"Encouraging consumers to ‘buy green’ by making environmentally-friendly goods cheaper might have drawbacks as the much feared ‘rebound effect’ could offset gains by pushing for ever more consumption, environmentalists argue.

Environmentally friendly goods are often overpriced for many consumers – and as the economic crisis continues to bite, many suggest that tax incentives are needed to make green shopping more affordable."

Suckers born every ... You can fool enough people long enough to sell slime as green.

Drive for 'green' consumption a chimera, NGOs warn

Published 28 October 2011

http://www.euractiv.com/sustainability/drive-green-consumption-chimera-ngos-warn-news-508616

UK solar subsdies to be cut by more than half

Haven't financing costs also declined? So what if the payback period will now be 18 years? What else would you do with your money? Keep it in the bank? :-)

N

Solar subsidies to be cut by more than half

Published 28 October 2011

http://www.euractiv.com/specialreport-solarpower/chinese-solar-subsidy-storm-heads-europe-news-508585?utm_source=EurActiv+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9861f0ac5e-my_google_analytics_key&utm_medium=email

... The cut will almost double the payback period for householders, the document revealed, meaning someone installing £10-12,000 solar panels will only be in credit after 18 years rather than the current 10. The rate will be reduced from 43.3p per kilowatt hour of solar electricity to just 21p, the document revealed, cutting returns from around 7% to 4%.

Reuters: German solar subsidies to fade 15 pct from 2012

An employment crisis of the rich or the poor?

Solar in Germany required less subsidy because the generation alternatives were relatively costlier and the retail tariffs relatively higher than, say, in China.

I think it's worth examining the comparative advantage - if China can produce GHG reductions for the ETS cheaper than Germany (relative to, say, some financial derivatives or loan products to PIGS), China should export GHG reductions to Germany and Germany should export loan products to China.

I wonder if that's what's happening any way! :-)
------

German solar subsidies to fade 15 pct from 2012

http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL5E7LR3J020111027

FRANKFURT Oct 27 (Reuters) - Germany's solar feed-in tariffs, subsidies the industry needs to be competitive, will fall 15 percent from 2012.

..

Bonn-based Bundesnetzagentur said solar installations in the 12 months to September 2011 -- the reference period determining the size of the cut -- reached about 5,200 megawatts (MW), down from 7,800 MW in the year-earlier period.

For cuts of 15 percent, installations during the 12-month period needed to be greater than 4,500 MW, according to the German renewable act EEG. Latest available statistics had suggested a cut of at least 12 percent.

Germany is the world's largest solar market by installations and therefore a major sales market of sector bellwethers such as U.S.-based First Solar , China's Suntech , Norway's Renewable Energy Corp and Germany's SMA Solar .

FT: UN says high fertility impedes growth

If women were freed from bearing and caring, could that put downward pressure on wages?

Mary Robinson says, "“The Horn of Africa has had the eight hottest years in succession ever. We are going to have to continue to think about drought and famine. We need to cut through rightwing theology and get back to the basics. We can and should address Africa’s fertility by educating women and improving healthcare.”

Yes, that would also mean putting solar mega projects aside, and using all "climate funds" for health and education.

High fertility impedes growth, says UN - FT.com

www.ft.com

Continued high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia is impeding economic development and perpetuating poverty, the UN Population Fund has warned. With an estimated 215m women seeking but unable to gain access to family planning each

Water.org: Killing without guns

"The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns."

"In just one day, more than 200 million hours of women’s time is consumed for the most basic of human needs — collecting water for domestic use. This lost productivity is greater than the combined number of hours worked in a week by employees at WalMart, United Parcel Service, McDonald’s, IBM, Target, and Kroger.. "

And with zero wage bill, marginal benefits cost. Ultimately the poor slave for us -- low wages and zero-price fuel/water mean cheap products in WalMart, McDonald's, Target, and Kroger..

Fight inflation. Keep poor people poor, and their women poorer.

Water.org » Water Facts

water.org

Today’s water crisis is not an issue of scarcity, but of access. More people in the world own cell phones than have access to a toilet. And as cities and slums grow at increasing rates, the situation worsens. Every day, lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills thousands,

..

Today’s water crisis is not an issue of scarcity, but of access. More people in the world own cell phones than have access to a toilet. And as cities and slums grow at increasing rates, the situation worsens. Every day, lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills thousands, leaving others with reduced quality of life.

• 884 million people lack access to safe water supplies; approximately one in eight people.
• 3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease.
• The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns.
• People living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city.
• An American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than a typical person in a developing country slum uses in a whole day.

Sanitation

• Only 62% of the world’s population has access to improved sanitation – defined as a sanitation facility that ensures hygienic separation of human excreta from human contact.
  
• Lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of infection.
• 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation, including 1.2 billion people who have no facilities at all.
• Of the 60 million people added to the world’s towns and cities every year, most occupy impoverished slums and shanty-towns with no sanitation facilities.

WorldHunger.Org: 2011 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics

".. 925 million hungry people in 2010 "

Animals to be fed to the rich were fed well enough to get a good price. And nicely maintained in the cold chain. The poor can't even get cold chain for their drugs and vaccines.

Oh, well. Poor people have to go low-carbon (carbohydrates, proteins) too .

2011 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics

www.worldhunger.org

No one really knows how many people are malnourished. The statistic most frequently cited is that of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which measures 'undernutrition'. The most recent estimate, released in October 2010 by FAO, says that 925 mi...

UN: Wasting 1.8 billion (and counting)

When I was born, world under-15 population was a little less than a billion, 75% of it in the 'less developed regions' (UN definition). By 2000, world under-15 population had nearly doubled to about 1.8 b people, with about 88% in the less developed regions. This will continue to be the case for the rest of the century - about 1.6 billion youngsters in the less developed regions throughout.

An av ...erage of 200 million children per year from 2000 to 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050 in less developed countries EXCLUDING China. The poorer and more remote, less 'connected', poorly 'serviced', people have higher fertility, and even their survival rates improve throughout all age groups. They account for about a half of the total new children on average, even as infrastructure services improve.

That is, some 100 million children a year, or three billion citizens of humanity over the next thirty years will not have the "minimum conditions" - apart from shelter and food security - to lead healthy, productive, peacefully "engaged" lives.

(Yes, I happen to believe that a healthy, productive, voluntarily engaged populace is the ONLY objective of public policy. The means and scale are 'special interests'.)

A couple of billion people wasted. Four billion more in the rest of my lifetime (should I live that long). (Apart from the newborns, the rest of the population without basic infrastructure is another billion or more. And the 55+ population is also increasing. I am talking about developing countries excluding China.)

The poor don't tax the earth's resources. It's our neglect of the poor that wastes them - and the earth's resources.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/26/un-economic-benefit-young-people

www.guardian.co.uk

UN: World will miss economic benefit of 1.8 billion young people

Population report says lack of education, infrastructure and jobs will mean a generation's potential will be wasted.

"The world is in danger of missing a golden opportunity for development and economic growth, a "demographic dividend", as the largest cohort of young people ever known see their most economically productive years wasted, a major UN population report warned on Wednesday.

Sacramento Bee: Afghan infant mortality still high

"In this Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011 photo, Falangnaz Mohammed stands next to her son, Shadgham, who suffers from lung problems, as he lies on a bed made from a desk after all of the other beds were occupied at Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghanistan, one of the world's least-developed nations in the world, has an infant mortality rate of 129 deaths per 1,000 births; Afghan children die before reaching 5 at a rate of 191 for every 1,000 births."

Photo Essay: Afghan infant mortality still high - sacbee.com

www.sacbee.com

Despite billions in international aid, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest nations in the world. Its high infant mortality rate is evidence that life remains hard for the Afghan people from the moment of birth.

Oxfam: Afghanistan: the worst place in the world to give birth

Or raise a child.. who could be brainwashed into suicide bombing. (Jihadists of all types make promises they don't have to deliver on.)

"A woman dies there every 27 minutes thanks to pregnancy-related complications. There are 1,600 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births but in the remote mountainous province of Badakhshan the rate is 6,500 per 100,000 – the highest recorded rate of maternal mor ...tality in the world."

I remember asking some Bamyan villagers - should midwives get a free phone and a phone charger with a light? All faces lit up and many said loudly, "YES!"

If only Oxfam gave up silly things like Climate Tribunals and delivered every family a light and a mobile phone - if nothing else, just as to communicate with every mother and child, and avoiding accidents.

Afghanistan: the worst place in the world to give birth – photo gallery | Oxfam International

www.oxfam.org

Where commitments to meet the Millennium Development Goals have been met, millions of people are now better off. But the pace of progress remains dangerously slow, and while some countries race ahead, others are moving backwards.

FT: China braced for wind turbine slowdown

I wonder how many of the installed wind turbines were feeding power into the grids in the first place.

Churning mills uselessly -- leave that to academia. There's better use for Chinese money - lending it to the US and Europe.

China braced for wind turbine slowdown - FT.com

www.ft.com

China, the world’s biggest market for wind power, is bracing for a sharp slowdown in wind turbine installations this year, a move that will spark a “bloodbath” among wind turbine producers, industry executives say. The slowdown has already claimed

National Post (Canada) on IPCC and Pachauri

What's wrong with grad students? Better than sophomores. Highly likely.

Or the PhDs that make up 'expertise' and produce 'peer-approved' junk.

Pachauri doesn't even have to worry about peers. Few people are that far down.

