The United States must deliver concrete mid-term greenhouse gas reduction targets by next month or it will destroy efforts to achieve a framework for a global climate change deal in Copenhagen, United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer said Monday as a week of international talks on global warming began in Barcelona.
“I do not think the international community will accept an agreement that lacks clarity from the U.S. on targets,” de Boer said.
The Barcelona talks are the final five days of two years of global negotiations leading up to the crucial UN Climate Change Conference, from Dec. 7-18, in Copenhagen. De Boer’s worst fear now is that the Copenhagen conference will end with a lack of clarity on key issues and lead to a protracted political standoff.
“Negotiations must stop at Copenhagen. Otherwise negotiations will drag on when only the technical work should be going on,” he said.
A decision by the Obama administration to put a concrete 2020 target on the table could be the game changer for the world, he suggested.
Written by Stacy Morford. Originally published on July 9, 2009, at SolveClimate.
In 2001, energy companies across the United States were busy drawing up plans for about 150 new coal-fired power plants. That year, Sierra Club launched its Beyond Coal campaign.
Today, the campaign celebrated its 100th defeat of a proposed coal plant.
“Coal mining is literally blowing the tops of mountains in Appalachia, coal burning is literally heating up our planet, spewing mercury across our landscape, and exposure to coal ash is wreaking havoc on streams and rivers across this country. So in every phase of the lifecycle, coal is filthy business,” Sierra Club campaign director Bruce Nilles said in announcing the milestone.
“We have persuaded the developers, the investors and the decision makers that we can do better than building dirty coal-fired power plants.”
By Stacy Feldman, originally published June 24, 2009, at SolveClimate.com
Washington is starting to wake up to something that’s been obvious to marine scientists for years. The winds blowing off U.S. waters could be a key to a national clean energy and green jobs revolution.
On Tuesday, the federal government awarded five leases to three companies that want to develop wind turbines off the New Jersey and Delaware coasts for the production of renewable energy.
They’re the first such leases the Department of Interior has ever issued for the Outer Continental Shelf. If this official statement is any indication, they won’t be the last:
“We made the development of offshore wind energy a top priority for Interior. The technology is proven, effective and available and can create new jobs for Americans while reducing our expensive and dangerous dependence on foreign oil.”
The declaration comes as the U.S. Congress is in the midst of a debate over a proposal that would create a costly long-distance “transmission highway” to carry land-based wind energy (among other clean and dirty sources) from the Great Plains to the power-hungry cities of the American East.
The LACCD Board of Trustees was thinking about much-needed modernization work and its first new construction in 35 years, but it was also thinking ahead. It passed a sustainable building policy mandating that all new buildings that use 50% or more of bond funding be LEED certified. The board had previously developed a renewable energy plan that aimed for a minimum 10% renewable energy standard.
At the time, the trustees were afraid that anything beyond that would be too costly, says Larry Eisenberg, executive director of Facilities, Planning and Development for the LACCD.
The system’s chancellor and the implementation team saw greater potential, though.
By David Sassoon. Originally published May 28, 2009, at Solveclimate
If Florida embraced its solar and wind power potential and got 20 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020, it would create 37,000 new jobs, generate more than $16 billion in economic activity by 2025, and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 319 million tons, a new study commissioned by the state Department of Environmental Protection shows.
The just-released report examined 28 policy measures in Republican Gov. Charlie Crist’s 2008 Climate Action Plan, including the 20 percent by 2020 renewable electricity standard.
In all, it found that implementing the full Climate Action Plan could add almost 150,000 new jobs and bring almost $40 billion in increased economic activity to the Sunshine state.
By Mindy S. Lubber, president of Ceres, a leading U.S. coalition of investors, environmental groups and other public interest organizations working with companies to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change. Originally published at SolveClimate.
Tom Benson, owner of the World’s Largest Laundromat in Berwyn, Ill., is tired of listening to conservative industry groups’ bluster that climate change legislation is bad for business.
That’s because clean energy saved his.
When Benson bought his business a decade ago, all that hot water helping scrub everything from Speedos to sheets ate up a staggering 25 percent of total monthly revenues. With 153 washers using thousands of gallons of hot water daily, you can only imagine the energy costs. And that’s before factoring in the 148 dryers.
So to cut his natural gas costs, Benson installed a solar hot water system on his roof. Three dozen 10-by-4-foot solar panels now produce more than 2,400 gallons of hot water daily, saving him some $25,000 a year.
“Our energy bills could have sunk this business,” says Benson. “Now, they’re a source of pride.”
Written by Stacy Feldman. Originally published May 14, 2009, at SolveClimate
Solar photovoltaics (PV) in the UK will be as cheap as grid-sourced fossil fuels much sooner than expected, a new study by Solarcentury finds.
For homeowners, PV will cross the “grid parity” mark in 2013. For commercial customers, it will occur around 2018. The magical parity date for PV is generally assumed to be 2020 in [...]
Written by Renee Cho and published on May 10, 2009, at SolveClimate.
Green jobs go far beyond the hands-on renewable energy and energy efficiency work that the Obama administration emphasizes with each new project and grant announcement.
To deal with the effects of climate change, jobs will be springing up across the spectrum of research and development, fueled by billions of dollars in Department of Energy grants and scientific funding provided by the economic recovery program and proposed through the Markey-Waxman bill’s National Climate Change Adaptation Program and Fund.
As Energy Secretary Steven Chu likes to say, borrowing from hockey great Wayne Gretzky:
“The United States should skate to where the puck is going to be.”
It is time for President Obama to mobilize us all to help build the new energy economy.
He has begun shaping the public policies we need. Now he needs to launch an Apollo project, interstate highway project, war effort and Marshall Plan all rolled into one.
For starters, he should call on us all to pick up our caulking guns and enlist in the war against energy waste – a national clean energy surge.
The potential for savings through efficiency improvements and conservation is enormous.
As Obama noted during the campaign, the United States is only the 22nd most energy-efficient major economy in the world right now. With very few exceptions, every vehicle, home, power plant, factory, community and state is hemorrhaging energy, energy dollars and greenhouse gas emissions.
California regulators tonight approved the world’s first low-carbon fuel standard, a bold set of performance-based fuel rules that are being closely watched in more than a dozen other states and countries, as well as in Washington.
Many of the program’s details are still in flux, to be worked out by the Air Resources Board before the standard takes effect in 2012.
The goal was clear, though: achieve a 10 percent reduction in the carbon intensity of transportation fuels by 2020. Fully implemented, California’s LCFS is expected to cut those emissions by 15 million metric tons a year.
“The big picture is we want to incentivize the use of electricity for vehicles. … We want to incentivize innovation,” said Air Resources Board member Daniel Sperling.
