Thursday, March 29, 2018

The CO2 Story

It's not a top ten type of topic, and I doubt if more than 10-percent of Germans really care, but if you watched ARD news (German public TV, Channel One) last night....it rated near the top.  Germany has a set of goals for emission of carbon dioxide for 2018.  Well....as of last week....they met the limit for all of 2018....so they will seriously exceed the 2018 goals (just like in 2017, but lets not bring that up).

According to ARD....the goal was a total of 2017 million ton of carbon dioxide for the whole year.

Who does this calculation?  the nature conservation group WWF.  According to them....by the end of 2018....Germany will have done four times the amount of permitted CO2.  Chief blame?  They suggest all of these coal-fired power stations that were supposed to have been shut down.  Course, if the Germans hadn't hyped up the closure necessary on nuke plants....they might still be on the big plan from a decade ago.  No one brings that topic up though.

Oddly, few mention it....but the US, even though they dumped their Paris Accords deal....are set to meet their goals.  I'm guessing some Germans are a bit angry over this.

As for public discussion over this report?  I noticed a couple of folks asking how the heck that the WWF measures this business, and if some areas are higher producers of CO2 than other areas.  You notice this particular topic is usually avoided by the climate geeks.  Major urbanized areas would naturally fit into the highest-to-blame group, but that would raise a bunch of questions about how the measurements are done and if any of this takes various other factors into consideration. 

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