#carbon-capture

[just2bruce]

Carbon Capture for ships - current state

Some people think carbon capture onboard is going to be important in meeting emissions goals for ships. There is some entrepreneurship, and some interest by large oil producers and purveyors. However, many problems remain to be solved. There is essentially no ‘supply chain’ to handle the liquefied carbon product the ships produce onboard from running the carbon capture equipment. Liquid CO2 has…

[wachinyeya]

hold up everyone—new bacteria discovered named “Chonkus” that can help us with our mistakes!

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - March 1-7

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! I’m almost finished with February’s doodles, sorry for the delay

1. Charles Darwin saw this Galápagos bird on Floreana Island in 1835, then it wasn't seen again for almost 200 years

“The Galápagos rail […] had been deemed locally extinct – and due for reintroduction from other Galápagos islands – until it was seen during recent fieldwork. [… “R]emove the invasive threats, and native species can recover in remarkable ways,” says Island Conservation’s Paula Castaño.”

2. Bill supporting free student meals passes through Utah legislature

“[The bill] would move thousands of students who qualify for reduced-cost school meals into eligibility for free breakfasts and lunch. […] H.B. 100 secures $2.5 million from the state’s education budget to help students from families who do not qualify for federal aid like SNAP or TANF.”

3. Indigenous leaders sign landmark carbon deal in Philippines

“[The deal establishes] the country’s first locally owned forest carbon project. The project, which places a monetary value on the potentially climate-warming carbon stored in trees, aims to halt deforestation through the sale of carbon credits — effectively making the forest more valuable alive than cut down.”

4. Powerful Speeches From Trans Dems Flip 29 Republicans, Anti-Trans Bills Die In Montana

“Transgender Reps Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell delivered powerful speeches on the Montana House floor on Thursday. Republicans defected en masse to join them in voting against anti-trans bills. […] One Republican even took the floor to deliver a scathing rebuke of the bill’s sponsor.”

5. Illinois proves states have a lot of power to advance clean energy

“[Two new bills] aim to evaluate the state’s current power grid, make it easier to expand the transmission system, and add a ton of new battery storage[…. Illinois already] has one of the cleanest grids in the nation thanks to bountiful nuclear power.“

6. ‘I feel real hope’: historic beaver release marks conservation milestone in England

“”We are visibly, measurably recovering nature and that is so exciting[….]” [… In] recent years, beavers have been returning to our waterways via licensed releases into enclosures and some illegal releases. […] Last week, the government announced that, with a licence, it is now legal for conservationists to release beavers into the wild, with no enclosures necessary.”

7. One of South Dakota’s largest wind farms just got the green light

“Invenergy says the new South Dakota wind farm will pump $78 million into landowner payments over the next 30 years, while local governments will see $38 million in property tax revenue. [… T]he project is expected to create 243 construction jobs and support eight long-term operational roles.”

8. The Antarctic ozone hole is healing, thanks to global reduction of CFCs

“[The] new study is the first to show, with high statistical confidence, that this recovery is due primarily to the reduction of ozone-depleting substances, versus other influences such as natural weather variability[….] "By something like 2035, we might see a year when there's no ozone hole depletion at all in the Antarctic.””

9. Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico rebound this year

“The number of monarch butterflies wintering in the mountains west of Mexico City [doubled] in 2024 despite the stresses of climate change and habitat loss[….] Tavera Alonso credited ongoing efforts to increase the number of plants the butterflies rely on for sustenance and reproduction along their flyway.”

10. Pip in final egg means bald eagles Jackie and Shadow should soon be parents of triplets

“Triplets would be unprecedented for the eagles in a decade of observation. […] The [third] eaglet is "actively working on getting out of the egg." […] The two already-hatched chicks, who will be named by the public in the days to come, are "looking much stronger than they were even yesterday[….]””

February 22-28 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Greenwashing set Canada on fire

On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they'd come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they'd made a new forest with their own blistered hands.

