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Emissions in sentence

2828 examples of Emissions in a sentence

China is intent on lowering CO2 emissions, cleaning its air, and becoming the twenty-first-century leader in low-carbon technologies such as photovoltaics and electric vehicles.
No matter how many schoolchildren are gunned down or what the scientific evidence may be for the effects of carbon dioxide emissions, people will not change beliefs that define their identity.
The focus on China intensified late last year, when new data from the International Energy Agency and other research organizations revealed that China had overtaken the US as the largest source of greenhouse gases – and, more ominously, that its emissions are growing at a rate that exceeds all wealthy nations’ capacity to decrease theirs.
Even if China met its own targets for energy conservation, its emissions would increase by about 2.3 billion metric tons over the next five years – far larger than the 1.7 billion tons in cutbacks imposed by the Kyoto Protocol on the 37 developed “Annex 1” countries, including the US.
Ironically, the American plan is taking shape even before the US takes any action to reduce its own emissions, inviting charges of hypocrisy, violation of international law, and threatening a major trade war.
Despite China’s official hard line, some Chinese environmental officials privately express alarm at run-away carbon emissions, and suggest that foreign green tariffs would actually strengthen their hand in domestic policy struggles over controlling greenhouse gases by helping to win political support for emissions cuts.
Pan Yue, vice-director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, recently argued in a China Daily article in favor of stronger emissions regulations and a more “green-oriented China,” warning that “China’s image among the international community” was in jeopardy.
The growing dispute over trade sanctions brings to the fore not only the fundamental ethical question of whether wealthy nations should bear the burden of emissions reduction alone, but also the strategic question of whether sticks as well as carrots should be used to induce green behavior in developing countries.
By supporting further consolidation of large-scale monocultures in the hands of the most powerful economic actors, we risk widening further the gap with small-scale, family farming, while pushing a model of industrial farming that is already responsible for one-third of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions today.
But – and here comes the real hit – carbon-dioxide emissions grew seventeen-fold.
The big problems, of course, are how we take account of past responsibility for the carbon in the atmosphere, how we balance aggregate national emissions and per capita figures – China leads in the first category; the US, Australia, and Canada are the biggest culprits in the second – and how we manage technology transfer from developed to emerging and poor economies.
But a closer look at the global energy system, together with a more refined understanding of the emissions challenge, reveals that fossil fuels will likely remain dominant throughout this century – meaning that carbon capture and storage (CCS) may well be the critical technology for mitigating climate change.
Kaya calculated CO2 emissions by multiplying total population by per capita GDP, energy efficiency (energy use per unit of GDP), and carbon intensity (CO2 per unit of energy).
Given the impracticality of winning support for proposals based on population management or limits on individual wealth, analyses using the Kaya Identity tend to bypass the first two terms, leaving energy efficiency and carbon intensity as the most important determinants of total emissions.
This view does not align with the prevailing mechanisms for measuring progress on emissions reduction, which target specific annual outcomes.
While reducing the annual flow of emissions by, say, 2050 would be a positive step, it does not necessarily guarantee success in terms of limiting the eventual rise in global temperature.
This means that efficiency may drive, not limit, the increase in emissions.
In all of these cases, the result of greater efficiency has been an increase in energy use and emissions – not least because it improved access to the fossil-resource base.
Instead, policymakers should adopt a new climate paradigm that focuses on limiting cumulative emissions.
After all, consuming a ton of fossil fuel, but capturing and storing the emissions, is very different from shifting or delaying its consumption.
The annual cost of adapting to climate change has now passed the $40 billion mark, and is expected to rise every year unless we can significantly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
Brazil’s efforts have led to perhaps the biggest emission reduction of any country in the world – at a time when deforestation accounts for around 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions.
For example, Indonesia is seeking to establish a Green Corridor in Kalimantan (the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo), where deforestation is not only fueling greenhouse-gas emissions, but also diminishing river flows, making it difficult in some months to transport goods by barge.
But, beyond this well-trodden battlefield, something amazing has happened: Carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years.
Estimating on the basis of data from the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) from the first five months of 2012, this year’s expected CO2 emissions have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14%, from their peak in 2007.
And, while a flagging economy may explain a small portion of the drop in US carbon emissions, the EIA emphasizes that the major explanation is natural gas.
Indeed, US carbon emissions have dropped some 20% per capita, and are now at their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961.
David Victor, an energy expert at the University of California, San Diego, estimates that the shift from coal to natural gas has reduced US emissions by 400-500 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 per year.
To put that number in perspective, it is about twice the total effect of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions in the rest of the world, including the European Union.
It is tempting to believe that renewable energy sources are responsible for emissions reductions, but the numbers clearly say otherwise.
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