By Tim Maughan2 April 2015 (BBC) – From where I’m standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge. Dozens of […]
25 March 2015 (Associated Press) – Despite mounting protests, Japan continues to finance the building of coal-fired power plants with money earmarked for fighting climate change, with two new projects underway in India and Bangladesh, The Associated Press has found. Japan had counted $1 billion in loans for coal plants in Indonesia as climate finance, […]
By Almuth Ernsting 17 March 2015 (The Ecologist) – A new coal and biomass-fired power station could soon be built at Drax in Yorkshire, already the UK’s biggest coal burner, writes Almuth Ernsting. It comes with a weak promise of possible ‘carbon capture and storage’ – an expensive, inefficient technology shunned elsewhere. As the Government’s […]
By Chris Clarke 18 March 2015 (KCET) – In a typical year, California gets almost a fifth of its energy from dams on its rivers and streams. But the last several years have been anything but typical: the ongoing drought has shrunk the state’s reservoirs and cut the amount of hydro power the state can […]
4 March 2015 (Carbon Counter) – China has put in place plans to “cap” coal consumption and production in 2020. For whatever reason, this is regularly rendered as “China has plans to peak coal consumption by 2020″. This is not exactly correct. The cap itself can, and probably will, simply increase after 2020. Another case […]
By Robert Wilson27 February 2015 (Carbon Counter) – China’s coal consumption officially fell by 2.9% last year for the first time in 14 years. Is this evidence of “peak coal” in China as some are already claiming or a temporary blip? Let’s begin with an obvious problem. China’s coal demand officially declined 14 years ago. […]
By Nick Kirkpatrick 2 March 2015 (Washington Post) – China is disappearing into a haze of pollution. In the capital, it’s a “life-or death situation,” as Beijing’s mayor bluntly put it in January. In February, he went so far as to declare his city unlivable. “Everyone must decide for himself if he wants to care […]
By Clara Chaisson29 January 2015 (OnEarth) – Increasingly intense storms in the United States might have an unexpected origin: Asian air pollution. Researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have found that aerosols from across the Pacific strengthen extratropical cyclones—a type of storm system that drives much of our country’s weather. Asia is home to the […]
By Damian Carrington7 January 2015 (The Guardian) – Vast amounts of oil in the Middle East, coal in the US, Australia, and China and many other fossil fuel reserves will have to be left in the ground to prevent dangerous climate change, according to the first analysis to identify which existing reserves cannot be burned. […]
By Oliver Wainwright16 December 2014 BEIJING (The Guardian) – The scene could be straight from a science-fiction film: a vision of everyday life, but with one jarring difference that makes you realise you’re on another planet, or in a distant future era. A sports class is in full swing on the outskirts of Beijing. Herds […]
