“Assuming no new climate policies,” the EIA says, “worldwide increases in output per capita and relatively moderate population growth overwhelm projected improvements in energy intensity and carbon intensity.”

EIA’s predictions may not come true for two reasons. First, China, the country that emits the most greenhouse gases (GHG), pledged to reduce emissions by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. Second, last week, companies from China and Finland signed 12 clean technology deals with a value of about $250 million. 

Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang said of the deals, “As China is experiencing rapid industrialization and urbanization, we have to build a resource-saving and environmentally friendly society as soon as possible.” He added, “Finland has advanced capability in clean tech innovation and application, so there’s great potential for cooperation between the two countries in this regard. I hope our companies will grasp the opportunity, strengthen development and application of clean tech and carry out more reciprocal cooperation.”

What about America?

What about the U.S., the second largest emitter of GHGs? Unfortunately, the outlook for climate change legislation to pass in Congress this year is not sunny with November elections coming up for Congress followed by the December break for Congress.

“There is little chance anything will happen this year,” said Tom Lewis, chief executive. “Healthcare legislation was passed because the president made a major push but no one is willing to take a major step prior to the mid-term elections,” Lewis said. “The Democrats are in line to lose a number of seats and I don’t see a passionate push between now and November 2 to get this over the finishing line,” he added.

President Obama said he hopes bill will pass this year because the oil spill highlights the need for energy reform, but he may have used up his political influence to pass healthcare reform legislation in March.

“Obama may have used all his political capital to get healthcare over the finishing line,” said Chelsea Maxwell, managing partner of the Clark Group and former senior climate advisor to Senator John Warner.

A recent article in the Guardian, a British newspaper, hit the proverbial nail on the head when it comes to the U.S. government and the oil industry. The article says that politicians have “allowed themselves to be seduced by the cheap petrol and tax provided by BP.” The article added that in the U.S. “big oil firms, like big banks are too big to bury.” There is one factor the article overlooks: the American people, who are disgusted by the disaster in the Gulf, and BP’s bungling of it.

Source Care2

China’s leaders are so concerned about rising energy use and declining energy efficiency that the cabinet held a special meeting this week to discuss the problem, according to a statement Thursday from the ministry of industry and information technology. Coal-fired electricity and oil sales each climbed 24 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, on the heels of similar increases in the fourth quarter

Premier Wen Jiabao promised tougher policies to enforce energy conservation, including a ban on government approval of any new projects by companies that failed to eliminate inefficient capacity, the ministry said. Mr. Wen also said that China had to find a way to meet the target in its current five-year plan of a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.

“We can never break our pledge, stagger our resolution or weaken our efforts, no matter how difficult it is,” Mr. Wen said. Western experts say it will be hard to meet the target, but that China’s leaders seem determined.

“No country of this size has seen energy demand grow this fast before in absolute terms, and those who are most concerned about this are the Chinese themselves,” said Jonathan Sinton, the China program manager at the International Energy Agency in Paris.

China has been the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases each year since 2006, leading the United States by an ever-widening margin. A failure by China to meet its own energy efficiency targets would be a big setback for international efforts to limit such emissions.

Such a failure would also be a potential diplomatic embarrassment for the Chinese government, which promised the world just before the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December that it would improve energy efficiency.

The issue has major economic implications for China and for global energy markets. The nation’s ravenous appetite for fossil fuels is driven by China’s shifting economic base — away from light export industries like garment and shoe production and toward energy-intensive heavy industries like steel and cement manufacturing for cars and construction for the domestic market.

Almost all urban households in China now have a washing machine, a refrigerator and an air-conditioner, according to government statistics. Rural ownership of appliances is now soaring as well because of new government subsidies for their purchase since late 2008.

Car ownership is rising rapidly in the cities, while bicycle ownership is actually falling in rural areas as more families buy motorcycles and light trucks.

General Motors announced on Thursday that its sales in China rose 41 percent in April from a year earlier, virtually all of the vehicles made in China because of high import taxes.

