Government Accountability Office http://gao.gov/products/GAO-13-242 [Energy Guardian article by Edward Felker] The Obama administration should do more to make federal climate change information available to communities coping with higher tides, strong storms and other problems caused by warmer temperatures, government auditors say. The Government Accountability Office called on President Barack Obama to tap a single office … Continue reading »
Tagged with Data Quality …
U.S. EIA Suspends “Annual Energy Review”, but will provide more annual data through the “Monthly Energy Review”
Energy Information Admin., US Dept. of Energy [E-mail Press Release] Due to budget considerations, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) will not publish the Annual Energy Review (AER) or its companion publication, Energy Perspectives, in 2013 (for data year 2012). To meet the needs of its customers, EIA will expand the Monthly Energy Review (MER) … Continue reading »
The Air That We Breathe: Addressing the Risks of Global Urbanization on Health
PLoS Medicine (Published: August 28, 2012 ; v9 n8: e1001301. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001301) http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001301 [Description] More than half of the world’s population now live in cities, and while urbanization has the potential to allow greater access to health care for all, huge discrepancies in how resources are allocated within cities result in major inequities in health. Addressing … Continue reading »
A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling
National Research Council http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13430 [Description] As climate change has pushed climate patterns outside of historic norms, the need for detailed projections is growing across all sectors, including agriculture, insurance, and emergency preparedness planning… Throughout this report, several recommendations and guidelines are outlined to accelerate progress in climate modeling. The U.S. supports several climate models, each conceptually … Continue reading »
Assumptions to Annual Energy Outlook 2012
US Dept. of Energy, Energy Information Administration http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/assumptions/ This report presents the major assumptions of the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) used to generate the projections in the Annual Energy Outlook 2012, including general features of the model structure, assumptions concerning energy markets, and the key input data and parameters that are the most significant … Continue reading »
Baseline Map of Carbon Emissions from Deforestation in Tropical Regions
Science (22 June 2012, v336 n6088 pp. pp1573-1576 DOI: 10.1126/science.1217962) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1573.full [Abstract] Policies to reduce emissions from deforestation would benefit from clearly derived, spatially explicit, statistically bounded estimates of carbon emissions. Existing efforts derive carbon impacts of land-use change using broad assumptions, unreliable data, or both. We improve on this approach using satellite observations of … Continue reading »
Annual Energy Outlook 2011 Retrospective Review: Evaluation of 2011 and Prior Reference Case Projections
US DOE, Energy Information Admin. http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/retrospective/ [Website] The Annual Energy Outlook 2011 Retrospective Review provides a yearly comparison between realized energy outcomes and the Reference case projections included in previous AEOs beginning with 1982. This edition of the report adds the AEO 2011 projections and updates the historical data to incorporate the latest data revisions.
Energy-Water Nexus: Information on the Quantity, Quality, and Management of Water Produced during Oil and Gas Production
US Government Accountability Office http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-156 [From an article in InsideEPA.com, sub. req'd] A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study, which found that produced water associated with natural gas development widely varies according to region, could bolster industry efforts to push back against forthcoming EPA wastewater rules for the natural gas drilling sector. [The study]… largely … Continue reading »
Universal Ownership: Why Environmental Externalities Matter to Institutional Investors
UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative http://www.unpri.org/files/6728_ES_report_environmental_externalities.pdf Many indicators regarding the health of the world’s environment remain firmly in the red. Trends such as climate change, water scarcity, air pollution, biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation all continue to threaten our finite stock of natural capital and the ability of our economy to provide sustainable growth and … Continue reading »
Federal Land Management: Availability and Potential Reliability of Selected Data Elements at Five Agencies
US Government Accountability Office http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-377?source=ra The federal government manages about 650 million acres, or 29 percent, of the 2.27 billion acres of U.S. land. Four land management agencies–the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the National Park Service (NPS) in the Department of the Interior (Interior) and the Forest Service, … Continue reading »
