Most Viewed Stories
Clean Economy News
Today's Climate
May 14, 2013
(The Age)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she's confident that European Union member states can agree to more ambitious climate protection targets.
Germany is in talks with EU member states including Poland about the need for a new CO2 emissions reduction target, Merkel told a sustainability conference today in Berlin.
“We need, as soon as possible, another EU-wide target that goes beyond the CO2 reduction of 2020,” Merkel said. "I think that at the end of this year, possibly in connection with the climate conference in Poland, that we can succeed in jointly agreeing" on a new target.
(AP)
Environmentalists celebrated a federal order Monday that they said opened the way for a more detailed review of a plan to restart the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant in California.
The ruling by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing board had the potential to lead to further delays in a possible restart.
The twin-reactor plant between San Diego and Los Angeles hasn’t produced power since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water.
(Bloomberg)
A unit of Warren Buffett's MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. plans to invest $1.9 billion to build additional wind farms in Iowa that would increase its wind generating capacity in the state by about half.
MidAmerican Energy Co., Iowa’s largest utility, plans to build as much as 1,050 megawatts of new wind power plants in the state, adding to about 2,285 megawatts of projects that it already owns and operates, the Des Moines, Iowa-based company said today in a statement on its website.
(AP)
Exxon Mobil Corp. is challenging $1.7 million in penalties proposed by federal safety regulators who faulted the oil company over a 63,000-gallon crude oil spill into the Yellowstone River, according to documents released Monday by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
In the first formal response to the alleged violations, Exxon attorneys said the company’s workers responded appropriately to warnings that the 12-inch Silvertip pipeline was endangered by erosion along the Yellowstone near the town of Laurel.
(Dallas Business Journal)
If Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) gets its way, liquid natural gas could be flowing out of Texas to countries around the world within five years.
The Irving-based oil and gas giant announced a partnership with Golden Pass Products and state-owned Qatar Petroleum International for a $10 billion expansion of the Sabine Pass LNG terminal along the Gulf Coast near Port Arthur.
(BBC News)
For decades, it seemed that most countries of the Levant, east of the Mediterranean Sea, had little or no share of the Middle East's abundant energy resources.
Israelis even had a joke about how Moses led his people through the desert for 40 years to reach the one place in the region with no oil.
But in the past few years, there have been offshore discoveries of gas and possibly oil that look set to open up new economic possibilities. In future, they could also redefine strategic relationships.
A 2010 US Geological Survey report estimated that there were 122 trillion cubic feet (TCF) (equivalent to 3455 billion cubic metres) of gas and 1.7bn barrels of oil off the coasts of Israel, the Gaza Strip, Cyprus, Syria and Lebanon.
(Guardian)
The World Bank is making a major push to develop large-scale hydropower, something it had all but abandoned a decade ago but now sees as crucial to resolving the tension between economic development and the drive to tame carbon use.
Major hydropower projects in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Nepal and elsewhere – all of a scale dubbed "transformational" to the regions involved – are part of the bank's fundraising drive among wealthy nations. Bank lending for hydropower has scaled up in recent years, and officials expect the trend to continue.
Such projects were shunned in the 1990s, in part because they can be disruptive to communities and ecosystems. But the World Bank is opening the taps for dams and related infrastructure as its president, Jim Yong Kim, tries to resolve a quandary at the bank's core: how to eliminate poverty while adding as little as possible to carbon emissions.
(Reuters)
Little progress has been made in a United Nations' effort to craft an agreement to lower greenhouse gas emissions from international air travel, raising doubts that its civil aviation body can deliver a final resolution by a September target date, several government officials said on Monday.
Representatives to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) said a high-level group of representatives from 17 countries tapped to expedite a global agreement continues to be bogged down by a few key issues.
The group had been tasked with developing a global plan to address aviation emissions using market-based measures in time for the body's triennial assembly in September.
(Guardian)
Peru has announced a bidding round for new oil and gas concessions but, contrary to what was initially expected, none of them are in the Amazon rainforest.
Nine concessions are to be auctioned, energy company Perupetro declared recently, but all of them are offshore along Peru's Pacific Ocean coast.
This constitutes a significant change of plan by Perupetro which last September issued a statement that before the end of 2012 36 new concessions would be established.
According to a presentation made to the World Heavy Oil Congress in Aberdeen in Scotland the same month, 27 of these concessions – totaling millions of hectares – would be in the Amazon.
May 13, 2013
(AP)
The old saying that "what goes up must come down" doesn't apply to carbon dioxide pollution in the air, which just hit an unnerving milestone.
The chief greenhouse gas was measured Thursday at 400 parts per million in Hawaii, a monitoring site that sets the world's benchmark. It's a symbolic mark that scientists and environmentalists have been anticipating for years.
While this week's number has garnered all sorts of attention, it is just a daily reading in the month when the chief greenhouse gas peaks in the Northern Hemisphere. It will be lower the rest of the year. This year will probably average around 396 ppm. But not for long — the trend is going up and at faster and faster rates.
