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Obama makes climate pledge to world, Republicans snipe in background

by ReeweeCady Posted on March 31, 2015

Obama makes climate pledge to world, Republicans snipe in background

By on 31 Mar 2015commentsShare

The Obama administration today unveiled its proposal for how it intends to reduce climate-changing pollutants under a U.N. agreement. Its contents are not particularly bold or surprising, but at least it’s on time! The U.N. had asked countries for their proposals by today and the vast majority haven’t met the deadline.

The proposal reaffirms that, by 2025, the U.S. will cut greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels. That’s pretty much just what was expected — the same commitment the U.S. made in its bilateral deal with China last fall.

A number of green groups praised the Obama administration for staying on track and playing a leading role in putting together a U.N. climate deal, which is supposed to be finalized this December in Paris. In a statement, the Sierra Club’s Michael Brune lauded the administration “for following through on the ambitious commitment made last November with China by pledging clear, significant action to tackle the climate crisis.” Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute called the proposal a “serious and achievable commitment” that shows the U.S. is “ready to lead by example.”

But most groups’ enthusiasm was lukewarm, and some were underwhelmed. Greenpeace said that the plan “begins to treat the wound, but does not stop the bleeding. As the world’s second largest emitter, the US must strengthen its commitment to climate solutions before Paris to ensure an agreement that immediately spurs the necessary transition away from fossil fuels and towards 100 percent renewable energy.”

Though major players like the U.S., the E.U., and Russia did submit their plans for cutting emissions by the U.N.’s soft deadline of March 31, most of the world’s nations are dragging their feet. The U.N. hopes that by December 2015, 190 governments will have outlined their proposals to curb emissions, and will be ready to sign an agreement pledging to put their plans into action. China and India, the largest and third-largest climate polluters, may not unveil their commitments before this summer, though we likely already know what will be in China’s — the same commitments it made in its pact with the U.S. last year.

The U.S. actually meeting its commitments is, of course, dependent on the president’s climate initiatives surviving this Congress’s attempts to gut them, and, possibly, the efforts of future presidents who have different feelings about the need to tackle climate change. Already, Republicans are gearing up to attack the U.N. process. “Considering that two-thirds of the U.S. federal government hasn’t even signed off on the Clean Power Plan and 13 states have already pledged to fight it, our international partners should proceed with caution before entering into a binding, unattainable deal,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned in a statement.

It would be quite a feather in McConnell’s cap if his Senate derailed 190 countries’ attempt to avert a global catastrophe. If he’s beginning to think about his legacy, he might not have a bigger chance to shape the future than this.

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How dry is California? So dry that taps might actually stop running

by LatriceNUR Posted on March 18, 2015

How dry is California? So dry that taps might actually stop running

By on 18 Mar 2015commentsShare

Could California really run dry? “It often seems impossible to imagine, but tap water shortages are a distinct possibility if mitigation efforts aren’t embraced and droughts become more frequent and intense in the coming years,” meteorologist Steve Bowen of reinsurance firm Aon Benfield told USA Today.

California’s rainy season is drawing to a close — without the rain its residents had been waiting for. Though some climatologists hoped this year’s El Niño system would make a difference, the state remains horribly parched. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which normally melts through the summer providing nearly a third of the state’s water, is at its second lowest point on record. “It looks like we are on our way to the worst snowpack in history,” Michael Anderson, the state climatologist, told The New York Times, noting that things look “pretty grim.”

So as the state braces for a fourth year of drought, state regulators on Tuesday imposed new water restrictions, mostly aimed at reminding Californians of the degree of scarcity. For instance, as the AP reports: “Servers in bars, restaurants and cafeterias can’t bring out water with menus and silverware unless customers ask. … The rule is meant to raise conservation awareness more than save water.” The L.A. Times notes that regulators consider this latest round of actions “quite modest.” Some cities, like Los Angeles, already have local rules that are stricter than the new ones being issued by the state.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the changing climate is in part to blame for the ongoing drought. “The normal cyclical conditions in California are different now from what they used to be,” Noah Diffenbaugh, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, told The New York Times. As the years go on and climate change moves forward, severe drought — even multi-decade “megadroughts” — could become the new norm.

