tagged w/ Carbon Emissions
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Wake up, people, this scam is about money and control. We are not going to destroy the world with carbon emissions! This is meant for a World Government takeover and Obama is the Captain of the ship.Wake up, people, this scam is about money and control. We are not going to destroy the... more
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For centuries, many peoples around the world have had to gather bundles of firewood for cooking ... a process that not only produces carbon emissions but has a significant effect on health.
Smoke and fumes cause respiratory diseases killing an estimated 1.6 million people a year worldwide.
But as the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference approaches, one Norwegian inventor believes he has refined a simple technology that could have a major impact for ordinary people, their environment and the world. It's called the Kyoto Box.
Al Jazeera's Andrew Simmons reports.
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I think that deforestation has a lot to do with droughts, it certainly results in desertification in many parts of the world.
What I like about these solar cookers, apart from the fact that they spare trees, do not emit carbon nor produce smoke and fumes that are bad for the health, they also liberate the women from the strenuous job of finding and gathering firewood, having to go further and further afar to do so, thus taking up a great deal of the women's time and energy.
Solar cookers plus simple solar stills in the Rift Valley of Kenya (where ground water is usually brackish) would solve a great deal of problems for the people living there.For centuries, many peoples around the world have had to gather bundles of firewood... more
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SHOCKING NEW NASA DATA / NEW PREDICTION = "3 TO 5 YEARS NO ICE IN ARCTIC"
THE PERMAFROST = IS NOW THAWING....
3-5 years All Arctic Ice will be gone. Five years after that... no ice on either pole!
Watch Video as prehistoric methane gas is released under the ice from the thawing permafrost below is ignited.
NEW DATA: The original time to reach the permafrost thawing tipping point wasn't predicted to happen until 2050.
We need to understand what is happening and how the effects of what is now taking place... will change all our lives in the "months and few years ahead".SHOCKING NEW NASA DATA / NEW PREDICTION = "3 TO 5 YEARS NO ICE IN ARCTIC"
THE... more
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Global warming... is much worse that you think.
PLEASE SELECT: "WATCH FULL PROGRAM"
Summary:
Dan Miller's presentation focuses on why the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports are actually best case scenarios. For example, IPCC climate models do not include the effect of melting permafrost releasing greenhouse gases, even though the permafrost is melting now and it holds more greenhouse gases than all that mankind has ever released.
Another example is that IPCC predictions of sea level rise only take into account thermal expansion of the oceans and melting of glaciers; the largest factor, disintegration of glaciers, was not included because it is hard to model. The result is that sea level rise will likely be substantially higher this century than the IPCC predicts.
Miller discusses several other potential catastrophes that are not included in IPCC predictions and also discusses tipping points that could put climate change solutions out of our reach in years or decades, the psychology of climate change, and why it is difficult for people to respond to the threat posed by a warming earth.
His talk concludes with a discussion of ways to address climate change and the risks and opportunities that companies face due to the climate crisis.
More Information:
The Climate Project
http://www.theclimateproject.org/aboutus.php
NASA | Earth Observatory
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6632
NASA | Science for a Hungry World: Part 6
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6632
HOME PROJECT: A Visual Global Tour /current effects of global warming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU
.Global warming... is much worse that you think.
PLEASE SELECT: "WATCH FULL... more
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THE WAXMAN-MARKEY bill on climate change that recently passed the House is a train wreck waiting to happen. Intended to reduce global warming and achieve energy independence, it is totally inadequate in its reliance on a flawed cap and trade system, and the recently released Senate version called the Kerry-Boxer bill follows the same track. Like the House bill, the Senate version represents the further transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the nuclear and fossil-fuel industries - a result of their immense power and influence.
