January 30 News: China Burning Nearly As Much Coal As The Rest Of The World

As of the end of 2011, China was burning nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined. [WaPo]

China's coal use grew 9 percent in 2011, rising to 3.8 billion tons. At this point, the country is burning nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined.

Coal, of course, is the world's premier fossil fuel, a low-cost source of electricity that kicks a lot of carbon-dioxide up into the atmosphere. And China's growing appetite is a big reason why global greenhouse-gas emissions have soared in recent years, even as the United States and Europe have managed to curtail their coal use and cut their carbon pollution.

Millions of people worldwide are fleeing their homes because of environmental disasters. But the conditions in which the refugees have to take up residence in neighboring countries isn't regulated by international law. [DW]

A new study by the National Wildlife Federation has concluded that climate change in the United States is happening much faster than many of its animal species are able to respond and adapt. [USA Today]

With its carbon cap-and-trade system now up and running, California - the most populous state in the U.S. and the ninth biggest economy in the world - is ahead of the rest of the country in taking action on climate change. [Time]

While air travel only accounts for an estimated 5 percent of global carbon emissions, that share is expected to grow as air travel becomes cheaper and more accessible. [The Economist]

According to a study by researchers at the Zoological Society of London and others, a mangrove forest shared by India and Bangladesh that's home to possibly 500 Bengal tigers is being rapidly destroyed by erosion, rising sea levels and storm surges. [The Guardian]

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/01/30/1513841/january-30-news-ch

Hong Kong Will Ban Dirtiest Diesel Vehicles From City Limits

It doesn't take a genius to link air pollution with old vehicles, and the powers-that-be in Hong Kong have tried for decades to reduce the constant smog smothering one of the world's most populated cities. Now a new initiative will ban the dirtiest diesel vehicles from the city limits while offering companies financial incentives for modernizing their delivery fleets.

While Hong Kong's ruling party hasn't laid out specifics, city leaders have noted that since air quality goals were enacted 25 years ago, the city has not met its own self-imposed goals once. In fact, last year saw 175 days of "high pollution" days, meaning almost half of 2012 was spent under a cloud of smog and engine emissions. While Hong Kong says that just 3,000 premature deaths a year are attributed to heavy pollution, the real number is probably a lot higher.

The main factor is the more than 120,000 diesel-powered heavy vehicles, including delivery trucks and buses, that operate in the city limits. 40% of these vehicles are older diesel models that comply with the Euro II model, emitting more than 12x the emissions that more modern diesel vehicles complying with the Euro V standard. While it is cheaper to run these older diesel vehicles rather than replace them, the long term health costs to society as a whole can no longer be tolerated, even in places like China, where the welfare of the working class is rarely cause for concern.

Hong Kong plans to get companies to phase out these older diesel vehicles by offering substantial government subsidies, while banning older diesel vehicles from operating in the city limits. City leaders hope that threat of banning businesses from operating their fleets in Hong Kong proper, along with generous subsidies, will lead to a cleaner, greener fleet of modern diesel vehicles. Other efforts to clean up air pollution include Hong Kong's police department buying and using a fleet of Brammo electric motorcycles, which have been met with unabashed enthusiasm.

Other cities, including Paris, France and London, England have experimented with ways of reducing urban congestion and pollution. While London enacted a congestion charge for downtown that exempts EV and plug-in hybrid vehicles, Paris has talked about banning older, larger, and dirtier vehicles from the city limits, though without the draconian efficiency of Hong Kong. Beijing has also toyed with such

If Hong Kong's efforts prove fruitful, other cities could follow their model. But it could also drive the cost of doing business in Hong Kong up as well. Will business owners adapt, fight, or flee these new stringent diesel restrictions?

Source: Bloomberg

The post Hong Kong Will Ban Dirtiest Diesel Vehicles From City Limits appeared first on Gas 2.

http://gas2.org/2013/01/02/hong-kong-will-ban-dirtiest-diesel-vehicles

Report: Humanity Has Overshot The Earth's Biocapacity

A new report on China's ecological footprint opens with some grim news for the planet as a whole: The demand humans place on the planet - in terms of land use, resource consumption, pollution, and so on - overshot the Earth's threshold for sustaining that demand back in the early 1970s. Since then the gap has only grown wider.

The report measures that demand by "ecological footprint," which takes into account the area people use to produce the renewable resources they consume, the area that's taken up by infrastructure, and the area of forest needed to absorb CO2 emissions not absorbed by the ocean. The report then compared that to the Earth's biocapacity, which measures the amount of area available to serve all those purposes.

Both factors are measured in units of global hectares (gha), which represent "the productive capacity of one hectare area of utilized land at global average biological productivity levels." And as it turns out, humanity's footprint now outpaces the planet's total biocapacity to the point that it would take one and a half Earths to sustain our total level of consumption:

In 2008, the Earth's total biocapacity was 12.0 billion gha, or 1.8 gha per person, while humanity's Ecological Footprint was 18.2 billion gha, or 2.7 gha per person. This discrepancy means it would take 1.5 years for the Earth to fully regenerate the renewable resources that people used in one year, or in other words, we used the equivalent of 1.5 Earths to support our consumption.

Just as it is possible to withdraw money from a bank account more quickly than the interest that accrues, biocapacity can be reused more quickly than it regenerates. Eventually the resources - our natural capital, will be depleted just like running down reserves in a bank account. At present, people are often able to shift their sourcing when faced with local resource limitations. However, if consumption continues to increase as it has in the past decades, the planet as a whole will eventually run out of resources. Some ecosystems will collapse and cease to be productive even before the resource is fully depleted.

Between 1961 and 2008, population growth drove much of the increase in humanity's global ecological footprint. But growth in footprint per capita was also a significant contributor to the rise, particularly in the developed western nations of the OECD and the up-and-coming countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Even though its population is significantly smaller, America's per capita footprint far exceeds that of China, and actually ranked 6th out of 150 countries measured in the report. And as the report's description suggests, the per capita footprint is amenable to reform: Shifting to renewable energy, upgrading to energy efficient infrastructure, smart land and water use, and a host of other changes can bring down a population's per capita footprint while also protecting and respecting its quality of life.

Smart use of energy and resources could also help close the overshoot gap from the other side as well: As the graph shows, the global ecological footprint has essentially plateaued over the last few decades, while the Earth's biocapacity has continued to drop. Which in turn brings up the limitations of how we currently measure human economic progress - even as global gross domestic product has climbed over the last four decades, global biocapacity has been in a continuous decline.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/12/15/1329841/report-humanity-ha