CarbonTracking

i was reading the EPA's National Inventory Report for Greenhouse Gas Emissions the other day. Some may say that I should get out more but these reports are real pageturners. Anyway, rather that talk about the report, I'm just going to mention one particular chart that I saw which piqued my interest. On pg 39, we [...]

Here's a quickie. The Nissan Leaf, heralded as the first mass-market electric car with real world performance, comes to Ireland in 2011. Stunning specs and all that but lets have a look at the emissions, shall we ? It's fuel consumption is 24 kWh/160km, that's right instead of measuring in liters or gallons, we're measuring fuel in [...]

The Irish Govt. has announced that it has "set a target of 10% electric vehicles by 2020". This is brilliant, of course, I'm a big believer in electric vehicles, far more efficient that internal combustion, less emissions etc. and you know that once electric cars take hold that warp-drive buttons in those cars are the next [...]

A couple of days ago, I heard another respectable politician discuss the matter of global population growth and its impact on CO2 emissions, climate change and global warming. Its become quite common now the line "What is the point talking about emissions reductions while the population is predicted to grow to 9 billion by 2040 [...]

2010 it is then. Here's a resolution : Enough warm fuzzy environmentalism, 2010 is the year for boring numbers. This is what the worlds NGO's and media were having us expect from Copenhagen, wasn't it ? All talk about "firm targets", "verifiable reductions" etc. Very straightforward, we all agreed. Didn't quite work out, did it ? Oh, the [...]

Forget GDP, GNP and all that economic blather. What's important is happiness, isn't it ? And some bright sparks in the New Economics Forum have been working on measuring just that. They've recently published the Happy Planet Index 2.0 which compares the, well, happiness of different countries. They use three indicators to measure this: Life Expectancy Life satisfaction Ecological [...]

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a commision some time ago to study the form that a carbon tax might take in France. That commission, led by former prime-minister Michel Rocard, presented its recommendations to the French government on July 27th. The heart of the matter is the introduction of a tax on all fossil [...]

Those Brits have done it again. One day after announcing their vision for a low-carbon future they now announce the beginning of a process to define a feed-in-tariff for renewable energy and its not too shoddy as the table below shows. A feed in tariff is the price the government will pay you if you put [...]

Aircraft fuel,kerosene, is exempt from tax. This is kind of odd as we see the advent of carbon taxes and also when petrol/diesel for personal use is heavily taxed (€0.40/litre for diesel). So how much of a difference would it make if the government were to tax aircraft fuel at a similar level ? Lets take a [...]

We've had the first generation of carbon-offsetting. You pay someone to plant trees, or you pay someone to generate green-electricity, maybe you pay someone to become a vegetarian. Its all a bit intangible sometimes, the time-period in which the offset occurs is sometimes unclear and the offset may be occurring on the other side of [...]