China says to cut power sector emissions by 60 percent by 2020

China will reduce emissions of major pollutants in the power sector by 60 percent by 2020, the cabinet announced on Wednesday, after world leaders met in Paris to address climate change.

China will also reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power generation by 180 million tonnes by 2020, the official People's Daily website said. It did not give comparison figures or elaborate how it would achieve the result.

Barack Obama heads to Alaska on mission to highlight climate change

By The Guardian

Barack Obama will use a trek across Alaska’s melting glaciers and permafrost to showcase the fight against climate change during a three-day visit to the state starting on Monday.

But the president, who departed for Anchorage in Air Force One on Monday morning, was accused of damaging his own environmental legacy – and the effort to keep warming below the internationally agreed goal of 2 degrees celsius – by allowing Shell to hunt for oil in Arctic waters.

20th century lead pollution in South America was worst in two millennia

By The Guardian

Mankind’s increasing potential to damage and then partially remediate the environment has been underlined by a new study of lead pollution found in Bolivian ice cores.

Swiss researchers found that less than half a century of leaded gasoline use in South America caused more Pb pollution (lead in the periodic table) than anything else in the previous two millennia, despite the long, precolonial history of mining and metal work in the region.

While this confirms one of the enormous negative impact of motor traffic and increased fossil fuel use, the study also showed that intervention by policymakers can make a significant difference because Pb levels dropped rapidly following the introduction of unleaded petrol.

The study - Pb pollution from leaded gasoline in South America in the context of a 2000-year metallurgical history, which is published on Friday in the journal Science Advances - was carried out by researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute of the University of Berne .

They used a mass spectrometer to measure lead concentrations and isotopes in a 138-meter-long ice core sample taken from the Illimani glacier. Different ratios of isotopes allowed them to distinguish between those from leaded petrol and those from mining.

They found that Pb pollution - a neurotoxin - tripled after the 1960s, when leaded petrol was introduced, compared to the historical average of two thousand years when most of the contamination was from silver mines and other types of metallurgy.

Previous studies, elsewhere in the world, have already shown a spike in lead levels in the second half of the 20th century. Last year, Nasa revealed that industrial lead pollution - which is carried by precipitation - beat human explorers to the South Pole by more than two decades.

The latest research is the first to confirm this trend South America, which is home to some of the world’s oldest mining activities.

“Our study reveals a significant drop in lead pollution levels after the ban on leaded gasoline in the region of the Bolivian Andes, although it has still not fallen to natural levels,” says Anja Eichler, one of the authors of the study. “This once again highlights the importance of the ban of leaded gasoline for the environment and human health.”