Singapore-based Sindicatum has 28 projects in China, India, Southeast Asia and the United States that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The group has a total of US$310 million to invest, including a fund of more than US$200 million.
The price of solar panels is falling fast enough to hurt Western manufacturers, but it is not yet low enough to make the sun a competitive source of electricity
SOLAR power has become an unlovely adolescent. It used to be a sweet little thing, shiny and new and full of promise. One day it will doubtless grow into a solid citizen, quite possibly a person of substance. At the moment it is stuck in between; no longer a child to be coddled and pampered, but not yet able to pay its own way. This presents a challenge both for the governments who want to see it grow up big and strong, and the companies that have been making money out of its progress to date. No one doubts that it will continue to grow; the question is who will suffer most from the growing pains.
Solar energy is popular because it is clean and abundant. The problem is that it remains expensive. According to recent calculations by the International Energy Agency, power from photovoltaic systems (solar cells) costs $200-600 a megawatt-hour, depending on the efficiency of the installation and the discount rate applied to future output. That compares with $50-70 per MWh for onshore wind power in America, by the IEA’s reckoning, and even lower prices for power from fossil fuels, unless taxes on greenhouse-gas emissions are included. The costs of solar are dropping; in some sunny places it may, in a few years, be possible to get solar electricity as cheaply from a set of panels as from the grid, and later on for solar to compete with conventional ways of putting electricity into the grid. But for the moment there would be no significant market for solar cells were it not for government subsidies. …
A backlash to New Zealand’s vow of purity
FANS combing internet sites are not the only people eagerly anticipating a pair of epic fantasy movies based on “The Hobbit”, by J.R.R. Tolkien, that it is planned will start filming this year. New Zealand’s tourist industry, too, is eager to see the islands’ sweeping and unsullied vistas revealed once more to millions of cinemagoers, as they were almost a decade ago when the first of the three films based on Tolkien’s “The Lord of The Rings” was released. Those films did a great deal to boost the country’s tourism trade (Air New Zealand promoted itself as the “airline to Middle Earth”), fitting nicely with the country ’s “100% Pure New Zealand” marketing slogan, first used a couple of years earlier.
But how much of this is, indeed, a fantasy? Last November, in his “Greenwash” column for the Guardian, a British newspaper, environmental journalist Fred Pearce pointed out that New Zealand’s greenhouse-gas emissions had risen 22% since 1990 (its commitment under the Kyoto Protocol was to keep them level) and were now 60% greater per head than Britain’s. The image New Zealand attempted to show the world amounted to a “shameless two fingers to the global community” in the face of a far dirtier reality, including the world’s third-highest rate of car ownership, and methane-belching cows that help to push agricultural emissions to almost half the country’s total. …
Industry’s move from the rich to the poor world is confusing the carbon accounts
ON MARCH 4th The Economist ran a story about the challenges facing scientists who are trying to find out which greenhouse gases come from where. On March 8th a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Steve Davis and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s campus at Stanford University brought to the fore a further problem in trying to figure out who emits what—one that turns not on how carbon flows through the atmosphere and biosphere, but on how it flows through the world economy. Who should be held responsible for the greenhouse-gas emissions involved in making, say, a flat-screen television? The country where the television is made? Or the country where it ends up being used?
Looking at the carbon emissions associated with a country’s consumption, rather than its production, does not change the general outline of what is going on in the world: rich people still emit more carbon dioxide than poor people do. But it does heighten the contrast. Rich countries which import manufactured goods from poorer ones end up with even higher emissions; poor countries that export a lot of manufactured goods with lower ones. Using figures from 2004, the most up to date that have the sort of industry-specific data they need, Dr Davis and Dr Caldeira reveal the striking scale of this effect. They find that roughly a quarter of the world’s emissions end up being consumed somewhere other than where they are produced. For a few small and reasonably post-industrial countries, such as Switzerland, the emissions associated with total consumption (emissions produced in Switzerland minus those associated with goods produced there and subsequently exported plus those associated with goods imported) are more than twice the emissions actually produced on Swiss territory. …
The best way to make hospitals green is to keep people out of them
IN JANUARY the National Health Service (NHS) in England calculated its carbon footprint as the equivalent of 21m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year—just short of the amount emitted by the Drax coal-fired power station in Yorkshire, western Europe’s largest. Unlike the power station’s emissions, though, those of the health service have been increasing: they have grown by half since 1990. Other countries fare no better. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that America’s health-care industry accounts for 8% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In Germany, a study by the Viamedica Foundation showed that a hospital’s energy expenditure per bed was roughly the same as that of three newly built homes.
The past few years have seen efforts to make things greener. The King Edward Memorial hospital in Mumbai, for example, was recently remodelled with solar heaters and rainwater-collection units. Many hospitals are switching from standard light-bulbs to compact fluorescent or LED lights. The Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas, was the first hospital to be certified “platinum” under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards of the United States’ Green Building Council—the highest designation there is. …
In its quarterly look at green IT, Forrester found that as the global recession begins to ebb, businesses are starting to ramp up investments in green IT. And while the Obama administration has been making green technology a key tool for driving down greenhouse gas emissions, what’s fueling the interest among IT professionals is not regulatory compliance, but costs driving down energy and other IT-related expenses.
