The Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) programme provides local governments the powers to buy and manage energy on behalf of citizens and businesses. CCA enables local governments to create an electrical buying organisation to purchase power from more sustainable energy sources, like wind or solar. CCAs can also aid in reducing dependency on fossil fuels, which are a significant cause of climate change.
The mining of transition materials, crucial to the production of EVs, echoes many concerns of traditional mining. Human rights abuses, disrespect for indigenous people and traditions as well as threatening the livelihoods of the local population are often overlooked in the name of the sustainability transition. Responsible sourcing, increased levels of recycling and honest marketing offer a solution for minimizing the human and environmental cost.
The current ETD is based on volume of fuels, rather than their energy content or impact on the environment. By default this favours fossil fuels. Instead, the revised ETD is based on the content of energy products.The revised ETD expands its regulatory scope to include aviation, shipping and fishing.The new proposal taxes polluting fuels more than cleaner fuels.
The ReFuel EU Aviation proposal offers targets for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and synthetic aviation fuels from 2025 to 2050 The policy proposal safeguards competitiveness in the air transport industry while ensuring that CO2 emissions linked to fuel in the aviation sector may be reduced by circa 60-61% by 2050 compared to the baseline year The emergence of SAF on the market would lead to a dramatic decline in the reliance of aviation on fossil jet fuel, leading to a 65% reduction of the latter by 2050
The EU is leading the way regarding emission standards. CO2 emissions regulations have been in place for passenger cars since 2009 and for vans since 2011. The proposal strengthens the reduction targets including a 100% reduction by 2035 relative to 2021 meaning the end of internal combustion engines.
Planned obsolescence encourages new product purchases and an economy centered around discard vs. repair. Planned obsolescence is responsible for the generation of e-waste, adversely burdening people and the planet. Recovering materials from e-waste and designing products with repairability in mind are readily available alternatives to planned obsolescence.
Working from home can reduce an individual’s overall greenhouse gas emissions and may carry other advantages such as improved work-life balance; However, in some cases, remote working can lead to feelings of isolation and the development of physical and mental health issues and so employees must be supported to create healthy workspace set-ups and stay connected with colleagues; Hybrid working policies may offer the advantages of increased flexibility, whilst alleviating feelings of isolation that may arise from working at home full-time, and can still result in a reduction in emissions.
This is the second in a three-part series on whether remote working is better for the environment than office-based working. The first article in the series discussed how remote working could reduce emissions from the daily commute. In this article, we weigh up this reduction in transport-related emissions, and any possible reduction in office-related emissions, with the increase in domestic-related emissions from heating and electricity that occurs as a result of working from home. The studies indicate that, on average, reduced emissions from commuting will outweigh increased domestic-related emissions, making remote working an environmentally friendly step to take [1,2]. However, in certain limited scenarios, travelling to work via less carbon-intensive modes of transport may result in lower emissions overall than working from home.
Remote working can have a positive impact on the environment through reducing transport-related emissions. Although these reductions are likely to represent only a small proportion of transport emissions as a whole, working from home could be one part of a package of policies aimed at reducing transport emissions.
Transportation often gets identified as a major vector for emissions, and is therefore the target of innovation.