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20 July 2015, WRI, An opportunity not to be wasted: The waste sector permeates almost every aspect of our society, and its mismanagement can lead to serious problems. Worldwide, we generated 1.3 billion tons of waste in 2012, which accounted forabout 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This volume is project to rise to 2.2 billion tons by 2025, with most of the increase expected in cities in the so-called emerging economies like Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa. The waste management utility sector is in the eye of the storm, and its evolution will be crucial to humanity’s response to various environmental challenges. As discussed in my previous blog in this series, the utility ecosystem is unable to respond to our social and environmental challenges because of entrenched interests, archaic infrastructure, systemic rigidities, and corporate inertia—all of which are painfully evident in the solid waste sector. Read More here

 

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20 July 2015, COIN, A Tale of Two Opinion Polls: As the old adage goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics – and the failure of UK pollsters to predict the outcome of the General Election earlier this year certainly did nothing to challenge this idea. Whether due to the influence of so-called ‘shy Tories’, or simply an outdated and unrepresentative method of phone-polling, the lesson was clear: individual surveys must be taken with a pinch of salt. Question-wording, sampling, timing and the method of administering a survey can all have a big impact on the result. And two polls released this week documenting global views on climate change illustrate this point perfectly.

The first – from the respected Pew Research Centre – was reported with the headline ‘climate change seen as top global threat’. More than 45,000 people across 40 countries were asked how concerned they were about a variety of international issues. Strikingly – and perhaps surprisingly given the lack of prominence given to climate change in most Anglophone nations – climate change came out on top. While US, European and Australian respondents were most fearful of ISIS and were often divided on climate change by political values, levels of climatic concern were so high in Latin America, and parts of Africa and Asia, that globally climate change was the leading issue.

A few days later, the climate-sceptic blog ‘Watts Up With That’ gleefully reported a similarly super-sized survey of global citizens, ‘My World2015’. Totting up the online votes of a staggering 7 million plus people, it captures the priorities of people from around the world, including many millions of people from countries with low incomes. When framed as a personal priority, rather than a global threat, climate change (perhaps unsurprisingly) comes last – after issues like ‘a good education’, and ‘better healthcare’. Read More here

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18 July 2015, The Conversation, Australia’s ‘Carnival of Coal’ – can you feel the love? As the latest State of the Climate report reaffirms 2014 to be “the hottest on record”, the NSW Liberal Party is pressing ahead with plans for a “Carnival of Coal” in August. The party’s upper house whip, Peter Phelps, has appealed to members to download a sticker for MP office doors in support of the upcoming carbon love-in. It says: I loved carbon before it was coal. The Liberal paleo-love for coal, which Tony Abbott has declared “good for humanity”, is at least a point of differentiation with Labor. Labor does not promote such slogans at all – even if, in Victoria, the Andrews Labor government is still issuing coal exploration licences. Both parties are capable of romancing the coal industry. But Liberal parties around the country have had much more success in convincing voters that either coal is more important than climate, or have decided that – with a population drip-fed on attention-deficit-consumerism and its reality television advertorials – their connection can be comfortably sublimated. Whatever its form, the love for coal in Australia is going to end badly, like all relationships based on fantasy. To slightly misquote a 19th-century philosopher: the demand to give up the illusion that coal is good for humanity is the demand to give up a condition which needs such an illusion. Read More here

 

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17 July 2015, RenewEconomy, States reject Coalition and cross-bench crack-down on wind farms: State and territory environment ministers this week unanimously rejected a push by the Federal Coalition government and cross-bench Senators to regulate noise from wind turbines in the same way as pollution from coal fired generators, and to introduce uniform planning rules for wind farms.The proposals were presented by Federal environment minister Greg Hunt at a meeting of state and territory ministers on Wednesday. They part of a deal struck between the Coalition and the cross-bench Senators who oppose wind farms, and want tighter rules on their development. The cross-benchers wanted wind farm “noise” to be treated in the same way as the emission of particulates from coal mines and power plants, smoke stacks from factories and vehicle exhausts, and included in the suite of National Environment Protection Measures. The states rejected this unanimously, along with a proposal presented by Hunt for wind farm guidelines to become national-based rather than state-based, another recommendation from the draft release of the Senate inquiry into wind farms chaired by anti-wind Senator John Madigan. All the state insisted that planning was a matter for the states, and were not interested. Read More here

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