Tag
Methane
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Memo To EPA: Stay Strong On Oil and Gas Standards
Next week, EPA will issue final New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for conventional air emissions from the oil and natural gas industry. The standards must require the capture of hundreds of thousands of tons of smog-forming emissions emitted annually by this industry, along with millions of tons of methane. Methane…
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Public Transit Buses: Diesel or CNG?
Recently, Pittsburgh’s mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, announced that his city would buy four new garbage trucks fueled by compressed natural gas (CNG) rather than diesel because, among other reasons, it would improve local air quality. Like Pittsburgh, many municipalities are dealing with an aging fleet of vehicles and weighing the environmental…
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Many Climate Decisions Ahead for EPA
Whatever the symbolic importance of the Keystone XL decision, it is only one of several climate-related policy decisions facing the Administration this year – and arguably one of the less significant ones. The Environmental Impact Statement on the project produced by the U.S. Department of State estimates that stopping the…
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Methane from Oil and Gas: Low-hanging Fruit that EPA Must Pick
November 30th was the last day for public comments on EPA’s proposal to significantly update air emissions limits for most of the oil and natural gas industry. The proposal makes much-needed revisions to existing requirements, which in some cases are over 25 years old, and in expanding the coverage of…
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Ice and Oil; Oil and Ice
Last month, U.S. scientists confirmed that the Arctic has lost the second highest annual amount of ice since monitoring began. Of the remaining ice, much more is thinner, single-year ice resulting from melting and refreezing during the year. Older, thicker multi-year ice has declined by 60% over the past 30…
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Making Sense of Gas vs. Coal and Climate: A Look at the Recent Paper by Tom Wigley
The last few months have seen a flurry of academic papers investigating whether using natural gas for power generation creates more global warming than using coal for power generation. A few have reached the startling conclusion that using gas for power is just as bad, or worse, than coal. The…
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Natural Gas: Palliative, Not a Cure
Plentiful and cheap natural gas is the Prozac of American energy policy. It may take the edge off of some of our worst symptoms in the near term. But it can also dull us to solving key long term and chronic problems, especially regarding climate change. And, as with any…
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A Cleantech Revolution in Four Easy Steps
A recent National Academy of Sciences report notes that CO2 lasts thousands of years in the atmosphere, so if we really want to limit the damage from climate change, we’ll need to drop the world’s energy system to near-zero emissions by 2050. Yet the U.N.’s climate chief, Cristina Figueres, recently…
