As the dust from Durban settles, the mountain left for world governments to climb to agree a new global climate treaty by 2015 is coming sharply into focus. The generous rhetoric of the UN climate conference last December is rapidly giving way to the defensive language of entrenched positions. China and India appear to see little role for themselves in helping to do what needs to be done to avoid dangerous climate change, the US is #, post-Fukushima Japan is helpless and countries like Australia, Russia and Canada show no signs of wanting to step up their pledges. --Sonja van Renssen, European Energy Review, 26 March 2012
When Chris Huhne was forced to remove himself from the Department of Energy, to fight criminal charges over an alleged speeding transgression, Britain’s green lobby took a body blow. Huhne was the most important advocate in government of the need to speed up wind power. His Lib Dem successor Ed Davey, with the support of the Chancellor, George Osborne, looks to have radically changed course. Davey let it be known that he intends to deal with the potential for power shortages, brown-outs and cuts by advancing a new gas generation strategy which will be legislated for in the Queen’s speech. --Alex Brummer, Daily Mail, 27 March 2012
Lord Browne, the former BP chief executive, said Lancashire has the potential to be the capital of Europe's emerging shale gas industry, in a scenario he predicted could help to create as many as 50,000 jobs across the UK. --James Ashton and Tom Bawden, The Independent, 26 March 2012
Famed lyricist Sir Tim Rice has taken aim at the government for backing wind turbine schemes, branding the environmental initiative "a scam". Prime Minister David Cameron's coalition government wants renewable sources to provide 15 per cent of the energy supply by 2015, but the investment into wind farming has divided the country. Rice admits he is not a fan of the scheme, and has even turned down big money offers to house wind turbines on his sprawling estate in Scotland. --New Magazine, 26 March 2012
I recently declined to support a Conservative function because I’m so incensed about these wind turbines. Like all so-called climate-change doubters, I am very pro the environment, but I strongly believe that it is something that can only be cured locally. Some insane overall scheme isn’t going to cure all the problems. And the money that is wasted! As a landowner in Scotland, I’ve been offered vast amounts of money to stick up wind turbines, which not only will make me richer, it will make less well-off people poorer, and will damage the environment. These schemes aren’t doing any good – just making rich people richer, and it’s depressing to see great areas of these useless objects up there. It’s a scam – a con – and until the Government has the brains to actually say, hang on, we’ve got it wrong, this is a total economic and environmental error, then I find it hard to give total support to them. –Sir Tim Rice, The Sunday Telegraph, 25 March 2012
The lack of any statistically significant warming for over a decade has made it more difficult for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters to demonize the atmospheric gas CO2 which is released when fossil fuels are burned. We need high-quality climate science because of the importance of climate to mankind. But we should also remember the description of how science works by the late, great physicist, Richard Feynman: "In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong." –William Happer, The Wall Street Journal, 26 March 2012
