Energy & Climate Change~

Two recent research reports published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature confirm that atmospheric concentrations of the ozone-depleting chemical CFC-11 had once again dropped significantly. By late 2019, levels were falling by about 1% a year — the fastest on record, according to the reports — showing that the world was back on track to repairing the damage to the Earth’s ozone layer by mid-century. China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environmental Protection has […]

The Third Pole is a region in Central Asia with the world’s third-largest store of ice after Antarctica and Greenland that is roughly the size of the US states of Texas and New Mexico combined. Third Pole glaciers are one of the world’s largest freshwater sources, and vital to billions of people from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Asia’s 10 largest rivers, including the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong and Ganges, are fed by […]

A fact’s a fact … Cumulative CO2 emissions by Western countries are 5 times those of China China’s cumulative CO2 emissions = 220 billion tonnes (13% of world total cumulative emissions) West’s cumulative CO2 emissions = 1148 billion tonnes (70% of world total cumulative emissions) United States cumulative CO2 emissions = 400 billion tonnes (25% of world total cumulative emissions) US contribution to cumulative CO2 emissions is more than any other country […]

A fact’s a fact … The West per capita produces double the CO2 of China Each Chinese citizen produces 6.86 tonnes of CO2 per year. Each citizen in the Western industrialized countries produces 12.1 tonnes per year on average. Canada, USA, & Australia are the worst at 15.59 t; 16.16 t; 16.88 t each ** The West includes: USA, European Union, Non-EU Europe, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Australia.

“Treating ‘humans’ as a single, monolithic whole, ignores the fact that the Great Acceleration has, until very recently, been almost entirely been driven by a small fraction of the human population, those in developed countries.” “The most striking insight is that most of the population growth has been in the non-OECD world but the world’s economy (GDP) is still strongly dominated by the OECD world. Despite the shift of global […]

On August 9, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report. It emphasizes that without “immediate, rapid, and large-scale” reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, it will be impossible to contain global warming and avoid frequent and severe climate events in the coming decades. Many laments the enormous costs of achieving zero carbon emissions, which the Energy Transition Commission estimates to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion […]