UPDATE: AUSTRALIA: Misconceptions helped kill Australian carbon tax. Read, how it happened.

Misconceptions helped kill Australian carbon tax - Yahoo News: "CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — In 2007, Australians were ready to do something to combat climate change, even if it was expensive. More than two-thirds of them said so in a poll, and both major political parties vowed to make industries pay for greenhouse-gas emissions.

The undoing of that perspective will likely be complete after a new Senate is sworn in Monday. It's expected to give Prime Minister Tony Abbott the votes he needs to repeal a 2-year-old tax charged to around 350 of Australia's biggest carbon polluters. Three top political leaders lost their jobs over the issue as support for climate-change measures plummeted.

A global recession, political miscalculations and failed negotiations only partially explain the dramatic change.

Opponents of the carbon tax implemented in 2012 had the media largely on their side. Electricity prices soared — not mainly because of the tax, but because power companies were spending billions on infrastructure. Most electricity users were compensated for the added cost of the tax, but many of them didn't know that. And rising gas prices fed the fury — even though the tax didn't apply to gasoline.

Australia's experience illustrates how easy it is to scuttle complicated environmental laws"



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UPDATE: CARRIBEAN CORAL REEFS: Parrot Fish and Sea Urchins can save Coral Reefs, Study says.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9aWMIexrcs

The Key To Saving Caribbean Coral Reefs Could Be These Fish, Researchers Say: "Drawing from more than 35,000 surveys of Caribbean reefs conducted between 1970 and 2012, a team of experts from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network detailed the drastic decline of the reef and highlighted threats to the delicate ecosystem. The largest threat, it seems, is not climate change, but the loss of a particular type of marine life.

"We saw that reefs with no grazers ended up getting smothered by algae. And after a period of time they see a significant or even complete collapse of the reef area," Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Program, told BBC News.

As authors write in the report, the population of parrotfish -- and other grazers, such as sea urchins, that consume algae and contribute to the health of tropical reefs -- has decreased significantly, primarily due to over fishing and pollution. However, if these types of fish are protected so that their numbers bounce back, Caribbean reefs have a good chance of recovering."



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UPDATE: CHINA 10 Year Green Horizon Initiative: IBM signs up to help fight China's war on smog

click link to read full article: IBM signs up to help fight China's war on smog | Reuters: "Under the agreement with IBM, Beijing's city government will be one of the partners in the company's China-focused 10-year "Green Horizon" initiative, which aims to draw on IBM's forecasting expertise and the collection of real-time emissions data to predict smog build-ups.

"It is about how we can help cities improve management based on 'Big Data', and better predict (pollution) with accuracy so the government can take proactive action," said Xiaowei Shen, China director of IBM Research, speaking at IBM's lab in Beijing's northwest high-tech district of Zhongguancun."



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