Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Skinny people dieting to reduce human biomass


So concludes David Appell about Mexico's new climate change law (my paraphrase).  Kinda hard to find detailed info about the law - David has useful stuff, a little more at Nature, and then way too much to sort through at the official legal gazette in Spanish.

The 50% below 2000 levels by 2050 will attract attention, but short term is what counts most to me.  They want 30% below business as usual by 2020, which sounds impressive but vulnerable to weird accounting.

They set overall limits and allow emission trading, so this is cap-n-trade for those who don't like that kind of thing.  I think it can be done well or done poorly.  Hopefully the American and European experiments will help Mexico figure out a good system.

Mexico's drought may have spurred political support for the law.  Too bad we've seen less action here in the States, although climate weirding has seemed to pick up some popular notice.

Progress, a bit at a time.

UPDATE:  what I really wanted to find out is if the law has a counterpart to what's been in American proposals - a tariff on imports from foreign nations that don't control carbon emissions.  That would be interesting, and entirely appropriate.  I skimmed the long Spanish web page but ran out of steam before I could find out.