David Legates has spent his career disputing climate science. Now he’s a top manager in the federal agency most involved in assessing global warming’s threat.

By Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News

In the shadow of the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has continued to press on with its work measuring the breadth and pace of the climate crisis.

So far in 2020, NOAA recorded the nation’s hottest summer on record, the second-lowest Arctic sea ice minimum and the greatest number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. coast since 1916. NOAA led a team that showed global warming is detectable at the bottom of the ocean. It funded work revealing the climate risks of coastal forest destruction. It helped develop a breakthrough method of measuring fossil fuel emissions in ambient air.

But climate scientists are bracing for the potential disruption of NOAA’s climate work with the appointment of two prominent climate science deniers and a former campaign official for President Donald Trump to top agency positions this fall. 

The hiring of Legates and others, only weeks before the election, comes just as NOAA is set to collaborate with more than a dozen other federal agencies on the next Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, due out in 2023. Work on the project kicked off in earnest on Oct. 15 when a call for authors was published in the Federal Register. The state-of-the-science synthesis of climate impacts and trends across the United States is meant to serve as a roadmap for policymakers. 

Veterans of the process fear the new hires may presage a Trump administration effort to inject doubt about the scientific consensus into the climate assessment. 

Foes of climate action hope that’s the signal being sent. 

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As a result, Chinese companies are testing several emerging technologies with significantly higher efficiencies compared to modules which are currently in production

By Kaavya Chandrasekaran, Economic Times Energy World

BENGALURU: The gap between solar manufacturing in India and China has been increasing with leading Chinese manufacturers making aggressive investments in capacity expansion and new technology, according to a recent report by renewable energy consultancy firm, Bridge To India.

“Long-term viability of the Indian manufacturing sector depends on its capacity to compete with leading Chinese manufacturers on cost of production, scale and technology,” the report on solar manufacturing said. It also noted that it would be challenging for Indian manufacturers to bridge the cost disadvantage with the Chinese players. “Indian companies are banking mainly on tariff barriers and incentives in form of capital and/or operating cost subsidies,” it said. The biggest risks they face are those of policy uncertainty and lack of in-house technology.

Indeed the Indian government attempted to address the policy uncertainty issue when it announced earlier this year that it would impose a basic customs duty on solar cells and modules as part of the bigger “Make In India” scheme. But the industry is growing impatient because the government has not provided any details such as a timeline since then, although the announcement was made in June.

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