The authors say the current fossil fuel business model assumes that there are no emissions limits.
Wind and solar produce no emissions, fuel costs nothing, and there are no major health or environmental dangers.
In Pennsylvania for example, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has found that there are no emissions from Marcellus shale activities that reach levels harmful to human health.
But it is still very different from what is the Holy Grail of clean coal technology -- that is, a power plant that has no smokestacks because it produces no emissions.
About 15 percent of the new cars sold in California by 2025 must run on electricity, hydrogen fuel or other alternative fuels that produce near zero or no emissions, according to new rules adopted unanimously by state regulators on Friday.
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Here the maths is unambiguous - we have insufficient budget for the carbon we are already emitting and by the time shale gas is produced in any quantity (five to 10 years), there will be no emissions space left for it.
But I would love a future of no tailpipe emissions, no brown air visible as I approach downtown Houston every day.
They assume that electric cars have no carbon emissions, although the electricity they use probably came from coal.
EVs don't need fuel to power them, which means no tailpipe emissions.
"There are no carbon emissions while using photovoltaic cells to produce electricity -- then (we can) use electricity to operate desalination plants to produce freshwater, " he predicts.
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And they'll go nuclear, which produces almost no carbon emissions.
It's a noble effort, with 539 signatories to date, but it has no teeth: no firm deadline for offsetting greenhouse gas emissions and no penalty for not doing so.
To receive RECs, Massachusetts facilities must also have 20-year lifecycle carbon dioxide emissions that are no greater than 50 percent the emissions from a natural gas facility.
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Although nuclear power plants are expensive to build, they are relatively cheap to run and produce virtually no greenhouse gas emissions.
This week's flexible pact deals only with the treaty's first time period (till the end of this decade or so) and calls for no cuts in emissions by poor countries.
It still has the advantages of offering reliable power, a degree of energy security, and no carbon dioxide emissions beyond those incurred in building and supplying the plants.
But the biodegradable characteristics of wastewater, if tapped to their full potential, could theoretically provide many times the energy that is now being used to process them, with no additional greenhouse emissions.
While new coal plants seem to be on the horizon in Texas, power companies operating in the state are also aware of a shift toward cleaner technologies, including nuclear power, which has no environmentally harmful emissions.
Lord Deben took issue with remarks Mr Osborne made in his speech at the Conservative party conference, when he said the UK should reduce emissions "no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe".
The U.S. is still No. 2 worldwide in net CO2 emissions, trailing only China, and is still No. 10 per capita.
Even if the legal niceties could be sorted out, there is no agreed way of assigning emissions from international flights to specific countries.
"He came to us before the 2008 election and said that everyone keeps talking about reducing oil reliance and cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but no one knows which approaches are more cost-effective than others, " says Phil Sharp, president of RFF.
Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 550 ppm -- which would invoke a rise in temperature of about three degrees Celsius -- would require energy emissions to rise no higher than 33 gigatons and would need to fall in the longer term.
"We're pleased the label clearly demonstrates the Nissan LEAF to be a best-in-class option, reflecting that it's a pure electric vehicle, uses no gas, has no tailpipe and has zero emissions, " said Scott Becker, senior vice president, Finance and Administration, Nissan Americas.
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The U.S. at No. 2 is slowly cutting emissions and is down to 5.9 billion tons per year.
There is no way to capture carbon dioxide emissions at the tailpipe.
What we can say clearly is that if we want to help New Orleans or other at-risk areas, cutting emissions will have virtually no impact for many decades.
Moreover, U.S. emissions restrictions would have no real-world climate impact.
Instead of that, the deal that emerged calls on America to cut its emissions by 7% no later than 2012, the European Union by 8% and the rest of the rich world by varying degrees.
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