scholarly journals Climate challenges and hydraulic power industry as a powerful tool to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-71
Author(s):  
Vladimir V. Tetelmin

Fossil fuel energy and increase in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere cause global climate change. In pursuance of the goals of the Paris Agreement, the global power industry must switch a significant part of fuel energy production to renewable energy production. The expected share of various sources in the global power industry by the end of the 21st century is provided. However, the limited possibilities of the biosphere make the current level of energy production from renewable sources nearly impossible. The most preferable scenario is proposed to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by reducing the use of coal by 170 million tons per year, which will ensure a corresponding reduction in emissions by 620 million tons per year and the achievement by 2050 of the material balance of carbon in the emission - flow system. Under the most preferable scenario, it will be necessary to commission alternative replacement powers of about 160 GW per year; at the same time, the average global temperature will additionally rise by 0.6 С compared to the current one. The prospects and advantages of the development of the Russian hydraulic power industry as an environmentally and economically efficient alternative to coal projects are considered. In the emerging reality, Russian hydraulic power companies are advised to determine their ambitious share of the Russian quota for reducing emissions and commissioning 30 GW of replacement hydraulic power capacities by 2050 with additional electricity generation of up to 120 TWh per year.

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William T. Morgan ◽  
Eoghan Darbyshire ◽  
Dominick V. Spracklen ◽  
Paulo Artaxo ◽  
Hugh Coe

AbstractDeforestation rates have declined substantially across the Brazilian Legal Amazon (BLA) over the period from 2000–2017. However, reductions in fire, aerosol and carbon dioxide have been far less significant than deforestation, even when accounting for inter-annual variability in precipitation. Our observations and analysis support a decoupling between fire and deforestation that has exacerbated forest degradation in the BLA. Basing aerosol and carbon dioxide emissions on deforestation rates, without accounting for forest degradation will bias these important climate and ecosystem-health parameters low, both now and in the future. Recent increases in deforestation rate since 2014 will enhance such degradation, particularly during drought-conditions, increasing emissions of aerosol and greenhouse gases. Given Brazil’s committed Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, failure to account for forest degradation fires will paint a false picture of prior progress and potentially have profound implications for both regional and global climate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 4599
Author(s):  
Mohd Alsaleh ◽  
Muhammad Mansur Abdulwakil ◽  
Abdul Samad Abdul-Rahim

Under the current European Union (EU) constitution approved in May 2018, EU countries ought to guarantee that estimated greenhouse-gas releases from land use, land-use change, or forestry are entirely compensated by an equivalent accounted removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air during the period between 2021 and 2030. This study investigates the effect of sustainable hydropower production on land-use change in the European Union (EU28) region countries during 1990–2018, using the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS). The results revealed that land-use change incline with an increase in hydropower energy production. In addition, economic growth, carbon dioxide emissions, and population density are found to be increasing land-use changes, while institutional quality is found to be decreasing land-use change significantly. The finding implies that land-use change in EU28 region countries can be significantly increased by mounting the amount of hydropower energy production to achieve Energy Union aims by 2030. This will finally be spread to combat climate change and environmental pollution. The findings are considered robust as they were checked with DOLS and pooled OLS. The research suggests that the EU28 countries pay attention to the share of hydropower in their renewable energy combination to minimize carbon releases. Politicians and investors in the EU28 region ought to invest further in the efficiency and sustainability of hydropower generation to increase its production and accessibility without further degradation of forest and agricultural conditions. The authorities of the EU28 region should emphasize on efficiency and sustainability of hydropower energy with land-use management to achieve the international commitments for climate, biodiversity, and sustainable development, reduce dependence on fossil fuel, and energy insecurity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Chiara Binelli

Several important questions cannot be answered with the standard toolkit of causal inference since all subjects are treated for a given period and thus there is no control group. One example of this type of questions is the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on global warming. In this paper, we address this question using a machine learning method, which allows estimating causal impacts in settings when a randomized experiment is not feasible. We discuss the conditions under which this method can identify a causal impact, and we find that carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for an increase in average global temperature of about 0.3 degrees Celsius between 1961 and 2011. We offer two main contributions. First, we provide one additional application of Machine Learning to answer causal questions of policy relevance. Second, by applying a methodology that relies on few directly testable assumptions and is easy to replicate, we provide robust evidence of the man-made nature of global warming, which could reduce incentives to turn to biased sources of information that fuels climate change skepticism.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atte Harjanne ◽  
Janne M. Korhonen

