emissions

Nearly two dozen senators co-sponsored a bill that would exempt an estimated 100,000 large livestock farms from reporting emissions from manure and other animal waste. Sponsors include the leaders of the Senate committee that would handle the bill.

Beginning on Wednesday, from 60,000 to 100,000 livestock and poultry operations will be required to report emissions of ammonia or hydrogen sulfide, said Drovers. The EPA previously exempted livestock farms from filing the reports but a federal court, in response to a lawsuit filed by environmentalists, vitiated the exemption.

A first-of-its-kind study lays out, on a county-by-county basis, the environmental impact of growing corn in the United States, offering the industry an unprecedented tool for improving sustainability along its supply chain.

The Swiss company Climeworks says it’s the first to develop a “commercial carbon dioxide capture plant” that can suck the greenhouse gas directly out of the air. It’s the kind of solution, some experts say, that is imperative given the dire pace of climate change.

An ethanol industry trade group says President Trump's decision to review fuel economy standards for automobiles set by his predecessor could mean a larger role for "high octane, low carbon fuels" such as renewable fuels. Trump announced "the big news that we're going to work on the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards, so you can make cars in America again" during a speech in Detroit.

The five-year period from 2011 to 2015 was the hottest on record, according to a report released by the World Meteorological Organization at international climate talks in Marrakech, Morocco. “Even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, reports the Seattle Times.

A study led by U-Minnesota scientists says emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, from Midwest streams may be much larger than thought.

The Chevrolet division of General Motors purchased credits for a 40,000 ton reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from ranchland in the "prairie pothole" region of North Dakota.

A global temperature increase of close to 1.5 degrees Celsius "is already locked into the earth's atmospheric system by past and predicted greenhouse gas emissions," said the World Bank in releasing a report on likely impacts in three regions of the world.

For the most part, farmers put their cropland to more intense use rather than convert forests and grasslands because of demand for biofuels in recent years, says a study by the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development.

A study by a University of Guelph researcher, published in Global Change Biology, says wetlands are the likely source of a recent and surprising increase in emissions of methane.

The executive summary of a European study, "Nitrogen on the Table," says if Europe reduced its meat consumption, it "would reduce nitrogen air and water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while freeing up large areas of farmland for other purposes such as food export or bioenergy."