6. Anti-plastic bag drive gains momentum
May 24, 2010 Bangkok Post
Pitsinee Jitpleecheep
May 24, 2010 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- Retailers of all sizes are being asked to co-operate with the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) on its new environmental programme to reduce the usage of plastic bags in Bangkok.
Porntep Techapaibul, a BMA deputy governor, said the capital generated about 10,000 tonnes of garbage per day. Of the total, up to 1,800 tonnes are plastic bags, the use of which rises by about 20% a year. The BMA has to allocate about 600 million baht to get rid of such garbage each year.
Given high concern about global warming, the BMA will encourage residents to take part in the 'Krungthep Yim Sod Sai Rai Tung Plastic' campaign, under the slogan under 'No Bag No Baht'. A pilot project started at the Chatuchak weekend market last week.
The campaign will expand to another eight markets owned by the BMA including Sanam Luang II, Prachachuen and Min Buri to test consumer response.
Under the campaign, customers who buy goods at shops at nine BMA markets will receive a one-baht discount for every 100 baht they pay if they bring fabric bags. At the same time, shoppers have to pay one baht per plastic bag. The measure will be enforced officially from Environment Day on June 5.
Proceeds from the "bag tax" will be used to help solve global warming problems or produce recycled bags.
Apart from the markets, the BMA also negotiated with leading retailers such as The Mall Group, Central Department Store, Tesco Lotus and Home Pro to join the campaign. Tesco Lotus and Home Pro are already taking part and more retailers are expected to join over the next two to three months.
"We hope the campaign will help gradually change the behaviour of Bangkokians and cap usage of plastic bags in Bangkok at 1,800 tonnes per day. However, if anything changes and the usage of plastic bags is more than 1,800 tonnes per day, we will consider some tax measures or increase household garbage collection fees to 360 baht per year from 240 baht currently," Mr Porntep said.
Newstex ID: KRTB-0199-45332329
Monday, May 24, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
Home Automation
7. China’s Soaring Energy Use Weakens Pledge on Efficiency
May 7, 2010 New York Times
HONG KONG — Even as China has set ambitious goals for itself in clean-energy production and reduction of global warming gases, the country’s surging demand for power from oil and coal has led to the largest six-month increase in the tonnage of human generated greenhouse gases ever by a single country.
China’s leaders are so concerned about rising energy use and declining energy efficiency that the cabinet held a special meeting this week to discuss the problem, according to a statement Thursday from the ministry of industry and information technology. Coal-fired electricity and oil sales each climbed 24 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, on the heels of similar increases in the fourth quarter
Premier Wen Jiabao promised tougher policies to enforce energy conservation, including a ban on government approval of any new projects by companies that failed to eliminate inefficient capacity, the ministry said. Mr. Wen also said that China had to find a way to meet the target in its current five-year plan of a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.
“We can never break our pledge, stagger our resolution or weaken our efforts, no matter how difficult it is,” Mr. Wen said. Western experts say it will be hard to meet the target, but that China’s leaders seem determined.
“No country of this size has seen energy demand grow this fast before in absolute terms, and those who are most concerned about this are the Chinese themselves,” said Jonathan Sinton, the China program manager at the International Energy Agency in Paris.
China has been the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases each year since 2006, leading the United States by an ever-widening margin. A failure by China to meet its own energy efficiency targets would be a big setback for international efforts to limit such emissions.
Such a failure would also be a potential diplomatic embarrassment for the Chinese government, which promised the world just before the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December that it would improve energy efficiency.
The issue has major economic implications for China and for global energy markets. The nation’s ravenous appetite for fossil fuels is driven by China’s shifting economic base — away from light export industries like garment and shoe production and toward energy-intensive heavy industries like steel and cement manufacturing for cars and construction for the domestic market.
Almost all urban households in China now have a washing machine, a refrigerator and an air-conditioner, according to government statistics. Rural ownership of appliances is now soaring as well because of new government subsidies for their purchase since late 2008.
Car ownership is rising rapidly in the cities, while bicycle ownership is actually falling in rural areas as more families buy motorcycles and light trucks.
General Motors announced on Thursday that its sales in China rose 41 percent in April from a year earlier, virtually all of the vehicles made in China because of high import taxes.
