Tag Archives: minister

India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

by CandelaTonkin Posted on March 29, 2016

India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

By on 29 Mar 2016commentsShare

India has a grandiose vision for its 1.2 billion people to drive only electric vehicles by 2030. And that’s not even the most ambitious part — the government thinks it can do it without spending a dime.

“We are trying to make this program self-financing,” Power Minister Piyush Goyal said at a youth conference this week, according to The Times of India. “We don’t need one rupee of support from the government. We don’t need one rupee of investment from the people of India.”

Goyal noted that a small working group of politicians will meet in early April to hammer out the details of the goal, which could include a program to incentivize buying electric cars by making them zero-down investments. Later on, the money the car owners would have spent on gas could go to paying off the price of the vehicle, according to Goyal.

As far as number of cars owned per household, India ranks low on the list, with just 6 percent of households reporting they own a car. But that number is expected to grow exponentially as the economy expands.

It’s not the first time India has announced sweeping sustainability plans under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sometimes to mixed results. Last October, the world’s third biggest greenhouse gas polluter announced its new climate plan, promising to obtain 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (primarily solar) by 2030. But earlier this year, the World Trade Organization ruled that provisions of Modi’s solar plan shut out international companies, particularly the U.S., from India’s burgeoning solar market. Most recently, the country levied a 4 percent “green” tax on new passenger vehicle sales, part of an effort to fight air pollution and traffic congestion.

India has no time to waste to tackle its pollution problem as its capital, New Delhi, already has worse air quality than Beijing.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

See the article here:  

India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

Obama and Trudeau take a big step on methane

by latishamedlock7 Posted on March 10, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hold a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Obama and Trudeau take a big step on methane

By on 10 Mar 2016commentsShare

The remarkable thing about Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama standing in front of the White House on Thursday morning was that the two countries were finally on the same side in the fight against climate change. After years of rule under Stephen Harper’s oil-dominated conservative party, Canada is now primed for a comeback as a global climate leader since the Liberal Party took over last fall. Trudeau has embraced the opportunity, joining the U.S. in announcing a series of climate pledges.

The details of the plan are as significant as the symbolism: While both countries promised responsible stewardship of the Arctic, the most notable part is their pledge on methane emissions, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and a growing climate problem.

Canada and the U.S. pledged to cut the oil and gas sector’s methane emissions by up to 45 percent by 2025 from a 2012 baseline. Before this visit, the Environmental Protection Agency had already planned on a similar cut for new or modified gas operations, but it overlooked the biggest offender — existing infrastructure. There are hundreds of thousands of sources that are currently leaking methane, sometimes a small amount during the extraction, processing, and transport of natural gas, but other times a disastrous amount, like in the case of Aliso Canyon’s massive gas leak.

Advertisement – Article continues below

The EPA will now begin developing regulations for these sources and “move as expeditiously as possible to complete this process,” the White House noted in a fact sheet. Now, Canada is getting on board, putting “in place national regulations in collaboration with provinces/territories, Indigenous Peoples and stakeholders. Environment and Climate Change Canada intends to publish an initial phase of proposed regulations by early 2017.”

This is big. So big, in fact, that a similar 45 percent cut to global oil and gas methane emissions would be the equivalent of shutting down one-third of the world’s coal plants, according to Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate and Energy Program Vice President Mark Brownstein.

The U.S. and Canada are the Nos. 2 and 4 worst methane polluters (Russia is No. 1), accounting for 11 and 3.2 percent of global methane from oil and gas, respectively. Brownstein noted in an email reducing oil and gas methane emissions is “the single most immediate, impactful, and cost effective thing we can do to impact the rate of global warming right now.”

The oil lobby American Petroleum Institute is indignant, of course. API accused Obama of bending to the will of “environmental extremists.” Its point is that the industry already has an economic incentive to reduce methane — after all, it’s gas they could sell consumers that’s escaping into the air — and any regulation would be burdensome. Environmentalists point out that with gas prices so cheap regulatory action is an absolute must: The sector has too little incentive to shrink its methane footprint on its own.

