tagged w/ CO2 Emissions
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A U.N. climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement Sunday on a far-reaching program meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change.
The 194-party conference agreed to start negotiations on a new accord that would ensure that countries will be legally bound to carry out any pledges they make. It would take effect by 2020 at the latest.
The deal doesn't explicitly compel any nation to take on emissions targets, although most emerging economies have volunteered to curb the growth of their emissions.
Currently, only industrial countries have legally binding emissions targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Those commitments expire next year, but they will be extended for at least another five years under the accord adopted Sunday — a key demand by developing countries seeking to preserve the only existing treaty regulating carbon emissions.
The proposed Durban Platform offered answers to problems that have bedeviled global warming negotiations for years about sharing the responsibility for controlling carbon emissions and helping the world's poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations cope with changing forces of nature.
The United States was a reluctant supporter, concerned about agreeing to join an international climate system that likely would find much opposition in the U.S. Congress.
"This is a very significant package. None of us likes everything in it. Believe me, there is plenty the United States is not thrilled about," said U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern. But the package captured important advances that would be undone if it is rejected, he told the delegates.
Sunday's deal also set up the bodies that will collect, govern and distribute tens of billions of dollars a year for poor countries. Other documents in the package lay out rules for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, protecting forests, transferring clean technologies to developing countries and scores of technical issues.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the deal represents "an important advance in our work on climate change."
But the deal's language left some analysts warning that the wording left huge loopholes for countries to avoid tying their emissions to legal constraints, and noted that there was no mention of penalties. "They haven't reached a real deal," said Samantha Smith, of WWF International. "They watered things down so everyone could get on board."
Environmentalists criticized the package — as did many developing countries in the debate — for failing to address what they called the most urgent issue, to move faster and deeper in cutting carbon emissions.
"The good news is we avoided a train wreck," said Alden Meyer, recalling predictions a few days ago of a likely failure. "The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve."
Scientists say that unless those emissions — chiefly carbon dioxide from power generation and industry — level out and reverse within a few years, the Earth will be set on a possibly irreversible path of rising temperatures that lead to ever greater climate catastrophes.
Sunday's breakthrough capped 13 days of hectic negotiations that ran a day and a half over schedule, including two round-the-clock days that left negotiators bleary-eyed and stumbling with words. Delegates were seen nodding off in the final plenary session, despite the high drama, barely constrained emotions and uncertainty whether the talks would end in triumph or total collapse.
The nearly fatal issue involved the legal nature of the accord that will govern carbon emissions by the turn of the next decade.
More at the linkA U.N. climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement Sunday on a far-reaching... more
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Take note US law enforcement: no pepper spray, no raids, no beatings.
This is it. This is the crux of the global economic and environmental crises we face and this was the place to take it. It is always the 1% that is heard even at these conferences above the voices of the poor, the indigenous peoples and those in this world who are being disproportionately affected most by climate change. It is our time now. Failure here is a failure of and for humanity, our water, our land, other species and our economies. The science is indisputable. The effects to water, agriculture and social structure are now a reality and becoming more severe. It is time to put humanity first.
Occupy climate justice.Take note US law enforcement: no pepper spray, no raids, no beatings.
This is it.... more
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Naomi Oreskes found herself under attack in 2004, when she called attention to the scientific consensus on climate change. Her search for those behind the broadside led her to document the evolution of doubt-mongering.
Climate Query For Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes is a science historian, professor at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author (with Erik Conway) of Merchants of Doubt, a book that examined how a handful of scientists obscure the facts on a range of issues, including tobacco use and climate change. Her seminal paper in the journal Science, "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," challenged - back in 2004 - the notion that climate change science was uncertain. Her work has documented the spread of doubt-mongering from an industry practice to a political strategy.
Oreskes did her undergraduate work at the Royal School of Mines in London and received her graduate degree from Stanford University. With her husband, Ken Belitz, and daughter, Clara, the family lives in San Diego. Her older daughter, Hannah, attends Stanford.
Somewhere between your undergraduate and graduate degrees, you became interested in the history of science. What drew you to that field?
I was always interested in the human side of science, especially why people disagreed about evidence, and the strong - yet divergent - opinions that my professors had about what constitutes good science. Beyond that, it is a long story.
