Excerpt from this InsideClimate News story:

New York City set an ambitious new standard for combating greenhouse gas emissions on Thursday, approving a package of climate policies designed to slash energy use in big buildings—the top polluters in the nation’s biggest city.

Supporters say the bills represent the largest emissions cuts adopted by any city worldwide and offer a template others can follow.

The plans approved by the City Council are expected to cut greenhouse gas emissions from large buildings by 40 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2030—about 26 percent below current levels. Buildings account for two-thirds of the city’s emissions, so slashing their energy use is critical to meeting New York’s larger climate goals.

The package sets emissions caps for individual buildings and provides a number of ways to meet them. It also includes bills that will increase the number of green roofs, encourage renewable energy, and order a study to look at replacing the 24 large fossil fuel power plants within the city with renewable energy generation.

The bill, which de Blasio has said he will sign, divides buildings into categories based on size and use, and sets hard emissions caps for each category. City-owned buildings will have to cut emissions fastest. Beginning in 2024, buildings that exceed their caps will have to pay fines—or buy renewable energy credits.

Mandyck praised the provision that allows building owners to purchase renewable energy credits, which help to spur a shift to carbon-free electricity. That flexibility makes the ambitious targets easier to achieve, and it also helps to finance the renewable energy projects that the cities will need to meet its climate goals.

Excerpt from this Huffington Post article:

A top New York City lawmaker unveiled landmark legislation Tuesday to dramatically decrease emissions from big buildings, the city’s largest source of climate pollution.

If passed, the bill would set a new standard for cities around the world and mark the most aggressive climate action yet taken by the nation’s largest and most financially and culturally influential city.

[City Councilman Costa Constantinides, a Queens legislator who leads the council’s Committee on Environmental Protection] said the bill, expected to be introduced Wednesday, Nov. 28, could “start a revolution” in cities around the world.

The bill takes a more ambitious approach than what was set out in August under a first-of-its-kind agreement between the city’s real estate lobby and affordable housing advocates to support legislation that would mandate 80 percent cuts to big building’s pollution by 2050. If the same coalition backs the legislation, it’s expected to pass sometime in the coming months.

Starting in 2022, the new legislation proposes cutting pollution 40 percent by 2030, a timeline roughly twice as fast as the original agreement brokered by the Urban Green Council, a nonprofit linked to the U.S. Green Building Council that published the framework as a report three months ago. It’ll establish a new Office of Building Energy Performance under the Department of Buildings and set up a 27-member advisory board to guide future emissions cuts through 2050. “We can be stricter in requirements, but at this point, we can’t be any looser,” Constantinides said.

The bill offers protections for the city’s dwindling stock of roughly 990,000 rent-regulated apartments, sparing landlords who own those buildings from expensive retrofit requirements that could be legally passed onto tenants in the form of rent increases of up to 6 percent a year. Instead, the legislation proposes requiring the same auditing for to all buildings over 25,000 square feet that buildings over 50,000 square feet already undergo, a step that avoids rent hikes but increases pressure to decrease energy use in the structures.

The Department of Energy study looks at greenhouse gas emissions attributable to tar sands oil extraction on a “well-to-wheel basis,” or from oil-field extraction to tail pipe. The researchers looked at energy intensities from 2008 onward at 27 oil-sands projects in Alberta, using public data from the province’s energy regulator. The study concludes that gasoline and diesel derived from oil-sands crude emits 18% to 21% more greenhouse-gas emissions than those same fuels made from U.S. conventional oil sources. On a well head-to-refinery basis, emissions from heavier oil-sands crude were about four times higher than for lighter U.S. conventional oil shipped to refineries.

The study is relevant to the Keystone Pipeline decision (or it should be). In addition, it should be used by federal authorities, particularly the BLM, when it makes decisions about tar sands oil extraction on publicly owned land in the US, particularly Utah.

Excerpt:

The study was conducted jointly by the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, researchers at Stanford University and the Institute of Transport Studies at the University of California, Davis. The Energy Department has yet to officially announce the results, but an abstract was published this month by Environmental Science & Technology, an academic journal.

Well-to-wheel, or life cycle, greenhouse-gas emissions are mandated under low-carbon fuel directives, such as the California Low-Carbon Fuel Standard and the European Union Fuel Quality Directive. But there is no single measurement formula, and previous results on oil-sands emissions intensity have varied.

Excerpt from this Washington Post story:

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell 2.1 percent last year almost entirely because of a sharp drop in coal consumption, according to the Rhodium Group, a private data research firm.

Coal-fired electric power generation, which had rebounded slightly in 2018, fell by a record 18 percent to the lowest level since 1975, the Rhodium study said. Coal burning produces carbon dioxide, which fuels climate change.

But much of that reduction was offset by rising emissions from the use of inexpensive natural gas. And transportation emissions remained relatively flat while emissions from buildings, industry and other parts of the economy grew.

The modest overall drop in emissions left the United States in danger of failing to meet its commitments under international agreements.

In 2019, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were roughly 12 percent below 2005 levels. That puts the United States at risk of missing the 17 percent target it agreed to reach by 2020 under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, the Rhodium study said. In addition, U.S. emissions last year were still “a long way off” from the 26 percent to 28 percent reduction that the United States pledged to carry out by 2025 under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the study said. The Trump administration has said it will withdraw from the Paris accord next fall.

