From an article in the Guardian:
Divisions over nuclear power and renewable energy threatened to derail the EU's campaign to assume a global leadership role in the fight against climate change at the bloc's spring summit which began last night. [...]
But France, backed by several east European countries, insisted carbon-free nuclear power be included within the EU energy mix and rejected [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel's proposal to make a 20 percent target for renewable energy binding on all 27 members.
At his swansong summit, the outgoing French president Jacques Chirac insisted that he would only agree to binding energy targets if nuclear power were included and proposed that 45 percent of the mix come from non-fossil fuel sources. France gets 80 percent of its power from nuclear power plants.
The Reuters story is more upbeat, saying that:
European Union leaders were on the brink of agreeing on Thursday to set a binding pan-European target for renewable energy sources as part of an ambitious strategy to fight climate change.
After the first working session of a two-day summit, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said the 27 leaders had agreed in principle to set a mandatory target for renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydro-electric power, and allocate the burden among member states later.
"We have agreed that we need a target for renewable energy supply and that it will be binding, but it will follow a discussion on what that means for each member state," Reinfeldt told reporters.
This debate is important in its own terms, and also as an effort to raise the bar before the G8 Heiligendamm Summit in June, when the U.S., China, and other countries will be asked to agree to a new scheme for new limits on global carbon emissions to replace the Kyoto Pact a global carbon trading scheme, and other measures to mitigate global warming.
(The Heiligendamm Summit piece in the New Scientist referenced above probably deserves its own item, but I'm trying to conserve bytes.)
City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks
Comments
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Biodiversivist Posted 11:37 am
09 Mar 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Robert Delfs Posted 2:39 pm
09 Mar 2007
The Interpress News report said that the summit adopted a target of generating 20% of total primary energy from renewables by 2020.
Everyone also seems to agree this won't be enough to make a real difference in global warming. In January, the EU Commission issued a paper warning that global emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced by at least 50% in order to hold average global warming to 2 degrees C, implying cuts of 60-80% by 2050 in emissions by Europe and other industrialized nations, the IPS report said.
The EU apparently offered to deepen the 2020 target to 30% "provided that other developed countries (commit themselves to comparable emission targets." That presumably means the US, so this would seem to be a fairly meaningless offer.
There are also apparently special "differentiated national overall targets" for some new EU members such as Poland and the Czech Republic which are heavily dependent on coal and heavy industry. And implications for the future role of nuclear power under the pact remain unclear.
Muddy or not, this still could be more important than green t-shirts. Once the dust clears, I hope someone who understands the situation with respect to energy and carbon emissions in Europebetter than I do will weigh in with a serious analysis of what this all means.
Robert Delfs
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:31 pm
09 Mar 2007
Well, not all biofuels are bad.
Algae Biofuels would neither threaten rainforrests, farmland, water supplies, or be harmful invasive plant species.
As is, looks like Europe is about to start production of BioButanol.
Essentially Ethanol, minus the performance downsides.
With a 42% higher energy yeild from the same ammount of ethanol feedstock.
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:15 am
10 Mar 2007
GreyFlcn,
I appreciate your upbeat techno tips. There is no end of technological ideas coming down the pipelines. Until such an idea makes a profit for a company as a product being purchased free of subsidies by consumers, it remains as just another idea. It is fun to hear about new ones, but we can't tout any of them as solutions. They are not solutions, they are just ideas that may one day lead to a solution.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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caniscandida Posted 3:35 am
10 Mar 2007
It strikes me that the French are not being unreasonable: if nuclear has generally worked to their satisfaction, they should not be required to develop renewables, for application within their borders, to the same extent as other countries.
The Eastern European countries are another matter entirely. And certainly France should be required to contribute to the development of renewables outside its borders.
It strikes me as crazy that the Europeans, in the name of fairness, and trying to honor the integrity of the member states, are going about this in so impractical a manner. Given the size of their continent, the geographic peculiarities of their respective countries, and the uneven distribution of resources, they surely realize that they are not equally well disposed to develop wind, solar and hydroelectric. So why are they so unwilling, or unable, to surrender some of their respective sovereignty to a truly united authority?
They already have experience in that kind of "internationalism," if that is the right word: e.g., the richer northern countries have spent a lot in developing the poorer southern countries and regions. Spain owes its recent prosperity to far-sighted cooperation like that, and Portugal and Greece too are showing signs of improvement. I say "cooperation," and not "generosity," as though it were foreign aid, because here and there, the Europeans glimpse that they all must hang together.
