For Americans, simple lifestyle changes could effectively add up to a massive cut in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to France’s entire annual emissions, according to a new study.

Thomas Dietz of Michigan State University’s department of sociology and environmental science and policy issued a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday that outlines 17 simple activities for Americans to reduce their carbon footprint.

Activities include purchasing a more fuel-efficient vehicle, using a clothesline for drying clothing and monitoring the thermostat more closely.

The activities have been grouped into five sectors: weatherization, switching to more efficient equipment, maintaining equipment, adjusting appliance settings, and modifying daily personal use.

Taking part in such activities could lead to a reduction of 123 metric tons of carbon emissions each year by the 10th year, said Dietz.

“This amounts to… 7.4 percent of total national emissions — an amount slightly larger than the total national emissions of France,” the study said.

“It is greater than reducing to zero all emissions in the United States from the petroleum-refining, iron and steel, and aluminum industries, each of which is among the largest emitters in the industrial sector.”

According to AFP, household energy makes up 38 percent of carbon emissions in the US. That’s about 626 metric tons of carbon, or eight percent of global emissions.

Study authors noted that US household energy accounts for more than the emissions of any country except China.

In other climate change news, Lord Stern of Brentford, a leading global warming authority, told the UK Times that people would be more effective at fighting climate change if they stopped eating meat.

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” said Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank. “It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Stern noted that methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Methane is 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide.

“I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said.

“I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

Additionally, Stern said that President Barack Obama must be present at the UN’s global climate summit in Copenhagen in December in order to reach a comprehensive climate deal.

“I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” said Stern.

Sometimes what’s bad for the economy can be good for the planet. Or so argued Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, yesterday. This environmental trend spotter pointed to several developments that may have escaped our attention as the global economy alternately sputtered and entered periods of freefall throughout the past 18 months.

Trend one: U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, have taken a tumble. They’re down 9 percent since 2007, Brown notes, fueled in part by a couple other developments.

Such as trend two: Americans are buying/keeping fewer cars. During the mid- to late-1990s, automakers sold more than 15 million cars a year. “Then, in 1999, [sales] jumped up to 17 million a year, and remained there for about eight years or so,” Brown says. This year: Those sales slumped to a measly 10 million. Meanwhile, U.S. motorists are on track to scrap about 14 million cars this year. So the U.S. fleet could shrink this year by nearly two percent.

Trend three: New cars tend to have a smaller carbon footprint than those now being scrapped — a trend that will only continue. There is already a rapidly expanding population of gas-sipping hybrids on the roads, and some moderately affordable, super-efficient electric and plug-in hybrids are slated to roll off assembly lines in about a year. (To help consumers find out how various cars compare in their fuel economy, the Environmental Protection Agency today released its 2010 passenger-car mileage guide.) And by 2016, thanks to a new White House policy issued in May, new U.S. cars must get an average 35.5 mpg. That’s four years earlier than the 2007 Corporate Average Fuel Economy law would have driven such a 40 percent boost in average mileage.

Trend four: The weight of U.S. cars has been diminishing as increasing amounts of steel have been replaced with lighter-weight structural materials. The result: “The amount of steel in the cars being retired is at least 40 percent larger than in the new cars being sold.” That’s contributing to a “steel surplus,” Brown says. Virtually every gram of steel in a retired car is recycled, he explains. Because it requires only about one-third as much energy to reuse steel than to produce it from scratch, pre-owned steel not only costs less but also contributes far fewer carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

Trend five: Phasing in considerably lighter, fuel-efficient cars might help the United States ditch its reputation as the world’s marathon gas guzzler. Currently, Brown notes, “the United States consumes more gasoline than the next 20 countries combined.” Already, the smaller, lighter U.S. fleet and recent reductions in annual driving distances per household have contributed to a drop in U.S. oil consumption. It fell five percent last year, Brown notes, and another five percent this year.

Trend six: Also contributing to the downturn in U.S. carbon emissions has been a drop in domestic coal consumption. This fuel is plenty dirty as it’s burned today, spewing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Increasingly, communities have been rebelling at the idea of a new soot-belching generating station being sited in their backyards. The result, Brown reported yesterday, coal use fell one percent last year and another 10 percent this year. Another telling stat: “In July,” he says, “the Sierra Club — coordinator of the national anti-coal campaign — announced the hundredth cancellation of a proposed [coal] plant since 2001. This battle is leading to a de facto moratorium on new coal plants.”

