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Contents

problems

climate change

Recently a pair of researchers with the University of Copenhagen published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing their work looking into the possibility of changes to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the circumstances that could lead to such changes. In their paper, Johannes Lohmann and Peter Ditlevsen noted that climate models show that irreversible changes to sub-systems such as the AMOC, one of Earth's global sub-systems, can occur prior to a tipping point if changes occur at a fast pace.

Carbon cycle

global GHG emissions

wildfires

tipping points

Abstract

Palaeorecords suggest that the climate system has tipping points, where small changes in forcing cause substantial and irreversible alteration to Earth system components called tipping elements. As atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise as a result of fossil fuel burning, human activity could also trigger tipping, and the impacts would be difficult to adapt to. Previous studies report low global warming thresholds above pre-industrial conditions for key tipping elements such as ice-sheet melt. If so, high contemporary rates of warming imply that exceeding these thresholds is almost inevitable, which is widely assumed to mean that we are now committed to suffering these tipping events. Here we show that this assumption may be flawed, especially for slow-onset tipping elements (such as the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) in our rapidly changing climate. Recently developed theory indicates that a threshold may be temporarily exceeded without prompting a change of system state, if the overshoot time is short compared to the effective timescale of the tipping element. To demonstrate this, we consider transparently simple models of tipping elements with prescribed thresholds, driven by global warming trajectories that peak before returning to stabilize at a global warming level of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. These results highlight the importance of accounting for timescales when assessing risks associated with overshooting tipping point thresholds.

    • thread Paul Ritchie; Twitter; 21 April 2021
      • thread Tom Nicholas; Twitter; 21 April 2021

sea level rise

Three new papers in the last couple of weeks have each made separate claims about whether sea level rise from the loss of ice in West Antarctica is more or less than you might have thought last month and with more or less certainty. Each of these papers make good points, but anyone looking for coherent picture to emerge from all this work will be disappointed. To understand why, you need to know why sea level rise is such a hard problem in the first place, and appreciate how far we’ve come, but also how far we need to go.

pollution

air pollution

Fossil fuel air pollution is responsible for roughly one in five deaths worldwide, a much higher death toll than previously thought, according to a new study published Tuesday.

Poor air quality from burning fossil fuels such as coal and diesel was responsible for more than 8 million deaths in 2018, according to research published February 9 in the journal Environmental Research by Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester, and University College London.

This new research suggests that mortality from fossil fuel air pollution is twice as high as previously thought; an earlier estimate from the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2015, the largest and most comprehensive study on the causes of global mortality, pegged the number of deaths from all sources of air pollution at 4.2 million.

Fossil fuel air pollution responsible for more than 8 million people worldwide in 2018

More than 8 million people died in 2018 from fossil fuel pollution, significantly higher than previous research suggested, according to new research from Harvard University, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and University College London. Researchers estimated that exposure to particulate matter from fossil fuel emissions accounted for 18 percent of total global deaths in 2018 — a little less than 1 out of 5.

Regions with the highest concentrations of fossil fuel-related air pollution — including Eastern North America, Europe, and South-East Asia — have the highest rates of mortality, according to the study published in the journal Environmental Research.


The OPAL Air Survey allows participants to find out about the air quality in their local area and across the country, and discover how the natural environment is affected by air pollution. It uses ‘bioindicators’, species whose presence or performance is sensitive to changes in environmental conditions. The OPAL Air Survey contains two activities, using different bioindicators of air pollution.

Activity 1: Lichens on trees

The survey recorded the abundance of nine different types of lichen growing on trees. This provided a bioindicator system for nitrogenous air pollutants, by including lichens that are nitrogen-sensitive (declining where pollution is high), nitrogen-tolerant (increasing where pollution is high) or intermediate (no strong preference).

Activity 2: Tar spot fungus on Sycamore

The tar spot fungus is sensitive to sulphur dioxide (SO2) pollution, and is less common where levels are high. Even though SO2 pollution has reduced over the past 50 years, recent observations suggest that tar spots are still less frequent closer to city centres. Activity 2 tested two hypotheses as to why this might be:

  • Street cleaning in city centres removes fallen leaves, which are a source of the fungus that causes tar spot
  • Other types of air pollution, particularly nitrogen dioxide (NO2) from road traffic, reduce tar spot formation

pandemic

population growth/decline

China is set to report its first population decline since records began in 1949 despite the relaxation of the government’s strict family planning policies, which was meant to reverse the falling birth rate of the world’s most populous country.

The latest Chinese census, which was completed in December but has yet to be made public, is expected to report the total population of the country at less than 1.4bn, according to people familiar with the research. In 2019, China’s population was reported to have exceeded the 1.4bn mark.

The people cautioned, however, that the figure was considered very sensitive and would not be released until multiple government departments had reached a consensus on the data and its implications.

“The census results will have a huge impact on how the Chinese people see their country and how various government departments work,” said Huang Wenzheng, a fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think-tank. “They need to be handled very carefully.”

The government was scheduled to release the census in early April. Liu Aihua, a spokesperson at the National Bureau of Statistics, said on April 16 that the delay was partly due to the need for “more preparation work” ahead of the official announcement. The delay has been widely criticised on social media.

Local officials have also braced for the data’s release. Chen Longgan, deputy director of Anhui province’s statistics bureau, said in a meeting this month that officials should “set the agenda” for census interpretation and “pay close attention to public reaction”.

Analysts said a decline would suggest that China’s population could peak earlier than official projections and could soon be exceeded by India’s, which is estimated at 1.38bn. That could take an extensive toll on the world’s second-largest economy, affecting everything from consumption to care for the elderly.

“The pace and scale of China’s demographic crisis are faster and bigger than we imagined,” said Huang. “That could have a disastrous impact on the country.”

China’s birth rates have weakened even after Beijing relaxed its decades-long family planning policy in 2015, allowing all couples to have two children instead of one. The population expanded under the one-child policy introduced in the late 1970s, thanks to a bulging population of young people in the aftermath of the Communist revolution as well as increased life expectancy.

Official data showed the number of newborns in China increased in 2016 but then fell for three consecutive years. Officials blamed the decline on a shrinking number of young women and the surging costs of child-rearing.

The real picture could be even worse. In a report published last week, China’s central bank estimated that the total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman was likely to have in her lifetime, was less than 1.5, compared with the official estimate of 1.8.

“It is almost a fact that China has overestimated its birth rate,” the People’s Bank of China said. “The challenges brought about by China’s demographic shift could be bigger [than expected].”

A Beijing-based government adviser who declined to be identified said such overestimates stemmed in part from the fiscal system’s use of population figures to determine budgets, including for education and public security.

“There is an incentive for local governments to play up their [population] numbers so they can get more resources,” the person said.

The situation has led to calls for a radical overhaul of China’s birth control rules. The PBoC report suggested the government should “completely” abandon its “wait-and-see attitude” and scrap family planning entirely.

“Policy relaxations will be of little use when no one wants to have [more children],” the paper said.

land use

Current estimates of land-use change may be capturing only one-quarter of its true extent across the world, new research shows.

The paper, published in Nature Communications, revises previous estimates of how much humans change the Earth’s land surface – such as via the destruction of tropical rainforests. It finds that, when accounting for multiple instances of change in the same place, 720,000 square kilometres of land surface has changed annually since 1960 – an area, the authors note, “about twice the size of Germany”.

These new estimates are a synthesis of high-resolution satellite imagery and long-term inventories of land use. Combining these two types of data sources, the authors write, allows them to examine land-use change in “unprecedented” detail.

solutions

strategy

Abstract

The ‘climate crisis’ describes human-caused global warming and climate change and its consequences. It conveys the sense of urgency surrounding humanity's failure to take sufficient action to slow down, stop and reverse global warming. The leading direct cause of the climate crisis is carbon dioxide (CO2) released as a by-product of burning fossil fuels,i which supply ~87% of the world's energy. The second most important cause of the climate crisis is deforestation to create more land for crops and livestock. The solutions have been stated as simply ‘leave the fossil carbon in the ground’ and ‘end deforestation’. Rather than address fossil fuel supplies, climate policies focus almost exclusively on the demand side, blaming fossil fuel users for greenhouse gas emissions. The fundamental reason that we are not solving the climate crisis is not a lack of green energy solutions. It is that governments continue with energy strategies that prioritize fossil fuels. These entrenched energy policies subsidize the discovery, extraction, transport and sale of fossil fuels, with the aim of ensuring a cheap, plentiful, steady supply of fossil energy into the future. This paper compares the climate crisis to two other environmental crises: ozone depletion and the COVID-19 pandemic. Halting and reversing damage to the ozone layer is one of humanity's greatest environmental success stories. The world's response to COVID-19 demonstrates that it is possible for governments to take decisive action to avert an imminent crisis. The approach to solving both of these crises was the same: (1) identify the precise cause of the problem through expert scientific advice; (2) with support by the public, pass legislation focused on the cause of the problem; and (3) employ a robust feedback mechanism to assess progress and adjust the approach. This is not yet being done to solve the climate crisis, but working within the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement framework, it could be. Every nation can contribute to solving the climate crisis by: (1) changing their energy strategy to green energy sources instead of fossil fuels; and (2) critically reviewing every law, policy and trade agreement (including transport, food production, food sources and land use) that affects the climate crisis.

economics

The Independent System Operator of New England, which oversees grid reliability in the region, has proposed to phase out its minimum offer price rule (MOPR--pronounced "moper) by 2025. This will have a negative impact on reliability.

