New England Clean Energy Council

Canadian oil sands projects are likely to kill up to 166 million birds over the next 50 years through habitat loss, pollution, and other effects, according to a study by a coalition of environmental groups.

source: Reuters

A federal judge on Tuesday limited the scope of President Clinton's popular "roadless rule" to federal lands in 10 Western states instead of the whole country, leaving some 13.6 million acres of roadless forests largely unprotected from road-building and other development. Tuesday's ruling is a compromise between throwing the rule out and keeping protections in place for most roadless forests in the U.S. Two federal appeals courts are expected to rule on the matter next year.

source: Associated Press

At the United Nations climate conference in Poland this week, a coalition of over 40 island nations called for extremely ambitious reductions in world greenhouse-gas emissions, fearing the effects of rising seas. The nations proposed that industrialized countries slash their emissions more than 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and more than 95 percent by 2050. "We are not prepared to sign a suicide agreement that causes small island states to disappear," said Selwin Hart of Barbados.

source: Reuters

The U.S. EPA on Tuesday approved a controversial rule change that the Bush administration has been trying to make for years which eases restrictions on burying streams under piles of mining waste, making mountaintop-removal mining easier. "By signing off on a rule to eliminate a critical safeguard for streams, the EPA has abdicated its responsibility and left the local communities that depend on these waters at risk," said Ed Hopkins of the Sierra Club.

sources: Earthjustice, The New York Times

POZNAN, Poland, Dec 2, 2008 (AFP) -- The head of the world's top climate scientists says he is stunned at the trillion-dollar cheques that have been signed to ease the banking crisis when funding for poverty and global warming is scrutinised or denied.

In an interview on the sidelines of the U.N. climate talks here, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he was both astonished and dismayed at the imbalance. "It seems very strange, what has happened in the past two or three months," he told AFP.

"It defies any kind of logic, if you look at the type of money that the world has spent on these bailouts, 2.7 trillion dollars (2.13 trillion euros) is the estimate, and it's been done so quickly and without questioning." Pachauri recalled that when the Millennium Development Goals for attacking poverty and sickness were being drawn up, a panel chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico, suggested "a fairly modest estimate" of 50 billion dollars a year in help for poor countries.

"But everyone scoffed at it. Nobody did a damn thing," Pachauri said in the interview on Monday.

"(Yet) here, you've got agencies, you've got organisations that are not only responsible for their own failure but the failure of the entire economic system, and they get cheques worth 2.7 trillion dollars. I find this amazing... What can you say, what can you do?"

Pachauri suggested that this two-sided story illustrated a "distortion" in the economic system.

Carbon emissions -- the fossil-fuel pollution that stokes climate change -- were another example, whereby the true cost of using or abusing natural resources was not factored in to calculations, he said.

"Once the dust settles and we know the direction the world is going to move in, I think there will be a very deep and major reappraisal of the way we've been growing economically," said Pachauri.

"I think we will have a major spring cleaning of the economic system ... I believe that you will get a shift towards much more efficient use of natural resources, much more efficient use of energy, and certainly doing away with a lot of waste."

The December 1-12 talks in Poznan, taking place under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are intended to serve as a springboard to an ambitious new treaty to slash emissions of greenhouse gases beyond 2012. The deal is scheduled to be completed in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Pachauri, who also made a speech to the conference, pointed to the latest scientific evidence on climate change, put forward last year in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report -- a landmark document that helped earn the panel the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore.

Only seven years are left, warned Pachauri, for global emissions of greenhouse gases to peak and then start declining, in order to stem warming to around two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels. Tackling the problem would cost less than three percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2030, a fleabite when compared to the bill that would come from drought, flood, rising sea levels and storms, he said. Pachauri added that he was pressing for a meeting with U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to drive home his message.

"If I can get 10 minutes with him, that's all I'll need," he said.

Copyright 2008 -- Agence France-Presse

The European Union has reportedly struck a deal with the bloc's automakers, agreeing to rules that would see car manufacturers cut their fleets' emissions 18 percent by 2015 and 40 percent by 2020. The E.U. had proposed a tougher standard last year, but heavy lobbying from automakers successfully diluted the goals.

source: Reuters

A man convicted of accidentally killing three bald eagles in the 1990s was pardoned by President Bush last week. Leslie Owen Collier of Missouri left hamburger poisoned with pesticide to kill some coyotes, but many of the animals that then ate the coyotes also died, including a red-tailed hawk, a great horned owl, and three bald eagles.

source: The Washington Post

California's largest solar-panel installation was completed this week atop a warehouse in Southern California; 600,000 square feet of solar panels will produce enough electricity to power some 1,300 homes. The installation is the first in the utility Edison's ambitious plan to affix solar panels on some two square miles of rooftops in the state.

source: Associated Press

Ford Motor Co. is planning a significant product shift that will focus on the manufacture of small, fuel-efficient cars in lieu of its largely failed strategy since the 1990s to churn out mostly large vehicles like trucks and SUVs. Ford's plan is meant to woo Congress into granting the Big Three U.S. automakers a much-needed $25 billion loan package.

source: The Wall Street Journal

BRASILIA, Dec. 1, 2008 (AFP) -- The Brazilian government on Monday announced a plan under which it would cut deforestation of the Amazon by 70 percent over the next decade.

