Monthly Archives: May 2011

We’ve argued before on this blog that taxing wealth is a defensible approach to raising revenue for vital climate change adaptation. It’s also a potential source of capital to finance investment in the low-carbon economy.

The city of Leipzig has been playing host to the International Transport Forum’s annual summit whose background paper this year focuses on the challenge of meeting the travel needs of a future world population of 9 billion.

This graphic showing the distribution across different income groups of vehicle use in the US caught the eye of a colleague to whom I sent the paper:

It tells two stories. Continue reading →

Okay, so it’s not all about how to ‘frame’ climate change to make it more acceptable; the substance of policy matters. For instance, the unfolding debacle in the UK concerning how it meets its carbon targets and whether a renewable energy target is helpful in this regard or a hindrance is not a matter of framing but of raw policy. The debate is however playing out in a political context that could quite easily lead to support for existing policy ebbing away. So as well as addressing the policy challenges, we need to pay close attention to how people are engaged in the debate; if there was a broad concensus on the issue then backsliding would not be an option and progress would be easier (to state the obvious). Continue reading →

A couple of weeks ago, we saw an interesting comment piece by David Roberts on Grist, over across the pond. The starting point for Roberts’ piece is a new report called Climate Shift, which claims to slay some sacred cows amongst US environmentalists (with views such as: the media’s actually pretty balanced, pro-Climate Bill forces spent as much money in campaigns as their opponents etc.). But what is interesting for us about it is that he broadens out the argument, to make a point that it is far easier to get attention for controversy than for a positive agenda. Continue reading →

Hidden away in one of Andrew’s recent posts was a link to an interesting DotEarth piece about how, after a few years of intense media attention, climate change has “reverted to its near perpetual position on the far back shelf of the public consciousness — if not back in the freezer.”

For old hands in US debates about the environment, this pattern should not come as a total surprise. I’ve just had my attention drawn (hat tip to Tim Bale at Sussex Uni) to what is apparently the classic work on the “issue-attention cycle”, by the doyen of US political scientists Anthony Downs (see lovely pic left).

Entitled “Up and down with ecology”, Downs’ 1972 article lays out a public interest cycle that many major issues go through in modern political life. As Downs puts it: Continue reading →