What attracted you to the climate change deniers?
I fell into this. I was working on the history of oceanography, and came across the work of Roger Revelle, Dave Keeling and others who'd been working on climate change since the 1950s. I came to understand that the scientific basis for understanding anthropogenic climate change was much firmer than most people knew. That led to my 2004 work, which led to me being attacked. So we started digging and found direct links to the tobacco industry.
Science is not sufficient to solve this problem, but it is necessary.
How do most mainstream scientists view this contrary viewpoint from their colleagues?
They are thoroughly appalled. Because it isn't a "contrary viewpoint," in the sense that the scientific evidence is contradictory or incomplete, or that our theories are inadequate to explain the observations. This is not the case, this is not a scientific debate.
Is the need to expose deniers that important in the policy world? Aren't other issues - such as economics and energy - far more important?
If we didn't have the science, we wouldn't know the cause. We wouldn't know that we have to control greenhouse gas emissions, and we could just burn coal. It is science that revealed the problem, science that pinpoints its cause, and science (that) tells us what kinds of interventions will be efficacious. Science is not sufficient to solve this problem, but it is necessary.
Are you frustrated by the continuing debate over the reality of climate change?
Yes, because some people are now saying, we should just accept that climate change is happening and not worry about the cause. Climate change is caused by greenhouse gases and that is why we need to do something about them. So it's time we rolled up our sleeves and got to work doing what we know in our hearts we need to do.
More at the linkNaomi Oreskes found herself under attack in 2004, when she called attention to the... more
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International Energy Agency: “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.”
“… we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F]…. Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”
The International Energy Agency has issued yet another clarion call for urgent action on climate. Their 2011 World Energy Outlook [WEO] release should end once and for all any notion that delay is the rational course for the nation and the world.
The UK Guardian‘s headline captures the urgency:
World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change
We must start aggressively deploying clean energy now through myriad policies, including a price on carbon. That has been the conclusion of most authoritative studies, of course, including the recent one by California’s independent state science and technology advisory panel (see “Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy“).
The IEA report deserves the label “bombshell,” though, because for most of the past two decades, the IEA was the source of bland, conservative, business-as-usual analysis. When I was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, no one at DOE paid much attention to IEA reports. And that perspective continued through most of the 2000s.
But in just the last few years they have woken up to the risks posed to peak oil — see IEA top economist warns (8/09): “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us” — and especially climate change. In releasing its 2009 WEO, the IEA warned, “The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming.”
Now the IEA has done the calculation a different way, concluding, “Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.” Those who counsel waiting for breakthrough technologies are urging us on a path that is unsustainable, irreversible, potentially catastrophic, and economically indefensible, according to the IEA.
The IEA is one of the few organizations in the world with a sophisticated enough global energy model to do credible (i.e non-hand-waving) projections of the cost of different emissions pathways and the costs of delaying efforts to achieve them. Their 2008 analysis of the 2°C warming pathway demonstrated that the total shift in investment needed to stabilize at 450 ppm is only about 1.1% of GDP per year — and that is not a “cost” or hit to GDP, because much of that investment goes towards saving expensive fuel (see “IEA report: Climate Progress has the 450-ppm solution about right“).
The new analysis shows that because of soaring emissions, we are running out of time for the “450 Scenario.” We are at risk of irreversibly “locking in” dangerous warming — a point I agree with mostly, but not entirely:
More at the linkInternational Energy Agency: “On planned policies, rising fossil energy use... more
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Australia's carbon tax is set to become law after the lower house of Parliament passed the government's historic but controversial set of bills to establish the world's most broadly based carbon pricing scheme.
Against last-minute efforts by the opposition to delay the passage of the bills and 11th-hour pleas for amendments by some business groups, the government passed its 18 pieces of legislation by a vote of 74 to 72 just before 10am.
The vote in the lower house, which was applauded by Labor MPs and spectators in the public gallery, was a crucial test for the government, given its wafer-thin majority. The bills will now go the Senate for debate but will pass comfortably with help from the Greens, probably next month.
