London Olympics Drops Carbon-Offset Plan

Organizers of the London 2012 Olympic Games dropped a plan to cut carbon emissions during the sporting showcase, abandoning a pledge made when it defeated eight other cities to host the event. Games administrators will “no longer pursue formal offsetting procedures” to mitigate Olympics-related emissions, documents posted on the London Olympics website said. --Sarah Halls, Bloomberg, 1 September 2011

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Tim Hudak's provincial Progressive Conservative party has pledged to kill the feed-in-tariff program, the Samsung energy deal and alter the Green Energy Act. --Norman de Bobo, London Free Press, 1 September 2011 Solyndra, a renewable energy firm that became the darling of the Obama Administration, shut the doors to its California headquarters today, raising fresh questions from the administration's critics about political favoritism in the federal loan program. The government loan guarantee was supposed to spur 1,000 full-time jobs once Solyndra's solar plant was fully operational. Instead, as the company announced Chapter 11 bankruptcy today, reports surfaced that 1,100 would lose their jobs. --ABC News & iWatch News, 31 August 2011

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Germany's accelerated exit from nuclear energy has considerably increased the risk of power blackouts, the country's energy-network regulator said Wednesday, calling on the industry to invest in new energy infrastructure to ensure security of supply. --The Wall Street Journal, 1 September 2011[Registration required] The basic problem with much of the media coverage of CERN’s CLOUD experiment is that they expected too much. As we have said this is first-stage stuff and not a yes or no judgement on the Cosmic Ray theory. Yet it was taken that way by many. Despite the fact that Cosmic Rays had been shown to have a significant effect on cluster formation (the first stage of cloud seeds) – although those clusters were too small – some took it as a refutation of the whole idea. In so doing they showed double standards in reporting the two aspects of the CERN experiments, the other being cloud formation in the absence of ionising radiation. --David Whitehouse, The Observatory, 1 September 2011

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