Tag Archives: Emissions

PLEA Network

29 December 2015 IACentre, Winner of Project Consored top 25 articles for 2009 – 2010 news stories: Pentagon’s role in global catastrophe. In evaluating the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — with more than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets — it is important to ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions? By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements. 

The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its 6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits or included in any count. The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon’s aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. At the time, the U.S. Navy had 285 combat and support ships and around 4,000 operational aircraft. The U.S. Army had 28,000 armored vehicles, 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, more than 4,000 combat helicopters, several hundred fixed-wing aircraft and 187,493 fleet vehicles. Except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which spread radioactive pollution, all their other vehicles run on oil. Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon. Read More here

PLEA Network

23 December 2015, Carbon News Network, Improving soils cuts carbon and grows more food. One straightforward way to combat both climate change and mass hunger is to replace carbon lost from the soil. All sorts of clever, expensive and downright daft ideas for removing carbon from the atmosphere have been suggested, but one of the simplest and most effective – building up carbon in the soil – hardly rates a mention. It is a process that happens naturally, but intensive agriculture, deep ploughing, heavy artificial fertiliser use and cutting down forests have impoverished soils worldwide. If the process could be reversed by adding extra organic matter to the soil each year, then the worst effects of climate change could be averted. Although the issue was hardly raised in the two weeks of negotiations on theParis Agreement in early December, behind the scenes the way farmers produce crops remains central to knowing whether we can hope to avoid the full impact of the warming climate. More than 100 of the 196 countries present in Paris which submitted plans beforehand on how to reduce their own carbon emissions put agriculture, forestry and replacing carbon in soils into their programmes. Better yields Also, on the fringes of the conference, the CGIAR Consortium, a partnership of leading agricultural research organisations, announced a US$225 million five-year plan to mitigate climate change by putting carbon back into the soil while improving developing world agricultural yields. This is part of a much longer-running international initiative started by France,the 4% Initiative, which aims to increase the carbon content of soil by four parts per thousand each year, enough to counteract human interference with the climate from the continued burning of fossil fuels. Read More here

PLEA Network

23 December 2015, Carbon Pulse, Dirtier energy mix pushes up Australia’s GHG emissions. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions rose 1.3% in 2014-15 to 549.3 million tonnes of CO2e, according to government data, as coal use increased after the carbon tax repeal. Electricity generation emissions increased 3% to 186.1 million tonnes of CO2e in the twelve months to June 2015, according to data from the Department of the Environment. “This increase corresponds to a flatlining in demand in the National Electricity Market (NEM) between the year to June 2014 and the year to June 2015 … combined with an increase in the emissions intensity of delivered electricity,” the report said. Electricity emissions from black coal rose 1.4% and brown coal 9.7%, the report said. Wind and other renewables increased 12.2%, but gas (6.2%) and hydro (30.3%0 saw drops. The comeback of coal in the generation mix has been well documented by NEM analysts, and coincided with the July 1, 2014 removal of the carbon tax. Most other sectors of the economy also saw higher GHG emissions in 2014-15, but this was partly offset by a 3.4% drop from agiculture, largely due to declining beef cattle population, a reduction in sheep numbers and reduced production of several key crops. Compared to 2005, Australia’s emissions have dropped 10.2%. Its target according to its DNC is to reduce emissions 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030. Australia now emits 23.2 tonnes of CO2e per capita, a 28.4% drop from 1990 but still among the highest in the developed world. Read More here

 

PLEA Network

15 December 2015, The Conversation, How emissions trading at Paris climate talks has set us up for failure. The Paris Agreement has mostly been greeted with enthusiasm, though it contains at least one obvious flaw. Few seem to have noticed that the main tool mooted for keeping us within the 2℃ global warming target is a massive expansion of carbon trading, including offsetting, which allows the market exchange of credits between companies and nations to achieve an overall emissions reduction. That’s despite plenty of evidence that markets haven’t worked well enough, or quickly enough, to actually keep the planet safe. The debate over whether to include carbon markets in the final agreement came right to the wire. Some left-leaning Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia vehemently opposed any mention, while the EU, Brazil, and New Zealand, among other countries, pushed hard for their inclusion – with support from the World Bank, the IMF and many business groups. Play with words What we have ended up with is some murky semantics. Though terms such as “carbon trading”, “carbon pricing”, “carbon offsetting” and “carbon markets” don’t appear anywhere in the text, the agreement is littered with references to a whole range of new and expanded market-based tools. Article 6 refers to “voluntary cooperation” between countries in the implementation of their emissions targets “to allow for higher ambition in their mitigation and adaptation actions”. If that’s not exactly plain speak, then wait for how carbon trading is referred to as “internationally transferred mitigation outcomes”. The same Article also provides for an entirely new, UN-controlled international market mechanism. All countries will be able to trade carbon with each other, helping each to achieve their national targets for emissions cuts. While trading between companies, countries or blocs of countries is done on a voluntary basis, the new mechanism, dubbed the Sustainable Development Mechanism (SDM), will be set up to succeed the existing Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism, providing for a massive expansion of carbon trading and offsetting while setting some basic standards. Read More here