We report national scale estimates of CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion and cement production in the United States based directly on atmospheric observations, using a dual-tracer inverse ...modeling framework and CO2 and Δ14CO2 measurements obtained primarily from the North American portion of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. The derived US national total for 2010 is 1,653 ± 30 TgC yr−1 with an uncertainty (1σ) that takes into account random errors associated with atmospheric transport, atmospheric measurements, and specified prior CO2 and 14C fluxes. The atmosphere-derived estimate is significantly larger (>3σ) than US national emissions for 2010 from three global inventories widely used for CO2 accounting, even after adjustments for emissions that might be sensed by the atmospheric network, but which are not included in inventory totals. It is also larger (>2σ) than a similarly adjusted total from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but overlaps EPA's reported upper 95% confidence limit. In contrast, the atmosphere-derived estimate is within 1σ of the adjusted 2010 annual total and nine of 12 adjusted monthly totals aggregated from the latest version of the high-resolution, US-specific "Vulcan" emission data product. Derived emissions appear to be robust to a range of assumed prior emissions and other parameters of the inversion framework. While we cannot rule out a possible bias from assumed prior Net Ecosystem Exchange over North America, we show that this can be overcome with additional Δ14CO2 measurements. These results indicate the strong potential for quantification of US emissions and their multiyear trends from atmospheric observations.
In response to the growing urgency of environmental concerns in civil society, governments have been accelerating their pursuit of green procurement. However, green procurement faces substantial ...barriers and challenges that are internal to the governmental organizations. Using a natural resource-based view as the theoretical lens, this study developed and tested a model on how leadership styles and innovation capability influence green procurement. The findings showed that neither transformational nor transactional leadership styles influence green procurement, although they do influence innovation capability. Notably, innovation capability fully mediates the relationship between both transformational and transactional leadership styles and green procurement. Our findings offer a more advanced understanding of the impact of leadership style on e-procurement and the role of innovation capability, thereby addressing the crucial questions of how leadership style and innovation capability can enhance green procurement to improve environmental sustainability.
The European Green Deal announced by the European Commission in December 2019 is a roadmap meant to foster the transition of the European Union towards the climate-neutral economy by reducing carbon ...emissions towards 55% by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. By putting the EGD in a boarder perspective of evolving, constitutional rationale of environmental protection in the EU legal order, this contribution examines horizontal, legal dimension and financial implications of the green transition. The challenge ahead of the Union is now how to transform the ambitious climate agenda into efficient legal and economic instruments ‘in a fair way, leaving no one behind’. This paper argues that EGD is a great opportunity, but in order to turn it into a success, it must be strongly anchored in the concepts pertaining to the constitutional framework of the EU legal order, in particular, the concepts of solidarity, sustainable development and high level of environmental protection.
In the construction of ecological civilization, green innovation has become an important driving force for the sustainable development of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper uses panel data of ...state-owned listed enterprises from 2008 to 2019 to explore mixed-ownership reform’s influence on the green transformation of SOEs and its specific mechanisms. The results show that the diversity of mixed shareholders, the depth of mixed equity, and the restriction of mixed equity significantly promote the SOEs’ green innovation. Moreover, there are distinctions in the impact of the shareholding ratio of heterogeneous shareholders on green innovation. Only the increase in the shareholding ratio of foreign shareholders has a positive correlation with green innovation. The mechanism tests indicate that the mixed-ownership reform plays a governance role in the green transformation of SOEs by optimizing the reasonable allocation of environmental protection subsidies and propelling environmental social responsibility’s active performance. Our study further subdivides the significant promotion effect of mixed-ownership reform on green innovation, finding that it only exists in the SOEs in heavily polluting industries and regions with a high degree of marketization. Finally, we find that the ownership structure adjustment caused by the mixed-ownership reform has improved SOEs’ environmental management system and facilitated its sustainable development capabilities.
Science for Environmental Protection National Research Council; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology
11/2012
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In anticipation of future environmental science and engineering challenges and technologic advances, EPA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to assess the overall capabilities of the agency to ...develop, obtain, and use the best available scientific and technologic information and tools to meet persistent, emerging, and future mission challenges and opportunities. Although the committee cannot predict with certainty what new environmental problems EPA will face in the next 10 years or more, it worked to identify some of the common drivers and common characteristics of problems that are likely to occur.
Tensions inherent to the structure of EPA's work contribute to the current and persistent challenges faced by the agency, and meeting those challenges will require development of leading-edge scientific methods, tools, and technologies, and a more deliberate approach to systems thinking and interdisciplinary science. Science for Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead outlines a framework for building science for environmental protection in the 21st century and identified key areas where enhanced leadership and capacity can strengthen the agency's abilities to address current and emerging environmental challenges as well as take advantage of new tools and technologies to address them. The foundation of EPA science is strong, but the agency needs to continue to address numerous present and future challenges if it is to maintain its science leadership and meet its expanding mandates.
