#decarbonize

[protoslacker]

This “green production” requires mobilizing massive amounts of labour, factories, materials, engineering talent, and so on.  In a growth-oriented scenario, this is difficult to do because our productive capacities are already devoted to other activities (activities that are organized around profit and which may not contribute to social and ecological objectives). So we need to either compete with existing forms of production (for labour, materials, energy etc, which can drive prices up), or otherwise increase total productive capacity (i.e., grow the economy).  This cannot be done at just any desired speed.  Under these conditions, there are very real physical limits to how fast we can decarbonize. 

Jason Hickel on his blog. Accelerationist Possibilities in an EcoSocialist Degrowth Scenario

[rchristianto-blog]

black gold, emas kok hitam

[euro-industry-org]

European Forest Industry: Future and Vision

CEI-Bois has published a press release on the EU forest industry in 2050, its vision of sustainable choices for a climate-friendly future and its key role in achieving carbon neutrality. The press release conveyed the idea of innovations to be introduced in the EU forest industry in 2050.

Presentation of the vision

In 2018, the European Commission presented its vision for a "Clean Planet for All", a long-term strategy to create a prosperous, modern, competitive and climate-neutral economy by 2050.

In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen's (President-elect of the European Commission) policy program for Europe proposed a European Green Pact, which should be the first European climate law to enshrine in law the goal of climate neutrality by 2050.

An ambitious project

In response to this ambitious project, the European Confederation of Wood Industries (CEI-Bois), the European Confederation of Paper Industries (CEPI), the European Panel Federation (EPF), the European Furniture Industry Confederation (EFIC), Bioenergy Europe and the Forest Sector Technology Platform (FTP) have come together to present their 2050 vision and their key role in contributing to the carbon neutrality goal.

Their vision encompasses the entire European forest products value chain - from forest owners and managers to the processing industry, universities and research institutes. The focus is on forest solutions and their contribution to meeting the growing expectations of European citizens.

Role in the bioeconomy

Europe's forest industry plays an important role in strengthening Europe's low-carbon circular bioeconomy as it forms a smart industrial ecosystem where materials, by-products and waste are sourced along the entire value chain, maximizing resource efficiency, including through reuse and recycling. This mitigates climate change throughout the system and brings other benefits of forest management to society.

To achieve this goal, the forest industry has identified 5 ambitious targets for a sustainable and inclusive climate-neutral economy

Decarbonize Europe by 2050 by replacing critical or CO2-intensive raw materials and fossil fuels with forest alternatives.

Eliminate waste in the circular economy by closing material cycles with a sectoral target of at least 90% raw material collection and 70% recycling in the industrial value chain.

Improving resource efficiency in the forest industry value chain by increasing productivity in all areas (including materials, production and logistics).

Meeting the growing demand for raw materials by maximizing new secondary flows and securing primary raw material supply from sustainably managed forests.

Meet the growing demand for sustainable products by increasing the use of wood and wood products in our daily lives.

The European Union's forest industry has a vision that their sector will become the most competitive and sustainable provider of zero-emission solutions through research and innovation, advanced technologies and increased recycling and reuse. This vision is also supported by European forest owners, farmers, printers, flooring manufacturers and agricultural contractors. If all the measures presented continue at the same pace, we will soon see good results.

[hope-for-the-planet]

Under what legal experts called a “historic” settlement, announced on Thursday, Hawaii officials will release a roadmap “to fully decarbonize the state’s transportation systems, taking all actions necessary to achieve zero emissions no later than 2045 for ground transportation, sea and inter-island air transportation”, Andrea Rodgers, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case, said at a press conference with the governor.

[enginedecarbon]

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[stevemaclellan]

In two study scenarios for 2035 [pdf] that rely on ambitious energy conservation measures, compared to a third one that doesn’t, the province saves up to C$9.5 billion on wholesale electricity costs compared to a plan where new wind and solar installations are replaced with gas. That’s after factoring in the cost of efficiency measures that save 23 terawatt-hours of electricity per year.

