Month: February 2017

How progressive: ship dead trees 5,000km and burn them (use £450m for kindling)

How progressive: ship dead trees 5,000km and burn them (use £450m for kindling)

via JoNovahttp://joannenova.com.au

It would make any hunter gatherer proud.

[The Times] Britain is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds subsidizing power stations to burn American wood pellets that do more harm to the climate than the coal they replaced, a study has found.

Chopping down trees and transporting wood across the Atlantic Ocean to feed power stations produces more greenhouse gases than much cheaper coal, according to the report. It blames the rush to meet EU renewable energy targets, which resulted in ministers making the false assumption that burning trees was carbon-neutral.

The UK tribes can thank chief Huhne (Energy and Climate secretary) for the 7.5 million tonnes of dead trees otherwise known as biomass — which  mostly come all the way from the US and Canada.

Naturally, doing something this improbable takes a lot of money.

Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies in 2015 for burning biomass, which was mostly American wood pellets.

Curiously, there are over 200 trillion cubic feet of dead trees stored under Lancashire. They may have been very very small trees, like algae sized, but nonetheless, 4,999 kilometers closer. Apparently when all the trees of […]

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February 24, 2017 at 01:39AM

Dakota Access pipeline camp cleared of protesters

Dakota Access pipeline camp cleared of protesters

via Climate Change Dispatchhttp://climatechangedispatch.com

Thousands of protesters, tons of garbage and nearly 750 arrests later, the Dakota Access pipeline occupation wrapped up Thursday as law enforcement cleared stragglers from the floodplain in preparation for the massive clean-up ahead. A total of 46 people were arrested after refusing to leave during the two-day evacuation at the Oceti Sakowin camp, the […]

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February 24, 2017 at 01:26AM

Lords Report Calls On UK Government To Prioritise Energy Security Over Climate Rush

Lords Report Calls On UK Government To Prioritise Energy Security Over Climate Rush

via Climate Change Dispatchhttp://climatechangedispatch.com

Affordability and decarbonisation must not be prioritised ahead of security of the UK’s energy supply, according to a House of Lords committee. The Economic Affairs Committee said in a report released today – The Price of Power: Reforming the Electricity Market – that decarbonisation should be achieved at the lowest cost to consumers. “This may […]

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February 24, 2017 at 01:26AM

Most scientists ‘can’t replicate studies by their peers’

Most scientists ‘can’t replicate studies by their peers’

via Current News – Principia Scientific Internationalhttp://principia-scientific.org

Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, research suggests.
This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon. From his lab at the University of Virginia’s Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs…

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via Current News – Principia Scientific International http://ift.tt/1kjWLPW

February 24, 2017 at 01:12AM