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UK business chiefs press for tougher curbs on greenhouse gases
David Adam, The Guardian
Business leaders yesterday urged Tony Blair to impose tougher limits on greenhouse gas emissions from UK industry. The senior figures from 14 top British companies, including Tesco, Shell and B&Q, told the prime minister that government curbs on carbon dioxide emissions were needed to drive the development of clean technologies. They called for stiff targets in the next round of the European carbon trading scheme and regulations to improve the energy efficiency of homes and businesses.
In an open letter released before a meeting at Downing Street, the executives said: “The scientific evidence is showing that human-induced climate change may be happening even faster than expected. It is clear to us that the need for ambitious and long-term action is becoming ever more urgent.”
The group, brought together under the Prince of Wales’s business and environment programme, said companies would only invest in low-carbon solutions if they received a firm pledge from ministers on the need to cut damaging emissions. Lobby groups opposed to action frequently present such regulation as a threat to economic growth, but the executives said it could “provide significant economic opportunities for British business”. Neil Carson, chief executive of Johnson Matthey, said strong policies to tackle climate change could give UK businesses an advantage in the new global markets for low-carbon technology.
(7 June 2006)
Climate change could crush wheat yields
AAP, The Age (Australia)
Soaring temperatures and declining rainfalls caused by climate change could wipe a billion dollars a year off Australia’s wheat industry within 30 years, a study suggests.
Professor Peter Grace, from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), said a study of five major wheat-growing areas predicted changes to weather patterns could cause a drop in production of up to 24 per cent.
Prof Grace said atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were predicted to increase significantly in Australia over the next 30 to 50 years, causing temperatures to rise up to three degrees and rainfall to drop by around 20 per cent or more.
“Under these conditions, and with the wheat varieties and agronomic practices currently used in Australia, we could expect to see an average decline in wheat yields across the country of 15 per cent, which equates to around a $1 billion in lost income,” Prof Grace said.
(7 June 2006)
UK utilities warn climate change to threaten power investment
MarketWatch
U.K. utilities and the government Monday warned that climate change threatened to undermine the power sector’s investment in power plants and transmission lines unless appropriate forecasts were devised to help guide the power sector’s future investment policy.
Most of the U.K.’s power plants and power lines were constructed to operate in cold winters and mild summers, senior utility executives said at a press conference in London. But climate change threatens to make winters more mild and summers much hotter, leading to both a change in power consumption and greater strain on power transmission and generation assets, the utility executives added.
(5 June 2006)
Lloyd’s tells members climate change could destroy insurers
Terry Macalister, The Guardian
Lloyd’s of London, the oldest insurance market in the world, yesterday urged its members to start taking global warming more seriously, by increasing prices to avoid being “swept away” in a sea of future financial claims.
Premiums will have to rise and some risks might even be classed as uninsurable due to greenhouse gases and rising sea levels, warned Lloyd’s in a report entitled Climate Change, Adapt or Bust.
“Although it’s almost two decades since the UN recognised that climate change was a catastrophic threat to the Earth, it’s clear that the insurance industry has not taken catastrophe trends seriously enough. Climate change is today’s problem not tomorrow’s. If we don’t take action now to understand the changing nature of our planet we will face extinction,” said Lloyd’s director, Rolf Tolle.
(5 June 2006)
Renewables could be `major economic opportunity’ for U.S., says study
Refocus Weekly vi EnergyResources
Using green power to meet 20% of U.S. electricity demand would create one-quarter of a million jobs by 2020, according to a report from a university in Dallas.
Global warming may represent a major opportunity for investment and job growth in the United States but any such potential is endangered if the general public and politicians remain mired in panic or a sense of resignation about climate change, says Lloyd Jeff Dumas in `Seeds of Opportunity – Climate Change: Between Complacency and Panic.’ Dumas is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Texas at Dallas, and the report examines the potential economic opportunities associated with mitigating global warming, with a focus on five policy approaches.
“It has been said that within every problem lie the seeds of opportunity,” it explains. “Global warming is no exception to that rule.”
Global warming threatens to result in huge economic dislocations, powerful storms, diseases, catastrophic droughts, dwindling food supplies, unprecedented floods and vanishing coastal areas, but the threat also presents an opportunity for private sector companies and government to find cost-effective ways to mitigate the damage likely to be caused by climate change. “There is the potential for earning substantial profits and creating large numbers of productive jobs by focusing on climate change solutions,” it adds.
(7 June 2006)
If anyone has some capital, I have a great idea for a gondola franchise -AF
