News update
Green energy: Unrealistic targets
Pandurang Hegde, Deccan Herald
Recently the Minister of Power, Coal and Renewable Energy Piyush Goyal reassured the commitment of the Central government in achieving the target of 1,75,000 MW of green energy by 2022. The performance of green energy projects needs to be assessed in the light of ground level experiences and the targets need be set realistically. By setting up unrealistic targets, the green energy is bound to attract those who are keen to reap the windfall profits rather than generating power.
A ‘Dashboard’ for the Indian Energy Sector (PDF)
Ashok Sreenivas, Rakesh K. Iyer – EPW
A first approximation of a multidimensional index assessing the energy sector in India would be a dashboard that would measure trends through fi ve summary dimensions. Such a dashboard provides revealing insights, even in their condensed form.
Japan uses climate cash for coal plants in India, Bangladesh
Cadillac News
Despite mounting protests, Japan continues to finance the building of coal-fired power plants with money earmarked for fighting climate change, with two new projects underway in India and Bangladesh, The Associated Press has found. The AP reported in December that Japan had counted $1 billion in loans for coal plants in Indonesia as climate finance, angering critics who say such financing should be going to clean energy like solar and wind power.
The hidden reasons behind slow economic growth: Declining EROI, constrained net energy
Kurt Cobb
…the growth in net energy appears to have slowed while EROI of fossil fuels continues to fall. That has led to greater competition for the available net energy and a general rise in fossil fuel prices from 2000 onward. There have been fluctuations, sometimes violent ones, tied to the so-called Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 and to the softening of the world economy in the past year which led to steep declines in oil prices (something which may be telling us there is another recession in the offing).
How Long Can Oceans Continue To Absorb Earth’s Excess Heat?
Cheryl Katz, Yale Environment 360
The main reason soaring greenhouse gas emissions have not caused air temperatures to rise more rapidly is that oceans have soaked up much of the heat. But new evidence suggests the oceans’ heat-buffering ability may be weakening.
Despite decades of deforestation, the Earth is getting greener
The Conversation
While the news coming out of forests is often dominated by deforestation and habitat loss, research published in Nature Climate Change shows that the world has actually got greener over the past decade. Despite ongoing deforestation in South America and Southeast Asia, we found that the decline in these regions has been offset by recovering forests outside the tropics, and new growth in the drier savannas and shrublands of Africa and Australia.
Species extinction and the Competitive Exclusion Principle
Ron Patterson, Peak Oil Barrel
The competitive exclusion principle usually describes the competition of animals for a particular niche. But humans are animals also. We have been in the competition for territory and resources for thousands of years. And we have been winning that battle for thousands of years. But it is only in the last few hundred years that our complete dominance in this battle has become overwhelming. We are winning big time, we are quite literally wiping them off the face of the globe.
It’s Time to Get Serious About Systemic Solutions to Systemic Problems
Gar Alperovitz
It’s getting harder and harder to be an optimist. A deep economic crisis has given way to a profoundly unequal recovery. Climate catastrophe is steadily unfolding across the globe. All of this in an age of unprecedented technological progress, which has manifestly failed to keep its promises. If there is one saving grace, it is that the pain caused by these interconnected failures make it possible — for the first time in modern history — to pose the question of system change in a serious fashion, even in the United States, the faltering heart of global capitalism.