(USA Today)
Global warming will destroy more than half of the habitats of most plants and a third of animals by 2080, biologists conclude, unless steps are taken to limit greenhouse gases.
Over the past century, average global surface temperatures have increased about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Academy of Sciences. This global warming is largely due to burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas, which retain heat and warm the atmosphere. Temperatures worldwide are expected to rise roughly 7 degrees by 2100 if the use of fossil fuels continues without attempts to mitigate their effects.
Without mitigation, "large range contractions can be expected even amongst common and widespread species," concludes the study led by Rachel Warren of the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia. It was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
(Bloomberg)
British Columbia’s provincial election threatens to stymie efforts by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNQ) and other Alberta oil-sands companies to sell crude to Pacific markets.
Adrian Dix, 49, whose New Democratic Party is leading in polls ahead of tomorrow’s vote, opposes plans to pipe oil across the country’s westernmost province for shipment by tanker to Asia. Premier Christy Clark, 47, whose ruling Liberals trail Dix by nine points in an Angus Reid Public Opinion poll, has laid out five conditions for her to support Enbridge Inc. (ENB)’s planned conduit through British Columbia, one of the two lines proposed.
(The Globe and Mail)
The kid, as Randy Thompson calls the land agent from TransCanada Corp., wanted to talk. He was persistent. So Mr. Thompson arranged a meeting at the family’s Nebraska ranch house.
"He wanted to know if they could do some surveying," Mr. Thompson recalls. "We told the kid – if you want to waste your time, go ahead and survey it. But I can tell you, we don't want the damn pipeline."
TransCanada wanted to build its Keystone XL project through the middle of the Thompsons' corn field. The family was worried that it would disrupt the farm’s irrigation system. But there was a solution. If TransCanada would move the pipeline an eighth of a mile – 200 meters – the Thompsons could live with that.
(New York Times)
As the debate over the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline continues in the United States, a Canadian trade delegation is insisting that Canadian oil extracted from tar sands — the product that would be transported by an expanded pipeline — should not be classified as being dirtier than other types of oil.
Last week Canada’s natural resource minster, Joe Oliver, threatened to take the European Union to the World Trade Organization over its plans to classify oil harvested from tar sands as “highly polluting.”
(The Globe and Mail)
A combination of growing oil sands production and congested pipelines is creating new opportunities for midstream companies that have cavern or tank capacity to spare.
The waiting game for proposed pipeline projects such as Keystone XL or the Trans Mountain expansion, along with a new focus on rail transport, has resulted in growth of an industry segment many consider a sideline: Storage.
"As the industry continues to grow, and as the industry continues to look for different ways of accessing markets, whether it’s by pipeline or by rail, all of that growth requires additional storage – particularly when the pipelines start to become full," said David Smith, chief executive of Keyera Corp., a midstream company that focuses on natural gas processing and natural gas liquids, but also has a significant storage business.
(AFP)
The world has entered a "new danger zone" with a record level of Earth-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said Monday.
With a CO2 level of 400 parts per million (ppm) announced last week, the highest in human history, the world "crossed an historic threshold and entered a new danger zone," she said in a statement urging policy action.
(AP)
A domestic natural gas boom already has lowered U.S. energy prices while stoking fears of environmental disaster. Now U.S. producers are poised to ship vast quantities of gas overseas as energy companies seek permits for proposed export projects that could set off a renewed frenzy of fracking.
Expanded drilling is unlocking enormous reserves of crude oil and natural gas, offering the potential of moving the country closer to its decades-long quest for energy independence. Yet as the industry looks to profit from foreign markets, there is the specter of higher prices at home and increased manufacturing costs for products from plastics to fertilizers.
(Guardian)
One of Europe's most influential government-owned investors in the energy industry has hinted it may expand funding of high-carbon coal projects despite mounting pressure from climate change campaigners to rule out such investments.
Riccardo Puliti, energy chief at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), warned against an "ideological" policy on carbon intensity in funding decisions without giving weight to other considerations.
The EBRD, which is based in London and owned by more than 60 countries, including the UK, is reviewing its energy policy. It has a €37.5bn (£32bn) loan book, with 41% of its investments last year channelled into the energy and infrastructure sectors.
(TheNational)
Dubai is finalising legislation that will enable property owners to feed solar power into the grid and may even allow them to make money from it.
The Government last year unveiled plans for a 1,000-megawatt solar park, but it believes that small-scale applications are important for meeting its renewable energy targets.
"In the near future we will have a legislative environment that allows for grid-connected solar power. There will be different approaches for different scales," said Ivano Iannelli, the chief executive of the government-owned advisory company Dubai Carbon Centre of Excellence.
(Wall Street Journal)
A new study offers fresh insights into how radioactive contamination from the Fukushima nuclear disaster may have spread through Japan's interconnected waterways, reaching some freshwater fish hundreds of kilometers away.
The research by two Japanese academics published in Nature magazine late last month reports traces of cesium found in 2011 "even in Shizuoka prefecture, 400 km south-west from the plant."
