Free Republic

The GOP accepts the notion of climate change - but not the way Democrats wanted them to.Senate Republicans head-faked Democrats on climate change Wednesday, agreeing in a floor vote that the planet’s climate was changing, but blocking language that would have blamed human activity. In a complicated maneuver that was the first politically perilous test for Senate Republicans, the new majority party split up the votes that Democrats had hoped would force the GOP into an awkward roll call on whether they believed in the science behind climate change — just hours after President Barack Obama slammed Republicans in his...

UN-backed event ends with unusual call from civil society groups to end capitalism A UN-backed conference in Venezuela has ended with a declaration to scrap carbon markets and reject the green economy. The Margarita Declaration was issued at the end of a four-day meeting of around 130 green activist groups, which the Venezuelan government hosted in order to raise the volume of civil society demands in UN discussions on climate change. “The structural causes of climate change are linked to the current capitalist hegemonic system,” the final declaration said. “To combat climate change it is necessary to change the system.”...

A paper published today in Earth System Science Data Discussions analyzes the 2014 carbon budget and predicts man-made CO2 emissions from fossil-fuels and cement production have increased by 65% since 1990. However, atmospheric levels of CO2 have only increased by 11% since 1990, indicating that ~83% of man-made emissions have been absorbed by natural sinks, far greater than the IPCC belief that natural sinks absorb 50% of man-made emissions. Thus, natural sinks [such as the up to 30% greening of the planet over the past few decades] are expanding faster than the IPCC anticipated, CO2 lifetime in the atmosphere is...

Does the world owe Australia bezillions of dollars in carbon credits? With years of La Nina rainfall on arid outback Australia, “we” (or rather the citizen plants of Australia) have apparently been sucking down the CO2 at a phenomenal rate: “almost 60 per cent of carbon uptake attributed to Australian ecosystems.” But, sigh, call me unconvinced. I think what this paper demonstrates is that consensus and simulations are not worth much, and that we don’t know where global CO2 is going.And anyway, the Australian outback vegetation explosion is ephemeral. While there may have been a lot of  carbon sucked out...

Just as computer technology greatly expanded Americans' wealth in the 1990s, the clean energy market could do the same thing in the years ahead, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday. He touted climate change as a societal challenge and an economic opportunity: ... "The energy market that we are staring at--that is the solution to the climate change," Kerry continued. "Energy policy is the solution to climate change. That market, my friends, is a $6-trillion market today with 4 to 5 billion users today, and it will grow to some 9 billion...

The European Union says it is beefing up its carbon trading system to make it more expensive for utilities and other businesses to burn fossil fuels. […] The agreed proposal would postpone the sale of 900 million additional carbon allowances—a move that will tighten supply, driving up prices. …

The helicopter rescue crew is coming to take me away, ha-haaa! They're coming to take me away, ho-ho, hee-hee, ha-haaa! To the funny farm. Where I can find banana peanut butter milkshakes sprinkled with delicious carbon credits. We thought it was a joke and so we laughed, we laughed when I had said that proving global warming had trapped us in ice and that I'm going MAD!!! And U.K. Guardian reporter Laurence Topham has proclaimed himself going mad (along with his craving for banana peanut butter milkshakes) in this rather morose video diary in which he discovers that that the...

The maximum amount of credits goes to a car that can go 300 miles and refuel to 95% of capacity within 15 minutes. The Tesla Model S falls short on range and, especially, on refuelling time. .... And so the joke begins. At the end of 2012, Californai decided that they needed a way to account for the Model S' ability to do a 90-second battery swap. This effectively meant it was refuelling a lot faster than its 15 minutes target, and to 100% capacity to boot. So the cancelled version remained at 4 credits, but the short-range version was...

One of Texas' oldest oil fields, in decline for decades, has become one of the hottest places in the country to drill for crude, as energy companies create clusters of wells with layers of horizontal branches. The Permian Basin—86,000 square miles centered on Midland, Texas—has been pumping oil since the 1920s, though production peaked at about 2 million barrels a day in the early 1970s. For decades, geologists have known that oil could be found in different layers of rock piled up like a stack of geologic pancakes. But now drillers are starting to tap those layers simultaneously from a...

The Obama administration on Friday announced that it was not backing down from a confrontation with the coal industry and would press ahead with enacting the first federal carbon limits on the nation’s power companies. The proposed regulations, announced at the National Press Club by Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, are an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year.

