ESTIF - European Solar Thermal Industry Federation
Brussels, 26 January – This morning, the ITRE (Committee on Industry, Research and Energy) of the European Parliament adopted the Initiative Report on Renewable Heating and Cooling presented by MEP Mechtild Rothe. The report calls the European Commission to present a Directive Proposal for the promotion of renewable heating and cooling, in order to substantially contribute to "securing European energy supplies and to significantly reduce Europe's dependence on oil and gas in particular". The report was adopted with 39 against 0 votes, and 3 abstentions.
A key element of the proposal is the setting of national binding targets, which "should contribute to reaching a realistic and ambitious target of at least a doubling of the share [of renewable heating and cooling] by 2020." The national targets should take into account the current shares as well as the potential of each of the relevant technologies in the different Member States. The word "binding" had been one of the few debated issues today, but the proponents of a stronger proposals prevailed: The original version, which calls for "binding" targets was upheld with 21 over 15 votes.
While the report does not suggest a harmonisation of support schemes at EU level, it proposes to agree on general principles for the support schemes to be adopted and implemented by the Member States and on a menu of suggested instruments, like tax breaks, financial incentives or regulatory measures. It also proposes measures to reduce the administrative barriers to the use of renewable heating and cooling.
ESTIF's European Policy Director Raffaele Piria expressed the association's satisfaction with the outcome of the vote in the ITRE but reminded also that the original text of MEP Rothe had been significantly weakened on some issues: "The adopted text shows the strong will of the Parliamentarians to promote, among others, solar thermal heating and cooling. We expect that Mrs Rothe's Initiative Report will receive a similarly clear vote in the European Parliament's plenary and hope that the European Commission will soon present a Directive proposal."
The official version of the Rothe report adopted today will be available in the next days or weeks on the website of the European Parliament (http://www.europarl.eu.int).
Additional Notes:
ESTIF, the European Solar Thermal Industry Federation, represents manufacturers, national associations and service providers active in the solar thermal sector.
ESTIF’s mission is to achieve high priority and acceptance for Solar Thermal as a key element for sustainable heating and cooling in Europe and with immediate effect to work for the implementation of all steps necessary to realise the high potential of Solar Thermal.
Press Contacts --- new physical address:
Raffaele Piria, ESTIF European Policy Director
Rue d'Arlon 63-65
B-1040 Bruxelles
BELGIUM
Tel: +32 2 546 19 38
Fax: +32 2 546 19 39
e-mail: info@estif.org
Web: www.estif.org
*****************************************************************************
MEPs debate responses to energy insecurity 
Europe can respond immediately to fears of energy insecurity by implementing already agreed measures on energy efficiency, combined heat and power and renewable energy, EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs told the European parliament on Tuesday. MEPs staged a debate on security of energy supplies in response to the recent Russia-Ukraine gas dispute. Also speaking to MEPs, Austrian energy minister Martin Bartenstein reiterated the current EU presidency's position that expanding nuclear power is not an option to diversify energy sources (ED 10/01/06).
He called instead for greater use of renewable energy and energy efficiency.MEPs from the centre-right EPP group supported a plan by Mr Piebalgs to draft a coherent EU energy policy, calling at "absolutely essential that the EU extends joint action to the energy field".For the Liberal group, Lithuanian MEP Danute Budreikaite said it was "high time" to build new nuclear power stations, emphasising the attractiveness of nuclear power in terms of carbon emissions. Rebecca Harms for the Greens/EFA group warned against such a move, emphasising risks surrounding nuclear waste.
* In a related development, EU economic and monetary affairs commissioner Joaquín Almunia has called for a "calm, honest and transparent" debate about nuclear power. Given current energy prices, he told Spanish media on Monday, "it would be suicide not to reassess under which conditions and with what guarantees" the future use of nuclear energy in Europe could be considered"In 1999, under Mr Almunia's leadership, the then-opposition socialist party gave a "solemn" commitment to shut down Spain's nuclear plants. However the socialist government last year reopened the debate over nuclear energy's future with the creation of a round table group to debate the issue.
********************************************************************************************
By Betsy Mason
ScienceNOW Daily News
4 January 2006
Clues from deep-sea sediments suggest that a rapid global warming episode millions of years ago triggered a drastic change in ocean circulation that lasted thousands of years and further baked the continents. Scientists say this window to the past might provide a view of future consequences of global warming.
Some 59 million years ago, carbon dioxide began to build up in the atmosphere, likely from volcanic eruptions. This slowly warmed the sea surface in the high latitudes, aided by slight variations in Earth's orbit. Scientists suspect the warming threw a wrench into ocean circulation and chemistry that caused extinctions of deep-sea species and land mammals alike. But exactly how circulation patterns were affected has been hard to pin down.
