Month: September 2009

Big Business steps into climate change mitigation

In the last few days I came across three different news on how large companies are beginning to act on global warming and  demand climate change mitigation action from global governments. The most important is the Copenhagen communiqué a message from 600 large companies – including Nike, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Tesco and SC Johnson – …

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Why Merkel’s reelection may be good news for climate

As Angela Merkel was reelected German Chancellor and is due to begin a new coalition with the Liberals, nuclear power plants may not be phased out in 2020 as it was previously agreed. Meanwhile, and if Germany keeps it targets of renewables answering 33 percent of the electricity demand in 2020 this may mean that …

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The Alps are endangered by climate change

To the latest report of the European Environment Agency, climate change “poses a grave threat” to the snows of the Alps, and thus will decrease the amounts of water received by many rivers like the Danube, Rhine, Po and Rhone. At the center of Europe the Alps – like the Himalayas are for Asia – …

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We still are funding fossil fuels industries

After the quite encouraging news of Wednesday I would like to present you a study showing that the United States’ government still gives much more money to polluting fossil fuels industries rather than lower carbon solutions. This occurs as I noted last year than to the UNEP  cutting the subsidies given to big oil and …

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A trillion to halve India’s GHG emissions increase

As we saw earlier this month, Indian greenhouse gases emissions are due to at least triple by 2030. However no hope of climate change mitigation should be lost as McKinsey estimates that halving this increase is possible. This would require that India allocates $1.1 trillion (750 billion euros) within the next twenty years  – an …

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IEA : Global CO2 emissions decreased

According to a study to be released in November by the International Energy Agency, global greenhouse gases emissions decreased by no less than 2.6 percent. This can be explained by several factors. Among these factors are the economic recession which decreased the emissions of the global industrial sector but also the various commitments of the …

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The Billion Tree Campaign is a huge success

The UNEP Billion Tree Campaign‘s goal was to plant seven billion trees before the Copenhagen meeting in December. To today’s news the goal was reached as China planted 2.6 billion trees to support the campaign. This shows at least two things : when China starts on something, it is unstoppable. The country’s efforts on climate …

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A global renewable energies boom

Thanks to GreenUnivers, a great French blog on green business, I came across the latest report from the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21). It presents various figures worth mentioning. Between 2004 and 2008, solar PV capacity increased sixfold to more than 16 GW, wind power capacity increased 250 percent to 121 …

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Investors demand strong climate change action

While many governments are slow to action, nearly 200 investors from around the world – led by Sir Nicholas Stern – are demanding strong climate change action as they see warming temperatures as a threat to the global economy. As the United Nations Environment Program notes : ” The world’s largest global investors issued a …

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France seeks alternatives to GDP

Gross Domestic Product, also know as GDP, is not a sustainable indicator. Indeed it only focuses on the economy and makes no mention of societies and environment. So we need alternatives that would take that into account. This is even more urgent with the current economic downturn. Indeed, even if things are slowly and difficultly …

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