Archive for the ‘carbon emissions’ Category

March 9, 2011
Nuclear Townhall

“Earth Hour,” started three years ago by the World Wildlife Fund and scheduled this year for March 26 at 8:30 p.m., is billing itself as “the biggest grassroots environmental movement in history.” 
 
“Hundreds of millions of people in thousands of cities and towns on every continent will speak out with one voice,” says the promotional YouTube video. For one hour they will turn off all lights in their city and hold candles, assembling in public squares for performances and entertainment (although shots in the video indicate they may not abandon their electric sound systems).
 
All to prove – what?  Colin McInnes, writing in Spiked Online, tackles more than a few of the presumptions behind this mass movement. “In 1859, a small farm in Pennsylvania became the site of the first successful oil well in the United States,” he begins. “[I]t had been known since 1854 that oil could be fractionated into a range of liquids including paraffin for lamps. Prior to this, oil from whales lit many American homes. So, in a reversal of the usual environmental narrative, the oil industry saved the whale.
 
“Improvements in energy efficiency can also be seen in the transition from wood to coal, oil, methane and uranium,” McInnes continues. “Each fuel produces more energy per unit weight and significantly less carbon. For example, one kilogram of coal can power a light bulb for four days, one kilogram of methane for six days and one kilogram of the carbon-free uranium for a remarkable 140 years. . . Modern, compact, combined-cycle gas turbines and nuclear plants now produce copious quantities of energy, but use modest amounts of steel, concrete and land. Ironically, the WWF’s vision of our energy future is based almost entirely on diffuse renewable energy that would require astronomical quantities of material, land and capital to deploy.”
 
So it will be nice to see the lights to off for an hour on the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge and all those other famous landmarks. Still, McInnes points out the fundamental paradox of all such “back-to-the-simple-life” efforts – they are nothing more than a transition to less efficient employment of resources. Where will all that candle wax come from?  Oil, of course.
 
Carter Horsley, the former real estate reporter for The New York Times, once lit his apartment for two months with candles after having Con Edison cut off his electricity in a dispute over his bill. He eventually decided to go back to light bulbs. “I found burning candles was more expensive than paying for my electric bill,” he said.

Read more at Spiked Online

Nuclear Townhall
January 26, 2011

Officials at the European Union in Brussels have closed down their Emissions Trading System (ETS) for a week on their carbon emissions after hackers stole $37 million worth of credits from the system.


 â€¨Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece and Poland were reported to be the countries whose accounts were looted – as if Greece didn’t already have enough troubles. ETS officials emphasized that the theft represented only .02 percent of the total emission on the spot market. It was unclear where the hackers would be able to fence their booty.
 


"This closure is a drastic measure as such, but not too dangerous . . .. We have around 14 member states whose registries have not been upgraded when it comes to security measures," said European Commission climate spokeswoman Maria Kokkonen, according to this report from dpa Berlin. The spot market represents only 20 percent of the overall volume in the cap-and-trade system, where countries buy and sell permits in a search for the cheapest way to reduce overall emissions. The remaining 80 percent is transacted in longer-term contracts.

Kokkonen said each country is responsible for its own security measures. "As long as there was no fraud, those (countries) who didn’t have adequate security measures didn’t feel the need … to do anything," she said.

Read more about it at dpa Berlin
 
 

December 19, 2010

The Hill is reporting that Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, says a clean energy standard including nuclear “could gain traction among Republicans in the next Congress even if it would create a new federal mandate.”

The report card is in for 2009 carbon emissions and the results are disappointing but not unexpected – improvements in the developing world are being cancelled by increases in the developing nations.