Category:

Climate, Environment, Renewable Energy

Public, not polluters, too often pay to clean up environment, EU auditors say

“Polluters need to pay for the environmental damage they cause,” said report author Viorel Stefan. “Up to now, though, European taxpayers have far too often been forced to bear the costs that polluters should have paid.”

The auditors looked at a sample of 42 environmental clean-up projects, backed by 180 million euros ($214 million) of EU funds, to fix issues like industrial pollution and contaminated landfill sites in Italy, Poland and Portugal.

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Govt may issue guidelines for ‘flex-fuel’ vehicles by October

The government is also working on an incentive scheme to promote manufacture and use of flex engines in vehicles. The details would be specified when policy in this regard is unveiled.

The use of flexible fuel vehicles (FFVs) is being actively looked at by the government to ensure increased use of bio-fuels for running vehicles, Petroleum Secretary Tarun Kapoor had told IANS earlier.

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Heatwave claims over 17,000 lives in 50 years in India: Study

Heatwave is one of the extreme weather events (EWE). In 50 years (1971-2019) EWE killed 1,41,308 people. Of this, 17,362 people were killed due to heatwave — a little over 12 percent of the total deaths recorded, the study said.

The maximum heatwave deaths were in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha, it added.
The research paper was authored by M Rajeevan, Secretary of Ministry of Earth Science, along with scientists Kamaljit Ray, S S Ray, R K Giri and A P Dimri, earlier this year. Kamaljit Ray is the lead author of the paper.

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Study indicates association of cloud bursts with forest fires

The study led by Alok Sagar Gautam from HNB Garhwal University and co-authored by S N Tripathi from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and Abhishek Joshi, Karan Singh, Sanjeev Kumar, R C Ramola from HNB Garhwal University can help improve the understanding of the complex mechanism of cloud burst, weather prediction and climate change condition over this region of Himalayas, the DST said.

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Why Mukesh Ambani’s gigafactory for hydrogen could be a game-changer

Zero-carbon electricity will be instrumental in decarbonizing, but it can only go so far, and we’re still quite a ways away from there. Power sector emissions flattened out early last decade, and almost certainly peaked for good in 2018.
Greater demand for renewable power will drive that curve down further, which will in turn incentivize its use in any process that can substitute electricity for something that creates greenhouse gas emissions.

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Development bank climate finance spending hit $66 bln in 2020 – report

A total $38 billion, or 58%, of the total went to low and middle income countries, the 2020 Joint Report on Multilateral Development Banks’ Climate Finance said.

Additional finance committed by other sources alongside the development banks totalled $85 billion, while direct funding from private sources was $5.9 billion.

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Floods may be nearly as important as droughts for future carbon accounting

“These wet extremes have basically been ignored in this field and we’re showing that researchers need to rethink it when designing schemes for future carbon accounting,” said senior study author Alexandra Konings, an assistant professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “Specific regions might be much more important for flood impacts than previously thought.”

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