“We have the once-in-a-generation opportunity to build an electricity system that expands Ontario’s clean electricity advantage and meets the needs of both urban and rural communities,” TAF CEO Julia Langer said in a release. “A modernized and decarbonized grid would remove barriers and expand opportunities for businesses, communities, and municipalities that want to reach their climate targets and develop their own energy projects.”

The report by the Concord, MA- and Toronto-based Power Advisory consultancy coincides with the Ontario government’s plans to build new gas-fired power plants to meet an expected electricity shortage. It arrives just a couple of weeks before the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) is due to release its own Pathways to Decarbonization study.

[bunnytumble]

How to decarb cannabis

What is decarboxylation?

Decarboxylation is a substance response those outcomes from two principal factors: intensity and time. When a cannabinoid decarboxylates, it loses a carboxyl gathering, which empowers it to collaborate with the body's receptors through which helpful and sporting impacts are evoked. Over a significant stretch of openness to the components, cannabinoids will decarboxylate on their own which is the reason legitimate cannabis stockpiling is so significant. Without hermetically sealed capacity in an adequately tough compartment, cannabis will lose strength as cannabinoids gradually decarboxylate and enact rashly.

To accelerate the decarbing system, you'll have to actuate cannabinoids like THC by warming them. At the point when cannabis is smoked or disintegrated, for instance, the THCA loses a carboxyl gathering and converts to THC. Similarly, the cannabinoid CBDA should decarboxylate to transform into CBD.

An urgent move toward making edibles or cannabis topical at home is decarbing weed to ensure all the cannabinoids you need to encounter are completely enacted. At the point when cannabis is cooked or prepared, its dynamic cannabinoids are retained through assimilation. Decarbing weed additionally lessens the gamble of microbiological impurities. At the point when weed decarboxylates, it loses dampness, which thusly diminishes the opportunity of bacterial development. Weed is dried and restored for a similar explanation, however some undesirable enactment of cannabinoid, and consequently deficiency of power, is inescapable during the relieving system.

Why you ought to decarb your weed

Basically, weed will not get you high except if it's decarbed. Pot's most sought after cannabinoids — THC and CBD — should be changed over from THCA and CBDA over the long run to convey the sought after sporting and helpful advantages. While making edibles and topical, decarbing works on the capability of these items by considering quicker cannabinoid assimilation. Edibles specifically have gained notoriety for conveying unimaginably intense, durable impacts, yet an eatable will not be pretty much as strong as its standing proposes on the off chance that the cannabis inside isn't decarbed appropriately.

Why decarboxylation is vital for edibles

Decarboxylation necessities to occur in all cannabis items to get high from them. Consuming edibles doesn't include heat, likewise with smoking a joint or hitting a vape pen, yet the decarboxylation cycle actually needs to happen to enact the weed in the palatable before utilization.

While making edibles, buds are regularly warmed in a stove first to decarboxylate them, and afterward implanted into a medium like margarine or oil. That implantation is then used to make edibles, like brownies, treats, chewy candies, from there, the sky is the limit.

Warming buds in a broiler before implantation is important to actuate the THC in the buds so it very well may be conveyed into the mixture, and afterward into the palatable.

Temperature and Decarboxylation

As we investigated in this article about disintegrating cannabis, different cannabinoid mixtures and terpenes answer particular temperature ranges. Some are enacted, modified, or even annihilated at various temperatures. This is one of the many reasons we love utilizing a powerful intensity territory vaporizer instead of combusting (smoking) cannabis. You get to receive the rewards of undeniably more perplexing components of the bud.

In a similar way, it is ideal to decarboxylate cannabis low and slow. Specialists say that around 230-250°F is the "perfect balance" temperature to decarb cannabis. There, THCA converts to THC while likewise protecting numerous other useful cannabinoids and terpenes. The substance responses (and THC actuation or debasement) will change with time, as verified in the diagram beneath.

Ways Of decarboxylating Cannabis

Fortunately it is exceptionally simple to decarb cannabis. Particularly the manners in which we make it happen - in the stove! Since the essential thought behind decarboxylating cannabis is to warm it, there are obviously numerous ways you could decarb cannabis at home. This remembers warming it for the oven, in a twofold evaporator, or in a slow cooker. Certain individuals add it straightforwardly in food or oil as a component of the last cooking process.

