Across all sectors of the economy, decreasing consumption of carbon-emitting fossil fuels resulted in both a lower carbon intensity and lower absolute emissions.
There are also direct rivals to new nuclear plants, such as fossil-fuel plants with carbon sequestration that can provide baseload power.
Many airlines -- Virgin being one example -- are actively developing bio-fuel technologies in an attempt to reduce their reliance on carbon-emitting fossil fuels, while a great deal of work is being done in the area of improving air-traffic management.
CNN: Green wing:?can technology make flying more environmentally friendly?
Nuclear energy's best hope lies in carbon pricing, which forces fossil-fuel plants to pay for the environmental cost of the carbon they generate.
ECONOMIST: Nuclear energy is unlikely to work without a carbon tax
Humans burning old fossil fuels spew out carbon-12, which is NOT radioactive.
FORBES: Climate Scientists Deepening Skepticism of Democracy
And electrically powered trains would emit less nasty carbon than fossil-fuelled aircraft.
Obvious no-regrets measures to take include cutting those subsidies that currently distort the choice of energy in favour of carbon-rich fossil fuels.
Climate researchers say this decrease in sea ice a symptom of a warming climate, caused largely by the combustion of carbon-rich fossil fuels.
Climate researchers say that a decrease in sea ice is a symptom of a warming climate, caused largely by the combustion of carbon-rich fossil fuels.
To achieve this, the WEO estimates that renewable and carbon-efficient fossil-fuel energies will have to expand their share of the energy mix from 19 to 26 percent by 2030.
In other words, no single category of renewable energy is growing anywhere near the speed it needs to bear the full brunt of displacing carbon-emitting fossil fuels anytime soon.
The bill also sets rules for building more natural-gas storage (as imports replace dwindling domestic supplies) and for developing technology to capture and sequester carbon emissions from fossil-fuel plants.
ECONOMIST: Nuclear power: The wind, the sun—and the atom | The
Natural gas is a nonrenewable carbon-producing fossil fuel.
FORBES: Cheap Natural Gas Will Kill More Coal Plants Than Us: EPA
Shuttering even one U.S. nuclear power plant could unleash massive carbon emissions if fossil-fuel plants were used to make up the lost power, according to a new study released this weekend by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
FORBES: Shutting Nuclear Plants Would Boost Coal And Carbon Emissions
From Atkins' vantage point, even if the energy bill dies in the Senate (as some predict it may), her company is positioned to reap the benefits of the transition away from fossil fuels and toward a lower-carbon economy.
Algae can be fed from waste-streams of CO2 from fossil-fuel power stations as a carbon elimination strategy and can also decontaminate groundwater, so there is a potential mix of environmental solutions in aid of a common goal of fuel beyond oil.
The third premise, that carbon penalties attached to fossil-fueled utilities will incentivize alternative technology innovations, is misleading in several respects.
Burning fossil fuels has sent the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level rocketing.
Biofuels have come to present a special problem because biogenic carbon is excluded from fossil-based caps as proposed to date even though (like most forms of bioenergy) their production is intrinsically coupled to terrestrial carbon stocks.
Assuming that humans will find something better to power the world with than carbon dioxide-emitting fossil fuels in the next one or two hundred years, that total warming back then was greater or equal to what we are likely to inflict on Greenland.
FORBES: Global Warming: Hotheads, Flatliners and Lukewarmers, Part One
The highest potential for man-made quakes may come from the development of carbon-capture technology, an effort to recover the carbon dioxide released by fossil fuels and blamed for an increase in global temperatures.
The price of solar power still has far to fall before it is cheaper than electricity generated from fossil fuels even if governments jack up fossil-fuel prices to reflect the cost of carbon emissions.
These benefits, in combination with growing electricity use worldwide, concerns about limited supplies of fossil fuels, and efforts to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and prevent climate change, have prompted governments and investors to pour money into this emerging technology.
Ministers are trying to make planning rules more nuclear-friendly, and hope that tighter carbon-emission limits will help nuclear energy shine by comparison with fossil-fuel plants.
Both rely heavily on coal, which is the most carbon-intensive of all the fossil fuels.
Turning fossil-fuel plants on and off adds inefficiencies, producing carbon emissions just to heat up boilers before energy production can begin.
FORBES: Wind Power May Not Reduce Carbon Emissions As Expected: Argonne
The science of global warming is politically controversial but generally accepted as fact by most researchers, who point to heat-trapping carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels as the major cause.
And they argue that simplistic comparisons with other electricity sources are unfair: fossil-fuel plants pay too little for their planet-warming carbon emissions, while renewables benefit from generous subsidies.
ECONOMIST: Nuclear energy is unlikely to work without a carbon tax
They show that warming spells very like that of the past 100 years occurred repeatedly, long before the large-scale use of fossil fuels and the associated emissions of carbon dioxide gas were a possible factor.
Once we turn that corner, the energy-environment trade-off will start to work to our advantage, and possibly to the advantage of the whole world if we can develop low- or no-carbon energy technologies that can compete with cheap fossil fuels.
应用推荐