MISSION STATEMENT
As conversations of weather occurrences and suggested anomalies become more frequent and mainstream in the scientific community, as well as at the grass-roots-level, the need to embrace and index substantive information into an authoritative conduit to encourage more research and development~~~IS IMPERATIVE.
Pertinent themes as Global Warming, Climate Change, and Melting Ice Caps has stimulated discussions, seeded forums, and spawned additional research, all to foster consensus, and recommend courses-of-action.
The intent of CLIMATE; THE CONVERSATION, is to be The Bulletin Board, The Platform, The Podium, and The Credible Source & Bibliography for such astute, sincere, and scholarly considerations.
Sincerely;
Administrators:
Andrew M. Marconi
Lou Marconi
""""President Obama stood in the chamber of the United Nations General Assembly last week and urged the world to follow his example and fight global warming.
But a major new declaration calling for a global price on carbon —
signed by 74 countries and more than 1,000 businesses and investors — is
missing a key signatory: the United States.
The declaration, released by the World Bank
the day before Mr. Obama’s speech at the United Nations Climate Summit,
has been signed by China, Shell, Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola. It calls
on all nations to enact laws forcing industries to pay for the carbon
emissions that scientists say are the leading cause of global warming.
The
United States, which is under growing international pressure to price
carbon, is missing from the declaration for a key reason: conservative
opposition to Mr. Obama’s climate change proposals, specifically a
carbon tax. The opposition will only intensify if Republicans win
control of the Senate in November and the new majority leader is Senator
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, where coal — the world’s largest source of
carbon pollution — is the lifeblood of the state’s economy.
“It’s
time for the global elites to face facts,” Mr. McConnell said in a
statement. “President Obama’s war on coal won’t have any meaningful
impact on global carbon emissions. What it will do is ship American jobs
overseas, raise the cost of living substantially for middle and
working-class families and throw thousands more Kentuckians out of
work.”
Although
the nonbinding World Bank declaration is meant largely as a show of
resolve ahead of a 2015 climate summit in Paris, it signals the
broadest, most explicit effort to date of world leaders and financial
institutions to push all nations to enact new taxes on old forms of
energy. The declaration notes that governments can either directly tax
carbon pollution or create market-based cap-and-trade systems, which force companies to buy government-issued pollution permits.
“The
most powerful move that a government can make in the fight against
climate change is to put a price on carbon,” said Rachel Kyte, the World
Bank’s vice president of sustainability.
To
many Republicans on Capitol Hill, such statements are anathema. In
2010, after Mr. Obama tried but failed in the face of conservative
opposition to push a national cap-and-trade bill through Congress,
victorious Republicans galvanized against the idea and launched
campaigns against politicians who support carbon pricing. Mr. Obama in
turn circumvented Congress and in June released a new Environmental
Protection Agency regulation under his executive authority
that requires states to submit their own plans to cut emissions — but
does not tell them explicitly how to do so. Nonetheless, California and
nine Northeastern states have already enacted cap-and-trade programs,
and seven states — California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode
Island, Vermont and Washington — signed on to the World Bank
declaration.
In
order to avoid more opposition from conservatives, Mr. Obama and other
top administration officials no longer call publicly for a national
price on carbon. But they have nonetheless signaled their support for
international and state efforts. In his speech at the United Nations,
Mr. Obama quoted the Democratic governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who
is urging other states to pass carbon pricing laws: “As one of America’s
governors has said, ‘We are the first generation to feel the impact of
climate change and the last generation that can do something about
it.’ ”
The
Obama administration has also enacted a policy signaling its readiness
to price carbon should the politics of Congress ever shift: a metric it
calls “the social cost of carbon,” designed to account for the cost of
one ton of carbon dioxide pollution. Mr. Obama’s economists have
determined the cost to be $37 a ton. Secretary of State John Kerry, a
longtime advocate of government policy to fight climate change — and the
chief author of the failed 2010 cap-and-trade bill in the Senate — last
week told a meeting of the Major Economies Forum that “when it comes to
climate change, we know exactly what it takes to get the job done.”
But
Mr. Kerry did not specifically mention carbon pricing at the forum, a
gathering of foreign ministers of the world’s 20 largest economies, and
said only, “It takes energy policy.”
About
40 countries have already implemented carbon pricing policy, while
dozens of others are now exploring it. In 2005, the European Union
enacted a cap-and-trade plan for carbon pollution, and at the United
Nations last week, European leaders pushed hard for the rest of the
world to sign on.
“We
need to define a new economy of the world,” President François Hollande
of France said in his remarks at the climate summit. “There will have
to be a new pricing system for carbon.”
The weekend before the summit, more than 300,000 people protested at a climate change demonstration in the streets of New York, where marchers waved signs reading “Tax carbon!”
The new carbon pricing push comes as countries and institutions that once fought the idea are now embracing it.
“On
carbon pricing, there’s a perfect storm taking place,” said Robert N.
Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard.
“There is increasing recognition that approaches that have been taken in
the past haven’t worked, and that the only way one can affect the
hundreds of millions of decisions is through price signals.”
Over
the last year China has enacted seven pilot cap-and-trade programs in
its provinces, although outside experts remain skeptical of Beijing’s
plans as the nation’s carbon emissions continue to rise.
At
the same time, the political power of the coal industry to fight such
laws remains potent. Australia, a major coal-producing nation, offers a
case study in the political dangers of supporting a carbon tax in a
coal-heavy democracy. A former Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard,
made tackling climate change a signature issue and enacted a carbon tax
— a move that was seen as political suicide. Last year Australians
voted her out of office and this past summer, the new prime minister,
Tony Abbott, pushed through a bill to repeal the carbon price.""""
This represents another
example of how a singular initiative, once effected and given the time
and place to demonstrate its cause-and-effect intentions in a positive
way, can influence the impact of a carbon tax, on a larger scale. Such a levy could prove to be the wake-up call, from a couple of stand-points. Certainly the economic impact on the individual business would have its stakeholders access profit & loss factors and decide on courses-of-action for remedy. And ancillary to this is the critical decision of whether the operation, in its current configuration has a long-term future, or if the outlook spells obsolescence. Nonetheless, the Carbon-Tax impact on the economy, pollution, and the focus on Climate; The Conversation---makes this worthy of continued scrutiny.
Lou Marconi
Lou Marconi
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