Tag Archives: climate-change

Obama highlights need for more clean-energy funding

President Obama turned his attention to the need for more clean-energy funding Monday, arguing that an expanded investment is needed to lay the foundation for long-term economic growth, cut dependence on foreign oil and slow the process of global warming. Obama, speaking to a group of renewable-energy company owners and investors, said the country has “known the right choice for a generation (and that) the time has come to make that choice.” In the years ahead, the United States “can remain the world’s leading importer of foreign oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of renewable energy,” Obama argued. “We can allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc, or we can create jobs preventing its worse effects

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UK PM issues Iran sanctions warning

Iran faces a "clear choice" between between international cooperation over its plans to develop nuclear energy or tougher sanctions, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned at a conference in London on Tuesday. Brown said Iran had an “absolute right” to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes but said it was a test case in helping all nations secure civil nuclear power without nuclear proliferation. “We have to create a new international system to help non-nuclear states acquire the new sources of energy they need because — whether we like it or not — we will not meet the challenges of climate change without the far wider use of civil nuclear power,” Brown said.

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U.N. Climate Change Czar Yvo de Boer

His colleagues call him the Flying Dutchman because of all the time Yvo de Boer spends in the air, traveling from one world capital to another as he tries to stitch together a global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions — and possible save the world. As the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change , de Boer is the U.N.’s point man for the ongoing global effort to plan a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The deadline for a new treaty is coming up fast — at the U.N

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Could Rising Seas Swallow California’s Coast?

Imagine San Francisco Airport under water, or Long Beach Harbor in Los Angeles, home to the second busiest port in America, washed away. Picture Orange County’s Newport Beach completely submerged under the encroaching ocean. That’s the soggy future that could be in place for California at the end of this century, if climate change continues unabated.

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Japan: GDP shrinks 12.1 percent in fourth quarter

Japan’s economy shrank more than 12 percent last quarter, the government said on Thursday, in another sign of how severely the global economic downturn has affected the world’s second-largest economy. “It has been a core belief of ours that every nation must not only live by, but help shape global rules that will determine whether people enjoy the right to live freely and participate to the fullest in their societies,” she said after a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, adding the United States itself “must continually strive to live up to our own ideals.” Both of them discussed China’s human rights record and situation in Tibet on the 50th anniversary of Tibet’s national uprising

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Obama moves to separate politics and science

As President Obama reversed the Bush administration’s limits on embryonic stem-cell research, he said scientific decisions must be "based on facts, not ideology." The president on Monday signaled a clear shift in tone from the Bush administration on a broad range of scientific issues. Obama overturned an order signed by President Bush in 2001 that barred the National Institutes of Health from funding research on embryonic stem cells beyond using 60 cell lines that existed at that time

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Woman arrested over custard attack on politician

A 29-year-old woman has been arrested in connection with a custard-throwing attack on British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, a Metropolitan Police spokesman told CNN Sunday. A woman was seen on television images Friday throwing a green slime-like liquid in Mandelson’s face as he stepped out of his car to attend a meeting on carbon emissions. The act was a protest against the expansion of London’s Heathrow Airport

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