Category Archives: air pollution

Carbon Sequestration – Suck it up buttercup

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I used to think that “air filters” or carbon capture methods from “fresh” air directly were a bunch of baloney or poppycock. Pick your adjective as you may. But lately I have been changing my mind.This is partly because of the scale ( 10 thousand) and partly because of their energy source. In this case geothermal is, for human purposes, endless. If those sources were located around the world and enough of these were built at those sites they could save the day. Then all we would have to figure out is how to get it back out of the oceans and large lakes. Still it’s a start.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-quest-to-trap-carbon-in-stone-and-beat-climate-change/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Vince Beiser

Backchannel

The Quest to Trap Carbon in Stone—and Beat Climate Change

On a barren lava plateau in Iceland, a new facility is sucking in air and stashing the carbon dioxide in rock. The next step: Build 10,000 more.

IT was undoubtedly the most august gathering ever convened on the uninhabited lava plains of Hellisheidi, Iceland. Some 200 guests were seated in the modernist three-story visitors’ center of a geothermal power plant—the country’s prime minister and an ex-president, journalists from New York and Paris, financiers from London and Geneva, and researchers and policy wonks from around the world. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on miles of moss-carpeted rock, luminously green in the September morning sunlight. Transmission towers marched away to the horizon, carrying energy from the power plant to the capital, Reykjavik, half an hour’s drive away.

The occasion: the formal unveiling of the world’s biggest machine for sucking carbon out of the air. The geothermally powered contraption represented a rare hopeful development in our climatically imperiled world—a way to not just limit carbon emissions but shift them into reverse. Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir declared it “an important step in the race to net zero greenhouse gas emissions.” Former president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson predicted that “future historians will write of the success of this project.” Julio Friedmann, a prominent carbon expert at Columbia University, hailed it as “the birth of a new species” of planet-saving technology.

Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald, cofounders of Climeworks, the company behind the carbon capture plant, strode up to the front of the room together. The fresh-faced Germans, both 38, were dressed in nearly identical white shirts and blue suits. They spoke in well-rehearsed, Teutonically accented English. “This year could turn into a turning point in how climate change is perceived,” said Wurzbacher (slightly taller, stubbly brown beard). “Thirty years down the road, this can be one of the largest industries on the planet,” enthused Gebald (slightly broader, curly brown hair).

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Go there and read. Alot. More next week.

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I Hope You Rot In Hell Joe Manchin – Why do you even call yourself a Democrat

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Let me very quickly say, that I wish no immediate harm to the simpering moron (sigh). I am not urging anybody anywhere to do any harm to the coal toad.  All I am say is that after he dies of Black Lung, I hope bad things happen to him.

He is not even a Democrat. He is a DINO: Democrat In Name Only. He knows the majority is thin and thus his power is great. So behind the flag of Fiscal Responsibility he argues for a smaller bill. A Bill that can “get paid for”. What gets dropped out of that smaller bill? Surprise! Surprise! The Climate Change program that his coal sucking buddies hate. I mean this is from Vanity Fair for God’s sake.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/joe-manchin-is-about-to-make-life-worse-for-his-own-constituents-and-the-planet

Infrastructure

Joe Manchin Is About to Make Life Worse for His Own Constituents—And the Planet

The West Virginia senator’s reported opposition to programs aimed at helping working families and combating climate change would dramatically dilute the Democrats’ infrastructure plans.

By Eric Lutz

Although Joe Manchin has been holding up Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans for a while now over the price tag, the West Virginia senator has been somewhat cagey about his actual demands. Not as guarded, perhaps, as Kyrsten Sinema, his fellow Democratic holdout; where she has refused to state her terms to anyone outside the White House, Manchin at least engages with his colleagues and speaks publicly about his objections to the reconciliation bill. But he’s been difficult to pin down nonetheless, adding to the frustrations of Democrats as they seek to deliver on the centerpiece of Biden’s domestic agenda.

Finally, while his terms are coming into clearer view, they’re only casting the future of the infrastructure bills in a thicker cloud of uncertainty. Now, the question isn’t only if the Biden bills will pass. It’s whether the bills will be recognizable if they do. Axios on Sunday reported that Manchin has given something of an ultimatum to the White House: He’ll support the child tax credit that would be one of the package’s biggest boosts to working families, but only if it…well, does less to help working families. Manchin is asking for the credit to include a work requirement and an income cap that would make families earning more than $60,000 ineligible for assistance—a demand that would weaken a key part of the spending bill. He is also, as Axios reported, continuing to rail against provisions of the reconciliation bill that are crucial to addressing climate change, supposedly because of concerns that the shift to clean energy the Biden plan would help usher in could cost jobs in the coal state of West Virginia. The Times reported Friday that Manchin, who personally has financial ties to the coal industry, opposes “a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy” that’s seen as key to Biden’s climate agenda.