Both bills impose a legal limit or “cap’’ on greenhouse gasses emitted each year. The trading part is based on issuing emission allowances, or permits, to various industries for each ton of greenhouse gas they emit. However, the fatal flaw in Waxman-Markey is the misguided government giveaway, for free, of 85 percent of all allowances, particularly to coal-related industries. For example, the most egregious source of carbon dioxide emissions is coal-fired electrical generating plants, which account for one-third of all such emissions. To mollify the powerful coal lobby and coal state representatives, this government giveaway provides little or no incentive to phase out old coal-fired plants anytime soon, and may diabolically increase their profits.
A lesson is to be learned from the 2005 European Union Emissions Trading Scheme that likewise gave away 95 percent of its emission allowances. The result was that EU electric utilities earned windfall profits while continuing to pass on higher energy costs to industrial and residential consumers. The EU told the US Government Accountability Office that “it could not be certain [the trading scheme] resulted in any reduction of emissions.’’
To successfully confront the climate change crisis and the nation’s addiction to fossil fuels, we at Clean Power Now endorse a straightforward carbon tax instead of the cap and trade schemes. To neutralize the impact on consumers, revenue from the carbon tax would be used to reduce payroll taxes, increase Social Security benefits, and fund renewable energy efforts that create new jobs and new industries particularly in the wind and solar sectors. This would amount to a tax shift with enormous societal benefits.
Others are supporting this as well. Elaine Kamarck, chairwoman of the US Climate Task Force and a former adviser to Al Gore, recently said in Politico, “Congress can go back to Al Gore’s original idea about how to deal with climate change: Raise taxes on carbon, and cut taxes on work. A carbon tax shift is one of those rare ideas that can take a political liability and turn it into a political asset; it allows Congress to vote for a tax cut and a tax increase while putting into place the financial incentives we need to transition to a noncarbon future.’’
A carbon tax is aimed at taxing the upstream source of carbon where it is produced, like coal mines, oil and natural gas wells, as well as shipping terminals and pipelines for imported fuel. Each pound of carbon embedded in the fuel would be taxed based on the fact that every pound of carbon consumed as fuel results in the emission of 3.6 pounds of carbon dioxide. Starting at a tax rate of $15 per ton of emitted carbon dioxide and progressively increasing until the goal of 80 percent reduction is achieved by 2050 is a good place to start.THE WAXMAN-MARKEY bill on climate change that recently passed the House is a train... more
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One of the three winners of the Germanwatch screenplay competition about Climate Justice. It was a great - and not too heady - way of presenting what everyday consumption in the West means not only in terms of CO2 emissions, but also looking at the larger justice-related questions this poses. Enjoy!One of the three winners of the Germanwatch screenplay competition about Climate... more
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This month, the mayor of Mesa, Arizona, a city of about 500,000 inhabitants in the American Southwest, became the 1,000th local leader to sign on to a climate change agreement under the United States Conference of Mayors.
In signing the compact — initiated in 2005 by Greg Nickels, the mayor of Seattle and the president of the conference — local leaders commit to reducing their cities’ carbon emissions in concert with the national goals laid out by the Kyoto Protocol: a 7 percent reduction over 1990 emissions levels by 2012.
As with the country-level signatories to the Kyoto agreement, many cities will fail to meet this goal. But with prospects dimming that world leaders will agree to a substantive successor treaty to the expiring Kyoto accord at the global climate summit meeting in Copenhagen in December, local endeavors like Mr. Nickels’s mayoral agreement would seem to take on a whole new measure of import.
“Locally elected officials can create ripples — and maybe even waves — in the fight against global warming,” Mr. Nickels wrote in the introduction to a report, published this month, highlighting the efforts of 16 mayors in various American cities. “What we do in our cities,” he continued, “whether it’s constructing green buildings, establishing electric car charging stations, planting urban forests or creating legions of good-paying green jobs, can serve as a model for state governments” and for Washington.
In a telephone conversation over the weekend, Tom Cochran, the executive director of the U.S. mayors’ conference, put it this way: “In my experience, mayors have always quietly changed human behavior — from civil rights to recycling,” he said. “You’re affecting things globally and nationally, but you start out locally.”
