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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are urging companies to broaden their carbon footprint calculations. They report that many U.S. companies in a variety of industries do not account for the entire supply chain that results in final goods and services--overlooking up to 75 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions involved. Most factories, it seems, assess only carbon dioxide released directly and not from materials processing or production of parts done by suppliers, which contributes significantly to the ultimate footprints. Similarly, most retailers analyze only their stores and not their merchandise supply lines. [More] News Scan Briefs: Sounds Like Thunder Take Two Pills and Don’t Call Me in the MorningUp to 58 percent of physicians in the U.S. regularly prescribe placebos, according to a survey of 679 rheumatologists and general internists conducted by Jon C. Tilburt of the National Institutes of Health and his colleagues. Even though placebos may contain no active ingredients, many ailments still respond positively to them [see “The Placebo Effect,” by Walter A. Brown; Scientific American, January 1998]. [More]

Tags: supply, placebo, footprint, chain, carbon

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are urging companies to broaden their carbon footprint calculations. They report that many U.S. companies in a variety of industries do not account for the entire supply chain that results in final goods and services--overlooking up to 75 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions involved. Most factories, it seems, assess only carbon dioxide released directly and not from materials processing or production of parts done by suppliers, which contributes significantly to the ultimate footprints. Similarly, most retailers analyze only their stores and not their merchandise supply lines. [More] News Scan Briefs: Sounds Like Thunder Take Two Pills and Don’t Call Me in the MorningUp to 58 percent of physicians in the U.S. regularly prescribe placebos, according to a survey of 679 rheumatologists and general internists conducted by Jon C. Tilburt of the National Institutes of Health and his colleagues. Even though placebos may contain no active ingredients, many ailments still respond positively to them [see “The Placebo Effect,” by Walter A. Brown; Scientific American, January 1998]. [More]

Tags: supply, placebo, footprint, chain, carbon

Technology policy lies at the core of the climate change challenge. Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people. The key is new low-carbon technology, not simply energy efficiency. [More] Green Buildings May Be Cheapest Way to Slow Global Warming North American homes, offices and other buildings contribute an estimated 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year--more than one third of the continent's greenhouse gas pollution output. Simply constructing more energy-efficient buildings--and upgrading the insulation and windows in the existing ones--could save a whopping 1.7 billion tons annually, says a new report from the Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), an international organization established by Canada, Mexico and the U.S. under the North American Free Trade Agreement to address continent-wide environmental issues. [More]

Tags: carbon, energy, buildings, billion, environmental

You might assume that Chicago dislikes environmentalists, judging by the response they get along Michigan Avenue. They loiter on its crowded sidewalks, trying to stop people with the brightness of their T-shirts, the authority of their clipboards and the innocence of their question: “Do you have a minute to save the earth?” Almost no passerby has that minute, let alone $20 to donate to the cause. What most people have is a scowl, a dismissive wave of the hand and the accelerating stride of a running back. In a city synonymous with Al Capone, do-gooder appeals are about as practical as a citizen’s arrest. But although 2.8 million residents of Chicago may scoff at the notion that noble intentions can stop climate change, that doesn’t mean they think the problem can’t be solved. The city’s leaders know that to get people to save the earth, you must appeal to their bank accounts, not just their consciences. And those leaders are putting their reputation on the line to prove it. [More] Cap and Dividend, Not Trade: Making Polluters Pay If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them. Instead future generations are stuck with the tab. A carbon tax, or a carbon cap-and-trade system, can fix this market failure, but because American politicians are loath to impose taxes, a cap is far more likely. Under a cap, government sets a limit on total carbon emissions and issues tradable permits up to the limit. Each year the number of permits declines, reducing emissions over time. Permits can be issued to companies that emit carbon dioxide or to those that supply it for burning--oil, coal and natural gas firms. Issuing permits to suppliers is easier to administer because no smokestacks need to be monitored. [More]

