William Moomaw

• Tufts University

Achieving sustainable development and meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals requires that there be an effective process of negotiating and implementing sustainable development policies and practices. This paper characterizes an evolving approach that we define as sustainable development diplomacy. Based on an analysis of the history of clima...

Climate change is a serious threat to all nations. This raises the question of why continuous treaty negotiations for more than two decades have failed to create a viable or adequate international climate regime. The current strategy of addressing climate change misdiagnoses the issue as a pollution problem by focusing on symptoms (emissions) and n...

This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SRREN) assesses the potential role of renewable energy in the mitigation of climate change. It covers the six most important renewable energy sources – bioenergy, solar, geothermal, hydropower, ocean and wind energy – as well as their integration into present and future energy syst...

The Working Group III Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN) presents an assessment of the literature on the scientific, technological, environmental, economic and social aspects of the contribution of six renewable energy (RE) sources to the mitigation of climate change. It is intended to provide policy re...

This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SRREN) assesses the potential role of renewable energy in the mitigation of climate change. It covers the six most important renewable energy sources – bioenergy, solar, geothermal, hydropower, ocean and wind energy – as well as their integration into present and future energy syst...

This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report (IPCC-SRREN) assesses the potential role of renewable energy in the mitigation of climate change. It covers the six most important renewable energy sources – bioenergy, solar, geothermal, hydropower, ocean and wind energy – as well as their integration into present and future energy syst...

Janet L. Sawin and William R. Moomaw focus on the efforts that are needed to renew the future and protect the climate. Annual global emissions must be reduced by 80 percent or more below 2000 levels by 2050 in order to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at a level that avoids dangerous anthropogenic climate change. This requires compounded...

Renewable energy can become the major energy supply option in low-carbon energy economies. Disruptive transformations in all energy systems are necessary for tapping widely available renewable energy resources. Organizing the energy transition from non-sustainable to renewable energy is often described as the major challenge of the first half of th...

Climate change is creating substantial and growing impacts on the Northeastern United States. As the world’s seventh largest contributor of heat trapping carbon dioxide, the region will play a critical role in moving towards stabilizing global concentrations at a level that avoids serious adverse consequences. The Northeast region is well positione...

A university president and environmental studies professor comment on the business case for sustainability from a university perspective.

Abstract Previous studies have sought to develop econometric models of water supply systems, which can be used topredict future water supply costs; none, however, have investigated the influence of climatic factors. In this paper, climatic and other regional influences on the costs of water supply in the USA are explored using multivariate analysis...

Nitrogen oxides are released during atmospheric combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, and during the production of certain chemicals and products. They can react with natural or man-made volatile organic compounds to produce smog, or else can be further oxidized to produce particulate haze, or acid rain that can eutrophy land and water. The react...

Chapter 8 of the IPCC Third Assessment Report: Climate Change 2001 is titled Global, Regional, and National Costs and Ancillary Benefits of Mitigation. This Chapter viewed the actions in the dual context of climate change and sustainable development to gain mitigation benefits as well as sustainability benefits.

The Clean Air Act imposes much stricter emission limits on new coal-burning power plants than on older ones — a practice that has no obvious theoretical justification. Elimination of “grandfather rules”, i.e., applying new plant standards to the US electric industry as a whole, would eliminate 40% of nationwide SO2 emissions and 15% of NOX emission...

Emissions trading has allowed reduction in emissions of a critical pollutant and has drawn attention to an important new policy option, but the success of the program cannot truly be evaluated until 2000—at least a decade after the passage of the CAAA.

A prepublication announcement called "Our Stolen Future" the second "Silent Spring." Its publishers see it as a wake-up call to a new set of environmental and health problems associated with the ubiquitous use of chemicals. A quick review of Rachel Carson's 1962 classic confirms that there are, indeed, parallels between these books. But there are a...

An International climate convention will require a means of measuring relative national emissions of greenhouse gases that is simple, fair and (preferably) empirical.

