Bloomberg 4th Aug 2017, Some eighty days into Emmanuel Macron’s new job, Europe’s biggest
renewable energy companies are still waiting for the French president to
make good on campaign pledges to boost green power.
To meet French goals of doubling onshore wind and tripling solar solar power by 2023, Macron’s
government still needs to show it can support investments by helping
developers cut through the country’s bureaucratic red tape.
Companies including Italy’sEnel SpA, Germany’s EON SE and Innogy SE remain
reluctant to develop renewables in Europe’s third-biggest economy. “We
regularly check our existing markets and potential new markets on new
project opportunities,” Innogy’s spokeswoman Viola Baumann said in an
email response to questions from Bloomberg. “There’s no new development
and that also applies to France.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-04/green-power-still-tied-up-with-red-tape-in-macron-s-france
Extreme weather could kill 150,000 people each year in Europe by the end of the century, say scientists. Hundreds of millions of people will be exposed to deadly weather events by 2100, researchers warn, Independent, Andrew Griffin Science Reporter @_andrew_griffin 5 Aug 17 , More than 150,000 people could die as a result of climate change each year in Europe by the end of the century, shocking new research has found.
The number of deaths caused by extreme weather events will increase 50-fold and two in three people on the continent will be affected by disasters, the study – that serves as a stark warning of the deadly impact of global warming – found.
The research by European Commission scientists lays out a future where hundreds of thousands of people die from heatstroke, heart and breathing problems, and flash flooding. It describes a world where droughts bring food shortages, people are at an increased risk of being killed by disease and infection, and the countryside is ravaged by wildfires.
It used historical records of extreme weather events and combined them with projections of the damage of climate change and changes in the population to project how, where and who will die from the effects of global warming.
In what they say is a “much needed wake-up call” to governments across the continent, campaign groups insisted that action is needed now to avoid being responsible for deaths across the world.“This is a stark warning showing why we need greater action on climate change fast,” said Friends of the Earth campaigner Donna Hume. “People across the globe are already dying due to extreme weather events and without concerted action this will get worse, including right here in Europe.
“This fate can be avoided but only if governments get serious about making the switch away from dirty fossil fuels. Three quarters of existing coal, oil and gas has to remain unused if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change – so why is the UK Government intent on digging and drilling for more across the British countryside?
“It’s time to ditch plans for fracking and new coal mines and instead invest in the renewable energy revolution.”……….
Yearly deaths could soar 50 times from 3,000 between 1981 and 2010 to 152,000 between 2071 and 2100, the research published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health found.Most of those people will die from heatwaves, which could cause 99 per cent of all weather-related deaths. Fatalities will surge from 2,700 per year now to 151,500 each year by 2071.
Such catastrophic global warming will hit the UK too, killing people at a similar rate. By 2080, up to 7,500 Britons could be dead from heatwaves, cold snaps and flooding.“With a one-in-three chance of record rainfall in England and Wales each winter, flooding is the most significant impact of climate change in the UK,” said Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven. “And yet the Government’s own advisers have warned that ministers have no coherent plan to deal with this threat…….
But much of the danger will come in southern Europe, where almost everyone will be affected by weather-related disasters.The study looked at the impact of the seven most dangerous forms of extreme weather events: heatwaves, cold snaps, wildfires, droughts, river and coastal floods and windstorms, in the 28 EU member states as well as Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. Researchers analysed 2,300 disasters records from between 1981 and 2010 and combined them with projections of how climate change will progress and what it will do to populations.
Scientists found one reduction in deaths: the number of people killed by cold snaps. But that was only a small reduction and was clearly not enough to outweigh any of the other dangers.
And they said that 10 per cent of the risk would come from developments other than climate change, such as population growth, migration and urbanisation.
The caution comes as a deadly heatwave dubbed “Lucifer” spreads across Europe. Authorities in several countries have issued health warnings and temperatures have been registered as high as 47C, fanning dozens of forest fires in Italy, France, Spain, Macedonia and Albania. ……
Sunday Times 6th Aug 2017, Serious concerns about the environmental and safety record of the Dounreay
nuclear plant have been raised by Scottish environment secretary Roseanna
Cunningham. In a letter to UK energy minister Richard Harrington, she
complained of a disappointing lack of progress across a range of projects
in the past year that sat oddly with the planned reduction in workforce at
the site.