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Go there and get mad; I mean read and get mad. More next week.

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Ban Cars! Ban Cars! Ban Cars! – We will try anyway

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It seems really weird that we all started out on bikes after horses and before cars were really affordable. There was a real love affair with bikes in the modern urban environment around the 1900s. Especially women who had never been allowed to get about. Bikes came on strong before mores or laws could be erected (so to speak) and women just went bonkers. Now every envirofreak (no offense intended) wants to go back to them. We shall see. We shall see.

The City Where Cars Are Not Welcome

As automakers promise to get rid of internal combustion engines, Heidelberg is trying to get rid of autos.

By Jack Ewing

HEIDELBERG, Germany — Eckart Würzner, a mayor on a mission to make his city emission free, is not terribly impressed by promises from General Motors, Ford and other big automakers to swear off fossil fuels.

Not that Mr. Würzner, the mayor of Heidelberg, is against electric cars. The postcard-perfect city, in southern Germany, gives residents who buy a battery-powered vehicle a bonus of up to 1,000 euros, or $1,200. They get another €1,000 if they install a charging station.

But electric cars are low on the list of tools that Mr. Würzner is using to try to cut Heidelberg’s impact on the climate, an effort that has given the city, home to Germany’s oldest university and an 800-year-old castle ruin, a reputation as a pioneer in environmentally conscious urban planning.

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Go the read – once you catch your breath. More next week.

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Who Pollutes Most? Planes Or Boats – At best it’s a toss up

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But it is a very real question. I think it is Airplanes myself for 2 reasons. 1. Because they pollute at a high altitude (roughly 3 – 30 thousand feet) and, 2. because of an amazingly random accidental experiment after 9/11 that showed with all planes grounded our atmospheric temperature dropped a full degree. With Boats (ok large Ships) they burn something like warm asphalt, and that over water where the output can fall directly into what ever body on which they float. So essentially which is worse? High altitude kerosene or low altitude vaporized warm asphalt? I know – it makes me want to puke.

As a side note – i wish somebody would measure the net effects on global warming between Boats and Plane as opposed to co2 emissions which is awfully easy but not particularly insightful.

Greening Our Shipping: Wind-Powered Cargo Ships Can Change Future of Freight Cutting Emissions By 90%

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Go there and read. More next week.

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In The Race To Despoil The Environment, China Wins – They are First, Second and Third

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This is an article from 8 years ago. Imagine how much worse it has gotten since then. They have no shame. Who will stop this? Not the Central Government. Not the Provencial Government and not the local for surel. This is what we call in the United States call, a National Sacrifice zone. Remove the people and keep on going. Its disgusting and it’s despicable. Big YUCK for everyone to see.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution

 

Rare-earth mining in China comes at a heavy cost for local villages

Pollution is poisoning the farms and villages of the region that processes the precious minerals

Health hazard … pipes coming from a rare-earth smelting plant spew into a tailings dam on the outskirts of Baotou in China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

From the air it looks like a huge lake, fed by many tributaries, but on the ground it turns out to be a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world, collectively known as rare earths.

The town of Baotou, in Inner Mongolia, is the largest Chinese source of these strategic elements, essential to advanced technology, from smartphones to GPS receivers, but also to wind farms and, above all, electric cars. The minerals are mined at Bayan Obo, 120km farther north, then brought to Baotou for processing.

The concentration of rare earths in the ore is very low, so they must be separated and purified, using hydro-metallurgical techniques and acid baths. China accounts for 97% of global output of these precious substances, with two-thirds produced in Baotou.

The foul waters of the tailings pond contain all sorts of toxic chemicals, but also radioactive elements such as thorium which, if ingested, cause cancers of the pancreas and lungs, and leukaemia. “Before the factories were built, there were just fields here as far as the eye can see. In the place of this radioactive sludge, there were watermelons, aubergines and tomatoes,” says Li Guirong with a sigh.

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Go there and vomit. More next week.