After the vote, Prime Minister Julia Gillard embraced Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, who had the difficult job of steering the policy, and even exchanged a peck on the cheek with Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd, whose reported ambitions to retake the leadership are proving a headache for the Prime Minister.
The passage of the bills are a crucial victory for Ms Gillard, whose popularity has fallen steadily since last year.
Under the legislation, about 500 of the biggest carbon-emitting companies in Australia will pay a price for each tonne of carbon. Most of the biggest emitters are electricity generating firms, mining companies and heavy industry manufacturers.
To compensate households, the government is cutting income taxes and boosting payments such as pensions and other benefits, as well as offering various lump sum payments.
The average household is expected to pay about $9.90 a week in extra living costs, including $3.30 on electricity.
However this will be offset by an estimated $10.10 in extra benefits and tax breaks. The Australian scheme will cover about 60 per cent of Australia's emissions, making it the most broad-based in the world.
Shortly before the vote, Mr Combet told ABC Radio that today was the culmination of a long and often gruelling debate.
"Look, it's been a very bruising political argument, that's quite right," he said. "If you fast forward 12 months' time and the legislation is through, the carbon price, emissions trading scheme, is in place and the economy is managing to deal with the reform, the cost impacts are modest as we have been saying, we'll have applied tax cuts and increases in the pensions and family tax benefits, nine out of 10 households receiving some assistance to adjust with this reform."
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has vowed to repeal the legislation if he becomes prime minister, though the government has insisted he will not be able to manage that.
The bills were passed with help from crossbench MPs Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor and Andrew Wilkie, as well as Greens MP Adam Bandt.
The lower house also passed the government's Steel Transformation Plan, which will deliver $300 million in assistance to steel makers who are considered especially vulnerable to international trade.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/carbon-tax-bill-passes-20111012-1ljtf.html#ixzz1aa3B5sMq
More at the linkAustralia's carbon tax is set to become law after the lower house of Parliament... more
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"A lot of climate skeptics claim that volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans do," Gerlach said. "They never give any numbers, but the fact is you will never be able to find the volcanic gas scientist that will agree to that," he said."A lot of climate skeptics claim that volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans... more
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And we have to stop allowing the same people to shut this conversation down. We are no where near prepared for adaptation and what this will bring in the future, nevermind the present. Even if we completely stopped greenhouse gas emissions today, what we have already put up in the atmosphere over the last century would continue to play out. And yet, we continue to spew out 70 million tons of this every day as if it doesn't matter and continue listening to those whose political and economic lives depend on making this a rote issue. Well it isn't rote, and it is now upon us. And this government is doing nothing. And that is simply unacceptable. And that will be a consideration when I vote in any election.
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excerpt:
"Joplin, Mo., was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.
Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.
From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.
Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state’s trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain. These aren’t scenes from another deadly-weather thriller like The Day After Tomorrow. They’re all changes that California officials believe they need to brace for within the next decade or two. And they aren’t alone. Across the U.S., it’s just beginning to dawn on civic leaders that they’ll need to help their communities brave coming dangers brought by climate change, from disappearing islands in Chesapeake Bay to dust bowls in the Plains and horrific hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet only 14 states are even planning, let alone implementing, climate-change adaptation plans, says Terri Cruce, a climate consultant in California. The other 36 apparently are hoping for a miracle.
The game of catch-up will have to happen quickly because so much time was lost to inaction. “The Bush administration was a disaster, but the Obama administration has accomplished next to nothing either, in part because a significant part of the Democratic Party is inclined to balk on this issue as well,” says economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “We [are] past the tipping point.” The idea of adapting to climate change was once a taboo subject. Scientists and activists feared that focusing on coping would diminish efforts to reduce carbon emissions. On the opposite side of the divide, climate-change deniers argued that since global warming is a “hoax,” there was no need to figure out how to adapt. “Climate-change adaptation was a nonstarter,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. “If you wanted to talk about that, you would have had to talk about climate change itself, which the Bush administration didn’t want to do.” In fact, President Bush killed what author Mark Hertsgaard in his 2011 book, Hot, calls “a key adaptation tool,” the National Climate Assessment, an analysis of the vulnerabilities in regions of the U.S. and ideas for coping with them. The legacy of that: state efforts are spotty and local action is practically nonexistent. “There are no true adaptation experts in the federal government, let alone states or cities,” says Arroyo. “They’ve just been commandeered from other departments.”
cont.And we have to stop allowing the same people to shut this conversation down. We are no... more
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Carbon emissions in the earth's atmosphere have reached a record high, according to the International Energy Agency.
