#greenhouse gas emissions
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"The prospects of the world staying within the 1.5C limit on global heating have brightened owing to the “staggering” growth of renewable energy and green investment in the past two years, the chief of the world’s energy watchdog has said.
Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, and the world’s foremost energy economist, said much more needed to be done but that the rapid uptake of solar power and electric vehicles were encouraging.
“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” he said in an interview. “Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investments in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase.” ...
The IEA, in a report entitled Net Zero Roadmap, published on Tuesday morning, also called on developed countries with 2050 net zero targets, including the UK, to bring them forward by several years.
The report found “almost all countries must move forward their targeted net zero dates”, which for most developed countries are 2050. Some developed countries have earlier dates, such as Germany with 2045 and Austria and Iceland with 2040 and for many developing countries they are much later, 2060 in the case of China and 2070 for India.
Cop28, the UN climate summit to be held in Dubai this November and December, offered a key opportunity for countries to set out tougher emissions-cutting plans, Birol said.
He wants to see Cop28 agree a tripling of renewable energy by 2030, and a 75% cut in methane from the energy sector by the same date. The latter could be achieved at little cost, because high gas prices mean that plugging leaks from oil and gas wells can be profitable...
He also called for Cop28 to agree a doubling of energy efficiency. “To reduce fossil fuel emissions, we need to reduce demand for fossil fuels. This is a golden condition, if we are to reach our climate goals,” he said.
Birol stopped short of endorsing the call that some countries have made for a full phase-out of fossil fuels by 2050 to be agreed at Cop28, but he said all countries must work on reducing their fossil fuel use."
-via The Guardian, September 26, 2023
#climate change#sustainability#climate anxiety#climate and environment#climate crisis#climate news#climate emergency#global warming#environment#climate action#iea#international politics#international energy agency#cop28#united nations#greenhouse gas emissions#fossil fuels#renewable energy#solar power#electric vehicles#ev#solar panels#climate tech#good news#hope#hope posting#hopepunk
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#renewable power#renewable energy#greenhouse gas emissions#green technology#green energy#environmentalism#good news#science#environment#nature#climate change#climate crisis
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https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2022/07/15/navajo-nation-citizen-science-pollution
Methane pollution is poorly tracked, so Diné activists are monitoring it themselves.
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From behind her FLIR GF320 infrared camera, Kendra Pinto sees plumes of purple smoke otherwise invisible to the naked eye. They’re full of methane and volatile organic compounds, and they’re wafting out of an oil tank in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin.
Pinto, a member of the Diné (Navajo) community and field advocate with environmental group Earthworks, relies on this device in her fight to keep her community’s air clean. She lives in the Eastern Agency of the Navajo Nation, home to booming oil and gas production.
“When I walk outside, I can’t just think about fresh air. I’m thinking about the VOCs. I’m thinking about the methane that I’m breathing in, because I know what’s out there,” Pinto said. “I see it all the time.”
She’s one of countless citizen scientists across the country who are tracking and reporting environmental harms committed by the oil and gas industry to regulators. And here, there are many: The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that each year, New Mexico’s oil and gas companies emit more than 1.1 million metric tons of methane, a greenhouse gas around 86 times more potent in its warming potential than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Much of this comes from wasted natural gas—$271 million of it in this state alone, according to the EDF. It leaks out of faulty equipment and is intentionally expelled through the processes of venting and flaring, in which excess, unrefined natural gas is released or burned from oil wells and refineries to eliminate waste or reduce pressure buildups.
This is bad for the planet—high volumes of methane released into the atmosphere accelerate the pace of the climate crisis. It’s also bad for the people who live around it who are exposed to the pollutants that typically come along with methane emissions, like benzene, a carcinogen, and PM2.5 and PM10—particulate matter small enough to get lodged deep in the lungs. Pinto said her neighbors experience disproportionately high rates of headaches, nosebleeds, allergies, and respiratory issues, like sinus and throat discomfort.
“I think the scariest thing about methane is it’s odorless,” Pinto said. “It’s a silent killer. And if my neighbors are breathing it in, that’s worrisome.”
These emissions and the fossil fuel development that causes them have long been “insufficiently regulated,” said Jon Goldstein, senior director of regulatory and legislative affairs at EDF. In 2020, then-president Donald Trump rolled back Obama-era regulations on methane that effectively eliminated the requirement that oil and gas companies monitor and repair methane leaks in their infrastructure.
The Senate voted to reinstate them in April 2021, and last November, the Biden administration announced it would introduce even more comprehensive regulations in an interagency effort to crack down on emissions from the oil and gas sector. As part of the plan, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed its own rules, which include a requirement that states reduce methane emissions from thousands of sources nationwide, and a provision that encourages the use of new technology designed to find major leaks. A final methane rule is expected to be implemented later this year.
The Navajo Nation, too, is taking things into its own hands: The Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency is currently considering adopting a permitting program to regulate methane from oil and gas development on its land.
Here, methane emissions from oil and gas companies are 65% higher than the national average, seeping out of pipelines, oil rigs, and the like. The San Juan Basin, some 150 miles northwest of Santa Fe, has received a failing grade from the American Lung Association for ozone pollution, or smog, the result of the combination between VOCs and radiation from sunlight.