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Since Humanity Is Doomed – Let’s talk about a symptom of that, Chernobyl

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Chernobyl symbolized the beginning of the end for me. Man had shown his weakness against forces that he unleashed on the Earth. If that was true then it was only a matter of time before the jinny or jin coalesced and demanded his due. The sum of which men could not produce. So the sword would fall on all our necks. But every once in awhile there is cause for hope.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/8-facts-about-the-animals-of-chernobyl?utm_source=pocket-newtab

8 Facts About the Animals of Chernobyl

Researchers thought the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was unable to support life. But a bunch of wolves, deer, wild boars, bears, and foxes disagree.

Mental Floss

  • Claudia Dimuro

Three decades after the Chernobyl disaster—the world’s worst nuclear accident—signs of life are returning to the exclusion zone. Wild animals in Chernobyl are flourishing within the contaminated region; puppies roaming the area are capturing the hearts of thousands. Tourists who have watched the critically acclaimed HBO series Chernobyl are taking selfies with the ruins. Once thought to be forever uninhabitable, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has become a haven for flora and fauna that prove that life, as they say in Jurassic Park, finds a way.

1. The Animals of Chernobyl Survived Against All Odds

The effects of the radioactive explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 devastated the environment. Around the plant and in the nearby city of Pripyat in Ukraine, the Chernobyl disaster’s radiation caused the leaves of thousands of trees to turn a rust color, giving a new name to the surrounding woods—the Red Forest. Workers eventually bulldozed and buried the radioactive trees. Squads of Soviet conscripts also were ordered to shoot any stray animals within the 1000-square-mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Though experts today believe parts of the zone will remain unsafe for humans for another 20,000 years, numerous animal and plant species not only survived, but thrived.

2. Bears and Wolves Outnumber Humans Around the Chernobyl Disaster Site

While humans are strictly prohibited from living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, many other species have settled there. Brown bears, wolves, lynx, bison, deer, moose, beavers, foxes, badgers, wild boar, raccoon dogs, and more than 200 species of birds have formed their own ecosystem within the Chernobyl disaster area. Along with the larger animals, a variety of amphibians, fish, worms, and bacteria makes the unpopulated environment their home.

THE PEOPLE have moved back too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Chernobyl?utm_source=digg

The people who moved to Chernobyl

By Zhanna Bezpiatchuk

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 left a ring of ghost villages as residents fled, fearing radiation poisoning.

But now people are choosing to live in the crumbling houses on the edge of the exclusion zone.

On a warm summer’s evening, Maryna Kovalenko is playing football with her two teenage daughters in their backyard.

Iryna and Olena laugh as the family dog attempts to wrestle away the ball, scattering the startled chickens.

But out beyond the family’s back fence, all is silent and still.

Numerous houses, a shop and a library stand vacant in the village of Steshchyna, northern Ukraine. Only the forest is gaining ground as creeping plants explore the cracks in this abandoned village.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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I Am So Excited To Be Posting On Earth Day – The 50th Anniversary

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That’s it. That’s all I can say. Well you know me, that’s not all I can say. Like the National Geographic Magazine says, they are divided about the results. We have accomplished alot but never enough because the root cause of climate change is evil greed, better known as capitalism. As long as we practice those economics, we will continue down the drain. The drain that looks like this:

https://newrepublic.com/article/157078/climate-crisis-will-just-shockingly-abrupt?utm_source=digg

The Climate Crisis Will Be Just as Shockingly Abrupt

The coronavirus isn’t a reason to put climate policy on hold. It’s a warning of the calamities ahead.

By Melody Schreiber

As governments around the globe debate how to respond both to the coronavirus itself and the economic chaos it has unleashed, a theme that’s come up over and over is how to prioritize what makes it into spending packages. In the United States, right-left fault lines have emerged over the question of bailing out emissions-heavy industries versus a greener stimulus. On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a large-scale rollback of environmental regulations as a response to the pandemic—allowing many emitters to police themselves when it comes to pollution.

While some argue that the oxygen in the climate debate should be taken up by the pandemic instead, the two issues aren’t mutually exclusive, experts say. In a warming climate, more diseases are likely to emerge and spread, making climate change action an important part of addressing future health crises. Moreover, the perception that climate change isn’t as urgent as other crises may rely on misunderstandings about how climate-related changes will happen. The rate isn’t constant: Instead, there’s reason to believe everything from Arctic melt to Amazon deforestation might experience what’s known as “tipping points,” where small changes in nature shift into rapid and irreversible damage.