Sugar industries generate substantial quantities of waste biomass after the extraction of sugar water from sugarcane stems, while biomass-derived porous carbon has currently received huge research ...attention for its sustainable application in energy storage systems. Hence, we have investigated waste sugarcane bagasse (WSB) as a cheap and potential source of porous carbon for supercapacitors. The electrochemical capacitive performance of WSB-derived carbon was further enhanced through hybridization with silicon dioxide (SiOsub.2) as a cost-effective pseudocapacitance material. Porous WSB-C/SiOsub.2 nanocomposites were prepared via the in situ pyrolysis of tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS)-modified WSB biomass. The morphological analysis confirms the pyrolytic growth of SiOsub.2 nanospheres on WSB-C. The electrochemical performance of WSB-C/SiOsub.2 nanocomposites was optimized by varying the SiOsub.2 content, using two different electrolytes. The capacitance of activated WSB-C was remarkably enhanced upon hybridization with SiOsub.2, while the nanocomposite electrode demonstrated superior specific capacitance in 6 M KOH electrolyte compared to neutral Nasub.2SOsub.4 electrolyte. A maximum specific capacitance of 362.3 F/g at 0.25 A/g was achieved for the WSB-C/SiOsub.2 105 nanocomposite. The capacitance retention was slightly lower in nanocomposite electrodes (91.7–86.9%) than in pure WSB-C (97.4%) but still satisfactory. A symmetric WSB-C/SiOsub.2 105//WSB-C/SiOsub.2 105 supercapacitor was fabricated and achieved an energy density of 50.3 Wh kgsup.−1 at a power density of 250 W kgsup.−1, which is substantially higher than the WSB-C//WSB-C supercapacitor (22.1 Wh kgsup.−1).
Traditional methods for analyzing organophosphorus pesticide chlorpyrifos, usually require the tedious sample pretreatment and sophisticated bio‐interfaces, leading to the difficulty for real‐time ...analysis. Herein, we use palladium single‐atom (PdSA)/TiO2 as a photocatalytic sensing platform to directly detect chlorpyrifos with high sensitivity and selectivity. PdSA/TiO2, prepared by an in situ photocatalytic reduction of PdCl42− on the TiO2, shows much higher photocatalytic activity (10 mol g−1 h−1) for hydrogen evolution reaction than Pd nanoparticles (1.95 mol g−1 h−1), and excellent stability. In the presence of chlorpyrifos, the photocatalytic activity of PdSA/TiO2 decreases. Through this inhibition effect the platform can realize a detection limit for chlorpyrifos of 0.01 ng mL−1, much lower than the maximum residue limit (10 ppb) permitted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
DetectHER: A palladium single‐atom (PdSA)/TiO2 platform directly detects the organophosphorus pesticide chlorpyrifos with high sensitivity and selectivity. PdSA/TiO2, prepared by an in situ photocatalytic reduction of PdCl42− on TiO2, shows high photocatalytic activity for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). In the presence of chlorpyrifos, the photocatalytic activity of PdSA/TiO2 decreases.
In the era of circular economies, governments and consumers are increasingly aware of environmental protection, which encourages enterprises to devote more attention to reverse logistics (RL). ...However, the limited resources and technical limitations of most manufacturing companies have motivated them to outsource their RL activities to professional third-party RL providers (3PRLPs). Optimal 3PRLP selection is instrumentally valuable in RL outsourcing practices because it has the potential to increase enterprises’ economic profitability and to improve their long-term development. Generally, 3PRLP selection is treated as a multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) problem. To this end, this paper aims to build a multi-perspective MADM (MPMADM) framework to offer systematic decision support for enterprises to select the optimal 3PRLPs. Attribute assessments in the proposed framework take the form of generalized comparative linguistic expressions (GCLEs), which can be transformed into hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) possibility distributions with semantic analysis in order to enhance information quality and reliability. Expert weights are then assigned in the use of an optimization model based on the correlation consensus measurement. Afterwards, the two-stage aggregation paradigm for computing with HFLTS possibility distributions is used to gather assessments at expert and attribute levels to compile overall assessments of each alternative 3PRLP. Compared with existing studies, our proposal considers environmental and social sustainability for attribute system establishment and introduces GCLEs for 3PRLP selection, which offer greater flexibility for experts to articulate their evaluations. In addition, the two-stage aggregation paradigm eliminates distortion and loss of information and provides decision makers with the capability to control the outcome’s precision. Moreover, the proposed expert weight determination approach is conducive to generating reliable weight vectors. Several illustrative examples, sensitivity analysis, and comparative analysis further demonstrate the flexibility and practicability of our proposal.
•An MPMADM framework is built for 3PRLP selection.•Semantic analysis is introduced to deal with GCLEs.•Aggregation paradigm for individual semantic-embedded assessments.•3PRLP selection by an automobile manufacturer is studied.
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