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Chinese companies apparently broke an international ozone agreement. What happens next?

The Montreal Protocol is hailed as a major climate victory. The 1987 international agreement completely phased out ozone-damaging chemicals like CFC-11 — formerly used as a refrigerant — and likely saved the ozone layer from complete collapse.

Imagine the surprise, then, when National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers in May detected a 25 percent increase in atmospheric CFC-11 since 2012.

“From the moment these emissions were first detected, the parties to the Montreal Protocol have been in near constant communication with an intense focus on identifying the complete scope of any illegal production,” says head of U.N. Environment Erik Solheim in an email.

The nonprofit Environment Investigation Agency now thinks it caught the culprit: Chinese foam insulation manufacturers. An EIA investigation released Monday found evidence of 18 companies across 10 Chinese provinces using CFC-11. By the researchers’ estimates, this would likely account for most of the emissions spike NOAA detected.

Many Chinese companies use CFC-11 in manufacturing foam insulation, according to a New York Times piece published ahead of the investigation. A refrigerator factory owner admitted to the practice, saying it was a cheaper choice and that until recently, some manufacturers weren’t aware of the environmental impacts.

So then, what happens next to enforce the ozone-saving treaty?

First off, a meeting of the parties who signed on to the agreement is underway. Discussing how to act on the apparent treaty violation is high on the agenda, according to Keith Weller, head of U.N. Environment News and Media.

If necessary, trade restrictions could be enacted, explains Durwood Zaelke, founder of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development who’s been involved in the Montreal Protocol since its inception. But, he says the initial approach is usually kinder.

“The question becomes, what do you need if you’re the violator to bring yourself back into compliance?” Zaelke says. “We are here to offer you whatever that is.” That could mean offering  support on how to shift to a safer alternative to CFC-11, for instance.

Zaelke is pretty optimistic that this approach will be successful, since it’s what the treaty’s parties have used to address past violations.

But direct enforcement will have to come from within China — ideally from the highest levels of government, says University of California Los Angeles law professor Alex Wang. He says recent pollution crackdowns in the country suggest potential for action on CFC-11.

“China has been building its enforcement apparatus in air pollution,” he explains. “You could imagine it being shifted to this issue.”

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Chinese companies apparently broke an international ozone agreement. What happens next?

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There’s been a mysterious rise in ozone-destroying emissions

Thought the ozone layer was safe? Think again.

CFC-11 is an ozone-depleting chemical whose phase out agreed upon in the ’80s and has been under an international ban since 2010. That’s why National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration researchers were surprised to discover it’s increased in the atmosphere by 25 percent since 2012. A research letter published Wednesday in the journal Nature takes a look at the possible causes for the spike.

“I’ve been making these measurements for more than 30 years, and this is the most surprising thing I’ve seen,” the paper’s lead author, Stephen Montzka, told The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol phased out ozone-damaging chemicals like CFC-11 worldwide. And thanks to the agreement, we’ve avoided a total ozone layer collapse by mid-century. 

Almost no CFC-11 has been been produced since 2006 — or so we thought. The study’s results suggest that someone’s breaking the rules of the agreement. Researchers suspect the spike in the ozone damaging chemical is coming from somewhere in eastern Asia. 

The ultimate impact on the ozone depends on how quickly the culprit is found and stopped. The Guardian reports that if these emissions are left unchecked, it could tack an extra decade onto restoration of the all-important ozone layer, which protects the earth from the sun’s damaging UV radiation.

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There’s been a mysterious rise in ozone-destroying emissions

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This is what it looks like when wildfire sweeps through a city

This is what it looks like when wildfire sweeps through a city

By on May 6, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

The Fort McMurray fire is still burning out of control, but footage is beginning to emerge of the destruction left behind in northern Alberta’s largest metro area.

As of Friday morning, the wildfire that flared up in northeastern Alberta on Tuesday had spread to 247,000 acres or an area the size of Dallas, according to the Capital Weather Gang. The wildfire is expected to be one of the most costly natural disasters in Canada’s history. At least 1,600 structures have been destroyed or damaged. The fire has also forced some oil sands extraction operations to go on hold, costing the Canadian economy millions of dollars a day.

Officials ordered 80,000 residents to evacuate ahead of the fire and so far, not a single direct fatality has been reported. Royal Canadian Mounted Police have started escorting evacuees who fled north on Tuesday back to the south toward Edmonton and Calgary where more resources are available. On the way, they’ll pass through a Fort McMurray very different than the one they left a few days ago.