Obama will certainly hear more from the oil and gas industry, including legal challenges, but he paid them little mind today.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.Climate on the Mind

A Grist Special Series

Get Grist in your inbox

Jump to original:

Obama and Trudeau take a big step on methane

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama and Trudeau take a big step on methane

Obama and Trudeau promise to lead the transition to a low-carbon global economy

by mklabs1234 Posted on March 10, 2016

Obama and Trudeau promise to lead the transition to a low-carbon global economy

By on 10 Mar 2016commentsShare

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The U.S. and Canada declared they would help lead the transition to a low-carbon global economy on Thursday, in a dramatic role reversal for two countries once derided as climate change villains.

The shared vision unveiled by Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau ahead of a meeting at the White House commits the two countries to a range of actions to shore up the historic climate agreement reached in Paris last December.

Advertisement – Article continues below

The two leaders committed to rally G20 countries behind the accord, promote North American carbon markets, cap emissions from hundreds of thousands of existing oil and gas wells, and protect indigenous communities in a region which is warming beyond the point of no return, according to a statement from the White House.

The initiative announced on Thursday brings the U.S. a big step closer to meeting its own Paris target by committing for the first time to cut emissions of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas responsible for about a quarter of warming — from existing oil and gas wells.

The biggest news however might be the final break with the policies of their predecessors who obstructed global efforts to fight climate change. In his seven years in the White House, Barack Obama has steadily transformed the U.S. into a climate leader on the international level.

“The two leaders regard the Paris agreement as a turning point in global efforts to combat climate change and anchor economic growth in clean development,” the White House said in a statement. “They resolve that the United States and Canada must and will play a leadership role internationally in the low-carbon global economy over the coming decades, including through science-based steps to protect the Arctic and its peoples.”

With Thursday’s announcement, Obama appeared to be passing the baton of climate leadership to Trudeau. Trudeau, just months into his prime ministership, has made clear he wants Canada to play a similar leadership role at home and on the global stage, White House officials told a conference call with reporters on Thursday.

“President Obama sees Prime Minister Trudeau as a really strong partner on these issues,” the officials said. “This is a very important moment along the way and we expect that cooperation to continue in the future.”

Under the initiative, the U.S. and Canada will work to ratify the Paris agreement as soon as possible, lending an important symbolic boost to prospects for bringing the Paris agreement into force as soon as possible after the April 22 signing ceremony. The agreement must be ratified by at least 55 countries representing 55 percent of global emissions.

Obama and Trudeau also said the leaders would move quickly to finalize their long-term emissions reductions strategies discussed at Paris, unveiling a plan by the end of 2016, and that they would lobby other major G20 industrialized countries to do the same.

An early opportunity for such lobbying comes later this year when Canada and the U.S. will bring in Mexico to the new North American partnership on climate.

The White House statement also suggested the two leaders would try to consolidate existing regional carbon markets, in line with other provisions in the Paris agreement for encouraging the transition to a clean energy economy.

Turning closer to home, the initiative also takes a big step to curbing a powerful climate pollutant in methane, whose emissions rose rapidly with the boom in oil and gas production across much of the U.S. and Canada.

The two countries committed to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by up to 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025 — in line with previous proposed rules from the Environmental Protection Agency and Canada’s major energy-producing province of Alberta.

On Thursday, the EPA raised the bar even further, pledging to draft rules to cut methane from existing oil and gas wells — which had been a key demand for campaign groups.

“We are going to have to tackle emissions from existing sources,” Gina McCarthy, the EPA administrator, told a conference call with reporters. “It has become clear that it is time for the EPA to regulate existing sources from the oil and gas sector.”

The commitment won widespread praise from environmental campaign groups who noted that tackling methane was one of the most effective ways of reducing U.S. and Canadian emissions overall.

The U.S. and Canada are both among the top five global emitters of methane.

“Acting fast to cut methane pollution from oil and gas operations is one of the single most important steps we can take to slow temperature rise and protect the climate,” Abigail Dillen, EarthJustice climate campaigner, said in a statement. “We applaud the president for redoubling his commitment to U.S. climate action.”

On the Arctic, the two countries said they would convene a high-level summit next August to try and keep pace with the record temperatures, sea-ice loss, permafrost thaws, and wildfires that are creating dangerous and irreversible impacts in the polar region — but also contributing to changing weather patterns and sea-level rise globally.

