"The Green Island" - 'The eco resort that's 'greener' than most'

We originally put in 96 solar panels and last year we put in 32 more. The first 96 were 205 watts per panel and cost $2000 each; the ones I put in last year are 245 watts per panel and cost me $900 each. Now I can get 255 watts per panel and they're about $400 so it's getting more and more economical.

http://2degreesproject.com.au/Story/green-eco-resort

President Obama’s 2nd-Term Plan To Address Climate Change

Well, this is interesting.

President Obama's Second-Term Plan To Address Climate Change

 

"The plan, according to senior administration officials, has three pillars: cutting carbon pollution in America, leading international efforts to cut global emissions, and preparing the U.S. for the costly impacts of climate change. President Obama will frame action as a moral obligation to do what we can for "the world we leave our children."

 

"Increasing renewables: Set a goal to double electricity fueled by renewable energy by 2020 nationally. This will be kickstarted by a goal of 10 gigawatts' worth of permits for renewable energy projects on public lands by 2020. Another Presidential Memorandum streamlines electric grid transmission projects across the country. Increase the federal government renewable target from the current 7.5 percent to 20 percent by 2020.
Get smarter: Conduct the first-ever Quadrennial Energy Review, focusing on infrastructure and investment. Aggregate energy data from federal facilities using the "Green Button" standard. Launch a Climate Data Initiative, which makes federal climate-related data available to the public, encouraging innovation and climate preparedness.
Fuel efficiency: The administration will develop post-2018 fuel economy standards for heavy-duty vehicles, building upon 2011′s first-ever such standards.
Appliances and buildings: Establish goal that current efficiency standards for appliances and federal buildings will reduce carbon pollution by more than 3 billion metric tons by 2030.
Efficient housing: Try innovative approaches to developing cost-effective energy delivery to multifamily housing. Federally subsidized housing stock will strive toward a goal of 100 megawatts of installed renewable capacity by 2020 as well. Find options to factor energy efficiency into the mortgage process. Expand Better Buildings Challenge to make multifamily housing more efficient.

On paper, the plan, if implemented quickly and decisively (which means also supported by a robust legal and public defense against the certain fusillade from Republican and industry groups), could be fairly consequential given the realities of current congressional dysfunction. Whether or not Keystone XL is approved, the U.S. needs to cut emissions a great deal, and there are things in the plan that could kickstart that process. To roll back carbon pollution with the intent of avoiding catastrophic global warming will require more."

High environmental costs if 2050 world population be fed

... Well, it depends how, as always.
Below, an excerpt from Bloomberg BusinessWeek's report:

“Current growth in global crop yields will be insufficient to feed the world in 2050,” according to the University of Minnesota. 

 But, if we are nice to each other, we may make it:

More efficient use of arable lands and increasing yield growth rates by sharing best-management practices may help lift production, the study authors wrote. Changing to more plant-based diets and reducing food waste could reduce the large expected growth in demand, according to the researchers. 

With the BAU, Business As Usual, it may not look so good:

Environmental Costs

“A portion of the production shortfall could also be met by expanding croplands, but at a high environmental cost to biodiversity and carbon emissions,” the authors said. 

Source: link.

Wind power: NIMBY-ism (Not In My Backyard) VS. WARYDU rhetoric (We Are Right; You Don't Understand)

Because it reads so nice, I am just going to copy-paste this paragraph from the "Acoustic Ecology Institute" (don't ask me what it is, I've never before heard of it) (Source: this here link):

 

From another page: link.

Modern wind turbines are massive structures, hundreds of feet tall, and often constructed in large wind farms that in effect industrialize rural landscapes, from the rolling grassy hills of California, to the vast rangeland of Texas, to ancient ridgelines in the Appalachians, to the commons in rural England. While the trade-offs may be worth it in some areas, the downsides have become more apparent. Resistance to wind farms is often belittled as NIMBY-ism (Not In My Backyard); but at the same time, proponents often slip into oversimplifeid WARYDU rhetoric (We Are Right; You Don't Understand). In most cases, industrial wind farms are complying with local noise limits; the issue has become whether these noise limits are sufficient to protect rural residents from irrevocable changes in the soundscapes of their homes and farms. If we are to forge a reliable energy future that is respectful of both the environment and the rights of neighbors, we'll need to move past knee-jerk reactions on both sides, and develop best practices that can ensure that the landscape and local residents don't become long-term casualties of today's "Klondike Wind Rush."

 

 

 
This caption is from the first site as well <link>:
How big are modern wind turbines? The ones on the left are 60m and 125m; the one on the right is 95m, with blades sweeping an area the size of a 747.
 

EU ETS update - 2 billion surplus allowances. Whoops.

 

EU ETS: continuing decline in emissions but growing surplus of allowances in 2012

Allowance surplus doubled in 2012

The surplus of emission allowances almost doubled from around 950 million at the end of 2011. A combination of the use of international credits, auctioned phase 2 allowances and remaining allowances in the new entrant reserve, sales of phase 3 allowances to generate funds for the NER300 programme and early auctioning of phase 3 allowances resulted in a cumulative surplus of almost two billion allowances by the end of 2012.

Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action, said: "The good news is that emissions declined again in 2012. The bad news is that the supply-demand imbalance has further worsened in large part due to a record use of international credits. At the start of phase 3, we see a surplus of almost two billion allowances. These facts underline the need for the European Parliament and Council to act swiftly on back-loading."

From: http://ec.europa.eu/clima/news/articles/news_2013051601_en.htm