Tag Archives: denmark

Greenland’s moment in the sun goes beyond Trump’s real estate interests

by CristinBKY Posted on August 16, 2019

Greenland is sooo hot right now. And we’re not just talking literally (though, yeah, that’s also true). In the last week, the gigantic Arctic island has been the focus of several news stories. Here’s a quick round-up of why Greenland is blowing up your Twitter feed:

#1: President Trump expressed interest in buying Greenland

Let’s start with the most bizarre story. According to a story from the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, President Donald Trump repeatedly asked his top aides “with varying degrees of seriousness” how he could buy Greenland. Like, literally buy it.

“It has to be an April Fool’s joke,” the island’s former prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen tweeted. “Totally out of season.”

FYI Greenland is currently a self-ruling part of Denmark, which controls the region’s foreign and security policy. Still, the president somehow thinks that buying 836,300 square miles of fjord-riddled tundra floating in the middle of the North Atlantic could be feasible since “Denmark was having financial trouble over its assistance to Greenland.”

In case you’re wondering, “Um, why would he do that?” it’s not necessarily because the president is eyeing the island as the next Trump Towers location. After all, 80 percent of Greenland is covered by an ice sheet, and the population is estimated at less than 60,000. But the island is considered to be rich in valuable minerals, which may be easier to access as its vast ice sheets melt.

Of course, there are some major issues with this plan. For one thing, Greenland is not looking for a buyer. In response to Trump’s alleged interest in purchasing the island, officials politely told the president, Thanks, but no thanks.

”We have a good cooperation with [the] USA, and we see it as an expression of greater interest in investing in our country and the possibilities we offer,” the government of Greenland said in a short statement. “Of course, Greenland is not for sale.”

#2: Greenland is melting

For decades, the Arctic has been galloping toward a more perturbed state butt they seem to have reached a fever pitch this summer. Greenland’s ice sheet just had its biggest daily melt event ever recorded. That resulting rise in sea level is, you know, bad news for all us coastal peeps.

The story received a lot of attention after sobering images of Greenland’s melting glaciers flooded the internet. According to the Associated Press, a team of NASA scientists is flying over Greenland to further understand why this is happening. Greenlanders, on the other hand, have a pretty good idea of what to blame (see next story).

#3: Greenlanders are convinced of climate change

Greenlanders are not snoozing on global warming. According to the first-ever national survey examining the human impact of the climate emergency, dubbed Greenlandic Perspectives on Climate Change, 92 percent of people in Greenland believe climate change is happening.

As for the 8 percent of respondents who didn’t answer in the affirmative? Only 1 percent actually said they didn’t believe in climate change, and around 6 percent said they didn’t know.

More than three-quarters of Greenlanders surveyed said they’ve felt the effects of climate change, with many expressing concerns about everything from its impact on sled dogs to food security.

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Greenland’s moment in the sun goes beyond Trump’s real estate interests

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More Americans Are Spending Life in Prison Than Ever Before

by DarbyWillason Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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One out of every nine prisoners in the United States is currently serving a life sentence—a record high—even as the overall prison population has fallen. That’s according to a depressing new report by the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group that’s been tracking life sentences since 2004. Almost 162,000 people are now serving life behind bars, up from 132,000 about a decade ago and 34,000 in 1984.

To put that in perspective, for every 100,000 people in America, 50 have been locked up for life. That’s roughly the total incarceration rate—including inmates whose sentences are just a few months—in Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. And it doesn’t even account for the tens of thousands of Americans handed sentences of 50 years or more, which are considered “de facto life sentences,” says Ashley Nellis, a senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project who co-authored the report.

What’s driving the uptick? It’s not a rise in violent crime or murder—both have dropped substantially since the mid-1990s. Nor is it an increase in the number of criminals behind bars: A majority of states saw declining overall prison populations from 2010 to 2015.

The Sentencing Project

The Sentencing Project

In part, the continuing rise in lifers is a legacy of three-strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing. It may also be related to the shift away from capital punishment. In some states that no longer allow executions, elected officials like governors and prosecutors have championed life-without-parole sentences—which account for the biggest increase in life sentences nationally—as a way to appear tougher on crime. “Going forward, we will have a system that allows us to put these people away for life, in living conditions none of us would want to experience,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, said in 2012 when his state abolished the death penalty. But these lengthy punishments probably aren’t keeping the public safer. “The impulse to engage in crime, including violent crime, is highly correlated with age,” the Sentencing Project notes. “Most criminal offending declines substantially beginning in the mid-20s and has tapered off substantially by one’s late 30s.”

The biggest losers of all this? Minorities. Of all the lifers and de facto lifers in the country, almost half are African American. What’s more, 12,000 of the total are locked up for crimes they committed as kids, though some are eligible for release thanks to recent court decisions. (In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that life-without-parole sentences are unconstitutional for juveniles who didn’t commit homicide. In 2012, the justices went further, saying that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for kids, including those who committed homicide, are also unconstitutional. Nineteen states and DC now ban any kind of life-without-parole sentence for juveniles.)

Finally, it’s important to remember that many of the prisoners serving these long sentences never actually hurt anyone: Two-thirds of lifers or de facto lifers in the federal system committed nonviolent crimes—and one-third of them are serving time for drug crimes. With Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department alongside his team of tough-on-crime advisers, there’s a good chance that won’t be changing anytime soon.

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More Americans Are Spending Life in Prison Than Ever Before

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Is Steve Jobs Responsible For the Decline of Shoplifting in Denmark?

by alejandrohayden Posted on February 22, 2017

Mother Jones

Here’s a loyal reader who knows how to punch my buttons:

Fine. What fresh hell do we have today?

“In Denmark, we are observing a trend toward a much more law-abiding youth,” said Rannva Moller Thomsen, an analyst with the Danish Crime Prevention Council. A recent long-term study funded by the council found that the share of 14-to-15-year olds who confessed to shoplifting at least one time dropped from 46 percent in 1989 to 17 percent in 2016.

….There are numerous possible explanations….But the most surprising explanation may be the simplest one: the Internet. “When young people spend time together in public spaces or meet privately and unwatched, the likelihood of them committing crimes increases,” said Moller Thomsen. “Many young people spend significantly more time online today than they did a few years ago. Overall, they are less social — but also less criminal.”

….In Britain, where youth crime levels have also sharply fallen, government and privately owned initiatives have been praised for creating organized activities that keep kids away from both the streets and from their computers and smartphones.

Right. In Denmark juvenile crime is declining because teens are all hunched over their smartphones instead of hanging around corner shops. In Britain, juvenile crime is down because of innovative programs that pull kids away from their smartphones. So let’s take a look at crime in Denmark. I will give myself a maximum of five minutes to research this. Starting…now.

I’m back. That took longer than I expected. I’m sure there’s better data out there, but here’s what I found after six minutes of googling. The numbers are from Table 8 in Nordic Criminal Statistics 1950–2010:1

I’ve overlaid the shoplifting statistics, and as you can see they pretty much follow the overall crime stats for Denmark. There’s a divergence between 2006-10, when overall crime increased, but the rest of the time both crime and juvenile shoplifting move pretty much in sync. I doubt very much that smartphones are responsible for the decline in murder and rape and fraud and so forth, so I doubt it’s responsible for the decline in juvenile shoplifting either.2

Besides, give me a break. Shoplifting declined by nearly half between 1989-2005, when smartphone penetration was about zero. This whole theory is ridiculous. I really wish everyone would knock it off with the outré just-so stories every time they run across some kind of crime statistic. Seriously, folks, what are the odds that smartphones have put the kibosh on shoplifting?

1Just because I love you all so much, I went ahead and filled in the 2011-16 crime figures from Danmarks Statistik.

2I think everybody knows what I do think is responsible, so I won’t mention it.

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Is Steve Jobs Responsible For the Decline of Shoplifting in Denmark?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 June 2016

by Damon40Dkvzh Posted on June 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hilbert and Hopper get along fine, but they don’t cuddle up together much anymore. Yesterday they did, however, when Hilbert decided to barge into the pod that Hopper had already staked out. Usually she gives up pretty quickly when this happens (you can almost feel Hopper mentally rolling her eyes and then heading off to some Hilbert-free spot), but this time she held her ground. Aren’t they adorable?