To get into why this is important, it's important to know how capacity auctions work. Every year, capacity owners (power generators like gas plants, wind farms, nuclear plants, etc.) offer to make capacity available in the future at a specific price. ISO-NE then tallies those offers from lowest to highest. It accepts the cheapest bid and then goes higher until it has gotten the generation it needs in the future. The highest of the offers then becomes the "clearing price" that all the lower accepted offers get paid. Bids above that price get rejected--they have not "cleared the auction." Their owners get nothing.

What is the most economically efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? The principles of economics deliver a crisp answer: reduce emissions to the point that the marginal benefits of the reduction equal its marginal costs. This answer can be implemented by a Pigouvian tax, for example a carbon tax where the tax rate is the marginal benefit of the emissions reduction or, equivalently, the monetized damages from emitting an additional ton of carbon dioxide (CO2). The carbon externality will then be internalized and the market will find cost-effective ways to reduce emissions up to the amount of the carbon tax.

However, most countries, including the United States, do not place an economy-wide tax on carbon, and instead have an array of greenhouse gas mitigation policies that provide subsidies or restrictions typically aimed at specific technologies or sectors. Such climate policies range from automobile fuel economy standards, to gasoline taxes, to mandating that a certain amount of electricity in a state comes from renewables, to subsidizing solar and wind electrical generation, to mandates requiring the blending of biofuels into the surface transportation fuel supply, to supply-side restrictions on fossil fuel extraction. In the world of a Pigouvian tax, markets sort out the most cost-effective ways to reduce emissions, but in the world we live in, economists need to weigh in on the costs of specific technologies or narrow interventions.

This paper reviews the costs of various technologies and actions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

carbon pricing

The cost of polluting is on the rise in Europe. Last week the price of carbon in the EU’s emissions trading system (ETS) surpassed €55 ($67) per tonne of carbon-dioxide equivalent. That is a record price for the world’s biggest carbon market and represents an increase of over 100% since December.

The rich benefit most from a de facto subsidy for home heating, a report says. The paper from the think tank Green Alliance makes the point that heating gas incurs VAT at only 5% instead of the usual 20%. Because the wealthy own the biggest houses, it says, they gain twice as much as the poorest from low VAT. The report suggests increasing VAT, then using the proceeds to insulate the homes of the poor. It also recommends increasing their benefits.

offsets

forest offsets

Forest offsets have been criticized for a variety of problems, including the risks that the carbon reductions will be short-lived, that carbon savings will be wiped out by increased logging elsewhere, and that the projects are preserving forests never in jeopardy of being chopped down, producing credits that don’t reflect real-world changes in carbon levels.

But CarbonPlan’s analysis highlights a different issue, one interlinked with these other problems. Even if everything else about a project were perfect, developers would still be able to undermine the program by exploiting regional averages.

Forest and soil carbon are an important piece of the climate change problem. But using land management to "offset" industrial emissions is a terrible idea. The incentives are all wrong and the administrative burden impossibly high

New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.

Carbon offsets are widely used by individuals, corporations, and governments to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions. Because offsets effectively allow pollution to continue, however, they must reflect real climate benefits.

To better understand whether these climate claims hold up in practice, we performed a comprehensive evaluation of California's forest carbon offsets program — the largest such program in existence, worth more than $2 billion. Our analysis of crediting errors demonstrates that a large fraction of the credits in the program do not reflect real climate benefits. The scale of the problem is enormous: 29% of the offsets we analyzed are over-credited, totaling 30 million tCO₂e worth approximately $410 million.

environmentalism

"Curiously, people very rarely offer evidence to support the notion that our ancestors lived environmentally friendly lives. It’s generally simply assumed that, since today’s industrial societies are so out of sync with the natural world, preindustrial societies must have been innately attuned to the Earth. But the available evidence doesn’t support this assumption. Whenever and wherever we choose to look, humans have demonstrated a capability and willingness to over-exploit and degrade the natural world in ways that argue strongly against any ancient environmental wisdom over and above what we possess today. ... What, then, are we to make of contemporary efforts to recapture this non-existent wisdom? [...] Where the myth can become counter-productive, however, is in its distrust of industrialised society. Not only is this distrust hopelessly quixotic in the twenty-first century, it overlooks the many positive developments in modern environmentalism—the continued development of carbon-neutral technology and the growing global cooperation on meeting climate goals, for example—that are dependent on our globalised, industrialised world. Industrialisation may have got us into this mess, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get us out of it. What won’t get us out if this mess are the low-tech solutions offered by believers in the myth of ancient environmental wisdom. ... We can’t return to an environmental golden age that never existed, and we’re not helping the planet by rejecting industrialisation in the false hope that we can."

One of the oldest and most influential of these beliefs is the myth of ancient environmental wisdom. This is the idea that our current ecological woes can all be traced back to the industrial revolution. Before that time, it’s argued, our ancestors lived in harmony with the natural world. This was partly due to the nature of preindustrial life: in a time before planes, pesticides and petrochemicals, there were simply fewer ways for people to damage the environment. More importantly, however, the myth insists that our ancestors were guided by respect and reverence towards our planet, and refused to act in ways that were unsustainable or destructive. It was the loss of this connection with the Earth, during the advent of industrialisation and mass urbanisation, that began our rapid descent into climate chaos.

...

The only problem? No such golden age ever existed.

Curiously, people very rarely offer evidence to support the notion that our ancestors lived environmentally friendly lives. It’s generally simply assumed that, since today’s industrial societies are so out of sync with the natural world, preindustrial societies must have been innately attuned to the Earth.

But the available evidence doesn’t support this assumption. Whenever and wherever we choose to look, humans have demonstrated a capability and willingness to over-exploit and degrade the natural world in ways that argue strongly against any ancient environmental wisdom over and above what we possess today.

In the centuries before industrialisation, for instance, agricultural societies were already driving a number of species towards extinction. Bears and wolves were deliberately pushed out of Western Europe, where they survive today only in remote and disconnected pockets. The Asiatic lion and cheetah, both of which historically roamed throughout much of India and the Middle East, were similarly persecuted and driven into ever smaller territories. Others weren’t so lucky: the auroch, the wild ancestor of cattle, was hunted to extinction in Poland during the seventeenth century. The dodo, Steller’s sea cow and the three metre-tall elephant bird were also wiped out before industrialisation.

Even further back in time, our ancestors were responsible for significant levels of deforestation across much of the world. For example, there’s evidence to suggest that many pre-Columbian civilisations, such as the Maya of Central America, practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, leading to drops in biodiversity, carbon sequestration and soil health. A 2016 study likewise found that prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Europe may have been deliberately burning back forests since the Ice Age, some 20,000 years ago.

natural v unnatural

Unnatural climate solutions? Rob Bellamy and Shannon Osaka; Nature Climate Change; Feb 2020 Department of Geography, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. 2Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. *e-mail: rob.bellamy@manchester.ac.uk

Framing solutions to climate change as natural strongly influences their acceptability, but what constitutes a ‘natural’ climate solution is selected, not self-evident. We suggest that the current, narrow formulation of natural climate solutions risks constraining what are thought of as desirable policy options.

