Home | U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. Wat€r Mu$ic. Les installations hydroélectriques produisent environ 14 % de l’énergie électrique en France, avec de fortes variations saisonnières en fonction de l’hydraulicité. Malgré d’importantes disparités entre pays, le pourcentage moyen est du même ordre au sein de l’Union européenne et dans le reste du monde. Mais l’importance de cette technologie dépasse la dimension purement quantitative de sa production. En effet, la flexibilité des centrales donne à l’énergie hydroélectrique un rôle essentiel pour répondre à la versatilité de la demande et des sources d’énergie intermittentes. Par ailleurs, après turbinage pour produire de l’électricité, l’eau peut satisfaire d’autres usages en aval des retenues. Pour valoriser au mieux les ressources en eau, il faut donc trouver un cadre institutionnel qui permette à l’opérateur des centrales de tirer profit de la flexibilité de ses installations tout en répondant aux besoins des autres usagers de l’eau.
Que d’eau, que d’eau ! Comment gérer les barrages ? A New Mode for Transportation Where There Are No RoadsTEDCity2.0 | TEDCity2.0. La disparition. Le 30 novembre 2014, le géant énergétique allemand E.ON a surpris la plupart des observateurs de l’industrie en annonçant qu’il se séparait de ses activités traditionnelles de production d’électricité en Europe pour se concentrer sur les réseaux, les énergies renouvelables, et les services aux consommateurs[1]. Cette annonce marque effectivement la disparition d’un géant énergétique européen, dont l’histoire se confond avec celle de la libéralisation de l’industrie électrique en Europe. Ce billet en tire les enseignements principaux. La naissance d’un géant A la fin des années 1990s, les gouvernements européens ont conjointement adopté des mesures visant à libéraliser les industries électriques et gazières.
Au delà des considérations politiciennes de court-terme, deux facteurs semblent avoir motivé cette décision. Premièrement, il s’agissait d’inclure dans le marché commun l’énergie, un secteur important de l’économie. Des cycles dans l’industrie électriques Des aventures exotiques.
Would we benefit from climate insurance? Scientists agree that climate change will have negative consequences, but there is enormous uncertainty regarding the extent of the damages. Civilization-threatening climate events such as runaway global warming or extreme sea level rise may not be likely over the next century, but they also cannot be ruled out. Yet, when economists estimate the monetary benefits of climate change policies, it is common to ignore the role that climate policy plays as insurance against the possibility of catastrophic events. Consider the benefits an individual receives when he buys a life insurance policy. If he dies, his family is protected from financial ruin. He is likely to lose money on this policy—in fact, he is hoping to lose money—but he still finds it worthwhile to purchase the policy due to the enormous benefits it provides if he dies, as well as the comfort of knowing his family will be covered in that event.
Now consider the benefits to society of climate change policy. Nature The Fracking Fallacy (20141204)
The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) The EU ETS: operates in 31 countries (all 28 EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway) limits emissions from more than 11,000 heavy energy-using installations (power stations & industrial plants) and airlines operating between these countries covers around 45% of the EU's greenhouse gas emissions. For a detailed overview, see: EU ETS factsheet (466 kB) EU ETS Handbook (3.19 Mb) A 'cap and trade' system The EU ETS works on the 'cap and trade' principle. A cap is set on the total amount of certain greenhouse gases that can be emitted by installations covered by the system. Within the cap, companies receive or buy emission allowances which they can trade with one another as needed. After each year a company must surrender enough allowances to cover all its emissions, otherwise heavy fines are imposed.
Trading brings flexibility that ensures emissions are cut where it costs least to do so. Key features of phase 3 (2013-2020) The main changes are: Sectors and gases covered. Kyoto Protocol 'loophole' has cost $6 billion - environment - 09 February 2007. A loophole in an important part of the Kyoto Protocol has cost nearly $6 billion, suggests new research. The loophole will now be closed, say officials. The problem relates to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This scheme allows investors in countries that have Kyoto Protocol targets to buy carbon credits by investing in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries. The credits are essentially permits to pollute in their own countries. The controversy centres around the inclusion of refrigerant-producing factories that generate the powerful greenhouse gas HFC 23 as a by-product.
