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July 24th, 2013:

An overview of EU environment policy targets and objectives

http://www.eea.europa.eu/highlights/an-overview-of-eu-environment?&utm_campaign=an-overview-of-eu-environment&utm_medium=email&utm_source=EEASubscriptions

An overview of EU environment policy targets and objectives

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Topics: Environmental scenarios , Policy instruments , Green economy ,

European Union legislation has established more than 130 separate environmental targets and objectives to be met between 2010 and 2050. Together, these can provide useful milestones supporting Europe’s transition towards a ‘green economy’, according to a report published by the European Environment Agency (EEA).

http://wwws2.eea.europa.eu/highlights/an-overview-of-eu-environment/image_xlarge

Image © NHD-INFO

This report shows that while we have been successful in agreeing a wide range of policies to protect the environment, implementing these policies remains a challenge. We are making some progress towards the EU aim of creating a green economy, but we need to keep the pressure on up to 2020 and beyond.

Hans Bruyninckx, EEA Executive Director

The ‘green economy’ has emerged as a priority in policy debate in recent years. But what does the concept mean in practice and how can one measure progress towards this strategic goal? A new EEA report, ‘Towards a green economy in Europe’, provides some answers. It does so through a comprehensive overview of environmental targets and objectives established by EU legislation for the period 2010–2050 and by providing examples of analysis of progress towards achieving them.

Hans Bruyninckx, EEA Executive Director, said: “This report shows that while we have been successful in agreeing a wide range of policies to protect the environment, implementing these policies remains a challenge. We are making some progress towards the EU aim of creating a green economy, but we need to keep the pressure on up to 2020 and beyond.”

The report identifies 63 legally binding targets and 68 non-binding objectives set out in EU policy covering the period 2010–2050. Of the 63 legally-binding targets, 62 have their deadlines in 2020 or before. Most of the current targets and objectives can be seen as interim steps towards a transition to a green economy, because in most cases eradicating the problems will require longer-term efforts beyond 2020.

The ‘green economy’ is an economic model which aims to increase prosperity by using resources efficiently as well as maintaining the resilience of the natural systems that sustain societies. With its ‘Environmental indicator report 2012‘, the EEA undertook its first analysis of Europe’s progress in the transition towards a green economy, using indicators to assess resource efficiency and to address ecosystem resilience. The findings show a mixed performance, although they suggest that Europe has made more progress in improving resource efficiency than preserving ecosystem resilience.

The new overview is useful as a comprehensive basis for reviewing progress in the past, and for considering the prospects for meeting future environmental policy objectives and targets.

Progress towards environmental targets in Europe

  • The EU has a non-binding objective to cut energy use to levels 20 % below business-as-usual projections by 2020. Although this implies that consumption must be a little lower than the level in the mid-1990s, the trend since then has moved upwards. So it appears likely that achieving the 2020 objectives will require stronger policy implementation and possibly additional policy impulses.
  • Alongside policies to mitigate climate change, the EU has several policies to help Member States adapt. The European Commission encourages all Member States to adopt comprehensive adaptation strategies. By mid-2013, 16 States had achieved this.
  • Regarding air pollution, the EU has generally made good progress towards its 2010 emissions targets set by the Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution. Meeting 2020 targets will require continued efforts.  Only in the case of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is there an obvious need to accelerate abatement efforts significantly. Modelling also suggests that achieving the targets is technically feasible for all pollutants except PM2.5.
  • Waste generated per capita should be in absolute decline by 2020, according to another non-binding objective. Waste generation shows a trend which, when extrapolated, suggests that the EU would narrowly miss its 2020 target. The trend is certainly ambiguous, however, with the decline in waste generation since 2007 giving some cause for encouragement.
  • Member States also have another waste-related objective, specifying that landfilling of waste should be near zero by 2020. An extrapolation of the trend points to a decline from 179 kg per capita in 2011 to 114 kg per capita in 2020, so achieving the target for near-zero landfill appears to require a radical change in waste management practices.

CIA Pays for Research to Manipulate Our Climate Living Green Magazine

http://livinggreenmag.com/2013/07/24/climate-change/cia-pays-for-research-to-manipulate-our-climate/

CIA Pays for Research to Manipulate Our Climate

Editor Post | July 24, 2013 |

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By Jon Bowermaster for TakePart.com

Instead of working to stop the causes of global warming, the government is publicly announcing plans to geoengineer our planet.

Progress very often comes with a price.

If we are not collectively learning anything else from the global warming emergency, perhaps that’s the biggest lesson: The world cannot advance the way it has—seven billion people burning fossil fuels with wild abandon—without a cost.

One cost is that we have so cooked the atmosphere that even conservative estimates predict average temps will rise three to seven degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

There are several ways to respond to this global cooking. One is to ignore and party on. Another is to conserve. Another is to vigorously look for options, towards renewables. And yet another is to tinker even further with technology to engineer our way out of the mess.

This week it was disclosed that the CIA is putting $630,000 into a geoengineering project that will study how humans are influencing weather patterns and assess more ways they can do so. The investment comes a year after the spy agency was forced by Congress to shutter its in-house research center on the relationship between climate change and national security.

Offloaded to the National Academy of Sciences, the program will be responsible for overseeing the first geoengineeringstudy funded by an intelligence agency. One of the CIA’s apparent prime curiosities is trying to slow global warming by using experimental technologies ranging from simulating volcanic eruptions to seeing how pumping sulfides into the atmosphere might impact national security.

