Monthly Archives: June 2009
Chaos, arm-twisting gave Pelosi win
Politico: After lawmakers had devoured the last of the Kalua Pig at last Thursday night’s White House Luau, Nancy Pelosi summoned her team back to the Capitol — to ensure the climate change bill wasn’t the next thing roasted on the spit. Pelosi and her top lieutenants would spend the next four hours whipping, [...]
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Louisiana coast will be underwater by 2100
Business Green: Researchers have concluded that large parts of the Louisiana coastline will be underwater by the end of the century, due to a combination of rising sea levels and shifting sediment levels in the Mississippi delta caused by dam construction. The study, published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience, finds that the amount [...]
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Indonesia premier hopefuls accused on environment
Agence France-Presse: Presidential hopefuls vying for Indonesia’s top job next week are ignoring the environment, despite dire threats from global warming and deforestation, environmental group Greenpeace has said. None of the three candidates has made the environment a priority in their campaigns or offered any detailed policies on issues such as deforestation or carbon [...]
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Seagrass losses reveal global coastal crisis
Reuters: Mounting loss of seagrass in the world’s oceans, vital for the survival of endangered marine life, commercial fisheries and the fight against climate change, reveals a major crisis in coastal ecosystems, a report says. A global study of seagrass, which can absorb large amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide, found that 29 percent of [...]
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Obama Toughens Rules for Some Lighting
New York Times: President Obama announced tougher energy efficiency requirements for certain types of fluorescent and incandescent lighting on Monday, the latest step in the administration’s push to cut the country’s energy use. The new rule , scheduled to take effect in 2012, will cut the amount of electricity used by affected lamps by [...]
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EPA gives California emissions waiver
LA Times: The Environmental Protection Agency will announce today that it is granting California’s request to impose tough restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks — reversing the Bush administration’s position and opening the way for the state to take the lead on global-warming policy. California developed the standards in 2004 but [...]
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Droughts and floods threaten China’s economic growth, forecaster warns
Guardian: China faces an increase in weather disasters which will threaten crops and economic growth, the country’s most senior forecaster has warned. He Lifu, of the National Meteorological Centre, told the China Daily newspaper that events such as droughts, floods and storms had become more frequent and severe since the 1990s and the trend [...]
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Companies Seek To Turn CO2, Algae Into Fuel
redOrbit: Dow Chemicals announced on Monday plans to join Algenol Biofuels in a project to use algae and carbon dioxide to produce ethanol fuel. The location of the facility will Dow’s Freeport, Texas site. The collaborative project will use Algenol’s technology that uses carbon dioxide and saltwater, supplied to algae in photobioreactors, to [...]
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Canadian geothermal firm pumps up $100m IPO
Business Green: Canadian geothermal firm Magma Energy last week announced that it is set to raise around C$100m after pricing its Initial Public Offering (IPO) of pricing of 66,667,000 common shares at C$1.50 per common share. Initial indications are that the IPO, which is scheduled to close on July 7, is oversubscribed and the [...]
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A devastating critique of EPA science? More like cherry picking and astrology
Real Climate: Some parts of the blogosphere, headed up by Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded lobby group ("CO2: They call it pollution, we call it life!"), are all a-twitter over an apparently "suppressed" document that supposedly undermines the EPA Endangerment finding about human emissions of carbon dioxide and a basket of other greenhouse gases. Well [...]
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Canada: Oil sands to take hit from U.S. bill
Globe and Mail: Alberta’s oil sands producers and their U.S. refiners face sharply higher costs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under legislation approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and championed by U.S. President Barack Obama. The American Clean Energy and Security Act, if passed by the U.S. Senate, could also result in new [...]
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Canada: Ontario shelves costly nukes
Various: The province has abruptly pulled the plug on new nuclear reactors at Darlington, blaming a bid "many billions" too high from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. and putting pressure on Ottawa to bankroll any revived deal. Energy Minister George Smitherman zapped his own much-touted $20 billion scheme to expand Darlington as aging nuclear [...]
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Can we ‘milk’ oil from algae?
Toronto Star: Imagine a dairy cow so small that you cannot see it. Now imagine when you milk the cow you get oil, not that white stuff we drink. Now imagine there are trillions of these oil-secreting cows and they replicate every 24 hours or less. As strange as it might sound, a scientist [...]
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30 percent energy savings possible in buildings
China Post: Power consumed by Taiwan’s existing and new buildings could be reduced by 30 percent by implementing technologies currently available at very little cost, according to a new report released by the European Chamber of Commerce Taipei (ECCT). The special report titled "Energy Saving Measures for Taiwan’s Built Environment: Technologies and strategies to [...]
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United Kingdom: Have the climate change deniers abandoned us during the heatwave?