It is the first time Brazil, home to the largest area of tropical woodland on the planet, has set a target for reducing the damage wreaked by illegal loggers and ranchers.

Environment Minister Carlos Minc unveiled the initiative in the presence of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and said it would be formally presented at a U.N. climate change conference underway this week in Poland.

"Just in terms of avoided deforestation in the Amazon, the plan foresees a reduction of 4.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide that won't be emitted up to 2018 -- which is more than the reduction efforts fixed by all the rich countries," Minc said.

The minister said Brazil hopes to use the plan to "increase the number of contributors to the Amazon Fund" launched last August which aims to collect money from around the world to fight deforestation.

Copyright 2008 -- Agence France-Presse

POZNAN, Poland, Dec 1, 2008 (AFP) -- War, hunger, poverty and sickness will stalk humanity if the world fails to tackle climate change, a 12-day U.N. conference on global warming heard on Monday.

A volley of grim warnings sounded out at the start of the marathon talks, a step to a new worldwide treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and help countries exposed to the wrath of an altered climate.

"Humankind in its activity just reached the limits of the closed system of our planet Earth," said Polish Environment Minister Maciej Nowicki, elected to chair the December 1-12 meeting in the city of Poznan.

"Further expansion in the same style will generate global threats of really great intensity -- huge droughts and floods, cyclones with increasingly more destructive power, pandemics of tropical disease, dramatic decline of biodiversity, increasing ocean levels," said Nowicki.

"All these can cause social and even armed conflict and migration of people at an unprecedented scale."

The forum of the 192-member U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) comes halfway in a two-year process, launched in Bali, Indonesia, that aims at crafting a new pact in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Nowicki's warning was underscored by Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides neutral scientific opinion on global warming and its impacts.

"The impacts of climate change, if there is inaction, can be extremely serious," he said, delivering some sobering statistics to sharpen minds among the almost 11,000 conference participants in Poznan.

The number of people living in severely stressed river basins is projected to rise from 1.4 to 1.6 billion in 1995 to 4.3-6.9 billion in 2050, Pachauri said.

"That's almost the majority of humanity," he said. Between 20 and 30 percent of species assessed will be at increasingly high risk of extinction as global temperatures exceed two to three degrees centigrade (3.6-5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, he said. Progress under the so-called Bali Roadmap has been bogged down over demands for concessions and the sheer complexity of a deal.

Rich countries are historically to blame for most of today's warming. They are lobbying for emerging giant countries, led by China and India, which will be the big polluters of tomorrow, to do more to tackle their surging emissions.

Developing countries, meanwhile, want the West to help pay for them to expand their economies in a sustainable manner and to stump up cash to help vulnerable countries cope with climate change.

Hopes for a breakthrough at Poznan have also been darkened by the global economic crisis.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, prime minister of Denmark, which is tasked with steering the proposed treaty to a conclusion, urged countries not to be deterred and argued that investing in green technology created growth and jobs. "I feel confident that the financial crisis will be overcome. The recovery will come. However climate change is not going to become less of a problem in the coming years," he said.

Environmental pressure groups agreed, with Greenpeace saying that the global recession was "nothing compared to the trillions of dollars that climate change will cost us."

"The current finance crunch was the result of ignoring major risks, so let's not repeat this mistake by ignoring the even bigger risks from climate change," said the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Delegates in Poland will be examining an 82-page document containing a vast range of proposals for action beyond 2012, when emissions-curbing pledges under the Kyoto Protocol run out.

The hope is to condense this labyrinthine document into a workable blueprint for negotiations culminating in a deal in Copenhagen.

One spur for optimism is the election of Barack Obama as US president, who has vowed to sweep away George W. Bush's climate policies which caused the United States to be isolated in the world environmental arena since 2001. Obama has set a goal of reducing US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent by 2050, using a cap-and-trade system and a 10-year programme worth 150 billion dollars in renewable energy.

Copyright 2008 -- Agence France-Presse

 

POZNAN, Poland, Dec 1, 2008 (AFP) -- Green groups upped the pressure at U.N. climate talks in Poland on Monday with wacky stunts aimed at prodding delegates from around the world to get moving on a new deal to tackle global warming.

The World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, welcomed the almost 11,000 participants at the 12-day talks in Poznan by handing out walnuts and urging them to "crack the climate nut" and overcome negotiation deadlock.

Greenpeace meanwhile unveiled a three-metre (10-foot) high sculpture depicting the Earth on the brink of destruction from a "tidal wave" of carbon dioxide made of wood and coal.