Zhou Xi’an, a National Energy Administration official, said in a statement last month that fossil fuel consumption was likely to increase further in the second quarter of this year because of rising car ownership, diesel use in the increasingly mechanized agricultural sector and extra jet fuel consumption for travelers to the Shanghai Expo.

The shift in the composition of China’s economic output is overwhelming the effects of China’s rapid expansion of renewable energy and its existing energy conservation program, energy experts said.

The increase in oil and coal-fired electricity consumption in the first quarter was twice as fast as economic growth of about 12 percent for that period, a sign that rising energy consumption is not just the result of a rebounding economy but also of changes in the mix of industrial activity. The shift in activity is partly because of China’s economic stimulus program, which has resulted in a surge in public works construction that requires a lot of steel and cement.

Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which many scientists describe as the biggest man-made contributor to global warming.

President Hu Jintao pledged in November that by 2020 the Chinese government would slow its growth in greenhouse gases by sharply improving energy efficiency. Mr. Wen went to the Copenhagen climate meeting three weeks later and opposed any international monitoring of China’s energy efficiency effort or binding limits on China’s overall energy consumption.

China’s current five-year plan, from 2006 to 2010, already sets an efficiency target that the country may now be less likely to meet.

The plan calls for the energy needed for each unit of economic output to decline by 20 percent in 2010 compared to 2005.

For a while, China seemed to be on track toward that goal. According to the ministry of industry and information technology, energy efficiency actually improved by more than 14 percent from 2005 to 2009.

But it deteriorated by 3.2 percent in the first quarter, the ministry said on Thursday.

Mr. Wen said that this deterioration would make it “particularly difficult” for China to meet the 20 percent target.

Without big policy changes, like raising fuel taxes, “they can’t possibly make it,” said Julie Beatty, principal energy economist at Wood Mackenzie, a big energy consulting firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Mr. Hu promised last November that China would improve the energy efficiency of its economy by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. The ministry statement on Thursday did not mention whether Mr. Hu’s promise might still be achievable.

Complicating energy efficiency calculations is the fact that China’s National Bureau of Statistics has begun a comprehensive revision of all of the country’s energy statistics for the last 10 years, restating them with more of the details commonly available in other countries’ data. Western experts also expect the revision to show that China has been using even more energy and releasing even more greenhouse gases than previously thought.

Revising the data now runs the risk that other countries will distrust the results and demand greater international monitoring of any future pledges by China. If the National Bureau of Statistics revises up the 2005 data more than recent data, for example, then China might appear to have met its target at the end of this year for a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.

China’s recent embrace of renewable energy has done little so far to slow the rise in emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Wind energy effectively doubled in this year’s first quarter compared with a year earlier, as China has emerged as the world’s largest manufacturer and installer of wind turbines. But wind still accounts for just 2 percent of China’s electricity capacity — and only 1 percent of actual output, because the wind does not blow all the time.

Meanwhile, fuel-intensive heavy industry output rose 22 percent in the first quarter in China from a year earlier, while light industry increased 14 percent.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations research unit, said in an e-mail message that he believed China was serious about addressing its emissions.

“There is a growing realization within Chinese society that major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be of overall benefit to China,” he wrote after learning of the latest Chinese energy statistics. “This is important not only for global reasons, because China is now responsible for the highest emissions of greenhouse gases, but also because its per capita emissions are increasing at a rapid rate.”

To some extent, China’s energy consumption now might actually help limit its global warming emissions in the future.

China, for example, used 200 million tons of cement in building rail lines last year, while the entire American economy only used 93 million tons, said David Fridley, a China energy specialist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Although production of that cement raised energy use and emissions of global warming gases, it also expanded a rail system that is among the most energy-efficient in the world.

China currently moves only 55 percent of its coal by rail, for example, which is down from 80 percent a decade ago, as many coal users have been forced by inadequate rail capacity to haul coal in trucks instead. The trucks burn 10 or more times as much fuel per mile to haul a ton of coal, Mr. Fridley said.