It is a sentiment echoed by local leaders across the globe — many of them frustrated by the partisan bickering and national chauvinism on display among nations involved in global climate negotiations.
“Advocacy for the role of local governments is not a luxury,” Bärbel Dieckmann, the mayor of Bonn, said in a video address to a global conference of mayors last June in Edmonton, Alberta. “It is the key to the sustainable future of billions of citizens of cities and towns worldwide. And who can show this commitment better than us, the world’s mayors?”
The winds of demographic change are certainly behind them.
Two years ago, researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia, working with United Nations data, estimated — somewhat lightheartedly — that the planet officially became more urban than rural for the first time on May 23, 2007.
The specificity of the date was, of course, largely symbolic, but the thesis was clear: More people are living in cities and urban areas than ever before. Indeed, the United Nations has estimated that as many as 60 percent of the planet’s inhabitants will be living in urban areas by 2030, compared with 14 percent a century ago.
Just what this means in the context of a roiling climate debate is unclear. Organizations like the United Nations and the Clinton Climate Initiative, for example, have made broad claims about the role of cities in contributing to a warmer planet.
“Cities occupy two percent of the world’s land mass yet contribute more than two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions,” begins the Clinton Initiative’s online explication of its C-40 program, which unites large cities across the globe in a commitment to reducing greenhouse gases.
Other metrics have cities consuming 70 percent or more of the planet’s energy resources and contributing as much as 80 percent to greenhouse gas emissions.This month, the mayor of Mesa, Arizona, a city of about 500,000 inhabitants in the... more
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Of all the explanations for Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the one that rang truest came from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "It sets the seal on America's return to the heart of all the world's peoples." In other words, this was Europe's way of saying to America, "We love you again"--sort of like those weird "renewal of vows" ceremonies that couples have after surviving a rough patch.
Now that Europe and the United States are officially reunited, it seems worth asking: is this necessarily a good thing? The Nobel Committee, which awarded the prize specifically for Obama's embrace of "multilateral diplomacy," is evidently convinced that US engagement on the world stage is a triumph for peace and justice. I'm not so sure. After nine months in office, Obama has a clear track record as a global player. Again and again, US negotiators have chosen not to strengthen international laws and protocols but rather to weaken them, often leading other rich countries in a race to the bottom.
Of course, Obama has made some good moves on the world stage--not siding with the coup government in Honduras, supporting a UN Women's Agency... But a clear pattern has emerged: in areas where other wealthy nations were teetering between principled action and negligence, US interventions have tilted them toward negligence. If this is the new era of multilateralism, it is no prize.Of all the explanations for Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the one that rang truest... more
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The energy efficiency revolution that is now under way will transform everything from lighting to transportation. With lighting, for example, shifting from incandescent bulbs to the newer light-emitting diodes (LEDs), combined with motion sensors to turn lights off in unoccupied spaces, can cut electricity use by more than 90 percent. Los Angeles, for example, is replacing its 140,000 street lights with LEDs—and cutting electricity and maintenance costs by $10 million per year.
The carbon-cutting movement is gaining momentum on many fronts. In July, the Sierra Club—coordinator of the national anti-coal campaign—announced the hundredth cancellation of a proposed plant since 2001. This battle is leading to a de facto moratorium on new coal plants. Despite the coal industry's $45-million annual budget to promote "clean coal," utilities are giving up on coal and starting to close plants. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), with 11 coal plants (average age 47 years) and a court order to install over $1 billion worth of pollution controls, is considering closing its plant near Rogersville, Tennessee, along with the six oldest units out of eight in its Stevenson, Alabama, plant.
TVA is not alone. Altogether, some 22 coal-fired power plants in 12 states are being replaced by wind farms, natural gas plants, wood chip plants, or efficiency gains. Many more are likely to close as public pressure to clean up the air and to cut carbon emissions intensifies. Shifting from coal to natural gas cuts carbon emissions by roughly half. Shifting to wind, solar, and geothermal energy drops them to zero.
