Smog in Shenyang in northeast China’s Liaoning Province. (Hei Yubai/European Pressphoto Agency)

If you listen to climate scientists — and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should — it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

But is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades.

In what follows, I will offer a brief survey of the economics of climate change or, more precisely, the economics of lessening climate change. I’ll try to lay out the areas of broad agreement as well as those that remain in major dispute. First, though, a primer in the basic economics of environmental protection.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

By Randy Shore | Vancouver Sun | March 24, 2010

Mussels grown in experimental multi-species fish farms not only consume waste, they can provide an additional revenue stream to producers (Photograph by: handout, Vancouver Sun)

New designs for fish farms could keep them in the ocean and help restore damaged marine environments at the same time, says a biologist working on a five-year nationwide aquaculture project.

Marine biologists in New Brunswick and in B.C. are employing mussels, oysters, sea cucumbers, urchins and seaweed to dramatically increase the amount of food created by salmon farms, and they believe they can extract excess carbon and nitrogen pollution from the sea in the process.

Taking the aquaculture industry onto land could be a missed opportunity to do the Earth some good and help mitigate the impacts of global warming, according to Thierry Chopin, a marine biologist at the University of New Brunswick. Nitrogen from agricultural sources contributes to oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans, resulting in huge dead zones in which nothing can grow. Fixing and storing carbon is believed to be key to fighting global warming.

“We have to think of extractive species as having a cleansing function in the ecosystem,” Chopin explained.

Read on: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/fish+farming+could+help+environment/2722656/story.html