Clinton's debate assertion matches her version of events in Hard Choices, confirming, I suppose, that she provided the talking points to her ghostwriter and then took the trouble to memorize them. They are, unfortunately, pretty far shy of the truth. Courtesy of India’s First Post, an excerpt from Hard Choices: "President Obama and I were... Read More

[Update: On November 13, the spokesperson for the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs addressed the rather unavoidable implication that the bilateral US climate agreement with the PRC represented a break with the "BASIC" bloc--Brazil, South Africa, India, and China--which had formed to negotiate climate matters with the United States at Copenhagen. The answer was "Two... Read More

It was the stuff of fantasy, of repeated failed expeditions and dreams that wouldn’t die. I’m talking about the Northwest Passage, that fabled route through Arctic waters around North America. Now, it’s reality. The first “bulk carrier,” a Danish commercial freighter with a load of coal, just traveled from Vancouver, Canada, to Finland, cutting a... Read More

Scott McConnell has pointed out how Michael Bloomberg has cited the damage inflicted by tropical storm Sandy as a good reason to endorse President Barack Obama. But it seems odd that other Democrats nationally have avoided using Sandy as a club to beat the GOP, possibly because they consider it unseemly. The Republican Party platform... Read More

I have an article up at Asia Times, US, China Lead Merry Dance at Cancun. It makes the case that the invective and verbiage spewed at the climate conference in Cancun reflects a shared but largely unspoken belief that the chances of coordinated global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are basically zero. The key... Read More

I have an article up at Asia Times with the rather odd title "A Pig Preening Before a Mirror". It addresses China's well-publicized international PR problems relating to its effective exploitation of the "Clean Development Mechanism", a Kyoto Treaty process for funneling global warming mitigation investment to developing countries. A context for the flurry of... Read More

Read all about it in my article at Asia Focus. The Kyoto climate change treaty (actually the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change or UNFCCC) has a few flaws: 1. It assigns legally binding emissions caps only to 40 nations in the developed world. 2. No binding caps were assigned... Read More