Sir, A key cause of the global failure to confront the climate change challenge (“Why the world faces climate chaos”, Martin Wolf, Comment, May 15) is political misleadership, not least in Europe. Ever since Kyoto the EU, in particular, has poured resource and political capital into renewable energy strategies that are utterly futile.
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The World Bank is making a major push to develop large-scalehydropower, something it had all but abandoned a decade ago but now sees as crucial to resolving the tension between economic development and the drive to tame carbon use. Major hydropower projects in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia,Nepal and elsewhere – all of a scale dubbed “transformational” to the regions involved – are part of the bank’s fundraising drive among wealthy nations. Bank lending for hydropower has scaled up in recent years, and officials expect the trend to continue. Such projects were shunned in the 1990s, in part because they can be disruptive to communities and ecosystems. But the World Bank is opening the taps for dams and related infrastructure as its president, Jim Yong Kim, tries to resolve a quandary at the bank’s core: how to eliminate poverty while adding as little as possible to carbon emissions.
Read MoreUscire dalla trappola dei gas serra è possibile. C’è la necessità, perché le emissioni di anidride carbonica, che nel 2011 hanno raggiunto il picco di 34 miliardi di tonnellate, stanno facendo saltare l’equilibrio del clima moltiplicando
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One of Europe’s most influential government-owned investors in theenergy industry has hinted it may expand funding of high-carbon coal projects despite mounting pressure from climate change campaigners to rule out such investments.
Talisman Energy of Canada and the US oil company Marathon said they were pulling out of what is seen as potentially one of the largest sources of shale gas in Europe.
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The two companies exploring for shale gas in the UK have confirmed that they intend to flare methane gas from their wells in a move that has been condemned by environmentalists. It is likely to be the most visible sign of the fracking revolution that many in business and government would like to bring to the UK.
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