I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn't merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.

At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they'd fed into their mills.

I was wrong. Last summer's Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren't just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.

Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/wildfires-treeplanting-timebomb.html

Cameron's summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned "penalty" for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).

Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they're heated. They're so flammable that firefighters call them "gas on a stick."

Cameron and her friends planted under brutal conditions: working long hours in blowlamp heat and dripping wet bulb humidity, amidst clouds of stinging insects, fingers blistered and muscles aching. But when they hit rock bottom and were ready to quit, they'd encourage one another with a rallying cry: "Let's go make a forest!"

Planting neat rows of black spruces was great for the logging industry: the even spacing guaranteed that when the trees matured, they could be easily reaped, with ample space between each near-identical tree for massive shears to operate. But that same monocropped, evenly spaced "forest" was also optimized to burn.

It burned.

The climate emergency's frequent droughts turn black spruces into "something closer to a blowtorch." The "pines in lines" approach to reforesting was an act of sabotage, not remediation. Black spruces are thirsty, and they absorb the water that moss needs to thrive, producing "kindling in the place of fire retardant."

Cameron's column concludes with this heartbreaking line: "Now when I think of that summer, I don’t think that I was planting trees at all. I was planting thousands of blowtorches a day."

The logging industry committed a triple crime. First, they stole our old-growth forests. Next, they (literally) planted a time-bomb across Ontario's north. Finally, they stole the idealism of people who genuinely cared about the environment. They taught a generation that resistance is futile, that anything you do to make a better future is a scam, and you're a sucker for falling for it. They planted nihilism with every tree.

That scam never ended. Today, we're sold carbon offsets, a modern Papal indulgence. We are told that if we pay the finance sector, they can absolve us for our climate sins. Carbon offsets are a scam, a market for lemons. The "offset" you buy might be a generated by a fake charity like the Nature Conservancy, who use well-intentioned donations to buy up wildlife reserves that can't be logged, which are then converted into carbon credits by promising not to log them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing

The credit-card company that promises to plant trees every time you use your card? They combine false promises, deceptive advertising, and legal threats against critics to convince you that you're saving the planet by shopping:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/17/do-well-do-good-do-nothing/#greenwashing

The carbon offset world is full of scams. The carbon offset that made the thing you bought into a "net zero" product? It might be a forest that already burned:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/11/a-market-for-flaming-lemons/#money-for-nothing

The only reason we have carbon offsets is that market cultists have spent forty years convincing us that actual regulation is impossible. In the neoliberal learned helplessness mind-palace, there's no way to simply say, "You may not log old-growth forests." Rather, we have to say, "We will 'align your incentives' by making you replace those forests."

The Climate Ad Project's "Murder Offsets" video deftly punctures this bubble. In it, a detective points his finger at the man who committed the locked-room murder in the isolated mansion. The murderer cheerfully admits that he did it, but produces a "murder offset," which allowed him to pay someone else not to commit a murder, using market-based price-discovery mechanisms to put a dollar-figure on the true worth of a murder, which he duly paid, making his kill absolutely fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

What's the alternative to murder offsets/carbon credits? We could ask our expert regulators to decide which carbon intensive activities are necessary and which ones aren't, and ban the unnecessary ones. We could ask those regulators to devise remediation programs that actually work. After all, there are plenty of forests that have already been clearcut, plenty that have burned. It would be nice to know how we can plant new forests there that aren't "thousands of blowtorches."

If that sounds implausible to you, then you've gotten trapped in the neoliberal mind-palace.

The term "regulatory capture" was popularized by far-right Chicago School economists who were promoting "public choice theory." In their telling, regulatory capture is inevitable, because companies will spend whatever it takes to get the government to pass laws making what they do legal, and making competing with them into a crime:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/13/public-choice/#ajit-pai-still-terrible

This is true, as far as it goes. Capitalists hate capitalism, and if an "entrepreneur" can make it illegal to compete with him, he will. But while this is a reasonable starting-point, the place that Public Choice Theory weirdos get to next is bonkers. They say that since corporations will always seek to capture their regulators, we should abolish regulators.

