Daily Briefing |
TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES
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Every weekday morning, in time for your morning coffee, Carbon Brief sends out a free email known as the “Daily Briefing” to thousands of subscribers around the world. The email is a digest of the past 24 hours of media coverage related to climate change and energy, as well as our pick of the key studies published in peer-reviewed journals.
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Today's climate and energy headlines:
- Mood of 'realism' about future deal at climate talks
- Energy firms to pay back billions: Windfall for customers as Big Six finally agree to refund direct debit overpayments after pressure from the MoS
- Energy bills could fall by 7pc if Government cuts green tax
- Big Six energy firms face investor exodus over political interference in pricing
- Climate change is an uncertain science
- Forests could face threat from biomass power 'gold rush'
- New Green tax threat in energy bills 'deal'
- Fracking 'across the South' with manageable risks, minister says
- Is Poland's coal and climate summit outrageous or irrelevant?
- Climate change scenarios: reconciling the new with the old
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News.
Climate & energy news:.
Energy companies are to repay customers up to £2?billion which
they have stockpiled from direct debit overpayments, according to
the front page of the Mail on Sunday. The deal means any customer
who is in credit by more than one month’s payment will be given an
automatic refund.
Britain’s energy companies have told the government they will cut
energy bills immediately by up to 7 per cent if the costs of the
Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme are removed entirely.
Alternatively, the scheme could be delayed by 18 months, which
would reduce its costs.
Fund managers controlling billions of pounds invested in UK energy
companies have warned that they are considering pulling out of the
sector because of political interference in the market. Labour’s
proposal to freeze energy prices has angered some of the country’s
leading institutional investors, according to the front page of the
Independent.
Climate & energy comment:.
Global warming has become a “substitute religion”, and leaked
emails from the University of East Anglia “degraded” the reputation
of the IPCC, argues Australia’s former Prime Minister John Howard.
Howard’s op-ed in the Sunday Telegraph is an edited version of a
speech he gave to the climate skeptic Global Warming Policy
Foundation last week.
Campaign group, Biofuelwatch calculates in a new report that the
UK could end up burning as much as 82m tonnes of biomass each year
– more than eight times the UK’s annual wood
production.
Tory ministers are pushing to delay the binding targets of the
Energy Company Obligation scheme, which adds a subsidy to energy
bills. But in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Ed Davey
signalled the cost of the scheme would be added to taxes instead –
and said that subsidies for wind and other renewables would not be
considered for cuts. In aneditorial, the paper urges the government to
review renewable energy targets so that energy bills come
down.
Households “right across the South” should prepare for gas
fracking to begin in their areas, energy minister Michael Fallon
has warned. Fallon says that in the next few weeks, a study by the
water industry will conclude that fracking will not contaminate the
water supply.
The Polish government will preside over a high-level coal industry
event on the sidelines of the international climate conference
which it is also hosting over the next two weeks. Official
documents indicate coal will play a major role in Poland’s energy
strategy until 2030.
.
A new study looks at how older (SRES) and newer (RCP) scenarios of
climate change compare, and which individual scenarios are most
alike. The SRES scenario A1FI maps closely to RCP8.5, for example –
both being high emissions scenarios.
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