By Jan von der Goltz - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon yesterday appointed Christiana Figueres (currently a senior climate negotiator for Costa Rica), to replace Yvo de Boer at the helm of the UN’s climate secretariat (UNFCCC).
It is a hopeful sign that the UN has settled on a policy maker from Costa Rica, a country that has received accolades for its ambitious...
As Nancy Birdsall wrote in a recent blog posting, an IMF Staff Position Note issued on March 25 offers valuable ideas for leveraging IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs, an international reserve asset and the IMF unit of account) to begin raising the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to respond to the looming challenge of...
Last week, Saurabh Shome and I reported that India’s proposed massive investments in clean power will cost about $50 billion more than generating the same power with coal. As we note in our paper, Less Smoke, More Mirrors, India is considering such investments “despite the absence of any meaningful international pressure to cut emissions, no...
In the wake of the shambles at Copenhagen, we could do worse than contemplate Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The two characters converse endlessly and anxiously, while they wait for the mysterious Godot to arrive and secure their enlightenment. But Godot never shows up, even though he keeps sending word that...
Right – it’s an “agreement”… to punt down the field for some transient face-saving. Obama said he had to fly back to Washington early because of the weather (riiiight ….). These guys have signally failed us. The Americans failed on emissions reductions. The Chinese failed on transparency. Plenty of credit to...