Although the data had been available the year of the accident from the Japanese government’s fisheries agency, this is the first time the data has been compiled and analyzed to try and assess exactly how — and how far — the damage had spread. "The data has been there, but it has not been very accessible," Toshiaki Mizuno, one of the co-authors of the report, told JRT.
(Wired)
Electric vehicles use the same roads, the same bridges and the same infrastructure as the rest of us. But because they don't burn gasoline, they're immune from paying taxes at the pump to fund that infrastructure. That's going to change.
EV buyers have long received a federal tax credit of $7,500, but with the passage of Washington state's House Bill 2660 last year, what one hand giveth, the other taketh away.
Eager to recoup some of the money lost to those opting for zero-emissions motoring, the state of Washington is slapping people with a $100 annual tax for driving an electric such as the Tesla Model S, Nissan Leaf and anything they've cobbled together in their garage.
(Marketwired)
Vancouver Fire Fighters Local 18 has endorsed a slate of ten provincial political candidates, including Green Party candidate Damian Kettlewell, in Vancouver-Quilchena, citing his commitment to public safety and leadership on climate change.
"Our members are on the frontlines of public safety and are the first to experience the dangers and impacts of climate change," said Gord Ditchburn, President, Vancouver Fire Fighters Local 18. "We live in a city that in a split second could see its pristine beauty destroyed if the right steps aren't being taken to invest in public safety. Join us in supporting Damian Kettlewell to ensure strong leadership on one of the most pressing public safety issues of our time."
May 10, 2013
(NPR)
At about 300 colleges across the country, young activists worried about climate change are borrowing a strategy that students successfully used in decades past. In the 1980s, students enraged about South Africa's racist Apartheid regime got their schools to drop stocks in companies that did business with that government. In the 1990s students pressured their schools to divest in Big Tobacco.
This time, the student activists are targeting a mainstay of the economy: large oil and coal companies.
(Politico)
President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency is in jeopardy after Republicans formed a united front Thursday to deny her a vote in committee.
Democrats erupted in frustration at the GOP “obstructionism” and vowed to find a way to push Gina McCarthy’s nomination through the Environment and Public Works Committee, despite the last-minute Republican boycott of the vote.
But even then, McCarthy could still face a filibuster on the Senate floor — and won’t have the 60 votes she needs, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told his Democratic allies Thursday morning.
(The Hill)
Vice President Biden is rebutting claims that the Obama administration hasn’t pushed hard enough on climate change and defending President Obama’s first-term record.
Asked by Rolling Stone magazine why the administration doesn’t “use the bully pulpit to talk about climate change like it does for gun control,” Biden replied: “We have.”
“The president used the biggest settings he had, in the inaugural address and the State of the Union. In his inaugural address, he said, ‘We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,’” Biden said in the wide-ranging new interview.
(The Hill)
The Obama administration has launched an online tool to bolster research into links between climate change and health and inform “more effective responses.”
The interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program on Thursday unveiled its Metadata Access Tool for Climate and Health (MATCH) platform.
“It is a publicly accessible digital platform for searching and integrating metadata ... extracted from more than 9,000 health, environment, and climate-science datasets held by six Federal agencies,” said Tom Armstrong, executive director of the interagency climate program, in a blog post.
(Politico)
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved its first energy bills of this Congress on Wednesday — offering the promise that lawmakers may be able to break through the broader impasse that has stymied progress on the issue.
The bills — all easy-to-stomach, rifle-shot measures — are meant to help lawmakers move on from the stalemates of the previous Congress, when constant electoral messaging and philosophical differences left hardened stances that stalled issues ranging from nuclear waste to offshore oil and gas revenue sharing.
(Bloomberg)
Senator Tom Libous, a champion of fracking in the New York Legislature, is blocking a bill that would delay drilling for natural gas for at least two more years. Passage of the measure would harm the prospects of a real-estate company founded by Libous’s wife and run by a business partner and campaign donor.
The donor, Luciano Piccirilli, operates Da Vinci II LLC, which owns 230 acres near Oneonta, west of Albany. Da Vinci II’s rights to underground natural gas are leased to a drilling company, property and corporate records show.
(New York Times)
The federal government has approved New York City’s plan to spend the first $1.77 billion in aid for Hurricane Sandy recovery, with the money expected to start flowing by early summer to homeowners, businesses and others in need.
The biggest chunk of money, $648 million, will go to programs to rebuild homes and make them more storm-resistant, according to the city’s plan. That amount also includes $9 million for rental subsidies for up to 24 months intended mostly for low-income renters and people at risk of homelessness.
(AP)
DETROIT — A state agency canceled a Wednesday event to honor the safety record of a Detroit oil refinery where a recent fire forced the temporary evacuation of some nearby homes.
The Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration had planned to present Marathon Petroleum Corp. with an award Wednesday for an outstanding safety and health record, and issued an advisory Tuesday to promote the event.
On Wednesday morning, however, the agency said in a statement it canceled the event while the company investigated the fire.
A number of residents had to leave their homes in nearby Melvindale because of the April 27 fire. No one was injured in the blaze, which burned a tank that the company said held wastewater produced in refining processes.
- « previous page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- …
- next page »
|
© InsideClimate News |