Tags: carbon, cap, permits, people, chicago

The Colorado River, the life vein of the Southwestern United States, is in trouble. The river's water is hoarded the moment it trickles out of the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado and begins its 1,450-mile journey to Mexico's border. It runs south through seven states and the Grand Canyon, delivering water to Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego. Along the way, it powers homes for 3 million people, nourishes 15 percent of the nation's crops and provides drinking water to one in 12 Americans. [More] Cap and Dividend, Not Trade: Making Polluters Pay If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them. Instead future generations are stuck with the tab. A carbon tax, or a carbon cap-and-trade system, can fix this market failure, but because American politicians are loath to impose taxes, a cap is far more likely. Under a cap, government sets a limit on total carbon emissions and issues tradable permits up to the limit. Each year the number of permits declines, reducing emissions over time. Permits can be issued to companies that emit carbon dioxide or to those that supply it for burning--oil, coal and natural gas firms. Issuing permits to suppliers is easier to administer because no smokestacks need to be monitored. [More]

Tags: carbon, permits, water, cap, pay

You might assume that Chicago dislikes environmentalists, judging by the response they get along Michigan Avenue. They loiter on its crowded sidewalks, trying to stop people with the brightness of their T-shirts, the authority of their clipboards and the innocence of their question: “Do you have a minute to save the earth?” Almost no passerby has that minute, let alone $20 to donate to the cause. What most people have is a scowl, a dismissive wave of the hand and the accelerating stride of a running back. In a city synonymous with Al Capone, do-gooder appeals are about as practical as a citizen’s arrest. But although 2.8 million residents of Chicago may scoff at the notion that noble intentions can stop climate change, that doesn’t mean they think the problem can’t be solved. The city’s leaders know that to get people to save the earth, you must appeal to their bank accounts, not just their consciences. And those leaders are putting their reputation on the line to prove it. [More] Cap and Dividend, Not Trade: Making Polluters Pay If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them. Instead future generations are stuck with the tab. A carbon tax, or a carbon cap-and-trade system, can fix this market failure, but because American politicians are loath to impose taxes, a cap is far more likely. Under a cap, government sets a limit on total carbon emissions and issues tradable permits up to the limit. Each year the number of permits declines, reducing emissions over time. Permits can be issued to companies that emit carbon dioxide or to those that supply it for burning--oil, coal and natural gas firms. Issuing permits to suppliers is easier to administer because no smokestacks need to be monitored. [More]

Tags: carbon, cap, permits, people, chicago

If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them. Instead future generations are stuck with the tab. A carbon tax, or a carbon cap-and-trade system, can fix this market failure, but because American politicians are loath to impose taxes, a cap is far more likely. Under a cap, government sets a limit on total carbon emissions and issues tradable permits up to the limit. Each year the number of permits declines, reducing emissions over time. Permits can be issued to companies that emit carbon dioxide or to those that supply it for burning--oil, coal and natural gas firms. Issuing permits to suppliers is easier to administer because no smokestacks need to be monitored. [More] Clean Cities and Dirty Coal Power--China's Energy Paradox CHONGQING--This year china surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution. The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chong­qing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,” as it is known--a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region. [More]

Tags: carbon, china, coal, permits, air

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American, for the seven days back dated to February 20th, 2008, because I actually filed on the evening of the February 21st, well, I'm Steve Mirsky by the way. If you have been breathlessly waiting for this ’s podcast I apologize, I was out of town at a couple of conferences and this week's episode features some highlights from one of them and that's the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS, which took place last week in the beginning of this current week in Boston. The other conference was inside baseball, was about the future of science journalism, which is going to be good, thankfully. So, this week on the podcast we'll hear from Nobel laureate David Baltimore about HIV research. We also have an interview with the director of the jet propulsion laboratory, Charles Elachi, and in a real coup, we actually managed to get Scientific American editor Mark Fischetti to come on board and make an appearance. First up, David Baltimore, he is the president of the AAAS and professor of biology at Caltech. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the reverse transcriptase. I attended his presidential address to the conference and he spent a few minutes reviewing the effort to create an HIV vaccine. Here's what he said. [More] Dark Side of Solar Cells Brightens It takes power to make power--even with a solar grand plan. From the mining of quartz sand to the coating with ethylene-vinyl acetate, manufacturing a photovoltaic (PV) solar cell requires energy--most often derived from the burning of fossil fuels. But a new analysis finds that even accounting for all the energy and waste involved, PV power would cut air pollution--including the greenhouse gases that cause climate change--by nearly 90 percent if it replaced fossil fuels. [More]

