Latest
Yesterday I wrote a post in defence of offshore wind. Today I feel compelled to write in defence of nuclear power. I do not see any contradiction here – both are major climate mitigation options that can play a substantial role in decarbonising the UK economy. Ironically, however, today’s attack on nuclear comes from environmentalists, many of whom have devoted years of their lives to raising awareness of the threat from climate change and seem unable to appreciate the harm they are currently doing.
Recent
In recent weeks government efforts to scale-up low-carbon energy here in the UK have taken quite a battering in the press, with alarming reports of imminent enormous increases in electricity bills supposedly thanks to the country’s climate change policy. The latest blow comes courtesy of a report by the right-of-centre think tank Policy Exchange (PE), whose report today concludes that households will by 2020 be paying an extra £400 per year thanks to measures to reduce carbon emissions.
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Following the marathon negotiations session at Durban, all the delegates should now be back home – and if not quite rested, certainly ready to assess the outcome with the benefit of some distance. In this (rather long) post I will look at the key documents agreed in the Durban outcome, and try to offer some sense of what they mean for the climate regime, and for the climate. (Apologies for some jargon, and for unexplained acronyms, which should be familiar to anyone following the negotiations, and without which this post would be even longer still.)
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As ministers arrive in Durban for the all-important second week of COP17, the vexed issue of whether a Kyoto Protocol second commitment period (KP2) will ever see the light of day is no closer to being resolved. This matters a great deal, though not for the climate – any KP2 will make no discernible difference either to carbon emissions or global warming. However, its great symbolic power means that Kyoto may now destroy as much as it ever achieved unless the deadlock can be broken. The moment of truth has been put off for many years. It cannot simply be postponed again.
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One of potentially the most important climate change scientific papers for a long time has just been published in Science Express, the top science journal’s rapid-publication service. Unlike most, this does not deepen the general global warming gloom by suggesting things are ‘worse than we thought’ – instead it suggests that very high climate sensitivities (the kind that make it already ‘too late’, or turn us into Venus) are vanishingly unlikely. And more, that the most likely climate sensitivity could be slightly less than previous studies concluded.
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