our friends at Avaaz have a new campaign on biofuels (full text below the fold).  Biofuels are already absorbing 20 per cent of the US corn crop, and that figure’s expected to rise to 32 per cent by 2016.  As Avaaz’s email puts it,
Each day, 820 million people in the developing world do not have [...]

This morning’s Guardian has a leaked report from EU foreign policy chiefs Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, due to go to all 27 heads of government this weekend, warning of “significant potential conflicts” in the decades ahead as a result of “intensified competition over access to, and control over, energy resources”.  Ian Traynor reports:
The officials [...]

The tiny Pacific small island state of Palau has just announced that it’ll be formally requesting protection from the Security Council on climate change and rising sea levels- and co-sponsoring a binding Security Council Resolution calling for mandatory emissions caps. 
It’s not the first time that climate change has appeared on the Security Council’s agenda (the [...]

A new study in the Science Journal shows human activity has left a mark on nearly every square kilometer of sea, severely compromising ecosystems in more than 40% of waters. Scientists have produced a global map of different activities including climate change, fishing, pollution and other human factors. The map is the first attempt to [...]

Excellent comment piece in today’s FT on how the Pentagon needs to plan for climate change.  According to the authors there are five key areas in which effective military planning can be undermined by uncertainty over when and how the major carbon-emitting countries combat climate change.
First, climate change poses a threat to fragile states that [...]

Blake Hounshell at ForeignPolicy.com has a succinct answer to people who don’t think binding targets are necessary in climate policy: this graph, which shows patent applications on sulphur control technologies in the US.  Guess what happened in 1970 and 1971?

Yale and Columbia universities have just published their 2008 Environmental Performance Index, which grades 149 countries on their sustainability.  Here’s the press release and the summary for policymakers. According to the Index, the most environmentally sustainable country in the world is - ready? - Switzerland.  Then Sweden, Norway and Finland.  The United States comes in at [...]

The FT’s consumer industries correspondent, Jenny Wiggins - who along with commodities correspondent Javier Blas deserves a medal (or at the very least a rise) for excellence in covering the food prices story over the last year - is looking at changing patterns of food consumption in India in the paper’s Saturday magazine today.  The [...]

Nick Butler - treasurer of the Fabian Society, chair of the Centre for European Reform’s advisory board, erstwhile chief of staff to BP’s former CEO John Browne - is a worried man.  Europhile though he is, the omens look not good:
The European economy is just beginning to feel the impact of Chinese growth, which will [...]

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