Politics and General News
Europe and US in legal clash over airline emissions (Reuters, July 1)
The US is joining China in protesting EU airline emissions rules. And they're taking it to court: U.S.-E.U. showdown over airline emissions begins today (New York Times, July 5).
Talks continue, emissions rise (Washington Post, graphic linked in July 3 article
Fun graphic on emissions by country over time. Stumbles by not including the EU as a single entity, though it does as a result give a fantastic picture of exactly how much bigger the US and China are as emitters than any other individual country.
Sulphur from Chinese power stations 'masking' climate change (Guardian, July 4)
An effect which will be reduced if and when they begin cleaning up their stations - which they need to do for local pollution reasons anyway (see also Study says sulfur from China's coal-burning caused slight pause in global warming, Associated Press, July 4).
China urges developing countries to lead in adopting verifiable carbon cut goals (Xinhua, July 5)
Europe suggests having binding emissions cut goals would be nice; China agrees and suggests the developed countries ought take care of that. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Conservative MEPs defeat new climate change targets (The Independent, July 6)
Europe fails to raise its 2020 target from a 20 to a 30 percent cut relative to 1990.
Markets and Investment
German cleantech addresses water scarcity (prnewswire.co.uk, July 1)
Water is expected to be the next big crisis; it's connected to climate change both because water management involves energy usage and because climate change will likely cause major, disruptive shifts in water availability.
Carbon credits could run out of steam (The National, July 3)
Carbon prices are way down, not quite for the reason I expected: "plans by the EC... to sell an extra 300 million carbon credits on the market to raise funds for green energy projects threatens to further saturate the market and push prices down." I assume there's also a general issue of uncertainty over the future value of these credits given the currently low expectations for international agreements.
The hunt for green in the green economy (Worcester Business Journal, July 4)
Article on the challenges in making cleantech pay; has some interesting anecdotes.
Second-quarter cleantech investment drops 33%, but biofuels make a comeback (blogs.forbes.com, July 6)
Apparently driven by niche market applications in petrochemical replacements that have nothing to do with biofuels per se.
Iran builds new gas pipeline (Financial Times, July 6)
To Pakistan. Iran is one of the biggest holders of natural gas reserves, but these have been largely unexploited due to the fact that natural gas users, if supplied by pipeline, become very dependent on their suppliers, and Iran is, well, Iran. Not sure what to think of this. I suspect that yoking two extremist, unstable states together in a strategically dependent relationship might not be a good thing, but that's just general intuition.
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