It is not hard to spot the birthplace of the UK’s shale gas industry. Protesters in yellow jackets and face masks wave signs at traffic passing the site at Little Plumpton near Blackpool. “There is no safe fracking,” says one placard. These people have maintained a round-the-clock vigil for more than 600 days close to the field where energy company Cuadrilla is seeking early next month to become the first in the UK to start commercial fracking for gas found in rocks deep underground. Tina Rothery, a protester, said resistance had delayed Cuadrilla by several months, if not years. “They say fracking is a few weeks away,” she added. “They have been weeks away from fracking for as long as I can remember.” Cuadrilla is aimi ng to prove the protesters wrong, seven years after the company’s first attempt to exploit shale resources in the north of England was halted after it unleashed earth tremors.
FT 26th Sept 2018 read more »
Standard Chartered has joined the rush of lenders pledging not to fund new coal power stations, bowing to pressure from environmental groups and some investors. The FTSE 100 emerging markets lender said the pledge demonstrated its commitment to supporting the Paris Climate Accord to limit global temperature rises to below 2C. However it does not include existing commitments, which could include helping to fund two major coal power plants in Vietnam where it is already involved. Investor group ShareAction said it welcomed Standard Chartered’s “great move”, but added that it would encourage shareholders to “ask the bank to apply its new policy” to the two Vietnam projects. Other banks to have made similar green commitments have included HSBC, RBS and ING.
Telegraph 25th Sept 2018 read more »
Chinese power plants run on coal, thought to have been cancelled because of government edicts, are still being built and are threatening to “seriously undermine” global climate goals, researchers have warned. Satellite photos taken in 2018 of locations in China reveal cooling towers and new buildings that were not present a year earlier at plants that were meant to stop operations or be postponed by orders from Beijing. The projects are part of an “approaching tsunami” of coal plants that would boost China’s existing coal capacity by 25%, according to the research group Coalswarm. The total capacity of the planned coal power stations is about 259GW, bigger than the American coal fleet and “wildly out of line” with the Paris climate agreement, the group said in a new report.
Guardian 26th Sept 2018 read more »