They say that it's impossible for good regulations to exist, and therefore the only regulation that is even possible is to let businesses do whatever they want and wait for the invisible hand to sweep away the bad companies. Rather than creating hand-washing rules for restaurant kitchens, we should let restaurateurs decide whether it's economically rational to make us shit ourselves to death. The ones that choose poorly will get bad online reviews and people will "vote with their dollars" for the good restaurants.

And if the online review site decides to sell "reputation management" to restaurants that get bad reviews? Well, soon the public will learn that the review site can't be trusted and they'll take their business elsewhere. No regulation needed! Unleash the innovators! Set the job-creators free!

This is the Ur-nihilism from which all the other nihilism springs. It contends that the regulations we have – the ones that keep our buildings from falling down on our heads, that keep our groceries from poisoning us, that keep our cars from exploding on impact – are either illusory, or perhaps the forgotten art of a lost civilization. Making good regulations is like embalming Pharaohs, something the ancients practiced in mist-shrouded, unrecoverable antiquity – and that may not have happened at all.

Regulation is corruptible, but it need not be corrupt. Regulation, like science, is a process of neutrally adjudicated, adversarial peer-review. In a robust regulatory process, multiple parties respond to a fact-intensive question – "what alloys and other properties make a reinforced steel joist structurally sound?" – with a mix of robust evidence and self-serving bullshit and then proceed to sort the two by pantsing each other, pointing out one another's lies.

The regulator, an independent expert with no conflicts of interest, sorts through the claims and counterclaims and makes a rule, showing their workings and leaving the door open to revisiting the rule based on new evidence or challenges to the evidence presented.

But when an industry becomes concentrated, it becomes unregulatable. 100 small and medium-sized companies will squabble. They'll struggle to come up with a common lie. There will always be defectors in their midst. Their conduct will be legible to external experts, who will be able to spot the self-serving BS.

But let that industry dwindle to a handful of giant companies, let them shrink to a number that will fit around a boardroom table, and they will sit down at a table and agree on a cozy arrangement that fucks us all over to their benefit. They will become so inbred that the only people who understand how they work will be their own insiders, and so top regulators will be drawn from their own number and be hopelessly conflicted.

When the corporate sector takes over, regulatory capture is inevitable. But corporate takeover isn't inevitable. We can – and have, and will again – fight corporate power, with antitrust law, with unions, and with consumer rights groups. Knowing things is possible. It simply requires that we keep the entities that profit by our confusion poor and thus weak.

The thing is, corporations don't always lie about regulations. Take the fight over working encryption, which – once again – the UK government is trying to ban:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/24/signal-app-warns-it-will-quit-uk-if-law-weakens-end-to-end-encryption

Advocates for criminalising working encryption insist that the claims that this is impossible are the same kind of self-serving nonsense as claims that banning clearcutting of old-growth forests is impossible:

https://twitter.com/JimBethell/status/1699339739042599276

They say that when technologists say, "We can't make an encryption system that keeps bad guys out but lets good guys in," that they are being lazy and unimaginative. "I have faith in you geeks," they said. "Go nerd harder! You'll figure it out."

Google and Apple and Meta say that selectively breakable encryption is impossible. But they also claim that a bunch of eminently possible things are impossible. Apple claims that it's impossible to have a secure device where you get to decide which software you want to use and where publishers aren't deprive of 30 cents on every dollar you spend. Google says it's impossible to search the web without being comprehensively, nonconsensually spied upon from asshole to appetite. Meta insists that it's impossible to have digital social relationship without having your friendships surveilled and commodified.

While they're not lying about encryption, they are lying about these other things, and sorting out the lies from the truth is the job of regulators, but that job is nearly impossible thanks to the fact that everyone who runs a large online service tells the same lies – and the regulators themselves are alumni of the industry's upper eschelons.