And speaking of adorable, yesterday I wrote a post wondering what the hell Donald Trump meant by this: “Every time you turn on one of those aircraft carriers it costs you probably a million bucks. I’d say, don’t turn it on. The captain would say, we want to show you how great these engines are working. No, I don’t want to hear it, just stop.”

Well, a reader from Denmark emails to suggest that this was—wait for it—a Reaganesque reimagining by Donald, who told this story years ago about his own yacht. As soon as he started talking about things that float on the water—i.e., aircraft carriers—his mind apparently drifted back to his own personal experience with things that float on the water—i.e., the ill-fated Trump Princess megayacht. And if my reader is right, a captain of the Trump Princess once wanted to show off his ship’s engines to the boss, who was horrified at the potential expense of firing them up.

This totally makes sense, since Trump is so self-involved that everything always relates back to himself in one way or another. And it also makes sense that he might not have wanted to fire up the engines in his yacht—especially since he was in the process of going bankrupt at the time—whereas it makes no sense at all to worry about “turning on” the engine of a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class supercarrier. So: can anyone verify this? Did Trump originally tell this story about his own yacht, and somehow drifted back in time when he was talking about aircraft carriers yesterday?

And now, since you’ve all been so patient about me sneaking a Trump story into a catblogging post, on to the cats.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 June 2016

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Greenland is melting way ahead of schedule

by AntwanLeslie874 Posted on April 13, 2016

Greenland is melting way ahead of schedule

By on 13 Apr 2016comments

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

To say the 2016 Greenland melt season is off to the races is an understatement.

Warm, wet conditions rapidly kicked off the melt season this weekend, more than a month-and-a-half ahead of schedule. It has easily set a record for earliest melt season onset, and marks the first time it’s begun in April.

Maps show the current melt area centered around southwest Greenland. The graph shows the current melt season in blue and the average in black.

Polar Portal

Little to no melt through winter is the norm as sub-zero temperatures keep Greenland’s massive ice sheet, well, on ice. Warm weather usually kicks off the melt season in late May or early June, but this year is a bit different.

Record warm temperatures coupled with heavy rain mostly sparked 12 percent of the ice sheet to go into meltdown mode (hat tip to Climate Home’s Megan Darby). Almost all the melt is currently centered around southwest Greenland.

According to Polar Portal, which monitors all things ice-related in the Arctic, melt season kicks off when 10 percent of the ice sheet experiences surface melt. The previous record for earliest start was May 5, 2010.

This April kickoff is so bizarrely early, scientists who study the ice sheet checked their analysis to make sure something wasn’t amiss before making the announcement.

“We had to check that our models were still working properly,” Peter Langen, a climate scientist at the Denmark Meteorological Institute (DMI), told the Polar Portal.

But alas, the models are definitely working and weather data and stories coming out of West Greenland have borne that out. According to DMI, temperatures at Kangerlussuaq, a small village in southwest Greenland, set an April record for that location when they reached 64.4 degrees F (17.8 degrees C) on Monday. That’s just a scant .4 degrees F (.2 degrees C) off the all-time Greenland high for April. Heavy rains have also inundated local communities.

The summit of the Greenland ice sheet has also been record warm. On Tuesday, it reached 20.3 degrees F (-6.5 degrees C) which while obviously below freezing, is still record mild for this time of year and is roughly 40 degrees F above normal. And the warmth isn’t over yet.

Temperatures could reach as high as 57 degrees F above normal this week. It’s distinctly possible more temperatures records could fall before the week is out.

Temperatures anomalies for Wednesday afternoon forecast by the Euro model. In Greenland, the temperature could reach as high as 57 degrees F above normal.

Weatherbell

And while normal temperatures are expected to return, the impacts of this warm stretch will remain with the ice sheet. Energy of all that melting ice is expected to wend its way a bit deeper into the ice pack, making it easier for continued melt later in the season.

The Greenland ice sheet represents one of the most massive stores of ice on the planet. If it were all to melt, it would raise oceans about 20 feet. Melting ice is also affecting ocean circulation and even the drift of the North Pole.

Climate change has been cutting into Greenland’s icy reserves, with warm air and water temperatures leading to the loss of millions of tons of ice each year. Dust and soot from forest fires in Canada and Siberia have also expedited the ice sheet’s melt.

