Discourse for all interested in all things air-quality related
San Diego – The San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) today [Aug. 22, 2024] announced that ridership increased more than 10% over the past year as more and more residents opt to use the transit system to get around. During the last fiscal year (July 2023 – June 2024), the transit agency logged 75,663,343 passenger … Read more
Over the past several years I’ve been keeping a watchful eye on the goings-on in the locomotive-and-train-propulsion-power-development-progress arena. There have been numerous postings here at the Air Quality Matters blog since day 1 that have dealt with this area. Here is just a small sampling of those. American high-speed rail building on a roll – … Read more
Nowadays, considerable time and energy is devoted to combatting climate change and global warming directly — which is a good thing. At the same time, significant time and energy is spent on dealing with climate change/global warming fallout — and that isn’t. Making worse those matters, it has been known for some time now that … Read more
There is no doubt in my mind that times have changed. Life has emerged from the pandemic business as usual, I’m afraid. Okay, so where exactly am I going with this? To provide perspective, let’s look at just one piece of the entire worldwide greenhouse-gas-emissions-reduction picture, or dare I say, puzzle: California. On this very … Read more
Washington, DC – Today [Jan. 29, 2024], the Department of Energy (DOE) released a final energy efficiency standard for stoves. The new standards will take effect in 2028 and, according to DOE, are projected to save Americans approximately $1.6 billion on their utility bills over 30 years. DOE modeled the new standard off of an agreement between … Read more
Conservation and community groups sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Department of Homeland Security today [Apr. 11, 2023] over their plans to rebuild Puerto Rico’s centralized electric grid back to the fossil fuel status quo instead of investing in the distributed renewable energy Puerto Ricans need. “Fossil fuel power plants produce pollutants that … Read more
Over the past decade, electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids have become increasingly popular, in part due to their perceived environmental benefits. But to what extent do reduced tailpipe emissions benefit human health and the climate? According to a new paper by scholars at Resources for the Future (RFF), these vehicles provide sizable benefits determined by … Read more
U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions drop 25% to 38% below what they were in 2005 by 2030, according to projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook 2023 (AEO2023). By the end of the projection period, 2050, U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions are 17% lower in this year’s Reference case compared with last year, … Read more
O’Hare International Airport’s Terminal 5 View Smart Windows installed as part of O’Hare International Airport’s Terminal 5 Expansion. View, Inc., the leader in smart building technologies, unveiled its new extensive Smart Windows installation this week at the recently completed 350,000-square-foot expansion of Terminal 5 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (ORD). The Terminal 5 expansion includes … Read more
A funny thing happened the other day in my Internet search to find information on climate change. Internet searches these days being all the rage, it’s become a common practice for journalists as well to engage in such activity related, of course, to their conducting journalistically-tied Internet-based research. So, with this in mind, I began … Read more