There is growing interest in using natural climate solutions to ameliorate the problem of anthropogenic global warming1–4. These would involve conserving, restoring or enhancing forests, wetlands, grasslands and agricultural lands to reduce CO2 emissions and/or remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Specific actions include reforestation, forest conservation and management, biochar burial, agroforestry, cropland nutrient management, conservation agriculture, coastal wetland restoration, and peatland conservation and restoration. Natural climate solutions are contrasted with emerging technologies for carbon removal such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which has featured prominently in climate scenarios that are consistent with keeping the rise in global temperature to well below 2 °C above preindustrial levels. Natural climate solutions, it has been suggested, are cheaper, are already tested and do not carry the same risks to water use, biodiversity and ecosystem services2. Indeed, it is often claimed that natural climate solutions would bring additional benefits to ecosystem services, including to biodiversity, water filtration and flood control, soil enrichment and air filtration. Another, often unacknowledged, benefit of natural climate solutions is in their name. Whether or not something is considered natural is well known to be an important predictor of public opinion: courses of action that are perceived as natural are seen as more desirable than those that are perceived as artificial, or unnatural5,6. And public support is crucial if we are to find socially robust solutions to climate change and develop effective policies around them. But what if natural solutions were not as natural as they might seem? And what if unnatural solutions were not as unnatural? We argue that, contrary to widely held assumptions, the nature of natural climate solutions is far from self-evident, and that the boundaries of this category arise from a particular and contestable conceptualization of what constitutes external, non-human nature. We suggest that scientists and policymakers need to recognize natural climate solutions not as a self-evident category, but one that is delimited by people acting in social groups. Under this view, we can branch out to alternative, still natural, solutions and avoid a dangerous narrowing of policy options. Delimiting what is natural Nature is universal. That is to say, it encapsulates the physical world in its entirety, including both untouched nature and nature modified by humans, as well as, of course, humans themselves. But nature is also social: people, acting in social groups, delineate the boundaries of what is considered natural and what is considered unnatural or artificial7. For natural climate solutions, a particular version of external, non-human nature has been advanced that focuses on the conservation, restoration or enhancement of selected aspects of ostensibly natural ecosystems (for example, forest, coastal wetland and peatland restoration) and selected aspects of nature modified by humans (for example, biochar burial, agroforestry and cropland nutrient management). Natural climate solutions thus hark back to ideas of nature as a holistic entity that must be both protected against human intrusion and restored to an authentic, original state. By professing to restore lost and threatened ecosystems, or using techniques inspired by the natural world, natural climate solutions leverage traditional ideas about an external nature in support of particular climate policies. But in specifying which techniques count as natural climate solutions, other options are inadvertently or tacitly specified as unnatural or artificial. The version of natural climate solutions being advanced can be broadly said to involve enhancing (or in some cases, imitating) existing natural processes. Most obviously, this seems to exclude articles manufactured from nature, precluding approaches such as direct air capture and storage, or low-carbon concrete. But it also omits approaches that should fall under this definition. Increasing the ocean’s alkalinity, for instance, is excluded but involves the enhancement of an otherwise relatively untouched nature: the oceans. In the same vein, enhanced weathering is omitted from natural climate solutions but could involve enhancing agricultural land, an aspect of nature modified by humans. Then there are inconsistencies in how more ambiguous approaches are classified. For instance, biochar burial and BECCS both involve enhancing an existing natural process (biomass growth) and articles manufactured from nature (pyrolysis plants and power stations combined with carbon capture and storage, respectively), but biochar burial is classed as a natural solution and BECCS is not. Perhaps the difference is that whereas biochar has been associated with civilizations in the Amazon — a group that we now consider to have lived in relative harmony with nature — BECCS has been associated with large-scale industrial agriculture and modern technology. The point here is that where the lines are drawn on what constitutes a ‘natural’ climate solution is not self-evident but selected — which means that they can be selected differently. And all climate solutions are fair game: they all come from a universal nature, and their different natural characteristics can be emphasized or de-emphasized to make them seem natural or unnatural, be it through inadvertent, tacit or deliberate means. The effect is one of framing: these solutions are natural, and those are not. It creates a conflated binary choice between the ostensibly natural and the ostensibly unnatural (Table 1). This natural framing is very important when it comes to the way in which climate solutions are perceived. Climate solutions can be framed in different ways, with different effects. But when something is presented as being natural, it is seen as more desirable than something that is presented — or implied — as being unnatural. Take, for example, direct air capture and storage, which when presented as being ‘like artificial trees’ is viewed significantly more favourably than when presented as a chemical process involving large industrial machinery8. Neither framing is necessarily any more ‘correct’ than the other; they are each merely partial, selective representations. Similarly, if the industrial burning of biomass for biochar burial — or the large-scale engineering and machinery involved in ecosystem restorations — were selectively emphasized, such solutions might seem somewhat less natural, and therefore somewhat less desirable. Powerful though such natural framings are, they cannot provide answers for all our climate policy dilemmas. We now live in a hybrid climate composed of both natural variability and anthropogenic forcings. Even with the help of natural climate solutions, a fully natural climate cannot be restored, just as current forms of wilderness inevitably bear some human fingerprint. Labelling some climate solutions as natural and others as artificial belies the reality that all technologies and policy actions lie somewhere in between. Expanding the range of solutions Natural climate solutions as they are currently being articulated in the literature also suffer from a great deal of hype and a great number of technical limitations, risks and uncertainties. Take, for instance, the recent controversy surrounding an article in Science9 that estimated that tree planting alone could sequester 205 GtC, which has now been shown to be an estimate approximately five times too large10. Add to this limitations to potential from land area requirements, risks to biodiversity and the release of other greenhouse gases such as methane, and uncertainties around the monitoring, reporting and verification of greenhouse gas stocks and fluxes11, among other things, and natural climate solutions might not be as desirable as they first appear. In the context of the vast scale of carbon removal required to meet international ambitions set out in the Paris Agreement12, framing this select set of climate solutions as natural, and thus inherently more desirable, dangerously narrows the range of climate solutions deemed attractive to policymakers. We therefore have three recommendations for both scientists and policymakers with respect to how the natural framing of climate solutions is used (and abused). First, we recommend that natural climate solutions be recognized not as a self-evident category, but one that is delimited by people and that is therefore open to alternative, more fruitful conceptualizations. Second, we recommend that the current, restricted conceptualization is resisted to avoid an unnecessary and dangerous narrowing of options. And third, we recommend that the meaning of ‘nature’ is expanded to capture the full range of climate solutions available to us — because we’ll need everything we can get.

References

  • 1. Kabisch, N. etal. Ecol. Soc. 21, https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08373-210239 (2016).
  • 2. Griscom, B. etal. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 11645–11650 (2017).
  • 3. Fargione, J. etal. Sci. Adv. 4, eaat1869 (2018).
  • 4. Seddon, N. etal. Nat. Clim. Change 9, 84–87 (2019).
  • 5. Sjöberg, L. J. Risk Res. 3, 353–367 (2000).
  • 6. Corner, A. etal. Glob. Environ. Change 23, 938–947 (2013).
  • 7. Castree, N. & Braun, B. Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics (Blackwell, 2001).
  • 8. Corner, A. & Pidgeon, N. Climatic Change 130, 425–438 (2015).
  • 9. Bastin, J. etal. Science 365, 76–79 (2019).
  • 10. Veldman, J. etal. Science 366, eaay7976 (2019).
  • 11. Greenhouse Gas Removal (Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering, 2018).
  • 12. Rogelj, J. etal. in Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (eds Masson-Delmotte, V. etal.) Ch. 2 (IPCC, 2019).

population reduction

CCS

CDR / GHG removal

overview / explainers

  • Afforestation and reforestation
  • Biochar
  • BECCS
  • ‘Blue carbon’ habitat restoration
  • Building with biomass
  • Cloud or ocean treatment with alkali
  • Direct air capture
  • Enhanced ocean productivity
  • Enhanced weathering
  • Soil carbon sequestration

research

These GHG removal (GGR) demonstrator projects will investigate:

  • management of peatlands to maximise their GHG removal potential in farmland near Doncaster, and at upland sites in the South Pennines and in Pwllpeiran, west Wales
  • enhanced rock weathering – crushing silicate rocks and spreading the particles at field trial sites on farmland in mid-Wales, Devon and Hertfordshire
  • use of biochar, a charcoal-like substance, as a viable method of carbon sequestration. Testing will take place at arable and grassland sites in the Midlands and Wales, a sewage disposal site in Nottinghamshire, former mine sites and railway embankments
  • large-scale tree planting, or afforestation, to assess the most effective species and locations for carbon sequestration at sites across the UK. It includes land owned by the Ministry of Defence, the National Trust and Network Rail
  • rapid scale-up of perennial bioenergy crops such as grasses (Miscanthus) and short rotation coppice willow at locations in Lincolnshire and Lancashire.

Forest

New research finds that letting forests regrow naturally can absorb 23% of the world's CO2 emissions every year.

Abstract

To constrain global warming, we must strongly curtail greenhouse gas emissions and capture excess atmospheric carbon dioxide. Regrowing natural forests is a prominent strategy for capturing additional carbon, but accurate assessments of its potential are limited by uncertainty and variability in carbon accumulation rates. To assess why and where rates differ, here we compile 13,112 georeferenced measurements of carbon accumulation. Climatic factors explain variation in rates better than land-use history, so we combine the field measurements with 66 environmental covariate layers to create a global, one-kilometre-resolution map of potential aboveground carbon accumulation rates for the first 30 years of natural forest regrowth. This map shows over 100-fold variation in rates across the globe, and indicates that default rates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may underestimate aboveground carbon accumulation rates by 32 per cent on average and do not capture eight-fold variation within ecozones. Conversely, we conclude that maximum climate mitigation potential from natural forest regrowth is 11 per cent lower than previously reported owing to the use of overly high rates for the location of potential new forest. Although our data compilation includes more studies and sites than previous efforts, our results depend on data availability, which is concentrated in ten countries, and data quality, which varies across studies. However, the plots cover most of the environmental conditions across the areas for which we predicted carbon accumulation rates (except for northern Africa and northeast Asia). We therefore provide a robust and globally consistent tool for assessing natural forest regrowth as a climate mitigation strategy.

Soil sequestration

MIT

there is little evidence that carbon farming works as well as promised.

The world’s farmlands do have the capacity to store billions of tons of carbon dioxide in the soil annually, according to a National Academies report last year. But there is still uncertainty concerning which farming techniques work, and to what degree, across different soil types, depths, topographies, crop varieties, climate conditions, and time periods.

It’s unclear whether the practices can be carried out over long periods and on a massive scale across the world’s farms without undercutting food production. And there are significant disagreements about what it will take to accurately measure and certify that farms are actually removing and storing increased amounts of carbon dioxide.

These uncertainties further complicate the well-documented challenges in setting up any reliable carbon offsets program. Studies have frequently found these systems can substantially overestimate reductions, as economic, environmental and political pressures all push toward issuing large numbers of offsets credits. The programs can also create opportunities for gamesmanship and greenwashing that undermine real progress on climate change, observers say.

Iida Ruishalme

Direct Air Capture

Steel

SSAB’s US mills utilize scrap-based electric arc furnace (EAF) technology, using almost 100% recycled materials in their production process. In addition to scrap, SSAB Iowa and SSAB Alabama (located just outside of Mobile) intend to utilize fossil-free sponge iron produced in Sweden as part of the Hybrit project in the coming years, enabling the eventual production of fossil-free steel.