But how this melt season progresses depends a lot on the weather. Last year, a cool spring kept Greenland mostly solid before a summer heat wave led to a rapid meltdown of the ice sheet. And in July 2012, a record-setting 95 percent of the ice sheet experienced surface melting due to high temperatures and soot from wildfires in Siberia.

It remains to be seen how the weather plays out in the coming months. But regardless of this year’s weather, it’s increasingly clear the planet’s ice is in for a rough ride. By 2100 the entire Greenland ice sheet could experience melting every year if temperatures continue to rise.

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Things Donald Trump Will Do In His Second Year

by LoisShillito Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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A non-exhaustive list:

Make tomatoes great again.
Rename Denali to Mt. Trump.
Forbid stupid homeowner association rules.
Fix Windows once and for all.
Eliminate ex-president Obama’s Secret Service detail.
Annex Cuba.
Build a permanent moon base as favor to Newt Gingrich. Also: lots of new zoos.
Send Atrios to a reeducation camp until his attitude improves.
Build a beautiful new Strategic Petroleum Reserve to handle all the oil he’s going to take from ISIS.
Nationalize Twitter.
Present Sarah Palin with a Kennedy Center Honor for the Performing Arts.
Invent really good artificial sugar and fat substitutes.
Declare war on Denmark, just to piss off Bernie Sanders.

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Things Donald Trump Will Do In His Second Year

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SantaCon Is the Devil. We Apparently Created It. We Are So Sorry.

by JaimieEnderby Posted on December 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Every day I wake up and check my iPhone and read hundreds of comments from Twitter eggs calling me a stupid libtard intern who hates America and only got his job (or is it an internship?) at pinko commie rag Mother Jones because of nepotism. As though my dad called up SAG and was like “I am an actor from the 70s. Get my son a job at a magazine …founded in the 70s?” It grows tiring, but I get it: It’s an act! It’s a show stupid people—or who my beloved Welsh call “simple”—engage in to demonstrate to their team or to God or to whoever that they are the type of person who doesn’t like our type of publication.

Team sports is what politics is all about. No one wants to admit it, but it’s a well studied field. No one cares about every issue. It would be a huge waste of time to do that. They care strongly about one or two issues, identify with the team that shares their position and then take on the rest of the team’s platform as a form of solidarity, albeit unconsciously,

(A great example of this is southern Democrats who loved infrastructure spending but hated black people and then became Republicans because Democrats were too nice to black people and suddenly they also hated infrastructure spending.)

Anyway, Mother Jones isn’t perfect. Far from it. A lot of our articles I disagree with. But Mother Jones doesn’t really have institutional opinions. The articles are the vetted and edited opinions of the bylined author. (For instance: Not everyone here loves Love Actually)

However, one of the things we here at Mother Jones totally deserve group collective criticism for is being inadvertently responsible for New York City’s worst event of the year: SantaCon.

Atlas Obscura explains:

The original inspiration for SantaCon actually came from a 1977 article in Mother Jones about a four-day event organized by Solvognen, a socio-politically charged anarchist theater group in Denmark. Solvognen, literally “Chariot of the Sun,” took their name from Norse mythology and the name of a highly prized national artifact that represents a horse pulling the sun across the sky.

I hate SantaCon. I hate their vomit. I hate their attitudes. I hate their irascibility. I hate their piss-soaked costumes. I hate their souls. I hate them on a profound level. If I were the type of person who believed in letting people drown, these are the type of people I would let drown. I wish they would just go back to whatever hell they came from (Long Island? Staten Island? Murray Hill?). Their very existence in New York makes me wish we had never fleeced this land from the Native Americans.

SantaCon is just an excuse for people with severe emotional problems to get together and act extra out of control because they’re in a mob. It’s like if The Ox-Bow Incident were set at Christmas and filled with vomit. Or if the Stanford Prison Experiment were set at Christmas and, well, filled with vomit.

