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The European Parliament has formally set a goal to make the entire European Union carbon neutral by 2050. Members of the European Parliament passed the Climate Act on Thursday in a vote of 442 for, 203 against, and 51 abstentions. The Act also increased the EU’s goal to reduce carbon emissions from 44 per cent of 1990 levels to 55 per cent by 2030. Swedish Social Democrat MEP Jytte Guteland said, according to SVT: “It’s a real boost compared to today’s level. I see that it will only play a bigger and bigger role for Europe and the world.” Swedish...

The U.N.’s climate summit will emit as much carbon dioxide as more than 8,200 American homes. It’s also equivalent to more than 11,700 cars driving for one year or 728 tankers trucks worth of gasoline. When air travel is factored in, the summit’s emissions are likely higher, according to one expert. This year’s United Nations climate summit will have a carbon footprint equivalent to the yearly electricity usage of more than 8,200 American households, according to the international body’s own figures. The U.N. estimates the summit, called COP24, will emit 55,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide — the very greenhouse...

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is poised to implement a new regulation without legislative approval to join 10 other states in a climate change agreement based on restricting carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.But lawmakers, policy analysts, and tea party activists in Virginia who oppose what they consider costly regulations of industry are raising questions about the economic and scientific arguments underpinning the proposed rule.They say the Virginia General Assembly should have a straight up-or-down vote on Northam’s plan, in part to ensure that any revenue the governor raises from “carbon trading” is collected and dispersed in a manner consistent...

San Francisco International Airport’s corporate jet traffic rose roughly 30 percent during an international climate change conference in California, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. California Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown hosted the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco from Wednesday to Friday. Brown traveled to the conference by car with his security detail, but the governor is known for his lavish travel on other occasions, such as a 2016 trip to Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine with real-estate tycoon and Democrat Party donor George Marcus. (RELATED: Gov. Brown Is Launching California Into Space — To Fight Global Warming) More than...

Our children’s lives are on the line. Not a single elected official, Democrat OR Republican, should accept money from fossil fuel corporations. Americans are dying because of a government too coward to save the planet. It’s wrong. And we will need a Green New Deal to survive.

Three Democratic governors said Thursday they won’t let the United States back away from a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, despite President Donald Trump decision to withdraw from an international pact. “This is an insane move by this president,” California Gov. Jerry Brown said, blasting the decision as “deviant behavior from the highest office in the land.” Brown joined Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington state and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York to form the U.S. Climate Alliance to uphold the Paris climate agreement, a pact involving nearly 200 nations aimed at slowing the warming of the planet. The...

The Canadian government approved a national carbon price on Friday after a heated discussion. In a meeting attended by provincial representatives, aboriginal leaders, as well as United States Vice President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pushed the carbon-pricing plan he had been working on for months. […] The plan calls for the cost of producing a ton of carbon pollution to rise 10 Canadian dollars ($7.60, €7.19) per year starting in 2018 until it reaches 50 Canadian dollars in 2022. In a compromise, the price would pause for British Columbia at 30 Canadian dollars in 2020. Out of...

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that international shame and condemnation is “the most powerful weapon in many ways” to ensure countries comply with the newly-signed climate change accord reached in Paris, which is meant to lower greenhouse gas emissions around the world.Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Kerry defended the merits of the climate agreement, but host Chuck Todd challenged him on how the deal will be implemented.“There’s a lot of pledges. There’s a lot of promises. But there seems to be no mechanism for getting countries to comply other than wagging your finger at them and...

Britain's Prince Charles has pointed to the world's failure to tackle climate change as a root cause of the civil war in Syria, terrorism and the consequent refugee crisis engulfing Europe. The heir to the British throne is due to give a keynote speech at the opening of a global climate summit in Paris next week where 118 leaders will gather to try to nail down a deal to limit rising greenhouse gas emissions. "Some of us were saying 20 something years ago that if we didn't tackle these issues, you would see ever greater conflict over scarce resources and...

  Al Gore Al Gore deserves an Oscar for hypocrisy to go along with the two Academy Awards his movie won last night, contends a think tank from his home state Tennessee. The former vice president's mansion in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, says the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, citing data from the Nashville Electric Service. Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth, a 95-minute film warning of a coming cataclysm due to man-made "global warming," won the award for best documentary feature and best...

