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Allen, Kara[[email protected]]
Allen, Kara
Mon 12/9/2013 3:20:30 PM
SEEC
Daily Clips 12.9.13
Sustainable Energy Environment
Coalition
Top news stories:
The annual United Nations climate change talks, which concluded
last month in Warsaw, unfortunately
found little common ground on carbon. The talks broke
down
over the
world s
richest nations inability
to
agree with the poorest on how
to
address the financial costs of global climate change.
Two of President Barack Obama s top pollution-control measures
face
courtroom
tests tomorrow as
coal-dependent utilities, miners and some states challenge
what
they call overreach by
the
Environmental Protection Agency.
Wildlife
groups and
the
Senate GOP s
top environmental
lawmaker are
both
irate over a new Interior
Department
rule allowing 30-year
permits
for
wind
farms
to
accidentally kill or
injure
bald and golden
eagles. The rule was
to
be published in Monday s Federal Register.
n
a
battle
that pits the East Coast against the Midwest over the winds that
carry dirty air from coal
plants,
the
governors
of
eight Northeastern
states plan
to
petition the
Environmental
Protection Agency
on Monday
to
force tighter air pollution regulations on nine Rust Belt and
Appalachian states.
Energy news:
The
wind
energy production tax credit is a tougher issue than you might
imagine for some good liberal
wonks. On the one hand, wind power is great. On the other hand,
tax credits are a market-distorting,
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inefficient
way of
making policy.
The oil and natural-gas industry probably won t ever get a
thank-you card from President Obama, but he
has a few big reasons to be grateful for the fossil-fuel
boom.
U.S. ethanol companies, producing at the fastest pace in 21
months, expect mill closings and cuts in
production since President Obama s administration proposed
reducing consumption
targets
for the first
time.
The
fourth
version
of LEED
formally launched
this
month, with a goal of pushing
the
building envelope
further than ever before.
Now
that
LEED - and green building in general - is mainstream and
standard
practice - the
US
Green Building Council USGBC) is raising the bar in some really
interesting, important
ways.
The American Frozen Food Institute has urged the EPA
to
enact its proposal to slash mandated corn
ethanol production by 1.4 billion gallons in 2014 while the
Biotechnology
Industry Organization (BIO) is
warning the agency that the Renewable Fuel Standard proposal
will hurt the biofuels industry.
The policy known
as the
Renewable Portfolio Standard RPS),
whereby
retail electricity
providers
are
mandated
to
meet an increasing share of sales from the competitive
procurement of clean and
renewable energy is proving successful
as
a viable framework for deploying a significant amount of
renewable generation at
the
state
level. 29 states in
total
plus
Washington,
D.C.
are successfully
deploying
RPS
policies
to
obtain homegrown, affordable, clean and renewable energy
resources.
Some
of
the biggest cities in
the US,
such
as
New York, Los Angeles and Boston are - or already have -
switched to LED lights, which means
they
won t burn out for some 20 years. It turns out that could put
a
big
dent
in utility profits for a couple of reasons.
Noble Energy officials say
it
may be
as
far
as
a decade away,
but
they re
confident
they ll be drilling for
oil in northeast Nevada.
Spain changed environmental rules
to
speed approvals on industrial projects from pig
farms to
oil rigs
and for the first time will regulate shale drilling.
The largest
private-sector
union in Canada has pledged its opposition to the proposed
Northern
Gateway
Pipeline, joining more than
100
First Nations groups and
other
unions
who
have vowed to fight
the project.
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Kenya plans
to
sign a concession accord
this
week
with
Fenxi Mining
Industry Co of
China
to
develop a
coal
deposit of 400 million
metric tons, ending a two-year delay and enabling
the
state
to
tender 31
more blocks.
Climate news:
In the Warsaw climate
change conference last
month, world
representatives
negotiated
an agenda
for
further
negotiations.
That they did not
manage
to
mess
that
up, we are told,
is
an achievement.
Canada is running
out of t ime to
offer
U S
President Barack Obama a climate change concession
that
might clinch
the
controversial Keystone
XL
oil pipeline,
as
the
country s
energy industry continues to
resist costly curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
A new study for
the
first
t ime
found
links
between
the
rapid loss
of
snow and
sea
ice cover in
the
Arctic
and a recent spate of exceptional
extreme
heat events in North America, Europe, and Asia. The study
adds
to the
evidence showing
that the
free-fall in summer
sea
ice extent and even sharper decline in
spring
snow
cover in
the
Northern Hemisphere
is reverberating throughout the atmosphere,
making
extreme events more likely to occur.
