United States official carbon footprint data video has been published in full color, showing hot spot areas of concern. It shows the detailed emissions of all 9 million square kilometers and plots down to 100 square meter areas.
The Vulcan project is a NASA/DOE funded effort under the North American Carbon Program (NACP) to quantify our fossil fuel CO2 emissions at space and time scales much finer than has been achieved in the past.
The detail and scope of the Vucan CO2 inventory makes it a valuable tool for policymakers, demographers and socail scientists.
This comes on the foot of Al Gore’s presentation evidencing the pace of climate change may be worse than what scientists have been recently predicting.
Evidence coming from the Vulcan project will back this call to challenge Americans to act with a sense of common urgency and ‘general mission… the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement.
He also called on the 3 presidential candidates to back up what they have been advocating on the campaign trail.
“(all) nominees have a very different and forward leaning position on the climate crisis… they’re saying the right things and should do the right thing when elected.”
He went on to say that every citizen should become an active participant in cimate change via personal action to activate legislative change on what he termed “the sclerosis in our civilization”.
For further reading go to Ted’s profile on Al Gore
Global Information and Communications Technology (ICT) usage accounts for approximately 2% of all global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a figure which now eclipses all CO2 emissions caused by aviation.
500 megatons of carbon dioxide could be put away annually thanks to a new process from Nova Scotia’s Carbon Sense Solutions. The race to develop integrated carbon capture and storage solutions could have some fresh competition in the form of concrete made with sequestered carbon dioxide. CO2 is stored in pre-cast concrete which it said has the potential to put away 500 megatons annually.
“What’s different about this application is that it operates under atmospheric conditions, using as-captured flue gas,” Robert Niven, president of Carbon Sense, said.
Pre-cast concrete uses a reusable mold to form walls, panels, beams and columns that are cured in a plant and then shipped to a construction site, offering faster production over pouring and curing on-site.
Niven said his company’s process could use the existing carbon dioxide emissions from a pre-cast concrete plant, funneling the emissions into a separate green product line.
The resulting concrete has a higher compressive strength, is less permeable and has a faster curing time than regular pre-cast concrete, according to Niven.
Regular pre-cast concrete can take 12 to 24 hours to cure using steam, while the CO2 carbonated concrete only takes an hour, and doesn’t use any steam. The carbon storing concrete from Carbon Sense can store 60 tons of carbon dioxide for every 1,000 tons of concrete.
Last month George Bush announced a stimulus package in excess of $150 billion. If it means most of us will head straight to the local Apple store to get the latest iPhone or some other slick gadget, well, you’d be stimulating the economy, granted, but you won’t be doing the environment any favors.
The bottom line is that every new gadget you buy will stimulate more of the same gadgets to be re-ordered from China’s booming their energy thirsty consumer electronics industry. And the more consumer electronics they produce for the American market, the more energy (aka oil) they’ll need to produce those gadgets we’ve come to love. And (dare I say it) the more oil they need, the more demand for oil there’ll be leading to higher prices for us at the petrol pumps = greater inflation = deeper recession.
Now this isn’t such a far reaching argument as you’d think. The consumer electronics industry is the fastest growing, energy hungry industry on the planet, and China’s demands for oil has not entirely been born out of their new found love for the Cadillac. It’s their breathtaking industrial demand for energy which is notably having a speculative effect on the world’s energy prices. Granted, they are trying to curb this with the opening of new open face coal collieries, but this won’t exactly benefit the environment either.
Solution born from our own common sense
In reality, most Americans are hardly in the mood to rush to the mall clutching the $600 rebate they’ve just inherited from a failed administration. With the Foreclosure rate up 57% from this time last year, it’s likely to be used to keep the banks away for, say, a couple of weeks more at best. Hardly stimulating stuff. In a climate of despair, climate change is low on the agenda for most.