Logging companies know a lot about forests. When we ask, "What is the best way to remediate our forests," the companies may well have useful things to say. But those useful things will be mixed with actively harmful lies. The carefully cultivated incompetence of our regulators means that they can't tell the difference.

Conspiratorialism is characterized as a problem of what people believe, but the true roots of conspiracy belief isn't what we believe, it's how we decide what to believe. It's not beliefs, it's epistemology.

Because most of us aren't qualified to sort good reforesting programs from bad ones. And even if we are, we're probably not also well-versed enough in cryptography to sort credible claims about encryption from wishful thinking. And even if we're capable of making that determination, we're not experts in food hygiene or structural engineering.

Daily life in the 21st century means resolving a thousand life-or-death technical questions every day. Our regulators – corrupted by literally out-of-control corporations – are no longer reliable sources of ground truth on these questions. The resulting epistemological chaos is a cancer that gnaws away at our resolve to do anything about it. It is a festering pool where nihilism outbreaks are incubated.

The liberal response to conspiratorialism is mockery. In her new book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein tells of how right-wing surveillance fearmongering about QR-code "vaccine passports" was dismissed with a glib, "Wait until they hear about cellphones!"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

But as Klein points out, it's not good that our cellphones invade our privacy in the way that right-wing conspiracists thought that vaccine passports might. The nihilism of liberalism – which insists that things can't be changed except through market "solutions" – leads us to despair.

By contrast, leftism – a muscular belief in democratic, publicly run planning and action – offers a tonic to nihilism. We don't have to let logging companies decide whether a forest can be cut, or what should be planted when it is. We can have nice things. The art of finding out what's true or prudent didn't die with the Reagan Revolution (or the discount Canadian version, the Mulroney Malaise). The truth is knowable. Doing stuff is possible. Things don't have to be on fire.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/16/murder-offsets/#pulped-and-papered

[mindblowingscience]

Stanford researchers have found a surprising genetic twist in a lineage of microbes that may play an important role in ocean carbon storage. The microbes, known as blue-green algae or cyanobacteria, have two different forms of a ubiquitous enzyme that rarely appear together in the same organism. “This is one of those great examples of science where you go out looking for one thing, but you end up finding something else that’s even better,” said Anne Dekas, an assistant professor of Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and senior author of the Nov. 25 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Continue Reading.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide humans produce is key to lowering atmospheric greenhouse gases and slowing global warming, but today's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million (ppm), 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preexisting global averages.

Read more.

[solarpunkbusiness]

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a brand-new device designed to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air and turn it into fuel – and it does so with only the power of the Sun.

“If we made these devices at scale, they could solve two problems at once: removing CO2 from the atmosphere and creating a clean alternative to fossil fuels,”

Reisner and his team sought to find a solution, and what they landed on was inspired by a natural process: photosynthesis. Similar to how plants require only sunlight as the energy source for converting carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and sugar, their new reactor device is also solely solar-powered.

The reactor is intended to work diurnally. The first step takes place at night, with the device capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air using specialized filters made out of a solid silica-amine adsorbent.

Things then heat up during the day; a mirror concentrates sunlight onto the bed of captured carbon dioxide, releasing it into another part of the device that contains a bed of semiconductor powder and triggering a chemical reaction that converts the carbon dioxide into syngas.

Syngas is short for synthesis gas, and though it can be used as a fuel itself, the team is aiming to find a way of converting it into a more widely useful liquid fuel – and to make their design even bigger.

[cognitivejustice]

Often, the dominant image of natural carbon sequestration is a vast forest canopy, but while reforestation is vital, it is not the most stable long-term carbon sink. Carbon stored in trees is vulnerable: wildfires release carbon as CO₂, and storms cause fallen trees to decompose, feeding microbes that respire carbon back into the atmosphere. To build resilient carbon sequestration systems, we must expand our focus to other ecosystems—such as grasslands sustained by herd animals.

