Which generates more greenhouse gases, transportation or buildings?

It all comes back to buildings.

A few months ago I wrote that transportation is now the biggest source of US CO2 emissions, noting that the switch from coal to natural gas for power generation had caused emissions from power generation to decrease while cars kept turning into trucks and emitting more. More recently, the Rhodium Group released final US emissions numbers for 2017, including other sectors, like industry and buildings.

Architect Gregory Duncan saw this graph and suggested that architects and others in the industry should not get complacent just because the yellow line was so low, way lower than power or transportation.

Read the Treehugger story by Lloyd Alter - “Which generates more greenhouse gases, transportation or buildings?”

Biggest polluters get clear path to hike emissions under plan

Australia’s biggest polluting companies would more easily jack up their greenhouse gas emissions under a Turnbull government proposal that critics say undermines multi-billion dollar efforts to tackle climate change.

The government has proposed loosening the safeguard mechanism,
which limits greenhouse gas emissions from big polluters.

The proposed change was prompted by feedback from businesses, including the petroleum industry, which said emissions rules did not adequately allow their businesses to grow.

The Department of the Environment and Energy last week released a consultation paper outlining planned changes to the "safeguard mechanism", which is supposed to ensure pollution reductions bought through the government’s $2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund are not offset by emissions increases elsewhere in the economy.

Read Nicole Hasham’s story in today’s Age - “Biggest polluters get clear path to hike emissions under plan.”

There’s Only One Way to Avoid Climate Catastrophe: ‘De-growing’ our Economy

You can almost feel the planet writhing. This summer brought some of the biggest, most destructive storms in recorded history: Harvey laid waste to huge swathes of Texas; Irma left Barbuda virtually uninhabitable; Maria ravaged Dominica and plunged Puerto Rico into darkness. The images we see in the media are almost too violent to comprehend. And these are the storms that made the news; many others did not. Monsoon flooding in India, Bangladesh and Nepal killed 1,200 people and left millions homeless, but Western media paid little attention: it’s too much suffering to take in at once.

What’s most disturbing about this litany of pain is that it’s only going to get worse. A recent paper in the journal Nature estimates that our chances of keeping global warming below the danger threshold of 2 degrees is now vanishingly small: only about 5 per cent. It’s more likely that we’re headed for around 3.2 degrees of warming, and possibly as much as 4.9 degrees. If scientists are clear about anything, it’s that this level of climate change will be nothing short of catastrophic. Indeed, there’s a good chance that it would render large-scale civilization impossible.

Read the Resilience story - “There’s Only One Way to Avoid Climate Catastrophe: ‘De-growing’ our Economy.”

'Biggest' or 'best' is easy is the cost doesn't matter

Becoming “the best” or “the biggest” at anything is easy if you are prepared to pay the cost.

Maybe this looks like a
slice of cake, but it is an
image of fracking.
 

The United States oil industry is ready to stride past Saudi Arabia to become the world’s biggest oil producer, but the cost will be measured in ruined communities and countless lives left in disarray.

Energy independence, or oil self-sufficiency at least, hinges on the recent development and arrival of hydraulic fracturing that has allowed the U.S, to extract oil previously economically unavailable.

The lure of “energy independence”, and of course massive profits for just a few, has overridden the short-term benefits and costs, that include among them the long-term potential pollution of aquifers, the inordinate use of water upon which communities depend and the fact that if could be all over in just few years.

The Huffington Post writes about this development in a story headed: “U.S. to be world’s top oil producer by 2016, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia, IEA predicts”.