EU DROPS ENERGY TARGETS

Saving energy? No thanks! Originally, the EU had intended to cut its energy consumption by 20% by 2020. But that's not going to happen after all as a draft plan by the European Commission on energy policy makes clear. It is scheduled to be published on Thursday. [Translation by Benny Peiser]

Calif. emissions plan hits snag - The Boston Globe

SAN FRANCISCO - California's blueprint to address global warming won't include details of an emissions-trading program as regulators try to build consensus on how best to organize the market-based system.

The California Air Resources Board will begin a rule-writing process after next month's approval of what is called a scoping plan and is seeking outside help from specialists to recommend ways to build a cap-and-trade system, said Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the rule-making panel. Under state law, the program must be ready to begin by 2012.

"It's very disappointing because it's another delay to the structure of the cap-and-trade system, and that's what everybody wants to know," said Alex Rau of Climate Wedge Ltd., an advisory firm in San Francisco focused on emissions markets. "They were a long way off at approaching consensus on the major design elements."

Nichols told venture capitalists and clean-energy executives last week in Mountain View, Calif., that she was "thinking of punting," saying the specifics of the emissions-trading program may not be ready for one to two more years.

Bob Carter - The Futile Quest for Climate Control

In 1990 the IPCC’s first Assessment Report concluded that no human influence on climate was discernible. Despite the huge expenditure of research effort and money since that time, the boundary arguments to the debate have scarcely moved. We now have copiously more data and more powerful computers, have spent upwards of $50 billion on climate research, and are the beneficiaries of twenty years of hard thinking by some of the world’s most accomplished scientists. Yet the protagonists in the debate remain in the same bunkers they occupied in the early 1990s, and a clear human-caused climate signal continues to elude us.
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The IPCC experiment has failed, in large part because of the priority that has been given to policy advocacy over the accurate reporting of empirical science. Attempting to prevent (“mitigate”, in the lingo) climate change is an expensive exercise in futility. Planning for inevitable future climate change, both natural and possibly human-caused, will best be undertaken in the same way as we plan for other natural disasters such as bushfires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami and cyclones...

Clean energy investment falls sharply

Investment in low-carbon technologies is suffering its first reversal after several years of record growth, as the financial crisis dims the sector’s prospects.

Worldwide investment in clean energy companies and new clean energy capacity fell sharply in the third quarter of 2008, compared with the previous quarter, according to New Energy Finance, a market analyst company.
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Clean technology investment has soared in the past four years [but wasn't Bush in office then?], on the back of high conventional energy prices and fears over climate change and energy security. The cost of renewables has come down and governments have increased their subsidies.