Video shot by firefighters in Fort McMurray reveals the unsettling scenes those evacuees will face in a town reshaped by the forces of the inferno that engulfed it.

Houses have been reduced to smoldering piles of ash and burnt out husks. Footage shows cars piled on top of each other, possibly as a result of explosions or powerful winds driven by the flames themselves. In some areas, flames are still burning while a pall of smoke hangs over the entire town.

Another #fortmcmurray fire pick. This was in the morning. No wind and still cool. #fire #craziness

A video posted by @milochristie on May 4, 2016 at 6:34pm PDT

Analysts at Aon Benfield, a reinsurance company, expect that economic losses from the fire will exceed $1 billion. The Bank of Montreal suggested the fire could cause $2.6 billion CAD ($2 billion USD) in losses if a quarter of Fort McMurray was destroyed, making this the most costly disaster in Canadian history. That number doesn’t include the cost of disrupting the oil sands industry, a major force in the Canadian economy.

The current record holder for costliest disaster is the 2013 Alberta floods, which inundated parts of Calgary and caused $1.65 billion in economic losses.

The risk of more damage isn’t over yet. Extreme fire conditions are expected to continue through this weekend. Hot temperatures and gusty winds could wreak havoc with the efforts of the 1,100 firefighters attempting to contain the blaze.

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This is what it looks like when wildfire sweeps through a city

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Yep, Gasoline Lead Explains the Crime Decline in Canada Too

Mother Jones

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Erik Eckholm of the New York Times writes that violent crime has plunged dramatically over the past two decades. But the reasons remain elusive:

There are some areas of consensus. The closing of open-air drug markets….revolution in urban policing….increases in drug and gun sentences….Various experts have also linked the fall in violence to the aging of the population, low inflation rates and even the decline in early-childhood lead exposure. But in the end, none of these factors fully explain a drop that occurred, in tandem, in much of the world.

“Canada, with practically none of the policy changes we point to here, had a comparable decline in crime over the same period,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor and an expert in criminal justice at the University of California, Berkeley. He described the quest for an explanation as “criminological astrology.”

I’m happy to see lead at least get a shout out. Unless I’ve missed something, this might actually be the first time the New York Times has ever mentioned childhood lead exposure as a possible explanation for the decline in violent crime. Progress!

But while Eckholm is right to say that none of the other factors he mentions can explain a decline in violent crime that happened all over the world, he’s wrong to include lead in that list. It’s the one explanation that does have the potential to explain a worldwide drop in crime levels. In particular, the chart on the right shows the use of gasoline lead in Canada, which peaked in the mid-70s and then began dropping as catalytic converters became more common. Leaded gasoline was banned for good in 1990, and is now virtually gone with a few minor exceptions for specialized vehicles.

So what happened? As Zimring says, Canada saw a substantial decrease in violent crime that started about 20 years after lead emissions began to drop, which is exactly what you’d expect. I calculated the numbers for Canada’s biggest cities back when I was researching my lead-crime piece, and crime was down from its peak values everywhere: 31 percent in Montreal, 36 percent in Edmonton, 40 percent in Toronto and Vancouver, and 53 percent in Ottawa. CompStat and broken windows and American drug laws can’t explain that.

“Criminological astrology” is a good phrase to describe the relentless effort of US criminologists to explain a worldwide phenomenon using only parochial US data. But there is one explanation that really does work pretty well everywhere: the reduction in gasoline lead, which happened all over the world, but happened at different times in different places. And everywhere it happened, crime started to decline about 20 years later. No explanation is ever perfect, but this one comes closer than most.

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Yep, Gasoline Lead Explains the Crime Decline in Canada Too

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People Around the World Are Pouring Into the Streets to Support Charlie Hebdo After the Paris Massacre

Mother Jones

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Dozens of demonstrations have been developing around the world in the wake of Wednesday’s massacre in Paris at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where masked gunmen murdered 12 and injured 10 others. French newspaper Le Monde is tracking the growing number of rallies, including those in Berlin, London, New York, and Montreal.

In Paris on Wednesday evening, a crowd reportedly numbering in the thousands gathered at Place de la Republique, rallying in solidarity around the phrase “Je Suis Charlie,” or “I am Charlie.” Some raised pens in tribute to the slain cartoonists.

