Major auto manufacturers are already heavily invested in developing advanced technologies that can significantly reduce fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions beyond the existing model year 2012-2016 targets.
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It directs my administration, under the leadership of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, to develop a standard to improve fuel efficiency and reduce harmful emissions for trucks, starting with the model year 2014.
The authors say the current fossil fuel business model assumes that there are no emissions limits.
They then added in meteorological data from 56 local weather stations, matched to the dates and locations of interest, and used another model to derive values for average emissions.
The highest economic growth model leads to the lowest level of emissions considered.
President-elect Barack Obama has a similar national policy for the US, and a new report by humanitarian charity Oxfam calls for this model to be applied to rich country emissions allocations, with auctioning taking over from free allocations.
An integrated-assessment model quantifies the marginal damages of air pollution emissions for the US which are multiplied times the quantity of emissions by industry to compute gross damages.
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With climate policy in disarray here in the United States as well, leading environmental organizations and progressives would do well to look to our friends in Australia for a new model to move away from compromised and politically unsustainable emissions trading and toward major public investments in clean energy innovation and infrastructure to create a prosperous clean energy economy.
Even in the high-abatement model, though, the developing countries are still offering greater emissions cuts, compared with business as usual, thanks mostly to plans for less deforestation.
Climate change will also be a theme - Mexico has said it wants to be the developing world's model for sustainability, and has vowed to halve its carbon emissions by 2050.
While it remains to be seen if Calera can produce cement strong enough to be useful in construction, the company is toying with a radical business model: It will give away cement while charging polluters a fee for removing their emissions.
Following a model used by Japan and Korea, China is also encouraging foreign automakers to bring modern emissions and safety technology and share it with their Chinese partners.
The thing is though, this particular economic model, A1T it was called, also led to one of the two lowest outcomes for emissions.
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America has had great success cutting sulphur-dioxide emissions, which are a precursor to acid rain, through a domestic trading scheme that may be a good model for any Kyoto-inspired carbon trading.
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