Visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is managing the latest soothing exercise for the US in India, which like China has now been told America will not try to impose conditions on economic growth. Of course there’s lots of positive hype, but the bottom line is that developing countries are being excused for being as bad as the developed world has been til now. Is this really the right message from a country intending to “lead” on climate change?
Fish: not only are there less of them, but there’s less to them. A new French study suggests fish have lost half their body mass over the past 20-30 years and that smaller species are making up a larger proportion of fish stocks - because of global warming. This will have major impacts on fecundity, and on food chains.
So nuclear is a good option? Not if no-one wants the waste. The British government’s plan to build a ₤13.8 billion underground storage facility for radioactive waste was offered to any local council that wanted it – but after three years, there are no takers.
Britain’s planned emissions trading scheme is seriously flawed because there will be too many free emissions credits as a result of the recession, climate campaign group Sandbag claims. The group is calling for much tougher caps on permitted credits.
Renewable sources now provide 11.1% of total US power generation, the Energy Information Administration says. Wind power showed the biggest growth last year with generation increasing by more than a third.
Plans to reduce rising emissions from global shipping have stalled, with the International Maritime Organization (IMO) delaying a decision on raising the cost of ship fuel to provide an offset fund. However the IMO meeting did agree draft technical measures to improve ship design.
Samsung Electronics is to invest 5.4 trillion won ($4.3 billion) in green R&D and facilities to make the world's largest memory chip maker a leading eco-friendly company by 2013. The aim is to reduce production emissions by 50 percent and to increase energy efficiency in all its products.
The US could cut power-generation greenhouse emissions by 20 percent immediately if it closed around 900 antiquated inefficient small coal stations and instead used the full capacity of its natural gas-powered plants – which currently run only 36% of the time because regulators prefer energy from coal, according to Sen. Robert Kennedy Jr.
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