No one knows what that might mean for the state’s 38 million residents — and its farmers, who lost $2.2 billion in 2014 alone because of the drought. State and local authorities are already going to extraordinary lengths to get water to residents. Cities and farmers are drilling deep into the ground to tap 20,000-year-old water reserves, dating from the last ice age. That prehistoric water is definitely a limited resource. Santa Barbara is considering using a desalination plant that was built in the 1990s to turn seawater into drinking water, even though the process is so expensive that the plant has never been used. The city’s mayor calls a “last resort.” As the drought continues and extraordinary weather becomes increasingly ordinary, Californians will have to come up with new answers to keep the taps flowing.

Meanwhile, state regulators warn that if local governments don’t step up with their own restrictions, new, stricter state regulations will follow those announced this week.

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How dry is California? So dry that taps might actually stop running

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Mounties claim anti-oil activists are a threat to Canada

by EstelaWJWvzqh Posted on February 18, 2015

Mounties claim anti-oil activists are a threat to Canada

By on 18 Feb 2015commentsShare

If you consider yourself part of the “anti-petroleum movement,” you’ve joined ranks with violent individuals who pose a threat to Canadian security, and who warrant close scrutiny from the intelligence wing of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

That’s the main thrust of a “protected/Canadian eyes only” document from January 2014. It was obtained by the French-language Canadian newspaper La Presse. Shawn McCarthy reports, in English, for the Canadian Globe and Mail:

In highly charged language that reflects the government’s hostility toward environmental activists, an RCMP intelligence assessment warns that foreign-funded groups are bent on blocking oil sands expansion and pipeline construction, and that the extremists in the movement are willing to resort to violence.

“There is a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,” concludes the report which … was obtained by Greenpeace.

“If violent environmental extremists engage in unlawful activity, it jeopardizes the health and safety of its participants, the general public and the natural environment.”

While painting environmental activists as a violent threat — referring specifically to Greenpeace, Tides Canada, and Sierra Club Canada — the report also casts doubt on their motivations. More from The Globe and Mail:

The report extolls the value of the oil and gas sector to the Canadian economy, and adds that many environmentalists “claim” that climate change is the most serious global environmental threat, and “claim” it is a direct consequence of human activity and is “reportedly” linked to the use of fossil fuels.

Never mind that the vast majority of scientists make the same wacky claims.

The report also suggests that the anti-petroleum crowd is doing the bidding of foreign funders, a claim also made recently by Canadian politicians. (Governments in countries with murkier records on freedom of speech than Canada sometimes use similar logic to stymie their own domestic environmental activists. See: Russia, India.)

Activists in the U.S. are under increased scrutiny too. As Grist’s Heather Smith wrote last week, the FBI has been contacting American anti–tar sands activists at home, at work, and at their parents’ houses. Many of the activists had blocked roads in the U.S. while trying to prevent the movement of oil-extraction equipment headed for the Canadian tar sands. Larry Hildes, a lawyer representing a number of these activists, told Smith that it was unclear what the agency was up to.

Conservatives in the Canadian parliament have, meanwhile, been pushing a bill that would expand the country’s intelligence agency’s ability to investigate “activity that undermines the security of Canada,” potentially through “interference with critical infrastructure.” Though the bill is ostensibly aimed at targeting Islamic fundamentalists, it could also allow the government to keep closer tabs on environmental groups. And now this leaked document may be an indication of an intelligence community that is gearing up to get more aggressive.

“What is genuinely alarming about the RCMP document is that, when combined with the proposed terrorism bill, it lays the groundwork for all kinds of state-sanctioned surveillance and ‘dirty tricks,’” Keith Stewart, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace, wrote in a blog post. Considering that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a climate denier known for muzzling scientists in his own government, we wouldn’t put any dirty tricks past him.

