The EPA has just released a draft of the latest edition of its report, “Inventory of US Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks”, covering years 1990-2010.
You can grab the whole (471-page!) report or subsections here.
Please notice that this is a draft version, and comments are due (via e-mail addresses on the above page) by March 28.
I haven’t had a chance to dig into this in any detail yet, but the news is about what most of us expected: US emissions were up in 2010 compared to 2009 as the economic recovery continued. CO2 emissions increased for all of the major sectors (residential, commercial, industrial, transportation, and electricity; see Table ES-2), with the total increasing about 3.9%. Methane emissions declined by less than 1%. Overall greenhouse emissions, including the sink effect of land use change and forestry, rose from 5,612.3 billion tons in 2009 to 5,823.0 billion tons in 2010, a gain of about 3.75% (Table ES-4).
That net emissions value (5,823.0 billion tons) represents a decline of about 6.3% from the peak in 2007, but an increase of 8.3% over the benchmark year 1990 (Table ES-4). The almost universally accepted guideline for emissions reduction is 80% below the 1990 level by 2050, so clearly we’ve had a net movement in the wrong direction over the last 22 years.