Scientists warn that climate change will lead to unprecedented catastrophic consequences, if global leaders do not take decisive action to reduce the harmful emissions soon.Carbon emissions in the earth's atmosphere have reached a record high, according... more
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A prominent anti-logging activist was murdered along with his wife in Brazil on Tuesday, just hours before the country's Chamber of Deputies overwhelmingly voted to let farmers destroy more of the Amazon.
The 410-63 vote defangs the 75-year-old Código Florestal (Forest Code), which has long required that farmers who own a piece of the Amazon preserve 80% of the land they own and farm only on the remainder. The new bill exempts small-scale farmers from the Forest Code and opens environmentally sensitive patches of land – such as hilltops, slopes, and watersides – to cultivation. It also grants amnesty to small-scale farmers who violated the law before July, 2008.
The bill has not yet passed to the Senate, and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has vowed to veto it if the amnesty provision remains, but that hasn’t stopped farmers from preemptively chopping and burning forested portions of their property, leading to a sixfold surge in deforestation, with the greatest increase coming in Mato Grosso.
Death of an Activist
Also on Tuesday, anti-logging activist José Claudio Ribeiro "Ze Claudio" da Silva was gunned down along with his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva, in rural Para inside the Praialta-Piranheira, a nature reserve where they had spent the last two decades as rubber-tappers.
Environmental Fallout
First passed in 1934 and strengthened intermittently thereafter, the Forest Code is considered one of the world’s most progressive forest policies. Supporters of the Forest Code say it has played a major role in the rapid deceleration of deforestation rates in the Amazon over the last decade.
Before surging this past year, deforestation rates had fallen dramatically in Brazil. From a ten-year high of 2.7 million hectares in 2004, the rate dropped to 0.70 million hectares by 2009.
In a letter in the July 16, 2010, issue of Science, six Brazilian scientists wrote that the new rules “will benefit sectors that depend on expanding frontiers by clear-cutting forests and savannas and will reduce mandatory restoration of native vegetation illegally cleared since 1965.”
The scientists warn that CO2 emissions “may increase substantially”, and as many as 100,000 species might be put at risk of extinction if the proposal becomes law. “Under the new Forest Act,” the scientists said, “Brazil risks suffering its worst environmental setback in half a century, with critical and irreversible consequences beyond its borders.”
cont.A prominent anti-logging activist was murdered along with his wife in Brazil on... more
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Plastics from single serving water bottles, or grocery bags accumulating in the world’s oceans have long been in the spotlight as eco villians.
Initially, biodegradable and compostable plant material based bottles seemed to be the cure for this convenience quandary. But beyond the simple math of eliminating petroleum as source material, there’s a problem: Most bioplastic doesn’t compost, unless in a professional environment (some don’t, even then). Bioplastics are not recyclable, since they are a different in formulation from conventional PET plastic. When they are accidentally included in recycling processing, it gums up the machinery.
To make matters worse, bioplastic, when tossed in the trash by people believing it would biodegrade, actually releases methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
In the past few years, companies such as Coca Cola and Pepsi have been working on bridging the gap, making plant based bottles that are also recyclable. A step forward, but in Coke’s case it’s 30% plant based, sourced from purpose grown sugar cane ethanol. While a Coca Cola representative told me “Estimates show that sugarcane production in Brazil could increase thirty times without endangering sensitive ecosystems or taking land destined for food crops,” the question arises, why even grow food crops for bottles when Pepsi is currently creating bottles sourced primarily from food production scraps?
While Coke continues to work on making the bottle 100% plant based and we wait to see if Pepsi will license it’s bottle technology to other companies, an interesting third option has been quietly innovating: Casey Container.