The Role of Herd Animals in Grassland Ecosystems

Restoring and expanding grasslands means dedicating more land to herd animals like bison (North America), wildebeest and antelope (African savannas), reindeer and caribou (Arctic tundra), and elephants (Africa and parts of Asia). Trophic rewilding reestablishes the intricate food webs that sustain these ecosystems. Through grazing, trampling, and nutrient cycling, herd animals regenerate grasslands, making them powerful carbon sinks.

Unlike forests, where carbon is stored in above-ground biomass, grasslands primarily store carbon underground. Their deep-rooted perennial grasses sequester carbon in subsoil and humus, a highly stable form of organic matter that can last centuries or millennia. While tree roots also store carbon, they eventually decompose upon deforestation, releasing CO₂. Conversely, grasslands continuously build soil carbon through root growth and turnover, making them a more enduring carbon sink.

How grazing enhances soil carbon storage

Grazing by herd animals facilitates long-term carbon storage in several ways:

Increased Root Turnover – When grasses are grazed, they shed fine roots, which decay and contribute to humus formation, locking carbon into the soil.

Boosted Microbial and Fungal Activity – Manure, dead roots, and trampled plant material provide organic inputs that fuel microbes, which convert carbon into stable soil compounds.

Stabilized Carbon in Soil Aggregates – Organic matter binds with soil minerals, forming stable aggregates that slow decomposition and protect stored carbon from being released.

[cottonwoolsocks]

if you don't know what's happened in UK politics today, it's terrifying news for climate change —

the UK government have just announced plans for over 100 new oil and gas drilling licenses. these new licences will directly contribute.

alongside this, the government announced funding for carbon capture and storage projects — this is great! carbon emissions are stored deep underground, and thus removed from the atmosphere. this solution has been being worked on by climate scientists for 40 years.

but the UK government are using carbon capture as a get out of jail free for drilling more oil.

this is dangerous.

carbon capture and storage works at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it does not negate further emissions. it only works if we stop burning fossil fuels.

carbon capture and storage is not the problem — continuing to burn fossil fuels is.

we should be angry.

[unganseylike]

i think ronan lynch has a disproportionate level of carbon emissions and further more has an infinite capacity to stop climate change and has done nothing. how did blue tolerate this i would be at his throat.

[wachinyeya]

Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, once a thriving wetland, is now being revived as an essential carbon sink to help combat climate change. Peatlands, like those in the swamp, cover only 3 percent of the Earth’s surface but store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined - which cover 30 percent of global land area. By restoring these unique ecosystems, researchers and conservationists aim to reverse centuries of damage caused by human activity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Peat is a spongy layer of partially decomposed plant material found in waterlogged, acidic environments like the Great Dismal Swamp. This natural carbon storage system has been severely degraded over time.

Since 2012, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and conservation groups like The Nature Conservancy have been rewetting parts of the swamp to protect and rebuild its peat layers. This involves constructing dams and plugging drainage ditches to retain water, which slows peat decay and allows new organic material to accumulate.

Restoration efforts have already rehydrated 60,000 acres of the swamp. Over the next few years, The Nature Conservancy plans to restore an additional 33,000 acres and protect 10,500 acres in Virginia and North Carolina. These projects are funded by over $200 million from the Inflation Reduction Act.

The impact of Virginia’s peatlands will be environmentally significant: restoring them could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of removing up to 1.4 million cars from the road each year.

The secondary benefit is that wetlands like these are home to a diverse range of species, many of which are adapted to the unique, waterlogged environment. Restoring their habitat will enable both plants and wildlife to thrive once more.

Mike Waddington, a peat researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, says: “When we think about storing carbon in ecosystems, it’s almost always about planting trees. There’s often tremendous pressure to plant trees in drained peatlands," he said, "but that’s the wrong choice given the carbon-storing ability of an intact bog." Adding: “In a way it’s the low-hanging fruit.”