Tags: week, science, conference, solar, american

Ornithologist and conservation biologist Jeffrey Wells talks about birds and their roles as markers for environmental health. He also discusses the Boreal Forest, the Boreal Birdsong Initiative, the eBird research project (that you can assist) and his new book, The Birder's Conservation Handbook. We also have a brief tribute to the late Arthur C. Clarke. Plus we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Websites mentioned on this episode include www.ebird.org; www.borealbirds.org Podcast Transcript: [More] Technological Keys to Climate Protection Technology policy lies at the core of the climate change challenge. Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people. Economists often talk as though putting a price on carbon emissions--through tradable permits or a carbon tax--will be enough to deliver the needed reductions in those emissions. This is not true. Europe’s carbon-trading system has not shown much capacity to generate large-scale research nor to develop, demonstrate and deploy breakthrough technologies. A trading system might marginally influence the choices between coal and gas plants or provoke a bit more adoption of solar and wind power, but it will not lead to the necessary fundamental overhaul of energy systems. [More]

Tags: carbon, emissions, system, birds, technologies

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American, for the seven days back dated to February 20th, 2008, because I actually filed on the evening of the February 21st, well, I'm Steve Mirsky by the way. If you have been breathlessly waiting for this week’s podcast I apologize, I was out of town at a couple of conferences and this week's episode features some highlights from one of them and that's the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS, which took place last week in the beginning of this current week in Boston. The other conference was inside baseball, was about the future of science journalism, which is going to be good, thankfully. So, this week on the podcast we'll hear from Nobel laureate David Baltimore about HIV research. We also have an interview with the director of the jet propulsion laboratory, Charles Elachi, and in a real coup, we actually managed to get Scientific American editor Mark Fischetti to come on board and make an appearance. First up, David Baltimore, he is the president of the AAAS and professor of biology at Caltech. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the reverse transcriptase. I attended his presidential address to the conference and he spent a few minutes reviewing the effort to create an HIV vaccine. Here's what he said. [More] Dark Side of Solar Cells Brightens It takes power to make power--even with a solar grand plan. From the mining of quartz sand to the coating with ethylene-vinyl acetate, manufacturing a photovoltaic (PV) solar cell requires energy--most often derived from the burning of fossil fuels. But a new analysis finds that even accounting for all the energy and waste involved, PV power would cut air pollution--including the greenhouse gases that cause climate change--by nearly 90 percent if it replaced fossil fuels. [More]

Tags: week, science, conference, solar, american

If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them. Instead future generations are stuck with the tab. A carbon tax, or a carbon cap-and-trade system, can fix this market failure, but because American politicians are loath to impose taxes, a cap is far more likely. Under a cap, government sets a limit on total carbon emissions and issues tradable permits up to the limit. Each year the number of permits declines, reducing emissions over time. Permits can be issued to companies that emit carbon dioxide or to those that supply it for burning--oil, coal and natural gas firms. Issuing permits to suppliers is easier to administer because no smokestacks need to be monitored. [More] Coal War: Georgia Court Halts Construction of New Coal-Fired Plant A Georgia court this week halted construction of a new 1,200-megawatt coal-fired power plant on the Chattahoochee River, dubbed Longleaf, because backers failed to provide a plan to limit climate change–causing carbon dioxide emissions from it. [More]

Tags: carbon, cap, permits, coal, dioxide

If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them. Instead future generations are stuck with the tab. A carbon tax, or a carbon cap-and-trade system, can fix this market failure, but because American politicians are loath to impose taxes, a cap is far more likely. Under a cap, government sets a limit on total carbon emissions and issues tradable permits up to the limit. Each year the number of permits declines, reducing emissions over time. Permits can be issued to companies that emit carbon dioxide or to those that supply it for burning--oil, coal and natural gas firms. Issuing permits to suppliers is easier to administer because no smokestacks need to be monitored. [More] Clean Cities and Dirty Coal Power--China's Energy Paradox CHONGQING--This year china surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution. The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chong­qing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,” as it is known--a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region. [More]

Tags: carbon, china, coal, permits, air

If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them. Instead future generations are stuck with the tab. A carbon tax, or a carbon cap-and-trade system, can fix this market failure, but because American politicians are loath to impose taxes, a cap is far more likely. Under a cap, government sets a limit on total carbon emissions and issues tradable permits up to the limit. Each year the number of permits declines, reducing emissions over time. Permits can be issued to companies that emit carbon dioxide or to those that supply it for burning--oil, coal and natural gas firms. Issuing permits to suppliers is easier to administer because no smokestacks need to be monitored. [More] Coal War: Georgia Court Halts Construction of New Coal-Fired Plant A Georgia court this week halted construction of a new 1,200-megawatt coal-fired power plant on the Chattahoochee River, dubbed Longleaf, because backers failed to provide a plan to limit climate change–causing carbon dioxide emissions from it. [More]