Her concerns come after shortcomings in safety performance at
Dounreay were identified in the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s annual
report, and criticism of the environmental management at the plant by the
Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
She said: “It is troubling that site management, despite repeated efforts, do not seem able to break the
pattern of incidents. Local stakeholders have told me that they cannot
understand why the substantial voluntary redundancy programme is in place,
when there is still so much work to complete.”
Local SNP MSP Gail Ross echoed the minister’s concerns. She said: “The Dounreay site is a vital
employer in Caithness and North Sutherland. Surely the most sensible route
to ensure safe operation would be to retain as many highly skilled and
experienced staff as they are able. Nuclear waste is not something that can
be dealt with on the cheap, regardless of the location. The UK government
must support Dounreay to ensure that the decommissioning process is as safe
as it can be, regardless of cost.” https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/dounreay-safety-concerns-raised-by-cunningham-sf7nd5d9b
Melting glaciers in Swiss Alps could reveal hundreds of mummified corpses, Frozen bodies of couple who vanished 75 years ago among those uncovered recently as global warming forces ice to retreat, Guardian, Philip Oltermann and Kate Connolly, 5 Aug 17, Swiss police say hundreds of bodies of mountaineers who have gone missing in the Alps in the past century could emerge in coming years as global warming forces the country’s glaciers to retreat.
Alpine authorities have registered a significant increase in the number of human remains discovered last month, with the body of a man missing for 30 years the most recent to be uncovered.
Rescue teams in Saas Valley in the Valais canton were called last Tuesday after two climbers retreating from an aborted ascent spotted a hand and two shoes protruding from the Hohlaub glacier…….
The discovery comes less than a week after the bodies of a Swiss couple, missing for 75 years, were found in the Tsanfleuron glacier in the same canton…….
Switzerland’s glaciers have been melting at an unprecedented rate, losing almost one cubic km in ice volume or about 900 bn litres of water over the past year. According to an investigation by Tagesanzeiger newspaper, eight of the 10 months in which the glaciers have lost the most in volume over the past century have been since 2008.
Since 1850, when glaciers covered 1,735 sq km (670 sq miles) of Swiss land, the total area has shrunk by a half, to about 890 sq km.
Police in Valais expect the bodies of many more missing persons to emerge because of global warming. “It’s quite clear,” a spokesman, Christian Zuber, told the Guardian.
That was the headline on a piece last week from the Washington Post, whose reporters continued the herculean task of debunking wave after wave of President Donald Trump’s lies. (It turned out there was a 30th Trump falsehood in that time frame, regarding the head of the Boy Scouts.) The New York Timeskeeps a running tally of the president’s lies since Inauguration Day, and PolitiFact has scrutinized and rated 69 percent of Trump’s statements as mostly false, false, or “pants on fire.”
Trump’s chronic duplicity may be pathological, as some experts have suggested. But what else might be going on here? In fact, the 45th president’s stream of lies echoes a contemporary form of Russian propaganda known as the “Firehose of Falsehood.”
In 2016, the nonpartisan research organization RAND released a study of messaging techniques seen in Kremlin-controlled media. The researchers described two key features: “high numbers of channels and messages” and “a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”
The result of those tactics? “New Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”
Indeed, Trump’s style as a mendacious media phenomenon resonates strongly with RAND’s findings from the study, which also explains the efficacy of the Russian propaganda tactics. Here are the key examples:
RAND: “Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels.”
Trump is known for his high-volume use of Twitter, tweeting about 500 times in his first 100 days in office, using both his personal account and the official @POTUS account. His tweets often become the subject of news stories and sometimes provoke entire news cycles’ worth of coverage across the mainstream media……..
Trump is also a prolific liar on stage: Of the 29 false statements the Washington Posttracked last week, five came in a speech to Boy Scouts, two came from a news conference, and a whopping 15 came from a rally in Youngstown, Ohio. (Seven others came from, where else, his personal Twitter feed.)
The deluge matters, notes RAND: “The experimental psychology literature suggests that, all other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive.”
RAND: “Russian propaganda is rapid, continuous, and repetitive”
Trump often repeats misleading statements in rapid, successive tweets……..
Why the technique works: RAND explains that “repetition leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to acceptance.”
RAND: “Russian propaganda makes no commitment to objective reality”
Phony news stories are a staple of Vladimir Putin’s Russia—and as Mother Jones has detailed, Trump and his team have been caught repeating several that originated in Russian news outlets.
RAND: “Don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.”
