US greenhouse gas emission drop

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 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.

http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-make-big-drop-target-2020-goals-20140417