#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…

[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

[dandelionsresilience]

Good News - May 15-21

Like these weekly compilations? Support me on Ko-fi! Also, if you tip me on Ko-fi, at the end of the month I'll send you a link to all of the articles I found but didn't use each week - almost double the content!

1. Translocation of 2,000 rhinos in Africa gets underway in “one of the most audacious conservation efforts of modern times”

“The 2,000 rhinos - more than are currently found in any single wild location in Africa - represent around 12-15% of the continent’s remaining white rhino population. […] “Rhinos perform an important ecological function in the environment as a large grazing herbivore,” says Dale Wepener[….] “The protection of rhino is far more than just looking after rhino; other species that occur in the protected areas will benefit from the protection,” explains Jooste. “This will lead to an increase in diversity and result in much healthier ecosystems.”

2. Florida Corridor Buffers Effects of Climate Change on Wildlife — And People

“A massive multi-partner effort that has conserved 10 million acres for wildlife in Florida over past decades will help buffer wildlife—and people—from the effects of climate change, a new report says. […] Protecting these corridors is important for wildlife genetics, demography and connectivity […], conducting prescribed fires in the corridor can reduce the risk of more intense wildfires [… and] they can provide buffers against hurricanes and seasonal thunderstorms.”

3. Global life expectancy to increase by nearly 5 years by 2050 despite geopolitical, metabolic, and environmental threats

“Increases are expected to be largest in countries where life expectancy is lower, contributing to a convergence of increased life expectancy across geographies. The trend is largely driven by public health measures that have prevented and improved survival rates from cardiovascular diseases, COVID-19, and a range of communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases (CMNNs).”

4. Valencia has Spain’s longest urban park

“Jardin del Turia (Turia Garden) is the green spine of the City of Valencia and Spain’s (and possibly Europe’s) longest urban park stretching for a length of 8.5 kilometres [… and] the current administration plans to make Jardin del Turia Europe’s largest city green space by extending it to the sea[….] Almost all Valencia residents (97 per cent) live within 300 metres of an urban green space. […] Jardin del Turia is a true urban oasis that provides exceptional thermal comfort, with a temperature difference of up to three degrees compared to other areas of the city.”

5. This Paint Could Clean Both Itself and the Air

“When an artificial ultraviolet light source shines on [photocatalytic] paint, the nanoparticles react with pollutants to make them break down—theoretically removing them from the nearby air and preventing a discoloring buildup. [… R]esearchers developed a new photocatalytic paint that they claim works using UV rays from ordinary sunlight, making its self-cleaning properties easier to activate. They’ve also shown that they can effectively produce this paint from recycled materials [including fallen leaves].”

6. Planting Seedlings for a Cooler Rockingham

“A dedicated group of volunteers recently planted over a thousand native seedlings in Lewington Reserve [… and] re-established canopy cover to areas of the reserve to create cooling shade for the local community and provide homes for native wildlife. […] Planting lots of trees and shrubs in urban areas can help create shade and cool cities, mitigating the impacts of climate change, contributing to biodiversity conservation and building greener, more resilient communities.”

7. Sydney’s first dedicated affordable housing for trans women designed to deliver ‘positive outcomes’

“Community housing provider and charity Common Equity NSW, […] which is for people on very low to moderate incomes, prides itself on creating inclusive living and promotes the independence and well-being of people and communities […, and] will deliver the first-of-its-kind social housing in a bid to provide a safe place to live for transgender women seeking an affordable home.”

8. Rewilding: How a herd of bison reintroduced to Romania is helping ‘supercharge’ carbon removal

“170 European Bison reintroduced to Romania’s Țarcu mountains could help capture and store the carbon released by up to 84,000 average US petrol cars each year. […] By grazing a 48 square kilometre area of grassland in a wider landscape of 300 kilometres squared, they helped to capture an additional 54,000 tonnes of carbon each year. That is around 10 times the amount that would be captured by the ecosystem without the bison.”

9. World’s biggest grids could be powered by renewables, with little or no storage

“[…] 100% renewable supply can then match the load by putting surplus electricity into two kinds of distributed storage worth that [an energy expert] says are worth buying anyway – ice-storage air-conditioning and smart bidirectional charging of electric cars, and recover that energy when needed, filling the last gaps with unobtrusively flexible demand.”