But now, with new high-speed passenger lines leaving more room on older lines to haul coal and other freight, the percentages could begin shifting away from energy-inefficient trucking, he said.

Source New York Times

Total World Coal Consumption in 2008: 7,238,207,000 Short Tons!
When it comes to global warming and air pollution, coal is the number one enemy. We were curious to know which countries burned the most, so we compiled a list of the top 10 coal-burning countries in the world based on the latest statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). We chose not to use per capita numbers because the atmosphere doesn’t care about that; in the end, all that matters is absolute numbers. Do you know which country’s number one? Could you guess most of the list?

#10 South-Korea 112,843 thousand short tons

#9 Poland 149,333 thousand short tons

#8 Australia 160,515 thousand short tons

#7 South Africa: 193,654 thousand short tons

#6 Japan: 203,979 thousand short tons

#5 Russia: 269,684 thousand short tons

#4 Germany: 269,892 thousand short tons

#3 India: 637,522 thousand short tons

#2 USA: 1,121,714 thousand short tons

#1 China: 2,829,515 thousand short tons

Danger! World Coal Consumption is Going Up Rapidly
According to the EIA numbers, between 2004 and 2008, total world consumption of coal went from 6,259,645,000 to 7,238,208,000 short tons. That’s a 15.6 percent increase of the most carbon-intensive kind of fuel in just four years. Ouch.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) forms during coal combustion when one atom of carbon (C) unites with two atoms of oxygen (O) from the air. Because the atomic weight of carbon is 12 and that of oxygen is 16, the atomic weight of carbon dioxide is 44. Based on that ratio, and assuming complete combustion, 1 pound of carbon combines with 2.667 pounds of oxygen to produce 3.667 pounds of carbon dioxide. For example, coal with a carbon content of 78 percent and a heating value of 14,000 Btu per pound emits about 204.3 pounds of carbon dioxide per million Btu when completely burned. Complete combustion of 1 short ton (2,000 pounds) of this coal will generate about 5,720 pounds (2.86 short tons) of carbon dioxide.

Via: EIA

As the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases at 20% of total global emissions how long will we wait before the upper level that causes catastrophic climate change is reached? Every day we wait another 45 millions tonnes of CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere.

It is time NOW to decarbonise and restructure a future that is safe for generations to come.

There are only two ways of enabling good policy legislation on climate change to be implemented. Either make the policy also good Politics and they’ll do it, or make it bad Politics if they don’t. What will it be the ‘carrot and the stick’ or the ‘stick and the carrot’?

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Climate scientists have long warned that global warming could unlock vast stores of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen into the Arctic permafrost, setting off potentially significant increases in global warming.
Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.
Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the university and a leader of the study, said it was too soon to say whether the findings suggest that a dangerous release of methane looms. In a telephone news conference, she said researchers were only beginning to track the movement of this methane into the atmosphere as the undersea permafrost that traps it degrades.
But climate experts familiar with the new research reported in Friday’s issue of the journalScience that even though it does not suggest imminent climate catastrophe, it is important because of methane’s role as a greenhouse gas. Although carbon dioxide is far more abundant and persistent in the atmosphere, ton for ton atmospheric methane traps at least 25 times as much heat.
Until recently, undersea permafrost has been little studied, but work so far shows it is already sending surprising amounts of methane into the atmosphere, Dr. Shakhova and other researchers are finding.
Last year, scientists from Britain and Germany reported that they had detected plumes of methane rising from the Arctic seabed in the West Spitsbergen area, north of Scandinavia. At the time, they said they had begun their work hoping to gain data to predict future emissions and had not expected to find evidence that the process was under way.
It is “indispensable” to keep track of methane in the region, Martin Heimann of the Max Planck Institute in Germany said in a commentary accompanying the Science report. So far, Dr. Heimann wrote, methane contributions from Arctic permafrost have been “negligible.” He added: “But will this persist into the future under sustained warming trends? We do not know.”
In an e-mail message, Euan G. Nisbet of the University of London, an expert on atmospheric methane, said the situation “needs to be watched carefully.”
Atmospheric concentrations of methane have more than doubled since pre-industrial times, Dr. Heimann wrote. Most of it comes from human activities including energy production, cattle raising and the cultivation of rice. But about 40 percent is natural, including the decomposition of organic materials in wetlands and frozen wetlands like permafrost.
Dr. Shakhova said that permafrost in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, peat land that flooded as sea levels rose after the last ice age, is degrading in part because runoff from rivers that feed the Arctic Ocean is warmer than in the past.
She estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.) By some estimates, global methane emissions total about 500 teragrams a year.
Dr. Shakhova said that undersea methane ordinarily undergoes oxidation as it rises to the surface, where it is released as carbon dioxide. But because water over the shelf is at most about 50 meters deep, she said, the gas bubbles to the surface there as methane. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million. Concentrations over the shelf are 2 parts per million or higher.
But, “I am not the person to judge” whether the Arctic findings suggest that estimates of climate change in coming decades should be rewritten, she added.
“I would not go so far as to suggest any implications,” she said. “We are at the very beginning of research.”