While going public with the study may be new, this is hardly the first time government agencies have tried to fool Mother Nature for the sake of national security. During World War II, the Germans experimented with producing fog to confuse allied bombers. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force seeded clouds above the Ho Chi Minh Trail to encourage tropical rains to turn the ground into muck. In a more plebian effort, in 2008 the Chinese had its “Weather Modification Office” seed clouds in order to discourage rain from falling over its Olympic stadiums.

Such experimentation continues today. Indonesia would prefer that its torrential rains fall over the ocean rather than land, where it produces flooding. The methodology, dropping tons of salt from military planes, has so far not been effective.

The notion of governments trying to fool nature is slippery territory.

And there is little stopping individuals from launching their own DIY attempts, as in the wacked effort last summer by San Francisco-based Planktos to seed the northern Pacific Ocean with 100 tons of iron sulphate as an alleged way to encourage plankton growth and slow warming of the seas. All that was accomplished was creating a brand-new waste dump of 100 tons of iron on the sea floor.

Read the rest of this article at http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/07/19/cia-puts-630000-studying-how-man-can-engineer-weather

Tags: CIA, climate change, geoengineering, global warming, pollution

Butterflies

HK Butterfly Net http://butterflyclub.greenpower.org.hk/eng/aboutus.php

Hong Kong is home to more than 260 butterfly species, which is one-tenth the total for China. Hong Kong can be described as a “butterfly paradise”. Butterflies catch people’s attention with their varied colours and elegant poses. They are the most beautiful guides in nature, leading people to an appreciation of the magnificent natural world.

Shell Nature Watch– Butterfly Explorer has been co-organised by Green Power and Shell HK Ltd. since 2004. It is the first local large scale educational and monitoring programme with butterflies as the theme. Starting from community promotion, school education and ecological surveys, we organised various activities to increase public awareness of and concern of butterflies, aiming to protect local butterfly diversity.

Friends fall out

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12917551.900-friends-fall-out-.html

Friends fall out

The Hong Kong branch of Friends of the Earth has severed relations with the international environmental organisation because of a dispute over sponsorship. The disagreement focuses on support of the Hong Kong group by Shell, the multinational oil company. Shell pays for local education programmes and buys advertising space in the group’s magazine One Earth. Shell is the target of a campaign by FoE International against producers of pesticides that contaminate the environment.

The argument arose at FoE International’s annual meeting last September. FoE England and Wales complained about the Shell adverts in One Earth. ‘They said we would be expelled unless we made major changes to our policy,’ says Ross Penlington, chairman of Hong Kong FoE;s board of directors. ‘It would have meant closing our magazine and changes in our funding policy which we didn’t feel we could make.’ Hong Kong FoE announced its temporary withdrawal from FoE Internatiohnal.

Arctic methane ‘time bomb’ could have huge economic costs

Arctic methane ‘time bomb’ could have huge economic costs

BBC News

– ‎43 minutes ago‎

Scientists say that the release of large amounts of methane from thawing permafrost in the Arctic could have huge economic impacts for the world.

Methane gas can dramatically change the global climate

Wednesday 24 July 2013

www.independent.co.uk%2Fvoices%2Fcomment%2Fmethane-gas-can-dramatically-change-the-global-climate-8730578.html

Methane gas can dramatically change the global climate

There are large uncertainties in the $60tn figure

Methane gas is one of the wildest of wild cards in the game of trying to assess future climate change. But among the many uncertainties, scientists know two things for sure: there is a vast amount of methane stored in the Arctic region, and if it were to be suddenly released into the atmosphere, it could dramatically change the global climate.

The latest study, it has to be said, is only the first, tentative stab at trying to assess the economic impacts of a sudden methane release from the Arctic. Unlike the usual peer-reviewed research papers in Nature, this one was clearly published under the rubric of “comment”.

The three researchers – an economist, a social scientist and an Arctic ice specialist – have broken new ground by tackling the difficult issue of assessing the economic costs of a large-scale escape of methane, which as a greenhouse gas is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period.

They used an economic computer model called PAGE09 which was also used by the Stern Review into climate change costs and the US Environmental Protection Agency. They estimated, on average, it would cost a staggering $60 trillion (£40tn) if just one of the known Arctic methane reserves were to be suddenly released as a result of melting permafrost.

Some will no doubt argue that these kinds of computer models are not to be trusted, and there are many assumptions and uncertainties lying behind this kind of work. Nevertheless, the researchers believe this is a useful exercise in balance given the optimism over the supposed economic benefits of Arctic oil and gas exploration, to say nothing of the shipping bonanza offered by an ice-free Northern Sea Route between Japan, China and Europe.

There are large uncertainties even in this $60tn figure. There is a 5 per chance that the costs could be as little as $10tn and a 5 per cent chance of them being as high as $220tn. But 80 per cent of this extra financial burden is likely to fall on the poorer nations of Africa, Asia and South America, which will suffer most as methane magnifies the risk of flooding to low-lying areas, extreme heat stress, drought and storms.

“What the model does is allow us to work out how much extra temperature rise there is and we find in average terms it brings forward the date at which the 2C temperature rise is exceeded by somewhere between 15 and 35 years,” explained Chris Hope, an economist at Cambridge University.

“As the temperature and sea levels rise, we can the go on to estimate the extra impacts in the regions around the world and in different economic sectors,” Dr Hope said.

“Of course the answer is uncertain, as everything about the climate is uncertain, but we can run the model many thousands of times to try to take account of this uncertainty,” he said.