Casey Container has created an additive usable with a wide range of plastics, even rubber, that allows the resulting product to be usable in all its usual applications, while being both recyclable and biodegradable. The resulting biodegraded material is not simply smaller pieces of plastic that continue to be an ecological issue. It becomes harmless biogas and biomatter. And rather than needing heat, light and moisture to begin the process of biodegrading and thus not working in tightly packed landfills, it is activated by the very microbes typically found in landfills.
Post Continues: http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/05/casey-container-missing-link-plastic-bottles-both-recyclable-biodegradable/Plastics from single serving water bottles, or grocery bags accumulating in the... more
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Corporate Accountability International (CAI) presented a proposal at McDonald’s Corp shareholder meeting yesterday that asked for a report on the links between fast food and childhood obesity. CAI worked with the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia on putting together the proposal.
The proposal was defeated, as were proposals by The Humane Society of the U.S. and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The Humane Society proposal asked McDonald’s to switch to cage-free eggs, and the PETA proposal asked the company to use controlled-atmosphere killing, considered to be more humane.
Despite the defeat, Nick Guroff, a spokesperson for CAI, called the proposal “an extreme success for a first introduction” and said that McDonald’s executives are going to be forced “to take these concerns – as much as they diminished them at their shareholder meeting and otherwise - very seriously.”
McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner defended the company’s right to “advertise freely.” He added that McDonald’s will “continue to advertise to our customers responsibly about our menu and about lifestyle choices and leave the personal responsibility up to them.” Skinner claimed that the fast food company takes “responsible advertising very seriously.”
Deborah Lapidus from CAI addressed the shareholder meeting and pointed out that San Francisco passed a measure “to limit toy giveaways to children’s meals that meet a very basic nutritional standard.” Other cities, including New York, “are looking to take similar, practical measures.”
Lapidus said that McDonald’s “appears hell bent on preventing communities from securing health protections against your abusive practices.” Addressing McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner, she asked, “Mr. Skinner, when will McDonald’s stop aggressively interfering in public health policy and opposing democratic efforts to create a healthier food environment, free of junk food marketing, for our children and future generations?”
Post Continues: http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/05/mcdonalds-stands-ground-advertising-children-shareholders-meeting/Corporate Accountability International (CAI) presented a proposal at McDonald’s... more
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Republicans once again seek to undo all of the work done regarding the Clean Air Act and to make caring for the future of our health and climate irrelevant. They violate the constitution by denying Americans the right to life by their blatant support of policies that perpetuate disease and death. And yet they cry about other bills being unconstitutional when it is their policies that would have us with even more sick Americans. It is immoral to the core. This act was passed forty one years ago, and because of it we have cleaner air and have saved lives. And it was a bi-partisan effort because once in our Congress caring about sick Americans, our environment and our future was not a partisan issue. The Republicans I see in this Congress are a disgrace to it. All they care about is their own economic loss in donations by not bowing down to those they really work for.
Of course, there are those polluter loving Democrats who always chime in with them and they deserve just as much of our outrage. However, there is no denying that on the whole Republicans have done more to block true progress in the areas that will best compliment a comprehensive healthcare and climate change policy. They think they know more about the environment and health than scientists and doctors do. Hopefully, this will not get far, but just to know they would go this far in denying Americans their right to life by continuing to support toxic pollution of our air and increasing GHG emissions to bring us to a tipping point that will cost more than any economic damage they can make up from this shows their true colors. We need to stand up liike others are in this world to preserve what little we have left of our voices. Clean is a RIGHT not a priviledge.Republicans once again seek to undo all of the work done regarding the Clean Air Act... more
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Fury is building over rolling nationwide blackouts triggered by the Obama administration’s deliberate agenda to block the construction of new coal-fired plants, as local energy companies struggle to meet Americans’ power demands amidst some of the coldest weather seen in decades.
- As we reported yesterday, four hospitals in Texas reacted furiously after they were hit with planned outages despite being promised they would be spared even as power to Super Bowl venues remains uninterrupted.
- Thousands in New Mexico have been left without natural gas as Gov. Susana Martinez on Thursday declared a state of emergency. “Due to statewide natural gas shortages, I have ordered all government agencies that do not provide essential services to shut down and all nonessential employees to stay home” on Friday, Martinez said after meeting with public safety personnel in Albuquerque,” reports the Associated Press.