There was also a stirring tribute from the entire newsroom of Agence France-Presse on Wednesday:

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People Around the World Are Pouring Into the Streets to Support Charlie Hebdo After the Paris Massacre

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Walk to work — you’ll be happier

Walk to work — you’ll be happier

20 Aug 2014 8:59 PM

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A recent survey from Montreal’s McGill University suggests that people who walk or take the train to the McGill campus are more satisfied with their daily commutes than those who do anything else.

Makes sense: If you walk or take the train, you’re not a slave to traffic. Ride the train, and you can even use your commute to get work done. That explains why walkers and train riders expressed 85 and 84 percent commute satisfaction, respectively.

But the discrepancies between the other modes of transportation are where things get interesting. Look at cyclists (82 percent satisfaction) and bus riders (75.5 percent), for example.

From City Lab:

Travel time accounts for much of the difference between the two tiers. Longer travel time led to lower satisfaction whatever the mode, but walkers, train riders, and cyclists were the least affected by time variables. … The satisfaction of drivers and bus riders also took a hit with additional “budgeted” trip time, likely on account of unpredictable traffic. …

While cyclists only budgeted 5 extra minutes a day for trip delays, bus riders budgeted 14 minutes. That’s more than an hour a week set aside by bus riders just to be sure they aren’t late for work.

Still, 75.5 percent satisfaction for those bus riders isn’t bad. Who knows, maybe people in Canada are just happier, no matter how they get to work.

Source:
Which Mode of Travel Provides the Happiest Commute?

, City Lab.

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Another climate crackdown from Obama’s EPA

keeping it cool

Another climate crackdown from Obama’s EPA

Shutterstock

The Montreal Protocol, arguably the world’s most successful environmental treaty, rapidly reduced CFC use around the globe – and, in doing so, put us on the path to save the ozone layer from threatened annihilation. But the treaty had an unintended consequence. Many manufacturers switched from CFCs to HFCs, which we now know to be especially potent greenhouse gases.

So now we have to put out that fire. And on Thursday, the EPA took a major step toward doing just that, issuing new draft rules that would limit the use of the chemicals.

“EPA is proposing to modify the listings from acceptable to unacceptable for certain hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and HFC blends,” the agency wrote in a notice of proposed rulemaking. The rule would affect the manufacture of aerosol cans, fridges, air conditioners used in buildings and in vehicles, and other such devices where lower-risk alternatives are “available or potentially available.”

David Doniger, director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the move “marks another crucial step” by the Obama administration to curb climate change.

“With safer coolants and aerosols already on the market, we need to phase out the most damaging HFCs now,” Doniger said. “This will help curb dangerous climate warming, drive innovation in energy efficiency, and help fulfill our obligation to leave a better world for our children.”

Now, to convince India and other governments to do the same.


Source
Protection of Stratospheric Ozone: Change of Listing Status for Certain Substitutes under the Significant New Alternatives Policy Program, EPA
Replacing Damaging HFCs Helps Curb Climate Change, NRDC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Another climate crackdown from Obama’s EPA

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Four new ozone-destroying gases found sneaking around the stratosphere

Four new ozone-destroying gases found sneaking around the stratosphere

NASA

A record-making hole in the ozone layer, in 2000.

There are things we know that we know, there are things that we know we don’t know, and there are four previously unknown ozone-eating gases that we now know are eating the ozone. (It goes something like that, right?)

No, we are not back in 1985, when scientists first discovered that the ozone layer had sprung a serious leak. Back then, 40 countries banded together to take unprecedented global action to restrict the nefarious chlorofluorocarbon gases (CFCs) responsible for the problem. The Montreal Protocol came into effect a mere four years after the threat was identified, culminating in a total ban on CFCs in 2010, tying up the loose ends once and seemingly for all (and, by happy accident, slowing the scourge of global warming by a 10th of a degree or so).

Now, according to a study published yesterday in Nature Geoscience, three new CFC gases have been found sneaking around the stratosphere, as well as a fourth close relative, a hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) commonly used in refrigerators and air-conditioners. These can be added to the catalogue of seven CFCs and six HCFCs previously ID’ed as armed and dangerous — the first new members added to this exclusive club since the ‘90s.

Researchers from the University of East Anglia looked deep into Greenland’s old snowpack, which contains an air-bubble record of atmospheric emissions over the past century, and determined that the new gases had only been around since the 1960s. This data, plus air samples collected in Tasmania, led the researchers to estimate that some 74,000 tons of the new gases had been released into the atmosphere by 2012.

