BACKGROUND Approaches to estimating and addressing the risk to children from fossil fuel combustion have been fragmented, tending to focus either on the toxic air emissions or on climate change. Yet developing children, and especially poor children, now bear a disproportionate burden of disease from both environmental pollution and climate change due to fossil fuel combustion. OBJECTIVE This ...

The use of wood waste for heating in urban settings provides an opportunity for communities to reduce annual fossil emissions by directly reducing the amount of fossil fuel used. Life-cycle assessments (LCA) comparing the environmental impacts of alternative processes or products provide the essential information to better understand opportunities for improvement. An LCA was performed on a Seat...

Fuels and chemicals derived from biomass are regarded as an environmentally friendly alternative to petroleum based products. The concept of using plant material as a source for fuels and commodity chemicals has been embraced by governments to alleviate dependence on the volatile petroleum market. This trend is driven not only by economics but also by social and political factors. Global warmin...

BACKGROUND The periods of fetal and child development arguably represent the stages of greatest vulnerability to the dual impacts of fossil fuel combustion: the multiple toxic effects of emitted pollutants (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, particles, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, metals) and the broad health impacts of global climate change attributable in large part to carbon dioxide releas...

[1] Estimates of fossil fuel CO2 are a critical component in atmospheric CO2 inversions. Rather than solving for this portion of the atmospheric CO2 budget, inversions typically include estimates of fossil fuel CO2 as a known quantity. However, this assumption may not be appropriate, particularly as inversions continue to solve for fluxes at reduced space and timescales. In this study, two diff...

The continued growth of world’s population and gradual increase of people’s living standards in developing countries have sped up the exhaustion of fossil fuels and caused large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Although renewable energy sources (e.g. wind energy, solar energy, hydro energy and biomass energy) have developed rapidly in recent years, limitations existing in these energy source...

Research and development of renewable energies has recently regained prominence given anticipated shortages of fossil-fuel-based energies and parallel rising prices of fossil-derived fuels and chemicals. This changing economic landscape combines with environmental degradation to constitute powerful forces of change [36]. Particularly, the quantities of ethanol produced via biotechnological proc...

We assess the large-scale, top-down constraints on regional fossil fuel emissions provided by observations of atmospheric total column CO2, XCO2 . Using an atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) with underlying fossil emissions, we determine the influence of regional fossil fuel emissions on global XCO2 fields. We quantify the regional contrasts between source and upwind regions and probe ...