Let us all give a round of applauds to CABA’s Quinton Zondervan who has been writing up a storm these past few weeks! You can read all of his latest publications below!
“Firms, innovators poised for shift away from fossil fuels”
via Boston Globe
IN RESPONSE to “Averting conflict in favor of the common good” (Opinion, Dec. 15): As a business observer to the climate negotiations in Paris last week, I’m glad to second Jeffrey D. Sachs’s sentiments regarding the agreement. For more than 25 years, my entire adult life, I’ve been working as a climate activist, and now, for the first time ever, we have a global mandate for climate action. This is enormously good news.
When the US Congress will come to its senses on climate change is anybody’s guess, but the business community is ready to take action. Now that we know the world is definitively moving away from fossil fuel dependence, businesses, innovators, and investors will make a decisive shift in the right direction, and that can only benefit the world as we begin to fend off the enormous threat of climate change.
“Next Step After the Climate Accord: A Carbon Tax”
via New York Times
I could not agree more with Thomas L. Friedman that the Paris agreement is a major milestone, and that a price on carbon would be a very welcome and effective contribution we could make from the United States.
Through the American Sustainable Business Council we are working with businesses and business leaders across the country to bring about exactly this outcome. We are in strong support of a bill by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, that would establish a nationwide revenue-neutral carbon tax. We also support various state-level carbon pricing efforts, including in Massachusetts and New York.
With the business community on board, we stand a fighting chance to price carbon and establish a safer climate.
Eyewitness to climate change agreement returns euphoric it ‘gives us a chance’
via Cambridge Day
The 21st Conference of the Partiesconcluded this weekend in Paris, producing the first-ever global climate change agreement. Through the agreement, all 196 countries in the world have confirmed their intention to keep temperature rise “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” Residents of Cambridge, and the United States more broadly, may wonder what relevance such an agreement has to us, especially as it does not specify any measures that must be taken to reduce our contributions to climate change… Read the whole story here!
via Boston Herald
George F. Will gives us a nice little lesson on the glorious history of fossil fuels (“Paris climate pact no ‘turning point’ ,” Dec. 18). There is no denying that the creation of our modern civilization was powered by gas, oil and coal.
But while he looks backwards in time with clarity, Will fails to look forward. In fact, he makes a powerful argument against his own position. By spelling out civilization’s advance from human labor to animal labor to fossil fuels, he demonstrates that we humans have the capacity to evolve and adapt our technologies over time. If Will had written his column in the 1800s, perhaps he would have sung the praises of whale oil as the ideal way to light a lamp.
Regardless of where we’ve gotten our energy from in the past, we’re now moving away from fuel sources that thicken the blanket of carbon dioxide warming the earth. To continue burning fossil fuels would doom future generations to a hellish existence. We know that new, renewable energy sources are available and becoming cheaper every day. The Paris climate change pact is our mandate to build our future on that technology.