10. Supporting the Long-Term Survival of Copper River Salmon and Alaska Native Traditions

“With $4.3 million in NOAA funds, the Copper River Watershed Project and The Eyak Corporation will remove fish passage barriers, opening more streams for salmon spawning and subsistence fishing. [… As part of this effort, o]ld narrow culverts that constrict water flow will be replaced with “stream simulation” culverts wide enough to fit the full stream, including its banks. They are also deep to allow contractors to place stones and other material inside to mimic a natural stream bottom.”

May 8-14 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.)

[wachinyeya]

[reasonsforhope]

One of the scariest things people say is “this very hot summer is going to be the coolest one for the rest of our lives.” How true is that? It really freaks me out when I hear that. How do we deal with this??

Honestly, I think at a certain point, with stuff like this, you just have to go "Hmm. Sure hope not!!" and go back to doing what you can to improve things in your little corner of the world.

As for how true it is...honestly, no one can really say, because we still understand laughably little about weather modeling, especially in the long term. Oh, sure, we understand miles more than we did a couple decades ago, but honestly, no one truly knows what the next few decades are going to look like - and ANY absolutes should be taken with a grain of salt

Will things in general get hotter? Yeah, obviously, and that sucks. But it's also worth remembering:

Renewable energy and decarbonization are progressing exponentially, and a lot of scientists have said that if you'd told them five years ago where we'd end up by now, they would never have believed you

Carbon capture - both natural and chemical - has a lot of really interesting potential that will almost certainly allow us to someday start to cool the planet back down

Nothing is universal. You know how everyone's having a ridiculously hot summer? I'm not. I'm in Southern California and we had one of the most mild and overcast Junes I've ever seen. I don't think it's gotten above 105 at all where I live this year, which is ridic at the end of July, and I live in one of the hotter area of SoCal. (Honestly this has been a really nice break after spending the past 8 years being the ones on fire)

We're gonna get a lot better at adapting to the heat, and a lot of the solutions are really low tech. Traditional technology and architecture is a big one, but also literally things as simple as "tear up a bunch of asphalt" and "put ultrawhite paint on rooftops and roads and playgrounds" will each cool things down by 10 degrees or more

[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.

[mindblowingscience]

Researchers report that replacing 50% of animal products with alternative proteins by 2050 could free up enough agricultural land to generate renewable energy equivalent in volume to today's coal-generated power while simultaneously removing substantial CO2 from the atmosphere. The study, published in the journal One Earth, is based on a CO2-removal method known as "bioenergy with carbon capture and storage" (BECCS), which involves cultivating quickly growing crops whose biomass can then be stored permanently in geological formations or used as a feedstock to produce renewable energy.

Continue Reading.

[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.

[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

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Biomass-based polymer can capture and release CO₂ without high pressure or extreme temperatures

A new, biomass-based material developed by FAMU-FSU College of Engineering researchers can be used to repeatedly capture and release carbon dioxide. The material is primarily made from lignin, an organic molecule that is a main component of wood and other plants, and it can take up carbon dioxide (CO2) from concentrated sources or directly from the air. The research appears in Advanced Materials. "The beauty of this work is the ability to precisely control the capture and release of CO2 without high pressure or extreme temperatures," said study co-author Hoyong Chung, an associate professor in the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. "Our testing showed that this material's structure stayed the same even after being used multiple times, making this a promising tool for mitigating carbon emissions."

Read more.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The federal government's proposed tax credit to incentivize companies to capture and store carbon dioxide underground doesn't exclude projects that also involve extracting more oil, according to policy experts who reviewed a draft of the long-promised legislation. First announced in the 2021 federal budget, the tax credit is intended to "support and accelerate" carbon capture — a blanket term that refers to technology used to sequester CO2 and store it safely underground — to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Projects where the carbon is piped away to an oil field, and injected underground to recover more oil, through a process known as "enhanced oil recovery" (EOR), were not to be included, the government said at the time. But the latest draft legislation shows the tax credit will be available to projects that are, in part, using the captured carbon for that purpose.

