Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
Here is my latest post on Cleantechies : “The European Environment Agency published in November a report on the cost, the toll, of air pollution due to industrial facilities to the European Union. “
” And the costs are staggering as the 10,000 facilities induced up to 102 and 169 billion euros in 2009 alone. However, a small number of these plants are responsible for the vast majority of this pollution. “
As usual to keep reading the article, please check it out there. I hope you will like it and look forward to reading your comments.
To Reuters quoting a local scientific report : ” Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods. “
“China faces extremely grim ecological and environmental conditions under the impact of continued global warming and changes to China’s regional environment,”
Given how the situation is dire already, one can wonder how it could be even worse… This sure explains why the People’s Republic is acting so massively on cleantech. Continue »
One of my very first post in 2010 was about what I was calling the triple crisis. As I noted back then ” our economies are crumbling, our climate is warming and our energy supplies are getting scarcer. “
You would think that after two years, we would have started to do something about them. Well, from what I see, we haven’t. Unemployment is still high, we are still as reliant on oil and coal and our climate is getting weirder.
This is the beginning of my latest article on Cleantechies. To read further, please go there. As always, comments and shares are more than welcome. Enjoy !
I blogged two years ago that CCS won’t solve the climate change problem as it is too risky, too expansive, too little and… too late. Joe Romm, the main contributor behind Climate Progress recently noted :
” There are simply too many unanswered questions for anyone to say today that we could rely on large-scale deployment of Carbon Capture and Storage in the 2030s as a major climate solution. “
Since we need to slash our emissions NOW – and certainly not by 2030 – we can see how useless CCS is. We should work on real solutions instead : energy efficiency, sobriety, renewables and nuclear.
Incandescent light bulbs are a relic of the past, a vastly inefficient past. Modern alternatives like CFLs and LEDs consume five to ten times less energy. For these reasons, the European Union or Australia have already phased them out.
More countries will be doing the same, namingly the United States and China. The latter will start banning 100-watt bulbs in October 2012. Last year over a billion of these bulbs were sold in the People’s Republic.
To Grist : ” The ban will save China 48 billion kilowatt hours of power per year. Which, if I’m doing my math right, is the equivalent of almost 100 nuclear reactors or large coal-fired power plants. “
The Economist noted as early as 2002 that coal is the environmental enemy number one. Yet, it is still used a lot to generate electricity at cheap prices. But this doesn’t even make economic sense.
To Grist : ” Electricity from coal imposes more damages on the U.S. economy than the electricity is worth. That’s right: Coal-fired power is a net value-subtracting industry.”
As a matter of facts, coal costs the US economy $53 billion per year in gross external damages (GED). How much does it cost globally ? That would be interesting to know !
To TreeHugger : ” If (the) Kyoto Protocol dies at COP17 climate talks, so does our climate “. This article reminds us that the next round of UNFCC climate talks will start in less than two months in Durban, South Africa.
It also reminds us that it is the only law we have on a global level on climate and that even if the United States are still not part of the process it is working (quite) well as developed nations decreased their emissions since 1990.
Due to end in 2012, the Kyoto Protocol might not be perfect but really got us moving on climate and energy issues. Continue »
This has made quite the headlines on environmental blogs and newspapers. As TreeHugger puts it : ” Germany now produces 20.8% of its electricity from renewable sources. That’s an increase of 15 percentage points since 2000 “
Now, let’s congratulate the main European economic powerhouse for that. The Germans truly deserve it and we got to give credit where credit is due. But, to me their decision to ditch nuclear – and doing it so fast – is a bad decision.
This is the case for two reasons : 1. the country will have to build new coal and gas fired plants ; 2. Its electricity is already much dirtier than the European average. Continue »
This is the conclusion of a new study carried out by the US NCAR. In their conclusion, they note : ” substitution of gas for coal as an energy source results in increased rather than decreased global warming for many decades “
Climate Progress notes: ” The fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere was first shown by the IEA in its big June report on gas. That study made clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels. “
I guess this should warn governments and companies worldwide that we have to seriously work on efficiency and renewables. And the faster, the better. Continue »
According to the ACEEE * : ” Changes in fossil fuel markets and updates to environmental regulations may result in the retirement of existing coal-fired plants, putting on the order of 40 GW of generation at risk of retirement.”
” The investments required for replacing or upgrading these plants would raise electricity rates for all customers. Customer-side investments in energy efficiency and combined heat and power can replace this capacity at a lower cost. “
This is by no mean really new as we have already discussed about such topics many times over. This just brings further evidence, which is always useful. Continue »
