Industrial Emissions

The European Union threatened Thursday to boycott President Bush's climate summit in Hawaii next month if the United States didn't allow specific targets for carbon emission reduction to be included in a draft text being prepared at a summit here this week. The text is a "road map" for negotiations to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The latest draft calls for industrialized countries to reduce emissions 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. The U.S.

In the Kyoto Protocol's accounting of greenhouse gases, the former Eastern bloc is a smashing success. Russia: Down 29% in carbon dioxide emissions since 1990. Romania: A 43% reduction. Latvia: A resounding 60% drop. Reductions such as those across Eastern Europe were the main reason the United Nations was recently able to report a 12% drop in emissions from the accord's industrialized countries over the 1990-2005 period. It was an illusion.

California and 11 other states sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday over a new regulation that exempts thousands of companies from disclosing to the public details about their use and emission of toxic chemicals. The lawsuit by the 12 states, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, accuses the agency of jeopardizing public health and seeks to force it to return to more stringent requirements. In joining the lawsuit, California Atty. Gen.

Indiana is moving to scale back limits on pollutants dumped into a Lake Michigan tributary by the sprawling U.S. Steel Corp. mill in Gary, according to environmental lawyers and former federal regulators who have reviewed a proposed water permit.

new york -- The world's biggest companies are making climate change a higher priority, in part through more widespread disclosure of carbon emissions, according to an annual report released Monday by a nonprofit group. The report from the Carbon Disclosure Project tracked how companies planned to deal with the risks and opportunities associated with greenhouse gas emissions and energy use.

Soot from coal-burning factories in northeastern United States may have been the most important factor in the warming of the Arctic region during the first half of the 20th century, U.S. researchers reported Friday. At its peak, soot produced about double the warming effect that modern-day carbon dioxide levels produce -- 3.2 watts per square meter, compared with about 1.6 watts -- the team reported in the online journal Science Express.

Boeing Co. faces a nearly $500,000 fine for allegedly allowing excessive levels of lead, mercury and other toxins to flow from its Santa Susana Field Lab in Ventura County into surrounding canyons and the Los Angeles River, regulators said Thursday.

California's diesel-powered bulldozers, scrapers and other heavy construction equipment must be retrofitted or replaced over the next 13 years to reduce the air pollution that sickens tens of thousands of residents every year, state regulators decided Thursday. Under tough new rules adopted by the Air Resources Board, California is the first state to make construction companies fix existing diesel-powered machines.

Democratic lawmakers charged the Schwarzenegger administration Friday with bullying the state's air board into softening enforcement of environmental laws, as two former top regulators testified that the governor's chief deputies routinely pressured them not to push ahead with policies that industry found objectionable.

It was only three months ago that international energy officials revised a prediction that China would surpass the United States as the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases by 2009 or 2010. It could happen, they warned, as early as the end of this year. That may have been conservative.