Building for a Zero Carbon future: trade-off between carbon dioxide emissions and primary energy approaches

Climate trade-off between black carbon and carbon dioxide emissions

There are various difficulties involved with comparing the effects of short-lived and long-lived atmospheric species on climate. Global warming potentials (GWPs) can be computed for pulse emissions of short-lived species. However, if the focus is on the long-term effect of a pulse emission occurring today, GWPs do not factor in the fact that if a radiative forcing is applied for a short period,...

Approaches to Reducing Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Accounting for Carbon Dioxide Emissions

It is an adage of accounting to monitor what you can measure but there is concern that some elements can potentially be very important yet very difficult to evaluate. There are now many who care about accounting for CO2 emissions: from scientists interested in the global carbon cycle to environmentalists concerned about global climate change, regulators overseeing international or subnational a...

Reducing Carbon Dioxide Emissions

DEBATE ABOUT the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, and fears that it will result in an intensification of the Greenhouse Effect and global warming, have spurred consideration of sustainable development. It has been claimed that technology to improve energy efficiency already exists that is cost-effective without consideration of the gains from abatement of carb...

Nuclear exit , the US energy mix , and carbon dioxide emissions

If the United States were to adopt a policy to phase out nuclear generation, as has happened recently in other developed countries, what would the environmental and energy-mix implications be? Based on alternative scenarios of nuclear exit that consider the influence of potential policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions, a model of the US and global economy indicates that, under current polic...