Sanborn Regional School District in Kingston, N.H., has signed the world's first power purchase agreement for ultra-efficient solar hot air, which will reduce heating bills.
As the leaves change and temps drop, the crisp autumn air brings a whole new load of waste possibilities with the new season. As opposed to the scorching summer months coupled with UV rays that dry lawns and surge kilowatts of electricity through homes for cooling, fall brings gutter clutter and leaf waste – not to mention high kilowatt usage in parts of the world prone to freezing temps.
New research shows how trees can improve air quality by filtering out pollution particulates, which are damaging to human health.
More than 10 years after electricity deregulation, the nuclear power industry has decreased greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and saved $2.5 billion a year as a result of operating more efficiently over the past decade, according to a new study.
People head to the beach to escape the stress of everyday life, but a new study out of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis finds that there are peak times to reap the restorative benefit.
At the 2008 Winter Olympics, Chinese officials didn't want the gold medal for "most polluted air." Reducing air pollution in an urban area like Beijing will require large, regional strategies according to scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Peking University. They studied the effects of emission reduction efforts at the Beijing Olympics.
One of NASA's satellites has provided the most detailed map yet of the pollution generated by some of the world’s biggest cities, and given an indication of the volume of emissions of the nitrogen oxides from direct measurements rather than relying on computer models and a range of assumptions.
Predictions of the ground-level pollutant ozone will be more accurate in future according to research published by environment scientists at research centers including the University of Birmingham in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) increased by 45 percent between 1990 and 2010, and reached an all-time high of 33 billion tons in 2010. Increased energy-efficiency, nuclear energy and the growing contributions of renewable energy are not compensating for the globally increasing demand for power and transport, which is strongest in developing countries.
On September 11, 2001, as the twin towers of the World Trade Center exploded and collapsed, clouds of dust billowed into the sky and across the city. Photographs from the outskirts show the thick clouds swallowing much of lower Manhattan. Satellite images reveal that the clouds were large enough to be seen from space. Survivors overtaken by the clouds emerged covered in a thick layer of dirt and debris. They reported that the clouds were so dense that they blacked out the sun.
The black smoke that rose from the water’s surface during the controlled burns pumped more than 1 million pounds of black carbon (soot) pollution into the atmosphere, according to a new study published last week by researchers at NOAA and its Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colo.
EPA Region 10 issued final air quality permits to Shell on Sept. 19 for oil and gas exploration drilling in the Alaska Arctic. The permits will allow Shell to operate the Discoverer drillship and a support fleet of icebreakers, oil spill response vessels, and supply ships for up to 120 days each year in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea Outer Continental Shelf starting in 2012.
The new UNTHA Recycling Technology (URT) system at the Appliance Recycling Centers of America (ARCA)’s facility in Philadelphia is ready to begin recycling as many as 150,000 refrigerators annually, GE and ARCA announced Sept. 9.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to approve the 8-hour ozone air quality plans for the San Joaquin Valley and South Coast areas. These plans, known as State Implementation Plans, are the roadmaps to meeting the Clean Air Act standard of 0.08 parts per million of ozone as measured in 8-hour increments.
Although the burning of natural gas emits far less carbon dioxide than coal, a new study concludes that a greater reliance on natural gas would fail to significantly slow down climate change. The study appears this week in the Springer journal Climatic Change Letters.
The far-reaching field project, known as HIPPO, is enabling researchers to generate the first detailed mapping of the global distribution of gases and particles that affect Earth’s climate.
With citizens’ groups seeking government regulation of foul-smelling ammonia emissions from large dairy farms, scientists reported that adding natural plant extracts to cow feed can reduce levels of the gas by one-third while reducing the need to fortify cow feed with expensive protein supplements.
Three studies by a University of California, Davis, air-quality research group are adding to the growing body of data suggesting that very fine and ultra-fine airborne metal particles are closely linked to serious human-health problems, including heart disease.
A new study of dust-like particles of soot in the air provides fresh evidence that reducing soot emissions from diesel engines and other sources could slow melting of sea ice in the Arctic faster and more economically than any other quick fix, a scientist reported.
Even after many decades of studying ozone and its loss from our atmosphere miles above the Earth, plenty of mysteries and surprises remain, including an unexpected loss of ozone over the Arctic this past winter,