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 !
China is facing a grim future because of climate change, massive pollutions and increasing prices of fossil fuels. To curb its booming energy consumption, it may soon introduce a carbon tax. As China Daily noted :
” China is considering levying a carbon tax within the next three years to tighten its regulations on polluting industries and put the economy on a greener path. (…) The main targets of the tax will be large users of coal, crude oil and natural gas.”
Even if some analysts have called this a hoax, Climate Spectator reminds us the many reasons why a carbon tax is actually the way to go for China, but also for ALL nations…
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 »
To Reuters : ” An Ecuadorean appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling that Chevron Corp should pay $18 billion in damages to plaintiffs who accused the U.S. oil giant of polluting the Amazon jungle and damaging their health. “
” A judge ordered Chevron to pay $8.6 billion in environmental damages last February, but the amount was more than doubled to about $18 billion because Chevron failed to make a public apology as required by the original ruling. “
This brings further development to the story I ran in 2010 where I noted that during three decades Texaco operated hundreds of oil wells without taking any notice of environmental issues. Continue »
The situation is critical in the People’s Republic of China as everyday it is becoming more and more evident than business-as-usual scenario would doom the country, and the world.
As the air pollution in Beijing is reaching truly horrifing levels the local government has called to ” reduce emissions of “major pollutants” by as much as 10 per cent by 2015 “ according to The Telegraph.
To do so, the country will need no less than ” $536 billion (410 billion euros) of investments for environmental protection in the five years through 2015 “ as Bloomberg reports. Continue »
To the Guardian : ” Nationwide, cancer rates have surged since the 1990s to become the nation’s biggest killer. In 2007, the disease was responsible for one in five deaths, up 80% since the start of economic reforms 30 years earlier.
” While the government insists it is cleaning up pollution far faster than other nations at a similar dirty stage of development, many toxic industries have simply been relocated to impoverished, poorly regulated rural areas. “
” Chinese farmers are almost four times more likely to die of liver cancer and twice as likely to die of stomach cancer than the global average, according to study commissioned by the World Bank. “ Continue »
To Climate Progress : “ Wednesday, Shell claimed responsibility for two oil spills dating to 2008 (which) are estimated to exceed the 11 million gallons spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster. “ (over 40 million liters)
” As a 2010 article by the Guardian’s environment editor explained: With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. “
” Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations… ” Continue »
If my Wednesday post on the 19,000 endangered species didn’t put you down, the findings of the International Programme on the State of the Oceans (ISPO) will. As the New York Times green blog notes :
” The state of the oceans is declining far more rapidly than most pessimists had expected, an international team of experts has concluded, increasing the risk that many marine species could be extinct within a generation.”
” (…) we have underestimated the overall risks and that the whole of marine degradation is greater than the sum of its parts, and that degradation is now happening at a faster rate than predicted “
To TreeHugger : “ That’s a lot of species. And it’s roughly 9,000 more than were endangered just over ten years ago, in 2000. That’s the finding of the latest report from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).”
” There are now roughly 19,000 species that are currently threatened with extinction around the world. So why the jump? The usual suspects – deforestation, poaching, climate change, pollution, and invasive species – are largely to blame. ”
But the situation is not completely dark as to The Economist “The news is best for mammals, whose complete dataset has made evaluation easier. The percentage of endangered species has actually fallen since 2000. “
To BusinessWeek : ” The tornado outbreak that killed 327 people in the Southeast last week may have been the largest in U.S. history, with an estimated 305 twisters, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. “
“More than 600 tornadoes formed in all of April, compared with the previous record of 267 set in 1974, the agency said in a statement today. That makes April 2011 the most active month ever “
As you can easily imagine, this stirred quite a lot of debates and discussions at TreeHugger, ClimateProgress and on Andrew Revkin’s blog. Continue »