The Washington Post has called Trump “the most fact-checked politician.” Yet, the RAND research found that pointing out specific falsehoods was an ineffective tool against the propaganda techniques they studied in Russia because “people will have trouble recalling which information they have received is the disinformation and which is the truth.” …..http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/08/trump-nonstop-lies/
HOW RADIOACTIVE UKRAINE IS BRINGING IN THE TOURISTS, FINANCIAL REVIEW AUG 4 2017 A by Cheryl L. Reed
The button that could have started a nuclear holocaust is grey – not red.
I learned this after climbing into a nuclear rocket command silo, 12 floors below ground, and sitting in the same green chair at the same yellow metal console at which former Soviet officers once presided.
Here, they practised entering secret codes into their grey keyboards, pushing the launch button and turning a key – all within seven seconds – to fire up to 10 ballistic missiles. The officers never knew what day their practice codes might become real, nor did they know their targets.
This base in Pervomaysk, Ukraine – about a four-hour drive from Kiev – once had 86 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of destroying cities in Europe and the United States. Though the nuclear warheads have been removed, the command silo with much of its equipment, giant trucks that carried the rockets to the base and an empty silo were preserved so that people could see what had been secretly going on at nuclear missile bases in the former Soviet Union.
Tourists go to Paris to marvel at the majesty of the Eiffel Tower, to Rome to stroll the cobbled streets of the Vatican, to Moscow to behold the magnificent domes of Red Square. And while Ukraine has its own plethora of domed cathedrals, including monasteries with underground caves, thousands of tourists are trekking to this country for a uniquely Soviet experience.
Here, they stand outside an exploded nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and rifle through the remains of a nearby abandoned city – Geiger counter in hand. In Chernobyl’s shadow, they marvel at the giant “Moscow Eye”, an anti-ballistic-missile detector that rises 50 storeys high and looks like a giant roller coaster.
Every day, a handful of travel companies ferry mostly foreigners to Chernobyl’s 30-kilometre “exclusion zone”. In 2016, Solo East Travel hauled 7500 people there, up from only one trip in 2000………
The museum tour guides are all former Soviet officers who once worked at the missile base. Ours, Gennadiy Fil’, once manned the nuclear controls. When American tourists dallied, snapping photos of the rockets above ground, he barked, “Ledz go!”
Then he darted through a heavy door of a squat building, down a series of winding stairs and through an underground tunnel, navigating by memory through the narrow, 150-metre-long passageway to the control centre in a silo. The narrow cylinder is suspended from the ground – theoretically, to withstand the shock of a counter-attack…….
No moral objections
Fil’, 55, said he never knew when he would be ordered to input real codes. It was his job, he said, shrugging. He said he had no moral objections to pushing the button. Launching nuclear missiles was a “political decision”, something that people on top of the ground decided, not him……..
In 1994, three years after Ukraine became independent, it joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and agreed to dismantle its 1900 Soviet missiles. At the time, Ukraine boasted the world’s third-largest stockpile of nuclear warheads after Russia and the United States. Ukraine shipped its nuclear warheads to Russia and dismantled its silos, often blowing them up or filling them with cement. The control silo at Pervomaysk was the only one spared – so it could become a museum. The 46th Rocket Division, part of the 43rd Rocket Army, was disbanded in 2001……..
Nuclear ghost town
The city of Pripyat was once a secret Soviet city, closed to anyone but workers of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and their families. Now the city, an hour-and-a-half drive from Kiev, is a nuclear ghost town. Forty-nine thousand people were forced to evacuate the day after Chernobyl’s Reactor No.4 exploded on April 26, 1986.
Nearly all the first responders and soldiers died from radiation poisoning while trying to contain the graphite fire and the radioactive particles spewing from the destroyed reactor, explained Bodnarchuk, our tour guide. Officially, only 31 firemen and soldiers were killed. But some believe that the disaster claimed at least 10,000 lives as wind carried radioactive material into Belarus and Northern Europe.
Even though critics have said that the designs of Chernobyl are outmoded and inherently unsafe, Russia reportedly is still using 11 similar nuclear reactors.
Today, visitors can stand across the street from the damaged reactor at Chernobyl, which recently was covered by a huge, $US2.3 billion shield. But the highlight of the tour is, by far, the crumbling city of Pripyat. Though tour operators are warned to stay out of Pripyat’s buildings, tourists routinely stomp through the city, including the hospital where dying first responders were taken……..
driving through the red forest near the Chernobyl reactor – where the radiation burned up all the trees, which were then bulldozed and buried. Our Geiger counters went crazy as we drove through the new-growth forest, registering 26 sieverts per hour.
