The concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the earth's atmosphere is creating changes in the world's climate. Reducing GHG emissions has become a national and international priority. Combusting carbon in the transportation sector contributes more than 28 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions (EPA, 2006). Within the transportation sector, light duty vehicles comprise about 60 percent of the GH...

Heat demand is a large contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the European Union (EU), as heat is largely produced using fossil fuel resources. Extended use of district heating (DH) could reduce climate impact, as DH systems can distribute heat produced in efficient combined heat and power (CHP) plants and industrial excess heat, thus utilising heat that would otherwise be wasted. The...

Electric vehicles (EVs) provide a tremendous opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and save money at the same time. In the United States today, EVs generally result in substantially fewer GHG emissions compared to gasoline-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. EVs are also typically cheaper to operate than ICEs. A recent Synapse analysis found that replacing ICEs wit...

With the global challenge of climate change, it becomes crucial to understand the factors that can guide carbon intensive companies to comply with environmental regulations through significant reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Using the natural-resource-based view, the argument in this paper is that focusing on sustainability-driven resources by companies is a way to meet environmen...

 An order-of magnitude estimate of life-cycle GHG reductions across potential municipal solid waste management scenarios shows that achievable reductions are on the order of current annual emissions from the conventional waste sector quantified in OECD countries’ GHG inventories. In other words, in most countries, at least 4 percent of current annual GHG emissions could be mitigated if waste m...

Demand for tools to rapidly assess greenhouse gas impacts from policy and technological change in the agricultural sector has catalyzed the development of 'GHG calculators'- simple accounting approaches that use a mix of emission factors and empirical models to calculate GHG emissions with minimal input data. GHG calculators, however, rely on models calibrated from measurements conducted overwh...

The Air Resources Board (ARB) has the primary responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in California under the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32). The overall mandate is to achieve 1990 GHG emission levels by 2020. In our efforts to reduce GHG emissions mandated by AB 32, ARB staff is currently working on multiple sector-specific GHG activities. The glass manufacturi...

Waste management practices can impact greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by affecting energy consumption, methane generation, carbon sequestration, and non-energy-related manufacturing emissions. This paper examines GHG emissions and sinks, from a life-cycle perspective, for selected paper, glass, metal, and plastic materials comprising about one-third of municipal solid waste (MSW) generated in th...

Meeting the future food security challenge without further sacrificing environmental integrity requires transformative changes in managing the key biophysical determinants of increasing agronomic productivity and reducing the environmental footprint. Here, we focus on Chinese rice production and quantitatively address this concern by conducting 403 on-farm trials across diverse rice farming sys...

The biological and economic values of coral reefs are highly vulnerable to increasing atmospheric and ocean carbon dioxide concentrations. We applied the COMBO simulation model (COral Mortality and Bleaching Output) to three major U.S. locations for shallow water reefs: South Florida, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. We compared estimates of future coral cover from 2000 to 2100 for a "business as usual...