Not unrelated: Denmark famously has been committed to developing wind industry, and apparently that is very practical off their western coast, on the North Sea. CBS News ran a story yesterday about the Danish island of Salmo, which the government had challenged to find a way to become carbon-neutral and sustainable, energy-wise. They seem to have succeeded. Wind is part of the solution; but also there was something about collecting hay and burning it (why is that carbon-neutral?) beneath super-hot water boilers, then pumping the water to residences and other buildings for heat.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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sunflower Posted 3:42 am
10 Mar 2007
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:05 am
10 Mar 2007
A project by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has come one step closer to making fusion energy possible.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services.
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:27 am
10 Mar 2007
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Biodiesel_from_Alg ...
GreenFuels, from MIT, they've already made a couple setups and have been contracting with local electricity companies running pilot projects.
http://www.greenfuelonline.com/stage/gf_files/GFHowDoesIt ...
Got a company in Austrailia already doing it on commercial scale, using wild algae.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0701/S00103.htm
LiveFuels, they've partnered up with Sandia National Labs, and plan to be pushing product in 2010.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18138/
_
The way I look at it.
Even if Europe and US did cancel all BioFuels production.
China, Mexico, and India (Texas) would go and help themselves to rainforrest crushing biofuels.
So either we can sit back and do nothing. Or we can get infront of it and steer where it's going.
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:35 am
10 Mar 2007
Harvesting wild ocean blooms of algae.
Curtisy of agricultural runoff.
http://biopact.com/2007/03/harvesting-algae-blooms-from-o ...
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Biodiversivist Posted 5:53 am
10 Mar 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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caniscandida Posted 6:30 am
10 Mar 2007
But in that case, where do you draw the line? Coal, petroleum and natural gas are not called "fossil fuels" for nothing; they are the metamorphosed (not a technical term, here) remains of plants and animals, our cousins, of the far-distant past.
The long Carboniferous Period, of the Paleozoic Era, beginning approximately 345 million years ago, is apparently so-named because its strata are characterized by deposits of coal, the remains of that period's abundant forests.
The venerable petroleum company called Sinclair, absorbed into BP, brilliantly used the green silhouette of a stylized tail-dragging, leftward-plodding brontosaur as their logo. Whether there is any real connexion between dinosaurs and fossil fuels, I rather doubt. Nevertheless, a Sinclair gasoline station being my father's favorite, I received at a very young age a promotional gift that they were then distributing, a wonderful little stamp book with images of prehistoric animals and descriptions of them; and that is how I got hooked on dinosaurs and their friends.
At the 1964-65 World's Fair in Queens, NYC, while other people were enjoying the monorail, the Belgian Waffles, IBM's tour-de-force mechanized vision of modern life, Disney's "It's a Small World" ride, and Michelangelo's Pieta` from the Vatican, all that mattered to me were the life-sized dinosaurs (such as they were imagined back then) of the Sinclair Pavilion.
So, I wonder what the principle is in defining "carbon neutrality." Apparently some consideration of time enters into the matter: carbon removed from the atmosphere by plants during the Carboniferous seems to be an untouchable treasure, while carbon removed from the atmosphere by plants last year is not nearly so precious.
And that makes perfect sense to me. After all, carbon in the atmosphere of the past few years is part of our climate; carbon of the atmosphere of hundreds of years ago is not. Or, not necessarily. : (
Mind you, lest there be some confusion, I follow David Roberts' banner, emblazoned with "URGE2"; and I whisper his motto, "Coal is our enemy!," every night before I go to sleep, and every morning as I awaken. I am only requesting some clarification.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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sunflower Posted 6:55 am
10 Mar 2007
If we slowed fossil carbon release by 300 million years then I suppose the rocks, oceans, and crustaceans would have time to sequester that carbon while the other animals and plants would have time to migrate, adapt, and evolve to the slowly changing climates.
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caniscandida Posted 8:15 am
10 Mar 2007
And I guess we want here a true contrafactual condition: "If we were to slow [but of course that cannot happen]."
But my understanding is that once that particular quantity of carbon got naturally sequestered back in, say, the Carboniferous Period, that was that, and it no longer affected evolution.
What happens to the carbon stored in a tree that dies naturally, and sooner or later falls to the ground, and is not fossilized, but rather suffers natural decay? Is all the carbon returned to the atmosphere in the waste of the organisms that carry out the decomposition?
I am sorry, these questions have naturally come up in the course of conversation, but they are very distant from the original post. Perhaps they might be more suitably pursued at another occasion.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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sunflower Posted 9:13 am
10 Mar 2007
It is conventional wisdom that bacteria will release the plant carbon back into the atmosphere.
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