“There is a real need just to do more science about the speed with which the melting is occurring and what the modelling of the implications are for that,” said Angela Anderson, who directs the climate and energy program for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There is a lot of science to be done to really understand how what is happening in the Arctic is going to affect all of us.”

Environmentalists immediately demanded an end to Arctic drilling, and pressed Trudeau to declare a halt to pipeline projects from Alberta tar sands.

The U.S.-Canada partnership came as data from the U.S. science agency, NOAA, showed that atmospheric CO2 levels had jumped by the highest amount on record last year.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.Climate on the Mind

A Grist Special Series

Get Grist in your inbox

Originally posted here: 

Obama and Trudeau promise to lead the transition to a low-carbon global economy

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama and Trudeau promise to lead the transition to a low-carbon global economy

If ISIS Had a Bomb That Could Put the East Coast Underwater…

by IsobelAult4 Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story was originally published by the New Republic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On the first of my two flights this weekend, I sat next to a defense contractor from Kentucky. He was on his way to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a project that sounded at once too mundane and too secretive to ask him to explain. The forecast up there was calling for temperatures to dive past 20 degrees below zero. He told me he planned to go straight from his next plane to a heated bus to the project to his heated hotel. Then he asked me where I was going.

“Paris,” I told him.

He mulled this over. “Well, you be careful,” he finally offered, reassuringly.

I knew what he meant. It had been a little more than two weeks since 130 people were killed in simultaneous attacks on restaurants, a concert hall, and France’s national soccer stadium, followed by police raids against the jihadists said to be responsible. So, like my seatmate, when most Americans think of Paris right now, they think of ISIS cells and flag-waving solidarity.

But I wasn’t coming to Paris to cover terrorism. I was coming to cover something that all of us have heard a lot less about in recent weeks, but whose stakes are far more important: a last-ditch effort by the world’s leaders to stop the most dangerous effects of climate change.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, you haven’t read the science. Earth’s average temperature has risen about 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.53 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late nineteenth century. We’re already seeing heat waves, forests burning, intensified droughts and hurricanes, and glaciers melting away before our eyes. As we start nearing a 2-degree increase, what once sounded like dystopian science fiction starts becoming reality: rising seas wiping out whole nations and parts of major cities, mass food shortages, and feedback loops we don’t even understand yet spiraling out of control. Without major action, we’re on track for anywhere from a 4 to 6 degree increase by the end of this century.

What that action will look like—and exactly how much destruction the world is willing to accept—is what is supposed to be determined at this conference.

That the build-up to these negotiations to assure humanity’s continued survival on Earth were overshadowed in the US by the latest battle between jihadists and everyone else, the interminable presidential primary, Thanksgiving, the college football playoff draw, and on and on tells you a lot about how we got to this point. If ISIS had a bomb that could put much of the East Coast underwater, torch millions of acres of forest, and threaten the entire world’s food supply, I’d like to think that stopping them would be a national obsession that would eclipse everything else.

But ISIS is a foreign enemy that we can fight and probably defeat without most of us having to sacrifice anything; even the fight itself can make us feel good about ourselves. Climate change is a vague, horrifying threat that affects everything. (Don’t forget that Syria’s civil war, the conflagration that turned ISIS into an international force, was also fueled in part by a drought sparked by climate change.)

Moreover, it’s a threat in which we ourselves are the problem, which means that stopping it will require that we change how we live in more ways than most people are comfortable imagining. And everyone is implicated. The fact that nearly everyone at this conference burned tanks full of jet fuel to get here is not lost on the organizers—they offered everyone attending a carbon offset to pay into, even though carbon offsets have been repeatedly shown not to work.

Still, if the first day has been any indication, most of the world’s governments are taking the threat seriously, or at least feel the need to look like they are. Previous climate conferences have been known for slow starts; some journalists and officials told me they’d learned the hard way not to bother coming until toward the end. But this time, no fewer than 150 heads of state showed up for the morning’s opening session, including President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Obama has reportedly met with Putin. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas shook hands. (Putin apparently blew off Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.) John Kerry is floating around somewhere. While I was sitting off to one side, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Bill Gates walked by, each mostly unnoticed by people rushing between other meetings in the hall.