– As the budgetary crunch brought on the by global recession begins to
ease, enterprises are starting to refocus their efforts on green
technology, according to a recent report from Forrester Research.
In its latest quarterly report on the subject, Forrester analysts
are finding that steadily grow…
HP, IBM and Yahoo were among the recipients of grants from the Department of Energy for projects aimed at making data centers more energy efficient through innovative components, better power supplies and improved cooling tchnologies. The $47 million in federal stimulus money will be matched by $70 million in private industry donations.
– The Department of Energy is handing out $47 million in grants to
projects aimed at increasing energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse
gas emissions from data centers and other IT facilities.
The grants, announced Jan. 6, will be distributed among 14 private
projects around the country, and wil…
Sara Flounders writes:By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.***The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin d…
New Delhi: After attending the UN Summit for Climate Change in Copenhagen Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday left for India.
He arrived in Copenhagen to join leaders from over110 countries on Friday. He also negotiated with leaders of China,Brazil and South Africa.
The leaders of the four BASIC countries like Brazil, South Africa, China including India [...]
1997: Negotiators from every country in the world agree on a deal to cut the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
After years of global negotiations and more than a week of round-the-clock meetings in Kyoto, Japan, representatives agreed to a sketch of a climate treaty that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol. The draft assigned [...]
The demand for answers continues as world climate-change leaders gather in Copenhagen for a summit on climate change.
On Monday, the EPA released a statement saying greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health and welfare.
But a new CNN poll finds that while most Americans believe that global warming is a proven fact, the number who think that climate change is due to man-made emissions has fallen below 50%.  We want to hear your views on global warming.
Post your video responses and we’ll show some during CNN Newsroom.
Who would pay more to tackle climate change?
AROUND 100 world leaders are set to attend the UN climate-change summit in Copenhagen to discuss a global deal to replace the Kyoto protocol. This will be tough. Scientists estimate that greenhouse-gas emissions from rich countries need to be cut by 25%-40% to keep global warming to a 2ºC rise above pre-industrial levels. The offers at Copenhagen add up to around 15%, with America offering only around 4%. The cost of averting an even bigger rise in temperature is put at a relatively small 1% of global output—a price, it seems, that many people are happy to pay. In a poll for the World Bank, over 40% of people in 13 countries said they would be willing to pay this extra amount for energy and other goods to help tackle climate change. China is the keenest on spending more while Russians were most unwilling to fork out any extra.
…
As if the climate change debate isn’t politically charged enough, recently leaked e-mails that appear to challenge the science of man-made greenhouse emissions is sure to heat the debate at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
– As climate change
critics, skeptics and outright deniers have a romp at the expense of facts and
scientific research over the disclosure of leaked e-mails at a British research
facility suggesting the threat that man-made greenhouse gas emissions is overstated,
delegates are arriving in Copenhag…
The GSMA, with The Climate Group, released a Green Manifesto, suggesting industry-wide changes to help lower greenhouse gas emissions. Contributing to its launch, at the Mobile Asia Congress event, were executives from China Mobile and Huawei.
– From the Mobile Asia Congress in Hong Kong, the GSM
Association (GSMA), in collaboration with The Climate Group, introduced a Green
Manifesto, a document outlining goals for lowering greenhouse gas emissions, as
well as steps that mobile communications companies can take to lower emissions
in ot…
The tiny Nano cars made by India’’s Tata Motors have been described by company director Jamshed J. Irani as having huge potential.
Even as analysts claim that the Nano could rock the international auto industry and put millions of new Indian drivers on the road, Irani told the Washington Post in an interview that while Tata [...]
The change in greenhouse-gas emissions in industrialised countries
THE volume of greenhouse gases emitted by 40 industrialised countries that report under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change increased by 1% in 2007 and by 3% from 2000 to 2007. But measured from 1990, the base year for Kytoto protocol targets, emissions fell by 4%. Britain has improved by switching from coal- to gas-fired power stations. But countries with significant primary industries, such as mining or forestry, tend to emit far greater quantities of greenhouse gases. Australia’s emissions are greater than France’s, though its economy is much smaller.
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The G20 will end subsidies on fossil fuels
TO LITTLE fanfare, world leaders at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh announced that they would phase out fossil-fuel subsidies in the medium term. The G20 (actually 19 countries plus the European Union and international financial institutions) account for 80% of greenhouse-gas emissions. The International Energy Agency estimates that poor countries, defined as those outside the OECD, spend $310 billion a year on such subsidies, mainly for petrol. But because the rural poor use little fossil fuel, these mainly benefit middle-income and higher-earning urban types. Rich countries also subsidise fossil fuels, by some $20 billion-$30 billion annually. The IEA and OECD calculate that eliminating fossil-fuel subsidies would result in a 10% reduction in global greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
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