Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Big oil stokes the fires for the planet to burn
Terry Macalister, Guardian (blog)
BP promised to go ‘beyond petroleum’. But carbon remains at the heart of big energy firms
—
There is a parallel universe in operation out there. Politicians try to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, while business executives lay plans to expand their carbon footprint.
While the pace of negotiations on a post-Kyoto treaty has picked up, and the European Union has outlined new schemes for increasing the price of carbon, oil companies seem intent on ensuring carbon remains at the centre of their businesses.
BP was once promising to go “beyond petroleum” and turn itself into a broadly based energy group under John Browne.
But his exit seems to have triggered a U-turn, with new boss Tony Hayward taking BP into Canada’s dirty tar sands and abandoning schemes for a revolutionary carbon capture and storage operation at Peterhead, Scotland.
Meanwhile rival Shell has been putting increasing amounts of investment into its tar sands business and various other “unconventional” gas projects, while selling off its once-proud solar operations in Asia and elsewhere.
(7 February 2008)
Cap and Trade and Fairness for Working Families
Alan Durning, Sightlilne
Climate policy offers an enormous opportunity not only to undo our fossil-fuel addiction and build a stable energy future, but also to reverse the natural unfairness of climate change itself.
I’ve said it before: energy prices are going up no matter what, with or without climate policy. But smart policy can turn rising costs into broadly shared benefits. It can shield working families, fund a shift to a clean future of new technologies, compact communities, and a trained, green-collar workforce.
Building economic fairness into climate policy is a no-brainer: there are several viable ways to make it happen. In my last post, I described a means to it called “Cap-and-Dividend,” in which most public proceeds from auctioning carbon emissions permits finance a program of payments to each citizen. Another approach that shields working families from high energy prices comes from Robert Greenstein, founder and chief of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. CBPP is the Washington, DC-based think tank that bird-dogs the federal budget on behalf of poor families. Greenstein wrote the plan with colleagues Sharon Parrott and Arloc Sherman.
In short, in this plan climate dividends go only to families with very low incomes, to buffer them from cost increases. It’s Cap and Dividend, but only families who need it most get a dividend.
(6 February 2008)
Report attacks Australia’s climate policy
Rosslyn Beeby, The Canberra Times
The Rudd Government’s climate change policy has already been overtaken by new science and will impose a “death sentence” on Australia unless urgently updated, say the authors of a new report.
Former Victorian government adviser Phillip Sutton and David Spratt, founder of climate change group CarbonEquity, say the Government’s policy lacks scientific depth and has been cobbled together from reports now surpassed by new data on the rate and scale of global warming.
In a hard-hitting report for Friends of the Earth Australia, they claim the Government’s commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 locks Australia into supporting a dangerous 3 degree rise in global temperature and is based on a United Nations report 12 years out of date.
The Melbourne-based policy analysts also cast doubt on the scope and relevance of the climate change review being conducted for the Federal Government by Australian National University economist Professor Ross Garnaut.
(2 February 2008)
Courtesy Phil Hart of ASPO-Australia.
