The United States is pumping less heat-trapping greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere today than it did a decade ago, the Environmental
Protection Agency reported this week, a welcome departure from the trend of
rapidly accelerating emissions elsewhere in the world's biggest industrialized
countries.
Emissions of carbon dioxide and other human-produced
greenhouse gases – like methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons,
perfluorocarbons and others – fell by 3.4 percent between 2011 and 2012, and
have dropped by about 10 percent since 2005, the EPA said Tuesday.
The announcement came in its Inventory of Greenhouse Gas
Emissions and Sinks, which the agency submits each year to the Secretariat of
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international
body charged with assessing the state of the world's climate every few years.
The drop in emissions was due both to short-term weather
factors and longer-term shifts in the U.S. energy mix. "The decline ...
was driven mostly by power plant operators switching from coal to natural gas,
improvements in fuel efficiency for transportation and a warmer winter that cut
demand for heating," the Los Angeles Times reported.
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http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-make-big-drop-target-2020-goals-20140417
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