French departments launch energy saving program for buildings

Last Friday the general councils of the French Departments Meuse and Haute-Marne launched a program on energy savings in social housing financed by Electricité de France (EDF), the largest electricity supplier in France. Around 5.000 of the 24.000 residence buildings for people with a limited income will be renovated with insulating materials. This will save 30% of the energy consumption for heating these buildings.

Moreover, these residences will be equipped with high performance heating systems, which EDF claims to reduce another 60%. In the future, the HLM public unit will build low energy houses with an energy for heating consumption not higher than 15 kWh per m2 per year.

EDF will finance this program by investing one million Euros per year during a period of five years. The plan in the two departments Meuse and Haute-Marne is a pilot plan and could be extended to other departments.

UN Report: Urgent call to act against climate change

The United Nations warns in the yet unpublished report of its World Climate Report that the world has less than 15 years to act against global warming through the use of new technology to prevent a climate catastrophe. “Irreversible natural processes, such as melting icecaps in Greenland and the over-acidification of the oceans will set in motion if carbon emissions are not substantially reduced by 2020,” the report states.

The current concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is 383 parts per million (ppm) and experts forecast a rise by 2.5 ppm every year. According to the UN report, presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) in May 2007 in Bangkok, carbon concentration would have to be established at a level of 420 ppm to prevent temperatures rising too quickly. Experts say in the report that the carbon concentration target still can be met, but only if the scenarios are the most stringent and if new technologies are introduced rapidly.

More information:

Financial Times Deutschland

Outline for IPCC Working Group III report Climate change 2007: mitigation of climate change

‘An Inconvenient Truth’ wins an Oscar

At the 79th Academy Award ceremony in Los Angeles, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, directed by Davis Guggenheim, has won an Oscar for best documentary. Not necessarily because it is such a cinematic masterpiece but because the subject, which is a wake up call to the public about the changing climate, is so important.

When he accepted the Oscar, the main 'actor' in the documentary Al Gore said: “People all over the world: we need to solve the climate crisis. We have everything we need to get started with the possible exception of the will to act. That’s a renewable resource – let’s renew it.” ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ also has won an Oscar for the best song; “I need to wake up’ by Melissa Etheridge.

Former US president candidate Gore recently announced that a series of live concerts will be organised to get people to take action to tackle climate change. The concerts will take place in July this year and are expected to be “bigger than Live Aid”. Up till now, the following artists have promised to play at the concerts: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters, Snoop Dogg, Black Eyed Peas, Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow, Melissa Etheridge, John Mayer, Faith Hill, AFI, Damien Rice, Keane, Korn, Lenny Kravitz and Snow Patrol.

How to deal with climate sceptics

How to deal with stubborn climate sceptics? Blogger Coby Beck published an extensive list of frequently used arguments in climate change denial and the reasons why they don’t make sense.

Coby Beck, an engineer in Artificial Intelligence from Vancouver, published his list of arguments on the GRIT website for Environmental News & Humour. He distinguishes various levels of Stages of Denial (varying from “There is nothing happening” to “Climate change can’t be stopped”) and also different Types of Argument (from uninformed and misinformed right down to underdog theories and “crackpottery”).

The two other ordering principles are Levels of Sophistication (from silly to scientific) and Scientific topics.

Most sceptic arguments sound familiar (“It’s the sun, stupid” or “It’s cold today in WagaWaga”) but sometimes, they’re a little silly as well (“We can’t even predict the weather next week”). The responses seem to be well-informed and they’re open to comments from visitors.

The World Wildlife Fund published the Beck‘s list on their own website under the title ‘How to answer the claims of a Climate Change Sceptic?’.

Further information:

Coby Beck’s blog on GRIST

EEA: ‘Transport emissions can’t be bridled’

The environmental performance of the transport sector is still unsatisfactory, according to the European Environmental Agency (EEA) in the report ‘Transport and Environment: on the way to a new common transport policy’. It describes the unstoppable growth of the European transport sector.

In 2001 the European Commission published the so-called White Paper outlining the European transport policy until 2010. Five years later, a mid-term review was published with a change of focus. Managing the growing transport demand is no longer the main issue. Now it’s addressing the negative side effects instead.

Emissions of greenhouse gasses from the European transport sector are steadily increasing. The effects of improvements in energy efficiency and introduction of renewable fuels are swamped by the growth of transport volumes. This tendency threatens both Europe’s and individual Member State’s progress towards their Kyoto targets, according to the EEA.

The problem is that both the volume transport and the passenger transport are pushing for more transport. Volume transport or freight is closely interwoven with economic growth. Most economic activities have a transport component and a better transport system stimulates economic development. On top of that, establishment of the internal EU market has stimulated European freight transport. Passenger transport has grown with increasing wealth. This applies not only to holidays and air travel, but to commuting traffic as well. We can simply afford to drive our cars through the traffic jams.

Russia asks approval for emissions cap under the Kyoto Protocol

22 Feb 2007 – The UN published Russia’s application for the Kyoto Protocol 2008-2012. Russia wants permission to set the cap for that period at 3.216 billion tones. This is 190 million tones lower than Russia’s previous estimate in January and it is equivalent to the emissions level in 1990.

The estimate has varied considerably over the last years. In 2004, Russia emitted 1.953 billion tones of CO2e, which is 1.3 billion tones lower than its 1990 estimate.

The UN has to decide in April 2009 whether to approve the Russian report or to demand changes.