Oct
3
| date: | 20 November 2014 – 21 November 2014 |
| city (country): | Brussels (Belgium) |
| organizer: | Plastics Recyclers Europe |
| webadress: | www.plasticsrecyclers.eu |
| e-mail: | info@plasticsrecyclers.eu |
| telephone: | +32 2 742 9682 |
| fax: | +32 2 732 4124 |
Oct
1
The world has changed since our leaders discussed climate change in 2009. It has become even more evident; ravaging crops in Africa, melting ice in the Arctic, drowning the Philippines and drying-up California. The poor are paying the highest price. But ever since super storm Sandy hit New York, even the rich in industrialized countries know that they can’t hide from devastating climate change in their gated communities.
Climate change is not on its way. It’s already here.
Yet, cost-effective, sensible solutions have also made quantum leaps since 2009. Clean, renewable energy is getting bigger, better and cheaper every day. It can provide the answers our exhausted planet is looking for. Renewables are the most economical solution for new power capacity in an ever-increasing number of countries. 100% of power capacity added in the United States last month was renewable and countries like Denmark and Germany are producing new ‘clean electricity’ records almost every month. In China, real change is under way, too. Not only is China installing as much solar this year as the US has ever done, but their apocalyptic coal boom which drove up global carbon pollution since 2000 is also coming to an end. Things are rapidly changing and the current economic paradigm is no longer impenetrable – the light of reason is starting to shine through its cracks.
If rationality and economics were humanity’s guide to living on this planet, climate action would no longer need summits. The more successful clean energy solutions get, the more they are cutting into the profit margins of those few powerful companies whose business models depends on continued fossil fuel dependency. That’s why we agree with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon when he says“instead of asking if we can afford to act, we should be asking what is stopping us, who is stopping us, and why?” We would add to this another question: for how long?
Today, it is interests of the fossil fuel industries – not technology nor economics – which are the only obstacle to securing a safe future for us and our children on this planet. And they know it, too. When we talk to people at major energy firms these days, they admit in private that they understand the need to transition towards clean energy. But the coal investments that companies like Duke Energy in the US, and Eskom in South Africa have made are holding them back. Worse, because they fear that their massive investments could become stranded (i.e. wasted) assets they are actively lobbying politicians to slow down the clean, people-powered energy revolution that is under way.
Business lobbies such as ALEC in the US or Business Europe in the EU are fighting tooth and nail to prevent progressive climate policies from being adopted. They claim they do this to “protect jobs”. But this is an utter lie. We want workers fully involved in a just transition to a clean energy future. But we also know from Greenpeace Energy Revolution analyses over the past decade that renewables and energy efficiency will deliver more jobs than carrying on with dirty energy business as usual. By implementing a step by step energy [r]evolution governments can, for example, help businesses create 3.2 million more jobs by 2030 in the global power supply sector alone. In South Africa, to pick just one country, 149,000 direct jobs could be created by 2030. That’s 38,000 more than in the current government plan.
Meanwhile, China’s turnaround on coal could also change the dynamics in the global climate debate. At the New York summit, the Chinese government could end the current “you go first” mentality that has poisoned progress during the UN climate talks. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if China, emboldened by its domestic actions, were to lead the world to a new global climate agreement by, for example, announcing in New York a peak in their emissions long before 2030?
It’s only these kind of bold, concrete commitments that will be acceptable for the New York climate summit. Progressive business leaders need to – as Ban Ki-moon put it, “push back against skeptics and entrenched interests”. They can do so by leaving destructive business lobbies such as ALEC or Business Europe and setting themselves concrete deadlines by which they will run their businesses on 100% renewable energy. Governments need to send a clear signal to investors by supporting a phase-out of fossil fuels by 2050. Indeed concrete steps need to be taken now – such as ending the financing of coal fired power plants – to get us there.
The world has changed since 2009. Baby steps are no longer enough. To control runaway climate change, we need to sharply change tack and sail with the wind, not against it with unsustainable fossil fuels.
That’s why we marched on the streets of New York, and cities around the world on September 21st: to show – alongside tens of thousands of people – that it’s time the polluters got out of the way and let us build a green, just and peaceful future for the generations which follow us.
Kumi Naidoo is the Executive Director of Greenpeace International.
Sep
27
By Tom Bawden
Earth’s protective ozone layer is beginning to recover, largely because of the phase-out since the 1980s of certain chemicals used in refrigerants and aerosol cans, a UN scientific panel reported in a rare piece of good news about the health of the planet.
