An EU-wide target to boost the use of biofuels in European transport could be revised due to fears of intolerable hikes in food prices, mass deforestation and water shortages, it emerged from statements made after the Spring Summit.

While no decision was taken at this year's summit, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, said: "We're not excluding the possibility that we'll have to amend or revise our goals." 

The target of raising the share of biofuels in transport from current levels of 2% to 10% by 2020 was agreed this time last year by EU leaders themselves. It was initially considered a good means of incentivising governments and industry to invest in biofuels, in order to reduce Europe's dependency on imported oil and contribute to the fight against climate change.

Yet a plethora of studies and impact assessments produced by various sources in the past year have raised the alarm, namely that increasing biofuel production to these levels based on current technologies – which mainly involve transforming food and feed crops into fuels – could have more negative consequences for the environment than positive ones. Read rest of story...

IF LIFE hands you lemons, goes the old saying, make lemonade. Not a bad summary there of opportunistic entrepreneurial capitalism, God bless it.

It's the one system that can turn adversity into cash (although system is overstating it; capitalism is essentially just human nature with price tags attached, so we can keep score).

By contrast, when socialists are handed lemons, they make them party officials.

But aggressive, dynamic, lemonade-making adversity-profiting capitalists are now overtaken by an even more wily crowd.

Instead of passively waiting for bad news to strike before creating a get-rich response, this bunch first creates the bad news.

They're handing lemons to themselves (and us). It's almost a form of insider trading.

Al Gore, for instance, claimed to be worth just $US2 million in 2000, the year he lost his bid for the US Presidency to George W. Bush.

Revkin advocates less command-and-control from government and says more should be done to address energy 'difficulties.'

Think the public is getting too much global warming from the media? Andrew Revkin (pictured), the environmental reporter for The New York Times, doesn’t think you’re getting enough.

Revkin spoke in Newark, Del., on March 12 for the University of Delaware’s Global Agenda lecture series, “Boiling Point: International Politics of Climate Change.” He told an audience he thought the climate change issue deserved more prominence in his paper’s print edition, however he understood why it wasn’t given as much.

“On the climate issue, climate – science particularly – climate, in multitude doesn’t get a lot of respect because science is laden with complexity,” Revkin said. “Newsrooms crave ‘Spitzer, Prostitute.’ That says it right there – where’s the complexity? Or – stock scandal, or you know, $107 oil, or the Yankees traded somebody big.” 

There has been a fair amount of coverage devoted to the federal government's new report on the possible Canadian effects of global warming, as I still like to call it (we all know that this "climate change" neologism is a cop-out, and that Al Gore will be urging some new trendy term on us five years from now). The first round of newspaper copy was designed to emphasize the scariest threats in the report; now it seems there is some speculation about what happened to the expensive public-relations blitz that was intended to accompany the report's release. We know the Conservative government is reluctant to make the large, immediate economic tradeoffs that professional environmentalists want. Could this be why the report was dropped quietly onto the internet like a Victorian flirt's handkerchief hitting a parqueted floor?

It's possible, but I don't think it's true. The report we're talking about is called From Impacts to Adaptation: Canada in a Changing Climate 2007. It's not a document about what we can do now to save Mother Earth: it's about what we can do to ready ourselves if some planetary warming, irrespective of the cause, is inevitable. In that sense it does not suit the environmentalist agenda to have the report widely publicized. Adaptation measures are competing for the same reserve of attention and funding as the Kyoto-type hair-shirt efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas output. The more we talk about living with a warmer Earth, the more we may come to see it as acceptable. 

Energy Policy: When America's biggest oil refiner contemplates putting almost a third of its refineries on the market, Congress should sit up and take notice. The business climate it has created is hurting our economy.

Valero Energy Corp. is an industry leader that refines more oil than any other in the U.S. The San Antonio, Texas, company had a good run in the stock market this decade, rising 1,400% before earnings topped last year. But it's no longer so easy for the company or any refiner.

Valero will probably sell three of its 17 refineries this year and maybe two more later to focus on its core operations amid what CEO Bill Klesse acknowledged on Tuesday is a weak economy.

But maybe that's because the environment for the energy business in the U.S. has turned downright hostile.

Upstream, oil drilling is off-limits, crimping supply and driving prices ever higher. Downstream, refiners are hit by not only high energy prices, but also bureaucratic regulations, environmental lobbies and special interests that make moving to Asia, where economic growth is still valued, more attractive. 

More than 20 years ago, climate scientists began to raise alarms over the possibility global temperatures were rising due to human activities, such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels.

To better understand this potential threat, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to provide a "comprehensive, objective, scientific, technical and socioeconomic assessment of human-caused climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."

IPCC reports have predicted average world temperatures will increase dramatically, leading to the spread of tropical diseases, severe drought, the rapid melting of the world's glaciers and ice caps, and rising sea levels. However, several assessments of the IPCC's work have shown the techniques and methods used to derive its climate predictions are fundamentally flawed.

Just when you thought that ubiquitous carbon credit peddler Maurice Strong had left the international stage forever, just like this winter’s bitter wind, there he blows again.

“It’s no great thrill for me to do this stuff. I’m not an environmentalist. But if business has no voice, that’s the worst of all worlds,” Jeff Immelt said tonight keynoting The Wall Street Journal’s “ECO:nomics” conference in California.

What’s scarier than seemingly inevitable government-mandated climate-change legislation that targets most of the industries GE thrives in? Exactly what the U.S. has now. 

The most inconvenient truth for climate alarmists is the burgeoning number of influential scientists with dissenting opinions on global warming.

Al Gore says global warming is an inconvenient truth. “Inconvenient” adds a clever twist to the name of the would-be president’s popular documentary and book. But far worthier of scrutiny is the other word in the title: “Truth.”

Man-made global warming, says the former politician and a rising sea of climate alarmists, is not just inconvenient, it’s an unequivocal, undeniable truth. In fact, the truth about global warming is so convincing, that “debate in the scientific community is over.”

Says who? Well, the United Nations for starters. February of last year, the United Nations issued a press release highlighting its latest report, which apparently proved “changes in the atmosphere, the oceans and glaciers and ice caps now show unequivocally that the world is warming due to human activities” (emphasis mine throughout). According to Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (unep), Feb. 2, 2007, will be remembered as the day “where the question mark was removed behind the debate on whether climate change has anything to do with human activity on this planet.”