Political Ecology

The first page of the calculator asks users to choose a county of interest from anywhere in the US. An input/output window allows them to choose which crops they will grow, yields, tillage practices, and nitrogen fertilizer rates. Default values based on localized USDA statistics are provided as a starting point. Given the farming practices [...]

Atmospheric ammonia is increasingly being recognized as a pollutant of key environmental concern. Ammonia contributes to several environmental problems, including direct toxic effects on vegetation, atmospheric nitrogen deposition, leading to the eutrophication and acidification of sensitive ecosystem, and to the formation of secondary particulate matter in the atmosphere, with effects on human health, atmospheric visibility [...]

The increasing demand for environmental information on the global warming impact of products requires a solid methodological framework which guarantees comparability and communicability. The publicly available specification PAS 2050 combines approaches to a variety of greenhouse gas specific assessment issues to deliver a globally applicable product Carbon Footprinting (CF) method, which is expected to be [...]

The team for the first time isolated sufficient quantities of purified vanadium nitrogenase to subject it to comprehensive tests. One of these involved exposing the enzyme to carbon monoxide – a potent inhibitor of nitrogen fixation in the molybdenum version of the enzyme. They discovered by chance that in a total atmosphere of carbon monoxide, [...]

Key classes of chemicals quantified using evacuated canisters included both alcohols and ketones, while sorbent tube samples included volatile fatty acids and ketones. The top five compounds made up close to 70% of VOCs and included: 1) acetic acid (830.1 μg m−3); 2) 2,3-butanedione (680.6 μg m−3); 3) methanol (195.8 μg m−3); 4) acetone (104.6 [...]

Dagobert Brito, the George A. Peterkin Professor of Political Economy, and Robert Curl, the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor Emeritus of Natural Sciences and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, made this recommendation in a paper published by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. A PDF of the paper can be viewed at: [...]

A fuel-based approach is used to estimate exhaust emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from mobile sources in the United States for the years 1996–2006. Source categories considered include on-road and off-road gasoline and diesel engines. Pollutant emissions for each mobile source category were estimated by combining fuel consumption with emission [...]