Be that as it may, those strategies require more active observing or mixing. Additionally, they effectively loan themselves to coincidentally overheating or unevenly warming the cannabis. Overheating will annihilate large numbers of the valuable cannabinoids, and the subsequent item can likewise turn out to be extremely dormant. Conversely, decarbing cannabis in the broiler is very exact, compelling, and essentially distant. The just more straightforward (and unscented) choice is to utilize one of these boss Nova or Mysterious Margarine programmed decarboxylator gadgets.

The most effective method to decarboxylate cannabis in the broiler

Line a baking sheet or glass baking dish with material paper. This makes it simple to gather and bundle everything in the wake of baking.

Pick your cannabis of decision. We explicitly save our more fleecy, free, less-manicured local buds for this. I additionally prefer to utilize the strains we develop that are high in both THC and CBD (rather than high-THC, low-CBD strains) to make even and recuperating oils or ointments. You can clearly do this with a CBD-just type of cannabis too. Assuming you're utilizing local cannabis, it is ideal to utilize material that has previously been appropriately dried and restored first. Assuming you want tips about collecting, drying, and relieving local cannabis - see this article.

Tear the buds into little pieces. See the photographs underneath for scale. Certain individuals grind their cannabis for decarboxylation; however I don't think that it is fundamental.

Presently, decarboxylate the cannabis on 250°F for 25-30 minutes. You could likewise involve a lower temperature for somewhat longer opportunity to protect more terpenes (for example 230°F for 45 minutes). Allude to the diagram above.

Note that CBDA takes more time to completely change over completely to CBD than the THC decarb process does. So in the event that you're working with a high-CBD strain and endeavoring to make CBD oil or balm, two fold the time at some random temperature.

Certain individuals cover their baking container of cannabis with foil or second baking sheet topsy turvy on top, all together snare any cannabinoids or terpenes that might volatilize simultaneously.

At the point when the time is up, eliminate the plate from the broiler and permit the cannabis material to cool completely. It ought to have changed from green to light brown.

Move the decarboxylated cannabis into a glass impermeable compartment with a tight-fitting cover, for example, a bricklayer container.

At long last, store the container of decarbed cannabis in a cool dim spot, similar to you would with other cannabis.

Plan to utilize your decarbed cannabis to make oil, ointment or edibles inside 3-6 months. I suggest a year most extreme, except if you weren’t a tranquilizer! It won't "turn sour", yet over the long run the THC normally corrupts to CBN - a cannabinoid that makes weed extremely sluggish. You can find our custom made cannabis-imbued oil recipe here, guidelines to make cannabis tinctures (otherwise known as Green Mythical serpent) here, and our recuperating effective balm recipe here.

[reasonsforhope]

"It’s technically possible for the UK to achieve its goal of having a clean power system by 2030, and doing so should reduce electricity bills and bolster the country’s energy security, the grid operator says in a study commissioned by the new Labour government.

The context

The UK recently shut its last coal-fired power plant and aims to slash its use of gas turbines as it seeks to all but eliminate fossil fuels from its electricity mix by the end of the decade.

In 2023, renewables and nuclear accounted for 62% of the country’s electrical output, while fossil fuels held a 38% share. Under the 2030 clean power target, fossil fuels (gas) would be reduced to less than 5% of the mix.

The latest

“The analysis concludes that clean power is a huge challenge but is achievable for Great Britain by 2030,” the National Energy System Operator said in a statement as it published the study.

Overall system costs are unlikely to increase if the target is met, and tariffs could in fact decline as legacy power contracts expire and if the state makes sufficient progress on energy efficiency gains, flexibility mechanisms, improving grid connection processes, and overall policy modernisation.

Significant investments are required in a short amount of time, but they would allow the UK to become a “leader” in new technologies while also reducing the country’s exposure to potential energy price shocks stemming from spikes in international gas prices, as was the case after Russia invaded Ukraine.

