Monthly Archives: January 2010

United States: Boardman coal-burning power plant may have a future after all: biomass

By | Published: January 31, 2010
Oregonian: PGE is trying to decide whether to close its coal-fired power plant near Boardman, in Eastern Oregon, or convert it to burn biomass, which could be less of a problem environmentally.Portland General Electric has three options for its Boardman power plant: close it, stop burning coal there, or make costly upgrades to clean up [...]
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United Kingdom: Miliband warns against climate change cynicism

By | Published: January 31, 2010
Press Association: Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband issued a warning that recent controversies over scientific data must not be allowed to undermine efforts to tackle global warming. Mr Miliband said the evidence that man-made climate change was occurring was "overwhelming" and was backed by the vast majority of scientists. He spoke out amid [...]
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So much wasted green for climate-change talks

By | Published: January 31, 2010
San Francisco Chronicle: It was bad enough last month watching Washington politicians merrily flying off to the U.N. climate change Conference of Parties in Copenhagen (or COP-15 for short), ostensibly to draft a global-warming treaty, when all the players knew that no meaningful pact would result and the only sure outcome was that much energy [...]
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Illinois ‘clean coal’ plants await their fate

By | Published: January 31, 2010
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: After years of planning and politicking, two next-generation power plants planned for central Illinois face their respective days of reckoning. The projects — FutureGen and Taylorville Energy Center — aspire to be among the most advanced, cleanest coal-fueled power plants in the world, proving that the nation’s vast coal reserves can [...]
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Copenhagen climate deal gets low-key endorsement

By | Published: January 31, 2010
Reuters: Nations accounting for most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have restated their promises to fight climate change, meeting a Sunday deadline in a low-key endorsement of December’s "Copenhagen Accord." Experts say their promised curbs on greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 are too small so far to meet the accord’s key goal of [...]
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Recharging your cellphone, Mother Nature’s way

By | Published: January 31, 2010
window.document.getElementById(‘post-7932′).parentNode.className += ‘ adhesive_post’;New York Times: A NEW solar cell that imitates Mother Nature`s way of converting sunlight to energy is making its debut in a variety of consumer products. The technology uses a photosensitive dye to start its energy production, much the way leaves use chlorophyll to begin photosynthesis. The dye-sensitized cells [...]
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United States: In Portland, going green and growing vertical in a bid for energy savings

By | Published: January 31, 2010
New York Times: Urban gardening used to seem subversive. People planted tomatoes in public parks, strung their hops to rooftops to make homebrew and reclaimed empty lots as community farms, never mind the property owner. Yet here in one of the more thoroughly tilled cities in America, subversive has come full circle: the federal [...]
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United States: Sea-level rise slowly becomes issue in Outer Banks

By | Published: January 31, 2010
Virginian-Pilot: Coastal scientists are predicting that rising seas could drown much of the Outer Banks by the next century, but the issue is just starting to be recognized as a looming crisis in league with beach erosion. Despite the vulnerability of the barrier islands to potentially catastrophic rising seas, there is no clarion call [...]
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Leaks imperil nuclear industry

By | Published: January 31, 2010
window.document.getElementById(‘post-7932′).parentNode.className += ‘ adhesive_post’;Boston Globe: The nuclear industry, once an environmental pariah, is recasting itself as green as it attempts to extend the life of many power plants and build new ones. But a leak of radioactive water at Vermont Yankee, along with similar incidents at more than 20 other US nuclear plants in recent [...]
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Top companies leaders in pollution, too

By | Published: January 31, 2010
Sydney Morning Herald: GREENHOUSE gas emissions by Australia’s top 200 companies surged by more than 10 per cent year-on-year, prompting fresh calls for a price on carbon to combat growing emissions levels. As Federal Parliament resumes this week with the government to put its carbon pollution reduction scheme before the Senate again, the superannuation [...]
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Big emitters supporting Copenhagen Accord

By | Published: January 31, 2010
window.document.getElementById(‘post-7932′).parentNode.className += ‘ adhesive_post’;Reuters: Big greenhouse gas emitters have restated their promises to fight climate change, meeting a Sunday deadline in a low-key endorsement of December’s "Copenhagen Accord". Following are plans announced since the Copenhagen summit. Each country’s percentage of world emissions is given in brackets, based on U.S. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center [...]
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Ed Miliband declares war on climate change sceptics

By | Published: January 31, 2010
Daily Mail: Climate secretary Ed Miliband broke his silence on the ongoing row about man-made climate change by declaring war on the ’siren voices’ who denied global warming was real or man-made. Mr Miliband said the by the ‘climategate’ controversy that appeared to show that vital data was suppressed or manipulated by climate scientists, [...]
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The folly of forgetting global warming

By | Published: January 31, 2010
Times Colonist: I wonder if anyone else watching the U.S. president’s state of the union address on Wednesday evening noticed the hilarity during his brief reference to global warming. "I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change," Barack Obama intoned, and had to pause until the [...]
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India reiterates carbon goals for climate accord

By | Published: January 31, 2010
window.document.getElementById(‘post-7932′).parentNode.className += ‘ adhesive_post’;Reuters: India has reiterated a goal of slowing the rise of its carbon emissions by 2020 as part of pledges due by Sunday under a "Copenhagen Accord" to fight climate change, an official statement said. Many other nations have also reiterated existing goals for slowing global warming before a Sunday deadline [...]
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Emissions of Potent Greenhouse Gas Increase Despite Reduction Efforts

By | Published: January 31, 2010
window.document.getElementById(‘post-7932′).parentNode.className += ‘ adhesive_post’;ScienceDaily: Despite a decade of efforts worldwide to curb its release into the atmosphere, NOAA and university scientists have measured increased emissions of a greenhouse gas that is thousands of times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide and persists in the atmosphere for nearly 300 years. The substance HFC-23, [...]
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