Despite all the heavyweights, and constant reminders in speeches and press coverage of the recent attacks, the security at this conference center next to a minor Paris airport does not feel all that overwhelming. Beyond the football fields’ worth of metal detectors and X-ray machines at the entrance, and a healthy complement of lightly armed security throughout the complex, it was easier to get here and move around than during similarly high-powered events at the UN’s New York headquarters, or to walk around landmarks on any given day in post-9/11 Washington. It will be telling in the coming days to see if the easy mingling helps with the negotiations.

There are plenty of people who think this conference will not be serious enough. UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres has been saying for months that she expects the Paris deal to fall far short of holding global temperature increases to 2 degrees. Thousands of demonstrators joined hands in Paris Sunday in defiance of a ban on rallies, to protest what one organizing group said would be “false solutions” in an agreement that would be “obsolete before it is signed.” Police fired tear gas to clear the Place de la République, and at least 280 people were arrested. One grassroots group emailed a press release at midday to call the as-yet-non-existent accord “a crime against vulnerable communities.”

And it’s true that the event has a everyone’s-chamber-of-commerce kind of atmosphere. The main hall feels more like Epcot than a political summit, with countries setting up pavilions to promote their climate initiatives. Mexico’s booth, done in faux-Aztec stonework, flashed pictures of waterfalls and rainforests alongside the same multicolored logo it uses on tourism posters. India’s featured an electronic waterfall that spat out designs such as climate-justice phrases and a human face that may or may not have been Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Indonesia, which is currently on fire thanks in large part to deforestation to produce palm oil, had a video screen proclaiming the environmental benefits of…palm oil.

But however mitigated the expectations, however low the attention, this is the climate conference we’ve got. The agreements that get made here over the next two weeks will likely do more than any others to decide what kind of planet we, and everyone born after us, gets to live on. I’ll be here for the duration, keeping an eye on things. À bientôt.

Read original article:  

If ISIS Had a Bomb That Could Put the East Coast Underwater…

Posted in alo, Anchor, eco-friendly, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If ISIS Had a Bomb That Could Put the East Coast Underwater…

French Government Nearing Decision About Whether to Ban Climate Protests

by Myrna Posted on November 17, 2015

We’ll know Wednesday or Thursday whether or not the big climate march in Paris will go ahead. A memorial for the victims killed in Friday’s attacks in Paris in front of the French Embassy in Berlin. Markus Schreiber/AP We learned yesterday that even after Friday’s terrorist attacks that killed 129 people in Paris, global warming activists are pushing to go ahead with large protests and civil disobedience in the French capital two weeks from now. On Tuesday morning, Paris time, representatives of a coalition of 130 environmental groups met with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to argue that the rallies should be allowed to take place alongside the upcoming UN climate summit—and to hear the government’s security concerns. The climate negotiations “cannot take place without the participation or without the mobilizations of civil society in France,” read a statement released yesterday by Coalition Climat 21, an umbrella group of activists. But even after the meeting this morning, there remains plenty of doubt about which events will be canceled and which will be permitted to take place. Paris remains under a state of emergency, and French President Francois Hollande has said parliament should extend that state of emergency for another three months. Jamie Henn, a spokesperson for the US-based environmental group 350.org, told me Tuesday morning that the French authorities are nearing a decision on the main climate march, which had been scheduled to take place in the streets of Paris on November 29, the evening before the summit opens. That permitting decision, he says, should come from the French government either Wednesday or Thursday. “The coalition is pushing hard for it to move forward if safety can be maintained,” Henn said. Organizers had expected to draw around 200,000 to the rally, according to Reuters. Coordinated climate rallies in cities around the world are expected to continue. “We’re still waiting for the French authorities to tell us if they think the march in Paris, and other mobilization moments around the climate talks, can be made safe and secure,” said Jean-François Julliard, Executive Director for Greenpeace in France, according to a statement. “Huge numbers are predicted for the Paris gathering. We at Greenpeace want it to happen.” But additional protests in Paris, such as plans to block roads and form human chains at the Place de la République, scheduled for December 12, “are still under negotiation,” Henn said. While security officials are still mulling the big November 29 March, activists say that French authorities have been pressuring them to cancel the more aggressive actions planned for the end of the summit. Those December 12 events were “always planned as civil disobedience and never had permission, so it’s not really a matter of the government banning it or not,” Henn said. “But the French authorities have made it clear they don’t want it to go forward.” Despite that, says Henn, “we’re committed to finding a way to make a strong call for climate justice at the end.” One thing we do know: The large exhibition pavilion set up by the UN at the site of the summit for environmental groups, observers, and the general public—called the Climate Generations space—will be maintained, “but maybe with new access rules,” Henn said. This post has been updated with more specific details about the December 12 protests. Excerpt from –  French Government Nearing Decision About Whether to Ban Climate Protests ; ; ;