Zhou Xi’an, a National Energy Administration official, said in a statement last month that fossil fuel consumption was likely to increase further in the second quarter of this year because of rising car ownership, diesel use in the increasingly mechanized agricultural sector and extra jet fuel consumption for travelers to the Shanghai Expo.
The shift in the composition of China’s economic output is overwhelming the effects of China’s rapid expansion of renewable energy and its existing energy conservation program, energy experts said.
The increase in energy consumption in the first quarter was twice as fast as economic growth of about 12 percent during that period, a sign that rising energy consumption is not just the result of a rebounding economy but also of changes in the mix of industrial activity. The shift in activity is partly because of China’s economic stimulus program, which has resulted in a surge in public works construction that requires a lot of steel and cement.
Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which many scientists describe as the biggest man-made contributor to global warming.
President Hu Jintao pledged in November that by 2020 the Chinese government would slow its growth in greenhouse gases by sharply improving energy efficiency. Mr. Wen went to the Copenhagen climate meeting three weeks later and opposed any international monitoring of China’s energy efficiency effort or binding limits on China’s overall energy consumption.
China’s current five-year plan, from 2006 to 2010, already sets an efficiency target that the country may now be less likely to meet.
The plan calls for the energy needed for each unit of economic output to decline by 20 percent in 2010 compared to 2005.
For a while, China seemed to be on track toward that goal. According to the ministry of industry and information technology, energy efficiency actually improved by more than 14 percent from 2005 to 2009.
But it deteriorated by 3.2 percent in the first quarter, the ministry said on Thursday.
Mr. Wen said that this deterioration would make it “particularly difficult” for China to meet the 20 percent target.
Without big policy changes, like raising fuel taxes, “they can’t possibly make it,” said Julie Beatty, principal energy economist at Wood Mackenzie, a big energy consulting firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Mr. Hu promised last November that China would improve the energy efficiency of its economy by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. The ministry statement on Thursday did not mention whether Mr. Hu’s promise might still be achievable.
Complicating energy efficiency calculations is the fact that China’s National Bureau of Statistics has begun a comprehensive revision of all of the country’s energy statistics for the last 10 years, restating them with more of the details commonly available in other countries’ data. Western experts also expect the revision to show that China has been using even more energy and releasing even more greenhouse gases than previously thought.
Revising the data now runs the risk that other countries will distrust the results and demand greater international monitoring of any future pledges by China. If the National Bureau of Statistics revises up the 2005 data more than recent data, for example, then China might appear to have met its target at the end of this year for a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.
China’s recent embrace of renewable energy has done little so far to slow the rise in emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Wind energy effectively doubled in this year’s first quarter compared with a year earlier, as China has emerged as the world’s largest manufacturer and installer of wind turbines. But wind still accounts for just 2 percent of China’s electricity capacity — and only 1 percent of actual output, because the wind does not blow all the time.
Meanwhile, fuel-intensive heavy industry output rose 22 percent in the first quarter in China from a year earlier, while light industry increased 14 percent.
Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations research unit, said in an e-mail message that he believed China was serious about addressing its emissions.
“There is a growing realization within Chinese society that major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be of overall benefit to China,” he wrote after learning of the latest Chinese energy statistics. “This is important not only for global reasons, because China is now responsible for the highest emissions of greenhouse gases, but also because its per capita emissions are increasing at a rapid rate.”
To some extent, China’s energy consumption now might actually help limit its global warming emissions in the future.
China, for example, used 200 million tons of cement in building rail lines last year, while the entire American economy only used 93 million tons, said David Fridley, a China energy specialist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Although production of that cement raised energy use and emissions of global warming gases, it also expanded a rail system that is among the most energy-efficient in the world.
China currently moves only 55 percent of its coal by rail, for example, which is down from 80 percent a decade ago, as many coal users have been forced by inadequate rail capacity to haul coal in trucks instead. The trucks burn 10 or more times as much fuel per mile to haul a ton of coal, Mr. Fridley said.
But now, with new high-speed passenger lines leaving more room on older lines to haul coal and other freight, the percentages could begin shifting away from energy-inefficient trucking, he said.
