19 February 2017, Bloomberg Fears Grow That Climate Conflicts Could Lead to War. Among the 21st-century threats posed by climate change — rising seas, melting permafrost and superstorms — European leaders are warning of a last-century risk they know all too well: War. Focusing too narrowly on the environmental consequences of global warming underestimates the military threats, top European and United Nations officials said at a global security conference in Munich this weekend. Their warnings follow the conclusions of defense and intelligence agencies that climate change could trigger resource and border conflicts. “Climate change is a threat multiplier that leads to social upheaval and possibly even armed conflict,” the UN’s top climate official, Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, said at the conference, which was attended by the U.S. secretaries of defense and homeland security, James Mattis and John Kelly. Even as European Union countries struggle to assimilate millions of African and Middle Eastern migrants and refugees, security officials are bracing for more of the same in the future. Secretary General Antonio Guterra named climate change and population growth as the two most serious “megatrends” threatening international peace and stability. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
1 February 2017, Renew Economy, Eight reasons why Dr Finkel is great news for Australia’s energy future. Our electricity grid looks likely to progress more systematically to a cleaner more secure future thanks to Australia’s Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel being brought in – to lead the analysis and policy recommendations. For those who could not make Tuesday night’s 2.5 hour session in Adelaide with him, here are some of the key comments made by him and his team:
1. Dr Finkel and SA’s Chief Scientist Leanna Read both see the grid becoming 100% renewable powered as the end point.
2. Dr Finkel is walking the talk: all electricity at his home is sourced from green power electricity and he is an electric car user.
3. He and his team will travel shortly to other renewable energy leading regions with few grid interconnections to share best practices for SA (Texas and Ireland), to high penetration locations committing to further quick transitions to distributed renewables (California, New York, Denmark, France, UK and Germany) and meeting GE and Siemens who are leading in creating distributed grid systems and controllers and grid storage. Read More here
31 January 2017, Climate News Network, Video demand drives up global CO2 emissions. Sitting back and watching your favourite streamed TV series may seem harmless enough – but video demand is leaving a hefty carbon footprint. LONDON, 31 January, 2017 – The internet is fast becoming a major source of global carbon emissions – and the main cause is video demand, the increasing popularity of “real time” streamed video content. Video streaming to internet-enabled TVs, game consoles and mobile devices already accounts for more than 60% of all data traffic – and the latest forecasts suggest this will rise to more than 80% by 2020. Increasingly, viewers across the world are watching films and TV series in real time through subscriptions to Netflix or Amazon, while social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are offering more and more streamed video content for free. This is driving a dizzying increase in the amount of information that needs to be stored and transmitted by power-hungry data centres. Up until 2003 the world had accumulated a total of five exabytes – five billion gigabytes – of stored digital content. By 2015 that amount was being consumed every two days, as annual consumption reached 870 exabytes. As more video is streamed and more of the world’s population goes online, annual data traffic is forecast to reach 2,300 exabytes by 2019. Read More here
4 January 2017, The Conversation, How and why we are moving beyond GDP as a measure of human progress. How we track our economy influences everything from government spending and taxes to home lending and business investment. In our series The Way We Measure, we’re taking a close look at economic indicators to better understand what’s going on. Ever since 1944, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been a primary measure of economic growth. It’s in the news regularly and, even though few can define what it means, there is general acceptance that when GDP is growing, things are good. There are problems with this simplistic formulation. GDP measures production only. It does not capture collapsing fish stocks, increasing obesity and diabetes, or new types of synthetic drugs. When people choose to work part-time to have a better work-life balance, GDP actually goes down. This narrow focus distorts our perception of progress. It guides our representatives to focus only on certain things – what is measured – and allows them to ignore what isn’t quantified and regularly reported. But a new set of measures is slowly being established, which aims to capture a wider range of human experiences and reset our idea of “success”. Called the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), these aim to include all the main pillars of a progressive society, from physical safety through to economic opportunity and good health. SDGs will force action by highlighting what is currently covered up by the narrow measures of how our economy and society are faring. A new way of framing progress The SDGs arose out of the expiration of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015 (which focused primarily on poverty reduction). Out of a growing awareness of the ecological limits of the planet, and a desire to ensure that progress is fair and accessible to all people, attempts were made at creating a comprehensive set of national goals for all nations. Read More here