Scientists said the development demonstrates that when the world comes together, it can counteract a brewing ecological crisis.
For the first time in 35 years, scientists were able to confirm a statistically significant and sustained increase in stratospheric ozone, which shields the planet from solar radiation that causes skin cancer, crop damage and other problems.
From 2000 to 2013, ozone levels climbed 4 percent in the key mid-northern latitudes at about 30 miles up, said NASA scientist Paul A. Newman. He co-chaired the every-four-years ozone assessment by 300 scientists, released at the United Nations.
“It’s a victory for diplomacy and for science and for the fact that we were able to work together,” said chemist Mario Molina. In 1974, Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland wrote a scientific study forecasting the ozone depletion problem. They won the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work.
The ozone layer had been thinning since the late 1970s. Man-made chlorofluorocarbons, called CFCs, released chlorine and bromine, which destroyed ozone molecules high in the air. After scientists raised the alarm, countries around the world agreed to a treaty in 1987 that phased out CFCs. Levels of those chemicals between 50 and 80 kilometres up are decreasing.
The United Nations calculated in an earlier report that without the pact, by 2030 there would have been an extra 2 million skin cancer cases a year around the world.
The ozone layer over the years. Image / NASA
Paradoxically, heat-trapping greenhouse gases – considered the major cause of global warming – are also helping to rebuild the ozone layer, Newman said. The report said rising levels of carbon dioxide and other gases cool the upper stratosphere, and the cooler air increases the amount of ozone.
And in another worrisome trend, the chemicals that replaced CFCs contribute to global warming and are on the rise, said MIT atmospheric scientist Susan Solomon. At the moment, they don’t make much of a dent, but they are expected to increase dramatically by 2050 and make “a big contribution” to global warming.
The ozone layer is still far from healed. The long-lasting, ozone-eating chemicals still lingering in the atmosphere create a yearly fall ozone hole above the extreme Southern Hemisphere, and the hole hasn’t closed up. Also, the ozone layer is still about 6 percent thinner than in 1980, by Newman’s calculations.
Ozone levels are “on the upswing, but it’s not there yet,” he said.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Program, said there are encouraging signs that the ozone layer “is on track to recovery by the middle of this century.”
Steiner called the effort to get rid of ozone-destroying substances “one of the great success stories of international collective action in addressing a global environmental change phenomenon.”
“More than 98 percent of the ozone-depleting substances agreed over time have actually been phased out,” he said. If not for such efforts, Steiner said, “we would be seeing a very substantial global ozone depletion today.”
Paul Wapner, a professor of global environmental politics at American University, said the findings are “good news in an often dark landscape” and send a message of hope to world leaders meeting later this month in New York for a UN climate summit.
“The precedent is truly important because society is facing another serious global environmental problem, namely climate change,” said Molina, a professor in San Diego and Mexico City. The 71-year-old scientist said he didn’t think he would live to see the day that the ozone layer was rebuilding.
Earlier this week, the United Nations announced that atmospheric levels of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, surged to another record high in 2013. The increase from 2012 was the biggest jump in three decades.
Next article: Plastics may pose a greater threat than climate change
– AP
Sep
25
Atlanta and Barcelona are roughly equal in population, but they are not equal in size. The two metropolitan areas, which each contain around 5 million people, look about like this graphic from a bird’s eye view.
And, as you can see in the graphic from the World Resources Institute, carbon emissions from public and private transportation combined are dramatically different, counted in tons of carbon dioxide per person.
Read also:
• Streets fill around world as climate-change activists march for cause
• UN says carbon levels at record high
These two characteristics – the literal footprint of a city and the carbon footprint of its transportation – are intimately linked.
The more spread-out an urban area, the more likely its residents are to run even the most routine errands by car, producing vehicle emissions.
The more compact it is, the less distance residents need to travel every day, and the easier – and cheaper – it is to build public transit.
These two cities illustrate a big piece of the climate change picture that gets much less attention than coal plants or hybrid cars: As the world urbanises at break-neck speed, the way we design growing cities will heavily determine the environmental impact of the people who live there. And decisions we make today about where and how to invest in transportation will lock in those impacts for decades.
If the world’s cities develop like sprawling Atlanta, the area of urbanised land on the planet could triple from 2000 to 2030, according to the World Resources Institute report. The number of cars could double to 2 billion, as could the amount of land used globally per household. The problems that would then arise would be both environmental and economic.
