policy

I've been fortunate to be doing a fair bit of travelling with work over the past year, so have become well used to the obligatory request on flights to turn off any electronic devices during take-off and landings. But is such a request really necessary?

(This post was originally published at Renewable Energy Magazine)

The likely conflict between the extension of the California condor’s habitat and wind development in California pulls the green movement in opposite directions, an unfortunate story that has repeated itself a number of times in the combined environmental-climate action community in the United States.

A worldwide battle for control of the Internet looms, which could soon pit the U.S. against the rest of the world. Starting this week in Geneva, at the World Conference on International Telecommunications, geopolitical rivals such as Russia and China will attempt to extract "unprecedented powers" over the future of the Internet, from domain names to cybersecurity, from data privacy to international mobile roaming rates.

Announcing new journal article: “Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook About Age: Unintended Consequences of the ‘Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act’” by danah boyd, Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz, and John Palfrey, First Monday.

Einstein is credited with saying that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Such words have renewed meaning when it comes to messaging about climate change as everything about it seems complex – its cause, its impact, and the challenges that humans face to address it.

The idea of how effective a national design policy is came up a few times this week during casual conversations with my friends in the design world. I am generally unimpressed with these activities because I am a result-oriented person and I don't waste time on just talking. I've seen many of these paper written up that don't worth the paper that they were printed on.

As America enters the next chapter of its political history, with a newly minted Congress and a hobbled presidency, national leadership on climate and energy issues continues to remain a pipe dream. One side wants to accelerate business as usual: more oil drilling, “clean” coal and nuclear plants, letting “the market” determine which technologies win or lose.

In the first part of this piece, I discussed how the fractured structure of cap and trade is either non-functional or marginally functional.  In the second part, I pointed out how cap and trade, due to its structure, is largely non-responsive to the ethical power of the climate action movement and concerned political leaders. Here I offer a context within which individual effective policy instruments can fit together.

In the first part of this post, I outlined how the components of cap and trade don’t work together to cut emissions.

2. Cap and Trade’s Perverse Ethics Threaten Climate Policy Effectiveness

In this 3-part post, I will outline how cap and trade’s composite structure contains within it fault lines that help defeat its and the climate action community’s goals.  In this first part, I will sketch out the components of the cap and trade hybrid