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More melting of the Arctic ice caused by accelerating warming would release further gases, setting off a “feedback” mechanism which could send climate change spinning out of control.

Methane (CH4) traps solar heat in the earth’s atmosphere even more effectively than CO2, which has been the focus of climate change fears for decades. Scientists believe it could cause 60 times more warming than carbon over a period of 20 years, though it also decays more quickly.

Atmospheric methane levels began rising in 2007, when an Arctic heatwave caused sea ice to shrink significantly. Now new preliminary results suggest levels have continued to rise through 2008 and 2009.

The new figures will be disclosed this morning at the start of a two-day conference on greenhouse gases at the Royal Society in London.

Professor Euan Nisbet, of Royal Holloway College of the University of London, and Dr Ed Dlugokencky of the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder Colorado, will set out their findings in a presentation on “Global atmospheric methane in 2010: budget, changes and dangers”.

After a decade of near-zero growth in methane levels, the two scientists will reveal that: “globally averaged atmospheric methane increased by [approximately] 7 ppb (parts per billion) per year during 2007 and 2008.”

They will go on: “During the first half of 2009, globally averaged atmospheric CH4 was [approximately] 7 ppb greater than it was in 2008, suggesting that the increase will continue in 2009. There is the potential for increased CH4 emissions from strong positive climate feedbacks in the Arctic where there are unstable stores of carbon in permafrost … so the causes of these recent increases must be understood.”

Professor Nisbet told The Independent at the weekend that the new figures did not necessarily mark a departure from the trend. “It may just be a couple of years of high growth, and it may drop back to what it was,” he said. “But there is a concern that things are beginning to change towards renewed growth from feedbacks.”