Our guide tried to calm fears about our exposure to radiation by assuring us that any high levels on our body would be detected by the machines we had to pass through on the way out of Chernobyl’s exclusion zone. Those machines – old Soviet steel contraptions that look like retro airport metal detectors – hardly inspire confidence……..http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/travel/how-radioactive-ukraine-is-bringing-in-the-tourists-20170729-gxlk6k
Guardian 2nd Aug 2017, Until recently, few of us were familiar with the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), the international organisation that governs many aspects of nuclear energy activity in member states. Brexit, and the rapidly retracted “leak” that Britain may seek “associate membership” of Euratomhas suddenly brought Euratom to the fore.
The precise legal situation regarding the UK’s continued membership of Euratom is contested, but there is much to learn from the history of this relationship: over the past six decades the UK has attempted to become an associate member or full member of Euratom five times.
Since joining in 1973, any nuclear treaties with other nations (including any signed before that date) were placed under the aegis of Euratom. This means that if Britain leaves Euratom, all its complex nuclear treaties with the United
States, the rest of Europe and many other nations across the world will need to be re-ratified in national legislatures before Britain is no longer a member.
This is a large international legislative task, and requires quick action before the Article 50 process ends in just over a year. If the treaties are not re-ratified by national parliaments, then, depending on the treaty, the UK could be in breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and a worst-case scenario could have a variety of very serious consequences
including: stopping work on Hinkley C, halting the movement of nuclear fuel, and even ending the import of medical isotopes for cancer treatments. https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2017/aug/02/our-60-year-relationship-with-euratom-offers-hard-lessons-for-brexit-negotiators
Get Reading 1st Aug 2017, Something has gone seriously wrong’ at AWE Aldermaston, says nuclear expert. Government inspectors raised serious concerns when the warhead factory failed to produce a plan for dealing with high activity radioactive waste.
In Cumbria 2nd Aug 2017, Toshiba, the owner of the company with plans for a £10bn Cumbrian nuclear new build, has been demoted to the second tier of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
The Japanese giant- which has taken full control of NuGen, which is behind proposals for a power station at Moorside, near Sellafield – has also seen its share price drop following the move. It will no longer feature in the Nikkei 225 index of Japan’s top public companies also faces the prospect of being delisted from the stock exchange altogether.
Nuclear Beautifying Competitions –Endorsing the Dangers of New Nuclear Reactors? Letter from Radiation Free Lakeland: “31st July 2017
Dear Royal Institute of British Architects and Landscape Institute,
Nuclear Beautifying Competitions –Endorsing the Safety of New Nuclear Reactors?
Amber Rudd the (then) Energy Secretary made statements in 2015 that new nuclear power stations must be designed to look beautiful in order to garner essential public support.
The RIBA and LI agreed to lend kudos and prestige to this unethical PR project by running competitions for the architecture and for the earth mounds (resulting from deep excavation for the foundations).
I would like to ask if you are endorsing the safety of the Moorside plan? If not will you please make a public statement clarifying that the design competition does not in anyway endorse the safety of Moorside. If you do not do this you are aiding and abetting the public being hoodwinked into embracing dangerous new untried untested reactors using “high burn” fuel next to Sellafield. Sellafield is widely acknowledged as the worlds most dangerous nuclear waste site, adding to an already intolerable risk is an abuse of the rights of all Europeans (and further afield) to expect a safe environment.
RED LIGHT SPELLS DANGER
Below are just a few of the many reasons why the RIBA and LI should make clear that their beautifying competitions do not in any way endorse the safety of the Moorside plan.
• Arnie Gundersen former US nuclear regulator has described the proposed Moorside AP1000 reactors as: Chernobyl on Steroids (1)
• Spent fuel arisings from Moorside would amount to 85% of the radioactivity contained in all existing legacy wastes from the UK’s nuclear power industry. (2)
• By applying the widely used fatal cancer risk factor of 10% per sievert we can calculate around 4 deaths will occur somewhere in the world for every year the station operates. Over 60 years the total would be 240 deaths. (3) (note this does not include accident or incident)
• The new reactors would be vulnerable to a very large release of radioactivity following an accident if there were just a small failure in the steel containment vessel.
