It has become assumed that most humans will live in cities going forward and they can be made to mitigate their environmental impacts. These assumptions come out of a period enjoyed ample energy from fossil fuels, invisible most, enormous resource flows non-urban areas. For reduce GHGs, means must reduced resourcing areas, challenging our current deep dependence on energy. This perspective sugg...

Earth system climate sensitivity (ESS) is the long-term (>10³ year) response of global surface temperature to doubled CO₂ that integrates fast and slow climate feedbacks. ESS has energy policy implications because global temperatures are not expected to decline appreciably for at least 10³ year, even if anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions drop to zero. We report provisional ESS estimates of ...

Emissions reduction legislation relies upon 'bottom-up' accounting of industrial and biogenic greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions at their sources. Yet, even for relatively well-constrained industrial GHGs, global emissions based on 'top-down' methods that use atmospheric measurements often agree poorly with the reported bottom-up emissions. For emissions reduction legislation to be effective, it is...

All environmental pollution, including emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), imposes costs on people who did not create the pollution. This is an example of an economic externality—a consequence or side effect of an action that is not experienced by the individual or entity from which it originates, and that is not reflected in prices. The damages and associated costs to society that GHGs cause...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Malmquist–Luenberger index Urban water utilities Greenhouse gas emissions Nonparametric productivity measurement The energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in the provision of urban water and sewerage services have become an increasingly important issue in recent times. However, the impact of negative externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions on the product...

Current emissions of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) have already committed the planet to an increase in average surface temperature by the end of the century that may be above the critical threshold for tipping elements of the climate system into abrupt change with potentially irreversible and unmanageable consequences. This would mean that the climate system is close to entering if not ...

In December 2014, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) issued for public comment a draft guidance document1 on how federal agencies should evaluate climate change in their analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act .2 The draft guidance does not directly regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs) or climate change, but rather provides agencies with “direction on when and how t...

This paper presents the sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of a mathematical model for Greenhouse gas (GHG) and energy consumption assessment from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The model is able to simultaneously describe the main biological and physical-chemical processes in a WWTP. Specifically, the mathematical model includes the main processes of the water and sludge lines influenc...