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There’s a Big Coal Giveaway in the Cromnibus Bill

by HalinaT79pr Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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

This story originally was originally published by The Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The 1,000-page omnibus spending package released Tuesday night is reigniting a fight over rules for U.S. financing of coal plants abroad.

In October 2013, the Treasury Department announced that it would stop providing funding for conventional coal plants abroad, except in “very rare” cases. And in December 2013, the Export-Import Bank announced a new policy that would restrict financing for most new coal-fired power plants abroad. The bank, often called Ex-Im, exists to provide financial support to projects that spur the export of U.S. products and services. The change in coal policy aligned with President Barack Obama’s June 2013 call to end US funding of fossil fuel energy projects abroad unless the products include carbon capture technology.

But the language in the omnibus blocks both Ex-Im and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the US’s development finance institution, from using any funds in the bill to enforce these new restrictions on coal projects.

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), chair of the House Committee on Appropriations, touted this prohibition in his statement on the spending package. He said the measure would help “to increase exports of US goods and services.” Rogers told The Hill that coal exports “are just about the only bright light in the coal business these days.”

Environmental groups have fought for years to get the government’s financial institutions to stop funding fossil fuel projects abroad, including a number of coal-fired power plants, mines, pipelines and natural gas export terminals. Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica said in a statement that including this rider in the omnibus “undercuts one of the most important contributions President Obama has made to climate policy internationally.”

“This continued desperate attempt by Republicans to prop up the moribund coal industry is a fools errand,” Justin Guay, associate director of the international climate program at the Sierra Club, told The Huffington Post. “The coal industry is a dead man walking; it’s time to align our economy with an industry that actually has a future.”

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There’s a Big Coal Giveaway in the Cromnibus Bill

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Methane is leaking out all over the damn place, thanks to the oil and gas industry

by BrandyBergeron Posted on December 10, 2014

Methane is leaking out all over the damn place, thanks to the oil and gas industry

By on 10 Dec 2014commentsShare

Methane, the second most common greenhouse gas emitted by the U.S., is a scary, scary thing. Thanks to two new studies, we just found out a bit more about how, through drilling for oil and gas, it leaks into the air.

Compared with CO2, methane is frighteningly potent — it’s 86 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2 over a 20-year time period. Even though the EPA estimates that methane is only 9 percent of the greenhouse gas cocktail the U.S. is tossing into the sky, the Environmental Defense Fund estimates that methane is responsible for around 25 percent of the human-made global warming we’re experiencing. The biggest source of methane emissions? The oil and gas industry, of course.

The first new study, put out by Princeton University and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that millions of unused oil and gas wells across America could be leaking significant amounts of unreported methane. Researchers measured methane leaks from 19 abandoned wells in northwestern Pennsylvania. From a Princeton announcement:

Only one of the wells was on the state’s list of abandoned wells. Some of the wells, which can look like a pipe emerging from the ground, are located in forests and others in people’s yards. [Researcher Mary] Kang said the lack of documentation made it hard to tell when the wells were originally drilled or whether any attempt had been made to plug them.

All of the 19 wells that the researchers looked at were leaking methane. All of them! But three of them were spitting out methane at thousands of times the levels that the others were. From an earlier study conducted by Stanford University, we know that there are around 3 million abandoned wells like the ones Princeton studied scattered across the U.S. That means abandoned wells like these that are just sitting out in the woods, not doing anything for anybody, could be making a notable contribution to climate change. Pennsylvania makes an attempt to plug those wells, but the Department of Environmental Protection, which is tasked with that work, is, predictably, understaffed.

The second study, by the University of Texas at Austin with funding from both the EDF and natural gas companies, found that among those wells that are operating, only a few are responsible for the vast majority of emissions. Around 20 percent of sites researchers looked at were emitting far more than the rest. “To put this in perspective, over the past several decades, 10 percent of the cars on the road have been responsible for the majority of automotive exhaust pollution,” said David Allen, chemical engineering professor at the Cockrell School and principal investigator for the study, which was published in Environmental Science & Technology. With natural gas wells, he said, it appears to be the same situation.