NESO’s analysis shows that clean technologies — renewables and nuclear — will be able to produce at least as much power as Great Britain consumes in total in 2030...

“A clean power system for Great Britain will deliver a backbone of home-grown energy that breaks the link between volatile international gas prices; that is secure and affordably powers our homes and buildings; that decarbonises the transport that we take to school and work; that drives the businesses of today and catalyses the innovations of the future.”

Next steps: The government will now consider NESO’s advice as it develops its clean power action plan later this year."

-via The Progress Playbook, November 5, 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Insurance companies are making climate risk worse

Tomorrow (November 29), I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Conservatives may deride the "reality-based community" as a drag on progress and commercial expansion, but even the most noxious pump-and-dump capitalism is supposed to remain tethered to reality by two unbreakable fetters: auditing and insurance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

No matter how much you value profit over ethics or human thriving, you still need honest books – even if you never show those books to the taxman or the marks. Even an outright scammer needs to know what's coming in and what's going out so they don't get caught in a liquidity trap (that is, "broke"), or overleveraged ("broke," again) exposed to market changes (you guessed it: "broke").

Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is on its deathbed. The market is sewn up by the wildly corrupt and conflicted Big Four accounting firms that are the very definition of too big to fail/too big to jail. They keep cooking books on behalf of management to the detriment of investors. These double-entry fabrications conceal rot in giant, structurally important firms until they implode spectacularly and suddenly, leaving workers, suppliers, customers and investors in a state of utter higgeldy-piggeldy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle

In helping corporations defraud institutional investors, auditors are facilitating mass scale millionaire-on-billionaire violence, and while that may seem like the kind of fight where you're happy to see either party lose, there are inevitably a lot of noncombatants in the blast radius. Since the Enron collapse, the entire accounting sector has turned to quicksand, which is a big deal, given that it's what industrial capitalism's foundations are anchored to. There's a reason my last novel was a thriller about forensic accounting and Big Tech:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

But accounting isn't the only bedrock that's been reduced to slurry here in capitalism's end-times. The insurance sector is meant to be an unshakably rational enterprise, imposing discipline on the rest of the economy. Sure, your company can do something stupid and reckless, but the insurance bill will be stonking, sufficient to consume the expected additional profits.

But the crash of 2008 made it clear that the largest insurance companies in the world were capable of the same wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, and short-termism that they were supposed to prevent in every other business. Without AIG – one of the largest insurers in the world – there would have been no Great Financial Crisis. The company knowingly underwrote hundreds of billions of dollars in junk bonds dressed up as AAA debt, and required a $180b bailout.

Still, many of us have nursed an ember of hope that the insurance sector would spur Big Finance and its pocket governments into taking the climate emergency seriously. When rising seas and wildfires and zoonotic plagues and famines and rolling refugee crises make cities, businesses, and homes uninsurable risks, then insurers will stop writing policies and the doom will become undeniable. Money talks, bullshit walks.

But while insurers have begun to withdraw from the most climate-endangered places (or crank up premiums), the net effect is to decrease climate resilience and increase risk, creating a "climate risk doom loop" that Advait Arun lays out brilliantly for Phenomenal World:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-doom-loop/

Part of the problem is political: as people move into high-risk areas (flood-prone coastal cities, fire-threatened urban-wildlife interfaces), politicians are pulling out all the stops to keep insurers from disinvesting in these high-risk zones. They're loosening insurance regs, subsidizing policies, and imposing "disaster risk fees" on everyone in the region.

But the insurance companies themselves are simply not responding aggressively enough to the rising risk. Climate risk is correlated, after all: when everyone in a region is at flood risk, then everyone will be making a claim on the insurance company when the waters come. The insurance trick of spreading risk only works if the risks to everyone in that spread aren't correlated.

Perversely, insurance companies are heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, these being reliable money-spinners where an insurer can park and grow your premiums, on the assumption that most of the people in the risk pool won't file claims at the same time. But those same fossil-fuel assets produce the very correlated risk that could bring down the whole system.

