Talk:Kyoto Protocol/Archive 3

message: :I must second that comment and further the discusion.  I propose that any relevant information be included within the main article.  In particular we should include information on Canada's failure to ratify a plan on time (I believe the dead line was supposed to be february 2005).  For example, a well sourced version of this information should be included under Kyoto Protocol#Current positions of Governments#Position of Canada.  Not only is this important because it gives the current situations, but I believe it creates an excellent "sensationalist" topic leaning towards another possible hot canadian political "scandal" (kind of like our gun registry).  This issue, I believe, should be included in the main article.  I also believe this is "the question" that will make me decide on what "party" should have my vote this comming federal elections (in 19 days or so).  (ie.: a little self gratification here on an article I wrote: It talks lightly about some situation regarding buses being overused and waste of municipal government money : [])  --CylePat 14:41, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Canada

message: This thing got into a bit of a mess. I think a pile of refs got lost; I've restored them. I hope. William M. Connolley 16:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mess 

message: I've expanded on these sections a bit, as they seemed a bit sparse to me. Jackson744 00:59, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opposition and Cost-benefit analysis 

message: I added a sentence on countries which ratified the treaty, but are not required to reduce emissions. Lucid-dream 04:41, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Status Section

message: Is there is a reason why there is a hyper-link called "Opposition to Kyoto Protocol" in that section that just redirects to the same page?  Is there an actual Wiki-article called this?  If not I will go ahead and remove the link. Lucid-dream 19:26, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There used to be an article. I'll rm the link, beating you to it :-) ... William M. Connolley 20:20, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opposition to Kyoto Protocol 

message: Might be of interest - Singapore Accedes To The Kyoto Protocol __earth (Talk) 06:28, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks.  This page and the list of signatories has been updated.  The UN's official list was updated yesterday. --Spiffy sperry 16:45, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Singapore 

message: I was trying to research chinese cooking and I did discover several things, but the only information I could find that looked like it talked about the fuels used for cooking in China were pay sites.
With that in mind, it appears that, roughly speaking, from various sources, that perhaps half the cooking in China is done with wood. There is much talk of fuel scarcity, and no mention of replanting (from any source) so it looks like a solid bet that the wood used in Chinese cooking does not meet any definition of Carbon neutral that I've run across.
That being said, the other common cooking fuels seem to be Coal (washed and unwashed), kerosene, agricultural residue (stalks), charcoal, LPG, coal gas, biomass and natural gas. I have no clear information on which is more prevalant, but it appears that kerosene had been the primary fuel since about 1870 and has just recently been displaced due to the following...
http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/webenerg.htm
:All Rural Chinese To Have Fuel Efficient Stoves by 2000
:45. By the year 2000, all Chinese rural household will have energy-saving stoves. Forty percent of rural households will burn coal while the number of households using methane will increase by 2.5 million. These conservation measures will boost the average combustion efficiency of domestic fuels to 22.2 percent. These conservation measures will cost over 5 billion RMB since energy conserving stoves cost 50 RMB each, energy conserving coal burning stove costs 50 RMB each, and building a methane generating pit costs 400 RMB each. These expensive projects, however, will achieve in the year 2000 an energy saving of several tens of millions of tons of coal-equivalent. Calculations are made on the basis of per capita domestic effective calorie consumption in the year 2000. 
Note, it appears that the reason for this is not GW, but the inability of China to supply cooking fuel to most of it's people. 
So coal appears to be the new primary cooking fuel.
Now that being said, I also found the following WRT the carbon neutrality of wood stoves.
:http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/no_CO2.html
:table cut and pasted
:Electricity generation - CO2 emissions in g/ kWh (life cycle analysis)
:coal                     800 to 1050
:gas turbines             430
:nuclear                  6
:hydraulic                4
:wood                     1500 without replantation
:photovoltaïc             60 to 150 (*)
:wind generation          3 to 22 (**)
:From Jean-Pierre BOURDIER, La Jaune et La Rouge de Mai 2000
:(*) The CO2 mainly comes from the manufacturing of the solar panel, but also of the battery that stores the electricity at night. Depending on the fact that these panels are manufactured in Denmark (electricity mostly coal produced) or in Switzerland (electricity mostly nuclear and hydro produced), the "CO2 content" of the panel is very different. The paying off is done in 20 to 30 years. But if "CO2 free" energies were used all along the cycle (manufacturing, transport, etc), and with "sober" technologies for the production (like thin layers) we would probably get to much lower values.
:(**) same remark as above for the production country. 
It appears that burning wood without replacement releases more CO2 than burning coal. And I suggest that for wood used for cooking, very little is replanted.
Also there is this...
:http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=readNews&itemid=1970&language=1
:Cooking with wood 'contributes to climate change'
:Stoves used in South Asia release large quantities of soot
:Eva Tallaksen
:7 March 2005
:Source: SciDev.Net
:Changing the way food is cooked in households across South Asia could help tackle climate change, according to a study published in the latest edition of Science.
:The research shows that 'biofuels' such as wood, agricultural waste and dried animal manure, which are widely used in the region, are a significant source of pollution in the form of soot.
:Soot particles absorb light, leading to increased temperatures in the atmosphere and decreased temperatures on land. These changes could have profound impacts on rainfall patterns, potentially making floods and droughts more intense.
and this...
:http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.energy.25.1.741
:Annual Review of Energy and the Environment
:Vol. 25: 741-763 (Volume publication date November 2000)
:(doi:10.1146/annurev.energy.25.1.741)
:GREENHOUSE IMPLICATIONS OF HOUSEHOLD STOVES: An Analysis for India
:It is commonly assumed that biomass fuel cycles based on renewable harvesting of wood or agricultural wastes are greenhouse-gas (GHG) neutral because the combusted carbon in the form of CO2 is soon taken up by regrowing vegetation. Thus, the two fifths or more of the world's households relying on such fuels are generally not thought to play a significant role in GHG emissions, except where the wood or other biomass they use is not harvested renewably. This review examines this assumption using an emissions database of CO2, CO, CH4, NMHC, N2O, and total suspended particulate emissions from a range of household stoves in common use in India using six biomass fuels, kerosene, liquefied petroleum gas, and biogas. Because typical biomass stoves are thermally inefficient and divert substantial fuel carbon to products of incomplete combustion, their global warming commitment (GWC) per meal is high. Depending on time horizons and which GHGs are measured, the GWC of a meal cooked on a biomass stove can actually exceed that of the fossil fuels, even if based on renewably harvested fuel.
That is, there is evidence that biomass fuels used in cooking are not enviornmentally neutral, even assuming replanting (and this assumption would seem unsupportable in most cases).
64.172.115.2 17:44, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is cooking with wood environmentally neutral?