kaiser solar array

Saudi Arabia’s oil minister has made the shocking statement that the world’s biggest oil exporter could stop using fossil fuels as soon as 2040 and focus on developing solar and wind energy resources. “Ali Al-Naimi’s statement is striking as Saudi Arabia’s wealth and influence is entirely founded on its huge oil wealth and the nation has been one of the strongest voices against climate change action at UN summits.

“In Saudi Arabia, we recognise that eventually, one of these days, we’re not going to need fossil fuels,” said Naimi at a business and climate conference in Paris on Thursday. “I don’t know when – 2040, 2050 or thereafter. So we have embarked on a program to develop solar energy,” he said in comments reported by the Guardian, Bloomberg and the Financial Times. “Hopefully, one of these days, instead of exporting fossil fuels, we will be exporting gigawatts of electric power.” [The Guardian]

Last week, scientists documented threats to the Larsen C and the long-threatened Larsen B ice shelf in Antartica, with the remainder of Larsen B predicted to not last past 2020. “And as for Larsen C, the Scotland-sized ice shelf could also be at potentially “imminent risk” due to a rift across its mass that is growing in size (though it appears more stable than the remainder of Larsen B).

And the staccato of May melt news isn’t over, it seems. Thursday in Science, researchers from the University of Bristol in Britain, along with researchers from Germany, France and the Netherlands, reported on the retreat of a suite of glaciers farther south from Larsen B and C along the Bellingshausen Sea, in a region known as the Southern Antarctic Peninsula.” [The Washington Post]

Republican presidential candidates are scrambling to use U.S. energy supply as a platform for their political campaigns, after watching a democrat preside over the oil and gas boom. “Their apparent answer: calling time on a 40-year-old federal ban on crude oil exports and using the newfound energy bounty to strategic advantage.

“We’ve got an abundance of supply,” Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said this week in Oklahoma at a gathering of putative Republican candidates for next year’s presidential election. Lifting the ban, he said, would allow exports to “our allies in Europe, where, instead of being dependent on (President) Vladimir Putin and the Russians, they could be dependent on Americans.” [Yahoo News]