Sweden cleanest, S. Arabia dirtiest: climate index
December 10, 2008
A worker collects waste wood chips to feed the electricity power plant in Växjö, southern Sweden, March 2008. Sweden does the most of any country for tackling emissions of greenhouse gases, while Saudi Arabia does the least, according to a barometer published on Wednesday by watchdogs at the UN climate talks here.
Sweden does the most of any country for tackling emissions of greenhouse gases, while Saudi Arabia does the least, according to a barometer published on Wednesday by watchdogs at the UN climate talks here.
Content from AFP expires 1 month after original publication date. For more information about AFP, please visit www.afp.com .
Similar stories from PHYSorg:
Sweden unveils 'ambitious' clean energy strategy
Mar 11, 2009 |
3.2 / 5 (10) |
3
UN meeting: help nations adapt to global warming
Aug 30, 2009 |
2.7 / 5 (6) |
1
Australia overtakes US as biggest polluter: report
Sep 11, 2009 |
2.9 / 5 (20) |
13
US expects China to cut emissions after a 'peak year'
Jun 13, 2009 |
3 / 5 (4) |
3
China: rich nations must cut emissions by 40 pct
May 22, 2009 |
2.4 / 5 (8) |
9
When our large hydro resource didn't cover all electrical needs we basically looked around; no gas, no coal, no oil, lets go nuclear.
With cheap electricity, heat pumps became popular(this is one of the reasons I think the green ideal of costly electricity to encourage efficiency is so dangerous; it also encourages people to keep burning oil and gas for heat).
We also developed fairly large scale district heating and district cooling(heat exchanger to sea water) systems with a variety of generation sources; from giant heat pumps consuming off-peak nuclear power to forrest waste/trash/heavy fuel oil burning CHP stations.
With a decent public transport system, that leaves you with 37% of primary energy comming from fossil fuels(mostly oil).
Assume that electric vehicles were economically viable today; replacing the 29% of generation that comes from oil would be a breeze since oil is only used at about 25% efficiency in a modest sized interal combustion engine, so that would only lead to a ~10% expansion being necessary for the electrical grid(not even that if people are willing to use offpeak electricity).
The problem is not generating power; that's the easy part, the problem is storage cost, storage density/range, charging duration and availability and replacing a giant vehicle fleet. I think this will be a very hard challenge.
Greens often make implicit the assumption that the difficult part is generating power and all that matters is how much energy you can produce; not whether you can match the demand profile, where the energy is needed, in what form it is needed(electricity doesn't go into a gas tank, electricity doesn't turn iron ore into steel), reliabillity, distribution/transmission, storage and a myriad of other factors. This is not true of course, since even with the well-behaved sources of electricity we have today the cost of transmission is higher than generation(without the continent wide Rube Goldberg machine of HVDC spiderwebs spanning the continent, gargantuan pumped hydro stations and vehicle-to-grid electricity storage and smart grid technology envisioned by the greens).
The price of electricity is much lower than the price of motor fuel in terms of useful work you can derive from it; if all that mattered was generating energy we'd all run our vehicles on electricity because it'd be the economically rational thing to do.
This is a very difficult problem and deserves a lot more attention than it gets.
Clean, when applied to CO2, is both misleading and redundant. Of course CO2 is clean. It is neither a pollutant nor dirty. CO2 is essential for all life forms on our planet.
I am more interested in determining what is the least amount of atmospheric CO2 needed for survival. Limiting CO2 may be far more dangerous than allowing natural systems to operate without interference.
Small scale experiments suggest higher, in the range of 180ppm otherwise there isn't enough to promote healthy plant growth.
Can we have some more physics please?
Sorry Roach, you're absolutely right.
From article:
The Climate Change Performance Index compares 57 states that together emit more than 90 percent of the world's annual output of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas.
And Iceland carbon footprint is NOT zero, they do drive normal cars for example.
Ok then, let's nitpick until the argument suits your needs.
"Iceland's carbon footprint, in regards to energy production, is zero."
As for the 57 states comment, when did CO2 become the principle greenhouse gas? It isn't. It's water vapor.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure 1000ppm would kill us all.
The two major greenhouse gasses are carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. Why? Because those are the two gasses that humans have been injecting into the atmosphere nonstop for the last hundred years. Another one to worry about is methane, which traps way more heat than CO2 and nitrous oxide, but its concentration has increased by only a small amount compared to the other two. As for water vapor, its more of a byproduct of the other three. the damage they cause includes increased water evaporation which accelerates the proccess more. We can't do much about wator vapor, but we can go for an acceptable 3/4 and reduce our emmissions of the other three greenhouse gasses.
That's certainly not true. We produce more water vapor than either CO2 or NO by a huge margin. That being said, water vapor also constitutes 95% of the GHGs in our atmosphere.
The reason why deserts drop below freezing at night and above 100 degrees F during the day is entirely due to the lack of water vapor. The water vapor isn't present in the desert and so the heat escapes from that region far more readily.
That being said while it's effect is not as noticed since everyone ignores it, I have to disagree with Vel on one point, Nitrogen is a beast when it comes to atmospheric warming that stuff just won't go away. N2 is like fricken gorrila glue or some crap. Dissociates at like 3000C the stuff just sucks in energy 29 J/molK.
It's specific heat runs about 20% over CO2, and while admitedly it's only about half that of water vapor, compare quantities. Nitrogen is the greenhouse gas. With out it, night temperature would likely approach the radiation background temperature of 4K and day time surface temps would be uncomfortable.
I did exagerate a little, I guess 40K is a lot warmer than 4K... If any AGW supporters want to go check so you can prove me wrong, please do. Just jump in a tub of liquid hydrogen then jump to a tank of liquid helium and tell me if you can feel a differance. Or you can just put members of the IPCC into each and see which ones say they are colder.
(wattsupwiththat.com)Deb (19:18:16) :
"Well after doing a quick google search,
We'd start getting drowsy at a CO2 concentration of 1% (10,000 ppm) if we were trapped in an unventilated room. The gas is toxic at levels greater than 5% (50,000 ppm). That's about 130 times greater than the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere - and (using one of those nifty linear extrapolations like the pro-AGW crowd adores so much) it would take something like 30,000 years for the current level to reach toxicity.
Now if we pull out that handy graph again of global temperature and atmospheric CO2 over geologic time, the greatest concentration recorded was only 7000 ppm back in the Cambrian - in other words, not toxic at all.
Hmm. I'm not spotting the impending apocalypse. It seems to me that humans could survive quite nicely on this planet at anytime during the past 600 million years and we'll continue to adapt in the future. And right now my future is snow shovelling..."
Lol! Water vapor! Ever heard of rain?
You have no idea about climate, do you?
Nuclear and hydro accounts for nearly all of Swedens electric generation, both of which generate negligible CO2, so Iceland doesn't have much of an advantage there.
Iceland has an advantage over Sweden on the space-heating front, where Sweden uses quite a bit of oil and forrestry waste(which is a bit oil intensive to transport and store).
Iceland is at a very large disadvantage on the transportation front; it uses a little less than twice as much oil as Sweden.
I don't think you want to resurrect the climate of the Cambrian, when mean temperature was 7 K higher even with a 3% lower solar constant.
It would necessitate abandoning all coastal cities, shuffling a few billion people around according to the new distribution of fresh water resources, abandoning most of the equatorial region, mass extinction of nearly all currently living plants and animal species. Burning every last chunk of coal out of a hatred for environmentalists is cutting your nose of to spite your face.
Completely brainwashed.