Greenland and Antarctica are melting six times faster than they were in the 1990s, according to a new study in the journal Nature. Between 1992 and 2017, Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice. This falls under the worst-case scenario projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the effects are already being felt in many parts of the world. The IPCC predicts that by the end of the century, 400 million people around the globe could be at risk of coastal flooding every year from sea-level rise alone.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Could Coronavirus Save The Planet – Well it certainly has reduced pollution

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Oil prices are actually at an all time low as supplies are on at an all time high. This article argues however that the oil corporations are so big that they will just diversify as climate change looms larger. In the end they will sell worthless reserves off to unregulated startup oil companies and oil will become like drugs.Those startups will function like drug cartels function today. Selling oil to those addicted to oil. Pretty picture? NO. Our future. Maybe.

PS – this is an enormously loooooog read.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1?utm_source=digg

Business

Shell Is Looking Forward

The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.

By

We think democracy is better,” said the jet-fuel salesperson. “But is it? In terms of outcomes?”

In a conference room overlooking the gray Thames, a group of young corporate types tried to imagine how the world could save itself, how the international community could balance the need for growth with our precarious ecological situation. For the purposes of our speculative scenarios, everything except for carbon was supposed to be up in the air, and democracy’s track record is mixed.

A graph from Chinese social media showing how many trees the country is planting — a patriotic retort to the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg — had a real effect on the room. Combine that with the Chinese state-led investment in clean-energy technology and infrastructure and everyone admired how the world’s largest source of fossil-fuel emissions was going about transition. That’s what the salesperson meant by “outcomes”: decarbonization.

Regional experts from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East–North Africa also entertained the democracy question, pointing to Iraqi disillusionment with voting and economic growth in Rwanda under Paul Kagame (“He’s technically a dictator, but it’s working”). The China expert said the average regional Communist Party official is probably more accountable for his or her performance than the average U.K. member of Parliament, a claim no one in the room full of Brits seemed to find objectionable. The moderator didn’t pose the question to me, the American expert, presumably because our national sense of democratic entitlement is inviolable.

Go there and read and read and read. More next week.

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I Love The Coronavirus – Less than a million dead

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And it has had a huge positive impact on the environment. Take this as exhibit one. China literally has cleaner air.  We need more viruses like this. Scare the world off fossil fuels.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51691967?utm_source=digg

Coronavirus: Nasa images show China pollution clear amid slowdown

  • 29 February 2020

 

 

Related Topics

Satellite images have shown a dramatic decline in pollution levels over China, which is “at least partly” due to an economic slowdown prompted by the coronavirus, US space agency Nasa says.

Nasa maps show falling levels of nitrogen dioxide this year.

It comes amid record declines in China’s factory activity as manufacturers stop work in a bid to contain the coronavirus.

China has recorded nearly 80,000 cases of the virus since the outbreak began.

It has spread to more than 50 countries but the vast majority of infections and deaths are in China, where the virus originated late last year.

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I know this is being sick. It is sarcasm. Go there and read. More of this next week.

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Climate Change Is Speeding UP – Those pesky Feedback Loops l

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Only speculated on several years ago. Feedback Loops are things that speed up or slow down climate change. The two that concern us here are the most obvious, clouds and ice shrinkage. The more water in the atmosphere the more clouds and the hotter the earth – the more water. But the killer one is, ice is very very reflective. What replaces it it is not and in the case of “dark” water, it is incredibly absorptive. The question has always been when would they kick in? I always said we would know when it was too late. Here we are.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-03/climate-models-are-running-red-hot-and-scientists-don-t-know-why?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why

The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time.

By

There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.

Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5°C, a nightmare scenario.

The scientists involved couldn’t agree on why—or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began “talking to each other like, ‘What’d you get?’, ‘What’d you get?’” said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model.

“The question is whether they’ve overshot,” said Mark Zelinka, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Researchers are starting to put together a­nswers, a task that will take months at best, and there’s not yet agreement on how to interpret the hotter results. The reason for worry is that these same models have successfully projected global warming for a half century. Their output continues to frame all major scientific, policy and private-sector climate goals and debates, including the sixth encyclopedic assessment by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due out next year. If the same amount of climate pollution will bring faster warming than previously thought, humanity would have less time to avoid the worst impacts.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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