clair031

Summary .   President Obama delivered his annual State of the Union speech on January 28, 2014 .   A portion dealt with energy policy and global warming.   He laid down a fundamental guideline for the U. S. and the world to address climate change, one whose motivation is the moral imperative to leave a world for our children’s children that is powered by renewable energy rather than by fossil fuels. The President’s administration has put in place several policies that promote reductions in the rates of emission of CO 2 .   Nevertheless, his “all of the above” energy policy emphasizes expanding the domestic production of fossil fuel, permitting the nation to approach energy independence.   The policies and the infrastructure underlying “all of the above” ensure that fossil fuels will be extracted, and CO 2 will continue to be released, for decades to come, defeating the President’s moral imperative. Only by migrating away from fossil fuels and toward renewab...

Summary .   In a recent article Richard Heede has analyzed the accumulated emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and natural gas from the beginning of the industrial revolution to the present.   He consulted a wide array of information available to the public to provide a cumulative accounting of total emissions of these gases by the emitting entities (rather than by country or region) using records beginning about 1850. After establishing a cut-off, 90 entities, accounting for 63% of the world’s accumulated emissions over this period, qualified for tallying.   This post provides tabulated data for the top 20 entities; of these the first five are Chevron, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, BP and Gazprom. This analysis, based on the emitting entity, represents a departure from commonly used analyses of global greenhouse gas emissions.   Importantly the analysis finds that a significant number of emitting entities are based in developing countries.   This con...