- Borderland residents have been asked to limit their use of natural gas as the Texas Gas Service asks that larger commercial facilities voluntarily close their doors to save supplies.
- People in Tucson have been asked to limit their use of hot water and moderate their thermostat levels to save on energy.
- Shortages of natural gas in San Diego County has forced utility companies to “cut or reduce the gas supplied to some of their largest commercial and industrial customers,” reports North County Times.
- In El Paso, “Hundreds of thousands of electricity customers continue to face periodic blackouts, and nearly 900 gas customers still have no heat,” reports the El Paso Times, with El Paso Electric resorting to using generators in a struggle to meet demand while still having to implement forced outages.
Coal-fired power plants are used to convert coal to synthetic natural gas. The Obama administration’s efforts to block the construction of new clean-burning coal plants has massively exacerbated this week’s outages.
Mexico has now announced that it will suspend supplying power to southern US states, underscoring how America has been left completely dependent and desperate as a result of the Obama administration’s war on the coal industry.
Cold weather is not the primary culprit behind the power outages that have hit many areas of the country this week. The real blame lies with the Obama administration’s deliberate war against the efforts of local power companies to meet America’s energy needs by building new plants, the vast majority of which have been blocked by judges, governors and the EPA over the last four years at the behest of the Obama administration in the name of preventing global warming.
State authorities in Texas have been engaged in a long-running battle with the EPA as the feds attempt to block the construction of new plants by enforcing adherence to new clean air permit regulations that cripple smaller companies’ ability to afford desperately needed new energy centers and plants. Twelve states are mounting a legal challenge against EPA restrictions that threaten to bankrupt the entire industry.
FULL STORY HERE:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/fury-builds-over-blackouts-caused-by-de-industrialization-of-america.htmlFury is building over rolling nationwide blackouts triggered by the Obama... more
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UK-based Cella Energy has developed a synthetic fuel that could lead to US$1.50 per gallon gasoline. Apart from promising a future transportation fuel with a stable price regardless of oil prices, the fuel is hydrogen based and produces no carbon emissions when burned. The technology is based on complex hydrides, and has been developed over a four year top secret program at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. Early indications are that the fuel can be used in existing internal combustion engined vehicles without engine modification.
According to Stephen Voller CEO at Cella Energy, the technology was developed using advanced materials science, taking high energy materials and encapsulating them using a nanostructuring technique called coaxial electrospraying.
“We have developed new micro-beads that can be used in an existing gasoline or petrol vehicle to replace oil-based fuels,” said Voller. “Early indications are that the micro-beads can be used in existing vehicles without engine modification.”
“The materials are hydrogen-based, and so when used produce no carbon emissions at the point of use, in a similar way to electric vehicles”, said Voller.
The technology has been developed over a four-year top secret programme at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, UK.
The development team is led by Professor Stephen Bennington in collaboration with scientists from University College London and Oxford University.
Professor Bennington, Chief Scientific Officer at Cella Energy said, “our technology is based on materials called complex hydrides that contain hydrogen. When encapsulated using our unique patented process, they are safer to handle than regular gasoline.”
http://www.gizmag.com/breakthrough-promises-150-per-gallon-synthetic-gasoline-with-no-carbon-emissions/17687/UK-based Cella Energy has developed a synthetic fuel that could lead to US$1.50 per... more
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A family from Canada’s Saskatchewan Province has obtained the first evidence suggesting that CO2 pumped underground to capture greenhouse gases may not be as secure as fossil fuel industries have claimed.
In 2004, Cameron and Jane Kerr, long-time residents of Weyburn, in Canada’s Saskatchewan Province, began noticing bubbling water, unusual algae growth, rising gravel mounds, and dead animals in the once-clear ponds around the farm that has been in their family for generations.A family from Canada’s Saskatchewan Province has obtained the first evidence... more
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Blowing up children and threatening climate change skeptics with physical violence barely merits a mention
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
While the establishment has invoked the supposed threat of vitriolic “right-wing rhetoric” as a tool with which to bludgeon freedom of speech in response to the Tucson shootings, it has conspired to sweep under the carpet far more extreme and threatening language and images used by leftists in the context of the climate change debate, rhetoric that has led directly to crimes and murders.
