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News: ‘Climate & Energy’ Archive

Kathy Freston: The Breathtaking Effects Of Cutting Back On Meat

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

Consume these vegetarian statistics with a grain of salt:

‘If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:
● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
● 70 million gallons of gas–enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
● 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.’

via Kathy Freston: The Breathtaking Effects Of Cutting Back On Meat.

Committee on Energy and Commerce – Chairmen Waxman, Markey Release Discussion Draft of New Clean Energy Legislation

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Chairman Henry A. Waxman of the Energy and Commerce Committee and Chairman Edward J. Markey of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee today released a draft of clean energy legislation that will create jobs, help end our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and combat global warming. The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) is a comprehensive approach to America’s energy policy that charts a new course towards a clean energy economy. [editor’s  strikethrough – coal isn’t clean or new]

via Committee on Energy and Commerce – Chairmen Waxman, Markey Release Discussion Draft of New Clean Energy Legislation.

Highlights:
● Calls for 6% renewable energy by 2012 and 25% by 2025.

● Clean fuels and vehicles. Includes biofuels.

● Smart Electricity Grid.

● This ‘clean energy’ bill draft includes support for developing carbon capture and sequestration as a means to “ensure a continuing place for coal in our nation’s energy future”. Perhaps it’s better just to leave the coal in ground in the first place and avoid a whole host of problems.

Excerpt from the draft summary:

“Carbon Capture and Sequestration. The draft promotes development of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies to ensure a continuing place for coal in our nation’s energy future. CCS is a method of reducing global warming pollution by capturing and injecting underground the carbon dioxide emitted from electricity generation plants that use fossil fuels.”

$3.2B Available in Block Grants for Local Energy Efficiency Upgrades | GreenBiz.com

Monday, March 30th, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Further energy efficiency project funds from the U.S. government’s stimulus package were released this week by the Obama administration in the form of $3.2 billion in block grants for cities, counties, states, territories and Native American tribes.

via $3.2B Available in Block Grants for Local Energy Efficiency Upgrades | GreenBiz.com.

Copenhagen Climate Congress: John Ashton

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Copenhagen, Denmark March 10, 2009

Repeatedly sounded was the ‘what we have here is a failure to communicate‘ theme. John Ashton addressed this concern at a press conference at the Climate Congress:

“Words mean different things. The word ‘uncertainty’ to a politician often means, come back and tell me when you know whether this a problem or not and that’s when I’ll look into it. Uncertainty to a scientist often mean there’s a signal, but there’s an error, an uncertainty in the amplitude of that signal. We don’t know quite how big that is, it may be four and it may be six, and there are plenty of people in the political world, who are quite happy to abuse the rigor that scientists bring to the ways in which they communicate, to serve political purposes which are not necessarily those which the communicators were intending to serve. Politics is a shark infested sea in that sense. My conclusion is, the more effort that people put into understanding not just what they are trying to say, but how it will be heard, how it might be manipulated and made mischief out of, the better the communication will be. Because in the end, we need a much better sense in our society of the urgency of this problem – we haven’t begun to close the gap between what the climate tells us we need to do and what we feel we’re capable of doing.”


See the full text of John Ashton’s plenary address.

Other speakers also contributed to the ‘failure to communicate theme’, including: Professor Lord Nicolas Stern, March 12, “One of the reasons they [the economists] got it wrong is because you [the scientists] didn’t tell them loudly and clearly enough”

Video of D.C. Capital Coal Plant shutdown of March 2

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

A short video documentary of the March 2, 2009 coal plant direct action protest set to rock music:

Meat vs. Climate: The Debate Continues – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

‘At least since a 2006 United Nations report asserted that livestock is responsible for a full 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions — a higher percentage than that caused by transportation — a debate over meat consumption and climate change has been cooking.

The latest round involves a recent editorial in the Archives of Internal Medicine by Barry M. Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. In it, Mr. Popkin revisits several studies linking meat not just with heart disease and other health issues, but also with worldwide consumption of energy and water resources — and global warming.

Water use, Mr. Popkin writes, is two to five times greater worldwide for animal-source food than for basic crops such as legumes and grains. He further argues that livestock production accounts for 55 percent of the erosion process in the United States and is also responsible for one-third of the total discharge of nitrogen and phosphorous to surface water.’

via Meat vs. Climate: The Debate Continues – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com.

Greenland Ice Core Analysis Shows Drastic Climate Change Near End Of Last Ice Age

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

‘Information gleaned from a Greenland ice core by an international science team shows that two huge Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes prior to the close of the last ice age some 11,500 years ago were tied to fundamental shifts in atmospheric circulation.’

via Greenland Ice Core Analysis Shows Drastic Climate Change Near End Of Last Ice Age.

Three Mile Island’s 30th Anniversary Sees Nuclear Renaissance

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Caught between a rock and a hard place:

‘Three decades later, fears of an atomic catastrophe have been largely supplanted by fears about global warming, easing nuclear energy into the same sentence as wind and solar power. Dogged by price spikes and an environmental assault on carbon dioxide emissions, fossil fuels are the new clean-energy pariah.’

via Three Mile Island’s 30th Anniversary Sees Nuclear Renaissance.

Nations Start to Agree on Paying for Climate Pledges – Bloomberg.com

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

‘March 23 (Bloomberg) — Nations are starting to agree on how rich countries could help pay for greenhouse-gas reduction and climate-change adaptation in developing markets, the United Nations said.

A proposed registry would list “nationally appropriate mitigation actions” by developing countries such as China and India and match them with pledges of financial and technological support by developed nations, the UN said in a document on the Web site of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Countries are “converging” on how the registry would work as part of UN climate talks this year, according to the March 17 document. The negotiations will culminate in a December meeting in Copenhagen. Emerging markets want richer countries to cut emissions first, saying the U.S., the European Union and other industrialized nations have contributed most to climate change. Only developed countries have targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which runs through 2012.’

via Nations Start to Agree on Paying for Climate Pledges (Update1) – Bloomberg.com.

Nations Near Arctic Declare Polar Bears Threatened by Climate Change – NYTimes.com

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Five countries that created a treaty nearly four decades ago to protect polar bears through limits on hunting issued a joint statement on Thursday identifying climate change as “the most important long-term threat” to the bears.

via Nations Near Arctic Declare Polar Bears Threatened by Climate Change – NYTimes.com.