#emissions

[hope-for-the-planet]

#emissions #climate change #hope #good news #global warming #carbon dioxide #climate anxiety #environmental anxiety

[thefirststarr]

The Ring Nebula (M57), is more complicated than it appears through a small telescope. The central ring is about one light-year across, but this remarkable exposure by the James Webb Space Telescope explores this popular nebula with a deep exposure in infrared light. Strings of gas, like eyelashes around a cosmic eye, are shown around the Ring in this digitally enhanced featured image in assigned colors. The long filaments may be caused by shadowing of the knots of dense gas in the nebula by light emitted within. The Ring Nebula is an elongated planetary nebula, a type of gas cloud created when a Sun-like star evolves to throw off its outer atmosphere to become a white dwarf star. The central oval in the Ring Nebula lies about 2,500 light-years away toward the constellation Lyra.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, JWST; Processing: Zi Yang Kong

#astronomy #space #science #universe #nebula #ring #ring nebula #emissions #shadow #light #planetary #planetary nebula #Lyra #constellation #planets #deep space #James Webb #james webb telescope #james webb images #follow #like #reblog #the first star #the first starr #thefirststar #thefirststarr #nasa #apod #tumblr #blog

[gwydionmisha]

#Indigenous Resistance #Canada #U.S. #Emissions #News

[reasonsforhope]

"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

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The world isn’t on track to meet its climate goals — and it’s the public’s fault, a leading oil company CEO told journalists.

Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from Fortune that the world has “waited too long” to begin investing in a broader suite of technologies to slow planetary heating.

That heating is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and much of the current impacts of that combustion — rising temperatures, extreme weather — were predicted by Exxon scientists almost half a century ago.

The company’s 1970s and 1980s projections were “at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models,” according to a 2023 Harvard study.

Since taking over from former CEO Rex Tillerson, Woods has walked a tightrope between acknowledging the critical problem of climate change — as well as the role of fossil fuels in helping drive it — while insisting fossil fuels must also provide the solution.

In comments before last year’s United Nations Climate Conference (COP28), Woods made a forceful case for carbon capture and storage, a technology in which the planet-heating chemicals released by burning fossil fuels are collected and stored underground.

“While renewable energy is essential to help the world achieve net zero, it is not sufficient,” he said. “Wind and solar alone can’t solve emissions in the industrial sectors that are at the heart of a modern society.”

International experts agree with the idea in the broadest strokes.

Carbon capture marks an essential component of the transition to “net zero,” in which no new chemicals like carbon dioxide or methane reach — and heat — the atmosphere, according to a report by International Energy Agency (IEA) last year.

But the remaining question is how much carbon capture will be needed, which depends on the future role of fossil fuels.

While this technology is feasible, it is very expensive — particularly in a paradigm in which new renewables already outcompete fossil fuels on price.

And the fossil fuel industry hasn’t been spending money on developing carbon capture technology, IEA head Fatih Birol wrote last year on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

To be part of a climate solution, Birol added, the fossil fuel industry must “let go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution.”

He noted that capturing and storing current fossil fuel emissions would require a thousand-fold leap in annual investment from $4 billion in 2022 to $3.5 trillion.

In his comments Tuesday, Woods argued the “dirty secret” is that customers weren’t willing to pay for the added cost of cleaner fossil fuels.

Referring to carbon capture, Woods said Exxon has “tabled proposals” with governments “to get out there and start down this path using existing technology.”

“People can’t afford it, and governments around the world rightly know that their constituents will have real concerns,” he added. “So we’ve got to find a way to get the cost down to grow the utility of the solution, and make it more available and more affordable, so that you can begin the [clean energy] transition.”

For example, he said Exxon “could, today, make sustainable aviation fuel for the airline business. But the airline companies can’t afford to pay.”

Woods blamed “activists” for trying to exclude the fossil fuel industry from the fight to slow rising temperatures, even though the sector is “the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies.”

That is an increasingly controversial argument. Across the world, wind and solar plants with giant attached batteries are outcompeting gas plants, though battery life still needs to be longer to make renewable power truly dispatchable.

Carbon capture is “an answer in search of a question,” Gregory Nemet, a public policy professor at the University of Wisconsin, told The Hill last year.

“If your question is what to do about climate change, your answer is one thing,” he said — likely a massive buildout in solar, wind and batteries.

But for fossil fuel companies asking “‘What is the role for natural gas in a carbon-constrained world?’ — well, maybe carbon capture has to be part of your answer.”

In the background of Woods’s comments about customers’ unwillingness to pay for cleaner fossil fuels is a bigger debate over price in general.

This spring, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will release its finalized rule on companies’ climate disclosures.

That much-anticipated rule will weigh in on the key question of whose responsibility it is to account for emissions — the customer who burns them (Scope II), or the fossil fuel company that produces them (Scope III).

Exxon has long argued for Scope II, based on the idea that it provides a product and is not responsible for how customers use it.

Last week, Reuters reported that the SEC would likely drop Scope III, a positive development for the companies.

Woods argued last year that SEC Scope III rules would cause Exxon to produce less fossil fuels — which he said would perversely raise global emissions, as its products were replaced by dirtier production elsewhere.

This broad idea — that fossil fuels use can only be cleaned up on the “demand side” — is one some economists dispute.

For the U.S. to decarbonize in an orderly fashion, “restrictive supply-side policies that curtail fossil fuel extraction and support workers and communities must play a role,” Rutgers University economists Mark Paul and Lina Moe wrote last year.

