Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
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The Little Solar Station That Could
The Columbia Generating Station, a nuclear power plant at Washington state’s Hanford nuclear reservation, sits just one mile from the White Bluffs Solar Station. For the past three weeks, Energy Northwest, the Pacific Northwest’s nuclear power producer, has been generating a tiny amount of electricity from solar panels at White Bluffs and selling it to […]
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Inuit Intuition
There is no word in the Inuit language for a robin, but suddenly, there are robins in Inuit territory — the vast, frozen lands of the Arctic. Mostly frozen, that is; this spring, there are bare spots in the tundra snow, just one of many signs that the far north is thawing. Other signs include […]
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Snoop Dog
Almost everyone’s been embarrassed at one time or another by an over-eager dog sniffing in the wrong places. Now car owners have to worry about the “smog dog,” designed to “sniff” tailpipes to detect air pollution. Formally called the AccuScan Remote Vehicle Emissions Testing System, the smog dog analyzes exhaust from cars as they pass […]
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Fatwa Alberta
Canada’s already-tense internal battle over whether to ratify the Kyoto Treaty on climate change heated up further yesterday, when the province of Alberta withdrew from negotiations after its alternative emissions-cutting plan was rejected by the other provinces and territories. In response, Alberta resigned as co-chair of the commission formed to negotiate climate issues and refused […]
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New Sue Review
Oral arguments were heard yesterday in the U.S. EPA’s lawsuit against the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider. Lawyers for the EPA argued that the TVA violated the New Source Review rule of the Clean Air Act by failing to install state-of-the-art pollution-control equipment when upgrading its older coal-burning power plants. Lawyers […]
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Greener Pastures
New Zealand is home to a staggering 45 million sheep and 8 million cattle, which together produce 90 percent of the country’s methane emissions — or about 43 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. To meet the terms of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, New Zealand has to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions […]
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Nothing Could Be Refiner
Ever since the 1970s, heavy trucks and buses have been allowed to use diesel virtually without regulation, because the fuel enjoyed a special status under clean air policies. But that could finally change after a federal appeals court ruled against oil refiners on Friday, upholding new U.S. EPA regulations to clean up trucks and buses. […]
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Out From the Cold
While average global temperatures are on the way up, Antarctica has cooled overall in the last few decades, a trend that has puzzled scientists. To make matters more baffling, a small peninsula of the continent has simultaneously been warming 10 times faster than the rest of the world. Now scientists are speculating that the region’s […]
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Middle Earth in the Balance
Seems like everyone but the U.S. is working on a way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that fuel global warming. Yesterday, the New Zealand government proposed levying a tax of about $10 per ton of CO2 to meet the targets of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The tax would go […]
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Whoa, We’re Halfway There
While the U.S. still bandies about toothless plans to cut greenhouse gases, the European Union is almost halfway to achieving the emissions reductions mandated by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. According to the European Environment Agency, the 15-nation bloc has successfully decreased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 3.5 percent below […]