Brown acknowledges that most of these trends reflect America’s sour economy. But he also sees signs that some of these trends might continue, if not quite at the same dramatic pace. Many utilities are investing in renewable energy sources for an increasing share of their electricity generation and many companies are choosing to make their production processes less carbon intensive and polluting.

Concludes Brown: “For years we’ve been hearing that it’s difficult, if not almost impossible, to substantially cut carbon emissions. In fact, it’s not all that difficult.”

Ummmm. I think millions of out-of-work Americans and huge numbers of companies in receivership would argue otherwise. It’s been a very painful and difficult transition.

And the worst is yet to come, Brown and others concede.

In December, formal negotiations commence on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, that ill-fated blueprint for limiting the release of carbon dioxide and other climate-warming pollutants. The new treaty’s crafters face a tough challenge.

On Sept. 29, White House science adviser John Holdren noted that the best available data from Earth and atmospheric scientists indicate that to prevent wholesale havoc as the planet warms, “global emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants should level off by about 2020 and shrink thereafter to something like 50 percent of the current levels by 2050.”

Brown, in his new book — Plan B 4.0 (W.W. Norton: New York, released Oct. 5) — argues that what Holdren outlined constitutes an anemic goal. Earth is already running a small fever, and to prevent it getting dangerously higher, nations “need to cut net carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020,” Brown contends.

If carbon emissions dropped only 10 percent — despite the help of the worst economy since the Big Depression — how is the world going to average changes eight times that big over the next decade? “Turning this situation around will take a worldwide, wartime-like mobilization,” Brown predicts in chapter 10 of his new book. That sounds like it’s going to be pretty difficult and painful.

Unfortunately, nature is increasingly suggesting that dramatically cutting energy use and pollution may also be non-negotiable.

African governments, supported by the African Union (AU), are now in the process of drafting harmonized legislation in regard of the climate change presently sweeping the continent and giving Africa a common voice in the international arena of negotiations and compensations expected to come out of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December.

Regional meetings are now ongoing to formulate a common African position for Copenhagen, and the African delegations are expected to look at US$70+ billion from the developed “polluters” whose previous actions are now adding to the African suffering previously wreaked on the continent through economic exploitation by the colonial and neo-imperial powers, stemming back to the slave trade.

East Africa, in particular, has been suffering of a region wide drought, spreading from the Horn of Africa across much of Ethiopia, Kenya and other countries and the ever faster and ever more intense cycles of drought and flooding have led to suggestions that this may be due to global warming and climate change.

Nairobi will be host city of a conference for African parliamentarians ahead of the Copenhagen meeting in mid-October and Nairobi-based United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), a number of relevant non-governmental organizations (NGOs), bi- and multilateral partners and, notably, also the Kenya Wildlife Service are all putting their resources together to organize the gathering.

At least one Member of Parliament from the over 50 African countries part of the AU will attend and development partners, civil society and NGOs too are due for the meeting, where a comprehensive approach towards the climate change problems will be outlined.

Again, appropriately, it is Ethiopia presenting the African position in Copenhagen, as this Eastern African nation has in the past drawn the global spotlight over devastating and debilitating droughts, visiting upon Ethiopia like one of the ancient biblical plagues.

Africa presently has the lowest carbon footprint of all continents, but because of its geographical position is the most likely to suffer the severe weather fallout associated with climate change with a predicted 10 percent rise in average temperatures over the next 90 or so years.

The main targets for compensation will be the United States, the EU, China, India, and Russia. The latter three are expected to be the most obstinate and difficult ones to reach an agreement with.

Years have passed since Kyoto and these countries still resist a sizeable reduction of their carbon emissions and other pollution, to play a part in combating global warming. Considering this, even any compensation Africa is seeking to allow the continent to mitigate the climate change fallout and to develop environmentally friendly industries needed to provide employment for the large numbers of young Africans soon seeking to enter the workplace will be a challenge of its own herculean proportions.