Flavia Nunes and Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, wondered if the answer might lie in deep-sea sediments. These sediments contain the fossil shells of microscopic organisms, known as foraminifera, and the carbon isotope ratios in the shells can indicate whether water at the sea floor had been deep for long periods of time or had recently sunk from shallow depths.
Up until about 55 million years ago, carbon isotope ratios from samples taken from 14 sites around the globe show that deep sea currents had been generally forming in the Southern Ocean and South Atlantic Ocean and flowing northward to the Pacific Ocean. But less than 5000 years later, the currents seem to have reversed direction, the researchers report 5 January in Nature. This backward flow persisted for at least 40,000 years, and the original pattern didn't completely return for 100,000 years.
The research backs up global climate models that suggest the ancient change in ocean circulation may have warmed so-called gas hydrates on the sea floor, causing massive amounts of methane to bubble into the atmosphere, which would have in turn caused more warming on both sea and land. All told, ocean temperatures spiked by about 6 degrees Celsius. Because modern atmospheric CO 2 levels are approaching those seen 55 million years ago, the team warns that people could have a long-lasting effect on deep-ocean circulation.
"Clearly there [was] something going on with deep-sea circulation patterns," says paleoceanographer James Zachos of the University of California, Santa Cruz. But correlating specific time intervals in sediments from different oceans can be very tricky, he says. It is also difficult to say whether the modern ocean will react the same way, he notes, because of differences such as the location of continents and the growth of the Antarctic ice sheet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
U.S. delegation to push technology sharing at Sydney summit
By Darren Samuelsohn, Greenwire senior reporter
Top U.S. energy and environmental officials will make the sharing of greenhouse gas-reduction technologies their main goal as they meet later this week in Sydney with the five other countries that combine with the United States to emit almost half of the world's global warming-causing emissions.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky and White House Council on Environmental Quality Chairman Jim Connaughton are leading the U.S. delegation at the Australia meetings scheduled to run Wednesday and Thursday.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was originally scheduled as the highest-level Bush administration official to attend the summit, but she cancelled those plans Friday amid the uncertainty over ailing Israel Prime Minster Ariel Sharon.
At a news briefing Friday, Dobriansky and Connaughton previewed their goals for the summit, which also includes Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea. They insisted the talks would not serve as an end-run around existing United Nations-sponsored requirements under the Kyoto Protocol. But they also said the summit's ultimate outcome would produce more substantial results.
"We do not see this as a replacement," Dobriansky said. "We see it as a complement to the Kyoto Protocol."
Connaughton, Bush's top environmental adviser, said the summit promises more than Kyoto because it stretches beyond greenhouse gases to address other issues including air pollution, energy security, trade and economic development. Each country will bring its own individual commitments on global warming to the table in an attempt to spur trade and investment of climate-friendly technologies.
For example, Connaughton said Bush's pledge to voluntarily cut greenhouse gases by 18 percent relative to U.S. economic growth would pair up, albeit not identically, with China's approach to improve energy efficiency of their coal-fired power plants by up to 20 percent by 2010.
Methane capture, "clean coal" power plants, civilian nuclear power, hydrogen transportation, electricity transmission, mining and building, and appliance efficiency are all focus areas for the talks. Hinting at Bush's budget plans for the coming fiscal year, Connaughton also said the United States planned to boost funding for climate-friendly technologies beyond the $3 billion it is scheduled to spend this year.
"We find this to be a much more powerful way of engaging because it is tailored to the priorities that each country has set for themself in accordance with their own national circumstances and, therefore, does not reflect this one-size-fits-all concept," Connaughton said.
Representatives of private industry, including mining conglomerate Rio Tinto and Exxon Mobil Corp., are also expected at the conference.
After Montreal
The talks come two months after a U.N.-sponsored summit in Montreal, where international delegates agreed on several complex implementation measures for the Kyoto accord. U.S. officials were criticized in Montreal for backing out of negotiations on future commitments beyond Kyoto, though they ultimately returned to the bargaining table after language was adjusted to reflect efforts like those to be discussed this week in Australia.
Asked if the six-nation meetings would be duplicated regularly, Connaughton and Dobriansky said they were not ready to discuss formal plans. They instead urged reporters to focus on actions by the government and non-goverment officials following the meetings. "You'll see some sectors moving really rapidly and you'll see others that have never talked to each other before working out the arrangements of how to create a real six country, business-to-business dialogue," Connaughton said.
The six nations behind the international conference come at the issue of global warming in different ways. Both the United States and Australia have signed but not ratified the 1997 Kyoto accord, while China, India and South Korea signed and ratified the agreement but are not bound by its limits because of their status as developing nations.
