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Green Notes - 23 Jun 08

By Chinthana ⋅ June 23, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

• As many as a quarter of British homes could be fitted with solar heating systems and thousands of wind turbines erected across the country under government plans for a “green revolution” to be set out next week. The UK Government will set out proposed renewable energy plans this week for meeting Britain’s EU-set target of ensuring that 15 per cent of UK energy comes from renewable energy sources by 2020. Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the new proposals are “the most ambitious” such strategy that Britain has seen. In the meantime environmentalists have urged ministers not to “wriggle” out of tough new European targets for renewable energy by including overseas schemes and projects that have not been completed.
• New research suggests that ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961 and 2003 were 50 percent larger than estimated in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. An international team of researchers, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory climate scientist Peter Gleckler, compared climate models with improved observations that show sea levels rose by 1.5 millimeters per year in the period from 1961-2003. That equates to an approximately 2½-inch increase in ocean levels in a 42-year span.
• Cicero has released a report touting how a new experimental carbon sequestration and disposition system can drastically lower CO2 levels and significantly improve our climate change prognosis. Carbon sequestration is on everyone’s minds. But while effective capture methods have been developed, the question remains: what do we do with all that CO2 we’ve got bottled up?
  Related News: The cleanest coal plant in North America is operated by Tampa Electric, in the middle of rural Florida. They call it clean because they don’t burn coal exactly - they mix it with water and oxygen and convert it into a gas. According to company president John Ramil, gasifying coal allows the company to remove pollutants like sulphur, nitrogen and soot, which virtually eliminates acid rain.

  John McCain continued his push for nuclear energy, calling for the U.S. to build another 45 reactors by 2030 in a bid to break U.S. dependence on pollution-generating fossil fuels. It would be a challenging goal given the high costs, potential local opposition and questions about how to store the nuclear waste these plants would produce. But the Republican presidential candidate Wednesday argued that nuclear power is clean, efficient and not meeting its potential.