Conspiracy of silence

www.nationalpost.com

A close look at the IPCC's roster of authors reveals that - on a wide range of topics including hurricanes, sea-level rise and malaria - some of the world's most seasoned specialists have been left out in the cold. In their stead, the IPCC has been recruiting 20-something graduate students.

Sacramento Bee blog: Six months since Fukushima

People were saved, property destroyed and replaced. Would make Paul Ehrlich so sad.

The Frame: Japan marks 6 months since earthquake, tsunami - sacbee.com

blogs.sacbee.com

TOKYO (AP) -- Last Sunday was the six-month anniversary of the day the massive earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan's northeast coast. Some 20,000 people are dead or missing. More...

Re-engineering (electrifying) Afghanistan - NOT!!

An excellent report by IEEE Spectrum in the October 2011 issue. Links are also worth reading.

"Put aside for the moment the $53 billion (including security costs) that the United States made available to reconstruct Iraq and the $55 billion it has spent on Afghanistan. Consider instead the hundreds of people who died trying to bring modern infrastructure to the people of those two countries, according to the website Icasualties.org. It compounds the tragedy that some of them died in the s...ervice of something as poorly run as USAID's projects in those countries.

Something else perished as well: A rare and potentially momentous opportunity was squandered. Counterinsurgency (PDF) is complicated and messy and hard, as I was told over and over again in Afghanistan. As theories about counterinsurgency were endlessly debated and tried out in Iraq and Afghanistan, some unconventional ideas were proposed and put to the test. None was more radical than the proposition that helping ordinary people become more comfortable and productive could be as valuable, in military terms, as killing bad guys.

Was that proposition right? We will never know for sure."

For half a billion dollars, every man woman and child in Afghanistan could've been given a solar lantern for free. In two years. The savings in kerosene would keep the market going.

Some of this is 'fog of war'. People don't think and do things right, and large complex organizations are unwieldy, esp. civilians having to work in wars as difficult as these. These problems are compounded by the fact that the US hasn't fought any 'conventional' war since the Korean War, and 50+ years later the philosophies and the methods of war have changed along with the technologies. Then you have the utter stupidity of the BCRR quartet (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld) going to war in Iraq on borrowed money, keeping the rich quiet by cutting their taxes.

(I thought of this while posting the Meltzer piece a few minutes ago. What did the rich do with the money we gave them via tax cuts? Blew them on the bubbles, egging on the bankers who were merely taking advantage of the relaxed rules. Nobody asks -- just what were the leaders of business and money doing when the Congress, the regulators, the media were all cooking up the storm? It's as if once someone has a million or 100 million dollars, it's someone ELSE's responsibility to make sure the system runs right, that Bernie Madoffs are exposed, that wartime contractors deliver the impossible.)

Returning to the power story, I don't think it was wrong for Black and Veatch to say that the Tarakhil diesel was necessary or that it could be built much faster than a hydro. (I think the Indians financed the transmission line for power imports into the North.) If at all, I would have subsidized more fuel and given more connections to the booming populations of Kabul and Kandahar, and made sure the lights stayed on. Some complaints of the Spectrum writer are highly idealistic. Recognizing that electricity was one thing the foreigners could deliver and Taliban couldn't, getting every Afghan family 2-3 solar lanterns with phone chargers could've been done for less than $300 m and in less than two years. (My highly idealistic fancy!)

Re-engineering Afghanistan - IEEE Spectrum

spectrum.ieee.org

The coalition has spent hundreds of millions trying to give Afghanistan electricity. Unfortunately, it made many of the mistakes it made in Iraq

VoA news - floods in Bangkok

If only Thailand has listened to AlG and gone zero-carbon.

Saving the earth is so 20th century. Save people and doggies first.

Thai PM Warns Swollen River Could Flood Inner Bangkok

www.voanews.com

Bangkok residents are bracing for rising flood waters that the prime minister says could inundate low-lying areas in the coming days. Although most of the capital is still dry, the prime minister is urging people near the city’s Chao Phraya river to move to higher ground.

NYT: Japan gets electricity wake-up call

Time to bury Kyoto (Protocol, not the city).

Japan Gets Electricity Wake-Up Call

www.nytimes.com

The Fukushima nuclear disaster has forced Japanese households to cut back on their consumption of electricity and to consider alternative sources of energy.

FT: Queen close to 'fuel poverty'

She could sell off Koh-i-Noor to the Tatas and the Mittals.

Or her son to whoever will take him.

Soaring prices push Queen close to ‘fuel poverty’ - FT.com

www.ft.com

The Queen is coming perilously close to joining millions of her subjects in “fuel poverty” as energy bills for four palaces and a draughty castle absorb a rising share of her income. About 4m households in England have fallen into fuel poverty, a