Source Telegraph

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Atmospheric levels of methane, the greenhouse gas which is much more powerful than carbon dioxide, have risen significantly for the last three years running, scientists will disclose today – leading to fears that a major global-warming “feedback” is beginning to kick in.
For some time there has been concern that the vast amounts of methane, or “natural gas”, locked up in the frozen tundra of the Arctic could be released as the permafrost is melted by global warming. This would give a huge further impetus to climate change, an effect sometimes referred to as “the methane time bomb”.
This is because methane (CH4) is even more effective at retaining the Sun’s heat in the atmosphere than CO2, the main focus of international climate concern for the last two decades. Over a relatively short period, such as 20 years, CH4 has a global warming potential more than 60 times as powerful as CO2, although it decays more quickly.
Now comes the first news that levels of methane in the atmosphere, which began rising in 2007 when an unprecedented heatwave in the Arctic caused a record shrinking of the sea ice, have continued to rise significantly through 2008 and 2009.
Although researchers cannot yet be certain, and there may be non-threatening explanations, there is a fear that rising temperatures may have started to activate the positive feedback mechanism. This would see higher atmospheric levels of the gas producing more warming, which in turn would release more methane, which would produce even further warming, and so on into an uncontrollable “runaway” warming effect. This is believed to have happened at the end of the last Ice Age, causing a very rapid temperature rise in a matter of decades.
The new figures will be revealed this morning at a major two-day conference on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, taking place at the Royal Society in London. They will be disclosed in a presentation by Professor Euan Nisbet, of Royal Holloway College of the University of London, and Dr Ed Dlugokencky of the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, which is run by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Both men are leading experts on CH4 in the atmosphere, and Dr Dlugokencky in particular, who is in charge of NOAA’s global network of methane monitoring stations, is sometimes referred to as “the keeper of the world’s methane”. In a presentation on “Global atmospheric methane in 2010: budget, changes and dangers”, the two scientists will reveal that, after a decade of near-zero growth, “globally averaged atmospheric methane increased by [approximately] 7ppb (parts per billion) per year during 2007 and 2008.”
They go on: “During the first half of 2009, globally averaged atmospheric CH4 was [approximately] 7ppb greater than it was in 2008, suggesting that the increase will continue in 2009. There is the potential for increased CH4 emissions from strong positive climate feedbacks in the Arctic where there are unstable stores of carbon in permafrost … so the causes of these recent increases must be understood.”
Professor Nisbet said at the weekend that the new figures did not necessarily mark a new excursion from the trend. “It may just be a couple of years of high growth, and it may drop back to what it was,” he said. “But there is a concern that things are beginning to change towards renewed growth from feedbacks.”
The product of biological activity by microbes, usually in decaying vegetation or other organic matter, “natural gas” is emitted from natural sources and human activities. Wetlands may give off up to a third of the total amount produced. But large amounts are also released from the production of gas for fuel, and also from agriculture, including the production of rice in paddy fields and the belches of cows as they chew the cud (which is known as “bovine eructation”). However, methane breaks down and disappears from the atmosphere quite quickly, and until recently it was thought that the Earth’s methane “budget” was more or less in balance.
Global atmospheric levels of the gas now stand at about 1,790 parts per billion. They began to be measured in 1984, when they stood at about 1,630ppb, and were steadily rising. It was thought that this was due to the Russian gas industry, which before the collapse of the Soviet Union was affected by enormous leaks.
After 1991, substantial amounts were invested in stopping the leaks by a privatised Russian gas industry, and the methane rise slowed.
Methane in the atmosphere: The recent rise
Many climate scientists think that frozen Arctic tundra, like this at Sermermiut in Greenland, is a ticking time bomb in terms of global warming, because it holds vast amounts of methane, an immensely potent greenhouse gas. Over thousands of years the methane has accumulated under the ground at northern latitudes all around the world, and has effectively been taken out of circulation by the permafrost acting as an impermeable lid. But as the permafrost begins to melt in rising temperatures, the lid may open – with potentially catastrophic results.

Source Independant UK

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Source Science Daily

Looking at this time-lapse of a Coal Fired Power plant puts the 24/7 emissions from the worlds 50,000 power plants into a scary reality.

Coal is mostly used to produce electricity, and the world’s annual consumption is presently around 6.2 billion tonnes, with estimates that 75 percent of this figure or 4.65 billion tonnes is used to produce electricity in the world’s 50,000 coal-fired power stations. By 2020, a 50 percent projected increase in global demand will put consumption up to 9.3 billion tonnes annually.
Does anyone apart from me see the correlation between coal use and escalating greenhouse emissions over the period from now until 2020? Logic suggests, if we want to stop global warming, stop coal!
China produced 2.38 billion tonnes in 2006, while also being a net importer of coal including supplies from Australia.
Just over 83 percent of China’s electricity comes from coal-fired power stations and this is on the rise. The United States consumes about 1.053 billion tonnes using 90 percent of this for energy generation.