Critics of this practice say it is very wasteful to use the CDM to ensure destruction of HFC 23, when it would be far cheaper to simply give the factories the money to install the equipment to destroy the gas. Wara says it would cost only $100 million to pay producers to capture and destroy HFC 23 compared with $6 billion in CDM credits. "No perverse incentives" Dumps and dams More From New Scientist. 42 Issues in the Design of Environmental Excise Taxes.pdf. Value of life. The potency of life (or cost of life) is an economic value assigned to life in general, or to specific living organisms.
[citation needed] In social and political sciences, it is the marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. [citation needed] As such, it is a statistical term, the cost of reducing the average number of deaths by one. It is an important issue in a wide range of disciplines including economics, health care, adoption, political economy, insurance, worker safety, environmental impact assessment, and globalization. [citation needed] In industrial nations, the justice system considers a human life "priceless", thus illegalizing any form of slavery; i.e., humans cannot be bought for any price. However, with a limited supply of resources or infrastructural capital (e.g. ambulances), or skill at hand, it is impossible to save every life, so some trade-off must be made.
Treatment in economics[edit] Policy applications of the VSL[edit] Uses[edit] Kevin M. Charter Cities | Urbanization Project. The Charter Cities initiative works with governments in rapidly urbanizing countries, focusing on the potential for startup cities to fast track reform. Collectively these countries will add billions of new residents this century. Existing cities will expand, and entirely new cities will emerge. We encourage reform-minded leaders to use new cities as a mechanism for change—a way to experiment with new rules that can offer people more job opportunities and new ways to make progress in both their own lives and the lives of their children. A charter city is a type of civic startup, a framework for reform. Civic startups allow societies to experiment with new rules, but to do so in ways that do not force change on those who don’t want it.
They are attractive to people who want to try new ways of doing things. A Flexible Framework for Reform Reformers can start a charter city by enacting founding legislation—or a charter—that commits a public entity to key principles of reform.
Eco - Green tax. Green Business. Why should we trust scientists, anyway? Climate scientists say they are 95 percent certain that human influence has been the dominant cause of global warming since 1950. They're about as sure of this as they are that cigarette smoke causes cancer. Why are they so confident? In part because they have a good grasp on how greenhouse gases can warm the planet, in part because the theory fits the available evidence, and in part because alternate theories have been ruled out.
Let's break it down in six steps: 1) Scientists have long known that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — such as carbon dioxide, methane, or water vapor — absorb certain frequencies of infrared radiation and scatter them back toward the Earth. 2) Climate scientists also know that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have grown significantly since the Industrial Revolution. 3) So it stands to reason that more greenhouse gases would lead to more heat. Skeptical Science. Australia is repealing its controversial carbon tax. The carbon-tax experiment in Australia is now over. Economists tend to prefer carbon pricing for tackling global warming On Wednesday, the Australian Senate voted 39-32 to repeal the nation's controversial tax on greenhouse-gas emissions.
The tax, first passed in 2011, had charged people roughly $23 for every ton of carbon-dioxide they emitted from oil, coal, or gas. The repeal is a big blow for climate policy. Economists have long argued that carbon pricing is one of the most effective ways to tackle global warming. The premise is simple: People should pay for the damage they cause by emitting carbon. And making fossil fuels more expensive will spur companies to seek out cleaner alternatives. But the major weakness of a price on carbon has always been politics. How Australia's carbon tax worked — and why it fell Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Australia's emissions fell after the carbon tax was enacted But it was also hugely controversial from the start. Further reading: Why the U.N. climate talks keep breaking down, in five simple charts. It's now the second week of this year's international climate negotiations in Warsaw and things ... aren't going well. Protestors at the Warsaw climate talks. (AP) "An old rift between rich and poor has reopened in U.N. climate talks," the AP reports, "as developing countries look for ways to make developed countries accept responsibility for global warming — and pay for it. " In short: Poor countries argue that richer countries are responsible for most of the carbon-dioxide already the atmosphere, so they should pay for the damage caused by global warming. The rich countries, for their part, point out that you also have to look at future emissions when divvying up blame — which puts the spotlight on fast-growing nations like China and India.
That dispute has taken all sorts of forms. We can break this argument down into chart form, with the help of the Global Carbon Project, which just released a fantastic presentation (pdf) on worldwide carbon emissions. But that's no longer true today. CarbonWeb - CarbonWeb.pdf. Where do greenhouse-gas emissions come from? - Everything you need to know about global warming. It depends on how much the planet actually heats up. The changes associated with 4° Celsius (or 7.2º Fahrenheit) of warming are expected to be more dramatic than the changes associated with 2°C of warming. Here's a basic rundown of some big impacts we can expect if global warming continues, via the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (here and here). Hotter temperatures: If emissions keep rising unchecked, then global average surface temperatures will likely rise at least 2ºC (or 3.6ºF) above pre-industrial levels by 2100 — and possibly 3ºC or 4ºC or more.