The world's largest peatlands are in the central Congo Basin, covering 16.7 million hectares - more than five times the size of Belgium. Researchers reveal that these peatlands store between 26 and 32 billion tonnes of carbon - roughly the equivalent to three years’ worth of global fossil fuel emissions.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - February 22-28

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! (This month’s doodles will be a little delayed since I wasn’t able to work on them throughout the month)

1. City trees absorb much more carbon than expected

“[A new measurement technique shows that trees in LA absorb] up to 60% of daytime CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion in spring and summer[….] Beyond offering shade and aesthetic value, these trees act as silent workhorses in the city’s climate resilience strategy[….]”

2. #AltGov: the secret network of federal workers resisting Doge from the inside

“Government employees fight the Trump administration’s chaos by organizing and publishing information on Bluesky[…. A group of government employees are] banding together to “expose harmful policies, defend public institutions and equip citizens with tools to push back against authoritarianism[….]””

3. An Ecuadorian hotspot shows how forests can claw back from destruction

“A December 2024 study described the recovery of ground birds and mammals like ocelots, and found their diversity and biomass in secondary forests was similar to those in old-growth forests after just 20 years. [… Some taxa recover] “earlier, some are later, but they all show a tendency to recover.””

4. Over 80 House Democrats demand Trump rescind gender-affirming care ban: 'We want trans kids to live'

“[89 House Democrats signed a letter stating,] "Trans young people, their parents and their doctors should be the ones making their health care decisions. No one should need to ask the President’s permission to access life-saving, evidence-based health care." "As Members of Congress, we stand united with trans young people and their families.”“

5. Boosting seafood production while protecting biodiversity

“A new study suggests that farming seafood from the ocean – known as mariculture – could be expanded to feed more people while reducing harm to marine biodiversity at the same time. […] “[… I]t’s not a foregone conclusion that the expansion of an industry is always going to have a proportionally negative impact on the environment[….]””

6. U.S. will spend up to $1 billion to combat bird flu, USDA secretary says

“The USDA will spend up to $500 million to provide free biosecurity audits to farms and $400 million to increase payment rates to farmers who need to kill their chickens due to bird flu[….] The USDA is exploring vaccines for chickens but is not yet authorizing their use[….]”

7. An Innovative Program Supporting the Protection of Irreplaceable Saline Lakes

“[… T]he program aims to provide comprehensive data on water availability and lake health, develop strategies to monitor and assess critical ecosystems, and identify knowledge gaps to guide future research and resource management.”

8. EU to unveil ​‘Clean Industrial Deal’ to cut CO2, boost energy security

“The bold plan aims to revitalize and decarbonize heavy industry, reduce reliance on gas, and make energy cheaper, cleaner, and more secure. […] By July, the EU said it will ​“simplify state aid rules” to ​“accelerate the roll-out of clean energy, deploy industrial decarbonisation and ensure sufficient capacity of clean-tech manufacturing” on the continent.”

9. Oyster Restoration Investments Net Positive Returns for Economy and Environment

“Researchers expect the restored oyster reefs to produce $38 million in ecosystem benefits through 2048. “This network protects nearly 350 million oysters[….]” [NOAA provided] $14.9 million to expand the sanctuary network to 500 acres by 2026 […] through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”

10. Nations back $200 billion-a-year plan to reverse nature losses

“More than 140 countries adopted a strategy to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars a year to help reverse dramatic losses in biodiversity[….] A finance strategy adopted to applause and tears from delegates, underpins "our collective capacity to sustain life on this planet," said Susana Muhamad[….]”

February 15-21 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Scientific American:

The scene that unfolded on a cold November day in central Illinois might seem commonplace, but it was part of a bold plan to pull billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stuff it into the ocean.

