Word: carbonization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Environmental innovation holds great promise. But it will take decades for clean-energy technologies to be distributed on a global scale. In the meantime, the global population will increase by 3 billion, the demand for higher standards of living will not abate, and carbon dioxide will be emitted at an increasing pace. Even if we were to stop all carbon emissions tomorrow, the world will still continue to warm up for at least another 30 years...
...power systems; switching from coal to natural gas; embracing renewable and nuclear energy; and favoring more fuel-efficient and hybrid vehicles. In addition, we can reduce and offset up to 20% of our emissions by conserving and restoring the world's forests. Forests not only store twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere, but constantly reabsorb it through photosynthesis. Nature's carbon-storage technology is extraordinarily efficient and can mitigate climate change better over the next 50 years than, say, the enlightened efforts of the energy or transportation sectors...
...recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes clear, the effects of climate change will be felt most significantly in the developing world. Fortunately, forest carbon storage is most efficient in the tropics and subtropics. Tropical forests also harbor more than half of life on earth, generate rainfall and provide shelter, food, medicine and energy to 1.6 billion of the people most vulnerable to climate change...
...them to benefit is through carbon-trading systems that include offset payments. These are payments made by those who want to reduce their emissions to others whose efforts, like planting trees, will do it for them. These offsets can now be bought and sold in a global market that seeks out the lowest cost and most efficient ways of reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. In the absence of such payments, the poor of the developing world will have no choice but to exhaust the land and become environmental migrants...
...implications of this, combined with desertification, species extinction and accelerated climate change from the release of carbon stored in forests, are all too clear. Unfortunately, the E.U. and the Kyoto CO2 trading systems effectively exclude forest carbon offsets because regulators and politicians became captives of the anticapitalist NGO community and their own native suspicion of free markets. This is both perverse, as it makes it harder and more expensive to mitigate climate change, and immoral - because it denies the resources required by the poorest to adapt...