Read the article: 

French Government Nearing Decision About Whether to Ban Climate Protests

Posted in alo, bamboo, Citadel, Create Space, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, global climate change, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on French Government Nearing Decision About Whether to Ban Climate Protests

Are India’s clean energy investments slowing the march of coal?

by KennethU81 Posted on October 19, 2015

Are India’s clean energy investments slowing the march of coal?

By on 19 Oct 2015commentsShare

Chinese investment in the Indian renewable energy sector has skyrocketed recently, and construction equipment manufacturer Sany Group is the latest to join the push. The company announced last week that it will direct $3 billion toward the development of at least two gigawatts of renewable energy capacity in India, largely in the states of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. That’s a lot of cash and a lot of capacity, and announcements like these check a solid handful of other sustainable development boxes: expansion of renewables, money flowing between developing countries, private sector partnerships — chalk it up to a win for the climate.

Right?

Stories of clean energy investment tend to be good news for environmentalists, but in this case, there’s the danger of missing the forest for the banyan trees. The key here is understanding the difference between climate action and pure economic development motives. India currently has upwards of 250 million people without electricity. It would take somewhere on the order of 225 terawatt hours annually to bring them online — making the projected 4.8 terawatt hours from Sany Group’s two gigawatts seem like relatively small potatoes. When it comes to energy policy, the main goal is shrinking that 250 million figure as quickly as possible. Which is exactly what coal power can do.

But wait! With substantial investment, couldn’t rural India leapfrog coal and satisfy climate aims and development goals at the same time? Presumably, the answer rests on the affordability of decentralized solar power. Over at Scientific American, though, Gayathri Vaidyanathan tells a different story:

The fallacy in this position, others argue, is that solar microgrids do not address climate change. The microgrids do not displace coal use because the target villages were never hooked to the central grid in the first place. In fact, in parts of India, microgrids have become a stopgap solution for the energy-poor while they wait for the central grid.

“I’d agree 100 percent this is primarily a development solution, not a climate solution,” said Justin Guay, climate program officer at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation who was previously with the Sierra Club.

That more renewable energy doesn’t necessarily imply fewer emissions is a central truth that’s easy to forget. After China and the United States, India is the third-highest carbon emitter globally, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed no intention of changing that.

In the run-up to the Paris climate negotiations, India submitted a pledge to develop 175 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2022. For reference, the entire world’s 2014 renewable capacity was 181 GW. And vis-à-vis the previous point, renewable energy capacity isn’t necessarily a marker of climate action. Over roughly the same time period, India is expected to build between 170 and 200 GW worth of coal power capacity. Sany Group’s investment is expected to prevent close to 4 million tons of carbon emissions annually, but India is expected to triple its emissions to 5.8 billion tons by 2030. Modi has previously said that he will not announce a peak emissions date for the country.

Of course, India’s per capita emissions are drastically lower than those of most developed and several developing countries. Morally (and financially) speaking, nobody really expects India to stop its coal-driven development unless someone else is picking up the tab. Sany Group’s announcement is a suggestion that China is trying to do exactly that, but China isn’t enough — and Sany Group is presumably investing in India’s renewable sector for economic, not environmental, reasons.

All told, it’ll take at least $2.5 trillion worth of investment for India to meet its energy goals, and these are goals that ultimately have very little to do with a decrease in the country’s carbon emissions. In India, coal is still king, and its reign is far from over.

Source:

Coal Trumps Solar in India

, Scientific American.

