Tag: Carbon emissions

Hydrogen’s Hidden Emissions

In just a few years, hydrogen has shot into mainstream conversations about tackling the climate crisis. It is now one of the most hotly discussed energy topics, and a very particular form of hydrogen known as fossil hydrogen (or ‘blue hydrogen’) is being pushed by the fossil fuel industry for government backing.

They claim it is climate friendly and can help with efforts to decarbonize our energy system, as it involves the use of carbon capture technology to trap and store emissions. One of the very few plants of this type, “Quest” is owned by Shell in Alberta, Canada.

Shell have boasted about the project as an example of how it is tackling global heating, claiming that the project demonstrates that carbon capture systems are “safe and effective” and is a “thriving example” of how this technology can significantly reduce carbon emissions.

COP26 Negotiators Do Little To Cut Emissions

Many climate advocates and vulnerable nations entered this year’s conference hoping to address an enduring failure of the Paris Agreement, which said nothing about fossil fuels. But a draft agreement released on Saturday included only one reference, calling on parties to accelerate phasing out “unabated” coal consumption and “inefficient” subsidies for fossil fuels more broadly. Explicit references to oil and gas were absent.

Carbon emissions climate crisis COP26 Oil and Gas

China And Solutions To Climate Change

Last year, President Xi Jinping, pledged that China’s CO2 emissions would peak before 2030, and China would become carbon neutral before 2060.

China has a track history of setting ambitious, nearly impossible goals and then achieving them–often before deadline–so this pledge is significant. Under the CPC, China has already created “an economic miracle” in transforming China into the largest economy in the world. It ended extreme poverty while creating the largest middle class in the world. It has virtually eradicated Covid through non-pharmaceutical methods, while vaccinating up to 20 million people daily, and pledging the largest number of vaccines (2.2 Billion) and distributing over 1 Billion-to the rest of the world.

Carbon emissions China climate crisis Green Economy

COP26: How The World’s Militaries Hide Their Huge Carbon Emissions

Climate change leadership requires more than stirring speeches. It means facing up to hard truths. One truth that governments around the world are struggling with is the immense contribution their militaries are making to the climate crisis.

For example, the US Department of Defense is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world – and the largest institutional emitter. Two of us worked on a 2019 study which showed that if the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal. In other words, the US military is a more consequential climate actor than many of the industrialised countries gathered at the COP26 summit in Glasgow.

Carbon emissions climate crisis COP26 Wars and Militarism

Climate Activists To Target UK Airports This Weekend To Protest Expansion

Climate activists will target 10 UK airports this weekend to protest proposed expansion.

Campaigners are planning to protest at Bristol, Doncaster-Sheffield, Gatwick, Glasgow, Leeds-Bradford, London-City, Luton, Liverpool, Manchester and Southampton airports from 11am on Saturday.

The action has been organised by Stay Grounded – a global network of more than 160 member organisations promoting alternatives to aviation to address climate change – as part of the COP26 Coalition Global Action Days, and is calling for the halt of airport expansion and for an end to the “greenwashing” of aviation.

Recommendations from the government advisory body the Climate Change Committee (CCC) stipulate that there should be no further expansion of airport capacity in the UK if the country is to meet its emissions targets.

Airports Carbon emissions climate crisis COP 26

Report: Plastics To Outpace Coal In Driving Climate Change

Bennington, VT – Plastics are on track to contribute more climate change emissions than coal plants by 2030, a new report finds. As fossil fuel companies seek to recoup falling profits, they are increasing plastics production and cancelling out greenhouse gas reductions gained from the recent closures of 65 percent of the country’s coal-fired power plants.

The New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change by Beyond Plastics at Bennington College analyzes never-before-compiled data of ten stages of plastics production, usage, and disposal and finds that the U.S. plastics industry is releasing at least 232 million tons of greenhouse gases each year, the equivalent of 116 average-sized coal-fired power plants.

And that number is growing quickly.

Carbon emissions climate crisis Coal Plastics

Indigenous Resistance Disrupts Billions Of Tons Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Annually

Bemidji, Minnesota — The Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International are releasing a new report titled Indigenous Resistance Against Carbon. The report analyzes the impact that Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel projects in the United States and Canada has had on greenhouse gas emissions over the past 10 years. From the struggle against the Cherry Point coal export terminal in Lummi territory to fights against pipelines crossing critical waterways, Indigenous land defenders have exercised their rights and responsibilities to not only stop fossil fuel projects in their tracks, but establish precedents to build successful social justice movements.

The new report shows that Indigenous communities resisting the more than 20 fossil fuel projects analyzed have stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least 25 percent of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.

Carbon emissions Environment Indigenous Activism Pipelines

Amazon Rainforest Is Releasing More Carbon Than It Stores

Over the last several years researchers have said that the Amazon is on the verge of transforming from a crucial storehouse for heat-trapping gasses to a source of them, a dangerous shift that could destabilize the atmosphere of the planet.

Now, after years of painstaking and inventive research, they have definitively measured that shift.

