In view of the stalemate on climate legislation in the Senate President Obama has  instructed the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) to prepare executive regulations for capping green house gas emissions from automobiles, trucks, refineries, power plants and major industrial emitters. These measures are designed to enter into force in early 2011 if no legislation has [...]

The decision by Areva, the French engineering company with a turn-over of some € 12 billion and employing 75 000 people around the world, to buy Ausra, a tiny US start-up company with less than 100 employees, is likely to give a further boost solar thermal power generation, after the launch of DESERTEC by a [...]

In December 2008 the EU has decided onto providing at least 20 percent of its energy needs - the equivalent of 30 percent of its electricity consumption - supply from renewable sources by 2020 latest. To that end, it will need to generate about one third of its electricity from renewables.
This is anything but easy! [...]

As of January 1st, the new Brazilian climate legislation (“National Policy on Climate Change Act”) has entered into force. It fixes ambitious targets. By 2020 green house gas emissions should be 39 percent lower than “business as usual”, which should bring back Brazil‘s emissions back to 1994 levels.
To reach this objective, Brazil must first and [...]

Fighting climate change requires action by all countries, but in particular the small number of major  emitting countries- China, USA, EU, Russia, Japan, India, Gulf states, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Korea, South Africa – on which effective mitigation of global climate change hinges.
Up to now only the EU and Japan have taken stringent actions they [...]

“Political pressure on governments and utilities to refrain from building new coal-fired power plants is rising across Europe. Citizens no longer want to have them in their neighbourhood. As a result as many as seven projects have been abandoned in Germany only in the course of 2009, the last most recentlymost recently in Lubmin in [...]

Insufficient Copenhagen reduction pledges a danger for the planet
In view of to containing the rise of global  temperaturesglobal temperatures and climate change within acceptable limits of maximum 2 centigrade humanity will have to reduce its green house gas emissions by half before 2050; and the developed countries must bear the major burden of this [...]

The international discussion on climate change policy has unduly focused on alternatives to fossil energies. As wind, solar, biomass, heat pumps geothermal etc continue to be substantially more expensive than oil or coal, politicians have been made to believe that fighting climate change is an expensive undertaking.
Whatever the outcome from Copenhagen the priority for the [...]

Australia is one of the worst green house gas polluters on earth. With its population of 22 million people, a third of France, it emits annually 400 million tons of C02, more than France. Its per capita emissions are close to 20 tons, higher than any other country with the exception of Canada, USA and [...]

10 days before the start of the Copenhagen climate negotiations the outcome seems slightly more open than a few weeks ago.
·      The scientific community has just in time presented new evidence about the extremely risky acceleration of climate change, thereby putting negotiators under heavy pressure to come to substantive agreement now, rather than [...]