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 !
During my daily hours of ride in the trains to go and come back from the job I read books but also newspapers. This allowed me to read a great article in the New York Times about an unexpected problem with solar power plants in California.
” Just weeks after regulators approved the last of nine multibillion-dollar solar thermal power plants to be built in the Southern California desert, a storm of lawsuits(…) are clouding the future of the nascent industry.“
You would think that an energy source that is virtually CO2 free would have less problems for its plants to be built. (See also this post on the NYT green blog)
The United Nations are launching the Decade for Deserts and the Fight against Desertification, an effort to improve the protection and management of the world’s drylands, home to over two billion people.
Drylands take up 41 percent of the land surface and are threatened by multiple factors such as soil degradation, climate change and unsustainable agriculture practices and poor water management.
An estimated S$42 billion (30 billion euros) is lost every year from desertification and land degradation. One billion people are at risks from desertification.
One of the many worrying consequences of climate change and global warming is desertification. To an expert it is currently spreading like cancer in the Middle East and in NorthAfrica.
Indeed, to data provided by The United Nations Development Programme’s 2009 Arab Human Development Report desertification is threatening 2.8 million square kilometers of land in this region.
With less water available to more people the situation will become even more explosive in the region if nothing was done to put a stop to this phenomenon.
Concentrating Solar Thermal is a fantastic energy source and some experts estimate that it could answer a quarter of the global electricity needs by 2050 if large plants were installed in sunny deserts.
However the New York Times notes that this energy source use significant amounts of water. Since this resource is already scarce in these areas this energy source already triggers tensions.
This is a further example of how no energy source is perfect and that energy efficiency and conservation are absolutely vital to our civilization. Continue »
Today is the World Day to Combat Desertification, an initiative raising awareness about this important phenomenon which decreases the amount of water, food and place available to both Nature and Mankind.
As the UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner noted: “Land degradation threatens nearly a billion people in some 100 countries and it is estimated that around a third of the world’s lands are experiencing desertification.”
Climate change is one of the factors explaining desertification but is not the only one. To learn out more, please check out the UNEP press release and the official website.
I was writing in a comment that solar thermal could and even should provide electricity to the nations of the Middle East and how it would much better than nuclear. It seems I was quite right.
Published by an environmental NGO and various official bodies specialized in solar energy, a study notes that concentrated solar power (CSP) in deserts could bring a quarter of the global electricity by mid-century.
To date, CSP provides a mere 430 MW worldwide but things could change fast as this energy offers multiple advantages such as virtually zero greenhouse gases emissions. Continue »