In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a team of researchers led by scientists from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, reported results from measuring carbon concentrations in columns of air above the Amazon. They found that the massive continental-size swath of tropical forest is releasing more carbon dioxide than it accumulates or stores, thanks to deforestation and fires.

“There is no doubt that the Amazon is a source,” said Luciana Gatti, the lead author of the study.

Amazon Rainforest Carbon emissions climate crisis Environment

Court Rules Germany Must Tighten Climate Law

Berlin – Germany must update its climate law by the end of next year to set out how it will bring carbon emissions down nearly to zero by 2050, its top court ruled on Thursday, siding with a young woman who argued rising sea levels would engulf her family farm.

The court concluded that a law passed in 2019 had failed to make sufficient provision for cuts beyond 2030, casting a shadow over a signature achievement of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s final term in office.

“The challenged provisions do violate the freedoms of the complainants, some of whom are still very young,” the court said in a statement. “The provisions irreversibly offload major emission reduction burdens onto periods after 2030.”

Carbon emissions climate crisis Germany Legal System

Joe Biden’s New Climate Pledge Isn’t Fair Or Ambitious

On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced that the United States will cut emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 as part of its commitment to the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change.

Biden’s announcement came during the administration’s virtual Leaders Summit on Climate, which aimed to push climate action around the world.

A key goal of the summit was “to keep a limit to warming of 1.5 degree Celsius within reach.” A 2018 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that global greenhouse gas emissions need to drop by 50 percent by 2030 to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

But Biden’s emissions pledge will not do enough to reach this goal, according to an analysis by Climate Action Tracker, a scientific organization that measures governmental climate action.

Carbon emissions climate crisis Joe Biden Paris Agreement

Big Banks Make A Dangerous Bet On The World’s Growing Demand For Food

As global banking giants and investment firms vow to divest from polluting energy companies, they’re continuing to bankroll another major driver of the climate crisis: food and farming corporations that are responsible, directly or indirectly, for cutting down vast carbon-storing forests and spewing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

These agricultural investments, largely unnoticed and unchecked, represent a potentially catastrophic blind spot.

“Animal protein and even dairy is likely, and already has started to become, the new oil and gas,” said Bruno Sarda, the former North America president of CDP, a framework through which companies disclose their carbon emissions. “This is the biggest source of emissions that doesn’t have a target on its back.”

Big Banks Carbon emissions Deforestation Food

Coalition Pushes For 50% Carbon Cut By 2030

The United States officially rejoined the Paris Agreement Friday, with climate envoy John Kerry warning that high-stakes negotiations at COP 26 in Glasgow this fall represent the “last, best hope” to avert catastrophic climate change.

“This is a significant day, a day that never had to happen,” Kerry said. “It’s so sad that our previous president, without any scientific basis or any legitimate economic rationale, decided to pull America out. It hurt us and it hurt the world.”

Now, he added, the U.S. is re-entering the landmark 2015 accord “with a lot of humility, for the agony of the last four years”.

The expression of “contrition” from the Biden administration is “balanced by a desire to resume the mantle of leadership at a time when almost every country is struggling to undertake the swift emissions cuts required to avert disastrous global heating of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era, as outlined in the Paris deal,” The Guardian writes.

Carbon emissions climate crisis John Kerry Paris Agreement

Many Overheated Forests May Soon Release More Carbon Than They Absorb

The last decades have been filled with dire warning signs from forests. Global warming has contributed to thinning canopies in European forests and to sudden die-offs of aspen trees in Colorado, as well as insect outbreaks that are killing trees around the world. In many places, forests are not growing back.

New research shows that Earth’s overheated climate will alter forests at a global scale even more fundamentally, by flipping a critical greenhouse gas switch in the next few decades. The study suggests that, by 2040, forests will take up only half as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they do now, if global temperatures keep rising at the present pace.

Carbon emissions Carbon sequestration climate crisis Forests

Are We Really Past The Point Of No Return On Climate?

A controversial new climate study has found that, even if greenhouse gas emissions were halted tomorrow, it might not be enough to stop temperatures from continuing to rise.

The study, published in Scientific Reports Thursday, was conducted by two researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School. They used the ESCIMO climate model to determine that, even if emissions ceased tomorrow, the permafrost would continue to thaw for hundreds of years.

“According to our models, humanity is beyond the point-of-no-return when it comes to halting the melting of permafrost using greenhouse gas cuts as the single tool,” lead author and professor emeritus of climate strategy Jorgen Randers told AFP.

Carbon emissions climate crisis greenhouse gases Sea level rise

Multinational Companies Account For Nearly A Fifth Of Global CO2 Emissions

Rome – The global supply chains of multinational companies such as BP, Coca-Cola and Walmart are responsible for nearly a fifth of climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new study.

But the businesses outsource many of these emissions to poorer parts of the world by investing in production in developing countries, said researchers from University College London and China’s Tianjin University.

Dabo Guan, the study’s co-author, called the work the “first quantitative evidence” on the investment flows and carbon footprints of multinational enterprises (MNEs).

Carbon emissions climate crisis Multinational corporations

Daily movement news and resources