"So far there is still an utter lack of any kind of visionary leadership in these talks. There are still governments that repeatedly fail to grasp the urgency of the crisis," Greenpeace said.

"That's why we need to make ourselves heard, because the impacts of climate change are racing ahead of the scientific projections."

It also launched a video running through 20 years of speeches and "broken promises" on climate change from the likes of former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian premier Silvio Berlosconi.

The forum in Poland of the 192-member U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) comes halfway in a two-year process, launched in Bali, Indonesia, that aims at crafting a new pact in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Delegates in Poland are tasked with whittling down an 82-page document containing a vast range of proposals for action into a workable blueprint for negotiations culminating in a deal in the Danish capital.

Aid agency Oxfam said that climate change would "increase global poverty and halt -- eventually reverse -- human development if governments fail to take major steps."

Copyright 2008 -- Agence France-Presse

On the eve of the next round of United Nations climate-treaty talks in Poznan, Poland, U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer warned the world's nations against a "cheap and dirty" fix for the economy that could set back climate progress. "We must now focus on the opportunities for green growth that can put the global economy onto a stable and sustainable path," he said.

sources: Reuters, Associated Press

The Atlantic hurricane season officially ended Sunday, marking the close of the second-most-costly season since 2005, and the fourth-busiest season overall since 1944. This year was "the only year on record in which a major hurricane existed in every month from July through November in the north Atlantic," according to the National Climatic Data Center.

source: CNN

BERLIN, Nov 26 -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged the EU Wednesday not to water down its climate protection goals in the face of a global recession and called for a worldwide deal on slashing CO2 emissions.

"I say here very clearly that I do not believe it would be right to sacrifice the well-founded climate goals of the European Union," Merkel told parliament during a debate on the federal budget.

The EU has fixed an ambitious triple objective for itself to achieve by 2020 the so-called 20-20-20 goals: a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels, bringing renewable energy use up to 20 percent of the total, and an overall cut of 20 percent in energy use.

Merkel originally launched the climate change/energy plan during Germany's EU presidency last year.

"That was our goal and that remains our goal," Merkel said.

A compromise on a binding deal may be reached on the issue during an EU summit in Brussels in mid-December.

The current text calls for some energy-intensive industries to pay for pollution rights starting in 2013.

Nearly 10,000 European firms currently benefit each year from free emissions rights when they exceed authorised pollution levels and some have called for diluting the EU plan until the economic crisis has passed.

Making companies pay for those rights is particularly contested in Germany, which is still home to several heavy industries, in particular the chemicals sector.

An unpublished economy ministry report leaked to the German press Tuesday said Germany could lose more than 100,000 jobs if the EU makes industries pay for pollution rights that are free at present.

Merkel acknowledged that Europe should not hobble itself in international competition considering that "outside Europe there is no (emission-rights) certificates system on a major scale".

"This must be negotiated... so jobs are not endangered," she said.

She said Germany was "pleased" that US president-elect Barack Obama "makes the impression that he is more open to climate protection" than President George W. Bush.

"We will have many opportunities to test that out this year and next year but we of course need an even playing field worldwide," she said.

The Polish city of Poznan will host a UN climate conference from December 1-12 to prepare the ground for talks in Copenhagen in December 2009 to complete a draft international treaty on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The aim of the international accord, which will be the most complex and ambitious environmental deal ever attempted, is also to channel funds, technology and expertise to poor countries bearing the brunt of climate change.

Copyright 2008 -- Agence France-Presse

The 2,400 solar panels covering the roof of a giant concert hall in the Vatican were activated on Wednesday. And seeing that now the pope is open to solar systems, Galileo shook his fist in his grave.

sources: Reuters, Catholic News Service, Agence France-Presse
see also, in Grist: 
• Pollution is on Vatican's updated list of moral sins
• Pope urges youth to care for the planet
• A Grist special series on God & the Environment

Broadway went green on Tuesday with the official announcement of the creatively named Broadway Goes Green effort. Think neon signs lit with energy-efficient bulbs, costumes washed with eco-friendly detergent, and programs printed with water-soluble ink. Oh, the drama!

source: The New York Times

The Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday partially backed off from unpopular plans to open land near Utah national parks to oil and gas drilling. BLM deferred leasing about one-third of the 93 tracts that the National Park Service had objected could contaminate parks with noise, water, and air pollution; the rest will still go on the auction block Dec. 19.

sources: Associated Press, The Salt Lake Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Deseret News
see also, in Grist: Obama looks to reverse Bush's drilling efforts in Utah

Los Angeles will source one-tenth of its energy from solar power by 2020 under a plan unveiled Monday by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Considering the town's many celebrities, a plan to tap star power is certainly forthcoming.

source: Los Angeles Times

Big Auto cannot sue to keep Rhode Island from enforcing tighter vehicle emissions standards, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres said, essentially, that pending cases were pointless and a waste of time, seeing as automakers have already lost similar battles in California and Vermont.

sources: The AM Law Daily, Associated Press