A summary of today’s top climate and clean energy stories.
Email the team on [email protected] or get in touch via Twitter.
Source: Will Rose/Greenpeace
Arctic 30: Greenpeace will “for sure” continue to stage oil rig protests despite having 30 activists taken prisoner by the Russian authorities, Frank Hewetson, one of the Britons freed from detention, has said. Peter Willcox, captain of the ship, is not so sure: “I’m going to be much more conservative with the way I do actions in the future.” Russia has started to release the 30 activists on bail, after they were accused of piracy for trying to scale an oil rig in the Arctic. (Energy Voice/Guardian)
UK: David Cameron is on track to commit ‘planetary suicide’, according to Alex Salmond. Cameron’s plans to roll back green levies invited the criticism of Scotland’s first minister, who said that the UK prime minister was more concerned with winning the next election than tackling climate change. (Guardian)
China: China will launch two new pilot carbon trading schemes this week in Beijing and Shanghai. The world’s biggest source of climate-changing carbon emissions, China is under domestic pressure from its population to counter air pollution and has pledged to cut the 2005 rate of CO2 emissions per unit of GDP growth by 40-45% by 2020. (Reuters)
Philippines: The US military has started to scale back its emergency relief operations in the Philippines, where Typhoon Haiyan caused mass devastation two weeks ago, as work shifts towards recovery and rehbilitation. The WMO has said that these sorts of storms could become more intense as the climate changes. (Reuters)
Research: Scientists have landed upon yet more evidence that the ocean is absorbing vast amounts of energy, which may explain why the atmosphere has not warmed as much as expected over the last 15 years. They found that a region of the Pacific is now warming at least 15 times faster than at any time in the last 10,000 years. (Climate News Network)