More than 235 U.S. scientists, including some of the nation’s most prominent climate researchers, are recommending new procedures for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including acknowledging errors on the organization’s website as soon as they are known.

In an open letter, the scientists, some of whom have contributed to IPCC reports, defend the quality and transparency of the panel’s research. But they suggest the IPCC should become more responsive in acknowledging mistakes and should publish an erratum online that corrects any errors discovered after publication. (more…)

(Reuters) – New forecasts suggest the European Union will exceed its target of getting 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources in 2020, the European Commission said Thursday.

The latest national projections submitted by governments to the E.U. executive suggest the 27-nation bloc could reach an overall renewable share of 20.3 percent by the end of the decade.

“These forecasts show that member states take renewable energy very seriously and are really dedicated to pushing their domestic production,” E.U. Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said.

Spain and Germany forecast the largest surpluses in 2020, predicting they will exceed their national renewable targets by 2.7 and 0.7 percentage points respectively.

This will help to make up for projected shortfalls in several EU countries, including Italy, which expects to miss its 17 percent target by 1 percentage point. (more…)

As surely as last year’s Paris fashions make their way west to New York, U.S. utilities are beginning to embrace European-style programs like feed-in tariffs and green power premiums.

State-level decoupling regulations are easing that transition to some extent. But many utilities are still reluctant to embrace the change fully, especially as prices for conventional energy have come back down and utilities are finding that available capacity in voluntary green power is going unsubscribed.

Utilities do not like the financial uncertainty posed by long-term contracting for renewable power to supply the programs if they are not going to be able to move the power. It inevitably puts the utility’s shareholder obligations at odds with its ratepayer obligations and results in one of two solutions: green premiums go up and make the company look bad on green; or, everyone on the system pays to cover the nut, and no one is happy. (more…)

The U.S. Senate voted 62 to 36 Wednesday to pass a tax extension bill (H.R. 4213) that includes a key $1 biodiesel tax credit.

The expiration of the credit on Dec. 31, 2009 put the breaks on an expanding industry and raised questions about biodiesel’s future in the U.S.

With many biodiesel plants either idle or shutdown throughout the country, the bill will reinstate the credit retroactively, extending it through Dec. 31., 2010.

Although biodiesel received a tremendous boost under the new renewable fuel standard (RFS2), without a tax credit, the industry could not compete on price with petroleum-based diesel.

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Despite strong evidence that growing food crops to produce ethanol is harmful to the environment and the world’s poor, the Obama administration is backing subsidies and programs that will ensure that half of the U.S.’s corn crop will soon go to biofuel production. It’s time to recognize that biofuels are anything but green.

In light of the strong evidence that growing corn, soybeans, and other food crops to produce ethanol takes a heavy toll on the environment and is hurting the world’s poor through higher food prices, consider this astonishing fact: This year, more than a third of the U.S.’s record corn harvest of 335 million metric tons will be used to produce corn ethanol. What’s more, within five years fully 50 percent of the U.S. corn crop is expected to wind up as biofuels.

Here’s another sobering fact. Despite the record deficits facing the U.S., and notwithstanding President Obama’s embrace of some truly sustainable renewable energy policies, the president and his administration have wholeheartedly embraced corn ethanol and the tangle of government subsidies, price supports, and tariffs that underpin the entire dubious enterprise of using corn to power our cars. In early February, the president threw his weight behind new and existing initiatives to boost ethanol production from both food and nonfood sources, including supporting Congressional mandates that would triple biofuel production to 36 billion gallons by 2022.

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U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Friday that the United States needs to come up with a better system for storing or disposing of radioactive nuclear waste than a planned repository near Las Vegas.

“The president has made it very clear that we are going to go beyond Yucca mountain. You should go beyond Yucca mountain,” Chu said. “But instead of wringing my hands, let’s go forward and do something better.”

The Obama administration, in January, announced it was stopping the license application for a long-planned multi-billion dollar nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain near Las Vegas, which is opposed by environmental groups. (more…)

Four Democratic U.S. senators have asked the Obama administration to stop investment in wind power and other renewable energy projects until the government ensures that the projects primarily use U.S. labor and materials.

The senators, led by U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, introduced legislation requiring that economic stimulus funds only be spent on clean-energy projects that use materials made in the United States and that create a majority of jobs in America.

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BEIJING (Reuters) – China said on Sunday it will spell out greenhouse gas emissions goals and monitoring rules for regions and sectors in its next five-year plan, with monitoring to show it is serious about curbing emissions.

The Chinese government said in November it would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activity, emitted to make each unit of national income by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels.

That goal would let China’s greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, but more slowly than its rapid economic growth.

The policy was a cornerstone of Beijing’s position at the Copenhagen summit on climate change late last year when governments tried with limited success to agree on a new global treaty on fighting global warming.

The United States and other powers said China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases from industry and other human activities, should have offered to do more to bring its domestic “carbon intensity” goal into an international pact that would reassure other governments.

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The European Commission confirmed on Thursday that it believes legally binding sustainability criteria for biomass used to generate heat and power are not necessary in Europe, thus ending a long process by which the European Union body has debated the utility of a supranational scheme.

The Commission, however, adopted a report on sustainability requirements for the use of solid biomass and biogas in electricity, heating, and cooling. The report makes recommendations on sustainability criteria to member states and encourages them to introduce schemes at the national level.

This strategy minimizes the risk of the development of varied and possibly incompatible criteria at the national level, leading to barriers to trade and limiting the growth of the bio-energy sector in the European Union. (more…)

A rising Asian nation leverages labor advantages to adapt Western technology to lower cost fabrication, and its leading companies rise as no-frills leaders in an emerging global market.

Thanks to free trade policies – kept in place, in part, to satisfy Western consumer demand for the product in its most afforable form — the Asian nation finds a ready export market that helps to build a worldwide brand and return immense profits.

Then, given a generation to develop a domestic engineering and technical workforce worthy of their place in the industry, the Asian nation’s concerns soon come to surpass their Western competitors and they bypass the godfathers of the business in innovation and quality, while retaining an edge in affordability.

Ring any bells?

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