(August 5, 2010) A new initiative is urging companies and investors to be more aware of the cost of negative impacts on the environment.

The impacts, known as 'externalities', are the impacts on society from factors such as emissions, pollutants or the using up of resources in the conduct of business.

A British consultancy Trucost has costed the negative environmental impacts of the world's top 3,000 listed firms at $US2.3 trillion a year.

Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Green Economy Initiative, has told Radio Australia's Connect Asia program one of the difficulties is in measuring 'natural capital'.

"If you think a lot that comes to you free from nature - in the form of clean air, fresh water or the fact that soil nutrients are provided by forests and other forms of vegetation, or the fact that pollination is provided by bees - all of this comes free," he said.

(The Economist August 3, 2010) U.S. cap-and-trade legislation was doomed to failure

No one expected a bang; but the idea of a cap on the United States' carbon emissions died with barely the bathos of a whimper.

Despite months of legislative fiddle piled on procedural faddle, no one ever drafted a bill with a carbon cap and the sort of trading system necessary for industry to meet its demands, that stood a chance on the Senate floor.

So the majority leader, Harry Reid, finally decided the whole issue should be quietly flushed away. With the midterm elections sure to swing heavily away from his Democrats, there is now no possibility of comprehensive climate-change legislation in the United States for years.

SP Research Network member Matthew Paterson (University of Ottawa), in conjunction with Peter Newell (University of East Anglia), recently published a new book, "Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy."

 On May 12, 2010, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) released details of the American Power Act, a comprehensive energy and climate change bill developed over the preceding nine months by the two senators, chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations and Homeland Security Committees respectively, along with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). With US unemployment just below 10 percent and the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig's ruptured well pouring thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico each day, the senators promised that if passed the bill will: (1) reduce US oil consumption and dependence on oil imports; (2) cut US carbon pollution 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and over 80 percent by 2050; and (3) create jobs and restore US global economic leadership. In this policy brief we evaluate the effectiveness of the American Power Act in achieving those goals.

(April 6, 2010) Remarks to the U.S. Energy Information Administration Conference - Lawrence H. Summers

A few months before I came into government, my twin daughters completed their course in AP U.S. history at their local high school and I reviewed for their test with them.  There were two aspects of that experience that stuck with me as I thought about my objectives in advising President Obama. 

The first is that while I, as a macroeconomist, thought of the 1982 recession as a big deal, thought of the inflation of the 1970s as a big deal, thought about the 1987 stock market crash as a big deal, none of them got mentioned in my daughters’ history course.

On the other hand, they spent six weeks on the events of the 1930s.