Tags: carbon, cap, permits, coal, dioxide

The U.S. government--and major U.S. banks--seem to have lost their appetite for coal. After spending five years and approximately $50 million on preliminary studies as well as selecting a proposed site in Mattoon, Ill., the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has scuttled plans to build the so-called FutureGen power plant. The facility would have captured the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) that is emitted when coal is burned for electricity generation. Instead, the DOE hopes to help industry add carbon-capture-and-storage capability to advanced coal plants already in the works. "This restructured FutureGen approach is an all-around better investment for Americans," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a statement announcing the change. The DOE is asking Congress for $407 million to research how to burn coal most efficiently, along with $241 million to demonstrate such carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies--at least $900 million less than DOE said it would have cost to complete FutureGen. [More] Smog Can Make People Sick, Even Indoors Smog caused by ground-level ozone isn't just an outdoor air problem. A new study shows that when the irritant's level rises outside, the number of people inside suffering from so-called "sick building syndrome" also increases. (Ozone, an air-polluting oxygen molecule (O3), forms when sunlight strikes motor vehicle tailpipe emissions.) "We found that outdoor air pollution, ozone, is associated with symptoms of lower-respiratory and upper-respiratory stress that occur in buildings to workers," says environmental health scientist Michael Apte of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who analyzed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data gathered on office air quality across the country. "These symptoms are prevalent at fairly high levels throughout the U.S. and are similar in other parts of the world." [More]

Tags: coal, doe, air, million, futuregen

The U.S. government--and major U.S. banks--seem to have lost their appetite for coal. After spending five years and approximately $50 million on preliminary studies as well as selecting a proposed site in Mattoon, Ill., the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has scuttled plans to build the so-called FutureGen power plant. The facility would have captured the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) that is emitted when coal is burned for electricity generation. Instead, the DOE hopes to help industry add carbon-capture-and-storage capability to advanced coal plants already in the works. "This restructured FutureGen approach is an all-around better investment for Americans," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a statement announcing the change. The DOE is asking Congress for $407 million to research how to burn coal most efficiently, along with $241 million to demonstrate such carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies--at least $900 million less than DOE said it would have cost to complete FutureGen. [More] Smog Can Make People Sick, Even Indoors Smog caused by ground-level ozone isn't just an outdoor air problem. A new study shows that when the irritant's level rises outside, the number of people inside suffering from so-called "sick building syndrome" also increases. (Ozone, an air-polluting oxygen molecule (O3), forms when sunlight strikes motor vehicle tailpipe emissions.) "We found that outdoor air pollution, ozone, is associated with symptoms of lower-respiratory and upper-respiratory stress that occur in buildings to workers," says environmental health scientist Michael Apte of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who analyzed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data gathered on office air quality across the country. "These symptoms are prevalent at fairly high levels throughout the U.S. and are similar in other parts of the world." [More]

Tags: coal, doe, air, million, futuregen

Like many of her neighbors, Maria Recchia-O'Neill has a sport utility vehicle sitting in her driveway in Rye Brook, just north of New York City. She drives it to work and around town to run errands. But although her vehicle looks like any other SUV, her Chevrolet Equinox gets excellent gas mileage--and it doesn't emit any pollutants or climate change–promoting carbon dioxide. That is because it is a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle--one of 40 such automobiles that U.S. carmaker General Motors provided for motorists to road test. [More] Brother, Can You Spare Me a Planet? (Extended version) The causes of the environmental crisis may be hugely complex, but the most effective way to deal with it in economic terms seems rather obvious. We must use our best scientific understanding of how environmental problems can be resolved as the basis for implementing scientifically viable economic policies and solutions. If this could be accomplished within the framework of the economic theory that we now use to coordinate economic activities in the global market system--neoclassical economics--there would be no cause for concern. But as this discussion will demonstrate, there is a large problem here that should be cause for great concern: Neoclassical economic theory is predicated on unscientific assumptions that massively frustrate or effectively undermine efforts to implement scientifically viable economic policies and solutions. [More]

