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Brown coal makes a comeback amid protests

Germany’s New Coal Boom



Twenty-three new coal-fired power plants are being built across Germany, with the capacity to generate 24,000 megawatts. The German Environment Minister, Peter Altmaier of the conservative Christian Democrat Party, supports the construction of further coal-burning power plants. In order not to jeopardize the German economy, one would have to “be in a position to be able to offer energy at prices that can compare with that of the main power competitors in other industrialized countries.” --Deutsche Welle, 1 August 2012
Will America’s shale gas revolution ever spread to Europe? According to Chevron, it already has. The company has been quietly buying up huge swaths of land across eastern Europe, an area it believes could be the next great frontier for shale gas exploration. It is convinced that the economic arguments for shale will ultimately trump the environmental concerns. --Guy Chazan, Financial Times, 2 August 2012 [Registration Required] In late July, the European Energy Commissioner Günter Oettinger spoke warmly of how the US is aiming to “re-industrialise the country first by oil” and “by accepting some risks with offshore drilling for own resources” including “tar sands and others”. The green lobbies, alerted to Oettinger’s “unguarded” comments, are plainly concerned that the UK’s energy policy schizophrenia has not only spread to Europe but is indicative of growing sentiment in Europe’s capitals. Europe is already undermining its own decarbonisation regime by investing heavily in coal, now the cheapest electric power fuel. the evidence that Europe’s biting economic crisis is driving a greater, fossil-fuelled, energy realism is mounting. –Peter Glover, Energy Tribune, 31 July 2012

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Greenland's ice seems less vulnerable than feared to a runaway melt that would drive up world sea levels, according to a study showing that a surge of ice loss had petered out. The discovery of fluctuations casts doubt on projections that Greenland could be headed for an unstoppable meltdown, triggered by manmade global warming. --Alister Doyle, Reuters, 2 August 2012 The politicization of climate science is so complete that the lead author of the IPCC's Working Group II on climate impacts feels comfortable presenting testimony to the US Congress that fundamentally misrepresents what the IPCC has concluded. I am referring to testimony given by Christopher Field, a professor at Stanford, to the US Senate. What Field says the IPCC says is blantantly wrong, often 180 degrees wrong. It is one thing to disagree about scientific questions, but it is altogether different to fundamentally misrepresent an IPCC report to the US Congress. --Roger Pielke Jr., 1 August 2012 Alberto Boretti writes that the huge deceleration of sea level rise over the last 10 years "is clearly the opposite of what is being predicted by the models," and that "the SLR's reduction is even more pronounced during the last 5 years." To illustrate the importance of his findings, he notes that "in order for the prediction of a 100-cm increase in sea level by 2100 to be correct, the SLR must be almost 11 mm/year every year for the next 89 years," but he notes that "since the SLR is dropping, the predictions become increasingly unlikely," especially in view of the facts that (1) "not once in the past 20 years has the SLR of 11 mm/year ever been achieved," and that (2) "the average SLR of 3.1640 mm/year is only 20% of the SLR needed for the prediction of a one meter rise to be correct." --CO2 Science, 1 August 2012

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Guest Column Dr. Benny Peiser -- Bio and Archives

Items of notes and interest from the web.


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