May 7, 2010 New York Times
HONG KONG — Even as China has set ambitious goals for itself in clean-energy production and reduction of global warming gases, the country’s surging demand for power from oil and coal has led to the largest six-month increase in the tonnage of human generated greenhouse gases ever by a single country.
China’s leaders are so concerned about rising energy use and declining energy efficiency that the cabinet held a special meeting this week to discuss the problem, according to a statement Thursday from the ministry of industry and information technology. Coal-fired electricity and oil sales each climbed 24 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, on the heels of similar increases in the fourth quarter
Premier Wen Jiabao promised tougher policies to enforce energy conservation, including a ban on government approval of any new projects by companies that failed to eliminate inefficient capacity, the ministry said. Mr. Wen also said that China had to find a way to meet the target in its current five-year plan of a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.
“We can never break our pledge, stagger our resolution or weaken our efforts, no matter how difficult it is,” Mr. Wen said. Western experts say it will be hard to meet the target, but that China’s leaders seem determined.
“No country of this size has seen energy demand grow this fast before in absolute terms, and those who are most concerned about this are the Chinese themselves,” said Jonathan Sinton, the China program manager at the International Energy Agency in Paris.
China has been the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases each year since 2006, leading the United States by an ever-widening margin. A failure by China to meet its own energy efficiency targets would be a big setback for international efforts to limit such emissions.
Such a failure would also be a potential diplomatic embarrassment for the Chinese government, which promised the world just before the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December that it would improve energy efficiency.
The issue has major economic implications for China and for global energy markets. The nation’s ravenous appetite for fossil fuels is driven by China’s shifting economic base — away from light export industries like garment and shoe production and toward energy-intensive heavy industries like steel and cement manufacturing for cars and construction for the domestic market.
Almost all urban households in China now have a washing machine, a refrigerator and an air-conditioner, according to government statistics. Rural ownership of appliances is now soaring as well because of new government subsidies for their purchase since late 2008.
Car ownership is rising rapidly in the cities, while bicycle ownership is actually falling in rural areas as more families buy motorcycles and light trucks.
General Motors announced on Thursday that its sales in China rose 41 percent in April from a year earlier, virtually all of the vehicles made in China because of high import taxes.
Zhou Xi’an, a National Energy Administration official, said in a statement last month that fossil fuel consumption was likely to increase further in the second quarter of this year because of rising car ownership, diesel use in the increasingly mechanized agricultural sector and extra jet fuel consumption for travelers to the Shanghai Expo.
The shift in the composition of China’s economic output is overwhelming the effects of China’s rapid expansion of renewable energy and its existing energy conservation program, energy experts said.
The increase in energy consumption in the first quarter was twice as fast as economic growth of about 12 percent during that period, a sign that rising energy consumption is not just the result of a rebounding economy but also of changes in the mix of industrial activity. The shift in activity is partly because of China’s economic stimulus program, which has resulted in a surge in public works construction that requires a lot of steel and cement.
Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which many scientists describe as the biggest man-made contributor to global warming.
President Hu Jintao pledged in November that by 2020 the Chinese government would slow its growth in greenhouse gases by sharply improving energy efficiency. Mr. Wen went to the Copenhagen climate meeting three weeks later and opposed any international monitoring of China’s energy efficiency effort or binding limits on China’s overall energy consumption.
China’s current five-year plan, from 2006 to 2010, already sets an efficiency target that the country may now be less likely to meet.
The plan calls for the energy needed for each unit of economic output to decline by 20 percent in 2010 compared to 2005.
For a while, China seemed to be on track toward that goal. According to the ministry of industry and information technology, energy efficiency actually improved by more than 14 percent from 2005 to 2009.
But it deteriorated by 3.2 percent in the first quarter, the ministry said on Thursday.
Mr. Wen said that this deterioration would make it “particularly difficult” for China to meet the 20 percent target.
Without big policy changes, like raising fuel taxes, “they can’t possibly make it,” said Julie Beatty, principal energy economist at Wood Mackenzie, a big energy consulting firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Mr. Hu promised last November that China would improve the energy efficiency of its economy by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. The ministry statement on Thursday did not mention whether Mr. Hu’s promise might still be achievable.