While Sarah Palin is castigated for using an image of crosshairs targeting political districts, leftists produce violent and bloody films that depict children being liquidated in an orgy of blood and guts for not toeing the line on the political dogma of man-made global warming.
When the 10:10 campaign put out a video that showed kids in a classroom being murdered by their teacher for refusing to lower their CO2 emissions, it sparked outrage amongst conservative bloggers, yet hardly a ripple was registered on the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, or any of the leftist blogs now erroneously trying to blame vitriolic “right-wing” rhetoric for Jared Lee Loughner’s massacre.
Similarly, there was no condemnation when a lobbying group used an image of a dead girl being hanged to push their propaganda about melting icebergs – and in fact the Discovery Channel gave the group an award for the commercial.
FULL STORY HERE:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/establishment-ignores-violent-rhetoric-from-eco-leftists.htmlBlowing up children and threatening climate change skeptics with physical violence... more
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Some very sad news. Tonight the country’s only federal climate change legislation in Parliament, the Climate Change Accountability Act, was defeated in the Senate 43 to 32.
What happened? In an unprecedented move, the Conservatives called for a surprise vote on Bill C-311 in the Senate while many Liberal Senators were missing. While that isn’t a first, the fact that the bill was called for a vote before any debate or consideration could be held is unprecedented. Conservative Senators were ordered not to speak to the bill during the 193 days it was in the Senate, and even the Conservative Speaker of the Senate was told to vote against the bill (when the Speaker’s role is to vote to continue debate in the case of a tie).
Keep reading and find out what you can do...
http://www.forgetthebox.net/mag/green-bean-tuesdays/breaking-eco-news-harper-officially-hates-the-environment.phpSome very sad news. Tonight the country’s only federal climate change... more
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Water use and greenhouse gas emissions are major concerns with developing “unconventional” hydrocarbon reserves
The Syncrude Canada Ltd. oil sands mining operation in Alberta, Canada is the largest in the world. For every barrel of oil produced from tar sands mining operations, four to six barrels of fresh water are withdrawn from the Athabasca River, according to experts.
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By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue
Before July 16, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued its 18-page letter directing the State Department to more carefully assess the considerable risks of the $7 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expected to issue a presidential permit approving construction in the fall.
EPA’s penetrating critique of the State Department’s permit review of the 1,702-mile pipeline, which the environmental agency called “inadequate,” puts that fall schedule on indefinite hold. The question for the oil industry, the governments of Canada and the activists in both countries desperate to tame oil sands development, is what other effects the EPA’s action could have.
The federal environmental agency has good reason to be vigilant. It has been busy since July 26 cleaning up a million-barrel tar sands oil spill from a ruptured pipeline in southern Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.
The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, to be built by TransCanada Corp., is the latest of three big oil pipeline construction projects that are at the vanguard of a new era in hydrocarbon development. Instead of drilling deep underground for pools of oil that are getting harder to find and more dangerous to punch open, energy developers are becoming miners, tapping what the energy industry calls “unconventional” reserves contained in oil-saturated sands and oil shales.
Near the northern end of the Keystone XL pipeline lies Alberta’s bitumen-saturated tar sands, a forested region as large as North Carolina that conservatively contains 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil: enough to satisfy U.S. demand at current rates of consumption until 2035. American, Canadian, Chinese, Korean and European oil companies are spending $15 billion a year to manage and expand immense open pit mines, processing plants, as well as toxic tailing ponds in order to boost production from 1.3 million barrels a day to more than three million barrels per day by 2025.
The investment in Alberta is the sharp tip of a long spear of unconventional oil development that reaches into the United States, the primary market. Energy and pipeline companies are spending $31 billion to ship oil in new pipelines from Alberta to U.S. refiners in the heartland, the Great Lakes and the Gulf coast. Refiners are spending more than $20 billion to expand refineries to produce fuels from tar sands oil. In all, the energy industry has said it wants to invest nearly $400 billion on tar sands oil production over the next 15 years.
Contrast that with annual investment in wind and solar energy, which reached $30 billion last year, according to the Department of Energy. Exxon Mobil Corp. paid more than that earlier this year—$41 billion—to purchase XTO Energy, which has big reserves in unconventional tar sands, oil shales, and deep shale natural gas reserves in the United States.