The United States accounts for 11 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, Houser said.

The Rhodium study comes after U.S. emissions in 2018 rose by 2.7 percent, so net U.S. greenhouse gas emissions ended 2019 slightly higher than at the end of 2016.

One factor that lowered the emissions level was the slowdown in the economy overall. Growth slowed to 2.3 percent in the first three quarters of 2019, down from a 2.9 percent pace in 2018.

The change was seen most clearly in the slowdown in freight moved by truck, from 7.1 percent year-on-year during the first three quarters of 2018 to 4.1 percent during the same period in 2019, the study said. “That turned a 5.6 percent increase in year-on-year diesel demand during the first three quarters in 2018 to a 0.8 percent decline during the same period in 2019,” it added.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

America’s greenhouse gas emissions from energy and industry plummeted more than 10 percent in 2020, reaching their lowest levels in at least three decades as the coronavirus pandemic slammed the brakes on the nation’s economy, according to an estimate published Tuesday by the Rhodium Group.

The steep drop, however, was the result of extraordinary circumstances and experts warned that the country still faced enormous challenges in getting its planet-warming pollution under control. In the years ahead, United States emissions are widely expected to bounce back once the pandemic recedes and the economy rumbles back to life — unless policymakers take stronger action to clean up the country’s power plants, factories, cars and trucks.

“The most significant reductions last year were around transportation, which remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels,” said Kate Larsen, a director at Rhodium Group, a research and consulting firm. “But as vaccines become more prevalent, and depending on how quickly people feel comfortable enough to drive and fly again, we’d expect emissions to rebound unless there are major policy changes put in place.”

Before the pandemic hit, America’s emissions had been slowly but steadily declining since 2005, in large part because utilities that generate electricity have been shifting away from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, in favor of cheaper and cleaner natural gas, wind and solar power. Over the past decade, utilities have retired hundreds of coal-burning power plants despite President Trump’s efforts to revive the industry.

Then, the coronavirus arrived. As governors placed their states under lockdown last spring and Americans sheltered in place, emissions started plunging across parts of the economy that had rarely seen sustained drops before.

Transportation, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gases, saw a 14.7 percent decline in emissions in 2020 as millions of people stopped driving to work and airlines canceled flights. While travel started picking up again in the latter half of the year as states relaxed their lockdowns, Americans drove 15 percent fewer miles over all last year than they did in 2019 and the demand for jet fuel fell by more than one-third.

Emissions from heavy industry, such as steel and cement, dropped 7 percent in 2020 as automakers and other manufacturers churned out fewer goods amid the economic slump. America’s buildings, which produce carbon dioxide when they burn oil or natural gas for heat, saw emissions fall 6.2 percent, driven by both lockdowns and warmer-than-average weather.

In the electricity sector, emissions plunged by 10.3 percent in 2020, driven by a sharp decline in coal burning. As electricity demand sagged nationwide, utilities ran their coal plants far less often because coal has become the most expensive fuel in many parts of the country. Instead, they used more natural gas — which produces less carbon dioxide than coal, but still generates significant heat-trapping methane — and drew more heavily on emissions-free wind and solar power.

Excerpt from this story from The Hill:

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by 9.2 percent last year amid the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report released Thursday.

The emissions reduction puts the country at 20 percent below its 2005 level and in line with Paris Agreement goal for the year, said the report, conducted by BloombergNEF for the Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE).

However, emissions are likely to rebound this year alongside economic recovery, the report noted. The World Meteorological Organization said late last year that it expects the year’s emissions decline to be a “tiny blip,” compared to the amount of greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere over the years.

In the year 2020, U.S. energy use dropped by 7.8 percent, according to the report.

The drop represented the greatest year-over-year decline in at least three decades.

The transportation sector saw the biggest drop in demand, at 14.4 percent, as people traveled less, the report said.

It also noted that renewables made up a record contribution to the power grid last year, producing 11 percent more energy than the year before and making up a fifth of the country’s power.

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

Global food production accounts for more than a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, with meat and dairy responsible for twice as much planet-heating carbon pollution as plant-based foods, according to the results of a major study published Monday.

According to research published in Nature Food, 35% of all global greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to food production, “of which 57% corresponds to the production of animal-based food,” including livestock feed.

“The global population has quadrupled over the last century,” the study notes. “Demographic growth and associated economic growth have increased global food demand and caused dietary changes, such as eating more animal-based products. The United Nations projects that food production from plants and animals will need to increase 70% by 2050, compared to 2009, to meet increasing food demand.”

“Increased food production,” the paper continues, “may accelerate land-use changes (LUCs) for agriculture, resulting in greater greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, reduced carbon sequestration, and further climate change.”

Beef production — which according to the study contributes 25% of all food-based greenhouse gas emissions — is by far the biggest culprit, followed by cow’s milk, pork, and chicken. Among plant-based foods, rice production is responsible for 12% of food-based emissions.

The publication notes that the provision of adequate grazing land and food for livestock fuels deforestation, while the animals also produce tremendous quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas found to be up to 87 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

The new study’s findings closely mirror those of separate research published last week by Friends of the Earth Europe, its German arm Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz, and the Berlin-based Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, which concluded that worldwide food production accounts for up to 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with animal agriculture responsible for more than half of that amount.