Browsing by Subject "greenhouse gas reduction"

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    A Bottom-up Approach to Setting a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Target for Charlotte, North Carolina
    (2011-04-28) Brewer, Shannon; Martin, Emily; Thompson, Lisa
    In 2007, Charlotte’s City Council passed a resolution directing City staff to: (1) Inventory City Operations Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions; (2) Establish aggressive and realistic GHG emission reduction targets; (3) Create an action plan; (4) Prepare a cost-benefit analysis; and (5) Adopt a budget to meet the emission reduction targets. The objective of this project is to update the inventory of GHG emissions from City operations and recommend a GHG emissions target, based on research into best practices as well as economic and technical feasibility. Several considerations are important to the City in the selection of a GHG emission reduction target. First, many other cities have set ambitious emission reduction targets that appear unlikely to be met by their respective target dates. Charlotte does not want to set an unattainable target that fails to consider technical and economic feasibility. In addition, the City hopes to set an example for the community by setting an aggressive target and by making consistent and visible progress towards reducing emissions. First, we interviewed a number of peer organizations, including other municipalities, universities and corporations. The purpose of this stage of our project was to investigate how comparable organizations set GHG emissions reduction targets and to document best practices for climate action planning. Our findings suggest that there is no accepted process for choosing a GHG emissions reduction target and many organizations set targets with little or no analysis into the economic or technical feasibility of achieving that target. The remainder of our work focused on identifying potential GHG reduction projects for the City and determining alternate emissions reduction scenarios. We decided on a bottom-up approach (starting with individual business units before creating an organization-wide strategy) to fit with Charlotte’s unique decentralized structure. Potential greenhouse gas reduction projects were identified through collaboration with five of the City’s key business units. These projects were incorporated into different scenarios based on several key factors. Using these scenarios as a basis, we believe that the most likely GHG emissions reduction that the City can achieve under current financial, technical, and political constraints is approximately 1% per year.
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    Environmental and Economic Implications of Regional Bioenergy Policy
    (2015-03-15) Galik, Christopher; Abt, Robert; Latta, Gregory; Vegh, Tibor
    The unique generation, landownership, and resource attributes of the southeastern United States make the region a ripe and important test bed for implementation of novel renewable energy policy. This policy brief describes the environmental and economic implications of one policy intervention: a hypothetical region-wide renewable portfolio standard (RPS) with separate biomass targets or “carve-outs.” A study of this intervention shows that over time the dominant contributor to such an RPS would be forest biomass and that existing resource conditions would influence patterns of biomass harvesting, resulting in a spatially and temporally diverse forest carbon response. Net forest carbon storage in the Southeast would be greater with the hypothetical RPS than without it in all but the final years of the modeled time period, but when displaced fossil fuel emissions are accounted for net greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions over the period could be substantial. The methods and findings presented here are also relevant to a broader array of policies that could increase biomass demand from the region, including pellet exports from the United States to the European Union and regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
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    Evaluation of Durham City and County Greenhouse Gas Reduction Initiatives
    (2014-04-25) Xi, Wenyi; Gao, Gary; Anjum, Rubaina; Son, Myeongyeon
    To combat climate change, local governments and communities have undertaken various initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Durham City and County created a GHG Emissions Reduction Plan in 2007, with a goal of 50% GHG reduction for government operations by 2030 from the 2005 baseline. The purpose of this study is to examine various projects that the Durham local governments have undertaken since 2007, evaluate their energy savings and GHG reduction, and provide recommendations for further GHG reduction. The scope includes only projects associated with local government. Six different project types are examined: building upgrades, transportation, traffic signals, landfill methane, water and wastewater management. About 20 government officials from different departments were interviewed to collect information about projects and relevant data such as energy consumption and financial costs. Based on the data, the study analyzes the trend of energy use and GHG emissions through time and uses common metrics to measure energy intensity. Most of the GHG reduction projects were effective and are discussed in detail in the paper. The study provides recommendations for each individual project as well as general overall recommendations. The overall suggestions are to 1) set quantifiable sub-goals for different projects to complement the current total 50% reduction goal, 2) offer training to facility management teams on the importance of adopting best practices prevalent in the relevant industries, 3) install better metering technologies for more accurate data, and 4) foster more collaborations and better communication between each government department as well as between the government and the private sector. These recommendations will also help other cities conduct similar GHG reduction initiatives.