U.S. exports its greenhouse-gas emissions — as coal. Profitable coal.
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-exports-its-greenhouse-gas-emissions--as-coal-profitable-coal/2015/10/08/05711c92-65fc-11e5-bdb6-6861f4521205_story.html
"We’re a fossil-fuel-exporting superpower that goes around lecturing the rest of the world about cutting emissions,”
Why is America so over air-conditioned ? It seems absurd, if not unconscionable, when you consider the money and energy wasted
Enduring Summer’s Deep Freeze - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/sunday-review/enduring-summers-deep-freeze.html
Why is America so over air-conditioned? It seems absurd, if not unconscionable, when you consider the money and energy wasted — not to mention the negative impact on the environment from the associated greenhouse-gas emissions.
(avec l’inévitable app pour smartphone qui permet à Google d’économiser des miyons de dollars en baissant la clim’)
Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt
▻http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/science-says-revolt
To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now . But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval” , as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.
Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually , according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.
[...]
In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal Nature Climate Change, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity . On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:
. . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.
In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).
Climate science : A sensitive matter | The Economist
▻http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/pe/asensitivematter
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010.
That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
Shifting geopolitics shake UN climate talks
►http://news.yahoo.com/shifting-geopolitics-shake-un-climate-talks-171639686.html
When the UNFCCC was crafted, developed countries accounted for two-thirds of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Today, that proportion is fast being reversed.
Developing nations — led by China, India and Brazil — emit half, and by 2030 the figure will be 65 percent, according to several estimates.
Utility Shelves Ambitious Plan to Limit Carbon - NYTimes.com
►http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/business/energy-environment/utility-shelves-plan-to-capture-carbon-dioxide.html
“We are placing the project on hold until economic and policy conditions create a viable path forward,” said Michael G. Morris, chairman of American Electric Power, based in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest operators of coal-fired generating plants in the United States. He said his company and other coal-burning utilities were caught in a quandary: they need to develop carbon-capture technology to meet any future greenhouse-gas emissions rules, but they cannot afford the projects without federal standards that will require them to act and will persuade the states to allow reimbursement.
Soyons clairs : sans « marché du carbone » et sans subventions, les entreprises ne feront rien contre l’émission de gaz à effet de serre.
Ce qui conforte l’idée que « l’économie verte » est avant tout un modèle spéculatif, et que la lutte contre le réchauffement climatique ne saurait se limiter aux mécanismes « incitatifs » proposés depuis Kyoto.
Sans parler évidemment de la faisabilité technique de la « séquestration du carbone » (i.e. combien de temps le carbone empaqueté sous terre y restera-t-il ? Quelles seront les conséquences à long terme,...). Mais si demain est déjà trop loin pour le capital, que dire d’une ou deux générations !