China’s Sany Group To Invest $3 Billion In Renewable Energy In India

, CleanTechnica.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get Grist in your inbox

Advertisement

Visit link: 

Are India’s clean energy investments slowing the march of coal?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LeapFrog, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, solar panels, solar power, Thermos, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Are India’s clean energy investments slowing the march of coal?

Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

by KamDennison87 Posted on August 11, 2015

Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

By on 11 Aug 2015commentsShare

To raucous applause of denialists everywhere, Australia submitted its climate pledge to the U.N. on Tuesday. The plan — immediately and nearly universally hailed as weak by climate hawks, climatologists, and most other reasonable people — is one of twenty-six voluntary greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges, covering more than fifty countries, filed in the run-up to the climate negotiations in Paris this December. While currently non-binding, these Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) are considered indicative of countries’ levels of ambition in responding to the global climate change dilemma.

Australia committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26–28 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. Compare this target to the European Union’s: 40 percent of 1990 levels — when global emissions were much lower — by 2030. While Australia’s pledge may look similar to that of the United States, which committed to a cut of 26–28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025, analysts at Australia’s Climate Institute project that the U.S.’s pledge will amount to a 41 percent reduction on 2005 levels by 2030. Canberra’s five years of wiggle room make for a significant break for fossil fuel companies.

Weak target aside, “even worse is the lack of policy instruments outlined to get us there,” argued Yannick Spencer, an Australian Master of Public Policy candidate at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, in an email to Grist. “In fact the policy instruments in place will get us nowhere near there, while being highly economically inefficient.”

The Australian INDC leans heavily on the government’s US$1.86 billion Emissions Reduction Fund, the country’s main climate strategy, even though analysts expect it to be “fully eroded” (read: out of money) by next year. The fund operates via a reverse auction, in which companies offer to undertake emissions-cutting projects and bid for taxpayer dollars to fund those projects. Not only is the fund running out of money, but its impact is dubious. The policy suite will allow Australia’s top 20 polluters to actually “increase their carbon emissions without penalties,” reported the Australian Financial Review.

Despite the backlash, the Australian government stuck to its coal-fired guns. “Australia is making a strong and credible contribution to the international effort to tackle climate change,” said Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a statement. “We are committed to tackling climate change without a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme that will hike up power bills for families, pensioners and businesses.”

Ignoring the fact that the INDC is neither strong nor credible, the position is at least a step up for Abbott, who previously called climate change “absolute crap.” (The PM also notably said, “I won’t be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated,” but we’ve only got time to cover one type of denialism today.)

Coal made up more than 60 percent of Australia’s energy mix in 2014. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private-sector coal company, quoted Abbott in a recent submission to the White House Council on Environmental Quality protesting the inclusion of greenhouse gases in National Environmental Policy Act analyses:

As Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently explained, … “Coal is good for humanity. Coal is good for prosperity. Coal is an essential part of our economic future here in Australia.”

The same can’t be said for the rest of the South Pacific. “If the rest of the world followed Australia’s lead, the Great Barrier Reef would disappear,” said Tony de Brum, foreign minister for the Marshall Islands, in a statement addressing Australia’s INDC. “So would my country, and the other vulnerable atoll nations on Australia’s doorstep.”

Source:
Australia Sets Emissions Goal, but Climate Scientists Say It Falls Short

, The New York Times.

Anger as Australia unveils ‘weak’ climate pledge

, RTCC.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

A Grist Special Series

Oceans 15

Get Grist in your inbox

Advertisement

Jump to original: 

Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

Posted in Anchor, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, global climate change, LAI, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Australia files joke of a climate pledge to the U.N.

Breaking: Malaysia Says Washed-Up Wreckage Is from MH370

by SonMdn121076 Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The biggest aviation mystery of our time is one step closer to being solved today, after the Malaysian Prime Minister confirmed that washed-up debris discovered on the remote French island Réunion last week is from Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

The barnacle-encrusted wing-part, called a “flaperon”, was being studied by French authorities for connections to the Boeing 777, which was carrying 239 people when it veered dramatically off-course and vanished on March 8, 2014, sparking an international hunt for the plane, thought to be at the bottom of the Indian Ocean off Australia.