Exposure to ozone has been tied to degraded respiratory health and asthma attacks, and it’s typically seen in cities, Goldstein said.
“The San Juan Basin isn’t home to large cities,” he said. In San Juan County, ozone is the result of the widespread build-out of oil and gas wells; approximately half of the county’s 50,000 residents who identify as Indigenous live within half a mile of those wells, according to EDF.
Catching emissions at the source will be crucial to changing this legacy. And where regulators can’t (or won’t) step in, residents like Pinto are. The federal government is now relying upon community monitoring, or work that citizens do to contribute to public understanding of the scope of air pollution near fossil fuel sites, a development that Eric Kills A Hundred, tribal energy program manager at EDF, believes will be “huge.”
The EPA’s methane proposal includes a plan to implement a program to “empower the public to detect and report large emission events for appropriate follow-up by owners and operators,” according to an agency news release.
During the comment period for the EPA’s proposed community monitoring program, members of the petroleum industry questioned whether the agency has the authority to establish it at all, primarily objecting to the idea that air quality monitoring be conducted by entities other than agencies and producers themselves, E&E News reported in May.
But Pinto said groups like Earthworks have a track record of doing this work long before federal regulators began tapping them for their data collection.
“Documenting these types of emissions is important because no one else is really doing it,” she said. “Even the agencies that are regulating this type of thing. Because we’re in a rural area, what can they actually capture when they come out here? Are they going to more than 100 sites?”
Kills A Hundred said these efforts are not only about what the Navajo Nation can contribute to government data on methane pollution, they’re also about empowering the community to play a role in stopping it.
“Having been the stewards of the land for so long,” he said, “it’s just so important for these communities to be active and raise their voice.”
#indigenous#native american#climate crisis#methane#fossil fuels#greenhouse gas emissions#navajo#dine#diné#navajo nation#epa#environmental action#pollution#science
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The key section of the IPCC report, which ignited the controversy, was fiercely fought over by scientists and governments up until the last moments before the document was finalised. The handful of mentions of CDR in the final 36-page summary for policymakers – which distils the key messages and is compiled by scientists alongside government representatives from any UN member that wants to take part – were only inserted after hours of desperate wrangling.
Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries were most insistent that CDR and CCS should be included and emphasised. In the end, nine references to CDR were left in the summary, and several more to CCS.
“Saudi Arabia brought 10 very experienced negotiators,” said one person. “They tried to take out references to renewable energy and tried to insist that references to carbon capture should be in there instead of, or at least as well as, renewables.”
But many scientists, campaigners and green experts are unhappy with the references. They fear that giving the impression there are viable options for removing carbon dioxide might engender a false sense of security. Most CDR technologies are unproven, are likely to be limited in scope, take years to develop and will cost large amounts of money.
Lili Fuhr, the director of the climate and energy programme at the Center for International Environmental Law, said: “We need to challenge the idea that we have to do less now, because we can do more later, with technofixes. This is a dangerous idea.”
Friederike Otto, a lead author of the IPCC, and senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said: “My feeling about CDR is that we should pretend it is not an option. We should act as if CDR will never be achievable. We do not have a technology at the moment that works at scale … so we should make our policies as if CDR is not an option.”
She said pursuing CDR could be a dangerous distraction, and questioned whether it was a good idea to spend money on technologies that offered highly uncertain future benefits, when viable ways of reducing emissions now were not being deployed fast enough. “CDR has already been used as an excuse to dither and delay,” she said.
Otto said: “It’s very important to highlight that we still can keep to 1.5C – we have the knowledge and the tools to do it. But what we do not have is a sense of urgency and political will.”
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Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:
We are running out of time to take action on climate change, says Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In a speech titled “Two Years to Save the World,” Stiell emphasized that governments, development banks and business leaders must take steps to avert much more serious impacts of the climate crisis within that time frame, reported Reuters.
“For those who say that climate change is only one of many priorities, like ending poverty, ending hunger, ending pandemics, or improving education, I simply say this: none of these crucial tasks — indeed none of the Sustainable Development Goals — will be possible unless we get the climate crisis under control,” Stiell said in the speech, delivered at London thinktank Chatham House.
According to the UN, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030 is essential to keep global heating to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels. However, for 10 consecutive months, global temperatures have reached record highs, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said.
“As of today, national climate plans — called Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs — in aggregate will barely cut emissions at all by 2030,” Stiell said. “We still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble, with a new generation of national climate plans. But we need these stronger plans, now. And while every country must submit a new plan, the reality is G20 emissions are around 80% of global emissions.”
The focus of the UN COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, will be for nations to come up with new climate finance goals to support developing countries in tackling climate change and making the transition away from fossil fuels, Reuters reported.
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Tobacco already kills eight million people every year, and, irrespective of any impact of newer products like e-cigarettes, the huge global burden of tobacco mortality and morbidity can be expected to remain for decades to come. Tobacco growing, manufacturing, distribution, and use, all contribute to global warming through the emission of greenhouse gases. In fact, the tobacco product life cycle releases an estimated 80 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent every single year. The tobacco industry’s emissions are larger than those for entire countries, including Denmark, Croatia and Afghanistan, and are comparable to emissions from the oil, fast fashion and meat industries.