Three small-business
owners
who had sued
New
York State
over
its
participation
in a regional carbon
cap-and-trade
program
lost
their
challenge in court last week, after a
New
York appeals court affirmed
that they
had
waited
too
long
to
bring
the
lawsuit.
As Mayor Michael Bloomberg winds down his last month in office,
his plan for
protecting
New York City
from the
threats
of climate change has received an important boost. But there is
still
uncertainty
over
whether his successor, Bill de Blasio, has any interest in
carrying forward Bloomberg's legacy on
combating
global
warming.
The maps
drawn
up by
the
Federal Emergency Management Agency were
wrong.
And government
officials
knew
it. According
to
documents
and interviews, state, local and
federal
officials had been
aware
for
years
that the
crucial maps
of
flood risks were inaccurate; some feared they understated
the
dangers in New York City's low-lying area.
The Governor-Elect has an opportunity before him to send a
signal
that
my concerns are misplaced and
that
he
will
seek all reasonable paths to create the clean energy future
that
he has spoken about. That
opportunity is
- in
this
case -
countable to the tune of
75,000.
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China is poorly prepared
to
tackle
the
impact
of
climate change
that
presents a serious
threat to the
country, thanks
to
a lack
of
planning and public awareness,
the
government said on
Monday.
Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday, is best known
for
his fight against South African apartheid.
But
his
long walk to freedom also included steps toward solving this
mammoth problem called climate change.
Environment Health news:
A 4.5-magnitude earthquake in central Oklahoma shook residents
Saturday, just weeks after
the
two
year anniversary
of the
strongest
earthquake
ever recorded in
the
Sooner state.
Inside an unmarked trailer at the end
of an
unmarked dirt road about 15 miles north of the nation s
capital, a high-tech radar monitor beeps every
10
minutes in an
effort
to find out who is
polluting
Maryland s
air.
Unions and
environmentalists
have found
one point of agreement
in
the bitter debate over the natural
gas
drilling boom:
fixing leaky old pipelines
that
threaten public health and
the
environment. It's a huge
national effort that
could cost 82 billion.
Shanghai authorities ordered schoolchildren indoors and halted
all construction Friday as China's
financial
hub
suffered one
of
its worst bouts
of
air pollution, bringing visibility down to a
few
dozen
meters, delaying flights and obscuring
the
city's spectacular skyline.
The Obama
administration
is enacting permanent protections for an endangered whale
species. A new
rule to be published next
week
by
the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration
(NOAA)
will
enshrine restrictions on ships along the Eastern Seaboard.
Conventional
wisdom
says
environmentalism
suffered a near-death experience in 2010,
when
a
sweeping
climate
change bill ran aground in
the Democratic-run
Senate.
But
aspiring eulogists
for the
green movement have gotten
ample material
in
the
years
before
and since that failure.
A memo released quietly by regulators earlier this year has
carved a major
loophole
in West Virginia's
rules restricting the amount
of
waste
that
can be accepted
by
the state's landfills, all
with
the intent to
ease a burgeoning
problem
caused by the boom in gas drilling, environmentalists say.
Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah)
is
pressing
Interior
Secretary Sally Jewell
not to
consider
withdrawn comments
about
U S
natural-gas development
as it completes
final regulations on hydraulic
fracturing.
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While the
administration
has been pressing the City Council to ban packaging like
foam cups
and
foam
takeout
food containers from stores and restaurants Dart
Container
Corporation,
one of
the largest
makers
of
such products has been pushing back, arguing that contrary
to what
the mayor says, their
products can be recycled after
they
have been used. The company s even offering a kind
of
guarantee.
The
Humane
Society of
the
United States issued a consumer warning earlier this week
informing
consumers
that Kohl's was selling faux-fur
handbags
made with real fur.
Ancient farming prac tices, such as raising fish
n
rice
paddies n
China or Aboriginal Australian fire
controls, will get a new lease
of
life under plans to slow extinctions of animals and plants,
experts said
on Monday.