In that event gases released from the reactor would be sucked through existing ‘pinhole’ containment flaws in the AP1000 Shield Building due to the ‘chimney effect’, potentially leading to the rapid venting huge amounts of radioactivity to the environment. (4)
• In 2013 Cumbria County Council suggested that a proposed low level radioactive landfill site should be located on or near the Sellafield site instead of at Keekle Head. The reply from the Keekle Head applicants, Endecom was that: it is not possible to site a low level nuclear dump at or near to Sellafield: there is insufficient space on the site ..and.. large areas of contaminated land would have to be excavated to develop a VLLW Facility ie deep excavation near Sellafield would disturb decades of nuclear seepage from the site. The Moorside Landscape Mounds would leach that contamination currently held underground to the nearby village of Beckermet which regularly floods. (5)
• According to the designers, the rainbow installation was inspired by a William Wordsworth poem remarking on the beauty of Cumbria, “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky”. The poem is actually about mans relationship with nature. Every aspect of nuclear power is an assault on the natural world from the ripping out of uranium in Greenland to the plan to dump high level nuclear wastes in Borrowdale Granite. No amount of beautification can hide the obscenity of nuclear.
Lending prestige to the Moorside plan is unethical at best an assault on human rights at worst. Radiation Free Lakeland ask both the RIBA and LI to make clear to the public that they are not in any way endorsing the safety of these three nuclear reactors on the greenfields and river Ehen floodplain next to Sellafield.
Energy Minister Alvaro Nadal said Tuesday the license for the Santa Maria de Garona plant in northern Spain would not be renewed as there was too much uncertainty surrounding the plant’s viability.
Production at the 46-year-old Garona was halted in 2012 when its operator, Nuclenor, objected to a new tax. Its board recently failed to reach agreement on keeping the plant open.
Environmentalists have long claimed that the plant is outdated, although Spain’s Nuclear Security Council this year said it could continue operating.
Spain has seven other nuclear reactors that produce some 20 percent of the country’s electricity.
NuClearNewsNo98, August 2017 The Government and Ofgem have published their strategy for a modernised, smart and flexible power system. The 32-page document by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) looks at how a smarter energy system will create opportunities to reduce energy costs, increase productivity and put UK businesses in a leading position to export smart energy technology and services to the rest of the world. The plan aims to facilitate a smarter grid through a series of technical and regulatory changes. (1)
A study by Imperial College and the Carbon Trust, which was commissioned by BEIS, estimates that between £17bn and £40bn could be saved by 2050 if technologies such as battery storage and demand side response become more widespread. New rules will make it easier for people to generate their own power with solar panels, store it in batteries and sell it to the National Grid. The rules are due to come into effect over the next year. They will reduce costs for someone who allows their washing machine to be turned on by the internet to maximise use of cheap solar power on a sunny afternoon. And they will even support people who agree to have their freezers switched off for a few minutes to smooth demand at peak times. They’ll also benefit a business that allows its airconditioning to be turned down briefly to help balance a spell of peak energy demand on the National Grid. Thanks to improvements in digital technology, battery storage and renewables, these innovations in flexibility are already under way with millions of people across the UK generating and storing electricity. So instead of predicting peak demand then building power stations to meet it, energy managers will be able to trade in Negawatts – negative electricity. (2)
The Government will invest £246m in battery technology that it says will be a key pillar in helping to power its industrial strategy. In its first major move to support the nascent battery revolution, the Government will set up a “battery institute” to award hundreds of millions of pounds to companies on the brink of major research and development breakthroughs. Greg Clarke underlined the importance of “cutting -edge energy plans”, which include battery power and electric, driverless vehicles.
The rapidly falling cost of battery power is expected to radically change the way Britain is able to make use of its renewable energy generation, by storing excess wind and solar for when wind speeds slip and sunshine wanes. Battery technology is already ushering in major upheaval for automotive industries and fuel retailers by accelerating the boom in electric vehicles. (3)
“You almost need to draw a line under what has come before [with energy markets] and start again” says Nick Boyle, the founder of Europe’s largest solar operator Lightsource. “There is no doubt that batteries completely and utterly metamorphose the market in that they make the uncontrollable controllable. It makes the arguments against renewable energy fall away,”
The new energy reality is not simply about consumers taking power from generators, but means the roles of producer and consumer will flip and, in some cases, merge. Lightsource is already pairing solar panels with battery packs to allow customers to effectively become their own energy market. Solar panels create energy which can be used at cheaper rates than electricity from the main grid, or stored in the battery to use later. If the battery and electric vehicle are both charged a Lightsource customer could sell their power back to the grid. By creating a network of households and businesses which can generate power and reduce demand, Lightsource could create a string of virtual low-carbon power plants.