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada

[charliejaneanders]

These cases for [climate] hope brim with heroes—proactive companies, social entrepreneurs, activists, etc. They typically lack villains. Naming villains—say, polluters or the elected officials they bribe—would involve politics, which is complicated. Lacking any real enemies, then, climate hope’s stated foes are the “doomers.” The relationship between hope and action is never specified.

Is Carbon Capture Cause for Hope?

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The world isn’t on track to meet its climate goals — and it’s the public’s fault, a leading oil company CEO told journalists.

Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from Fortune that the world has “waited too long” to begin investing in a broader suite of technologies to slow planetary heating.

That heating is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and much of the current impacts of that combustion — rising temperatures, extreme weather — were predicted by Exxon scientists almost half a century ago.

The company’s 1970s and 1980s projections were “at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models,” according to a 2023 Harvard study.

Since taking over from former CEO Rex Tillerson, Woods has walked a tightrope between acknowledging the critical problem of climate change — as well as the role of fossil fuels in helping drive it — while insisting fossil fuels must also provide the solution.

In comments before last year’s United Nations Climate Conference (COP28), Woods made a forceful case for carbon capture and storage, a technology in which the planet-heating chemicals released by burning fossil fuels are collected and stored underground.

“While renewable energy is essential to help the world achieve net zero, it is not sufficient,” he said. “Wind and solar alone can’t solve emissions in the industrial sectors that are at the heart of a modern society.”

International experts agree with the idea in the broadest strokes.

Carbon capture marks an essential component of the transition to “net zero,” in which no new chemicals like carbon dioxide or methane reach — and heat — the atmosphere, according to a report by International Energy Agency (IEA) last year.

But the remaining question is how much carbon capture will be needed, which depends on the future role of fossil fuels.

While this technology is feasible, it is very expensive — particularly in a paradigm in which new renewables already outcompete fossil fuels on price.

And the fossil fuel industry hasn’t been spending money on developing carbon capture technology, IEA head Fatih Birol wrote last year on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

To be part of a climate solution, Birol added, the fossil fuel industry must “let go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution.”

He noted that capturing and storing current fossil fuel emissions would require a thousand-fold leap in annual investment from $4 billion in 2022 to $3.5 trillion.

In his comments Tuesday, Woods argued the “dirty secret” is that customers weren’t willing to pay for the added cost of cleaner fossil fuels.

Referring to carbon capture, Woods said Exxon has “tabled proposals” with governments “to get out there and start down this path using existing technology.”

“People can’t afford it, and governments around the world rightly know that their constituents will have real concerns,” he added. “So we’ve got to find a way to get the cost down to grow the utility of the solution, and make it more available and more affordable, so that you can begin the [clean energy] transition.”

For example, he said Exxon “could, today, make sustainable aviation fuel for the airline business. But the airline companies can’t afford to pay.”

Woods blamed “activists” for trying to exclude the fossil fuel industry from the fight to slow rising temperatures, even though the sector is “the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies.”

That is an increasingly controversial argument. Across the world, wind and solar plants with giant attached batteries are outcompeting gas plants, though battery life still needs to be longer to make renewable power truly dispatchable.

Carbon capture is “an answer in search of a question,” Gregory Nemet, a public policy professor at the University of Wisconsin, told The Hill last year.

“If your question is what to do about climate change, your answer is one thing,” he said — likely a massive buildout in solar, wind and batteries.

But for fossil fuel companies asking “‘What is the role for natural gas in a carbon-constrained world?’ — well, maybe carbon capture has to be part of your answer.”

In the background of Woods’s comments about customers’ unwillingness to pay for cleaner fossil fuels is a bigger debate over price in general.

This spring, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will release its finalized rule on companies’ climate disclosures.

That much-anticipated rule will weigh in on the key question of whose responsibility it is to account for emissions — the customer who burns them (Scope II), or the fossil fuel company that produces them (Scope III).

Exxon has long argued for Scope II, based on the idea that it provides a product and is not responsible for how customers use it.

Last week, Reuters reported that the SEC would likely drop Scope III, a positive development for the companies.

Woods argued last year that SEC Scope III rules would cause Exxon to produce less fossil fuels — which he said would perversely raise global emissions, as its products were replaced by dirtier production elsewhere.

This broad idea — that fossil fuels use can only be cleaned up on the “demand side” — is one some economists dispute.