Complicating energy efficiency calculations is the fact that China’s National Bureau of Statistics has begun a comprehensive revision of all of the country’s energy statistics for the last 10 years, restating them with more of the details commonly available in other countries’ data. Western experts also expect the revision to show that China has been using even more energy and releasing even more greenhouse gases than previously thought.
Revising the data now runs the risk that other countries will distrust the results and demand greater international monitoring of any future pledges by China. If the National Bureau of Statistics revises up the 2005 data more than recent data, for example, then China might appear to have met its target at the end of this year for a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.
China’s recent embrace of renewable energy has done little so far to slow the rise in emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Wind energy effectively doubled in this year’s first quarter compared with a year earlier, as China has emerged as the world’s largest manufacturer and installer of wind turbines. But wind still accounts for just 2 percent of China’s electricity capacity — and only 1 percent of actual output, because the wind does not blow all the time.
Meanwhile, fuel-intensive heavy industry output rose 22 percent in the first quarter in China from a year earlier, while light industry increased 14 percent.
Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations research unit, said in an e-mail message that he believed China was serious about addressing its emissions.
“There is a growing realization within Chinese society that major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be of overall benefit to China,” he wrote after learning of the latest Chinese energy statistics. “This is important not only for global reasons, because China is now responsible for the highest emissions of greenhouse gases, but also because its per capita emissions are increasing at a rapid rate.”
To some extent, China’s energy consumption now might actually help limit its global warming emissions in the future.
China, for example, used 200 million tons of cement in building rail lines last year, while the entire American economy only used 93 million tons, said David Fridley, a China energy specialist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Although production of that cement raised energy use and emissions of global warming gases, it also expanded a rail system that is among the most energy-efficient in the world.
China currently moves only 55 percent of its coal by rail, for example, which is down from 80 percent a decade ago, as many coal users have been forced by inadequate rail capacity to haul coal in trucks instead. The trucks burn 10 or more times as much fuel per mile to haul a ton of coal, Mr. Fridley said.
But now, with new high-speed passenger lines leaving more room on older lines to haul coal and other freight, the percentages could begin shifting away from energy-inefficient trucking, he said.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
home automation
Climate bill could be harmed by Gulf spill
May 1, 2010 Associated Press Online
By MATTHEW DALY and NOAKI SCHWARTZ
WASHINGTON, May 1, 2010 (AP Online delivered by Newstex) -- A historic environmental protection bill is in danger after a massive oil spill put a new focus on the perils of offshore drilling, a feature that was supposed to win wider support for the legislation.
The bill, supported by President Barack Obama, calls for new offshore drilling -- a concession by environmentalists. But with the tragedy off the Gulf Coast growing daily, even conservationists who have waited a decade for the legislation are now saying it will fail if offshore drilling remains in the bill.
"When you're trying to resurrect a climate bill that's face-down in the mud and you want to bring it back to life and get it breathing again, I don't think you can have offshore drilling against the backdrop of what's transpiring in the Louisiana wetlands," said Richard Charter, energy adviser to Defenders of Wildlife. "I think it's flat-lined."
Some Democrats, including two of New Jersey's congressmen and both of its senators, threatened Friday to pull their support if offshore drilling is included in the bill designed to curb emissions of pollution-causing gases blamed for global warming.
Introduction of the legislation was postponed on Monday for an unrelated reason. The bill aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and it also would expand domestic production of oil, natural gas and nuclear power.
Obama called for new offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean from Delaware to central Florida, and the northern waters of Alaska. He also asked Congress to lift a drilling ban in the oil-rich eastern Gulf of Mexico, 125 miles from Florida beaches.
The images of last week's explosion and the growing, uncontrolled spill in the Gulf of Mexico made the bill's road to approval much more difficult. The accident, which threatens wildlife and fishing grounds along the Gulf Coast, will likely force many wavering lawmakers to reconsider whether they support expanded drilling.
"I think that's dead on arrival," U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, told CNN on Friday.
But South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said Friday he has not wavered in his support. "We've had problems with car design, but you don't stop driving," he told The Greenville News. "The Challenger accident was heart-breaking but we went back to space."
A White House spokesman said this week that President Barack Obama remains committed, at least for now, to plans to expand drilling to new areas of the Outer Continental Shelf.
But David Jenkins, a spokesman for Republicans for Environmental Protection, said the politics of offshore drilling are "changing by the minute" as the spreading slick of oil threatens coastal states that traditionally support drilling.
