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 !
A post on TreeHugger got my attention last week. It was about how the President of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, stated that further to the economic downturn in 2007 he putted people before banks and cleantech before fossil fuels.
As the OECD notes, the economic situation is improving quickly and now the country is powered a 100% by low carbon sources. (To be fair, it was nearly the case before as the country benefits from huge geothermal capacities.)
Of course, what was done there couldn’t be completely replicated here in Europe or in America. But I think there are some lessons we could learn… See this article from Time Magazine for more.
… but fossil fuels are progressing even faster. This is in a nutshell the message from the International Energy Agency’s (IEA, the OECD energy office) latest report, the Clean Energy Progress Report. As GreenTechMedia noted :
” Renewable energy generation has grown, on average, by 2.7 percent a year since 1990. Electricity generation, however, has grown by 3 percent, meaning that the steps forward have been eclipsed by the overall market.”
Indeed, coal, despite being dozens of times dirtier than renewables, has fulfilled 47 percent of the new electricity demand in the past decade. Continue »
According to the International Energy Agency, China became in 2009 the world’s biggest energy consumer in front of the USA. Indeed it consumed 2.25 billion tons of oil equivalent (TOE) while the latter consumed 2.17 billions.
To the Wall Street Journal : ” China’s total energy consumption was just half that of the U.S. 10 years ago, but in many of the years since, China saw annual double-digit growth rates. “
The IEA notes that these figures would be much higher without the important energy efficiency efforts carried out in the past few years. Continue »
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – the body regrouping some of the richest nations – is now urging its members to act fast on climate change.
Solutions to this challenge exist and Mankind just needs to apply them. Moreover, they are affordable compared to the cost inaction would have on a global scale.
This is quite revealing of the level of the threat that such an economic body focuses on it. Most importantly we know that it can be avoided. Continue »