For the U.S. to decarbonize in an orderly fashion, “restrictive supply-side policies that curtail fossil fuel extraction and support workers and communities must play a role,” Rutgers University economists Mark Paul and Lina Moe wrote last year.

Without concrete moves to plan for a reduction in the fossil fuel supply, “the end of fossil fuels will be a chaotic collapse where workers, communities, and the environment suffer,” they added.

But Woods’s comments Tuesday doubled down on the claim that the energy transition will succeed only when end-users pay the price.

“People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price,” Woods said. “That’s ultimately how you solve the problem.”

[wachinyeya]

Herd of Bison Reintroduced in Europe Are Climate Heroes–Helping Store CO2 Equal to 43,000 Cars https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/herd-of-bison-reintroduced-in-europe-are-climate-heroes-helping-store-co2-equal-to-43000-cars/

Just Imagine what they could do for the “Americas”!! Bring back bison!

“A recent study that looked at the effects of European bison on the ability of forests in Romania to store carbon found that these large animals have a ‘heroic’ effect.

By increasing the carbon storage potential of forests by 10%, it’s the equivalent of taking 54,000 US gasoline-powered cars off the road—and there are only 170 animals.

In 2014, WWF Romania reintroduced a herd of European wood bison into the Țarcu mountains that has grown from 100 to 170 head. Rooting around in the woods, scrub, and fields for their fodder, rolling around on the ground, and stomping, breaking, and squishing the landscape up with their hooves, are all important ecosystem mechanisms that have been absent for decades.”

[reasonsforhope]

With breathtaking views over Table Mountain, the world’s tallest building made of industrial hemp is set to open in Cape Town this June.

At 12 stories tall, the Hemp Hotel at 84 Harrison st. used carbon-negative materials that captured more carbon in the walls of the building than it emitted manufacturing them.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa believes that the cannabis and hemp industry could create 130,000 jobs in places like Afrimat Hemp—the producer of the so-called “HempCrete” blocks which went into the hotel.

Made from water, lime, hemp, and a cement binder, the blocks from Afrimat Hemp are made of entirely South African hemp, which along with selling to corporate clients, are also used to build a number of social housing projects in South Africa and neighbouring Mozambique.

For the Hemp Hotel, Afrimat Hemp partnered with Wolf Architects in Cape Town for the build.

The company admit that hemp construction is 20% more expensive than traditional materials, but the urgency with which some corporations want to help tackle climate change offers them a unqiue opportunity: selling carbon credits—but with buildings, rather than trees.

“We can fund forests, or we can fund someone to live in a hemp house. It’s the same principle,” Afrimat Hemp’s carbon consultant Wihan Bekker told African News.

Company data shows that a 430 square foot house (40 square meters) produces 30 fewer tons of carbon than traditional methods, around what a mature tree can sequester in its roots across its lifetime.

-via Good News Network, 5/5/23

[thoughtlessarse]

Canadian taxpayers covered 93 per cent of the costs of the Quest carbon capture project, a Greenpeace report reveals. Shell has sold millions of ‘phantom’ carbon credits based on emissions savings that never happened, according to a new investigation. The fossil fuel giant made more than $200 million Canadian dollars (€135 million) selling the credits from its flagship carbon capture facility to Canada’s biggest oil sands companies. But a two-for-one deal struck with the Government of Alberta meant that Shell was selling credits for two tonnes of CO₂ for every one tonne that it actually captured. Greenpeace Canada’s new ‘Selling Hot Air’ report explains how this legal but climate-wrecking operation worked. […] In 2008, Shell lobbied the Alberta provincial government to subsidise its Quest CCS facility near Edmonton city, the first and so far only one in the oil sands industry. Freedom of Information documents obtained by Greenpeace show these negotiations included the two-for-one deal. Shell benefited from this between 2015 to 2021, before the subsidy was phased out in 2022. By this point, Shell had been able to register 5.7 million credits that had no equivalent CO2 reductions. Chevron, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil and Suncor Energy were among the largest buyers of the credits, which are meant to compensate for their own emissions en route to ‘net zero’. “Selling emissions credits for reductions that never happened is the worst kind of hot air, because it literally makes climate change worse,” says Keith Stewart, Greenpeace Canada’s senior energy strategist and author of the new report.

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