Without concrete moves to plan for a reduction in the fossil fuel supply, “the end of fossil fuels will be a chaotic collapse where workers, communities, and the environment suffer,” they added.

But Woods’s comments Tuesday doubled down on the claim that the energy transition will succeed only when end-users pay the price.

“People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price,” Woods said. “That’s ultimately how you solve the problem.”

#us politics #news #the hill #2024 #carbon emissions #green energy #climate change #climate crisis #exxon mobil #Darren Woods #United Nations Climate Conference #COP28 #carbon capture and storage #renewable energy #International Energy Agency #Fatih Birol #fossil fuels #Securities and Exchange Commission #emissions

[wachinyeya]

#good news #new zealand #climate change #science #nature #environment #environmentalism #conservation #emissions #carbon emissions #greenhouse gas emissions

[alicemccombs]

#billionaires #emissions #climateactionnow #healearth

[feckcops]

Hot air: five climate myths pushed by the US beef industry

“While fossil fuel consumption has done the most to put us on our dangerous path to climate catastrophe, a widely cited 2020 study in the journal Science argued that we can no longer avoid the worst of the climate crisis by cutting fossil fuels alone. Staying below the average global temperature rise of 2C – a threshold that scientists say will lead to systems collapse, mass extinctions, fatal heat waves, drought and famine, water shortages and flooded cities – will require ‘rapid and ambitious’ changes to food systems.

“The single most impactful food-related change we can make, according to their findings, is not increasing yields, ramping up agricultural efficiency or cutting food waste, though those approaches all would help. It’s adopting a plant-rich diet.

“While building out energy infrastructure can take years, changing our diet is something we can work toward today.”

#meat industry #beef industry #beef #diet #meat #western diets #plant-based #vegan #vegetarian #overconsumption #emissions #greenhouse gases #climate crisis #climate breakdown #climate change #climate #ecological crisis #usa #the west

[zentouro]

gosh i'm rusty at this, but i made another youtube video after *checks watch* 8 months.

#new video #IEA #fossil fuels #climate change #advocacy #emissions #Youtube

[bansuvs]

#climate catastrophe #environment #emissions #net zero #uk politics

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Alberta's United Conservative Party government released a climate plan Wednesday that it hopes will take the province to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 but offers few details, targets or new measures on how it would get there.

Instead, Environment Minister Sonya Savage has promised a package of commissions, committees and studies to determine what Alberta needs to do.

“You can't just pick random targets with a random date and say we're going to get there,” Savage said. “We have to do the hard work and that's what our plan is going to do.”

Alberta faces huge carbon challenges. The latest federal inventory indicates that the province produces about 38 per cent of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions with only 11 per cent of its population.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #canadian politics #canadian news #canada #canadian #alberta #environment #carbon emissions #climate crisis #climate change #emissions #sonya savage #UCP #conservatives

[hope-for-the-planet]

"Energy think tank Ember issued its fourth annual report on global electricity production earlier this week. The report found that wind and solar generation have reached an all-time high of 12% of global electricity production. The report found that clean electricity sources, comprising both renewable and nuclear power, totaled 39% of total global electricity production. The report also suggests that climate emissions may have peaked in 2022 and may begin to decline, though that said, emissions did reach an all-time high in 2022. In terms of fossil fuel generation, the report found that coal power grew only by 1.1% and gas power generation fell about 0.2%, the second decline in three years."

#clean energy #green energy #energy #climate change #emissions #carbon dioxide #global warming #environment #hope #good news #climate anxiety #ecogrief #ecoanxiety #environmental despair #carbon emissions

[towlerknows]

I wish Taylor cared about the environment enough to stop using her private jet as a taxi. It even flies empty to go pick her up. There are no ethical billionaires I guess.

I wish human beings as a collective wouldn't harass and threaten her to the point where if she took a regular flight, she would have to have the entire airport shut down just so she could get there. Consider the number of cops and security and airport personnel that would have to be on stand-by; the way that everyone wants a piece of her and when she's living her life in public, hundreds of people are attempting to make money off of her - or kill her.

Yeah, if the world was a perfect place, private planes wouldn't be necessary for her to do her job AND exist in public.

Unfortunately, it's not, and the carbon emissions from her jet - which account for only about 0.0003% of the total emissions in the United States alone as her tour generated $5 BILLION for local economies - are unlikely to change any time soon.

So I wish you and people like you would take your sealioning somewhere else.

#number calculated as her producing 15000 tonnes of carbon #divided by the 5 billion tons produced in the US alone in 2022 #taylor swift #emissions #idiots

[awesomecooperlove]

🎥🎥🎥

#climate change hoax #climate clowns #greed #corruption #scammers #deep state oligarchs control the weather worldwide #weather control #carbon #us politics #global warming #emissions #scammers rule our planet #exposing the scammers

[margheritagagliardi]

Shipping emissions significantly impact the climate, human health and ocean biodiversity. Governments must apply more stringent controls on fuels and engines, in order to drastically reduce atmospheric pollutants from ships. Infographic produced for the Clean Arctic Alliance.

#infographics #infographic #energy #sustainability #climate change #shipping #emissions #fossil fuels

[nando161mando]

Emissions from motor vehicles could have decreased by over 30% from 2010 to 2022 if not for the popularity of SUVs. More pedestrians would be alive too.

#emissions #co2 emissions #co2 #carbon dioxide #methane #ausgov #politas #auspol #tasgov #taspol #australia #fuck neoliberals #neoliberal capitalism #anthony albanese #albanese government