Difference between revisions of "Resources"

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Revision as of 20:45, 16 April 2021

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.

global GHG emissions

wildfires

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.

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

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.

decarbonisation

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.

economics

carbon pricing

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.

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

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

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

recycling

incineration

pyrolysis

energy mix

data - graphs

lifecycle assessment

grid

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.

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

China

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

Future energy plans

energy modelling

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

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

Princeton etc 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.

UK

nuclear

nuclear

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.

reactor technology

CANDU

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

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.

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.

discussion

advocacy

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.

nuclear accidents

Chernobyl

Fukushima

anti-nuclear

Sovacool

renewables

hydro

solar

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.

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.

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.

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.

energy conversion & storage

batteries

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.

ammonia and hydrogen

synthetic fuels: methanation

land use

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.

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

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.

cities

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

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.

MISC

fashion industry

science communication

Australian, generally good but solutions denialist