Japan's new carbon tax to cost utilities $1 billion annually | Reuters

(Reuters) - Japan's new tax on carbon emissions will cost utilities about 80 billion yen ($1.02 billion) annually from 2016, adding to their already high costs of running power stations after the Fukushima crisis shut most of the country's nuclear plants, a government backed think-tank said.

Climate cut ‘more bang for our buck’ - Local - Bedford Today

Cuts to the mayor’s climate change fund will secure more ‘bang for our buck’ according to environment portfolio holder Charles Royden.

Energy: tilting at windmills

The irony here is that it is not only the onshore wind which it blighting rural commuinities. Being as wind farms tend to be in remote spots – and more so offshore farms – for every turbine, there are dozens more highly intrusive electricity pylons marching across the countryside, costing at least £8.8 billion over the next eight years alone.

This points to an even greater failing of our electricity supply industry, that of the abuse of the transmission system and the national grid.

The greatest failing lies with the presumption that electricity can be parcelled up and sent over great distances as high-voltage packages, without penalty. It cannot. The cost of the infrastructure is huge, its presence is intrusive and the energy losses are massive. Depending on who you consult, as much as ten percent of the electricity produced - variable with distance – nearly as much energy as is produced by our entire nuclear estate and twice as much as our current total wind capacity can deliver.

Why sustainability is bad for the environment - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The business of 'sustainability' has become the business of preventing carbon emissions.

This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge leads to an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then 'zero-carbon' is the solution. Society needs to go about its business without spewing the stuff out. Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies, quickly enough, to generate the power we 'need' without producing greenhouse gases and there will be no need ever to turn the lights off; no need ever to slow down.

To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet's ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world's wildest, most beautiful and most untouched landscapes. The sort of places which environmentalism came into being to protect.

And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonised by enormous 'solar arrays', glass and steel and aluminium, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of 500 foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons and wires.