A few miles south of Urbana a dump truck trundled past bare fields of dirt before turning into an adjacent lot. It deposited a cottage-size mound of grayish-blue sand—190 metric tons of a crushed volcanic rock called basalt. Farmers spread the pulverized basalt across several fields that they sowed with corn months later. This was the fourth year of an ambitious study to test whether the world’s farmlands can be harnessed to simultaneously address three global crises: the ever rising concentration of planet-warming CO2 in the atmosphere, the acidification of the oceans and the shortfall in humanity’s food supply.

The trial results, published in February 2024, were stunning. David Beerling, a biogeochemist at the University of Sheffield in England, and Evan DeLucia, a plant physiologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, led the study. They found that over four years, fields treated with crushed basalt and planted with alternating crops of corn and soy pulled 10 metric tons more CO2 per hectare out of the air than untreated plots. And crop yields were 12 to 16 percent higher. In other research, they found that adding crushed basalts to soils improved the harvest of miscanthus, a tall grass that is used to make biofuels, by 29 to 42 percent, and the fields captured an estimated 8.6 metric tons of CO2 per hectare of land each year, compared with untreated fields. “It was exciting,” Beerling says. “We were pleasantly surprised.”

Their findings added to positive results elsewhere. In 2020 researchers in Canada reported that adding the mineral wollastonite to fields growing lettuce, kale, potatoes and soy sequestered CO2 in the soil at rates as high as two metric tons per hectare per year. And last spring Kirstine Skov, a natural geographer at the start-up company UNDO Carbon in London, showed that crushed basalts improved the yields of spring oats by 9 to 20 percent while reducing soil acidity in several fields in England.

The basalt in Illinois came from a quarry in southern Pennsylvania, where it is mined for roofing and building materials. Basalt is the most abundant rock in Earth’s crust. As it naturally weathers—gradually dissolving in soil water—it captures CO2, converting it into bicarbonate ions in the water, which cannot easily reenter the atmosphere. The reaction also releases into the soil nutrients that are important for plant health, including calcium, magnesium and silicon. Grinding and spreading basalt—an approach known as enhanced rock weathering (ERW)—speeds up those processes greatly. It could help cash-strapped farmers around the world by increasing crop yields, reducing fertilizer use and potentially allowing them to sell carbon credits.

[mindblowingscience]

A pair of climate scientists at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science ETH Zurich, working with a colleague from Stripe Inc., has found evidence suggesting that the only way to prevent the planet from continuing to grow warmer is to use 1000-year carbon sequestration strategies. In their paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, Cyril Brunner, Reto Knutti and Zeke Hausfather suggest their research has shown that short-term carbon sequestration strategies will lead to the release of captured carbon before the planet can recycle the carbon in the atmosphere naturally.

Continue Reading.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

New theory on dense gases and liquids could aid carbon capture

The transport of dense gases and liquids is becoming increasingly relevant in relation to carbon capture. Research published in The Journal of Chemical Physics is helping us understand more about how this can be done most efficiently. Gas must be compressed before it can be transported over long distances. This can be done either by increasing the pressure of the gas or by converting it into a liquid. In order for this to occur safely and efficiently, we need to understand as much as possible about how the gas behaves before and during transportation. Dense gases are affected by changes in pressure and temperature, and there has not been a fundamental theory for different dense gases and liquids until now. "I am developing a theory to describe the transport properties of dense gases and liquids," said Ph.D. research fellow Vegard Gjeldvik Jervell from the thermodynamics group at NTNU and the Porelab Centre of Excellence.

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[probablyasocialecologist]

Direct air capture requires copious amounts of renewable energy if it is going to be carbon negative. For example, one analysis found that removing the majority of current emissions, 30 gigaton (Gt)/year, would require around 50 exajoules (EJ)/year of electricity by 2100, and 250 EJ/year of heat, representing over half of today’s final energy consumption globally. Now, few people think that anyone would try to build out that much direct air capture—even removing 1 Gt/year would be quite a feat; 30 would be nearly unthinkable—but the point is worth noting. Climate-significant use of direct air capture assumes cheap and abundant renewable energy.

Holly Jean Buck, Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough