Earthjustice

    Wednesday 01 August 2007

Groups file suit seeking stronger energy efficiency standards for air conditioners and heat pumps.

    New York, New York - Earthjustice, on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the state of Massachusetts have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for failing to strengthen weak and outdated energy efficiency standards for commercial heating and cooling equipment. The suit challenges DOE's weak and outdated standards allowing these products to continue to waste both energy and money, and generate thousands of needless tons of air pollution, including greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

    "Strong efficiency performance standards are the antidote to America's ailing energy system," said David B. Goldstein, Air & Energy director for NRDC. "Energy efficiency - a technology we have available to us right now - will help curb global warming, maximize energy savings, and protect consumers and the environment. Technology, science and the law demand that we act now to move cleaner and greener products into the marketplace. The DOE needs take its blinders off and step out of the way of America's progress."

    DOE adopted the standards for new air conditioners, heat pumps, and similar products commonly used in offices, schools and other commercial facilities on March 7. The standards are far weaker than recommended by experts at the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), a professional group recognized by Congress as an authority on energy efficiency.

   
    By John D. Dingell
    The Washington Post

    Thursday 02 August 2007

    Successful laws to protect the environment are built on simple concepts. They discourage harmful behavior - the dumping of sewage or industrial waste into bodies of water, the destruction of habitat, the emission of toxic chemicals - by a variety of measures, all of which raise the cost of engaging in certain behavior. You can't develop land, and profit, if you're endangering a threatened animal. You have to dispose of chemical substances responsibly. And so on.

    Good environmental law can also encourage good behavior: the development of alternative approaches, such as substances that cause less harm, or new technologies.

    We should keep this in mind when discussing carbon. How do we raise the cost of emitting carbon, promoting conservation and efficiencies, and make alternatives more economically viable, thus addressing the problem of climate change?

    Alternative energy sources - those that are not carbon-based or substantially improve on (i.e., reduce) carbon emissions relative to the fuels we now consume - are fairly well known: wind, biofuels (cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel), solar, waves, geothermal and nuclear.

   
    By Edith M. Lederer
    The Associated Press

    Friday 03 August 2007

Nearly 100 worried countries back negotiations to tackle warming.

    United Nations - Nearly 100 countries speaking at the first U.N. General Assembly meeting on climate change signaled strong support for negotiations on a new international deal to tackle global warming.

    There was so much interest among worried nations - many facing drought, floods and searing heat - that the two-day meeting was extended for an extra day so that more countries could describe their climate-related problems, how they are coping, and the help they need.

    "We now have the momentum," General Assembly President Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa told delegates at the closing session Thursday evening. "What we do with this is more important. We need to ensure that we agree an equitable, fair and ambitious global deal to match the scale of the challenges ahead."

    Clinching that deal will likely take several years of intense and difficult negotiations, which are expected to start at a December meeting on the Indonesian island of Bali. It will focus on a replacement for the Kyoto protocol, which requires 35 industrial nations to cut their global-warming emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, when the accord expires.

    Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has made climate change a top priority since taking the reins of the U.N. on Jan. 1, urged all countries to reach a comprehensive agreement by 2009, which would leave time for governments to ratify the accord so it could take effect in 2013.

   
    By Ben Blanchard
    Reuters

    Thursday 02 August 2007

    Beijing - China blamed global warming on Wednesday for this year's weather extremes, which have led to more than 700 deaths from flooding and left more than seven million with little access to water.

    Such extremes are likely to get worse and more common in the future, said Song Lianchun, head of the China Meteorological Administration's Department of Forecasting Services and Disaster Mitigation.

    "It should be said that one of the reasons for the weather extremes this year has been unusual atmospheric circulation bought about by global warming," Song told a news conference carried live on the central government Web site (www.gov.cn).

    "These kind of extremes will become more frequent, and more obvious. This has already been borne out by the facts," he said. "I think the impact on our country will definitely be very large."

    Some parts of China have had too much rain, and others too little this summer.

    
    By Larry Rohter
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 31 July 2007

    Manaus, Brazil - Alarmed at recent indications of climate change here in the Amazon and in other regions of Brazil, the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has begun showing signs of new flexibility in the tangled, politically volatile international negotiations to limit human-caused global warming.

    The factors behind the re-evaluation range from a drought here in the Amazon rain forest, the world's largest, and the impact that it could have on agriculture if it recurs, to new phenomena like a hurricane in the south of Brazil. As a result, environmental advocates, scientists and some politicians say, Brazilian policy makers and the public they serve are increasingly seeing climate change not as a distant problem, but as one that could affect them too.

    Brazil remains suspicious of foreign involvement in its management of the Amazon, which it views as a domestic matter. But negotiators and others who monitor international climate talks say Brazil is now willing to discuss issues that until recently it considered off the table, including market-based programs to curb the carbon emissions that result from massive deforestation in the Amazon, in which areas the size of New Jersey or larger are razed each year.

   
    The Associated Press

    Monday 30 July 2007

    Grants Pass, Oregon - The return of oxygen-depleted water off the Oregon coast is a sign of a warming climate, which could have ill effect on populations of sea creatures, scientists said Monday.

    It's the sixth year the water, known as a dead zone, has formed.

    "It does, indeed, appear to be the new normal," said Jane Lubchenco, professor of marine biology at Oregon State University. "The fact that we are seeing six in a row now tells us that something pretty fundamental has changed about conditions off of our coast."

    Unlike the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which is caused by fertilizer washing down the Mississippi River, the Oregon dead zone is triggered by northerly winds, which create an ocean-mixing condition called upwelling.

    This brings low-oxygen waters from deep in the ocean close to shore, and spreads nitrogen and other nutrients through the water column, kicking off a population boom of plankton, the tiny plants and animals at the foundation of the ocean food web.

    Normally, this is good for salmon, giving them lots of food to eat. But when huge amounts of plankton die, they fall to the bottom of the ocean, where they decompose, depleting the water of oxygen.