Europe

An offshore wind energy boom in Europe

The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) published its annual report and the results are encouraging as the offshore wind energy capacity grew by 54 percent in 2009 with 577 MW. The United Kingdom appears to be leading the sector as it installed more than half of the added capacity of the European Union. And this […]

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Germany to cut its emissions by 40 percent

To Reuters, ” Germany will stick to a more ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020 even though the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen fell short of expectations, a government adviser said on Monday. “ Details of how the country will achieve such drastic cuts still remain to be defined.

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The huge failure of the Copenhagen conference

The Copenhagen climate conference failed in preparing the future of the Kyoto Protocol. This is even more enraging as at first positive signs kept on piling : the United States and  many developing nations proclamed they would act. I saw it coming as still too many are elected representatives around the world that don’t understand the benefits a

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Europe could slash emissions by 40 percent

A joint report by Friends of the Earth Europe (FOEE) and the Stockholm Environment Institute shows that Europe can cut its greenhouse gases emissions by 40 percent by 2020. This is not entirely new or surprising as the UK pledged for 34 percent cuts and as Europe could go as far as 30 percent. What

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Green economy: 90,000 new green jobs in France

Here is my latest post for CleanTechies : According to a new report [Fr] from the ADEME ( the French Environment and Energy Management Agency ) 90,000 jobs have been created in the French green growth sectors between 2006 and 2008. These jobs have been created mostly in energy conservation and the development of renewable

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The Cleantech arms race continues

Earlier this year I was wondering if cleantech is the new arms race. I noted at the time that America, Europe and China are beginning to compete in such an important economic sector. A US study released last month shows that not only there is an arms race between the United States and Asian nations,

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Spain to add 8.8 GW of green electricity by 2012

According to Reuters Spain will add up to 8.8 GW of renewable energies by 2012. As GreenUnivers [Fr] points out this would increase by 37 percent the current renewable electricity capacity in just three years. This occurs as now wind energy has more installed capacity than nuclear in Spain and even supplied the country more

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Europe to go beyond its Kyoto Protocol goals

The European Union 15 first members already achieved their Kyoto Protocol goals and will even go beyond. Meanwhile, the 27 members already cut their emissions by 13.6 percent. These excellent results date of 2007. With the economic recession of the past months, the industrial activity have drastically decreased and thus the emissions and thus slashed

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The United States is a food wasteland

This is the catchy title of an article GOOD recently published. It is not entirely new to me as I previously wrote about it, but the data provided there undoubtedly has to be shared. Here goes the beginning of  the article : ” When it comes to food, Americans are the undisputed champions of one

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Does the European Union really leads on climate ?

Some six weeks ahead of Copenhagen, the Guardian published an article on how the European Union believes it is taking the lead on climate change mitigation. At first I was quite optimistic with the title. However there is nothing new: the EU is still willing to cut by 20 percent its emissions by 2020 and

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