I know what you’re going to say: “Oh, the fun police are here! Policing our fun!” I am not a member of the fun police. I am a member of the social contract, which dictates there are ways to act in public police. If you want to drink half a bottle of Jäger and piss yourself while shouting about some imaginary injustice you suffered playing Madden ’98 on Nintendo Dreamcast, go right ahead. But do it in your own home. Don’t do it in public. Being in public means being in public, and when you are in public dressed like Santa—drunk, covered in piss, shouting about some nonsense—you are ruining the experience of other people who happen to be in public. You are a selfish jerk.

What about Halloween or Saint Patrick’s Day, you say? Well, those days are awful too. They’re all just excuses for stupid people who lack the conviction to do what they want to do—be drunk and piss themselves—on a normal day. They need society to arbitrarily say it’s okay to be a stupid drunk with your stupid drunk friends this one day a year. If you were at least an honest asshole you’d let your sociopathic flag fly and be a stupid drunk with your stupid friends just because it’s a Tuesday! Or a Monday! Or Easter! On any given day you can win or you can lose, but if you do it because of an email blast saying other people are going to make it nominally socially acceptable, then you’re a coward. SantaCon is not legally binding. It’s not like The Purge but for bros to act out. You do you, bros. But just know that the fact that you’re doing your thing on the day when normal society has tried to cordon you off means you’re a sheep.

Society hates you.

I hate you, SantaCon. I hate you the way Eddie Murphy hated Alan Arkin when Arkin surprisingly won an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine and Murphy lost for Dreamgirls. I hate you the way I hate people with poor posture, which many of you stupid Santas have, by the way. The religious say, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” I hate you the way the religious hate the sin.

Why are you the way you are? We could lay you on the couch and play psychology—Daddy wasn’t around! Mommy loved your sister more! You come from a long line of alcoholics with no shame and are just playing the part!—but we don’t have to. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to watch in horror as you stumble around drunk, secreting fluids on yourself.

I hope you all make it home alive this Saturday and don’t stumble into the street and drown in your own vomit, but Darwin suggests many of you should probably in fact stumble into the street and drown in your own vomit. I’ve been to the Galapagos. It has a lot of things. It does not have SantaCon.

There’s a line in Richard II where he’s about to be tossed from the throne by Bolingbroke and he says, “Let’s make dust our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the world.” Saturday, thousands of drunken bros will make snow their paper and with bleeding kidneys write sorrow on the bosom of our streets.

So anyway, have a great Saturday! (Have a great life!) Stay safe. And for our part in the creation of SantaCon, we’re eternally sorry.

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SantaCon Is the Devil. We Apparently Created It. We Are So Sorry.

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Denmark wages war on food waste

by DouglasOshea Posted on September 2, 2015

Denmark wages war on food waste

By on 2 Sep 2015commentsShare

You know what’s better than a fresh danish? An old danish on its way to the trash.

According to NPR, the Danes are very into reducing food waste right now. So into it, in fact, that they’ve reduced their food waste by about 25 percent compared to five years ago. Today, the average Dane wastes about 104 pounds of food per year. We in the U.S., for comparison, waste 273 pounds per year on average (USA, USA, USA!).

Part of Denmark’s success comes from Selina Juul, a 35-year-old Russian transplant who decided that targeting consumers, rather than retailers and food processors, would be the easiest way to address the country’s waste problem. Here’s more from NPR:

In 2008, after years of dismay at the amount of food she saw landing in Danish trash cans, Juul started the organization Stop Wasting Food.

Farmers and retailers often get the brunt of the criticism when it comes to food waste, but Juul decided to start at the other end.

“I thought, ‘Who can we move? Well, we can move the people.’ So we started focusing on the people,” she says.

Juul created a Facebook group and two weeks later started appearing in the national media, where she has been a regular figure ever since.

It was an efficient strategy, given that individual consumers are responsible for 36 percent of food waste in this country, compared to retailers (23 percent), the food processors (19 percent) and primary producers (14 percent), according to figures from the Ministry of the Environment and Food.

Maia Lindstrøm Sejersen, a spokesperson for Denmark’s largest retailer, told NPR that it’s always been in retailers’ best interest to sell as much food as they could (even the ugly or old stuff), but doing so is easier now that citizens are so conscious of waste:

She says Dansk Supermarked’s chains have sold food near expiration at reduced prices for decades. But while buying these items might once have been considered a sign of poverty for consumers, it’s now a badge of pride. And the company has responded by piling reduced price goods in dedicated areas, marked with special signage.