Passive Radiative Cooling

geoengineering

decarbonisation plans

energy modelling

enroads

Jessie Jenkins

SUMMARY: Avoiding the worst effects of #ClimateChange​ requires near-zero electricity sector CO2 emissions by mid-century. Despite agreement on the need for “#DeepDecarbonization​” of the electric power sector, there remains considerable uncertainty and debate about the relative importance of various low-carbon electricity resources in near-zero-emissions power systems. Do recent cost declines and performance improvements for wind, solar, and energy storage technologies mean we are now on a "fully renewable" pathway to zero carbon? With new nuclear and carbon capture and storage projects struggling to compete—or even complete!—should we abandon these more reliable low-carbon resources, or redouble efforts to overcome challenges to their adoption? And what role does energy storage or increased control over electricity consumption play in all of this?

In this seminar, Jesse D. Jenkins will present recent research systematically evaluating the role of various low-carbon resources under increasingly stringent CO2 limits and considering a wide range of uncertainty in technology costs, renewable resource quality, and demand patterns. This comprehensive evaluation finds that cost-effective deep decarbonization relies on at least one reliable resource playing the role of a “flexible base” for the low-carbon power system, augmenting "fuel-saving" variable renewables. Energy storage and demand response provide "fast bursts" of power and play a distinct and complementary role. Furthermore, the best mix of resources for a zero carbon system may differ from the least-cost resource portfolio suited to more modest goals. This indicates a potential for path-dependency or costly lock-in if decarbonization proceeds myopically. This work implies that physical science and engineering research should improve and expand the set of flexible base resources. Policy should also harness a diverse suite of low-carbon technologies and avoid narrowing support to variable renewables alone. Failing to deploy sufficient flexible base capacity could significantly increase the cost of deep decarbonization of power systems—and thus the overall costs of climate mitigation.

transitions - Vaclav Smil

global - UN - nuclear

IEA

The International Energy Agency's Net Zero Emissions (NZE) scenario puts too much faith in technologies that are "uncertain, untested or unreliable" and fails to reflect both the size and scope of the contribution that nuclear technologies could make, World Nuclear Association said today.

UN - nuclear

The world’s energy sector is undergoing a profound transition. This transition is driven by the need to expand access to clean energy in support of socio-economic development, especially in emerging economies, while at the same time limiting the impacts of climate change, pollution and other unfolding global environmental crises. Fundamentally this transition requires a shift from the use of polluting energy sources towards the use of sustainable alternatives. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic also reminds us of the importance of resilience in the energy system and is a profound motivation for countries to ‘build back better’. There are many pathways to achieving this transition and each country will pursue its own route, taking into account its own endowment of natural resources as well as other local and regional factors. The UN’s 2030 agenda, distilled in the sustainable development goals, has become an indispensable tool for decision-makers concerned with navigating these difficult decisions. This report explores the potential for nuclear energy as part of the energy portfolio and shows how the utilisation of local or regional uranium resources can provide a platform for sustainable development. It explores potential entry pathways in the context of local and regional factors, including the utilization of domestic uranium resources, which could facilitate nuclear energy and economic development by applying the United Nations Framework Classification for Resources (UNFC) and United Nations Resource Management System (UNRMS).

USA

Biden admin / American jobs plan

The Biden infrastructure package is evidence of the way climate politics have evolved over the last 15 years. There are many people/orgs to thank for this. I'm proud to say we @TheBTI have anticipated and advocated for this style of politics since our founding.

nuclear

2020/2021 Princeton NZA / VCE / AGU studies

A slew of new net-zero studies have been published in recent months, including Princeton's Net Zero America (NZA) project, the Vibrant Clean Energy Zero By Fifty scenario, and by a team of researchers led by Jim Williams at USF. All three of these take a deep-dive into how the US could reach net-zero emissions by 2050, down to the level of where each new generating facility might be located, where new transmission lines would be built, and how electricity generation sources can meet hourly grid demand in different regions of the country. Each study contains multiple scenarios looking at the sensitivity to future technology prices, land use constraints, and other factors. But for simplicity, we focus in this comparison on their marker scenarios: E+ for NZA, the default Zero By Fifty scenario from Vibrant, and the central scenario from Williams et al. Both NZA and Williams et al. use a combination of the EnergyPATHWAYS (EP) and RIO models to generate their scenarios, while Vibrant uses their WIS:dom model.

While the models differ in important ways, they all paint a broadly similar picture. Wind and solar expand rapidly in the next three decades. US coal use falls off a cliff, reaching zero by 2030 or 2035. At the same time, natural gas use stays rather flat — or even increases modestly — between 2020 and 2030, as it serves a key role in filling in the gaps in variable renewable generation. Gas capacity actually increases in two of the three decarbonization models through 2050, though capacity factors — how often the gas plants are run — fall rapidly, and gas increasingly becomes a blend of hydrogen and methane closer to 2050.

California’s plan to make all of its electricity carbon free by 2045 will double electricity demand. Three groups of analysts optimize its grid to be economically and environmentally sustainable.

California’s government has set ambitious goals to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, starting with electricity. A 2018 law mandated that, by 2045, all retail sales of electricity in the state must derive from carbon-free sources. Jerry Brown, who was then the governor, issued an accompanying executive order requiring the entire state, not just the electric sector, to zero-out net emissions also by 2045. Policymakers have to grapple with achieving these goals. Reducing emissions in the economy as a whole will increase demand for electricity, which will be used to power cars and heat buildings in place of fossil fuels. Energy planners estimate that such electrification will increase California’s peak demand for electricity from 50 gigawatts today to 100 gigawatts midcentury.

CAN THIS DEMAND BE MET? The Environmental Defense Fund and the Clean Air Task Force convened three groups of energy system experts to model California’s electricity system in order to figure out how the state might make that much affordable, clean, and reliable electricity. Groups from Princeton University, Stanford University, and Energy and Environmental Economics (E3), a San Francisco-based consulting firm, each ran separate models that sought to estimate not only how much electricity would cost under a variety of scenarios, but also the physical implications of building the decarbonized grid. How much new infrastructure would be needed? How fast would the state have to build it? How much land would that infrastructure require? Although each of these models offered its own depictions of the California electricity system and independently explored the ways it would be optimized, they all used the same data with respect to past conditions and they all used the same estimates for future technology costs. Despite distinct approaches to the calculations, all the models yielded very similar conclusions. The most important of these was that solar and wind can’t do the job alone.

Princeton / Net-Zero America

Net-Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure, and Impacts, a report issued in December by a large team centered at Princeton University, analyzes five possible pathways for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. It has been praised as the most thorough examination to date of deep decarbonization strategies. It quantifies and maps the infrastructure that will need to be built and the investment that will need to be made to achieve net-zero. It shows how jobs and health will be affected in each state.

In this webinar, the report’s co-principal investigators described the report’s methodology and highlighted findings of special interest to state policymakers.

With a massive, nationwide effort the United States could reach net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 using existing technology and at costs aligned with historical spending on energy, according to a study led by Princeton University researchers.

The new “Net-Zero America” research outlines five distinct technological pathways for the United States to decarbonize its entire economy. The research is the first study to quantify and map with this degree of specificity, the infrastructure that needs to be built and the investment required to run the country without emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than are removed from it each year. It’s also the first to pinpoint how jobs and health will be affected in each state at a highly granular level, sometimes down to the county.

The study’s five scenarios describe at a highly detailed, state-by-state level the scale and pace of technology and capital mobilization needed across the country, and highlight the implications for land use, incumbent energy industries, employment, and health. Initial results were released December 15, in recognition of the urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the need for immediate federal, state, and local policy making efforts. Journal publications will follow in early 2021.

This website presents the pathways in an interactive context to enable policy makers and other stakeholders to extract specific results that are most useful to them. The site should be used in conjunction with the Net-Zero America report to fully understand the data contained herein.

AGU

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C points to the need for carbon neutrality by mid‐century. Achieving this in the United States in only 30 years will be challenging, and practical pathways detailing the technologies, infrastructure, costs, and tradeoffs involved are needed. Modeling the entire U.S. energy and industrial system with new analysis tools that capture synergies not represented in sector‐specific or integrated assessment models, we created multiple pathways to net zero and net negative CO2 emissions by 2050. They met all forecast U.S. energy needs at a net cost of 0.2–1.2% of GDP in 2050, using only commercial or near‐commercial technologies, and requiring no early retirement of existing infrastructure. Pathways with constraints on consumer behavior, land use, biomass use, and technology choices (e.g., no nuclear) met the target but at higher cost. All pathways employed four basic strategies: energy efficiency, decarbonized electricity, electrification, and carbon capture. Least‐cost pathways were based on >80% wind and solar electricity plus thermal generation for reliability. A 100% renewable primary energy system was feasible but had higher cost and land use. We found multiple feasible options for supplying low‐carbon fuels for non‐electrifiable end uses in industry, freight, and aviation, which were not required in bulk until after 2035. In the next decade, the actions required in all pathways were similar: expand renewable capacity 3.5 fold, retire coal, maintain existing gas generating capacity, and increase electric vehicle and heat pump sales to >50% of market share. This study provides a playbook for carbon neutrality policy with concrete near‐term priorities.

China

China’s surprise pledge to reach “carbon neutrality” before 2060 could cut global warming this century by 0.25C and raise the country’s GDP, our new analysis shows.

