human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
VIEWED: 60750
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“Given that we will need to process gigatons of CO2 annually to combat the CO2 challenge, we really need to think about solutions that can scale,” Varanasi says. “Starting with this mindset enables us to identify critical bottlenecks and develop innovative approaches that can make a meaningful impact in solving the problem. Our hierarchically conductive electrode is a result of such thinking.”
MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical
A new electrode design boosts the efficiency of electrochemical reactions that turn carbon dioxide into ethylene and other products.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-engineers-make-converting-co2-into-produ
cts-more-practical-1113
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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And ... how do you power the electrode? 2nd law of thermodynamics says you'll have to use more energy than you might get out of the product. Altho in this case, the product (ethylyne) is a useful precursor to a lot of things, including plastics and detergents.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
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Alt economist Steve Keene weighs in on climate change.
"We're going to destroy civilization by 2050"
I have listened to Keene on economics. He delves deeply into mathematics for analysis, and he solves complex math far beyond my ability to grasp.
At around 3 minutes is the data that concerns him.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Alt economist Steve Keene weighs in on climate change.
"We're going to destroy civilization by 2050"
I have listened to Keene on economics. He delves deeply into mathematics for analysis, and he solves complex math far beyond my ability to grasp.
On the opposite side is David Collum, Cornell Chemistry professor.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:The world emits 37 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, but only 2 billion tonnes of solid waste. I see garbage trucks hauling away that 2 billion but there is nothing much being done about the 37 billion tonnes. Why is that? Because people can see garbage but are blind to transparent gases. If they can't see and can't imagine, 37 billion tonnes of waste can't be a problem.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And ... how do you power the electrode? 2nd law of thermodynamics says you'll have to use more energy than you might get out of the product. Altho in this case, the product (ethylyne) is a useful precursor to a lot of things, including plastics and detergents.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+co2+emissions+per+year
https://www.google.com/search?q=world+solid+waste+per+year
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Biden says ‘nobody can reverse’ his climate agenda. But Trump is poised to try.
In a speech from the Brazilian rainforest, the president didn’t mention his successor by name, but urged him to build upon a “strong foundation” of clean-energy policies.
11/17/2024 04:07 PM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/17/biden-trump-amazon-rainforest
-climate-speech-00190049
Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” is likely to pull out of the Paris accord, roll back environmental protections and increase production of oil and gas — which is already at an all-time high. Trump’s transition team is reportedly discussing ways to eliminate the electric vehicle tax credit championed by Biden. And he’s already stacking his Cabinet and West Wing with officials eager to rip apart federal programs aimed at reducing air and water pollution.
Trump on Saturday announced he’d selected Chris Wright to lead the Energy Department. Wright, the head of a Denver-based oilfield service company, has disputed the role of climate change in causing extreme weather.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Satellites spot methane leaks – but ‘super-emitters’ don’t fix them
Governments and companies almost never take action when satellites alert them about large methane leaks coming from oil and gas infrastructure
By James Dinneen | 15 November 2024
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2456488-satellites-spot-methane-l
eaks-but-super-emitters-dont-fix-them/
Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas to address, behind carbon dioxide, and a rising number of countries have promised to slash methane emissions in order to avoid near-term warming. At last year’s COP28 climate summit, many of the world’s largest oil and gas companies also pledged to “eliminate” methane emissions from their operations.
The world has more ways than ever to spot the invisible methane emissions responsible for a third of global warming so far. But according to a report released at the COP29 climate summit, methane “super-emitters” rarely take action when alerted that they are leaking large amounts of the potent greenhouse gas.
“We’re not seeing the transparency and the sense of urgency that we require,” says Manfredi Caltagirone, director of the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, which recently launched a system that uses satellite data to alert methane emitters about leaks.
Today, a growing number of satellites are beginning to detect methane leaks from the biggest sources of such emissions: oil and gas infrastructure. That data is critical to holding emitters to account, says Mark Brownstein at the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental advocacy group that recently launched its own methane-sensing satellite. “But data by itself doesn’t solve the problem,” he says.
The first year of the UN methane alert system illustrates the yawning gap between data and action. Over the past year, the programme issued 1225 alerts to governments and companies when it identified plumes of methane from oil and gas infrastructure large enough to be detected from space. It now reports that emitters only took steps to control those leaks 15 times, a response rate of about 1 per cent.
