Asia

Australia is getting hotter, Beijing more irrespirable

Last week two events caught my attention in the Asia Pacific region as they show that our climate is warming and our air is deteriorating. Both events look unrelated at first but aren’t as fossil fuels are in both cases the culprit. The first one was the horrendous fires and temperatures witnessed in Australia. The […]

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Can Japan, and the world, ever be nuclear free ?

This is the question many are asking themselves as the Japanese government initially wanted to go nuclear free by 2040 but finally removed the specific deadline as the New York Times reported. Nuclear plants can last decades provided they are operated and maintained carefully. Nuclear accounts for 18 percent of the electricity mix of the

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Organized crime is also behind deforestation

If I tell you “organized crime” you will most likely think about drug and weapons trafficking, prostitution, money laundering, extortion and so on. But as the Huffington Post Green reports : ” The United Nations Environment Program recently released an alarming report indicating organized crime is responsible for 50 to 90% of illegal logging in

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Worth an article – My July 2012 tweets

I have been committed since January 2007 to bring you each month a selection of the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change and the world energy sector. However, I don’t blog as much as I would like to and generally write around 25 posts per month. But many more news are

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700 million people in a huge blackout in India

The increasing number of air conditioning appliances – and overall electricity demand – in India had presumably a huge consequence as yesterday, 600 million people went without electricity for several hours. As the New York Times noted : ” The world’s largest blackout ever crippled roughly half of India for a second consecutive day on

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An indian man single-handedly planted a forest

Never giving up is a state of mind. Persistence might well be omnipotent as the US President Calvin Coolidge once said. As Treehugger reported, a lone Indian man planted a 1360 acre (550 hectares) forest. Since 1979 then 16-year old Jadav “Molai” Payeng have planted hundreds of trees and have created a small forest ecosystem on

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Another solar efficiency record : 43.5 %

As Treehugger reported last week, the Japanese company Sharp has broken another record : 43.5 percent of efficiency, to be compared with their previous record, 36.9% efficiency which had been reached in November 2011. Typical solar panels in the market today still have around 15 or 20 percent of efficiciency. But research is breaking records

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IEA : Global CO2 emissions increased in 2011

As the situation is getting more and more desperate and climate gets weirder, global greenhouse gases emissions keep on increasing globally. As the International Energy Agency stated last week : ” Global carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil-fuel combustion reached a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2011, according to preliminary estimates from the International

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