Tags: economic, vehicle, scientifically, neoclassical, concern

In December the U.S. Air Force flew a C-17 transport plane across the country powered in part by a new propellant: natural gas transmuted into a synthetic liquid fuel. Heat and catalysts converted methane into syngas (carbon monoxide and hydrogen) which were then transformed into liquid hydrocarbons (otherwise known as oil and its derivatives): petroleum, gasoline and, in the case of aviation, kerosene. "Hitler flew Messerschmitts on it," says William Anderson, assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for installations, environment and logistics, about such Fischer-Tropsch synthetic fuel, which can be made from methane, coal, plant oils--even wood waste. "We believe that having a secure domestic source of fuel makes it easier for us to do that mission [to fly and fight]. It is less likely that there would be some disruption to the fuel source that we need to fly airplanes." [More] The Skinny on the Environment When Susan Handy moved to Davis, Calif., in 2002, she immediately bought a commuting vehicle: a wheeled trailer, for toting her kids behind her bike. Handy, an environmental policy analyst at the University of California, and her husband frequently pedal to work, with two preschoolers in tow. Among locals, their commute is common. Fifty miles of bike lanes ribbon Davis, which is only about 10.5 square miles in area. Handy calls Davis “a small town that really works.” City planners, health researchers and local leaders want more U.S. communities to “really work”--and to that end, they have begun retrofitting the country, from Atlanta to Sacramento. Inspired by a new urbanism that celebrates neighborhoods and alarmed by health problems--particularly childhood obesity--these trailblazers are building paths, sidewalks and other architectural features while promoting policies and behaviors that get people moving. [More]

Tags: fuel, davis, handy, work, oil

CHONGQING--This year china surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution. The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chong­qing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,” as it is known--a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region. [More] Can Nuclear Power Compete? On an August afternoon in Washington, D.C., typically miserable for its heat, humidity and stillness, reporters gathered at a downtown hotel not known for its air-conditioning. Stuffed inside a windowless conference room that was being heated still further by the television people’s lights, we waited for Michael J. Wallace, who had been trying, in fits and starts, to unveil nuclear power’s second act. On arrival, Wallace, a meticulous manager not known for ad-libbing, looked out over the sweating reporters and smiled. “It’s days like today that highlight the real need for new, emissions-free, baseload power,” he said. Unless we get started soon, he added, rolling blackouts could become the norm. [More]

Tags: china, power, air, coal, wallace

CHONGQING--This year china surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution. The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chong­qing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,” as it is known--a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region. [More] Can Nuclear Power Compete? On an August afternoon in Washington, D.C., typically miserable for its heat, humidity and stillness, reporters gathered at a downtown hotel not known for its air-conditioning. Stuffed inside a windowless conference room that was being heated still further by the television people’s lights, we waited for Michael J. Wallace, who had been trying, in fits and starts, to unveil nuclear power’s second act. On arrival, Wallace, a meticulous manager not known for ad-libbing, looked out over the sweating reporters and smiled. “It’s days like today that highlight the real need for new, emissions-free, baseload power,” he said. Unless we get started soon, he added, rolling blackouts could become the norm. [More]

Tags: china, power, air, coal, wallace

The ongoing disruption of the earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable. Under midrange projections for economic growth and technological change, the planet’s average surface temperature in 2050 will be about two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than its preindustrial value. The last time the earth was that warm was 130,000 years ago, and sea level was four to six meters higher than today. No one knows how long it will take sea level to “catch up” with such an increase; it could be several centuries, or it could be less. Even with uncertainties, there is reason to believe that tipping points into unmanageable changes will become much more probable for increases larger than two degrees C. To achieve a better-than-even chance of not exceeding that figure, human emissions must start to decline soon, falling to about half of today’s level by 2050 and further thereafter. [More] Deadly by the Dozen: 12 Diseases Climate Change May Worsen Bird flu, cholera, Ebola, plague and tuberculosis are just a few of the diseases likely to spread and get worse as a result of climate change, according to a report released yesterday by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). To prevent such ailments from becoming as destructive as the "black death" (which wiped out a third of Europe's population in the 14th century) or the flu pandemic of 1918 (which killed an estimated 20 million to 40 million people worldwide, including between 500,000 and 675,000 people in the U.S.), WCS suggests monitoring wildlife to detect signs of these pathogens before a major outbreak. [More]

Tags: change, climate, degrees, level, million