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 !
I wanted to write about how I am witnessing the weirding and warming climate myself. So far, France has seen an incredibly dry spring with dramatic droughts to the point of endangering many cultures. Then, summer came, with rain, a lot of it.
It was one of the rainiest summers I had seen. You would think that it would be enough ? Nope, we had so far an unusually dry and warm fall [Fr]. Two weeks ago we had up to 20°C, 10°C above the norms.
So to sum up : drought in spring, rain in summer and warm fall, ie. completely messed up seasons. I wonder what our climate will look like in 2030 and beyond if it goes on like this…
Yesterday I was fortunate to attend a conference given by Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet – known here by her initials, NKM - the incumbent Minister for Ecology and Sustainable Development of France.
Green causes are going forward in France as she is at the top of this most important Minister and I am sure that the many achievements of the Grenelle de l’Environnement are just the beginning for a more sustainable France.
During the Q&A session after the conference, I was able to ask her opinion on how the European Union could go for more ambitious emissions reduction targets. Continue »
Here is another post I wrote on Cleantechies : ” While I was visiting my family in the Region of Lorraine – North Eastern France – I came across two distinct news illustrating the possible future of the region, and in a way, of the whole country. ”
” The first one is about dirty polluting fossil energy as to Elixir Petroleum, an Australian company, there would be massive quantities of shale oil and gas in Lorraine’s soil. ”
As always with guest posts, to keep reading, please check out their website. I look forward to reading your comments and thoughts there.
To Ecogeek : ” Paris has introduced plans for a city-wide EV car-sharing network that will operate much like its successful Velib bike-sharing system. The car-sharing program will begin on December 5 with 250 EVs available. “
” The system will allow to pick up and drop off the cars at different locations as long as they’re returned to a designated parking spot. The chosen vehicles, called Bluecars, will (..) let drivers know where those parking spaces are. “
” The Bluecars are tiny, compact EVs (which) will have solid-state lithium metal polymer batteries that Pininfarina claims have a lifespan of 200,000 km and require no maintenance. “
Electric cars are great as they consume much less energy and don’t rely on dirty foreign oil to transport people. They promise to be all the rage in the years and decades to come, but to date, we see very few of them.
But what if we transformed today’s cars into electric ones ? This is the question raised by Andrew Revkin’s article on Dot Earth. This got me thinking and I wanted to document myself on that promising matter.
To Gas 2.0 this has been the case many times over already with various kinds of cars such as a Corvette, a roadster or a VW Beetle to name but a few. 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 »
First, the good ones : To Reuters : ” Significant progress has been made in efforts to contain and stabilise the situation at Fukushima, the head of the United Nations atomic agency said on Friday.”
And some bad : To the Wall Street Journal ” EDF announced that its EPR project in Flamanville, France (…) will be delayed until 2016, due to “both structural and economic reasons,” which will bring the project’s total cost to EUR6 billion.”
The reactor was due to start in 2014 and to cost much less… Meanwhile, China announced a nuclear power breakthrough by switching on its first fast breeder reactor.
Here is my latest post for CleanTechies : “On Monday, the French Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, presented new regulations for large solar installations.”
“(…) Let us hope these new projects will be successful as the previous attempts at creating an solar photovoltaic industry in France have been a resounding failure. ”
” (…) In any case, we shall see whether these most ambitious objectives will be reached and whether sustainable jobs in the sector will be created. So stay tuned !“
According to the WWF : ” WWF and Lafarge, the world’s largest cement maker, today agreed to continue working together to further reduce the company’s greenhouse gas emissions and to help build hundreds of energy-efficient buildings. ”
” (…) The company has been a member of WWF’s Climate Savers Programme since 2001 and has already exceeded previously set emissions reductions targets, leading to net emission reduction of 21.7% per ton of cement below 1990 levels in 2010. “
It seems some companies really understand that we have to commit ourselves to slashing our greenhouse gases emissions as much and as fast as possible. Continue »
” Last week the French government was the first to enact a law forbidding hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking”. This technology enables to recover shale gas via the use of massive amounts of water and chemicals.”
” The former remaining afterward polluted, hence the controversy. The law had been discussed by both the lower and upper chambers since March before being finally enacted on June 30th by the Senate with 176 votes in favor and 151 against. ”
This is the introduction to my latest post for Cleantechies. For more please read the full article there. All comments and feedback are welcome !