Skeptics are winning: “The carbon market is dead” The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus...

As the European cold front is about to enter its third week, the Danube River and Black Sea have frozen over in many countries, with La Repubblica reporting that 420 have died across Europe. ... The Black Sea waters around the Ukrainian port city of Odessa were completely frozen for the first time since 1977, and Ukrainian ports will remain closed until at least Feb. 15. Russia's Novorossiysk port, usually an ice-free port all year round, was closed for two days last week because of ice. In the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanța, the waters were frozen for up...

taking the Obama administration to task over the forthcoming decision to pull the plug on the U.S.-Canadian oil pipeline: Newt Gingrich, who frequently talks about the Keystone Pipeline in his stump speech, railed on the news that President Obama is rejecting the permit. Speaking to a standing-room only crowd of about 350 people in Warrenville, S.C., “boos” erupted when Gingrich said the pipeline had been “vetoed.” “Now, this is a stunningly,” Gingrich began until he was interuppted by a crowd members shouting “stupid mistake.” After pausing for a moment Gingrich responded, “This is a stunningly stupid thing to do.”

China's biggest airlines warned on Thursday they will refuse to pay a new EU tax aimed at cutting carbon emissions. Beijing said it has deep concerns over the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which came into force on New year's Day and demands all airlines pay a green duty to offset carbon emissions. "China opposes the European Union's unilateral legislation. China has expressed to the EU our deep concern and opposition many times on a bilateral level," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said. … "The CATA, on behalf of Chinese airlines, is strongly against the EU's improper practice of...

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Thursday the world was on an "inexorable march toward the abyss," which he blamed in part on the discovery and exploitation of vast reserves of so-called "shale gas" around the world. Shale gas is natural gas locked in rock formations that in the past decade has been found in great abundance around the world and is now considered a top source of future energy. Castro, 85, wrote in one of his occasional columns published in Cuban state media that "numerous dangers threaten us, but two of them—nuclear war and climate change—are decisive and...

Report says global climate deal hinges on Obama reelectionBy Ben Geman - 01/05/12 11:55 AM ET Prospects for striking a binding global climate deal by 2015 are probably toast if President Obama loses in November. That’s among the conclusions in a wide-ranging, new climate and green energy outlook from banking giant HSBC’s research branch. A major outcome from the United Nations climate talks in December was a plan to craft a deal by 2015 — one that would include big, developing nations such as China — and have it come into force by 2020. But Obama’s main Republican White House...

This guy (Headmaster Rob Benzie) has become Scrooge in England, except he doesn’t provide even one lump of coal, because, well that would mess up his “carbon footprint”. This is just too bizarre not to pass on, thanks to The Daily Bayonet who writes: A headmaster at a British school decided a great lesson in sustainability would be to turn off the heat for a day. In December: Pupils at Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, were forced to grip their pens through thick gloves and wear their coats and hats in class as temperatures dropped to 1C. The school’s...

Representatives from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Durban, South Africa, to negotiate strategies for dealing with climate change, including how to extend the soon-to-expire Kyoto Protocol. Efforts to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto pact, which committed industrialized nations to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a set amount by 2012, have been on hold since the failure of the climate conference in Copenhagen two years ago. Previous debates have focused on how to balance the responsibilities of developed nations with those of emerging and still-developing countries, and few believe this conference, which begins Monday, will result in a new...

California plan(s) to launch their long-promised cap and trade program to fight global warming starting tomorrow (Oct. 20, 2011). (Not coincidentally) Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will include these two headlines that are up already online: Japan Reconsiders Plan to Cut Carbon Emissions And, EU Weighs Pullback on Cutting Emissions

There seems little possibility that next month's climate summit in Durban will produce an emissions reduction agreement -- meaning the world will soon lack any binding CO2 targets. Europe may soon find itself alone in the fight against global warming. A climate catastrophe descended on the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin early last week. Politicians and diplomats from around the world were attending a conference to discuss how global warming will affect the world. They examined scenarios depicting how millions of people living in coastal areas could escape flooding, what will happen to the fishing and mineral rights of island...