To sum up: Emissions from oil and gas wells — both those that are currently operating and those that have been abandoned — are a major issue that has been going largely unnoticed.

Unfortunately, America doesn’t have a system set up to monitor the wells and determine which are the major emitters. And, even if we did, there’s no standard policy on what to do with methane-leaking wells when we find them. The White House announced back in March that it intended to fill this policy gap with some regulations by the fall of 2014. But the regulations aren’t out yet, and environmental groups are becoming frustrated.

“The last we heard was the same. EPA is expected to decide on whether to issue methane standards this fall,” said Kate Kiely, a spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which, along with Clean Air Task Force and the Sierra Club, issued a report showing how the EPA could cut methane leaks from oil and gas drilling in half. But winter’s drawing closer by the day. “The clock for that timeline is ticking, and we’re hopeful they’ll stick to it and release strong standards for reducing this waste.”

Source:
Abandoned Wells Leak Powerful Greenhouse Gas

, ClimateWire via Scientific American.

Methane still belches from USA’s old oil and gas wells

, USA Today.

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Methane is leaking out all over the damn place, thanks to the oil and gas industry

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32 Countries Where Global Warming Could Make Violence Worse

by JoyBarnhill Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Recently, the Pentagon released a disturbing report. Climate change, it warned, will exacerbate problems like terrorism and disease outbreaks, drain military resources, and create new enemies. The report said that the military’s basic operations—everything from training to its supply chains and infrastructure—are now threatened by rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns. It all points to one conclusion: Global warming is a national security issue.

Now a new analysis, released Wednesday, is naming 32 countries in which conflict and civil unrest could be worsened by the changing climate. The findings are part of the seventh annual “Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas” from Maplecroft—a firm that studies how vulnerable countries are to various risks. It concludes that climate change is already impacting “food production, poverty, migration and social stability—factors that significantly increase the risk of conflicts and instability in fragile and emerging states.”

Those pressures could also “lead to disenfranchisement and drive support for radical groups.”

Maplecroft

Maplecroft analyzed how exposed populations in these are countries are to climate impacts and assessed how well their governments will be able to adapt over the next 30 years. According to the report, the five countries most vulnerable to climate-related conflict and food insecurity are Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Chad.

The 10 countries that Maplecroft found were most vulnerable to food insecurity and climate change. Maplecroft

The report’s authors highlight Nigeria (tied for third the list), where “widespread drought and food insecurity helped create the socio-economic conditions that led to the emergence of Boko Haram and the violent insurgency in the North East of the country.”

Boko Haram is a militant Islamist group that the US Justice Department says has been responsible for 600 attacks on government, churches, mosques and schools. It has killed about 5,000 people since 2009 and displaced over 650,000. The group kidnapped more than 200 girls and young women in April. (The Nigerian government says it has reached a ceasefire with the militants that would include the release of the girls, but according to the BBC the talks are still ongoing.)

After visiting Nigeria earlier this year, my Mother Jones colleague Erika Eichelberger found that drought, population explosion, environmental degradation, and poverty are all aggravating the country’s armed conflicts. There are now more clashes between farmers and nomadic herders over ever-dwindling agricultural land, and economic hardships in the country are boosting Boko Haram’s recruitment efforts. Eichelberger quoted Oluwakemi Okenyodo, the executive director of CLEEN Foundation, a Nigerian security-focused nonprofit, as saying that when “young people are pushed to the wall,” there’s a greater chance that they will be sucked into the growing Boko Haram insurgency. Eichelberger reported that “there’s not enough hard evidence yet to implicate human-caused climate change in the bulk of the ecological disaster” in Nigeria—but that could change in the future as rising temperatures increasingly threaten agriculture in the region.

In a 2011 report, the United States Institute of Peace outlined a “basic causal mechanism” linking global warming to future conflict in Nigeria: Water and agricultural land shortages are followed by sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Governmental inaction on these issues in turn opens the door to conflict. “In the increasingly parched, violent northeast,” writes the report’s lead author Aaron Sayn, “members of groups like Boko Haram explain their acts by voicing disgust with government.”

