But he was unable to enact a cap-and-trade program to reduce the level of heat-trapping emissions.
Those heat-trapping gases are from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.
Every second, the world's smokestacks and cars pump 2.4 million pounds of the heat-trapping gas into the air.
The tube, coated with heat-trapping layers of ceramics and metals, cooks a surrounding layer of oil to 750 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nations are disagreeing on the tactics to curb heat-trapping emissions and the targets that they would be required to meet.
But it does lend credence to those business-minded folks who say that the federal government must take steps to minimize heat-trapping emissions.
But the EPA estimates that all the sources of methane combined still account for only 9 percent of greenhouse gases, even taking into account methane's more potent heat-trapping.
It accounts for three-quarters of the planet's heat-trapping gases.
Any policy to reduce heat-trapping pollution will inevitably target the main sources of Americans' energy: the coal burned by power plants for electricity and the oil that is refined to run automobiles.
The science of global warming is politically controversial but generally accepted as fact by most researchers, who point to heat-trapping carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels as the major cause.
While methane is a cleaner source of energy than oil or coal when burnt, on its own it is an unusually powerful heat-trapping agent -- perhaps 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
If carbon dioxide were black, we could actually see our atmosphere darkening with carbon dioxide, creating a heat-trapping blanket that is raising global air and ocean temperatures and threatening to dramatically rearrange our climate.
The European Union, for example, wants to see industrial nations--its own members included--bring emissions of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases down to 85% of what they were in 1990, and do it within the next 12 years.
The report said the blanket of heat-trapping gases has already raised ground temperatures by one-half degree Celsius (1.1 F) in the last 100 years, and scientists say the pace could quicken dramatically over the next 100 unless pollution is limited.
Inside, keep your body off the ice or ground (the Inuit put their sleeping blankets on top of a bed of sticks and reeds) and create heat-trapping "loft" (it's what keeps you warm in a sleeping bag) by layering a few small blankets or big trash bags, with leaves or crumpled newspapers in between.
Such a change in temperature -- which many scientists believe is being caused by pollution trapping heat in the atmosphere -- would mean widespread droughts and floods and massive economic and natural damage, experts say.
Low-level clouds are thought to matter more than high-level ones because they are more prevalent and because they are better at reflecting solar heat away from the Earth than they are at trapping it, blanket-like, as high clouds do.
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