E2 Round-up: Bleak outlook for climate accord, House climate bill authors cast wary eye to Senate, Spain's cautionary green jobs tale

Connie Hedegaard, European commissioner for climate change, gives a bleak assessment of prospects for a global treaty in Mexico City, in the Financial Times.

“To get every detail set in the next nine months looks very difficult,” she said.

Governments had been hoping to forge a final treaty at a global conference this December in Mexico, after failing to do so in Copenhagen. However, Hedegaard said this was more likely to happen at a follow-up meeting next year in South Africa, reports the FT.

Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones examines whether Waxman-Markey was a waste of effort, given that the Senate climate trio appears to be ditching the idea of an economy-wide permit trading program to lower carbon dioxide emissions. 

"This new tack doesn't mean the House would have to shelve its bill entirely, as its measure includes elements of the ideas that the Senate trio is considering. But some House lawmakers worry that the Senate will abandon the hard-won balance they struck between environmentalists and industry," Sheppard writes.

The New York Times has a cautionary tale about green jobs. The Spanish solar industry had revived an old energy mining town; now the boom has gone bust.

“But as low-quality, poorly designed solar plants sprang up on Spain’s plateau’s, Spanish officials came to realize that they would have to subsidize many of them indefinitely, and that the industry they had created might never produce efficient green energy on its own,” the Times reports.

Not all of Spain’s solar’s players have been swept out to sea, however. A few have restructured and are surviving.

Ethanol, an often maligned answer to fossil fuels, is on the rebound, according to Bloomberg. Falling prices costs Bill Gates a cool $44 million but Valero, a larger ethanol producer, stands to make a profit as demand rises.

“Four years after George W. Bush made ethanol a centerpiece of his presidency’s push to cut dependence on foreign oil, three of the biggest producers have sought bankruptcy protection and prices have fallen 61 percent from their mid-2006 record. Now demand is rebounding because ethanol is almost 66 cents cheaper than gasoline, the biggest discount in 14 months,” Bloomberg reports.