The Welsh parliament voted against the use of shale gas fracking in Wales, signaling a discontent within U.K. parliaments over proposed shale gas development. “A proposal against shale gas fracking was voted through in the Welsh Assembly late on Wednesday, effectively making it impossible for shale gas developments to receive planning permits in Wales.

Environmentalists, who oppose the use of fracking due to concerns about it polluting groundwater and triggering earth tremors, welcomed the Welsh decision.

“The Westminster government needs to catch up with Scotland, Wales and many other areas of the world and bring in a moratorium on controversial fracking,” Friends of the Earth Energy Campaigner Donna Hume said in a statement.” [Reuters]

All Power Labs, an energy startup that emerged out of a Berkeley artist collective has been producing machines that distribute clean energy and shipped to the developing world. “Over the past seven years, the group has been building devices called gasifiers that take plant waste (like walnut shells and wood chips) and turn it into electricity with a byproduct of biochar. It’s decades old technology — which was popular during World War II and is still used on a large industrial scale today — but Mason’s vision was to shrink down the tech to a personal scale, not just to run The Shipyard off the grid, but also to make it available to anyone who wanted to make it or buy it.

Now after years of refining the systems, All Power Labs has shipped 500 products and employs 40 workers. The team — a combination of junkyard fabricators, university-trained engineers and solar industry execs — has been gaining momentum, transitioning from their early DIY days into what they hope is a stable and predictable product-oriented energy company.” [GIGAOM]

A new study published in Nature has investigated warm periods in Earth’s deep history to determine the effect of C02 on global temperatures and the validity of the climate change debate. “The “factors” are natural phenomena such as water vapor, clouds, sea ice, dust and vegetation—all of which exert varying pulls on the climate. Water vapor and sea ice, for instance, are potent warming agents, while dust is a cooling agent. When scientists use computer models to simulate climate change, they translate all these factors into into code and enter them into Earth’s virtual reality.

But using modeling to understand how temperatures respond to CO2 can be challenging. That’s because models depend on how well the computer codes reflect the natural world, David Lea, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not affiliated with the study, said in a phone interview.

Paleoclimatologists instead look into Earth’s history to a time when the planet was warmer than it is today, about 3 million years ago. It was the Pliocene, an epoch when the earliest human ancestors evolved in Africa. The world was 2 to 3 C warmer than today, and CO2 levels were roughly similar, as well, the Nature study finds. The Arctic was free of sea ice. [Scientific American]