“We’ve always said that we would like to equip a million homes with solar panels and batteries. If you use a 4kW panel that would be 4GW of capacity,” says Boyle. This is the equivalent scale of Hinkley Point C plus a gas-fired power plant, but only when the sun shines. “But if you add a 6kW battery you’ve created an extra 6GW of storable electricity which could be used to balance the grid.”
“It’s not about hardware anymore. It’s about software. And this can move at such an incredible pace and will only get quicker,” says Boyle. “It seems like we’re offering something impossible. But this is only because many are still using a yardstick of how they bought energy in the past. You almost need to draw a line under what has come before and start again.” (4)
“This government’s record on energy has been incompetent to the point of derision or despair, depending on how much you care about it” says Stuart Elmes, CEO of Viridian Solar. But finally the Government is showing signs that it gets it.
Greg Clarke. Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is talking about nothing less than the coming revolution in energy, one that has become evident to many working in the renewables sector, but has until now been just a little too far over the horizon for the politicians to ‘get’. A combination of key technologies – solar, wind, and energy storage coupled with a real-time energy market driven by information technology are maturing and the impact will be extraordinary.
Solar panels and wind turbines have a complementary output profile and a combination of both will even out seasonal energy production in northern climates such as the UK. Energy will be stored in and released from large batteries – including those in electric vehicles – to meet shorter term peaks in demand and troughs in supply. Real-time electricity pricing will allow internet enabled appliances to turn on or regulate down following pricing signals to smooth out demand to better match supply.
What we’re looking at is a fundamental shift from an energy system based on resources to one founded on technology. The inflexion point is coming and it’s now no longer a question of whether the oil age will end, but how soon it will come. So, two cheers for Greg Clarke, it looks like he’s got the vision, competent implementation to support a smart grid will now be the key to the UK taking advantage of the coming energy revolution. (5) http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/nuclearnews/NuClearNewsNo98.pdf
PUTIN WARNS U.S.-RUSSIA NUCLEAR WAR WOULD LEAVE NO SURVIVORS, Newsweek 6/7/17Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed the idea that the U.S. would claim victory in a conflict with Russia, noting that “nobody would survive” such a clash.
The Putin Interviews | Vladimir Putin & Oliver Stone Discuss NATO
Speaking to U.S. movie director Oliver Stone for The Putin Interviews, a four-part series on Showtime, Putin shared a negative view of U.S. military action and its NATO alliance. “NATO is a mere instrument of U.S. foreign policy,” Putin says in a clip of the interview, aired by the Showtime channel. “It has no allies, it has only vassals. Once a country becomes a NATO member, it is hard to resist the pressures of the United States.”
Climate News Network 30th July 2017, Shares in major oil and gas companies are expected to plunge in value in
the next three to five years because of climate change-related financial
risks, meaning more investors will spurn fossil fuels.
This is the verdict of British asset managers who control billions of pounds of investments in
stock markets.
It could have serious consequences for many thousands of
people whose pension funds have invested in these companies, as well as
many institutions and charities which rely on dividends for their income,
according to a report by the Climate Change Collaboration (CCC), a group of
four UK charitable trusts. http://climatenewsnetwork.net/more-investors-will-spurn-fossil-fuels/
Scotsman 31st July 2017,A growing number of people in Scotland want to see stronger action on
climate change, according to a poll. Results from a survey by WWF Scotland
show an increase in the percentage of those calling for more investment,
renewable energy sources and a reduction in emissions.
The data comes as a new Climate Change Bill is out for public consultation, and around 1,000
Scots were surveyed in May and June for the WWF study. More than
three-quarters, 76 per cent, of respondents said the Scottish Government
should reduce climate change emissions by “investing more in improving the
energy efficiency of homes across Scotland”, up from 67 per cent in 2016.
Nuclear Beautifying Competitions –Endorsing the Safety of New Nuclear Reactors?
Below are just a few of the many reasons why the RIBA and LI should make clear that their beautifying competitions do not in any way endorse the safety of the Moorside plan.