The bottom line is that the race between clean energy alternatives and much dirtier unconventional reserves is an economic mismatch. Last year total investment globally in clean energy was $140 billion, according to solar and wind producers. The fossil fuel industry is spending an estimated three times that amount on developing unconventional oil reserves, according to the International Energy Agency.
cont.Water use and greenhouse gas emissions are major concerns with developing... more
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Readers of a certain age, and a certain literary bent, will recognize the words of Alexander Portnoy’s psychiatrist, spoken at the close of Philip Roth’s transgressive 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint.
After lo these many years, they popped into my head today as I read that Senate Democrats had finally thrown in the towel on an energy bill that would have included a partial cap-and-trade provision for limiting carbon emissions from power plants. The bill, written by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, was touted by Washington insiders and some major environmental groups as this year’s last hope for federal climate legislation. Yet it would have relied on carbon offsets and other dodges to postpone the day of reckoning with true, visible carbon emissions pricing — the cornerstone of meaningful climate policy.
Instead, reported the New York Times, Senate Democrats will pursue a limited bill aimed at increasing oversight of oil drilling and tightening energy efficiency standards — with no direct assault on climate-destabilizing CO2. (For a later Times story amplifying the first, click here.)
Yes, now, we may begin — “we” being Americans who care about climate, sustainability, and Earth — to unite around a climate approach that is effective, equitable and transparent enough to win the support of our fellow citizens and a Congressional majority.
I’m referring of course to the idea advanced by climatologist Jim Hansen as fee-and-dividend and by the Carbon Tax Center as a revenue-neutral carbon tax, by which fossil fuel extractors and importers pay the U.S. Treasury fees pegged to the carbon content of the coal, oil and gas they take from the ground or bring into U.S. ports, and the Treasury distributes the revenues to all Americans via equal monthly dividends (“green checks”), or by tax-shifting from regressive taxes such as payroll taxes.
The Senate’s antipathy to even the partial cap-and-trade proposed by Sen. Kerry will doubtless be spun as indicating that for the foreseeable future the well for climate legislation has been poisoned. The Carbon Tax Center says that the opposite may be true: with cap-and-trade out of the way at last, the political well can begin to be de-toxified so that the effective, equitable and transparent carbon fee-and-dividend can be seriously considered.
For this to happen, however, the Big Green groups like EDF and NRDC that for years have dominated climate discourse among environmentalists, and that convinced Congressional Democrats and the White House that the only way to “put a price on carbon” in America was via carbon cap-and-trade, will have to abandon that approach and allow others, and themselves, to try a fresh start.
It will be said that cap-and-trade failed because Fox News and other climate deniers branded it as “cap-and-tax” and, therefore, a carbon tax (or fee) cannot possibly succeed. And it is true that carbon cap-and-trade was looked to, years ago, as a way to build on the success of acid rain cap-and-trade, win over Republican free-marketers, and put a price on carbon without having to parade the dreaded t-a-x word before the public.
In the event, though, carbon cap-and-trade did none of these things.
Instead, Big Green’s pursuit of carbon cap-and-trade tethered the climate movement to complex financial instruments and branded us as servants of Wall Street elites. It opened the legislative floodgates to off-the-charts Beltway deal-making that rightly repulsed the public. Perhaps most importantly, the co-optation of climate advocacy by the cap-and-traders robbed us of the high moral ground we might have shared with abolitionists, suffragists, labor agitators and civil rights workers — true American heroes who fought to liberate our society of oppression and injustice.
If you’re in the climate movement, you recognize that fossil fuels’ assault on Earth’s climate is an ultimate form of oppression and injustice: of rich against poor, of the profligate against the frugal, of the present against the future. Ending this assault will require concerted action on many fronts; and it starts by internalizing the climate-damage costs of coal, oil and gas into their prices, so that the free ride for fossil fuels is ended and all of the alternatives, from energy efficiency, renewable energy and low-carbon fuels to conservation-based behavior and mindfulness toward energy consumption, may compete fairly and effectively.
continuedReaders of a certain age, and a certain literary bent, will recognize the words of... more
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