Meanwhile, it was learned that Uganda is the first country to take advantage of the World Bank’s “Bio Carbon Fund,” which was set up, post Kyoto, to help countries to restore forests through reforestation projects. The National Forest Authority (NFA) is the lead partner in Uganda under a scheme aimed to ultimately bring forest cover back to 10s of thousands of hectares previously stripped of trees. Several hundred jobs are also expected to be created under the scheme, which laudably involved communities directly to ensure sustainability of the project.

NFA announced that they will use tropical hardwood trees, native trees and commercial tree species in areas where they are rolling out the project to ensure the longevity of the project while still, after some years, being able to use the “commercial” species for timber production. They have also pointed out that Uganda’s carbon trading position will be greatly enhanced, generating more funds to support the work NFA does nationwide. Watch this space.

By Daniel Fineren

LONDON (Reuters) – Canadian oil sands are vital to North America’s energy security and are being developed in an environmentally responsible way, Canadian Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt said in an interview.

Several U.S. states are considering introducing low carbon fuel standards which would make fuels that emit the highest levels of climate-warming carbon dioxide more expensive.

U.S. President Barack Obama has expressed support for the idea but his administration has not taken a tough stance against carbon-intensive Canadian oil sands.

“Canada’s oil sands are an incredibly important part of energy security for the United States,” Raitt told Reuters at a carbon capture and storage (CCS) conference in London.

“If you don’t purchase from Canada, who are you going to purchase from? It’s going to be more reliance on OPEC nations,” she said.

With an estimated reserve of 173 billion barrels, Canadian oil sands are the largest source of crude oil outside the Middle East. But development of Alberta’s huge reserves requires open pit mines and carbon-spewing processing plants, placing producers at a disadvantage under any fuel standard that rewards low carbon sources.

Last week, the Canadian and Alberta governments promised C$865 million ($823 million) to help oil major Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSa.L) develop carbon capture and storage technology to trap the harmful gas at its oil sands processing plant.

“The government will be involved in the promotion of the oil sands … it is a great asset, it is imperative to energy security in North America and it is being developed in a responsible manner and will continue to do so,” Raitt said.

“We are very close to the province of Alberta in that outreach program. So we are here in London doing it … and certainly I will be engaging with the United States as well.”

Raitt said the two governments were working together to address environmental concerns with oil sands and coal-fired power stations with CCS technology.

After backing away from the Kyoto agreement signed by a former Liberal government, arguing the sharp cuts required would do too much damage to Canada’s economy, the Conservative government has pledged to cut Canada’s carbon emissions by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020.

“We are leading the way on carbon capture and storage technology and funding of real demonstration projects to remove greenhouse gases from the use of coal and the use of oil and gas, recognizing as well the importance of energy efficiency and renewables,” Raitt said.

CHINA INTEREST

In August, PetroChina (PTR.N) agreed to pay C$1.9 billion for a 60 percent stake in two planned Canadian oil sands projects.

Current regulations call for an automatic review of any foreign purchase of Canadian assets worth more than C$312 million and allow the government to block any investment that would adversely affect national security.

Despite the importance of its oil sands for energy security, the Canadian government said last month it would not introduce further barriers to investing in the country.

“We are a trading nation,” Raitt said when asked whether the government would take a tougher stance on future bids for its energy assets.

“We are very cognizant of the fact that if we want to trade and invest in other countries, we have to allow that trade and investment to happen in ours. However, it has got to be done within the corporate rules of the Canadian government.”

State-run Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) is building nuclear reactors in China and hopes to win more contracts.

NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

Raitt said she was still waiting for investment bankers N.M. Rothschild & Sons to deliver a restructuring plan for AECL aimed at boosting its capacity to supply nuclear reactors to a growing global market.

AECL could be split into reactor building and research units, a decision the government expects to make when the report comes comes back this fall.

“To be able to be a vendor of nuclear reactors in the world and be able to build nuclear reactors in the world you have to have a very high degree of focus on that line of business,” Raitt said.

“We also need capacity to deal with something as large as selling nuclear reactors and we are welcoming to investment and equity to help us do that and be an international player.”

