I thought I would post some links to some Geography related stories that have been in the news over the past fews days, that may have been overlooked due to frequent reports of the ever changing situation in Japan and the Middle East. Unfortunatley, due to a mountain of other work to tackle, I don't have time to write about them but they are definetly worth reading if you can find a spare 5 minutes.
China tops global clean energy table. After a recent study compiled by the US Pew Environmental Group, China has remained the worlds leading investor in low carbon energy technology with an investment of £34.1bn in 2010. China is also the world's largest producer of wind and solar power units. Argentina topped the list, in terms of year-on-year growth, as it saw its investment grow by 568% since 2009. The USA, even though their investment increased by 51% slipped behind Germany, to 3rd place. The UK's investment dropped by 70% which means they are now ranked outside the top 10. The drastic drop in the UK's investment has been partly blamed on the uncertainity that was created by the formation of the coalition government. The report concluded that long term certainity, created by national policies and government commitment, was most attractive to investors and therefore countries who offered this, like China, India and Germany, have been most successful in securing and utilising investment for the development of low carbon technology. The low carbon energy sector does not include nuclear power and so statistics surrounding this were not included. Nuclear power attracted $243bn in 2010 which was an increase of 30% since 2009 and an huge increase of 630% from 2004 - it will be interesting though to see if and how investment figures will be influenced by the events in Japan........
UN report: Cities ignore Climate Change at their peril - This article is defintely worth reading as it links energy intensity and climate change to development and the population trends created by development. It also discusses not only the changes, the report concludes, that these trends will have on the environment and the climate but the impacts it will have on water supplies, energy provision, infrastructure, industrial production and public services.
Green Machine: Emissions cuts could save 280,000 lives. Another article that manages to link the energy module to population and it provides some very interesting statistics which am I am sure would be great to include in some essays relevant to the topic. It dicusses the other advantages, apart from the obvious environmental ones, that reductions in carbon dioxide emissions would have - many of which I must admit that I hadn't thought of.
These articles are very helpful if you are wanting to improve the links you can make between the population and energy module - especially the last two - and they all provide little bits of information and data that I am sure would look really good if you could sneak them into longer answer questions.
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