There have been some successes. For instance, the UN issued several alerts this year to the Algerian government about a methane source that had been continuously leaking since at least 1999, with a global warming effect equivalent to half a million cars driven for a year. By October, satellite data showed it had disappeared.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The world emits 37 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, but only 2 billion tonnes of solid waste. I see garbage trucks hauling away that 2 billion but there is nothing much being done about the 37 billion tonnes. Why is that? Because people can see garbage but are blind to transparent gases. If they can't see and can't imagine, 37 billion tonnes of waste can't be a problem.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And ... how do you power the electrode? 2nd law of thermodynamics says you'll have to use more energy than you might get out of the product. Altho in this case, the product (ethylyne) is a useful precursor to a lot of things, including plastics and detergents.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+co2+emissions+per+year
https://www.google.com/search?q=world+solid+waste+per+year
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
And we think fish are stupid bc they shit in their own "air"!
While we do the same.
Yep, SECOND, people can be stupid. But they can be equally stupid (or greedy znd corrupt) about how to fix the problem.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Fixing this waste problem is not hard to understand, but how many people would be bothered to understand it? About 1 person in a 1,000? In 10,000? That's why 1 person in 100 (or 1 person in 10?) who is greedy and corrupt can get away with your money without doing the job properly. Since Signym is an exemplary 1 person in 10,000, here is a short excerpt from a much longer article:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yep, SECOND, people can be stupid. But they can be equally stupid (or greedy and corrupt) about how to fix the problem.
Reality check on technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air
Study finds many climate-stabilization plans are based on questionable assumptions about the future cost and deployment of “direct air capture” (DAC) and therefore may not bring about promised reductions.
By Nancy W. Stauffer | November 20, 2024
https://news.mit.edu/2024/reality-check-tech-to-remove-carbon-dioxide-
from-air-1120
The cost per tonne of CO2 removed is inevitably high. Recent modeling studies assume DAC costs as low as $100 to $200 per ton of CO2 removed. But the researchers found evidence suggesting far higher costs.
To start, they cite typical costs for power plants and industrial sites that now use carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) to remove CO2 from their flue gases. The cost of CCS in such applications is estimated to be in the range of $50 to $150 per ton of CO2 removed. The far lower concentration of CO2 in the air compared to power plant flue gases will lead to substantially higher costs.
The DAC units needed to capture the required amount of air are massive. The capital cost of building them will be high, given labor, materials, permitting costs, and so on. Some estimates in the literature exceed $5,000 per tonne captured per year.
Then there are the ongoing costs of energy. Removing 1 tonne of CO2 requires the equivalent of 1.2 megawatt-hours of electricity. If that electricity costs $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, the cost of just the electricity needed to remove 1 tonne of CO2 is $120. The researchers point out that assuming such a low price is “questionable,” given the expected increase in electricity demand, future competition for clean energy, and higher costs on a system dominated by renewable — but intermittent — energy sources.
Then there’s the cost of storage, which is ignored in many DAC cost estimates.
Clearly, many considerations show that prices of $100 to $200 per tonne are unrealistic, and assuming such low prices will distort assessments of strategies, leading them to underperform going forward.
Much more at https://news.mit.edu/2024/reality-check-tech-to-remove-carbon-dioxide-
from-air-1120
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Since I worked on the compliance side of air pollution, i was often part of the rule- making process, from internal meeting with "stakeholders" (i.e. industry reps. To the best I can recall, evironmental groups were never present) to public hearings.
The driving questions were always "how?" and "how much will it cost?"
For EFFECTIVE pollution control you need a few things:
First, you need to know the current ambient concentration
Then, you need to estimate the cost of that pollutant, in terms of things like illness and death, agricultural loss etc. For CO2 that's tricky, but there certainly are things like heat related deaths. So without forward projection, the slowing and looping of the jet dtream causing extreme, stagnant weather patterns and damage losses, excess heat deaths; excess air conditioning costs (for example, needing tonupgrade schools with AC); lost productivity during excess heat events etc. This would have to be done by comparison to some previous time, say, the 1950s when fog was a common occurence in coastal CA.
Then you have to identify and focus on the largest emitters and start pencil whipping various control technologies. If you want to be successful yiu need to look at this in the most open minded way possible. Unexamined assumptiins and biases may close off fruitful areas of action.
One bad forest fire year undid 18 years of CA decarbonization
Then you start calculating cost prr ton.
Then slog thru the rule making process where everybody wuth a vested interest tells you how they're gojng to be ruined.
Assuming that you actually get a policy changed (eg. Federal forest management, bettrr land use planning, agricultural incentive for carbon capture farming, carbon tax) or command-and-control rules written, then you monitor the pollutant in question (both upwind and downwind of the control areal) to see if you're making a difference.
One thing has never worked so far, and that's any kind of "carbon market". The only thing pollution trading seems to have generated is a lot of scams. In theory its the perfect libertarian answer. In practice, it's impossible to implement.
There's generally no magic technology, no big breakthrough, just a lot of on-the-ground followup.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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