By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – A key senator on Monday said the committee she leads should approve a bill to tackle global warming before a U.N. climate summit in December, and the U.S. energy secretary said he hoped the bill could be signed into law by then.

“I believe we will get this bill out of my committee soon,” Senator Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, told reporters after a meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

“Certainly before Copenhagen, and we’re hoping maybe to even have it on the floor (of the Senate),” she said.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu was much more optimistic than Boxer when asked when the legislation could become law. He told reporters in London he remained hopeful President Barack Obama would be able to sign a domestic climate change bill before the Copenhagen conference.

“Whether there will be a bill on the president’s desk and he’ll sign it, I’m hopeful it will be,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting on clean coal technologies.

Boxer co-authored the Senate Democrats’ 800-page draft bill on climate change with Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry.

Boxer said Ban, who has been lobbying U.N. member states to agree on a deal to fight global warming in Copenhagen, had asked Boxer about the timeline for the U.S. legislation.

Obama, in a sharp reversal from his predecessor George W. Bush, has vowed to impose mandatory limits on the emission of climate-warming greenhouse gases and made tackling global warming a signature issue of his administration.

The Bush administration had opposed mandatory emission limits, arguing that they would damage the competitiveness of U.S. industry.

GREENHOUSE GASES

The Boxer-Kerry draft bill would reduce U.S. industry emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020, a smaller reduction than European Union countries have pledged.

Their proposal embraces central elements of a climate change bill passed in June by the Democratic-led House of Representatives.

The two senators face a tough fight to win over skeptical Republicans and some Democrats to get their proposal passed, but their prospects improved on Sunday when a Republican senator broke ranks with his party to outline a compromise with Democrats.

Republican Senator Lindsay Graham and Kerry wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times that they believed they could pick up enough support to pass a wide-ranging bill to limit carbon emissions.

“We refuse to accept the argument that the United States cannot lead the world in addressing global climate change,” Graham and Kerry wrote. “We are also convinced that we have found both a framework for climate legislation to pass Congress and the blueprint for a clean-energy future.”

Graham is one of a few dozen fence-sitters who Kerry and Boxer have been courting in order to amass the 60 votes needed for passage in the 100-member Senate..

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – The Canadian and Alberta governments said on Wednesday they will spend C$779 million ($756 million) on a carbon capture project planned by TransAlta Corp, their second such funding announcement in less than a week.

TransAlta, the country’s largest investor-owned power generator, plans the carbon capture and storage development at its Keephills 3 coal-fired power plant near Edmonton, Alberta, where it aims to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 1 million tonnes a year.

Under a letter of intent, Ottawa will invest C$343 million and the Alberta government will kick in C$436 million over 15 years.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said at a news conference at the plant that the overall cost of the so-called Project Pioneer is estimated at about C$1.4 billion.

Last week, his government and Alberta’s said they would spend C$865 million on a carbon capture and storage project proposed by Royal Dutch Shell Plc for its oil sands upgrading plant in northern Alberta.

Some environmentalists have criticized the strategy, saying public money is being funneled into projects proposed by large polluters with uncertain results when it could be invested in alternative energy sources and conservation.

“Of course, the incentive is that we all have a long-run interest, as governments, as the private sector, in developing technology that we think will be in widespread need in the decades to come,” Harper said.

TransAlta’s plan involves using chilled ammonia capture technology, developed by France’s Alstom SA, to strip out carbon dioxide from the power plant. The gas, which is blamed for global warming, would then be piped to old oil fields to boost production as well as stored in saline aquifers deep underground.

Capital Power Corp is TransAlta’s partner in the 766 megawatt power plant and the carbon capture project.

Canada has set aside C$1 billion for such ventures in a clean energy fund, and Alberta has earmarked C$2 billion for carbon capture and sequestration projects. The two governments aim to cut carbon emissions, while preventing a drop in investment in energy projects.

Ottawa has said it seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020.

Alberta has short-listed two other carbon capture projects that have yet to be finalized for funding commitments. They are being proposed by groups including Capital Power and Enbridge Inc as well as Enhance Energy and Northwest Upgrading.

