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Credit: Timothy Strobel ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scientists have found a way to make carbon both very hard and very stretchy by heating it under high pressure. This "compressed glassy carbon", developed by researchers in China and the US, is also lightweight and could potentially be made in very large quantities. This means it might be a good fit for several sorts of applications, from bulletproof vests to new kinds of electronic devices. Carbon is a special element because of the way its atoms can form different types of bonds with each other and so form different structures. For example, carbon atoms joined...

WASHINGTON - Exxon Mobil Corp. and other large oil companies are backing a carbon tax proposal put forward earlier this year by a group of former Republican leaders including James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and a Houston attorney. The Climate Leadership Coalition, a group that includes Baker, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and former Secretary of State George Shultz, announced a list of "founding members" Tuesday that includes Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, Total, General Motors and Johnson & Johnson. "We support @TheCLCouncil as a founding member and are working to support its policy development process," Exxon...

In a decision that evokes former President Obama’s environmental agenda, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) on March 23, 2017, expanded its authority in a way that’s likely to drive up electricity rates. Every four years, Xcel Energy undergoes a resource planning process that outlines their ability to meet ratepayers’ electricity demand. They present portfolios containing cost analyses regarding the utility’s generation, and the Commission selects the “lowest cost resources available to provide the company with enough capacity and energy to in turn be able to provide customers with reliable electricity.” However, in the 2016 Energy Resource Plan, the Public...

President Donald Trump said the United States "will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on Earth" as he announced a U.S. pullout from an international accord designed to curb climate change. But facts muddy that claim. Data show that the U.S. is among the dirtiest countries when it comes to heat-trapping carbon pollution. One nation that has cleaner air in nearly every way is Sweden.

Scientists apparently can't predict where forests are right now, but weather patterns one hundred years from now, no problem. Some things were never suitable for a 'free market' and CO2 is one of them People are willing to set up a two trillion dollar global market to read carbon, but their carbon models are so primitive that giant ‘oops’ moments are now happening on a regular basis reports Joanne Nova. A Yale-led study in 2015 estimated that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, about seven and a half times more than some previous estimates. Previously, the only...

GOP Groups Call Carbon Tax A Free Market Solution To Climate Change CHRIS WHITE 11:15 AM 03/20/2017 Various conservative groups are ramping up efforts to promote what they call “free enterprise” policies to wrestle the climate change warrior title from Democrats. GOP-affiliated groups, such as ConservAmerica and republicEn, are doubling efforts to recruit Republican lawmakers to work on rebutting President Donald Trump’s climate skepticism. They are also hoping to hijack the Democrats’ traditional stranglehold on the environmental movement. Their primary goal is to use what they believe are free market solutions to so-called man-made global warming to entice Republican colleagues...

A huge well of molten carbon that would spell disaster for the planet if released has been found under the US. Scientists using the world’s largest array of seismic sensors have mapped a deep-Earth area, covering 700,000 sq miles (1.8 million sq km). This is around the size of Mexico, and researchers say it has the potential to cause untold environmental damage. The discovery could change our understanding of how much carbon the Earth contains, suggesting it is much more than we previously believed. …

The fact that it’s being proposed by Republicans doesn’t make it any more economically palatable. Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule — Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” Barack Obama declared after Democrats’ disastrous losses in the 2010 midterm elections. That shellacking finally killed off the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. From it was born the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the Obama administration’s war on coal, in turn a contributory factor to Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’...

Countries around the world are trying to get their greenhouse gas emissions under control — to see them inch down, percentage point by percentage point, from where they stood earlier in the century. If everybody gets on board, and shaves off enough of those percentage points, we just might be able to get on a trajectory to keep the world from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius above the temperature where it stood prior to industrialization. But if a new study is correct, there’s a big problem: There might be more greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere than we thought....

Rejecting “carbon” talk. As for those knowingly using the term for propaganda purposes, they should have a huge carbon footprint placed firmly on their carbon-based posteriors The side that defines the vocabulary of a debate, wins the debate. So we could ask: as we fight the global-warming scam, why are we using the language of the scammers? It’s harder to combat “carbon” taxes, “carbon” credits and callow “carbon” appeals if we accept that at issue is “carbon.” Calling CO2 “carbon” is like calling H2O “hydrogen.” Carbon is about as useful to a plant aspiring to photosynthesize as a tank of...

carbon tax initiative (I-732) garnered only 42 percent of the vote in Washington State. The tax was supposed to be revenue neutral by lowering the state sales tax by 1 cent and provide tax rebates of up to $1,500 per year to 460,000 low-income households. The initial $25 per ton would have boosted the price of gallon of gas by about 25 cents, and added 2.5 cents to each kilowatt-hour of coal-fired electricity, and 1.25 cents to electricity generated by natural gas. Interestingly, the proposal which aimed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide that are contributing to man-made global warming...

