The annual exercise in futility and finger-pointing that is the United Nations Climate Change Conference will wrap up in Doha soon – or maybe not. “I can sit here all year,” the Qatari leader of the talks said, according to the BBC. “You decide when to leave.” As yet another Conference of the Parties comes…
UN climate talks in Doha are lurching to a close with key issues unresolved. There are outstanding disputes on finance, compensation for climate change damages and allocations of carbon permits – so-called hot air. Developing countries are furious at what they say is a lack of ambition among richer countries to tackle climate change. And…
A new private venture aims to sell manned trips to the moon by 2020, its founders announced. The company, called Golden Spike (after the final spike built into the First Transcontinental Railroad), plans to sell each moon mission for about $1.5 billion — a relative bargain, said the company’s president and CEO Alan Stern, a…
Rich countries are to blame for climate change and should take the lead in forging a global climate pact by 2015, a deadline that “must be met,” the head of the United Nations said. On the sidelines of international climate talks in Qatar, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it was “only fair and reasonable that…
Rich countries spend five times more on fossil-fuel subsidies than on aid to help developing nations cut their emissions and protect against the effects of climate change, the Oil Change International campaign group said. In 2011, 22 industrialized nations paid $58.7 billion in subsidies to the oil, coal and gas industries and to consumers of…
The reluctance of industrialized countries to accept binding emission targets will dry up demand for carbon credits and reduce their prices further, experts said at the climate talks in Doha, where 200 countries are trying to negotiate an agreement on climate issues. Russia, Japan, New Zealand have made it clear that they will not accept…
Two major organizations released climate change reports this month warning of doom and gloom if we stick to our current course and fail to take more aggressive measures. A World Bank report imagines a world 4 degrees warmer, the temperature predicted by century’s end barring changes, and says it aims to shock people into action…
Finding a good alternative energy stock isn’t easy, investors are finding. One problem is that is that the market in general has dropped since the election. Also, alternative-energy stocks tend to lag when the price of oil falls. Another problem is that some alternative-energy companies are start-ups with little in the way of earnings.
China, India, South Africa and Brazil said a climate deal planned for 2020 won’t be a “new regime,” threatening confrontation with the U.S. which wants to eliminate a firewall between developed and developing nations. The four nations reined in expectations for the Durban Platform, a mandate agreed last December at United Nations treaty talks in…
The World Bank is urging stepped-up efforts to meet world carbon reduction goals after looking at what it says would be the catastrophic consequences if average world temperatures rise more than 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. In what World Bank President Jim Yong Kim acknowledged was a “doomsday…