($1=$1.03 Canadian)

By Inae Riveras

SAO PAULO, Oct 14 (Reuters) – Use of sugar cane-based ethanol as a substitute for gasoline is among the cheapest and easiest ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Brazilian study published on Wednesday.

Cane ethanol provides about eight times the energy used to produce it and adoption of new cane plant varieties and processes could increase its efficiency further.

The study looked only at the future production of cane over pastures or as a replacement for other crops — not over native forests.

Most new cars in Brazil can run on ethanol alone and the biofuel’s environmental benefits are redoubled by burning its bagasse byproduct in thermoelectric plants powering mills and sometimes even feeding into the grid.

“As ethanol is already competitive with gasoline at current oil prices, the additional cost (in adopting ethanol) is zero,” said Isaias Macedo, from the Interdisciplinary Center of Energy Planning at the University of Campinas, one of the study’s authors.

“And the possibility of producing ethanol in several countries makes it especially attractive,” Macedo added.

Brazil is the world’s largest producer of cane-based ethanol. The United States is the No. 1 ethanol maker but its fuel is made from corn whose energy output is roughly equal to that used to produce it.

Ethanol’s gradual replacement of gasoline since the introduction of flex-fuel cars in early 2003 and the blending of 20 to 25 percent of ethanol in all gasoline sold in Brazil, combined with the co-generation of energy through the burning of bagasse at mills, has slashed greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2006 alone, the drop in emissions by the transport and energy sectors was 22 percent of what they would be if the country’s cars were burning gasoline, according to the study.

Still, Brazil remains one of the top emitters of greenhouse gases due to destruction of its massive Amazon rain forest. Trees release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when they’re felled or burned.

Considering Brazil’s total emissions unrelated to deforestation, ethanol helped reduce overall emissions by 10 percent that same year, according to the study which also involved researchers at the University of Sao Paulo.

Considering fuel production and emission-cutting targets set by Brazil in its 2008’s climate change plan, ethanol could reduce emission levels in the transport and energy sector by 43 percent in 2020 and 18 percent for all emissions excluding deforestation.

Brazil is seeking to play a leading role in talks in Copenhagen in December aimed at agreeing a new climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

The ethanol industry does not want Brazil’s poor ranking for total emissions to tarnish its environmental credentials. It has been fighting to show the world how cane is the most energy-efficient raw material for ethanol.

About 90 percent of Brazil’s sugar cane is produced in the center-south region, which includes Pantanal wetlands. But the main producing areas are about 2,000 km (1,250 miles) from the Amazon forest. The rest in the north/northeast of the country.

Macedo said that, based on an estimated cost of $100 per tonne of CO2 avoided in 2020 or 2030, it would be possible to attribute to ethanol an additional value of 20 U.S. cents per liter.

“When you decide to use ethanol, this is how much you’ll avoid paying for another option,” the researcher said.

By Wendell Roelf

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – Preventing the destruction of marine life, from plankton to seagrasses and mangrove forests, could help offset between 3 to 7 percent of current fossil fuel emissions, a U.N. environment report said on Wednesday.

The “Blue Carbon” report found that of all the biological carbon captured in the world, slightly more than half is captured by marine-living organisms.

“Healthy oceans (are a) new key to combating climate change,” said the report, which highlighted how marine organisms such as seagrasses naturally absorb greenhouse gases.

Life in seas and estuaries captured and stored up to 1,650 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, the equivalent of almost half of the emissions from the entire global transport system, it said.

“We already know that marine ecosystems are multi-trillion dollar assets linked to sectors such as tourism, coastal defense, fisheries and water purification services,” said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme.

“Now it is emerging that they are natural allies against climate change,” he said, launching the report in Cape Town.

The report proposed that governments consider a “blue carbon” fund to help protect marine life.

It estimated that between 2 and 7 percent of the “blue carbon” stores were being lost every year due to factors such as pollution and clearance of mangroves for coastal development.

The proposed fund, which would be used to protect and manage coastal and marine ecosystems, could eventually allow the future use of carbon credits similar to that proposed for tropical forests in U.N. climate negotiations.

Steiner did not provide a target figure for the fund, which he said was unlikely to be adopted at a December 7-18 U.N. meeting in Copenhagen to agree a pact to fight global warming.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009