New research has found that China’s pledge to achieve “carbon neutrality” before 2060 is “largely consistent” with the Paris Agreement’s aim of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

But, to stay below this level of warming, the country will need to aim higher than its current net-zero goal and accomplish “deep” emission reductions in the near term, the authors state.

Abstract Given the increasing interest in keeping global warming below 1.5°C, a key question is what this would mean for China’s emission pathway, energy restructuring, and decarbonization. By conducting a multimodel study, we find that the 1.5°C-consistent goal would require China to reduce its carbon emissions and energy consumption by more than 90 and 39%, respectively, compared with the “no policy” case. Negative emission technologies play an important role in achieving near-zero emissions, with captured carbon accounting on average for 20% of the total reductions in 2050. Our multimodel comparisons reveal large differences in necessary emission reductions across sectors, whereas what is consistent is that the power sector is required to achieve full decarbonization by 2050. The cross-model averages indicate that China’s accumulated policy costs may amount to 2.8 to 5.7% of its gross domestic product by 2050, given the 1.5°C warming limit.

UK

Atkins / SNC Lavalin

nuclear

recycling

incineration

pyrolysis

energy mix

data & graphics

The Energy Current LCP Enact - UK / EU real time grid data

carbon/energy equivalence calculation

This page contains a simple carbon calculator for use by UK organisations based upon the July 2017 recommended conversion factors provided by Defra as part of its Environmental Reporting Guidelines.

The conversion factors are for use by UK and international organisations to report on 2020 greenhouse gas emissions.

carbon intensity

Both fossil-fuel and non-fossil-fuel power technologies induce life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, mainly due to their embodied energy requirements for construction and operation, and upstream CH4 emissions. Here, we integrate prospective life-cycle assessment with global integrated energy–economy–land-use–climate modelling to explore life-cycle emissions of future low-carbon power supply systems and implications for technology choice. Future per-unit life-cycle emissions differ substantially across technologies. For a climate protection scenario, we project life-cycle emissions from fossil fuel carbon capture and sequestration plants of 78–110 gCO2eq kWh−1, compared with 3.5–12 gCO2eq kWh−1 for nuclear, wind and solar power for 2050. Life-cycle emissions from hydropower and bioenergy are substantial (∼100 gCO2eq kWh−1), but highly uncertain. We find that cumulative emissions attributable to upscaling low-carbon power other than hydropower are small compared with direct sectoral fossil fuel emissions and the total carbon budget. Fully considering life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions has only modest effects on the scale and structure of power production in cost-optimal mitigation scenarios.

lifecycle assessment

Abstract

Both fossil-fuel and non-fossil-fuel power technologies induce life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, mainly due to their embodied energy requirements for construction and operation, and upstream CH4 emissions. Here, we integrate prospective life-cycle assessment with global integrated energy–economy–land-use–climate modelling to explore life-cycle emissions of future low-carbon power supply systems and implications for technology choice. Future per-unit life-cycle emissions differ substantially across technologies. For a climate protection scenario, we project life-cycle emissions from fossil fuel carbon capture and sequestration plants of 78–110 gCO2eq kWh−1, compared with 3.5–12 gCO2eq kWh−1 for nuclear, wind and solar power for 2050. Life-cycle emissions from hydropower and bioenergy are substantial (∼100 gCO2eq kWh−1), but highly uncertain. We find that cumulative emissions attributable to upscaling low-carbon power other than hydropower are small compared with direct sectoral fossil fuel emissions and the total carbon budget. Fully considering life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions has only modest effects on the scale and structure of power production in cost-optimal mitigation scenarios.

integrated lifecycle assessment

Abstract

Decarbonization of electricity generation can support climate-change mitigation and presents an opportunity to address pollution resulting from fossil-fuel combustion. Generally, renewable technologies require higher initial investments in infrastructure than fossil-based power systems. To assess the tradeoffs of increased up-front emissions and reduced operational emissions, we present, to our knowledge, the first global, integrated life-cycle assessment (LCA) of long-term, wide-scale implementation of electricity generation from renewable sources (i.e., photovoltaic and solar thermal, wind, and hydropower) and of carbon dioxide capture and storage for fossil power generation. We compare emissions causing particulate matter exposure, freshwater ecotoxicity, freshwater eutrophication, and climate change for the climate-change-mitigation (BLUE Map) and business-as-usual (Baseline) scenarios of the International Energy Agency up to 2050. We use a vintage stock model to conduct an LCA of newly installed capacity year-by-year for each region, thus accounting for changes in the energy mix used to manufacture future power plants. Under the Baseline scenario, emissions of air and water pollutants more than double whereas the low-carbon technologies introduced in the BLUE Map scenario allow a doubling of electricity supply while stabilizing or even reducing pollution. Material requirements per unit generation for low-carbon technologies can be higher than for conventional fossil generation: 11–40 times more copper for photovoltaic systems and 6–14 times more iron for wind power plants. However, only two years of current global copper and one year of iron production will suffice to build a low-carbon energy system capable of supplying the world's electricity needs in 2050.

energy density, land take etc

Highlights

  • The energy densities and spatial footprints of various power generators are estimated.
  • Process energy analysis to determine the energy required to produce electricity.
  • The nuclear fuel cycle was found to have the highest energy density.
  • Renewables produce ‘dilute electricity’ with a large spatial footprint or land-take.
  • Bioenergy plants having the lowest energy density, or largest spatial footprint.

energy payback time/ratio/EROEI

The energy payback period, efficiency factor and carbon dioxide emissions in different power generation methods were studied. Nuclear, coal, peat, natural gas, wind and photovoltaic power were examined. To calculate the energy payback period of power generation, the energy inputs of different power generation methods were examined by using hybrid analysis, which is a combination of process analysis and the input-output method. The energy inputs of power generation were examined starting from raw material and fuel resources in the soil and ending up in the power station. The study also considered the handling of spent fuel and combustion residues. The energy payback periods were as follows: nuclear power 20-33 months, coal power 33 months, peat power 26-27 months, gas power 21-27 months, wind power 7 months and photovoltaic power 60-95 months. The energy payback period of nuclear power was strongly influenced by the uranium enrichment method. In natural gas power the energy payback period was influenced by the amount of natural gas used as fuel in compression stations and production fields and in photovoltaic power by the semiconductor material of the cells. The most significant carbon dioxide emissions were produced in the power generation methods based on combustion. Depending on the way of examination, both nuclear power, wind power and photovoltaic power produce carbon dioxide emissions, but on a significantly lower level.

Weissbach

There have been more than 50 studies of energy payback of solar PV in the literature. They yield fairly consistent results over time, improving over time. However, there are also two studies which show very low EROI for solar PV (one from Weissbach et al, and another from Ferroni and Hopkirk). Both of those studies came under intense criticism for methodological errors. Those two studies are FAR outliers.

materials use - nuclear v solar v wind

grid

The Independent System Operator of New England, which oversees grid reliability in the region, has proposed to phase out its minimum offer price rule (MOPR--pronounced "moper) by 2025. This will have a negative impact on reliability.

To get into why this is important, it's important to know how capacity auctions work. Every year, capacity owners (power generators like gas plants, wind farms, nuclear plants, etc.) offer to make capacity available in the future at a specific price. ISO-NE then tallies those offers from lowest to highest. It accepts the cheapest bid and then goes higher until it has gotten the generation it needs in the future. The highest of the offers then becomes the "clearing price" that all the lower accepted offers get paid. Bids above that price get rejected--they have not "cleared the auction." Their owners get nothing.

islanding

So...a 'basic solar fact' is that the grid needs to be ready to split into gated neighborhoods because we can't really supply electricity like we used to?

This neighborhood spends 10x (because they can afford it) as the grid breaks down...that's the new resiliency?

SOLAR 101: “Islanding” isn't just a type of vacation. It also refers to electrical systems that can disconnect from the larger grid to meet local needs with sources like solar. Learn how islanding makes communities more resilient

Simply put, we need a reliable and secure energy grid. Two ways to ensure continuous electricity regardless of the weather or an unforeseen event are by using distributed energy resources (DER) and microgrids. DER produce and supply electricity on a small scale and are spread out over a wide area. Rooftop solar panels, backup batteries, and emergency diesel generators are examples of DER. While traditional generators are connected to the high-voltage transmission grid, DER are connected to the lower-voltage distribution grid, like residences and businesses are.

Microgrids are localized electric grids that can disconnect from the main grid to operate autonomously. Because they can operate while the main grid is down, microgrids can strengthen grid resilience, help mitigate grid disturbances, and function as a grid resource for faster system response and recovery.

Texas 2021

Germany - energiewende

The German Economy Ministry has held a summit to discuss a dramatic slowdown in the wind energy sector that's threatening agreed climate goals. The problems are due to policy mistakes and growing public resistance.

ANALYSIS: GERMAN WIND SWINGS MAKE COAL/GAS DISPATCH MORE VOLATILE

German wind power output reached a new record this week, peaking above 33 GW overnight Tuesday, but dropped to just 1 GW by Friday, with coal and to a lesser extend also gas-fired power plants providing the flexibility needed to keep the system balanced, a Platts analysis of hourly generation profiles shows.

coal

Japan

Japan is planning to build a bunch of new coal plants…but it might also close loads of old ones. What's going on? Plus or minus for climate?! THREAD with analysis + charts

Europe

France compared to Spain, Germany, Poland

UK compared to Germany

UK

Scotland

China

nuclear

As of this month, China has 49 nuclear reactors in operation with a capacity of 47.5 GW, third only to the United States and France. And 17 under construction with a capacity of 18.5 GW. None have been shut down.