State governments are getting behind renewables big time. Thirty-four states have adopted renewable portfolio standards to produce a larger share of their electricity from renewable sources over the next decade or so. Among the more populous states, the renewable standard is 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Illinois, and 33 percent in California.
While coal plants are closing, wind farms are multiplying. In 2008, a total of 102 wind farms came online, providing more than 8,400 megawatts of generating capacity. Forty-nine wind farms were completed in the first half of 2009 and 57 more are under construction. More important, some 300,000 megawatts of wind projects (think 300 coal plants) are awaiting access to the grid.
U.S. solar cell installations are growing at 40 percent a year. With new incentives, this rapid growth in rooftop installations on homes, shopping malls, and factories should continue. In addition, some 15 large solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity are planned in California, Arizona, and Nevada. A new heat-storage technology that enables the plants to continue generating power for up to six hours past sundown helps explain this boom.
For many years, U.S. geothermal energy was confined largely to the huge Geysers project north of San Francisco, with 850 megawatts of generating capacity. Now the United States, with 132 geothermal power plants under development, is experiencing a geothermal renaissance.
After their century-long love-affair with the car, Americans are turning to mass transit. There is hardly a U.S. city that is not either building new light rail, subways, or express bus lines or upgrading and expanding existing ones.
As motorists turn to public transit, and also to bicycles, the U.S. car fleet is shrinking. The estimated scrappage of 14 million cars in 2009 will exceed new sales of 10 million by 4 million, shrinking the fleet 2 percent in one year. This shrinkage will likely continue for a few years.
Oil use and imports are both declining. This will continue as the new fuel economy standards raise the fuel efficiency of new cars 42 percent and light trucks 25 percent by 2016. And since 42 percent of the diesel fuel burned in the rail freight sector is used to haul coal, falling coal use means falling diesel fuel use.The energy efficiency revolution that is now under way will transform everything from... more
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You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are todayYou would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on... more
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ScottP
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A new report put together by Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University examines how environmentally friendly digital music distribution is in comparison to traditional methods. Turns out, carbon emissions and energy use can be cut by 40% to 80%, depending on a few factors, including packaging, shopping methods and delivery methods.A new report put together by Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Civil and... more
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A revolutionary UN scheme to cut carbon emissions by paying poorer countries to preserve their forests is a recipe for corruption and will be hijacked by organized crime without safeguards, a Guardian investigation has found.
The UN, the World Bank, the UK and individuals including Prince Charles have strongly backed UN plans to expand the global carbon market to allow countries to trade the carbon stored in forests.
If, as expected, this is agreed at crucial UN climate change talks taking place in Bangkok this week and concluding in Copenhagen in December, up to $30bn a year could be transferred from rich countries to the owners of endangered forests.
But experts on all sides of the debate, from international police to politicians to conservationists, have warned this week that the scheme, called Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (Redd), may be impossible to monitor and may already be leading to fraud. The UN itself accepts there are "high risks".
Interpol, the world's leading policing agency, said this week that the chances were very high that criminal gangs would seek to take advantage of Redd schemes, which will be largely be based in corruption-prone African and Asian countries.
"Alarm bells are ringing. It is simply too big to monitor. The potential for criminality is vast and has not been taken into account by the people who set it up," said Peter Younger, Interpol environment crimes specialist and author of a new report for the World Bank on illegal forestry.
"Organised crime syndicates are eyeing the nascent forest carbon market. I will report to the bank that Redd schemes are open to wide abuse," he said.
The significance of the felling of forests across great swaths of the world cannot be overstated - it is are responsible for about 20% of the globe's entire carbon emissions. With governments anxious to find new ways to meet increasingly stringent national emission targets, a scheme which promises to benefit poor countries, cut emissions cheaply and not require any new technology is highly attractive.
But most of the countries rich in forests are also home to some of the world's most corrupt politicians and uncontrolled logging companies, who stand to make billions of dollars if they can get Redd projects approved.
