Date published: 2006/05/25
The BBC says:
London could soon have a network of scientific stations to monitor the great city's carbon "footprint".
The system would deploy instruments to track flows of gases such as carbon dioxide to get an idea of the capital's true contribution to climate change.
The proposal comes from researchers at King's College London.
The project's data could be used to guide future development decisions, ensuring London's carbon footprint is kept as small as possible.
"We know that cities are a major source of carbon but we don't understand the detail; there are very few studies," said KCL Professor Sue Grimmond.
Those that have been done in places such as Tokyo, Rome, Marseille and Copenhagen, show - not unexpectedly - that downtown areas produce large amounts of carbon, especially in winter months and in drive times when the roads are full of vehicles pumping out CO2.
Less well understood are the carbon contributions of the leafy suburbs of cities.
Well interesting enough. But these people are not measuring London's "carbon footprint". They are only measuring geographically based carbon emissions, not emissions produced elsewhere. If your electricity is generated miles away, you are responsible for those emissions, but the proposed measure would not count that. Similarly if you put up an office building in London then the carbon emissions produced when making the steel and concrete is not counted, but it should be. Etc. So this proposal does not even come close to measuring London's "true contribution to climate change".
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