Environmental Law

In The News (October 20)

By Dennis Pfaff and Kevin Livingston, Editors

• Opportunities in the renewable energy technology sector are becoming more diverse as regulatory support extends to technologies other than wind farms, according to a venture capitalist cited in this dispatch from Reuters.
• Here's a possible consequence of climate change that it's likely not a lot of folks saw coming:  tigers are attacking people in some parts of India with more frequency, a development experts think might be related to habitat loss from an altered climate, reports Reuters.
• Plans to dismantle an Illinois nuclear power plant have been temporarily shelved because the fund that will pay for the $1 billion decommissioning has declined in value, according to the Chicago Tribune.
• There are those who are looking at landfills as valuable sources of raw materials in a resource-scarce world, according to the Toronto Star.
• Along those lines, Pasadena in Southern California has approved a contract to buy power generated by methane gas from a garbage dump in Arizona, reports the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.
• How many soldiers does it take to change 359,268 light bulbs? This report doesn't say, but it does estimate that a program to replace incandescent lights in military housing units with compact flourescent lights is expected to save $11 in electricity costs, the government's EERE News reports.
• Federal regulators have issued their final rules on wholesale electricity competition in regions with organized markets; read all 338 pages here, courtesy of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
• A German firm is opening a big new solar cell factory in Oregon, and when fully complete the SolarWorld AG facility is expected to produce 500 megawatts’ worth of solar cells annually and employ 1,400 workers, according to Fortune magazine's Green Wombat blog.
• In one of the tastier approaches to battling climate change, the company that owns California's Fetzer Vineyards is converting to lightweight wine bottles, a move expected to reduce glass usage by 16 percent, saving 3,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide emissions, reports GreenBiz.com.
• The candidates for the White House both agree -- the Bush administration’s policies on global warming were far too weak, promising a big change in direction no matter who gets in (depending on the economy, of course), suggests this analysis from The New York Times.
• Scientists say it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world, according to this not-especially-cheery report from the Washington Post .
• Alaskan pollock appear to be defecting to Russia, as the heavily harvested and managed fish cross an international boundary in search of food as winter ice retreats and water temperatures rise; it all sets the stage for a geopolitical dispute says the Los Angeles Times.
• Notoriously smoggy Mexico City is embarking on an ambitious program to carpet its concrete cityscape with rooftop gardens, or green roofs, that it hopes will suck up and filter the city’s pollution, cut energy use and lower temperatures, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  

Full post as published by Climate Law Update on October 20, 2008 (boomark / email).