Energy

A protester in Ukraine swings a metal chain during clashes - a taste of things to come? Photograph: Gleb Garanich/Reuters

submitted by Mikayla McDonald

From South America to South Asia, a new age of unrest is in full swing as industrial civilisation transitions to post-carbon reality

theguardian.com - by Nafeez Ahmed - February 28, 2014

If anyone had hoped that the Arab Spring and Occupy protests a few years back were one-off episodes that would soon give way to more stability, they have another thing coming. The hope was that ongoing economic recovery would return to pre-crash levels of growth, alleviating the grievances fueling the fires of civil unrest, stoked by years of recession. . .

. . . The recent cases illustrate not just an explicit link between civil unrest and an increasingly volatile global food system, but also the root of this problem in the increasing unsustainability of our chronic civilisational addiction to fossil fuels. . .

. . . Of course, the elephant in the room is climate change.

huffingtonpost.com - by Jeffrey Sachs - February 3, 2014

CLICK HERE - Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone XL Project - Executive Summary January 2014 (44 page .PDF report)

The new State Department Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone Pipeline does three things. First, it signals a greater likelihood that the pipeline project will be approved later this year by the administration. Second, it vividly illustrates the depth of confusion of US climate change policy. Third, it self-portrays the US Government as a helpless bystander to climate calamity.

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Tom Meyer's new system generates hydrogen fuel by using the sun's energy to split water into its component parts. After the split, hydrogen is sequestered and stored, while the byproduct, oxygen, is released into the air. Credit: Tom Meyer

phys.org - January 14, 2014

Solar energy has long been used as a clean alternative to fossil fuels such as coal and oil, but it could only be harnessed during the day when the sun's rays were strongest. Now researchers led by Tom Meyer at the Energy Frontier Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have built a system that converts the sun's energy not into electricity but hydrogen fuel and stores it for later use, allowing us to power our devices long after the sun goes down.

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euractiv.com - January 8, 2014

The EU's decarbonisation of its energy sector will only cut emissions by half the amount needed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius in 2050, according to a business-as-usual scenario quietly released by the European Commission over the Christmas period.

CLICK HERE - STUDY - EU Energy, transport and GHG emissions trends to 2050

Scientists and EU leaders agree that by mid-century, Europe must ramp up energy savings and green its power generation to slash CO2 emissions by 80-95% compared to 1990 levels, and so avoid catastrophic climate change. 

But according to a European Commission ‘Trends to 2050’ study, which was released below the radar over the Christmas period, the continent is only on track to reduce its emissions by around a third in 2030, and 44% in 2050.

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