Spanish Companies Pay Developer To Reduce Greenhouse Gases at Chinese Landfill

Spanish companies are paying a Chinese developer to cover a landfill site with a plastic cap to collect the greenhouse gases it emits, the World Bank said Monday.

The deal is the latest the World Bank has brokered allowing Europe and Japan to meet their greenhouse gas reduction pledges under the Kyoto Protocol by cutting emissions in China.

About a dozen similar deals have been signed in China, and more than 500 others are in the works, said Andres Liebenthal, the environment coordinator for the World Bank office in Beijing.
The Tianjin Clean Energy and Environmental Engineering Co. will collect the methane and other greenhouse gases emitted by the landfill and use it to generate electricity to sell to the North China Power Grid, a World Bank statement said. Excess gases will be burned.

In addition to electricity revenues, the company will get money from a consortium of Spanish companies for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases the landfill generates, according to the statement and Liebenthal.

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G8 make historic climate deal

World leaders will work with the United Nations to slash greenhouse gas emissions in a new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol by 2009. The agreement was sealed at the G8 summit on the Baltic coast, and importantly has the buy-in of the world's largest polluter, the United States, as well as the other members Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. However the historic agreement falls short of setting hard targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as wanted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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U.S. Pressures G8 Nations to Weaken Stance on Global Warming

The United States has been working behind the scenes to stop the next Group of Eight (G8) summit in Germany next month from setting clear goals to fight global warming and from calling for urgent talks to negotiate a new climate strategy to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012, according to documents obtained by Reuters.
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New energy rules could unleash an economic boom and help quash climate change

In 1997, as the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change was being negotiated, the U.S. Senate voted, 95-0, to reject any agreement that "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States." The senators were acting on the widespread fear that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy would hurt American businesses and cost millions of jobs. Those were the beliefs and the politics of the times.

Ten years later, it's increasingly clear that it will be more costly not to act on global warming than to act. Clean, renewable, efficient energy will not be a burden but a boon -- the next in a series of revolutions, beginning with telecom and digital that have invigorated our economy with new ideas, new industries, and new jobs.

Voters, investors, activists, business leaders, and policy experts are pushing for clean energy to create jobs, limit climate change, and reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. And yet, progress is slow: oil imports and carbon emissions continue to rise. Why?

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