A carbon tax proposal in Washington state, scheduled for the ballot on Tuesday, has been drawing national attention for weeks as a result of the unexpected controversy it’s inspired among environmental groups, many of whom have outright opposed the initiative. And in the final days leading up to the vote, new voices have continued to join the fray, including influential players on all sides of the climate change conversation. **SNIP** Also last week, economic justice organization Rebuild the Dream, founded by former White House adviser and current CNN commentator Van Jones, released two Facebook ads — reportedly at a cost...

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While at best, Clinton’s clean cookstove campaign seems slimy, and may be illegal, one might cast a blind eye if the program achieved its aggrandizing goals. Hillary Clinton’s “trustworthiness” problem is fed by a long history of “varying credibility,” as a recent Politico story delineated, including cattle-futures trading, law firm billing records, muddled sniper fire recollections and e-mail use. While providing pertinent points, the Politico list is just a sampling. One missing item on the “mistrust” litany is a project she reportedly cooked up as Secretary of State, but that was shaped by her family foundation. State Department staff sent...

Ottawa (AFP) - Canada will impose a national minimum carbon price in 2018 in order to meet its Paris accord commitment to slash greenhouse gas emissions, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday. "All Canadian jurisdictions will put a price on carbon pollution by 2018... To get there, the government will set a floor price for carbon pollution," he said in a speech to parliament. Each province will have a choice in how they implement the pricing, he added, for example, by imposing a carbon tax or adopting a cap-and-trade system. The federal government, Trudeau said, is proposing a minimum price...

Atmospheric carbon dioxide has reached a historic threshold as levels remain above 400 parts per million through the end of September – the point in which values typically drop to their lowest. Climate scientists now warn that it’s ‘almost impossible’ that these numbers will fall next month, and likely won’t dip below 400ppm in the foreseeable future. While there may be brief, daily events in which the levels fall short of this amount, monthly values are set to keep climbing as the ‘rising half of the cycle’ begins, when carbon dioxide could even break 410 ppm.~SNIP~CLIMATE CHANGE IS ALREADY CAUSING...

It sounds simple: If something has a big carbon footprint and you get rid of it, you eliminate those carbon dioxide emissions. Right? But it’s not always that easy. In a recent study published in The Journal of Industrial Ecology, researchers at the Center for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey in England estimated the annual carbon footprint of crime in England and Wales, and found that reducing crime could actually cause society’s overall carbon footprint of society to increase. The findings illustrated the rebound effect, which describes how reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases in one area can...

The meltdown of California’s cap-and-trade system of reducing carbon emissions has not only thrown its climate change crusade into disarray but caused collateral damage. One victim is Gov. Jerry Brown’s $3.1 billion plan to spend auction proceeds, now on indefinite hold. It not only affects a $500 million allocation for Brown’s bullet train project, but another $500 million for “low carbon transportation and fuels.” The latter is a centerpiece of Brown’s very ambitious drive to reduce petroleum use in auto travel – the largest single source of California’s carbon emissions – by 50 percent by 2030 even though the Legislature...

Donald Trump will have a climate plan and it will be ugly. For now, the Republican frontrunner is pedaling the kind of denialism his party loves, having called global warming everything from a "hoax" to a "con job" to a Chinese plot. But an interview with his energy adviser hinted that Trump might endeavor to Make Atmospheric Carbon Levels Great Again. "My advice would be, while I'm a skeptic as well", Trump energy honcho Kevin Cramer [said], "he is a product of political populism, and political populism believes that there needs [to be] some addressing of climate change". Cramer has...

In fact, deep ocean circulation slowed down to such an extent that the heavy, saline water mass below a depth of 2000 metres was not in contact with the surface for almost 3000 years. "During this time, so much bound carbon in the form of animal and algae remains trickled down from the more intermixed sea surface into the deep water layer that we were able to identify it as the major carbon reservoir that we have looked for so intensively," says Thomas Ronge. The data also showed that the already old age of the water masses was artificially increased...