NPR: Spain’s solar panels, wind turbines, green talk. Impact: hardly anything. A lesson for Copenhagen – carbon’s way up anyway.
Again today, rather than try to keep comprehensive track of the meetings in Copenhagen, The Tracker will highlight one pertinent story you perhaps won’t otherwise get to, and is not on any or many of the sites devoted around the clock to all things COP-15. NPR has, as have many serious large outlets, been following the UN meeting closely. As part of its coverage it had this week a segment from Spain, by Jerome Socolovsky. The nation, he reports, has been a hot spot for renewable, green energy investment. It’s really been going at it hard (until the economy forced a slowdown in subsidies). But its carbon emissions have shot up anyway. The piece is focussed, well-reported, and a tad discouraging.
Message: This climate change thing is going to be hard to tackle, even for relatively heavily industrialized western nations.
It’s also hard without the tornado of noise about e-mails and without scientists’ talk of smacking skeptics in the snoot, denying them data, and maybe getting people fired for publishing climate skeptic papers (no evidence, so far, anybody was really fired).
With that awkward transition, a long and energetic riposte to those who see the CRU e-mails as a serious erosion of IPCC’s version of things – and for those who are willing to read yet more about it – is at Yale Environment 360. It is in a post by science writer Fred Pierce, who mentions that one of his e-mails is among those in what, for some, is a damning trove.
- Charlie Petit
