The United States finalized on Thursday its first greenhouse gas emissions rules on automobiles and also boosted fuel efficiency standards--moves that Canada is jointly imposing on its industry.
The rules are part of President Obama's goal by 2020 to cut emissions by about 17 percent under 2005 levels of the gases blamed for warming the planet.
Obama wants Congress to pass a long-delayed climate bill, but to push it along, he has also set in motion steps for the Environmental Protection Agency to begin regulating the emissions from cars and large polluters like power plants.
The "cloud" of data that is becoming the heart of the Internet is creating an all-too-real cloud of pollution as Facebook, Apple and others build data centers powered by coal, Greenpeace said in a new report to be released Tuesday.
A Facebook facility being built in Oregon will rely on a utility whose main fuel is coal, while Apple is building a data warehouse in a North Carolina region that relies mostly on coal, the environmental organization said in the study.
"The last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where … Read more
Toshiba is in talks with a company backed by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to jointly develop advanced nuclear reactors, the Japanese electronics maker said Tuesday.
The Japanese electronics maker, which is also the world's No. 3 chipmaker behind Intel and Samsung Electronics, added it will restart plans to build a factory to make NAND flash memory chips as the global economy recovers.
Toshiba, which owns U.S. nuclear firm Westinghouse, said it was in preliminary talks with the Gates-backed firm TerraPower to develop so-called traveling-wave reactors, which are designed to use depleted uranium as fuel and thought to hold … Read more
Good old-fashioned guilt and frugality might go a long way toward helping the U.S. reduce its carbon footprint.
Converting the U.S. electricity grid to a series of smart grids would have a significant impact on carbon emissions from utilities mainly because the shift would tend to change people's usage habits, according to a report released last week by the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
Researchers at PNNL's Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center (EIOC) used real-time U.S. electric grid data, advanced software, modeling computation, and data from existing smart-grid projects to determine whether, … Read more
The White House has dropped projected revenue from a "cap-and-trade" mechanism to fight climate change from its new budget, an administration official said, bowing to the possibility that the Congress may not pass it.
Last year, the Obama administration forecast revenue of $646 billion in the years 2012-2019 from an emissions trading program that formed the crux of its proposal to fight global warming.
The legislation that contains that proposal is now stalled in the Senate, and cap-and-trade--which sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions and allows companies to trade permits to pollute--may be cut from a final bill … Read more
An inventor and a generator manufacturer have come up with a new use for used motor oil.
Cyclone Power Technologies signed a deal with Phoenix Power Group on Thursday to develop an external combustion engine that runs on waste oil. The deal signs over waste-oil-related rights to Cyclone's Mark V external combustion engine to the Phoenix Power, which plans to use the engine in its new Phoenix 5-Series Generator.
"Cyclone still retains rights for the Mark V with other fuels," a Cyclone representative noted in an e-mail. "Phoenix Power only holds exclusive rights for generators running … Read more
The Obama administration is announcing on Monday the selection of nine projects totaling $187 million aimed at improving the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks.
The funding includes more than $100 million from the $787 billion economic stimulus plan President Barack Obama pushed through Congress last February. An additional 50 percent will come from the private sector, according to the announcement to be made by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu in Columbus, Ind.
The Obama administration is under pressure to show it is working to create jobs with the U.S. unemployment rate stuck at 10 percent.
WASHINTON--Two U.S. senators pledged on Tuesday to take up legislation early next year to extend the biodiesel tax credit as it looks likely action will not be taken on it this year.
An industry group complained that if a bill was passed by Congress early next year to extend the credit, it would not be enough to stop plants from closing after the credit expires on December 31.
Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and the panel's top Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, said they would take up … Read more
COPENHAGEN--U.N. climate talks ended with a bare-minimum agreement on Saturday when delegates "noted" an accord struck by the United States, China, and other emerging powers that falls far short of the conference's original goals.
"Finally we sealed a deal," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. "The 'Copenhagen Accord' may not be everything everyone had hoped for, but this...is an important beginning."
A long road lies ahead. The accord--weaker than a legally binding treaty and weaker even than the "political" deal many had foreseen--left much to the imagination.
It set a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times--seen as a threshold for dangerous changes such as more floods, droughts, mudslides, sandstorms, and rising seas. But it failed to say how this would be achieved.
It held out the prospect of $100 billion in annual aid from 2020 for developing nations but did not specify precisely where this money would come from. And it pushed decisions on core issues such as emissions cuts into the future.
"This basically is a letter of intent...the ingredients of an architecture that can respond to the long-term challenge of climate change, but not in precise legal terms. That means we have a lot of work to do on the long road to Mexico," said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat.
Another round of climate talks is scheduled for November 2010 in Mexico. Negotiators are hoping to nail down then what they failed to achieve in Copenhagen--a new treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol. But there are no guarantees.… Read more
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