Though the peak ozone-obliterating ‘80s — all that hairspray! — saw emissions of more than a million tons of CFCs a year, this tiny toot is disturbing because it might point to a leak in the treaty. As things stand, the ozone layer is still several decades from total recovery, so a new source of CFCs, however small, is troubling. As Johannes Laube, the study’s lead author, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.:

“Two of the CFCs do what you would expect for CFCs — they increase in the 1980s, they slow down their increase in the 1990s, and then slowly start to decline. But the other two gases, they don’t do that,” he says.

“The other two gases are actually becoming more abundant and this indicates that they are still being emitted into the atmosphere.”

So where are these gases coming from? (Wasn’t me!) The scientists suggest that agricultural insecticides or solvents for cleaning electronics might be to blame. We have one solid clue to go on so far: Differences between air samples taken by passenger jets suggest that the secret source of these gases lies in the Northern Hemisphere … but considering that most of the world’s polluters live on this side of the equator, that doesn’t really narrow the lineup of usual suspects. (Well, I guess you’re off the hook this time, Australia.)

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Ozone layer will take five more decades to fully recover

Ozone layer will take five more decades to fully recover

gr33n3gg

Remember when the world came together to save the ozone layer — even Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher? The Montreal Protocol, a treaty that went into effect in 1989, curbed the use of CFCs and other chemicals that tear up the planet’s UV-absorbing sheath of ozone. But that was nearly a generation ago — and things still haven’t been fully patched up in the lower stratosphere.

The ongoing fragility of the ozone layer reminds us how long it can take for atmospheric conditions to stabilize after we have screwed them up. The L.A. Times reports:

In 2006, the ozone hole grew larger than ever. It reached a similar extent in 2011, before shrinking to its second-smallest size in 2012. Naturally occurring meteorological conditions were mostly responsible for those fluctuations, two NASA studies found.

Over the next two decades scientists expect the ozone hole to continue to vary widely.

“It’s not going to be a smooth ride,” said Susan Strahan, a senior research scientist at NASA. “There will be some bumps in the road, but overall the trend is downward.”

Not until chlorine falls below 1990s levels, a milestone scientists predict for sometime between 2015 and 2030, will the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances begin to have a discernible effect.

Prognosis for a full recovery? NASA says it will happen around 2070.

NASAClick to embiggen.

It’s worth remembering that the chemicals that destroyed the ozone layer can persist in the atmosphere for decades. Carbon dioxide pollution, the main cause of global warming, can persist in the atmosphere for centuries.


Source
NASA says ozone hole stabilizing but won’t fully recover until 2070, Los Angeles Times

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Ozone layer will take five more decades to fully recover

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Ballot effort to ban tar-sands oil from Maine city appears to have failed

Ballot effort to ban tar-sands oil from Maine city appears to have failed

Voters in South Portland, Maine, split like a tar-sands pipeline on Tuesday over whether to allow tar-sands oil to be funneled through their city and loaded onto ships.

But it appears that a ballot initiative that would have prevented dockworkers from handling the Canadian crude failed by a small margin. The Waterfront Protection Ordinance [PDF] was supported by 4,261 voters and opposed by 4,453. Backers might request a recount.

The Bangor Daily News reports:

The ordinance sought to prevent the expansion of petroleum-related activities on the South Portland waterfront and, as a result, the potential transportation of tar sands through a 236-mile pipeline, owned by the Portland Pipe Line Corp., that runs from Montreal, through New Hampshire and into western Maine, where it passes Sebago Lake on its way to South Portland’s waterfront. …

The Portland Pipe Line Corp. has not officially proposed any such project, but [the company’s CEO] in the past has expressed interest in reversing the flow of its pipeline to carry tar sands from Montreal to South Portland harbor, where it would be loaded onto refinery-bound ships. Currently, Portland Pipe Line pumps crude oil from tankers that arrive in South Portland to refineries in the Montreal area, as it has done since 1941. …

Proponents of the waterfront protection ordinance argued that bringing tar sands into Maine, via a path that would take it past Sebago Lake, would be an environmental hazard. In addition, those in the pro-ordinance camp cited the potential increase of air pollution caused by the need to burn off toxic chemicals at the pier before the tar sands could be pumped onto the tankers.

Best of luck with that recount, folks.


Source
South Portland narrowly rejects attempt to ban ‘tar sands oil’ from waterfront, Bangor Daily News

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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