Brookings Press Blog

"Primary Politics" author argues “Health care could help climate bill” on Politico.com

Conventional wisdom has it that the angry and protracted health care debate killed the chances of a climate change bill. Neither side has the energy or the will to come back to the table, according to this view. But Primary Politics author and U.S. Climate Task Force co-chair Elaine Kamarck takes a contrarian view. “While everyone was focused on health care, environmental and energy legislation advocates had time to rethink their policy,” she contends. Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Susan Collins (R-ME), John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are among those outlining new proposals. As a result, Kamarck concludes, “Chances have now increased substantially that, in spite of everything, a climate bill can be passed.”

- Read “Health care could help climate bill.”

- Learn more about Primary Politics.

Books on Climate Change

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference enters its second week in Copenhagen, negotiators from around the world are still at odds over a number of issues. Brookings Press has published a number of books in recent years that illuminate the issues at hand.

In Global Warming: Looking beyond Kyoto, some of the best-known and respected authorities in climate policy—including members of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—provide a comprehensive agenda for global collective action. Representing both industrialized and developing nations, the contributors present a thought-provoking examination of the economic, social, and political context of climate policy within their countries.

Although international attention has focused primarily on the industrial and energy sectors, the agriculture, forestry, and land use sector is a major driver of the climate change problem. Thus, it must also be an integral part of the solution. In Climate Change and Forests: Emerging Policy and Market Opportunities international experts explain the links between climate change and forests, highlighting the potential role of this sector within emerging climate policy frameworks and carbon markets.

Increasingly, climate change and development are two sides of the same coin. Climate Change and Global Poverty: A Billion Lives in the Balance? draws on expertise from the climate change and development communities to ask how the public and private sectors can help the world's poor manage the global climate crisis.

Climate change threatens not only the environment but global peace and security as well. Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change brings together experts on climate science, foreign policy, political science, oceanography, history, and national security to take measure of these risks. Its editor, Kurt Campbell, currently serves the Obama administration as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

And as policymakers strive toward a post-2012 climate change framework, the success of the trading system in building a relatively successful international institution might provide lessons for the climate change system. Climate Change, Trade, and Competitiveness: Is a Collision Inevitable? examines the relationship between climate change and trade and lays out the complex decisions facing policymakers.

- Learn more about Global Warming

- Learn more about Climate Change and Forests

- Learn more about Climate Change and Global Poverty

- Learn more about Climatic Cataclysm

- Learn more about Climate Change, Trade, and Competitiveness

Does the Earth Need Saving?

The climate change debate has branched out to the U.S. Senate

How many trees must fall to save the earth? According to Senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner: however many trees it takes to create a 492-paged bill on climate change. How long might it take to read said 492 paged bill? Well, on Wednesday June 4,the Senate found out. The AP article “Climate bill stalls in Senate after dispute” discusses how Senate clerks spent eight hours reading the bill aloud when “Republicans demanded a reading of the 492-page document because of a partisan dispute over judicial nominations. . . . The bill, the most ambitious legislation on global warming ever taken up in Congress, would cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 71 percent by mid-century from power plants, refineries, factories and transportation.” This controversial bill may or may not make it out of the Senate, but the fact that it was introduced points to a significant number of people who believe something must be done to safeguard our planet from its most dangerous inhabitants: humans. Does this bill constitute the best course of action? Its provisions continue to be heavily disputed, but to determine the proper solution we must all first agree that a problem exists. Kurt Campbell outlines a compelling argument for the security and foreign policy implications of climate change in his most recent publication Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change. Campbell and his contributors examine three scenarios as a basis for future planning and analyze the implications of each, ranging from disease proliferation, large-scale migration, and increased low-intensity conflict to the risk of nuclear war. The effects of climate change have been felt in communities throughout the world, and now the debate regarding this environmental issue has finally found an arena in the United States Senate. Nobel Laureate, and former Vice President, Al Gore believes Campbell’s book “is an important effort to translate the broad outlines of climate change into more specific visualizations of the social, political, and moral consequences. . . .” Climate change may prove to be the single greatest challenge confronting the United States and indeed, human civilization. Climatic Cataclysm helps explain why.

- Read the AP article “Climate bill stalls in Senate after dispute.”

- Is the world edging toward a climatic cataclysm? Explore the evidence Climatic Cataclysm.

Global Warming

New book looks for solutions beyond Kyoto

Climate change poses a multidimensional international challenge, one that eludes straightforward solutions. In Global Warming: Looking beyond Kyoto (Brookings and the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, 2008), some of the best-known and respected authorities in climate policy—including members of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—provide a comprehensive agenda for global collective action. Representing both industrialized and developing nations, the contributors present a thought-provoking examination of the economic, social, and political context of climate policy within their countries.

“With customary skill, Ernesto Zedillo has assembled a penetrating collection of international perspectives on what to do next about the most important challenge of our time—global warming and the resulting climate change. As nations look beyond the Kyoto Protocol to more serious action, this volume will be both timely and extremely helpful."
—James Gustave Speth, Yale University, author of Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment

- Learn more about Global Warming.

Of related interest:

- Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change (Available Spring 2008).

The Results Are In: Climate Change Tops the Charts

Our “issues election” at BookExpo America 2007 focused on the issues that most concern this year’s attendees

This year at BookExpo America, we polled the attendees about which issues were most important to them. In keeping with the idea of the forthcoming book Opportunity 08: Independent Ideas for America’s Next President, the poll focused the discussion on today’s pertinent issues rather than the presidential candidates and their views. Members of the Press whittled the 26 topics presented in Opportunity 08 down to 5: climate change, health care, homeland security, immigration, and Iraq.

Our booth at BEA had five canisters, each labeled with one of the five topics. Attendees were asked to place a marble in the canister for the issue that was of most importance to them; this type of voting eliminated the possibly partisan stance of the voter and solely measured the amount of interest in the topic itself. Climate change, the winner of our marble poll, received 31.55% percent of the votes, beating out Iraq by 3 percentage points. Health care came in third with 26.13% of the votes. Surprisingly (to us, at least), immigration received just 7.82% of the votes and homeland security garnered only 6.04%.

The goal of our issues election was to focus on the issues that matter to voters in this unusually wide-open presidential election. The results indicate substantial interest in more dialogue on climate change, the situation in Iraq, and the health care system.

Citizens are clearly saying they want to hear more from candidates about the issues and less about partisan politics. Opportunity 08 aims to help presidential candidates and the public focus on critical issues facing the nation, providing ideas, policy forums, and information on a broad range of domestic and foreign policy questions.

- Learn more about Opportunity 08, the book.

- Learn more about Opportunity 08, the project.

- Learn more about BookExpo America.