Beyond an anaemic international agreement to extend the Kyoto Protocol to 2020, it is hard to see what positive momentum was achieved at the end of the two-week UN conference on climate change which ended on Saturday in Doha.

While almost 195 nations did endorse the proposal to extend Kyoto past 2012, no new targets for reducing toxic global greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and no binding plan to keep global temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees Celsius were announced.

Even the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Christiana Figueres, gave a luke warm response to the meeting.

Electrical power generation from wind energy last year prevented as much global warming pollution as taking 13 million cars off the road, says a new widely-quoted report published in the US.

The report — Wind Power for a Cleaner America: Reducing Global Warming Pollution, Cutting Air Pollution and Saving Water — adds that wind power saved the equivalent amount of 26 billion gallons of water, more than enough to meet the annual domestic use needs of a city the size of Boston.

Released last week by Environment America Research & Policy Center, a federation of state-based, citizen-funded environmental advocacy organizations, the report also said wind energy helped reduce air pollution, including reductions of 137,000 pounds of nitrogen oxide emissions and 91,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide emissions.

Wind energy in South Australia now meets around 26% of the region’s electricity demand and has become one of the nation’s growth sectors, a new report says.

The 22-page report — The Critical Decade: Generating a renewable Australia — also noted that wind power is one of the country’s most cost-competitive renewable electricity sources.

Published by the Climate Commission, the report said Australia has enormous potential for renewable energy but currently that potential is under-utilised. “In coming decades, the Australian economy could be powered almost entirely by renewable energy,” the report said, adding the nation has world-class wind and solar resources.

As delegates and observers get ready for the annual UN conference on climate change which begins next Monday in Doha, they will have lots of reports to consider as they being working towards the goal of extending the existing Kyoto Protocol designed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

According to one of those studies, The Emissions Gap Report, which was coordinated by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the European Climate Foundation, shows that greenhouse gas emissions are now about 14% above where they need to be in 2020.

Released Wednesday, the report says that the concentration of warming gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) has increased 20% since 2000.

Wind power and other renewables will become the become the world’s second-largest source of power generation by 2015 and close in on coal as the primary source by 2035, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

“A steady increase in hydropower and the rapid expansion of wind and solar power has cemented the position of renewables as an indispensable part of the global energy mix,” the IEA said Monday in its annual World Energy Outlook report.

“The rapid increase in renewable energy is underpinned by falling technology costs, rising fossil-fuel prices and carbon pricing, but mainly by continued subsidies: from $88 billion globally in 2011, they rise to nearly $240 billion in 2035,” the report added.