Middle East

UAE / Abu Dhabi

Africa

As their economies grow, pre-industrialized countries are beginning to see rapid development and urbanization. This takes a lot of energy, so African governments are looking to nuclear power as a reliable source of baseload energy that won’t contribute to climate change. The IAEA said it has communicated with nearly a dozen African nations about drawing up plans for civilian nuclear energy programs. At least seven nations in sub-Saharan Africa have signed agreements to receive support from Russia to deploy new plants.

reliability

nuclear

radiation and health

  • Posters The Society for Radiological Protection

Abstract

Effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear accident remain a topic of interest. We investigated whether children born to parents employed as cleanup workers or exposed to occupational and environmental ionizing radiation post-accident were born with more germline de novo mutations (DNMs). Whole-genome sequencing of 130 children (born 1987-2002) and their parents did not reveal an increase in the rates, distributions, or types of DNMs versus previous studies. We find no elevation in total DNMs regardless of cumulative preconception gonadal paternal (mean = 365 mGy, range = 0-4,080 mGy) or maternal (mean = 19 mGy, range = 0-550 mGy) exposure to ionizing radiation and conclude over this exposure range, evidence is lacking for a substantial effect on germline DNMs in humans, suggesting minimal impact on health of subsequent generations.

Tritium

IEA

Nuclear power and hydropower form the backbone of low-carbon electricity generation. Together, they provide three-quarters of global low-carbon generation. Over the past 50 years, the use of nuclear power has reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by over 60 gigatonnes – nearly two years’ worth of global energy-related emissions. However, in advanced economies, nuclear power has begun to fade, with plants closing and little new investment made, just when the world requires more low-carbon electricity.

This report, Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System, focuses on the role of nuclear power in advanced economies and the factors that put nuclear power at risk of future decline. It is shown that without action, nuclear power in advanced economies could fall by two-thirds by 2040.The implications of such a “Nuclear Fade Case” for costs, emissions and electricity security using two World Energy Outlook scenarios – the New Policies Scenario and the Sustainable Development Scenario are examined.

Achieving the pace of CO2 emissions reductions in line with the Paris Agreement is already a huge challenge, as shown in the Sustainable Development Scenario. It requires large increases in efficiency and renewables investment, as well as an increase in nuclear power. This report identifies the even greater challenges of attempting to follow this path with much less nuclear power. It recommends several possible government actions that aim to ensure existing nuclear power plants can operate as long as they are safe, support new nuclear construction and encourage new nuclear technologies to be developed.

UN

Global climate objectives fall short without nuclear power in the mix: UNECE UN News; 11 Aug 2021

The urgent need to reduce emissions and slow global heating, should involve the roll-out of more nuclear power stations, regional UN energy experts argued in a new briefing on Wednesday.

Carbon Neutrality in the UNECE Region: Integrated Life-cycle Assessment of Electricity Sources UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR EUROPE; 2021-2022

EU

JRC Science for policy report: Technical assessment of nuclear energy with respect to the ‘do no significant harm’ criteria of Regulation (EU) 2020/852 (‘Taxonomy Regulation’) Joint Research Centre; 2021

thread by RePlanet on Twitter; Aug 2022

reactor technology

safety

Taishan EPR radiation leak

environmental

Planning documents published by EDF have revealed that almost 8 million fish were “impinged” – or sucked into the cooling system – by the existing plant Sizewell B each year between 2009 and 2013. Extrapolating from these figures, Tasc has estimated that 28 million fish could be impinged in the cooling system of both plants each year

VVER 1200

CANDU

fast breeder reactors

advanced reactors

Morgan D. Bazilian; Joule; Aug 2020

Terrapower
Natrium?
USA

The University may soon be home to a new micro-nuclear reactor, which would provide campus with clean energy, as well as opportunities in research and education on campus.

The project is pending approval and funding by the U.S. Department of Energy. If awarded, work will begin in 2021, with projected completion by 2026.

USNC reactor - TRISO fuel
Molten Chloride Fast Reactor - Elysium
Westinghouse eVinci
Seaborg

fuel

flexibility

Plutonium - breeder reactors - reporocessing

Thorium

Protatctinium - proliferation

In 1980, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) observed that protactinium, a chemical element generated in thorium reactors, could be separated and allowed to decay to isotopically pure uranium 233—suitable material for making nuclear weapons. The IAEA report, titled “Advanced Fuel Cycle and Reactor Concepts,” concluded that the proliferation resistance of thorium fuel cycles “would be equivalent to” the uranium/plutonium fuel cycles of conventional civilian nuclear reactors, assuming both included spent fuel reprocessing to isolate fissile material.

current

economics

This new NEA report focuses on potential cost and project risk reduction opportunities for contemporary Gen‑III reactor designs that could be unlocked in the short term and that are also applicable to small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced reactor concepts for deployment in the longer term. The study identifies longer‑term cost reduction opportunities associated with the harmonisation of codes and standards and licensing regimes. It also explores the risk allocation schemes and mitigation priorities at the outset of well‑performing financing frameworks for new nuclear that require a concerted effort among government, industry and the society as a whole.

  • thread by David Hess (of World Nuclear) on economics of nuclear with reference to the OECD-NEA report

energy lifecycle / time to repay construction energy

The performance of Nuclear Power can also be measured by calculating the total energy required to build and run a Nuclear Power plant and comparing it to the total energy it produces.

...

So the Forsmark Plant produces 93 times more energy than it consumes. Or put another way, the non-nuclear energy investment required to generate electricity for 40 years is repaid in 5 months.

jobs

discussion

advocacy

Public attitudes to nuclear power are critical in shaping nuclear policies in OECD/NEA countries and the latter will only be able to make use of this energy source if a well-informed public considers that its benefits outweigh its risks. This report provides a number of insights into public attitudes towards nuclear power. Support for nuclear energy is generally correlated with the level of experience of and knowledge about nuclear power. Interestingly, while the public is generally aware of the contribution of nuclear power to ensuring security of energy supply, its potential contribution to combating climate change is less well recognised. Solving the waste disposal issue would also significantly increase the level of public support. Furthermore, OECD/NEA governments may wish to reflect carefully on how to react to these results as, according to the surveys, they are the least trusted source on energy issues, far behind regulators, non-governmental organisations and scientists.

IT’S A BALANCING ACT.

We need to acknowledge our challenges but we must focus on our solutions. We need to be as aware of what we are gaining as what we are losing so we know what to fight for, not just what to fight against. We have to stop going negative all day long.

As far as we know, on average there has never been a better time to be born than now.

We are living longer.

We have eliminated horrible diseases and we are still winning those fights. We are growing more food on less land. Violence is decreasing. The world is more literate and more educated.

A smaller share of humanity lives in poverty and more people are living lives of independence and opportunity.

we are beginning to see a return of nature

Many of these achievements have come at a cost to our natural world. But now we are beginning to see a return of nature, the expansion of forests and the return of wild creatures in places they have not been seen in decades.

But not everywhere. We continue to lose wild nature as we encroach on other species and their habitat.

So our challenge is to bring all of humanity on the development journey while stabilizing our climate and restoring our natural world.

It’s going to be a rocky ride and we are going to have some losses along the way, but we can do this.

And the critical ingredient is plentiful, clean energy.

ENERGY. THE GREAT UNIVERSAL SUBSTITUTE.

When we apply energy to development, fertility rates plummet, helping us stabilize the human population and elevate women into lives of greater choice and opportunity.

when we apply energy, we liberate human lives

When we apply energy we can liberate human lives and labor, meaning people aren’t just surviving, they are thriving.

When we apply energy we can be more efficient with other resources. With energy, we can recycle, demanding less of virgin nature to provide for our needs.

With energy and agriculture we get more food from less land, liberating spaces to remain as nature or return to nature.

With energy we build dense settlements, clean our water and manage our waste.

With energy we can liberate our oceans as we grow our own food.

WE KNOW HOW TO DO THESE THINGS BUT WE RELY ALMOST ENTIRELY ON PLENTIFUL AND RELIABLE FOSSIL FUELS.

The energy that makes human lives so much better, now threatens us by altering our precious, irreplaceable climate.

There is an answer. There is a proven energy source that can meet our needs without changing the climate.

When we use it we save millions of lives because it doesn’t pollute the air.

It uses less land and less materials.

It works in every climate and every location.

IT’S NUCLEAR ENERGY THAT BREAKS THE PARADOX. We can unify human development with the protection and restoration of wild nature.

The potential of nuclear energy, especially new generations of super-efficient plants is so great, that we can go large on how we want the world to be.

We can use energy to make clean synthetic fuels, to recycle more materials, to capture and sequester greenhouse gases, allowing the natural world to heal every step of the way.

We can use energy to clean and rehabilitate damaged land. We can use new reactors to destroy the waste from older reactors, and gift ourselves clean reliable energy in the process. Nuclear energy provides the path of disarmament, permanently destroying the weapons of war.

a bright new world is within reach.

WE NEED TO SEE IT.

WE NEED TO FEEL IT.

WE NEED TO KNOW IT AND WE NEED TO GO FOR IT.

