Global carbon dioxide emissions from industry rose about 3 percent in a weak global economy this year, a study released today showed, adding fresh urgency to efforts to control planet-warming gases at U.N. climate talks in South Africa. The study by the Global Carbon Project, an annual report card on mankind's CO2 pollution, says a slowdown in emissions during the 2008-09 global financial crisis was a mere speed bump, and the gain in 2011 followed a 6 percent surge in 2010. "The global financial crisis was an opportunity to move the global economy away from a high-emissions trajectory. Our results provide no indication of this happening," the authors say in the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The North American arm of LG Electronics plans to halve its carbon footprint by 2020. LG Electronics USA said today the company would use 2007 emissions levels as the baseline for the 50 percent reduction, which would largely revolve around its energy use. Its operations consume roughly 19.4 million kilowatt hours each year. In a statement announcing the plan, LG Electronics USA offered a glimpse into how the company would achieve this aggressive goal. Energy management figures prominently in its strategy, such as optimizing its energy management systems, and it also plans to boost efficiency by targeting its HVAC, lighting and data centers. Green power will also play a significant role through LG's purchase of renewable energy certificates (RECs). In October, the company partnered with Blue Star Energy Solutions to buy RECs for its Englewood Cliffs, N.J., headquarters (a 50-50 split between wind and biomass sources), the ...

The Obama administration is changing the way wind energy projects in the American Midwest are financed by "spreading the costs" to consumers and businesses in other states, possibly doubling or perhaps tripling energy bills in the region in the coming years, experts are telling WND. Obama's team at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates much of the coal, gas, hydroelectric and oil industries, late last month approved a scheme long sought by environmentalists that links windmills and windmill farms to conventional energy transmission grid lines in the nation's heartland.

Protecting the world’s forests will be a crucial way to fight climate change, given deforestation contributes to more carbon emissions than all vehicles combined. Now Google has emerged as a key warrior in the deforestation battle. On Thursday morning in Cancun, Mexico at the COP 16 U.N. climate negotiations, the search engine giant unveiled Google Earth Engine, a product which combines an open API, a computing platform and 25 years of satellite imagery available to researchers, scientists, organizations and government agencies. While the software and satellite imagery in Google Earth are already being used to look at world climate change data, Google Earth Engine offers tools and parallel processing computing power to groups to be able to use satellite imagery to analyze environmental conditions in order to make sustainability decisions.

The failure of the U.N. climate process is proof that shared economic sacrifice cannot be the basis of global action. Nations will not scale up clean energy as long as it remains so much more expensive than fossil fuels. Thinking past talks in Cancun, nations should focus instead on energy innovation, adaptation, and no regrets policies that do not require agreement about global warming. The first step is recognizing that the global market for clean energy exists only thanks to government subsidies and mandates. Instead of imposing emissions controls and subsidizing existing technologies, nations should use competitive deployment to purchase advanced energy technologies, benchmark the winners, and allow intellectual property to spill-over between firms and nations. This is the framework we propose for pragmatic global climate action in the cover story for a special energy section in today's Wall Street Journal, pegged to the start of U.N ...

The transportation chief of the European Union said Monday that airlines based in the United States could receive an exemption, at least in part, from European carbon regulations if Washington moved to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at home. Enlarge This Image Simon Dawson/Bloomberg News European Union officials are trying to persuade airlines based elsewhere to comply with European climate policies. “We are ready to negotiate and to talk about these issues and not only make declarations,” Siim Kallas, the European commissioner for transportation, said during a news conference. “Adequate measures from other countries can be taken into account.”

The world’s low-carbon energy market is likely to triple by 2020, HSBC analysts forecast on Monday, saying that rising concerns about resource scarcity would support broad consensus on the threat of climate change Reuters reports. The electric vehicle market would benefit most, growing more than 20 times by 2020 to reach $473 billion, said HSBC’s “Sizing [...]

The market for carbon accounting software in the U.S. last year was as small as an average venture capital funding round: about $10 million. But researchers are predicting that the market will boom to some $120 million by next year and $250 million by 2012. Competing for that cash are dozens of startups, as well as big players in the enterprise software field, along with firms that have strayed over from the field of environmental and health compliance.

Senator John Kerry said a bipartisan climate change bill would emerge soon in the U.S. Senate, contradicting what he called the "conventional wisdom" that the legislation was dead this election year. Kerry is working closely with the Obama administration and a bipartisan group of senators on a comprehensive bill to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide pollution blamed for global warming. "We're on a short track here in terms of piecing together legislation we intend to roll out," Kerry told a climate policy forum, without giving details of his proposals. The Massachusetts Democrat and White House officials are among the most optimistic that a bill to tackle global warming can be produced, despite strong opposition among many lawmakers and as time runs out ahead of the November midterm elections.

The global race to develop clean technology is not just about who can build the best solar parks or wind farms. It is also shaping up as a contest between Chinese-style capitalism and the more market-oriented approach fancied by the United States and Europe. The question comes down to this: will China's highly capitalized command-and-control economy trump laissez-faire in a low-carbon shift that is widely portrayed as the next industrial revolution? The failure in Copenhagen to agree to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a new global climate treaty when it expires in 2012 has thrown the focus on national measures. And by almost all accounts, the Chinese are coming on strong.

Clean-energy company executives and investors met with White House officials today to make their case for a federal cap on emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. "We have come here this morning with one particular request, and that is that we pass comprehensive climate change and energy policy legislation this year," said Entergy Corp. CEO Wayne Leonard, who was one of more than 100 U.S. executives who met with Obama administration officials at the White House. "We want to get America back in the business of exporting technology instead of dollars."

The global IT and communications industry is on track to release a new methodology for measuring the carbon footprint of a vast array of IT products designed to provide a standardised approach for tracking the sector's carbon emissions. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the U.N. agency that represents the global IT and communications industry, will next month host a meeting of one of its standardization study groups where it expects to finalize the new standard.

A historic moment will unfold Sept. 22 at the United Nations headquarters, as U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao speak to top world leaders, each offering specific proposals for reducing pollution from greenhouse gases that are affecting the global climate. Despite the speeches, controversy remains among large and small nations, and it often [...]