Credit to The Australian for printing both points of view. Published as an Op-Ed today.Carbon credits market is neither free nor worth anything by: Joanne NovaFrom: The Australian July 31, 2013 12:00AM THE paradox du jour: people who like free markets don’t want a carbon market, and the people who don’t trust capitalism want emissions trading. So why are socialists fighting for a carbon market? Because this “market” is a bureaucrat’s wet dream. A free market is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. “Free” means being free to choose to buy or to not buy the product. At...

LONDON, June 19 (Reuters) - The world should stop arguing about whether humans are causing climate change and start taking action to stop dangerous temperature rises, the president of the World Bank said on Wednesday. Kim Jim Yong Kim said there was 97 to 98 percent agreement among scientists that global warming was real and caused by human activity. "If you disagree with the science of human-caused climate change you are not disagreeing that there is anthropogenic climate change. What you are disagreeing with is science itself," Kim told a Thomson Reuters newsmaker event in London.

My last article about thorium as an alternative nuclear reactor fuel drew way more readers than I expected. I intentionally glossed over the complexities of specific reactor designs for the sake of simplicity, but in this article I want to go deeper. This article explains some of the differences between traditional uranium reactors and molten salt thorium reactors (MSRs).

After hitting record lows back in January, there was a plan to prop up the EU carbon market. That worked…for a while. Then the backloading plan was rejected, and the real market forces took over.From: Environmental leader: EU Carbon Prices Plunge to Record LowsCarbon prices hit record lows today after the European Parliament rejected an emergency plan to boost the ailing EU carbon market.In a 334-315 vote, with more than 60 abstentions, lawmakers rejected a proposal to postpone — or backload — the auctioning of 900 million EU Emissions Trading Scheme allowances from the years 2013-2015 to 2019-2020. This...

The second person, a former housing industry executive intimately familiar with of Fannie Mae's operations, agreed that Donilon was at the head of an unceasing anti-regulatory campaign that the company waged throughout his tenure. The former housing executive said that on political issues, especially regulatory oversight, Donilon was the right-hand man to Fannie Mae chairman and CEO Franklin Raines.

A private company backed by a controversial U.S. businessman has unilaterally conducted the world's most significant geoengineering project to date. Russ George, in conjunction with a First Nations village on Haida Gwaii, has dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean in a technique known as ocean fertilization. The experiment, which is in violation of two United Nations moratoria, has outraged environmental, legal, and civic groups. The iron sulphate was dumped into the Pacific back in July, but recent satellite images are now confirming its effects — an artificial plankton bloom that's 10,000 square kilometers (6,214 square...

Come November, California will open North America's first full-scale carbon market, in which companies buy and sell the right to emit greenhouse gases from their factories, power plants and oil refineries. It's a major undertaking involving hundreds of companies and - potentially - billions of dollars. Success or failure could have big implications for California's fight against climate change, not to mention the state's fragile economy. So on Thursday, California officials plan to stage a dress rehearsal. The California Air Resources Board will hold a practice auction, giving future players in the carbon market a chance to see how the...

RANJIT NAGAR, India — When the United Nations wanted to help slow climate change, it established what seemed a sensible system. Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more dangerous the gas, the more that manufacturers in developing nations would be compensated as they reduced their emissions. But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity. They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits...

Aug 1 (Reuters Point Carbon) - In an effort to dissuade companies in key industries facing new carbon costs from leaving the state, California is considering giving them millions of dollars worth of additional free greenhouse gas allowances, state's air regulator said on Monday. California's cap-and-trade program seeks to emulate tactics used in the European Union and Australia to address emission "leakage" - a term describing the exodus of employers from a state or country in order to sidestep environmental costs. The California Air Resources Board (ARB), the regulator of the forthcoming program, held a workshop in Sacramento on Monday...

So much for that global “free” market.Scott the trader writes to explain that the EU “CER” credits are the ones people can buy and exchange for Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) but they have sunk to $4. The more expensive $9 EUA units that most commentators mention, are not exchangeable in the Australian market:The EU CER price is equivalent to about A$3.80  per tonne…  Almost $20 below Australia’s fixed price.    These are the products most comparable to Australia’s $23/Tonne as it will be CERs that we can surrender instead of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) to satisfy an Australian Clean...