How much of this census will be propaganda and spin? Or is this a real effort by China to measure its pollution? I am not so sure. Decide for yourself. This is the beginning of the article :
China has revealed its most ambitious measure of what explosive development has done to its environment, saying Tuesday its first national pollution census has mapped nearly 6 million sources of industrial, residential and agricultural waste.
The world’s largest polluter also said its pollution levels might peak sooner than expected as China tries to balance economic and green concerns.
The central government now has a year to use the census results to shape its next five-year environmental protection plan. Ministries are also studying the possibility of an environmental tax, China’s vice minister of environmental protection, Zhang Lijun, told a news conference.
The European chemical industry is embracing innovation to ensure sustainability. Moreover, through innovation the industry is providing measures to facilitate a sustainable society.
The chemical sector plays a significant role in the European economy, contributing 30% of the world’s total chemical production, employing 1.2 million people and generating €537 billion in sales in 2007.
The EU registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemical substances (REACH) Regulation is at the centre of a shift towards more sustainable solutions. Aiming to protect human health and the environment, REACH makes companies responsible for registering information on the properties of their chemicals with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).
Now we will see whether our leaders will stick to their comittments from the shambolic Copenhagen Conference:
————-
Donors will probably have to decide for themselves how to spend money in 2010 since there is no mechanism to guide handouts. A “Copenhagen Green Climate Fund,” also planned by last month’s low-ambition summit, does not yet exist.
“The expectation is that donor countries will deliver through existing bilateral and multilateral channels of their own choosing,” Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change said of the fast-track funds.
“There are some legal hiccups created by the accord not being a (U.N.) instrument,” said Gordon Shepherd, director of international policy at the WWF environmental group. But he said a flow of funds could help build trust between rich and poor.
This is an interesting article I thought I would share with everyone here:
Industrial biotechnology is gaining supporters among environmentalists as a way to make significant cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions and eventually move to a society free from fossil fuels. The lofty idea behind industrial, or white, biotechnology is to use nature’s own ingredients to solve industrial problems. White biotech industries use enzymes - proteins that speed up chemical reactions - for various applications to increase efficiency of energy and raw-material use and eventually replace fossil fuels.
An engineering professor has figured out why oil remains trapped along miles of gravel beaches more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Prince William Sound.
An estimated 20,000 gallons of crude remain in Prince William Sound, even though oil remaining after the nearly 11-million-gallon spill had been expected to biodegrade and wash away within a few years.
The problem: The gravelly beaches of Prince William Sound are trapping the oil between two layers of rock, with larger rocks on top and finer gravel underneath, according to Michel C. Boufadel, chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Temple University. His study appeared Sunday in Nature Geoscience’s online publication and will be published in the journal later.
A very interesting blog post by Christine Arena today:
—————-
Investors are hoarding it to hedge against the dollar’s weakness. Consumers are buying it up in ever increasing volumes. Gold seemingly adds up to big opportunities wherever you look, with US gold jewelry sales representing a growing $17 billion market and China gold jewelry sales reaching nearly 260 billion yuan in 2009. But the fact is that this precious metal has a dark side, too. As gold’s prestige and value increases, so do the implications of the trade itself.
“Most consumers don’t know where the gold in their products comes from, or how it is mined,” says NoDirtyGold.org, a group that encourages retailers to cease carrying gold that comes from illegal sources. “Gold mining is a dirty industry: it can displace communities, contaminate drinking water, hurt workers, and destroy pristine environments.”
Climate change scepticism is likely to surge in 2010 and could exacerbate “hardship” for the planet’s poorest people, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change has told the Guardian.
Writing on environmentguardian.co.uk today, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also dismisses suggestions that he is personally profiting from policies to tackle global warming.
The amount of venture capital that went toward green-technology companies fell to $4.85 billion in 2009, compared to $7.6 billion in 2008, according to numbers published on Wednesday by Greentech Media. The number of deals was up slightly from 350 in 2008 to 356 this year.
In a statement, venture capitalists cast the numbers in a positive light, saying that the number of deals has increased and the quality of entrepreneurs working in the area is improving.
But even with billions of government stimulus dollars spent on energy, the economic downturn has clearly had an impact on the overall sector. Venture capitalists cut off funding for at least two companies in 2009–algae fuel company Greenfuel Technologies and battery company Imara, which both failed to generate significant revenues.
This is an interesting analysis of the Copenhagen talks:
Fuqiang Yang, director of global climate solutions, WWF International
The negotiations in Copenhagen ended without a fair, ambitious or legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this, what emerged was an agreement that will, at the very least, cut greenhouse gases, set up an emissions verification system, and reduce deforestation. Given the complexity of the issue, this represents a step forward.
I hasten to add that much of the hard work still lies ahead. The Copenhagen accord, the text that came out of the talks, leaves a long list of issues undecided. Among them are the emissions targets industrialised nations will accept, and how much climate finance they will offer.
The accord essentially allows countries to set their own greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals for 2020.
By Email
RSS