‘Plastics, the Environment and the Tobacco Industry’, Tobacco Tactics
#Tobacco Tactics#Tobacco#e-cigarettes#tobacco mortality#tobacco morbidity#greenhouse gas emissions#global warming#tobacco industry#tobacco product life cycle
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youtube
The Biden administration is pausing new projects, for environmental reasons, to increase the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG) overseas.
Natural gas by itself is the least bad fossil fuel. But gas cannot be shipped – so it needs to be liquefied. This process causes it to become more damaging to the climate.
There's also the matter of methane leaks associated with natural gas.
Donald Trump has already stated that on Day One of his dictatorship that he will "drill drill drill". Trump is an existential threat to the planet.
#liquefied natural gas#lng#methane leaks#climate change#fossil fuels#jennifer granholm#greenhouse gas emissions#the environment#ali velshi#joe biden#biden administration#donald trump#existential threat#drill drill drill#election 2024
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Things can be done. There can be change for the better.
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"Although methane is harmful in its effect on our climate, a new study of the greenhouse gas shows that its effects are not as intense as previously thought.
The biggest sources of methane gas emissions come from coal, oil, and gas development, although emissions from agriculture is probably the most heavily publicized.
As the planet absorbs heat from the sun, it would naturally radiate this long-wave energy back out into space. But greenhouse gasses trap the heat inside the atmosphere, causing ‘the greenhouse effect’.
Scientists at the University of California-Riverside have now found that methane also absorbs short-wave energy, which, through the creation of cooling clouds, actually cancels 30% of its own heat (the heat which the gas has created in the greenhouse effect).
Specifically, it creates more low-level clouds that offset the short-wave energy from the sun and fewer high-level clouds which increase the outward radiation of long-wave energy from the Earth.
“This has implications for understanding in more detail how methane and perhaps other greenhouses gases can impact the climate system,” said Robert Allen, UCR assistant professor of Earth sciences. “Shortwave absorption softens the overall warming and rain-increasing effects but does not eradicate them at all.”
They also found, as Allen says, that methane cancels 60% of increased levels of precipitation predicted under global warming models—yet more good news for cities and towns around flood zones.
For a number of reasons, this could be a revolutionary discovery. The EPA says that methane’s greenhouse effect is 34 times that of CO2.
Using the U.S. as an example, methane accounts for only around 10% of the nation’s emissions. The lifespan of a methane molecule in terms of its harmful affect on climate is around 9 years.
This means that methane emitted 9 years ago is no longer causing a greenhouse effect. By contrast, the greenhouse effect of CO2 molecules is more than 1,000 years.
For years, climate scientists have known that methane was a critical greenhouse gas for humanity to target, but now we can create more accurate models that reflect how methane is 30% less harmful than we thought and it counteracts 60% of its own harmful rain effects."
-via Good News Network, 3/28/23
The study was published in the renowned journal Nature, and there's a full open access copy here!
#global warming#climate change#emissions#methane#greenhouse gasses#greenhouse gas emissions#nature#agriculture#atmospheric science#carbon dioxide#good news#hope#science and technology
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#good news#science#environmentalism#carbon emissions#carbon reduction#greenhouse gas emissions#co2 emissions
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This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels.
This, at least temporarily, exceeds the 1.5C benchmark set as a target in the Paris climate agreement but that landmark deal will not be considered breached unless this trend continues on a decadal scale.
“If the anomaly does not stabilise by August – a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events – then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated.”
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DISCLAIMER: Please do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
Masks and diapers for cows to stop 'climate change'
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Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
Over the past 20 years, cement manufacturers have quietly doubled their carbon dioxide emissions, highlighting a sector that has received relatively little public scrutiny despite contributing nearly three times as much to global warming as the airline industry. With cement production only expected to increase through mid-century, a growing number of people are now calling for a more concerted effort to tackle concrete’s expanding carbon footprint.
Scientists say that the cement industry will need to decrease its annual emissions by at least 16 percent by 2030 to be in line with the Paris Agreement. But between 2002 and 2021, the industry’s global emissions doubled from 1.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide to nearly 2.9 billion tons, according to data from the CICERO Center for International Climate Research and the Global Carbon Project that was shared with the Associated Press.
Cement manufacturing now accounts for at least 8 percent of all the world’s CO2 emissions. In comparison, aviation accounts for about 2.8 percent of total global emissions, according to a 2020 report from the International Energy Agency.
“Cement emissions have grown faster than most other carbon sources,” Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University who leads the Global Carbon Project, told the AP, adding that the climbing emissions can largely be tied to increased manufacturing in China.
Used to build much of the infrastructure that enables today’s modern society—think roads, bridges, buildings and even the ground you walk on—concrete is the second-most widely used substance on Earth, behind only water. And according to the IEA, the cement sector is the third-largest consumer of energy and the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide when looking at industrial players alone.
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