"If this plays out, how many politicians will be jumping up and saying they won't vote for this because it doesn't include offshore drilling?" Jenkins said.
While the environmental community never embraced drilling, some muted or at least downplayed their opposition to Obama's proposal for the sake of the larger climate bill, said Steve Cochran, with the Environmental Defense Fund.
While the spill essentially kills any proposal for more drilling, he said it also demonstrates more than ever the need for a comprehensive energy bill that protects the environment.
"We need to take advantage of the opportunity of this bill to make sure we never face this situation again," he said.
Carl Pope, chairman of the Sierra Club, agreed. He said the authors of the bill will have to come up with a new formula to attract support from moderate Democrats, independents and Republicans.
"The oil industry spent 40 years building a story line that it knew what it was doing underwater and because it knew what it was doing we could allow it to turn our most sensitive coastline into oilfields," he said. "We've now been reminded once again that oil and water do not mix."
Newstex ID: AP-0001-44515662
May 1, 2010 Associated Press Online
By MATTHEW DALY and NOAKI SCHWARTZ
WASHINGTON, May 1, 2010 (AP Online delivered by Newstex) -- A historic environmental protection bill is in danger after a massive oil spill put a new focus on the perils of offshore drilling, a feature that was supposed to win wider support for the legislation.
The bill, supported by President Barack Obama, calls for new offshore drilling -- a concession by environmentalists. But with the tragedy off the Gulf Coast growing daily, even conservationists who have waited a decade for the legislation are now saying it will fail if offshore drilling remains in the bill.
"When you're trying to resurrect a climate bill that's face-down in the mud and you want to bring it back to life and get it breathing again, I don't think you can have offshore drilling against the backdrop of what's transpiring in the Louisiana wetlands," said Richard Charter, energy adviser to Defenders of Wildlife. "I think it's flat-lined."
Some Democrats, including two of New Jersey's congressmen and both of its senators, threatened Friday to pull their support if offshore drilling is included in the bill designed to curb emissions of pollution-causing gases blamed for global warming.
Introduction of the legislation was postponed on Monday for an unrelated reason. The bill aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and it also would expand domestic production of oil, natural gas and nuclear power.
Obama called for new offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean from Delaware to central Florida, and the northern waters of Alaska. He also asked Congress to lift a drilling ban in the oil-rich eastern Gulf of Mexico, 125 miles from Florida beaches.
The images of last week's explosion and the growing, uncontrolled spill in the Gulf of Mexico made the bill's road to approval much more difficult. The accident, which threatens wildlife and fishing grounds along the Gulf Coast, will likely force many wavering lawmakers to reconsider whether they support expanded drilling.
"I think that's dead on arrival," U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, told CNN on Friday.
But South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said Friday he has not wavered in his support. "We've had problems with car design, but you don't stop driving," he told The Greenville News. "The Challenger accident was heart-breaking but we went back to space."
A White House spokesman said this week that President Barack Obama remains committed, at least for now, to plans to expand drilling to new areas of the Outer Continental Shelf.
But David Jenkins, a spokesman for Republicans for Environmental Protection, said the politics of offshore drilling are "changing by the minute" as the spreading slick of oil threatens coastal states that traditionally support drilling.
"If this plays out, how many politicians will be jumping up and saying they won't vote for this because it doesn't include offshore drilling?" Jenkins said.
While the environmental community never embraced drilling, some muted or at least downplayed their opposition to Obama's proposal for the sake of the larger climate bill, said Steve Cochran, with the Environmental Defense Fund.
While the spill essentially kills any proposal for more drilling, he said it also demonstrates more than ever the need for a comprehensive energy bill that protects the environment.
"We need to take advantage of the opportunity of this bill to make sure we never face this situation again," he said.
Carl Pope, chairman of the Sierra Club, agreed. He said the authors of the bill will have to come up with a new formula to attract support from moderate Democrats, independents and Republicans.
"The oil industry spent 40 years building a story line that it knew what it was doing underwater and because it knew what it was doing we could allow it to turn our most sensitive coastline into oilfields," he said. "We've now been reminded once again that oil and water do not mix."
Newstex ID: AP-0001-44515662
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