"Fraud could include claiming credits for forests that do not exist or were not protected or by land grabs. It starts with bribery or intimidation of officials, then there's threats and violence against those people. There's forged documents too," said Younger. "Carbon trading transcends borders. I do not see any input from any law enforcement agency in planning Redd."A revolutionary UN scheme to cut carbon emissions by paying poorer countries to... more
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Minqi Li: Despite the rhetoric the US and China are not doing much about carbon emissions
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Shelley Pack and Sarah Norton, Planet Green's "Keep it Green Girls" give the cliffnotes version of their favorite movie!Shelley Pack and Sarah Norton, Planet Green's "Keep it Green Girls" give the... more
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Want to know what countries are falling to do the work on climate change
check it out
Come on people, NO EARTH NO PEOPLE
If we start taking care of the earth ,the earth will take care of usWant to know what countries are falling to do the work on climate change
check it... more
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"I’ve gathered some interesting facts as it relates to the use of natural resources and the creation of waste. The base facts have been compiled from various sources including the Environmental Protection Agency, Earth911.com, and the National Recycling Coalition. Where necessary, I have scaled the data in such a way to make it representative of the impact that a single individual (you) has on the environment over the course of a lifetime. These facts are representative of a typical individual in the U.S. Unless you are a green-freak, it is very likely that the statistics here provide a direct representation of your personal impact on the environment. I, of course, welcome all polite corrections to this information. Let’s get started…""I’ve gathered some interesting facts as it relates to the use of natural resources... more
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US has once again made unreasonable demands that developing countries adopt similar emission reduction targets as the rich countries. Such demands are against the Bali (Climate Conference) Action Plan and threaten to derail the climate negotiations.US has once again made unreasonable demands that developing countries adopt similar... more
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In the last week, two major utilities - California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and New Mexico’s largest utility, the Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) - have left the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of its stance on climate change.In the last week, two major utilities - California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas... more
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Researchers at MIT have shown the benefits of a new approach toward eliminating carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions at coal-burning power plants.
Their system, called pressurized oxy-fuel combustion, provides a way of separating all of the carbon-dioxide emissions produced by the burning of coal, in the form of a concentrated, pressurized liquid stream. This allows for carbon dioxide sequestration: the liquid CO2 stream can be injected into geological formations deep enough to prevent their escape into the atmosphere.
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It might seem paradoxical to reduce the carbon footprint of a coal plant by making its emissions into a more concentrated stream of carbon dioxide. But Ahmed Ghoniem, the Ronald C. Crane (1972) Professor of Mechanical Engineering and leader of the MIT team analyzing this new technology, explains: "this is the first step. Before you sequester, you have to concentrate and pressurize" the greenhouse gases. "You have to redesign the power plant so that it produces a pure stream of pressurized liquid carbon dioxide, to make it sequestration ready."
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Ghoniem says even though this process uses more energy at the beginning of the combustion cycle because of the need to separate oxygen from air and pressurize it, the increased efficiency of the power cycle raises the net output of the plant and reduces the compression work needed to deliver CO2 at the requisite state for sequestration, as compared to the unpressurized carbon-capture systems; in other words, the overall energy penalty is reduced. "You have to deliver carbon dioxide at high pressure for sequestration," he points out. The system simply introduces some pressurization earlier in the process, so the output stream requires less compression at the end of the process while extracting more energy from the combustion gases.
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Ghoniem concedes that much more research is still needed for CCS technology. The three areas that need study most, he says, are systems' integration to determine the operating conditions at which the different components work together for highest efficiency; component-level research to optimize of the design of individual parts of the new system, especially the combustion chamber; and process analysis to examine the details of the physics and chemistry involved. His group has been concentrating on detailed computer simulations of the process to aid in the design of better systems.
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This caught my eye! It seems like an effective way to address CO2 emissions, but what are the costs of injecting liquid CO2 into the planet?!Researchers at MIT have shown the benefits of a new approach toward eliminating... more
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