But it takes a new type of environmental organisation to fight for it.

It takes an organisation that treats humanity as a cause worth fighting for, not an enemy to fight against.

An organisation that faces up to our challenges but acknowledges and celebrates our achievements.

An organisation that embraces our knowledge, our potential and the tools at our disposal.

It takes an organisation like Bright New World.

We are here to fight for something better. We plan to make it happen and we are going to love every minute of it.

waste

Giant Mine sits near Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Once it was a productive gold mine, but after the gold ran out, the mining company went bankrupt and left the government to clean up the mess: enough arsenic trioxide dust to kill everyone on Earth. The solution: freezing it, at least for now.

nuclear accidents

Chornobyl

A well-known process in nuclear physics, already identified in Chernobyl back in 1990, has become tabloid news creating unwarranted alarm. I'll try to explain it in a short THREAD.

health effects / mutations

Exploiting children w disabilities for your anti nuclear propaganda is really gross. This issue has been well studied by the worlds leading scientists looking at the Chernobyl liquidator cohorts. No hereditary effects. Zero. Stop fear mongering.

[image Chernobyl/misinformation/Children's home in Belarus - NatGeo.jpeg]

Summary

14. Two studies of the genetic effects of radiation in humans have recently been published. One of them involved the offspring of survivors of cancer who had received chemo- and/or radiotherapy treatments and the other involved females who had been exposed to radiation (from beta particles, gamma rays, and x rays) during infancy for the treatment of haemangiomas. Neither of these found significant effects attributable to parental exposure to chemical agents and/or radiation.

15. The results of studies of minisatellite mutations in the children of those exposed in areas contaminated by the Chernobyl accident and in the children of those exposed to the atomic bombings in Japan are not consistent: in children from Chernobyl areas, the mutation frequencies were increased, while in the Japanese children, there were no such increases. It should be noted that the control children for the Chernobyl study were from the United Kingdom.

16. The search for genetic effects associated with Chernobyl exposures in Belarus or Ukraine, which had the highest contamination, and in a number of European countries provide no unambiguous evidence for an increase in the frequencies of one or more of the following: Down's syndrome, congenital anomalies, miscarriages, perinatal mortality, etc.

Abstract

Effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear accident remain a topic of interest. We investigated whether children born to parents employed as cleanup workers or exposed to occupational and environmental ionizing radiation post-accident were born with more germline de novo mutations (DNMs). Whole-genome sequencing of 130 children (born 1987-2002) and their parents did not reveal an increase in the rates, distributions, or types of DNMs versus previous studies. We find no elevation in total DNMs regardless of cumulative preconception gonadal paternal (mean = 365 mGy, range = 0-4,080 mGy) or maternal (mean = 19 mGy, range = 0-550 mGy) exposure to ionizing radiation and conclude over this exposure range, evidence is lacking for a substantial effect on germline DNMs in humans, suggesting minimal impact on health of subsequent generations.

Russian war

Russian soldiers allegedly suffering ARS after digging trenches in Red Forest Prof Claire Corkhill; Twitter; 31 March 2022

  • rolls eyeballs to the ceiling* This is nonsense. There simply isn't enough radiation in the Red Forest after 30 years. Misquoted the original source too, who said soldiers had been taken for check up. Bad, sensationalist journalism.

Responding to article in Metro claiming "Russian troops withdrawn from the Chernobyl nuclear power site are being rushed across the border to a special medical facility in Belarus with ‘acute radiation sickness’". Discussion joined by Professor Mike Wood

Fukushima

anti-nuclear

Sovacool

Helen Caldicott & Kate Brown

renewables

IEA

biomass

Prince George plant will grind ancient cedar and hemlock into pellets to be burned for fuel overseas, destroying forest that’s home to endangered caribou and vast stores of carbon

hydro

Abstract Hydropower has been the leading source of renewable energy across the world, accounting for up to 71% of this supply as of 2016. This capacity was built up in North America and Europe between 1920 and 1970 when thousands of dams were built. Big dams stopped being built in developed nations, because the best sites for dams were already developed and environmental and social concerns made the costs unacceptable. Nowadays, more dams are being removed in North America and Europe than are being built. The hydropower industry moved to building dams in the developing world and since the 1970s, began to build even larger hydropower dams along the Mekong River Basin, the Amazon River Basin, and the Congo River Basin. The same problems are being repeated: disrupting river ecology, deforestation, losing aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity, releasing substantial greenhouse gases, displacing thousands of people, and altering people’s livelihoods plus affecting the food systems, water quality, and agriculture near them. This paper studies the proliferation of large dams in developing countries and the importance of incorporating climate change into considerations of whether to build a dam along with some of the governance and compensation challenges. We also examine the overestimation of benefits and underestimation of costs along with changes that are needed to address the legitimate social and environmental concerns of people living in areas where dams are planned. Finally, we propose innovative solutions that can move hydropower toward sustainable practices together with solar, wind, and other renewable sources.

solar

Xinjiang Uyghur forced labour

waste

Solar energy is a rapidly growing market, which should be good news for the environment. Unfortunately there’s a catch. The replacement rate of solar panels is faster than expected and given the current very high recycling costs, there’s a real danger that all used panels will go straight to landfill (along with equally hard-to-recycle wind turbines). Regulators and industry players need to start improving the economics and scale of recycling capabilities before the avalanche of solar panels hits

concentrating

Heliogen, a clean energy company that emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday, said it has discovered a way to use artificial intelligence and a field of mirrors to reflect so much sunlight that it generates extreme heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius.

The breakthrough means that, for the first time, concentrated solar energy can be used to create the extreme heat required to make cement, steel, glass and other industrial processes. In other words, carbon-free sunlight can replace fossil fuels in a heavy carbon-emitting corner of the economy that has been untouched by the clean energy revolution.

artificial photosynthesis

The new device takes CO2, water, and sunlight as its ingredients, and then produces oxygen and formic acid that can be stored as fuel. The acid can either be used directly or converted into hydrogen – another potentially clean energy fuel.

Key to the innovation is the photosheet - or photocatalyst sheet - which uses special semiconductor powders that enable electron interactions and oxidation to occur when sunlight hits the sheet in water, with the help of a cobalt-based catalyst.

EROEI

ecological impacts

Researchers assessing the impact of solar energy development across Europe have come up with ten ways in which the expansion of solar can be shaped to ensure pollinators benefit.

  • thread by Basin and Range Watch @BasinRange on Twitter with photo

Desert tortoise fence surrounds the 3,000 acre Yellow Pine Solar project, South Pahrump Valley, in the fragile Mojave Desert. Everything inside the fence will be bulldozed. These were your public lands.

wind

The German Economy Ministry has held a summit to discuss a dramatic slowdown in the wind energy sector that's threatening agreed climate goals. The problems are due to policy mistakes and growing public resistance.

offshore longevity

The world’s largest developer of offshore wind farms will need to spend about $490 million fixing cables that have been damaged by scraping against rocks on the seabed

  • Wind developer Orsted found its subsea cables scraped by rocks
  • Developer will spend as much as $490 million on repairs

The world’s largest developer of offshore wind farms Orsted A/S has found that some of its cables connecting to wind farms have been damaged by scraping against rocks on the seabed and will need to spend as much as 3 billion Danish kroner ($489 million) to fix them. It’s part of the growing pains for the offshore wind industry that’s become one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity.

Floating wind energy projects could open up vast areas of the world’s oceans to produce carbon-free power. But developers must first solve two key technical problems, according to France’s electric-grid operator.

Sea swell can cause vibrations that harm floating-substation equipment, while cables can be damaged by a buildup of shells and seaweed

recycling

Veolia will process the blades for use as a raw material for cement, utilsing a cement kiln co-processing technology. VNA has a successful history of supplying repurposed engineered materials to the cement industry. Similar recycling processes in Europe have been proven to be effective at a commercial scale.

public opposition

Are we heading for an over-reliance on wind? With wind generation costs continuing to drop dramatically, Schalk Cloete takes a data-driven look at the obstacles wind will face as its contribution to the global energy mix (a little over 2% today) keeps rising. In the main, it is grid integration and public opposition to very visible turbines – and they are related. Putting turbines out of sight and offshore will increase transmission costs. And the system complexity of integrating new power sources into the grid will add costs that early-stage wind (and solar) have not yet faced. Cloete has modelled different technology mixes – including nuclear, CCS and hydrogen – and assigned a range of different possible costs to uncover what the energy mix and total system cost scenarios can look like. Depending on the fortunes of each technology, the plateau for wind may come sooner than its proponents believe. Cloete says wind’s weakness – that its remote location will increase its transmission costs – should be more acknowledged. He also urges policy makers to be tech neutral in their planning, so that the potential of nuclear and carbon capture is acknowledged too.

Levelised costs of electricity often dominate the energy and climate debate. Green advocates like to believe that if we only invest enough in wind and solar, the resulting cost reductions will soon put an end to fossil fuels. While this is already a severely oversimplified viewpoint, a single-minded focus on cost makes such simplistic analyses even less useful.