We’d have to spend a lot more money paving roads and extending utilities to people who live farther apart than in close quarters. Houston, the institute points to as an example, spends about 14 per cent of its GDP on transportation. Compact, bike-happy Copenhagen devotes about 4 per cent.
Atlanta is more spread-out than Barcelona, so its residents are more likely to run errands by car, producing vehicle emissions. Photo / Thinkstock
The alternative to Atlanta doesn’t have to look like Manhattan (Barcelona is nowhere near as dense as that). And it would be hypocritical of Americans who already enjoy extensive road infrastructure, ubiquitous cars and spacious homes to now lecture the developing world that it can’t have the same.
The fundamental issue here, though, isn’t about forcing everyone into high-rises or out of their cars and onto bicycles. It’s about planning for the growth to come instead of simply letting it happen haphazardly.
Invariably, the latter leads to sprawl, congestion, wasted productivity and higher infrastructure costs. But if we plan now to accommodate millions more global city-dwellers in more compact cities, with better transit infrastructure, we can rein in the massive costs – for the environment and local economies – associated with unchecked, infinite urban development.
Do this in the world’s 724 largest cities, the institute says, and we might curb greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5 billion tons a year by 2030. If we built denser, more connected cities, the report adds, we could save $15 trillion in infrastructure investments over the next 15 years.
To put this in further perspective, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and UC Davis recently modeled what might happen if global cities heavily shifted away from constructing new roads and parking garages and subsidising gas consumption, and focused instead on expanding public transit and non-motorised transportation (inherent in this shift is the idea that we’d have to build more compactly).
Do that on a massive scale, Michael Replogle and Lewis Fulton concluded, and we could save $100 trillion in public and private capital and transportation operating costs by 2050. We could reduce emissions from urban passenger transport by 40 per cent.
Change the ways we get around, and how much we travel, and an alternative future come 2050 would look very different than if we continue with business as usual.
– Washington Post
Sep
25
Grim study reveals demand for new products results in huge dumping of electronic equipment
They are on our person, in our homes and in our workplaces, many of them harbouring heavy metals and toxic materials which are dangerous to people and the environment unless they are properly recycled.
Yet the soaring international demand for electric and electronic products is fuelling a global rise in e-waste, which is set to reach 65.4 million tonnes annually by 2017.
The grim forecast is from a new study, which has mapped more than 180 countries. It reveals that, in just five years, the yearly amount of e-waste will rise by 33 per cent from the 49 million tonnes of used electrical and electronic items generated last year.
Worldwide, the US is the worst offender with 9.4 million tonnes of e-waste each year, with around 26,500 tonnes being sent to poorer countries each year.
Mobile phones form the bulk of the 14 million used electronic products exported with most used phones destined for Hong Kong, and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Old computers are generally sent to Asian countries, while heavy items like TVs and computer monitors end up in places such as Mexico, Venezuela, Paraguay and China.
Another contributor to the global e-waste mountain is China, producing around 7.3 million tonnes a year and ranked second in the world after the US for its volume of e-waste.
Britain is another major contributor, ranking sixth in the world in terms of the total amount – creating around 1.4m tonnes of waste a year.
From unwanted flat-screen TVs to mobile phones, from fridges to microwaves, the UK is the worst offender in the EU.
A new report by Wrap (Waste & Resources Action Plan), an independent body created by the British Government to promote recycling, reveals that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of e-waste are being dumped in landfills across the country.
Wrap is now working with a number of leading retailers and manufacturers to develop a Sustainable Electricals Action Plan. This aims to improve the sustainability of electrical products by developing industry standard guidance on design and buying specifications for major household appliances aimed at extending their life.
Sep
24
In the first international test for his climate-change strategy, President Barack Obama pressed world leaders Tuesday to follow the United States’ lead on the issue, even as a United Nations summit revealed the many obstacles that still stand in the way of wider agreements to reduce heat-trapping pollution.
“The United States has made ambitious investments in clean energy and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions,” Obama said. “Today I call on all countries to join us, not next year or the year after that, but right now. Because no nation can meet this global threat alone.”
But none of the pledges made at Tuesday’s one-day meeting was binding. The largest-ever gathering of world leaders to discuss climate was designed to lay the groundwork for a new global climate-change treaty.
It also revealed the sharp differences that divide countries on matters such as deforestation, carbon pollution and methane leaks from oil and gas production:
– Brazil, home to the Amazon rainforest, said it would not sign a pledge to halt deforestation by 2030.