The Guardian quotes Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak as saying: “Today, 513 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts has conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Réunion is indeed from MH370. We now have physical evidence that on 31 March last year, flight MH370 tragically ended in the south Indian ocean.”

Great mysteries remain, however, most notably how the wing part ended up drifting so many thousands of miles from the search area off Australia’s Western coastline.

Originally posted here – 

Breaking: Malaysia Says Washed-Up Wreckage Is from MH370

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Breaking: Malaysia Says Washed-Up Wreckage Is from MH370

Some big, important countries are promising to cut out fossil fuels by 2100

by LourdesManor Posted on June 8, 2015

Some big, important countries are promising to cut out fossil fuels by 2100

By on 8 Jun 2015commentsShare

The global economy must be completely fossil fuel–free by the end of the century. That point of climate consensus came out of a meeting today between the U.S., the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the European Union, which make up the G7.

In the interest of preventing the planet from warming by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the nations said in a joint statement, “we emphasize that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required with a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century.” To that end, the nations agreed to work toward cutting emissions by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel also announced that the G7 countries would raise $100 billion by 2020 to help poorer nations adapt to climate change. Those funds, she said, would come from public and private sources. Financing to help the developing world confront climate change has long been a point of contention in climate negotiations, and past efforts to get rich countries to pony up have been a bit rocky.

Environmental groups praised the G7 announcement, which they had worried would be derailed by dissent from Japan and Canada. “The decisions made by the G7 today indicated an acknowledgement that there needs to be a phase-out of climate-killing coal and oil by 2050 at the latest,” said Greenpeace’s head of international climate politics, Martin Kaiser. “Merkel and Obama succeeded in not allowing Canada and Japan to continue blocking progress towards tackling climate change.”

After the Fukushima disaster, Japan backed away from nuclear energy, and has drawn criticism for favoring coal over renewables. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration has leaned heavily on Alberta’s tar sands as a potential economic boon for the country, and has been notoriously unfriendly to climate campaigners who disagree.

In a statement, the Sierra Club called today “the first time that the leaders of the world have made clear with one voice that we must get off fossil fuels completely.”

Though this announcement doesn’t require these countries to actually do anything specific, green groups see it as an encouraging indicator of momentum as we approach December’s U.N. climate summit in Paris, where 200 countries will commit to specific plans for how to green their economies. If, six months before diplomats sit down with pens in hand, the leaders of the world’s major economies are making announcements that involve words like “decarbonisation” — well, greens see that as a good thing.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get Grist in your inbox

Link: 

Some big, important countries are promising to cut out fossil fuels by 2100

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Some big, important countries are promising to cut out fossil fuels by 2100

The Iranian Nuclear Deal: What the Experts Are Saying

by PreciouKKNV Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Shortly after the participants in the Iranian nuclear talks announced that a double-overtime framework had been crafted, I was on television with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who is something of a celebrity rabbi, a failed congressional candidate, and an arch-neoconservative hawk who has been howling about a potential deal with Iran for months. Not surprisingly, he was not pleased by the news of the day. He declared that under these parameters, Iran would give up nothing and would “maintain their entire nuclear apparatus.” Elsewhere, a more serious critic, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who last month had organized the letter to Iran’s leaders signed by 47 GOP senators opposed to a deal, groused that the framework was “only a list of dangerous US concessions that will put Iran on the path to nuclear weapons.”

These criticisms were rhetorical bombs, not statements of fact. Under the framework, Iran would give up two-thirds of its centrifuges used to enrich uranium and would reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (which is the raw material used to develop bomb-quality highly-enriched uranium) from 10,000 kilograms to 300 kilograms. These two developments alone—and the framework has many other provisions—would diminish Tehran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon. Its nuclear apparatus would be smaller, and under these guidelines, Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons, while certainly not impossible, would be much more difficult. Yet because politics dominates the debate over this deal—as it does so often with important policy matters—foes of the framework could hurl fact-free charges with impunity.

Continue Reading »

Source:

The Iranian Nuclear Deal: What the Experts Are Saying

Posted in alo, Anchor, Bunn, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Iranian Nuclear Deal: What the Experts Are Saying