The weak, sharp f to f electronic transitions of rare earth ions show characteristic crystal field splitting when complexed by crown ethers. Some of these complexes also exhibit structureless bands several thousand $cm^{ -1}$ in width having extinction coefficients of the order of 100. For ytterbium $(Yb^{+3})$ complexed with 15-crown-5 and benzo-1...

Generally speaking, hydrogen bonds to the lone pairs of nitrogen heterocycles are expected to dissociate in $n\pi^{*}$ excited states. We have recently shown that this is not necessarily the case for pyrazine and tetrazine when bonded to very acidic alcohols. In the present study we present spectroscopic evidence that the expected hydrogen bond bre...

An analysis of the crystal field splitting of the f to f electronic transitions of $Eu^{+3}$ complexed in solution with the crown ethers 15-crown-5 or benzo-15-crown-5 reveals that there is little distortion from $C_{5v}$ geometry. Highly specific and different quenching of europium fluorescence is found to take place in each europium-crown complex...

Beside the two benzine- like $\pi \pi^{*}$ transitions occurring in both of these molecules in this region, several additional transitions have been previously reported including a Rydberg transition in pyrazine, and a possible $n\pi^{*}$ or Rydberg transition in pyridazine. To obtain additional information on these transitions, we have studied the...

We have previously discussed the electronic absorption and fluorescence, spectra of hydrogen bonded tetrazine which suggests the existence of both singly and doubly hydrogen bonded species in the ground and lowest excited $n\pi^{*}$ singlet state. We will present newly obtained fluorescence spectra in the region 540-650 nm which strongly support th...

While liquid solution complexes between many cations and crown ethers have been reported, very few studies have been made which involve rare earth ions. In this paper we will present spectral data fro trivalent neodymium ($Nd^{+3}$) and trivalent europium ($Eu^{+3}$) complexes with the crown ethers 15-crown-5 and benzo-15-crown-5. In contrast to pr...

Generally, it is assumed that hydrogen bonds to non-bonding orbitals are broken when the electrons in those orbitals are promoted to an $n\pi^{*}$ excited state. In fact, considerable evidence has been accumulated to support this contention. Last year we reported that the large amount of vibronic structure which remained when pyrazine $(C_{4}N_{2}H...

This report summarizes our study of transitions to the lowest $n\Pi^{*}$ singlet states of hydrogen bonded monocyclic azines. Using fluorinated alcohols, it is found that like pyrimidene and pyridazine, the absorption spectrum of hydrogen bonded s-triazine is broad and structureless. This is interpreted to mean that all hydrogen bonded complexes of...

There has been considerable study of the effect of hydrogen bonding on the energy and shape of $\eta\Pi^{*}$ electronic absorption and luminescence bands. In several studies involving azaaromatic molecules, it is found that while the absorption spectrum is significantly shifted by the presence of a hydrogen bond, the fluorescence is not. It is ther...

The lowest lying singlet state of the azabenzenes has been shown to be of $n\Pi^{*}$ character. Additional $n\Pi^{*}$ states arising from other valence shell configurations are expected, but transitions to them have not yet been unambiguously confirmed. The difficulty in observing some of these higher n$\Pi^{*}$ transitions occurs because they are...

The photoelectron spectrum of quinoline has been reported by several authors and closely resembles that of napthalene. To determine the location of the n-orbital ionization potential Heilbronner measured the photoelectron spectra of a large number of azanapthalenes, and then used regression analysis to correlate observed bands to their calculated H...

The absorption spectra of pyrazine and some methyl and chloropyrazines have been measured and compared in the region of the ${^{1}} B_{3u} - {^{1}}Ag$, n$\Pi^{*}$ transition of pyrazine. The vapor spectrum of 2, 6-dimethyl pyrazine shows a weak but allowed band system (0,0 at 31 $158 cm^{-1}$) in addition to the stronger, but very broad pyrazine $n...