carbon
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China may emit more carbon per person than U.S. by 2017
China is now the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, but its per-capita emissions are still less than those of the average U.S. citizen. In six years, that could flip, says a new report from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency that was sponsored by the European Commission. Current U.S. per-capita emissions are 16.9 […]
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Scientists build machine to suck carbon from the air
This machine sucks carbon out of the air like a Ghostbusters beam snarfing up ectoplasm. The idea is that if we can build millions of these babies, and find a good place to stick the carbon they capture, we can start to bring down Earth's already-dangerous levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
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Critical List: Solar installations increasing; giant snails invade Miami
The number of non-residential solar panel installations is growing.
Disasters connected to weather or climate made more than 30 million people in Asia refugees last year, the Asian Development Bank reports.
Oil industry consultant Daniel Yergin wrote a new book about energy. It'll probably annoy you.
A professor in Canada made a machine that could suck carbon out of the air. -
Do individual green actions matter? Maybe not, says New York Times
The Huffington Post's eco-etiquette column yesterday featured a question from “Kimberly,” who writes "I used to be enthusiastic about going green, but now I feel like what's the point? Like a stupid reusable water bottle is going to make a difference…" She got a comforting answer, but if she’d written to the New York Times, op-ed contributor Gernot Wagner might have told her she might as well pack it in.
HuffPo’s advice columnist Jennifer Grayson identified Kimberly’s problem — "You're having a F**k it moment right now" — and told her to step back, take a breather, and "remember that individual actions do make a difference."
But Wagner, an economist with the Environmental Defense Fund, has a different answer for people like Kimberly:
[S]adly, individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it doesn’t add up to enough. Self-interest, not self-sacrifice, is what induces noticeable change. ...
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Critical List: Keystone XL protests begin; Fukushima area could be uninhabitable for decades
In DC, protests against the Keystone XL pipeline began this weekend. The first round of protesters that cops arrested sat in jail through the weekend, longer than police had said they'd be detained.
The area around Fukushima has levels of radioactivity so high, it could be uninhabitable for decades.
The U.K. cycling industry contributes more than $4.7 billion to the country's economy each year. -
Where do greenhouse gases come from?
This chart from the United Nations Environment Programme (click to embiggen) looks complicated, sort of like a traffic sign cross-bred with a banyan tree. But it basically just traces the path of greenhouse gases from polluting industries, through uses, out into the atmosphere. So you can tell at a glance, for instance, that energy industries […]
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Critical List: Mitt Romney doesn’t believe in carbon; Halliburton’s profits are up
Mitt Romney doesn't think carbon is a pollutant and doesn't think the EPA should regulate it. But he has said that we should reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. May he doesn't understand what those words mean?
The hybrid electric flying car! (Brought to you by the military-industrial complex.)
Climate change could wipe out whitebark pine trees in the West, but the Fish and Wildlife Service can't be bothered to list the trees as endangered, or even threatened. -
Study: Earth losing its climate change defenses
Like your body, the planet can heal itself a little bit. Some places, like forests and oceans, are carbon sinks -- they absorb carbon from the atmosphere, slowing down the rate at which everything goes to hell. But climate change is no papercut, and as it gets worse, it’s actually breaking the planet’s immune system. Two new studies in Nature argue that two types of carbon sinks -- oceans and soil -- are becoming less effective as climate change advances.
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Critical List: Republicans vote to give states power over clean water; deer ticks in the Great Lakes
House Republicans voted yesterday to let states decide whether a company is living up to the Clean Water Act or not. The EPA's decision to prevent West Virginia coal companies from dumping waste into rivers prompted the bill to begin with, so it's pretty safe to assume that the bill's not meant to strengthen CWA protections.
The federal government says the cost of carbon is $21 per ton; a group of pro-environment economists says the cost is closer to $900 per ton.
China's feeding its "strategic pork reserve" with soybeans grown in Brazil on environmentally sensitive land.
As Moscow more than doubles in size, it will raze acres of forestland.