Higher sea-level rise: The expert consensus is that global sea levels will rise somewhere between 0.7 and 1.2 meters by the end of the century if global warming continues unchecked (that's between 2 and 4 feet). And that's only the average. Heat waves: A hotter planet will mean more frequent and severe heat waves. Droughts and floods: Across the globe, wet seasons are likely to become wetter, and dry seasons drier. Welcome to Carbon Atlas | Global Carbon Atlas. Montomery_testimony_0714.pdf. MIT Thinks It Has Discovered the Perfect Solar Cell. A new MIT study offers a way out of one of solar power's most vexing problems: the matter of efficiency, and the bare fact that much of the available sunlight in solar power schemes is wasted.
The researchers appear to have found the key to perfect solar energy conversion efficiency—or at least something approaching it. It's a new material that can accept light from an very large number of angles and can withstand the very high temperatures needed for a maximally efficient scheme. Conventional solar cells, the silicon-based sheets used in most consumer-level applications, are far from perfect. Light from the sun arrives here on Earth's surface in a wide variety of forms.
These forms—wavelengths, properly—include the visible light that makes up our everyday reality, but also significant chunks of invisible (to us) ultraviolet and infrared light. That makes sense because visible light is the most intense form of light that reaches the Earth's surface. Image: stanford.edu. Corporate Average Fuel Economy. CAFE Standards Reach Prius Levels 25 Years After Its Introduction Starting in 2011 the CAFE standards are newly expressed as mathematical functions depending on vehicle "footprint", a measure of vehicle size determined by multiplying the vehicle’s wheelbase by its average track width.
A complicated 2011 mathematical formula was replaced starting in 2012 with a simpler inverse-linear formula with cut-off values. [3] CAFE footprint requirements are set up such that a vehicle with a larger footprint has a lower fuel economy requirement than a vehicle with a smaller footprint. CAFE has separate standards for "passenger cars" and "light trucks", despite the majority of "light trucks" actually being used as passenger cars. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) regulates CAFE standards and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) measures vehicle fuel efficiency. U.S. Effect on automotive fuel economy[edit] Prices inflation adjusted to 2008 dollars. Calculation[edit] Summary of Roll the DICE Again: The Economics of Global Warming William Nordhaus and Joseph Boyer October 1999 Overview Global warming has become the major environmental policy issue of today.
Concerns about the impact of global warming have increasingly been the subject of research and debate among natural and social sciences, and nations have undertaken a controversial new approach to curbing global environmental threats in the Kyoto Protocol of December 1997. Dealing with complex scientific and economic issues has increasingly involved developing scientific and economic models. The purpose of the present study is to integrate scientific knowledge of the dynamics of climate change with our understanding of the economic aspects of emissions of greenhouse gases and damages from climate change.
The analysis is laid out in six chapters. Summary of the Model and Analysis We provide here a short overview of the approach and major results of the book. Major results. WGI AR5 Chapter Template - SYR_AR5_LONGERREPORT.pdf. Webcast | Stanford University Roundtable. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Home Page. Sivens, un drame de la décision publique à la française | TSE DEBATE. Le drame de Sivens a révélé les faiblesses de l’organisation de la décision publique en France. La décision de construire le barrage dépend du rapport de force politique local, ce qui a fini par déboucher sur des affrontements violents entre agriculteurs et écologistes.
Afin de réduire le risque que de tels drames se reproduisent, il est nécessaire de revoir en amont le modèle de prise de décision sur les projets publics. François Hollande a proposé le 27 novembre à la Conférence Environnementale un nouveau modèle de « démocratie participative » basé sur des référendums locaux. Mais comment bien décider sans être au préalable bien informé ? Aussi faut-il, en premier lieu, repenser l’évaluation des projets publics. Un financement public, des bénéfices privés Mais on peut vouloir construire le barrage pour d’autres raisons que l’efficacité économique, par exemple pour des raisons d’équité vis-à-vis d’agriculteurs vivant des situations difficiles, ou pour favoriser le développement rural. The cost of wind and solar power keeps dropping all over the world.