Lake Chad supports vast swathes of Nigerian farming and grazing land, but it has lost more than 90 percent of its original size. Jacques Descloitres/NASA GSFC

Maplecroft’s rankings lend even more weight to the growing body of research tying climate change to the potential for more violence. Prior to the unrest that eventually exploded into revolution and armed conflict, Syria had experienced an unprecedented drought that led to the internal displacement of thousands of people who had lost their livelihoods.

Natural resources were also at the heart of the Darfur crisis. “It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon wrote in a 2007 Washington Post op-ed. “Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.”

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32 Countries Where Global Warming Could Make Violence Worse

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Why the World Health Organization Doesn’t Have Enough Funds to Fight Ebola

by MiriamPTCZ Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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With the Ebola virus continuing its spread throughout West Africa—and landing this week in a fifth country, Senegal—the custodians of global health are becoming more adamant that the world is not doing enough to stop the deadly pathogen. That is, the rich nations of the world are not providing sufficient resources for the fight against Ebola. World Health Organization leaders came to Washington last week to ask for $600 million to build and administer new treatment centers in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone—the three countries with the most infections—and provide safe burials for victims in those countries. This is essential, given that the killer virus spreads via bodily fluids, and many people have contracted the disease through contact with the bodies of dead Ebola victims.

Due to budget constraints, the WHO had only a limited presence in West Africa at the time of the outbreak and it failed to detect and contain the virus before it got out of control. These poor countries had to deal with the crisis on their own during the epidemic’s earliest stages. The WHO’s earlier budget cuts also caused the organization to lose some of the senior staff most qualified to lead a response.

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Why the World Health Organization Doesn’t Have Enough Funds to Fight Ebola

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Environmental free-trade deal could help tar-sands producers

by FSDFreeman Posted on July 8, 2014

Wanna see a magic trick?

Environmental free-trade deal could help tar-sands producers

By

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Negotiations began Tuesday at the World Trade Organization on a free-trade agreement that would free “environmental goods” from the shackles of tariffs and other protectionist measures. Such measures have been put in place around the world to protect domestic manufacturing industries and jobs from cheaper imports. They can increase the price of the products compared with, say, if they were all made in Vietnamese sweatshops.

The WTO talks in Geneva are a big deal — they involve the United States, China, the European Union, and 11 other countries. They could affect $1 trillion worth of trade every year.

So why aren’t environmentalists shouting, “Hallelujah?”

Because it’s a ruse.

“These negotiations are less about protecting the environment than they are about expanding free trade,” Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program, told Grist. “Of course we support the increased use of, and trade in, environmentally beneficial products. But we have really serious concerns about the approach that the World Trade Organization is taking.”

The definition of “environmental goods” is being touted by much of the media as including wind turbine components and catalytic converters for controlling air pollution. But the list of goods that could be covered by the agreement, which was initially developed by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, is far longer, and more sinister, than that. It includes products that have precious little to do with the environment — and some that can actually be used by industries that harm the environment.

Examples from the list include waste incinerators, which burn trash to produce electricity — and, in doing so, can pollute air and water with poisonous byproducts. The list also includes steam generators, which are used by coal and nuclear power plants. And it includes centrifuges, which are not only used for water purification but also by tar-sands oil producers.

Even if the list of products were whittled back to include only those that can truly benefit the environment, there are serious questions over whether such an agreement would be a good thing. Consider that American environmentalists, including 350.org, the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace USA, and the Sierra Club, have been defending India’s protectionist solar rules, calling on the U.S. to drop its WTO complaint against them. The U.S. Trade Representative is irked that India is requiring many of the solar panels used for its ambitious clean-energy expansion plans to be produced domestically. Those rules are useful, however, in spurring the growth of a local and sustainable green-collar economy in an impoverished nation.

And, then, there’s the questionable role of the WTO in guiding the talks.