Only Japan among the countries in the new pact is bound to meet Kyoto's greenhouse gas reduction mandates.
The summit is not without its critics.
"The administration's technology-only approach is a dollar short and a day late," said Annie Pensonk, international counsel for Environmental Defense. Pensonk said she agreed with the concept of technology sharing but not as the sole means to address global warming.
U.S. companies do not plan to give away their technologies for free, Pensonk said, and the federal budget deficit is a strong indication that Congress has no plans to offer subsidies that would stimulate such sharing internationally.
Also, Pensonk noted that the Bush administration's push toward technology sharing runs directly counter to a Senate resolution adopted last summer which called for cutting U.S. greenhouse gases through a mandatory, market-based plan.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), an advocate of mandatory greenhouse gas controls on U.S. industries, also has weighed in on the upcoming meeting. He discussed climate issues in Sydney last week in a meeting with Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
McCain has since been joined on his Pacific trip by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and John Sununu (R-N.H.). Their itinerary includes climate-related visits to New Zealand and Antarctica.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Paradise Drowning
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times op-ed
MALE, Maldives
When President Bush visits India next month, he should add a whistle-stop at this gorgeous chain of tropical islands southwest of India, for they are a window into the future if we continue to spew carbon into the environment.
These palm-lined islands, where colored fish and small sharks play in the coral reefs, are a paradise. But old-timers point to myriad changes wrought by the rising seas, and the government is already moving some inhabitants from the lowest atolls to those that are a bit more elevated.
Alas, the high point in this entire nation of 1,200 islands is only eight feet above sea level. So people here worry that eventually the entire nation may have to move, making the Maldives perhaps the first country in the world to be destroyed by global warming. (Tuvalu and Kiribati, both small Pacific island nations, are other contenders for the title of the first modern nation to be drowned.)
"There is a realistic threat that we could be the first environmental refugees in the world," said Mohamed H. Shareef, the chief government spokesman.
He notes that some scientific models have suggested that the seas may rise in this century by two or three feet, as polar ice caps melt and seawater warms and expands. He adds, "As 75 percent of the total land area of the Maldives is under three and a half feet, our islands would be submerged to such an extent that we would have to relocate."
The tsunami a year ago offered a glimpse of what may come: when the waters reached their peak, most of the Maldives disappeared under the Indian Ocean for a few minutes.
One reason for Mr. Bush to drop by is that the Maldives may be the most pro-American Muslim country in the world. Local tolerance and pragmatism are exemplified by the attitude toward liquor: don't drink it, but overcharge foreigners for it.
But the more important reason for Mr. Bush to come is not geopolitical but environmental. He should witness a paradise that is gravely threatened by irresponsible environmental policies in the U.S. - the world's leading source of greenhouse gases - and other major carbon emitters. As evidence mounts that climate change is real, is caused by humans and is accelerating because of feedback loops in nature, I find it astonishing that the U.S. still refuses to adopt serious measures to curb greenhouse gases.
Granted, there is considerable uncertainty about the scale of the damage we are inflicting on the earth. But that's no reason to play Russian roulette with our biosphere.
So we must encourage conservation and fuel efficiency, support alternative forms of energy like wind, solar and biofuels, and - I'll get hate mail about this - grudgingly accept nuclear power, because it doesn't produce greenhouse gases. We should also adopt a carbon tax, and join the Kyoto process of binding curbs on emissions.
A visit to the Maldives is sobering because it juxtaposes extraordinary beauty and extraordinary fragility. The islands have perfect white sand beaches, and the most exclusive resorts here charge several thousand dollars per room per night. And yet the luxury rooms are on sandbars barely peeking above the horizon. When the tide is coming in, you have the creepy feeling that unless it stops very quickly, you'll be left treading water in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Local people say that the rising seas have already led to severe erosion on some islands, to wells filling with saltwater, and to storms' becoming more violent.
"My island sits lower in the water now, because of rising seas," said Hasan Ibraahim, a fisherman from the island of Kandholhudhoo. Twice a year, he said, waves now wash over the island - and so, after the tsunami, the government decided to relocate the island's entire population.
He's sad to say goodbye to the land of his ancestors, but after the tsunami it was three days before he found his 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son - and he doesn't want to live through that nightmare again.
So Mr. Bush should come and talk to fishermen who endure the mutating climate every day - and then he should ponder the implications of rising seas for Florida, the Carolinas, Long Island. The Maldives may be the canary in the world's coal mine.
"Our message to the U.S. is as simple as this," said Mr. Shareef, the government spokesman. "Sea level rise is not just a phenomenon which is just going to engulf the Maldives and then stop. If it affects us tomorrow, it will affect you the day after