Aviation is responsible for an estimated 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and many believe they could be even more damaging because they release these pollutants high in the atmosphere.
Despite the immense challenges involved
(Reuters) – The warmth generated by human bodies in the Parisian metro will help heat a public housing project in the city center, the capital’s largest owner of social housing said on last week.
The building, located in the famous rue Beaubourg close to the Pompidou museum, is being renovated in an environmentally
Xcel Energy, the largest electric utility in Colorado, Friday filed a plan with the Public Utility Commission that would bring it into compliance with Colorado’s new Clean Air Clean Jobs Act signed into law by Governor Ritter in April. The new law is designed to target encourage steep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants — and to effectively block
Renewable energy is energy which comes from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, and geothermal heat, which are renewable as opposed to fossil fuels for example which once gone are gone. In 2008, about 19% of global final energy consumption came from renewables, with 13% coming from traditional biomass, which is mainly used for heating, and 3.2%
The German government plans to tax airline passengers as much as €26 ($33) per flight as part of a plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and other environmental impacts of the aviation industry and to generate revenue. Passengers will be required to pay €13 per flight up to 1,553 miles within the European Union and €26 for longer flights departing
The drive to extract and store CO2 from coal-fired power plants is gaining momentum, with the Obama administration backing the technology and the world’s first capture and sequestration project now operating in the U.S. Two questions loom: Will carbon capture and storage be affordable? And will it be safe?
On a placid bend of the Ohio River in West Virginia sit two coal-fired power plants. The Philip Sporn Plant boasts four boilers from the 1950s, surrounded by mountains of coal and a series of man-made lakes to contain the toxic residue of its coal-burning.
A faint haze emanates from its main smokestack, the only visible sign of the thousands of tons of acid-rain-forming sulfur dioxide, smog-forming nitrogen oxides, and climate-warming carbon dioxide it emits each day, a consequence of the plant’s complete lack of pollution-control technologies. The 1,100 megawatts of electricity it produces will never benefit from such controls, as they are too expensive to install on the multiple small boilers, according to the plant’s owner, American Electric Power.
A state panel recommended that most of the proceeds from a proposed carbon tax in California, set to take effect in 2012, should be given back to consumers. The 16-member Economic and Allocation Advisory Committee, charged with figuring out the most cost-effective way to implement a tax on carbon emissions, threw its support behind a so-called “cap-and-dividend” approach.
Such a plan would set a steadily decreasing limit on CO2 releases by major emitters, place a price on carbon dioxide emissions, and then give most of the revenue back to citizens.
As the world weighs how to deal with warming, the idea of human manipulation of climate systems is gaining attention. Yet beyond the environmental and technical questions looms a more practical issue: How could governments really commit to supervising geoengineering schemes for centuries?
In the summer of 2006, geoengineering — the radical proposal to offset one human intervention into planetary systems with another — came roaring out of the scientific closet. Deliberate climate modification, as climate scientist Wally Broecker once noted, had long been “one of the few subjects considered taboo in the realm of scientific inquiry.”
For the fourth year in a row, Europe has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions, with CO2 output falling by 1.3 percent in 2008.
The recession appears to be the main factor in the emissions reduction, as factories were idled across the continent. But European Union Environmental Commissioner Stavros Dimas said the EU’s emissions trading scheme and development of renewable energy sources also is playing a part in the reduction.
“This is a timely message to the rest of the world in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference,” said Dimas.
A significant majority of Americans supports President Obama’s efforts to overhaul energy policy and a slight majority favors a controversial program to place a cap and price on carbon dioxide emissions, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans back administration and congressional efforts to combat climate change and develop renewable energy and 55 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the issue, compared with 30 percent who do not.
A key U.S. congressional committee has approved historic legislation that for the first time would put a cap and a price on carbon dioxide emissions. After weeks of debate and an intensive, multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by industry and environmental groups, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a bill calling for a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2020 and an 83 percent reduction by 2050.
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