This article in New York Magazine tells us that, unless we take “aggressive action”, our planet is headed for: Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts …
Continue reading “What climate change could wreak, sooner than you think”
Over the past year, oil companies have seen the price of their product fall by half. Yet, the visiting professor and chair of the Kings Policy Institute at Kings College London writes, there is a “poverty of strategic thinking” on what to do about this, beyond blind trust that “prices must rise again”. “There is no serious analysis of …
Continue reading “Opinion on the strategic situation of oil companies”
Beijing is surrounded by rubbish dumps so large that they have been described as the city’s “seventh ring”. On Thursday Beijing Enterprises completed the largest ever Chinese acquisition of a German business, purchasing a German waste management company for €1.44bn. The target company is regarded as an industry leader in advanced technologies for filtering emissions. The firm currently converts 4.7m …
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President Obama’s White House has proposed “bold” $10 per barrel tax on imports of oil. “The White House said that the tax would encourage a shift away from an oil-dependent transportation system and provide revenue that it would use to pay for much-needed infrastructure investment.” With a current price of $30-$40/bbl this represents a tax …
Continue reading “Obama proposes $10 per barrel oil tax — unlikely to happen”
Bubbles are created when buyers overpay in the hope of finding a ‘greater fool’ to sell to later. This has happened lately in the Chinese stock and property markets. Apartments were built on borrowed money, bought and left empty as prices rose, in the hope they could be offloaded later on to a greater fool before the bubble burst. The same approach was applied in the …
A new report forecasts that shocks to food production (reductions of 5%-7%) will be three times more likely by 2040, because of increases in extreme weather brought about by climate change. As a result, the position of people in developing countries will be “almost untenable” position, with the USA and UK “very much exposed” to …
Continue reading “Food production shocks ‘will happen more often because of extreme weather’”
Some people think we can keep extracting fossil fuels and later use some techno-fix to extract the carbon back out of the atmosphere. Researchers in Germany have found that even if we did that, the fact that the oceans absorb CO2, then transport it to the deep ocean, means that the oceans would stay …
For the record, it appears that ocean currents are destabilizing methane hydrates on the Arctic slope. The warmer the ocean gets, the more methane gets spewed out of those stores on the continental shelf, and the warmer the ocean gets, ad infinitum. There is an immense amount of carbon stored in the arctic. “It’s a giant number. But we …
Continue reading “Climatologist: If We Release a Small Fraction of Arctic Carbon, ‘We’re F*cked’”
For the record, new analysis shows that the number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainablenumbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats. “If half the animals died in London zoo next week …
Continue reading “Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years”
Back in March the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest Working Group II report. The report predicted: food insecurity due to more intense droughts, floods, and heat waves a decline in crop yields starting in 2030, even as global food demand continues to rise water insecurity, due to shrinking of glaciers and changing …
Continue reading “UN’s IPCC: “climate change consequences ‘bleak’, but cheap to fix””