The Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment says conditions placed by the US as part of its climate fast-start finance initiative is killing the Indian solar panel industry. According to the CSE, the US Exim Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation are offering low-interest loans to solar project developers in India only if they buy the equipment, the solar panels and cells from US companies. As a result most orders are being bagged by US companies rather than local manufacturers, putting the domestic solar photo-voltaic industry at risk, says CSE deputy director Chandra Bhushan. Fast start finance is a $30 billion fund set up under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The fund, adopted at the Copenhagen climate meet in 2009, is meant to help developing nations deal with the impact of climate change and limit greenhouse gas emissions, says Bhushan. --Labonita Ghosh,
Economic Times of India, 17 August 2012
Britain is supposed to be on the cusp of a nuclear renaissance. A country whose last new nuclear plant was hooked up to the grid in 1995 now aims to have five new stations operating by 2025. With two reactors apiece, the new plants would together generate 16 gigawatts (GW) - one billion watts - of affordable, low-carbon power - a crucial part of the Government’s plans to keep the lights on as polluting coal and old nuclear plants are retired. Or at least, that was the plan. But with nuclear developers pulling out, policy proposals deemed unworkable and costs spiralling, the chances of it actually happening on time - and affordably - seem, at best, slim. --Emily Gosden,
The Daily Telegraph, 21 August 2012
So Tim Yeo, the conflicted committee chairman, will question John Gummer, the conflicted candidate on whether conflicts of interest are acceptable. I imagine this could be a penetrating cross-examination. It promises to be Commons comedy gold. --Andrew Montford,
Bishop Hill, 19 August 2012
Contrary to “consensus” climate change wisdom, this remote mountain region where China, India and Pakistan intersect is not losing its glaciers, it is gaining ice mass. Not only is the Karakorum not contributing to sea-level rise, it is responsible for a slight drop in the world's oceans—for now. Did someone say “settled science?” This is the most unsettling thing about climate change, and nature itself: the “facts” keep changing. Sometimes this is due to science improving and sometimes it is due to nature itself changing. Those who talk about nature, science and climate change in absolutes, those who pretend to know what the future holds, are trying to fool the rest of us, or they are fools themselves. --Doug L. Hoffman,
The Resilient Earth, 21 August 2012
Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes. So far all of these specters have turned out to be exaggerated. True, we have encountered obstacles, public-health emergencies, and even mass tragedies. But the promised Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It—have consistently failed to materialize. To see the full depth of our apocaholism, and to understand why we keep getting it so wrong, we need to consult the past 50 years of history. –
Matt Ridley, Wired, 17 August 2012
