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Obama Announces Energy and Environment Team |
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Monday 15 December 2008
by: The Associated Press
Washington - President-elect Barack Obama plans to name Democratic Sen.
Ken Salazar of Colorado to run the Interior Department, rounding out an
environmental and energy team charged with quickly tackling global
warming and developing alternative forms of energy.
The choice of Salazar to be secretary of a department that oversees oil
and gas drilling on public lands and manages the nation's parks and
wildlife refuges will be announced later this week, an Obama transition
official said Monday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to
avoid pre-empting Obama's announcement.
Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu will be energy secretary, and
Lisa Jackson, the former head of New Jersey's environmental department,
will head the Environmental Protection Agency, Obama announced Monday.
Carol Browner, a confidante of former Vice President Al Gore, will lead
a White House council on energy and climate. Browner headed the
Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration. Nancy
Sutley, a deputy Los Angeles mayor, will be chair of the White House
Council on Environment Quality.
The President-elect vowed to "move beyond our oil addiction and create
a
new hybrid economy."
Salazar is expected to balance the protection of natural resources while
tapping the nation's energy potential - an approach that Obama has said
he wants .
He co-sponsored a bill in Congress to create a new land conservation
system under the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management for
permanently protecting 26 million acres of national monuments,
wilderness areas and wild and scenic rivers. The legislation died during
the lame duck session of Congress after the November election.
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Obama Left With Little Time to Curb Global Warming |
Sunday 14 December 2008
by: Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press
Washington - When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving
environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb
that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid.
Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent
of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred
since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is
close to running out, and Obama knows it.
"The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over," he said
on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel
Peace Prize for his work on global warming. "We all believe what the scientists
have been telling us for years now that this is a matter of urgency and national
security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way."
But there are powerful political and economic realities that must be quickly
overcome for Obama to succeed. Despite the urgency he expresses, it's not at
all clear that he and Congress will agree on an approach during a worldwide
financial crisis in time to meet some of the more crucial deadlines.
Obama is pushing changes in the way Americans use energy, and produce greenhouse
gases, as part of what will be a massive economic stimulus. He called it an
opportunity "to re-power America."
After years of inaction on global warming, 2009 might be different. Obama replaces
a president who opposed mandatory cuts of greenhouse gas pollution and it appears
he will have a willing Congress. Also, next year, diplomats will try to agree
on a major new international treaty to curb the gases that promote global warming.
"We need to start in January making significant changes," Gore said
in a recent telephone interview with The Associated Press. "This year coming
up is the most important opportunity the world has ever had to make progress
in really solving the climate crisis."
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Mood Mixed As Climate Summit Ends |
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Saturday 13 December 2008
by: Richard Black, BBC News
Poznan - The UN climate summit has ended with delegates taking very different views on how much it has achieved.
Western delegates said progress here had been encouraging,
but environment groups said rich countries had not shown enough
ambition.
Developing nations were angry that more money was not put forward to protect against climate impacts.
The meeting is the halfway point on a two-year process aimed at reaching a deal in Copenhagen by the end of 2009.
As envisaged at last year's conference in Bali, that
agreement is supposed to have two major elements - an expanded Kyoto
Protocol-style deal committing industrialised countries to deeper
emission cuts in the mid-term, perhaps by 2020, and a longer-term
agreement encompassing all countries.
"The conference enabled us to make real progress on every
topic on the Bali roadmap," said Martin Bursik, Environment Minister of
the Czech Republic, which assumes the EU presidency in January.
"All the elements exist for us to reach an efficient and equitable agreement in Copenhagen."
But the comments of Tim Jones of the World Development
Movement summed up the feelings of many groups campaigning for
environmental protection and poverty alleviation.
"There has been disappointingly little progress on the agreement reached last year in Bali," he said.
"Yet again the rich countries, who carry the historical
responsibility for climate change, have failed to offer sufficient
cuts."
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Wednesday 10 December 2008
by: Le Monde | Editorial
It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of the December 10-11 meeting
in Brussels of the Twenty-Seven's heads of state and government: a part of Europe's
economic future and its international status as well as the future of the international
treaty on climate change are in play there.
What's at issue? In March 2007, European officials committed to reduce the
Union's greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent, to produce 20 percent of the
Union's energy from renewable resources and to reduce EU energy consumption
by 20 percent between now and 2020. The "climate energy package" is
a set of measures designed to implement these commitments concretely. In the
last year, decisions concerning standards for automobile emissions and concerning
renewable energy have been adopted; the question of energy economization has,
unfortunately, been postponed for later and a text on the operation of the carbon
market has been bitterly debated.
Why does that text provoke such intense tension? Because it makes the emission
quotas attributed to companies participating in the carbon market gratis no
longer by putting them up for auction, while those quotas were free in the first
phase of the market's operation. Poland and the Baltic states have objected
that this system would penalize their energy infrastructure, while they are
at a lesser level of economic development than Western Europeans. Germany is
afraid of finding its industry's competitiveness altered. Under the aegis of
the French presidency, intense discussions have allowed the negotiation of concessions
and allowances.
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UN: Climate Talks to Fail Without Tough CO2 Goals |
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Tuesday 09 December 2008
by: Alister Doyle and Anna Mudeva, Reuters
Poznan, Poland - The United States and other rich nations must pledge by
the end of next year specific targets for cutting greenhouse gas
emissions by 2020 to win agreement on a U.N. climate pact, the UN's top
climate official said on Tuesday.
Some analysts say that President-elect Barack Obama may not be ready to
set formal emissions targets for 2020 within a year, and that economic
recession could delay an end-2009 deadline by 190 nations for agreement
on a new UN global warming pact.
"We have to have numbers on the table from industrialized countries (by
the end of 2009) otherwise the other dominoes won't fall," Yvo de Boer,
head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said during December 1-12
talks on global warming.
Poor nations such as China and India would not sign up for more action
to slow their rising emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels,
without leadership from the rich, he told a news conference during U.N.
talks of 11,000 delegates in Poznan.
And he gave a one-word answer - "Yes" - when asked if he would
rate
the negotiations a failure if they set no 2020 greenhouse cuts for rich
nations to succeed 2012 goals set by the existing Kyoto Protocol.
A U.N. official said de Boer's remarks covered the United States, even
though President George W. Bush kept the country out of Kyoto. Bush said
Kyoto was too costly and wrongly excluded 2012 targets for developing
nations.
But de Boer also cautioned against too much ambition for a new global
deal due to be agreed in Copenhagen next year, saying that many details
of a new pact could be worked out later.
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Al Gore: Don't Count on Magic |
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Saturday 29 November 2008
by: Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
The world's most prominent environmentalist on carbon taxes,
clean coal and the dangers of illusion.
Former Vice President Al Gore-now a Nobel Prize winner and the world's
most prominent environmentalist-isn't looking for another job in Washington.
But his eloquent warnings about the dangers of global climate change have obviously
helped shape the priorities of the incoming Obama administration. Gore sat down
with NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria recently to talk about a bailout for Detroit,
the greening of China and the elusive promise of "clean coal." Excerpts:
Zakaria: Would you bail out the carmakers?
Gore: Whatever assistance might be forthcoming should be
focused on speeding the changes that are absolutely essential to ensure that
our companies are competitive in the global marketplace. When I was vice president,
I initiated a program called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles.
The federal government invested over a billion dollars in partnership with the
Big Three to focus on the accelerated development of advanced high-efficiency
vehicles. But as soon as they felt they were off the hook at the end of 2000,
they pulled the plug and walked away.
How would you do it? Would you provide loans but force the automakers
to raise fuel efficiency or speed up hybrid production?
I think the whole industry should be transformed. It's really tragic that General
Motors, for example, allowed Toyota to get a seven-year head start on the hybrid
drivetrain in the Prius. I personally believe that the U.S. auto fleet should
make a transition as quickly as possible toward plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
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Sunday 23 November 2008
by: Geoffrey Lean, The Independent UK
Barack
Obama and congressional leaders are preparing rapid legislation to cut
US emissions that cause global warming and to kick-start a clean energy
revolution.
Two bills are to be introduced as soon as the
president-elect takes office in January. One will provide $15 billion
(£10.1 billion) a year to encourage innovation in renewable energies as
part of a thorough overhaul of the highly polluting US energy system.
The other will pave the way to setting up a system of tradable
emissions permits to combat global warming. The moves, to be taken
quicker than expected, will galvanise top-level international
negotiations on a new climate treaty that reopens in Poznan, Poland,
next week, and will greatly boost attempts to bring in a "green new
deal" as the best way out of the financial crisis.
Yesterday - as exclusively predicted in The Independent on
Sunday three weeks ago - Mr Obama took the first steps towards creating
green jobs, a crucial element of the proposed deal, as a top priority
for his forthcoming administration. In his weekly radio address, he
announced that he has ordered his advisers to produce an economic
recovery plan that will create 2.5 million new jobs in two years by
building windfarms, making solar panels and fuel-efficient cars, as
well as in modernising schools and re-building crumbling
infrastructure.
Senior Democratic sources added that the president-elect
had picked Timothy Geithner, head of the New york Federal Reserve Bank
to be his Treasury Secretary. "We are facing a sea change," said
Barbara Boxer, the Democratic head of the Senate Environment and Public
Works Committee, of the two new bills. "Instead of denial we will have
resolve; instead of procrastination we will have action. The time to
start is now."
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Unexpected Rise in Carbon-Fueled Ocean Acidity Threatens Shellfish, Say Scientists |
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Tuesday 25 November 2008
by: Ian Sample, The Guardian UK
The
world's oceans are becoming acidic more quickly than climate change
models predict, according to scientists who claim it will have a
dramatic impact on marine ecosystems.
Water samples collected around an island in the eastern
Pacific over the past eight years showed seawater had acidified more
than 20 times faster than scientists expected. The effect could be
devastating for shellfish and other crustaceans, because acidic waters
dissolve calcium carbonate used by the organisms to make their
protective shells.
Oceans absorb about a third of the carbon dioxide released
into the atmosphere by human activities. When the gas dissolves in
water, it forms carbonic acid, which alters the ocean's delicate
chemical balance.
The increasing acidification of the oceans is likely to
have impacts that run throughout the marine ecosystem, because the
organisms most affected are at the bottom of the foodchain.
Timothy Wootton, a biologist at the University of Chicago,
led a team of researchers who analysed the acidity, salinity and
temperature of water around Tatoosh Island off the northwestern coast
of Washington state.
Over eight years, the pH level of the water fell by 0.36 to
about 8.1, more than 23 times more than the predicted fall of just
0.015 points. Water is neutral if its pH is seven, and becomes more
acidic as the pH falls below that.
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