But, she admits, the recent movement to prevent food waste has pushed grocery stores to improve further, particularly in one area.

“Fruits and vegetables have always been tricky because they have to look lovely and fresh,” she says. “Sometimes maybe we’ve been too quick to say ‘this needs to go.’ But now that people are so focused on food waste, we can, for example, take the outer, [wilted] leaves off a head of lettuce and sell it at a reduced price.”

Anyone who’s eaten what’s under those wilted leaves, cut out a spot of mold on an otherwise good piece of cheese, or snagged a day-old bagel from their local cafe’s trash pile knows that such “garbage” is actually not garbage at all. In fact, throw a slice of that cheese on an old bagel, top with some salvaged lettuce, and scrounge up a bruised tomato, and you’ve got yourself a meal!

Source:

Denmark Might Be Winning The Global Race To Prevent Food Waste

, NPR.

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Income Inequality Has Spurred a Boom in Private Security

by OdetteCordeaux Posted on April 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is a truly fascinating chart: countries with lots of income inequality—driven largely by the gains of the ultra-rich—also spend more and more of their money on security services. Gotta keep the hoi polloi at bay somehow, after all. However, the researchers who produced the chart also add some appropriately scholarly cautions:

Does the graph show that inequality causes a country to devote more of its labor force to guard labor? It is hard to be sure. It could be that people with a strong commitment to economic justice are, for some unknown reason, also more law-abiding, explaining the difference between Denmark and the United States. But the correlation evident in the graph could be evidence that economic disparities push nations to devote more of their productive capacity to guarding people and property. Fear and distrust of one’s neighbors and fellow citizens fuel the demand for guard labor. Economic disparities can contribute to both. Among the countries shown, a common measure of distrust of strangers is strongly correlated with both the guard-labor fraction and inequality.

Social spending, also, is strongly and inversely correlated with guard labor across the nations shown in the graph. There is a simple economic lesson here: A nation whose policies result in substantial inequalities may end up spending more on guns and getting less butter as a result.

Perhaps this is our dystopian, Piketty-esque future: a small class of ultra-wealthy rentiers; a breakdown of public safety because the rich employ their own private security forces and don’t feel like funding anything further; a retainer class of managerial drones; and then everyone else—sullen and resentful, but kept in line by the hard men in dark glasses toting automatic weapons and driving armored limos.

Actually, probably not. Eventually robots will provide better security services than fragile human beings, so the security forces will be out of jobs too. By then, however, even the ultra-wealthy won’t care if robots produce enough to make life lovely for everyone. Sure, they’ll still want their share of the still-scarce status goods—coastal property, penthouse apartments, original Rembrandts—but beyond that why should they care if everyone lives like kings? They won’t, and we probably will. As long as we don’t all kill ourselves first.

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Income Inequality Has Spurred a Boom in Private Security

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U.K. joins the club, vows to curb coal financing

by DarellHollway Posted on November 21, 2013

U.K. joins the club, vows to curb coal financing

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No longer will British taxpayers have to foot the bill for the climate-unfriendly practice of building coal power plants in developing countries.

Britain pledged Wednesday to end most financing support for coal power projects. The pledge came during U.N. climate talks in Warsaw, Poland. The U.S., Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the World Bank, and the European Investment Bank have already made similar promises, which are aimed at curbing carbon emissions. From Bloomberg:

“We will work to get support of more countries and the multilateral development banks,” U.K. Energy Secretary Edward Davey said in Warsaw, where delegates from about 190 countries met for United Nations climate talks. Funding for coal would be allowed under the “rare circumstances” when alternatives aren’t available and there’s a case for reducing poverty.

Reliance on coal moved into focus at the talks after a UN report indicated that humans already burned more than half the amount of fossil fuels that could lead to dangerous changes in the climate. Coal generated 30.3 percent of the world’s primary energy in 2011, the highest level since 1969, according to the World Coal Association. It slipped to 29.9 percent last year.

“Now the Japanese and Germans need to follow suit,” said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.


Source
Sierra Club commends UK coal financing ban, Sierra Club
U.K. Joins U.S. Pledge to Stop Funding Foreign Coal-Power Plants, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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