– The United States decided not to join 73 countries in supporting a price on carbon, which Congress has indicated it would reject.
– And minutes after Obama said “nobody gets a pass,” Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli insisted the world treat developing nations, including China, differently than developed nations, allowing them to release more heat-trapping pollution.
China, the No. 1 carbon-polluting nation, signed on in support of pricing carbon and vowed to stop the rise of carbon-dioxide emissions as soon as possible.
“Today we must set the world on a new course,” said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who added that pricing carbon was critical. “Climate change is the defining issue of our age. It is defining our present. Our response will define our future.”
In some ways, the summit, which was part of the annual UN General Assembly, answered that call.
The European Union said its member nations next month were set to approve a plan that would cut greenhouse gases back to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The EU also called for using renewable energy for 27 percent of the bloc’s power needs and increasing energy efficiency by 30 percent.
The United States will not release its new emissions targets until early next year.
“There were not that many surprises,” said Connie Hedegaard, the top climate official for the European Commission, referring to Obama’s speech.
Hedegaard said the first-ever limits on carbon from power plants, proposed by Obama back in June, were “a good signal to send, but after today we will still have to wait until first quarter of 2015 to see how ambitious the United States will be.”
By 2020, China will reduce its emissions per gross domestic product by 45 percent from 2005 levels, Zhang said. But because economic growth in China has more than tripled since 2005, that means Chinese carbon pollution can continue to soar. Still, outside environmentalists hailed the country’s promises because they went beyond any of China’s previous statements.
More than 150 countries set the first-ever deadline to end deforestation by 2030, but that goal was thrown into doubt when Brazil said it would not join. Forests are important because they absorb the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The United States, Canada and the entire European Union signed onto a declaration to halve forest loss by 2020 and eliminate deforestation entirely by 2030.
If the forest goal is met, the UN says it would be the equivalent of taking every car in the world off the road. A group of companies, countries and nonprofits also pledged to restore more than 1 million square miles of forest worldwide by 2030. Norway promised to spend $350 million to protect forests in Peru and another $100 million in Liberia.
World leaders pledged to spend at least $5 billion making the world more sustainable. France promised $1 billion. Korea pledged $100 million. Others, like Chile, pledged cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
A 2009 agreement called the Copenhagen Accord called for developed countries to contribute $10 billion a year in 2010 and scale it up to $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries cut emissions and adapt to a changing climate.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro chastised “polluting powers” for causing an “evil of such planetary dimensions” and then trying to barter their way out of their responsibilities.
Seychelles President James Michel called small island nations like his “victims of this pollution” and said it was up to the countries that burn the most coal, oil and gas to do the most.
“If they don’t do something, the Earth will not survive, and that will be the end of us all,” Michel said in an interview before the start of the summit.
Ban, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, former US Vice President Al Gore and scientist Rajendra K Pachauri warned that time was short. By 2020, Ban said, the world must reduce greenhouse gases to prevent an escalating level of warming. Five years ago, leaders pledged to keep world temperatures from increasing by another 3.6 degrees Celsius.
Pachauri, who headed a Nobel Prize-winning panel of scientists that studied the issue, and Ban told world leaders the effects of global warming are already here, pointing to a UN building that flooded during the devastating Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
Pachauri said it will get worse with droughts, storms and food and water shortages. He foresaw even more violent climate-driven conflicts.
And, Pachauri said, “a steady rise in our death toll, especially among the world’s poorest. How on Earth can we leave our children with a world like this?”
– AP
Sep
24
‘Abu Dhabi produces an estimated 20 kg per capita of waste cooking oil annually,’ notes Tadweer’s general manager Eisa Saif Al Qubaisi. ‘Processing and reusing this as fuel is an environmentally friendly and efficient energy solution that can contribute up to 5% of sustainable energy needs by 2020.’
The institute has selected Dr Isam Janajreh, associate professor of mechanical engineering and head of MIST’s Waste to Energy Laboratory, as the project’s principal investigator. In this role, he will design, plan and formulate the modelling and experimental investigations with assistance from Dr Ahmed Aljabri and a group of Master’s degree students.
‘The research agreement illustrates the UAE’s commitment to facilitating the production of clean energy and minimisation of waste,’ states MIST’s president Dr Fred Moavenzadeh. ‘With the support of the country’s leadership, we will continue our contribution to the development of clean energy technologies and ensure faster adoption of sustainable measures.’
For more information, visit: www.masdar.ac.ae and www.cwm.ae
