Posted by maria-energia on July 29, 2007 at 03:26:10 PM

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for urgent international action to slow global warming, marking it as a top priority of his tenure.

Ban pointed out the devastation wrought in developing countries because of global warming’s impacts. Those same countries don’t have the resources to cope with the effects, and yet have contributed to least to the cause of the problem.

Ban laid out a clear timetable for action while California recently to learn about the state’s aggressive campaign to cut climate change emissions. The General Assembly meets this week to discuss the issue, and Ban will convene a “high-level” meeting on September 24^th in New York. Negotiations will begin in Bali in December. Key to those negotiations is hammering out a plan for a post-Kyoto Protocol world. The framework expires in 2012, and Ban said a successor pact must be ready for ramification in 2009 to allow time for nations to pass it into law.

Earlier this month, the Secretary-General met with President Bush to discuss global warming. Ban called is a “very good meeting” and that Bush “now realizes the seriousness” of the problem. However U.S. leadership on the issue is critical and the status quo “cannot be an option.”

Posted by maria-energia on July 12, 2007 at 10:42:43 PM

Another piece of legislation aimed at cutting climate change emissions was unveiled in Congress on Wednesday. Sponsored by Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), the bill creates a cap-and-trade system of carbon dioxide (CO2), a major contributor to global warming.

Although the “Low Carbon Economy Act” isn’t as ambitious as other bills before Congress, it does have something the other bills don’t: broad support. In addition to being bipartisan, supporters include unions like the AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers, the United Mine Workers. Union officials said they were satisfied that the bill would make costs bearable for carbon polluters and penalize foreign countries that didn’t do enough to control their emissions.

Several utilities, including Duke Energy also support the bill. Duke CEO James Rogers said that while the bill isn’t perfect, it does chart a path towards a low-carbon future while keeping the economy strong.

But to get that labor and corporate support, the bill had to put limits on the price industry would pay for CO2 permits at $10. In order to get the two Republican Senators from Alaska on board, it also includes billions of dollars to help the state cope with climate change’s effects on roads, bridges, and coastal areas.

The Low Carbon Economy Act caps emissions at 2006 levels beginning in 2020, and 1990 levels in 2030. The cap-and-trade system would grant permits to industries like oil refineries, manufacturing facilities and coal plants. 

Not everyone likes the bill: The global warming director for the Sierra Club, Dan Becker, said it was worth than nothing. But the climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, David Doniger, said the bill was at least evidence that Congress was getting the message on global warming. Although it probably won’t pass, it’s at least a good starting point. Let’s hope so.

via the New York Times

Posted by maria-energia on July 1, 2007 at 12:45:28 PM

Business leaders from three continents are teaming up to manufacture and sell lower-cost photovoltaic solar panels.

Signet Solar is a renewable energy startup based in Palo Alto, CA. It already has a R&D facility located in Dresden, Germany because of that nation’s global leadership and market-friendly policies towards solar and wind power. Earlier this month, Signet also announced plans to build three manufacturing plants in India (where the future market for solar power will likely be huge). With this breadth of expertise, resources, and geography, combined with “thin solar” manufacturing equipment from Applied Materials (Silicon Valley’s semiconductor tools giant), Signet hopes to build global partnerships to secure more of the solar power market share.

Signet is betting that solar power will soon be as inexpensive to produce as traditional fossil fuels, either because of continued government incentives and subsidies or because of new costs applied to fossil fuels that reflect the global warming emission and damage they cause (such as a carbon tax).

Nonetheless, solar manufacturing costs have been falling for years, and some industry analysts are cautiously predicting that within a decade, solar will reach “grid parity” and be just as inexpensive to produce as old, dirty methods of energy. At that point, explains Andrew Leonard of Solon.com, “…a market that has been growing like gangbusters for a decade will go absolutely bonkers.”

Posted by maria-energia on June 21, 2007 at 10:01:13 PM

World leaders rejoiced at the G-8 summit earlier this month when President Bush finally discussed human-caused global warming and possible solutions.

Now he’s expounding on those solutions. He announced  today that “there can be no solution [to global warming] without nuclear power.”  Specifically, he claimed that three new nuclear power plants are needed each year beginning in 2015 to keep up with demand. I didn't hear anything about energy efficiency being the first step to deal with demand.

No new licenses have been filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 1973. The U.S. currently gets 20 percent of its power from 104 nuclear power plants.

"We're beginning to make some progress," Bush said. "That's good news for the American consumer." He added that nuclear plants are a good fit because they don’t release global warming emissions like coal plants.

The U.S. isn’t the only world power wanting to ramp up nuclear power, of course. Check out Watthead’s piece on China’s plan to increase nuclear power use 20-fold by 2030.

Posted by maria-energia on June 10, 2007 at 10:22:52 PM

Late last week, leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations agreed to "seriously consider" cutting emissions 50 percent by the year 2050. They also affirmed the importance of developing nations to cut missions and plan to develop a global framework on emissions by the end of 2008.

This outcome is a far cry from German Chancellor Angela Merkel's initial plan to get the G8 to limit global temperature rise this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) and to cut emissions 50 percent by 2050. In an interview before the G8 meetings, she had told the German Magazine Der Spiegel that her 3.6 degree proposal was ?non-negotiable as far as I am concerned.? But Bush Administration officials flat-out rejected mandatory emissions targets.

So is it a success that world leaders have agreed to "seriously consider" cutting emissions? Depends who you ask. British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the agreement "a major, major step forward." Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat said it was "a very positive outcome." Even Chancellor Merkel said she was "very satisfied" with the meetings.

But others were less than satisfied. The Taipei Times reported that Daniel Mittler, climate policy advisor of Greenpeace International, called the deal "clearly not enough to prevent dangerous climate change. The U.S. isolation in refusing to accept binding emission cuts has become blindingly obvious at this meeting." Likewise, Philip Clapp of the U.S. National Environmental Trust said that although Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Blair were portraying the agreement positively, "President Bush didn't give them an inch. The best they could get from him was a statement that their 50 percent-by-2050 emissions reduction proposal would be `seriously considered.` That's a pretty tiny landmark."

At any rate, world leaders seemed very excited that the U.S. was willing to even talk seriously about climate change and that it had abandoned its previous positions that global warming was a myth or that human were not causing it. The Financial Times editorialized that although the G8 should still be skeptical of President Bush, his engagement is finally reflecting a change in Americans' stance on the issue.

I wonder if it would not have been better for the other G8 nations to move forward and commit to Chancellor Merkel's targets without U.S. support. Did they cater to the lowest common denominator? Or was this a wise decision to continue talks and planning, given China and India's additional aversion to mandatory cuts?