This article will elaborate on this point by example of two clean energy technologies that face very different non-economic barriers: nuclear and wind.

bird and bat deaths

UK

Green Park

saline/fresh water

Rivers dump some 37,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater into the oceans every year. This intersection between fresh- and saltwater creates the potential to generate lots of electricity—2.6 terawatts, according to one recent estimate, roughly the amount that can be generated by 2000 nuclear power plants.

environmental impacts

biodiversity

Laura J. Sonter, Marie C. Dade, James E. M. Watson & Rick K. Valenta ; Nature Communication; 2020

Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production and, without strategic planning, these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.

geothermal

energy conversion & storage

cryogenic

batteries

Form Energy's "reversible rusting" battery and markets for energy storage

Cody Hill @cody_a_hill

Down here on the ground today, in what is presently the worlds best market for storage:

5 hours maybe has 5% more value than 4 hours

10 hours has ~1% more value than 8

100 hours a rounding error vs 24 hours

V2G

pumped storage

Pumped storage hydro has far more resource potential than required for a fully decarbonized grid and it’s cheap per megawatt-hour (MWh) of storage. The downside is that it’s slow to build, capital intensive, and heavily regulated right now in the United States. The Department of Energy FAST program aims to change that.

hydrogen

what effect does injected hydrogen have on furnace, flame and exhaust in natural gas combustion plant?

ammonia and hydrogen

  • The only known way to address the ‘difficult-to-decarbonize’ economic sectors is with the large-scale use of hydrogen as a clean energy carrier and as a feedstock for synthetic fuels such as ammonia. This can fully decarbonize aviation, shipping, cement, and industry using known and proven technologies. This would be a complement to all those renewables being deployed, not an alternative.
  • ...conventional nuclear can deliver clean hydrogen for as low as $2/kg in Asian markets today. We find that a new generation of advanced modular reactors, hereafter referred to as advanced heat sources, with new manufacturing-based delivery models, could deliver hydrogen on a large scale for $1.10/kg, with further cost reductions at scale reaching the target price of $0.90/kg by 2030. This is the only technology that can realistically achieve this low price from electrolysis in the short to medium term. Therefore, for the near term we are referring to advanced modular reactors, but in the longer term, advanced heat sources could also include fusion and high-temperature geothermal. These additional advanced heat sources could be designed as drop-in modules to the production platform architecture described in this report.
  • These advanced heat sources can be built rapidly and at the required scale with a Gigafactory approach to modular construction and manufacturing or in existing world class shipyards.

synthetic fuels: methanation

land use

Highlights

  • We re-photographed 361 landscapes that appear on historical photographs (1868–1994).
  • Visible evidence of environmental changes was analyzed through expert rating.
  • More trees and conservation structures occur where there is high population density.
  • Direct human impacts on the environment override the effects of climate change.
  • The northern Ethiopian highlands are greener than at any time in the last 145 years.
    • thread George Monbiot; Twitter; April 2021

Since 1868, the population of Ethiopia has risen from 7m to 112m. An environmental disaster? No. In the study area, land degradation has DECREASED with population growth. More trees, more vegetation, less erosion. Why? Because the overriding issue, as some of us have been trying to point out for a while, is not population but *policy*. In 1868, land tenure was feudal, and people and their livestock were driven onto steep slopes and into destructive forms of land use. But since then, there's been land reform, giving people equal shares, followed by policies to exclude livestock from much of the land, replant trees, stop indiscriminate felling and protect soil. The result has been a major improvement in people’s livelihoods AND in land quality. It’s a remarkable but unsurprising riposte to the false, essentialist and sometimes racist claim that the fundamental environmental problem, which leads inexorably to disaster, is people - often “other people” or “those people” - breeding too much.

degradation

restoration

The seasonal river that runs by El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state, has been transformed by community-built weirs. These slow the flow of the rainy season downpours, spreading water and allowing it to seep into the land. Before, just 150 farmers could make a living here: now, 4,000 work the land by the Sail Gedaim weir.

wilding and food production

We are told endlessly that rewilding is an awful idea in Britain, even though we live in one of the most nature impoverished countries in the world, because ambitious nature restoration on farmland will diminish our food security. This is a flawed argument for several reasons.

biotechnology

food & ag

Soil Carbon Sequestration - Iida Ruishalme

Organic

  • One of the most rapidly growing sectors in the food industry is organic agriculture.
  • This is based on the belief that organic diets protect from pesticide toxic effects.
  • A shift towards an organic diet reduces the consumer's exposure to pesticides.
  • Insufficient evidences exist to conclude that this can have health benefits.

paraquat

biotech / GM

glyphosate

waste heat

Waste heat generated from water treatment plants will be harnessed and used to keep commercial greenhouses warm in the UK in a world-first.

Marine - Seaspiracy

racism

cities

building

action

Social barriers

economic action

The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) is a European group of global pension funds and investment managers, totaling over 1,200 members in 16 countries, who control more than $40 trillion in assets (€33 trillion). They have drawn up a plan to cut carbon in their portfolios to net-zero and hope other investors will join them.

The group’s mission is to mobilize capital for a global low-carbon transition and to ensure resiliency of investments and markets in the face of the changes, including the changing climate itself. They provide asset managers with a set of recommended actions, policies, collaborations, measures and methods to help them meet the net-zero goal by 2050 in an effort to address climate change. Their framework was developed with more than 70 funds worldwide.

behaviour change

Posted on 13 April 2021

A major new report by the Cambridge Sustainability Commission on Scaling Behaviour Change calls on policy makers to target the UK’s polluter elite to trigger a shift to more sustainable behaviour, and provide affordable, available low-carbon alternatives to poorer households.

While efforts to address the climate crisis will require us all to change our behaviours, the responsibility is not evenly shared. Evidence reviewed by the Cambridge Commission shows that over the period 1990–2015, nearly half of the growth in absolute global emissions was due to the richest 10%, with the wealthiest 5% alone contributing over a third (37%).

activism

climate restoration

conservatives

The British Conservation Alliance is a new political organisation led by young libertarians promising to break the left’s monopoly on green issues. Its website says it is “empowering students to engage in the principles of pro-market environmentalism and conservative conservation” and it talks of “ecopreneurship”, saying: “the market is continuously innovating and rewarding ecopreneurs who develop environmentally conscious business models and initiatives.”

legislative

UK CEE Bill

The drafting of the CEE bill gratefully acknowledges the expert contributions and insights of:

  • Professor Kevin Anderson (University of Manchester, Energy and Climate Change)
  • Dr. James Dyke (University of Exeter, Global Systems)
  • Dr. Charlie Gardner (University of Kent, Conservation Science)
  • Prof. Dave Goulson (University of Sussex, Biology - Evolution, Behaviour and Environment)
  • Prof. Tim Jackson (University of Surrey, Ecological Economist)
  • Dr. Joeri Rogelj (IPCC report lead author, Grantham Institute for Climate Change)
  • Prof. Graham Smith (University of Westminster, Centre for the Study of Democracy)
  • Mr. Robert Whitfield (former Senior Vice President of Airbus Industrie)

The “Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill” would significantly expand the remit and scope of the Climate Change Act 2008, assigning new duties to government, parliament and the advisory Committee on Climate Change to enact a strategy that meets more ambitious targets for both climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as stronger criteria of justice, responsibility and safety.

A new citizens’ assembly would put people at the heart of that strategy through a process of deliberative democracy informed by expert advice. The bill, recently tabled in parliament as a private member’s bill by a coalition of MPs from six political parties, now needs to gain the support of a majority of MPs to be passed into law.

sewage to fertiliser

Using treated waste as an agricultural fertilizer has several climate-related benefits.

science

science communication

Australian, generally good but solutions denialist

Economist, journalist and broadcaster Tim Harford speaks to David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, about his recent book, How to make the world add up: Ten rules for thinking differently about numbers. He describes the book as is "my effort to help you think clearly about the numbers that swirl all around us" - a vital discussion in an age of so much conflicting information.

science communication, Deep Adaptation, and mental health

No scientific study has found that climate change is likely to wipe out civilization, but for many even the possibility is terrifying enough to upend their lives.

two reasons this matters now:

1) it worsens the mental health burden both on people relatively removed from the effects of climate change as well those already living with more extreme weather — particularly cilmate-aware young people across the global south

2) it affects* climate action, inspiring some people to act more urgently but leaving others feeling hopeless, even if the people exaggerating are themselves fighting climate change and don't want anybody to give up

  • the net effect is not clear

Transport

“StoreDot and BP present world-first full charge of an electric vehicle in five minutes” runs the headline on this news item from BP which actually talks about an electric scooter. The Storedot website is a bit more gung-ho about their new battery technology, which they think would enable a 5-minute full recharge of an electric car with 300 mile range. Really?

air

aviation entrepreneur and TED Fellow Cory Combs lays out how electric aircraft could make flying cleaner, quieter and more affordable -- and shares his work on Electric EEL, the largest hybrid-electric plane ever to fly.

nuclear powered ship

MISC

carbon mapping satellite

fashion industry

EU sustainable taxonomy

Technology Readiness Level

cryptocurrencies and NFTs

materials requirements

A letter authored by Natural History Museum Head of Earth Sciences Prof Richard Herrington and fellow expert members of SoS MinErals (an interdisciplinary programme of NERC-EPSRC-Newton-FAPESP funded research) has today been delivered to the Committee on Climate Change

The letter explains that to meet UK electric car targets for 2050 we would need to produce just under two times the current total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production.

A 20% increase in UK-generated electricity would be required to charge the current 252.5 billion miles to be driven by UK cars.

relative risk

In all, 3,950 people were affected and 53 died

glyphosate