“We have concerns about putting this approach of liberalizing environmental goods under the thumb of the World Trade Organization, which is an institution that does not have a good track record on the environment,” Solomon said.

She would prefer to see such talks overseen by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is guiding climate negotiations that could culminate next year in a new international climate treaty. Or, she said, any number of other international groups or mechanisms — virtually anything but the WTO.


Source
Trade Talks on $1 Trillion in Environmental Goods, Associated Press

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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Enviros bash industry-backed “green” building program

by PearleneN53 Posted on May 14, 2014

LEED it ain’t

Enviros bash industry-backed “green” building program

By

Wonderlane

Not every building that looks green actually is.

Corporations that stand to lose the most from a widespread shift toward genuine green building practices are doing what they can to preserve the status quo. For years they’ve been smearing LEED, or Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, the nation’s preeminent green building certification program. They have lobbied lawmakers to ban the use of LEED certifications for government buildings — and they have succeeded in some states, such as in Maine. And they’ve cooked up their own green-building certification program: Green Globes.

The Sierra Club and Greenpeace are now counterattacking. They’ve launched a new initiative, Greenwash Action, to expose the forces behind Green Globes. From a Greenwash Action report:

Green Globes is a creature of the chemical, plastics and conventional timber industries. It is being peddled as a cheaper and easier alternative to the better-known LEED green building rating system, and claims to deliver the same environmental results. But if you really want to understand Green Globes, you need to know who’s behind it.

Green Globes is administered by an organization called the Green Building Initiative (GBI). Not only have the chemical, plastics and timber industries stacked GBI’s board of directors, their relative handful of “members and supporters” are mostly entities from the same industries that pay-to-play as much as $50,000 a year. These include trade associations and lobbying groups like the American Forest & Paper Association, The Vinyl Institute, the American Chemistry Council, and the Society of the Plastics Industry that are themselves funded by the huge and powerful corporations whose interests underlie Green Globes and drive its agenda.

Lloyd Alter of Treehugger, who has been tracking the attacks on LEED for years, says the environmentalists’ efforts to defend LEED “will be an uphill struggle.”

“I wish Greenwash Action had a larger backing than just Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, who will be immediately labelled as lefty treehuggers,” he writes. “But somebody has to do this.”


Source
A closer look at Green Globes, Greenwash Action
Greenwash Action fights back against the attacks on LEED green building certification, Treehugger

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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Enviros urge U.S. to stop meddling in Indian solar affairs

by HannaDabney Posted on April 25, 2014

Enviros urge U.S. to stop meddling in Indian solar affairs

By

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A U.S. push to smash open India’s fast-growing solar market could end up hurting the climate.

That was the message from 15 U.S. environmental groups in a letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, just days before his office plans to move forward with a World Trade Organization complaint against India’s solar rules.

As we’ve told you before, India is going gangbusters for solar – a commendable trend in a coal-reliant country. Solar installations doubled in 2013, driven largely by ambitious federal energy policies.

U.S. solar component producers, notably GE partner First Solar, want in on that action, but Indian officials are trying protect and nurture a domestic solar industry to help provide jobs for its impoverished populace.

Now American enviros are coming down heavily on India’s side in the dispute. “We are writing to express our grave concerns that the United States plans to increase uncertainty in the Indian solar market by asking the World Trade Organization (WTO) to establish a panel to evaluate whether India’s national solar program violates international trade rules,” write the environmental groups, including 350.org, the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace USA, and the Sierra Club.

“We believe this misguided claim could delay growth of the solar market in India and harm the future of solar deployment at a time when growth of renewable energy has never been more critical,” the letter continues. “Our global climate will remain in danger if only some countries develop renewable energy industries while others continue to rely on fossil fuels. In order to avoid catastrophic climate impacts, all countries must urgently be investing in renewable energy technologies.”

Froman’s office plans to move its complaint against India forward at the WTO on Friday, Reuters reports. Meanwhile, India has been investigating America’s own solar policies in anticipation of a potential counter-complaint.


Source
Green groups urge U.S. to drop solar trade case against India, Reuters

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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