2009-03-19

Hooray for Holdren!

I saw this first on John Baez site. Its a good thing for the world as a whole that president Obama has appointed John Holden as scientific advisor and it will likely speed up the pace in US environmental initiatives and activities and thus push chances for global collective actions upwards.

Two years ago he held a video-taped one hour speech at the Belfer center on the state the planet and what activities can be done in terms mitigation, adaptation and suffering. The slides are also available  And also costs incurred for doing the neccessary actions to stabilize the the grenhouse gases at reasonable levels which are incurring costs in the range of 1 % of the worlds total global product (GWP), compared to the 2 % of GWP spent on defence today.

He also recommends that the developed countries must lead the way and take action immediately and take the up-front costs and compensate developing countries for eg minimizing deforestation. It is promising that the USA is acting with objective responsability and will certainly up the antes for a successful meeting in Copenhague at the end of the year.