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North Dakota, the emerging US shale gas/oil paradise, and northern German wind energy regions are learning similar lessons: Both produce more new energies than they are able to sell, due to inadequate pipeline and grid systems. The consequence is a waste of energy, through gas flaring in North Dakota and temporary over-supply of wind and solar power in Germany. In both cases, market exaggerations and/or excessive production incentives are responsible for the mismatch.

• In North Dakota, the rapid development of shale gas operations by far exceeded the regional demand; and the subsequent price slump made the construction of gas pipelines to distant consumption centres economically uninteresting. Flaring of surplus gas became therefore a necessity.
• In Northern Germany, attractive feed-in tariffs and purchase guarantees by grid operators led to increasing over-supply due to insufficient grid capacity unable to transport the wind electricity to the consumption centres in southern Germany.

From a climate perspective, the US dilemma is much worse than the German one: flare gas is burning continuously and it contains methane, which is more dangerous for the atmosphere than C02. In the case of Germany, old coal or gas power plants have to be temporarily re-activated leading to short-term increases of C02 emissions. The lesson to be drawn should be the same in both cases: When introducing new energy systems policy makers should pay more attention to a balanced development between production and consumption. They should have foreseen that North Dakota and Northern Germany would need to ship most their increasing gas or electricity output to distant consumption centres and given appropriate directives for creating the transport infrastructure. It will, however, take several years before the necessary pipelines or grids can be installed. A more radical short-term response would be a moratorium during which investors would abstain from completing new production facilities. But for legal reasons that is more easily said than done. Society will thus have to put up with the consequences of imperfect investment choices, as it has to permanently. Brussels 29.01.2013 Eberhard Rhein

In his State of the State address, Gov. Rick Perry urged lawmakers to draw $3.7 billion for water and transportation projects, 12 years after warning that the Rainy Day Fund should not be touched.

Americans may have grown more aware of the potential risks of climate change, but they are no more willing to bear the costs of trying to solve the problem.

An expedition begins to save the spectacular biodiversity of Indonesia's seas, which are threatened by an unholy trio of coastal pollution, climate change and habitat destruction.

BRITAIN’S leaky buildings are responsible for around 40% of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions. So as the government faces up to its obligation to reduce these by 80% (from 1990 levels) by 2050, it has proposed an ambitious plan to retrofit housing stock and business premises with energy-efficiency measures.The Green Deal launches today, though that might be news to you: according to a YouGov poll last week, four out of five Britons have not actually heard of the deal. Given that politicians have spoken of improving 14m of the country's 26m houses, they have been careful to suggest that the deal is going to be a slow-burner. It is certainly starting off that way.The idea behind the Green Deal is smart enough: householders and business owners will pay for energy-saving improvements—45 are currently eligible—through their electricity bill. They pay over the course of time, rather than in one wodge up front, and the money saved in energy usage should pay off the new debt. The loan stays with the property.The process begins with a Green Deal assessor visiting the premises to work out what changes could be usefully made. According to the deal’s “Golden Rule”, only if the value of the savings over 25 years is greater than the cost of the proposed work does the scheme get the go-ahead. “Golden Rule” seems a mite bullish, though, for something that amounts to a guideline ...

AIR TRAVEL only accounts for an estimated 5% of global carbon emissions. But that share is expected to grow as air travel becomes cheaper and more accessible. In order to combat climate change, the European Union has tried to introduce a mandatory emissions-trading scheme that would force airlines to buy carbon offsets. As we have written about before, politicians in emerging nations and America balked at the EU proposal. American lawmakers moved quickly to forbid American airlines from complying with the EU scheme. In November the EU announced it would postpone implementation of the plan until at least September 2013. The idea is that the United Nations' International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) will come up with a global framework for trading airline emissions offsets. The ICAO has been pursuing just such a scheme for over a decade, so the decision to put everything in its hands is not exactly confidence-boosting. In his second inaugural address, Barack Obama promised that America would try to combat the threat of climate change. The airline emissions situation will be an early test of how serious he was about that. As Elisabeth Rosenthal, a writer at the New York Times, noted on Friday, Airlines for America, a major American airline trade group, has pushed for voluntary targets through 2020, with financial penalties only setting in after ...

The World Bank is looking forward to deepening cooperation with China in the fields of urbanization and climate change.

With President Obama declaring climate change a part of his second-term agenda, all eyes are on the United States on the matter of airlines’ carbon emissions.