Renewable energy is a widely used term that describes certain types of energy production. In politics, business and academia, renewable energy is often framed as the key solution to the global climate challenge. We, however, argue that the concept of renewable energy is problematic and should be abandoned in favor of more unambiguous conceptualization.Building on the theoretical literature on framing and based on document analysis, case examples and statistical data, we discuss how renewable energy is framed and has come to be a central energy policy concept and analyze how its use has affected the way energy policy is debated and conducted. We demonstrate the key problems the concept of renewable energy has in terms of sustainability, incoherence, policy impacts, bait-and-switch tactics and generally misleading nature. After analyzing these issues, we discuss alternative conceptualizations and present our model of categorizing energy production according to carbon content and combustion.The paper does not intend to criticize or promote any specific form of energy production, but instead discusses the role of institutional conceptualization in energy policy.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 7373-7389 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Stohl

Abstract. Most atmospheric scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions have already caused significant changes to the global climate system and that these changes will accelerate in the near future. At the same time, atmospheric scientists who – like other scientists – rely on international collaboration and information exchange travel a lot and, thereby, cause substantial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). In this paper, the CO2 emissions of the employees working at an atmospheric research institute (the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, NILU) caused by all types of business travel (conference visits, workshops, field campaigns, instrument maintainance, etc.) were calculated for the years 2005–2007. It is estimated that more than 90% of the emissions were caused by air travel, 3% by ground travel and 5% by hotel usage. The travel-related annual emissions were between 1.9 and 2.4 t CO2 per employee or between 3.9 and 5.5 t CO2 per scientist. For comparison, the total annual per capita CO2 emissions are 4.5 t worldwide, 1.2 t for India, 3.8 t for China, 5.9 t for Sweden and 19.1 t for Norway. The travel-related CO2 emissions of a NILU scientist, occurring in 24 days of a year on average, exceed the global average annual per capita emission. Norway's per-capita CO2 emissions are among the highest in the world, mostly because of the emissions from the oil industry. If the emissions per NILU scientist derived in this paper are taken as representative for the average Norwegian researcher, travel by Norwegian scientists would nevertheless account for a substantial 0.2% of Norway's total CO2 emissions. Since most of the travel-related emissions are due to air travel, water vapor emissions, ozone production and contrail formation further increase the relative importance of NILU's travel in terms of radiative forcing.


2017 ◽  
pp. 31-44
Author(s):  
Kiyoshi Takahashi ◽  
Seita Emori ◽  
Shinichiro Fujimori ◽  
Toshihiko Masui

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 35-42
Author(s):  
Abdullah A. Abdullah

The element carbon Carbon dioxide emissions are increasing primarily as a result of people's use of fossil fuels for electricity. Coal and oil are fossil fuels that contain carbon that plants removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis over millions of years; and in just a few hundred years we've returned carbon to the atmosphere. The element carbon Carbon dioxide concentrations rise primarily as a result of the burning of fossil fuels and Freon for electricity. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas produce carbon plants that were photosynthesized from the atmosphere over many years, since in just two centuries, carbon was returned to the atmosphere. Climate alter could be a noteworthy time variety in weather designs happening over periods ranging from decades to millions of a long time. The permanent change in climatic conditions, or in the time period of long-term natural conditions, indicates irregularity in climatic conditions. Discuss toxins are pollutants that have an adverse impact on the ecosystem through interferometry's with the climatic environment, plant physiology, creature organisms, complete biological systems and human property in the form of agricultural or human crops. We list the best climate to represent the fact that global climate change has been identified as one of the major environmental problems facing humanity in the 21st century. In this context, the list of "classic" poisons must be included alongside substances such as oxides of nitrogen or sulfide. Certain environment limiting agents – the most crucial of them being carbon dioxide – which otherwise do not damage life formations. On the other hand, climate research has linked some compounds that have long been known to discuss toxin (occasionally dark CO2) with the warming of the climate.


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