The system is in trouble. US claims from "natural disasters" are topping $100b/year – up from $4.6b in 2000. Home insurance premiums are up (21%!), but it's not enough, especially in drowning Florida and Texas (which is also both roasting and freezing):

https://grist.org/economics/as-climate-risks-mount-the-insurance-safety-net-is-collapsing/

Insurers who put premiums up to cover this new risk run into a paradox: the higher premiums get, the more risk-tolerant customers get. When flood insurance is cheap, lots of homeowners will stump up for it and create a big, uncorrelated risk-pool. When premiums skyrocket, the only people who buy flood policies are homeowners who are dead certain their house is gonna get flooded out and soon. Now you have a risk pool consisting solely of highly correlated, high risk homes. The technical term for this in the insurance trade is: "bad."

But it gets worse: people who decide not to buy policies as prices go up may be doing their own "motivated reasoning" and "mispricing their risk." That is, they may decide, "If I can't afford to move, and I can't afford to sell my house because it's in a flood-zone, and I can't afford insurance, I guess that means I'm going to live here and be uninsured and hope for the best."

This is also bad. The amount of uninsured losses from US climate disaster "dwarfs" insured losses:

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/hurricanes-floods-bring-120-billion-insurance-losses-2022-2023-01-09/

Here's the doom-loop in a nutshell:

As carbon emissions continue to accumulate, more people are put at risk of climate disaster, while the damages from those disasters intensifies. Vulnerability will drive disinvestment, which in turn exacerbates vulnerability.

Also: the browner and poorer you are, the worse you have it: you are impacted "first and worst":

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/frontline-fenceline-communities

As Arun writes, "Tinkering with insurance markets will not solve their real issues—we must patch the gaping holes in the financial system itself." We have to end the loop that sees the poorest places least insured, and the loss of insurance leading to abandonment by people with money and agency, which zeroes out the budget for climate remediation and resiliency where it is most needed.

The insurance sector is part of the finance industry, and it is disinvesting in climate-endagered places and instead doubling down on its bets on fossil fuels. We can't rely on the insurance sector to discipline other industries by generating "price signals" about the true underlying climate risk. And insurance doesn't just invest in fossil fuels – they're also a major buyer of municipal and state bonds, which means they're part of the "bond vigilante" investors whose decisions constrain the ability of cities to raise and spend money for climate remediation.

When American cities, territories and regions can't float bonds, they historically get taken over and handed to an unelected "control board" who represents distant creditors, not citizens. This is especially true when the people who live in those places are Black or brown – think Puerto Rico or Detroit or Flint. These control board administrators make creditors whole by tearing the people apart.

This is the real doom loop: insurers pull out of poor places threatened by climate disasters. They invest in the fossil fuels that worsen those disasters. They join with bond vigilantes to force disinvestment from infrastructure maintenance and resiliency in those places. Then, the next climate disaster creates more uninsured losses. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finance and insurance are betting heavily on climate risk modeling – not to avert this crisis, but to ensure that their finances remain intact though it. What's more, it won't work. As climate effects get bigger, they get less predictable – and harder to avoid. The point of insurance is spreading risk, not reducing it. We shouldn't and can't rely on insurance creating price-signals to reduce our climate risk.

But the climate doom-loop can be put in reverse – not by market spending, but by public spending. As Arun writes, we need to create "a global investment architecture that is safe for spending":

https://tanjasail.wordpress.com/2023/10/06/a-world-safe-for-spending/

Public investment in emissions reduction and resiliency can offset climate risk, by reducing future global warming and by making places better prepared to endure the weather and other events that are locked in by past emissions. A just transition will "loosen liquidity constraints on investment in communities made vulnerable by the financial system."

Austerity is a bad investment strategy. Failure to maintain and improve infrastructure doesn't just shift costs into the future, it increases those costs far in excess of any rational discount based on the time value of money. Public institutions should discipline markets, not the other way around. Don't give Wall Street a veto over our climate spending. A National Investment Authority could subordinate markets to human thriving:

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/industrial-policy-requires-public-not-just-private-equity/

Insurance need not be pitted against human survival. Saving the cities and regions whose bonds are held by insurance companies is good for those companies: "Breaking the climate risk doom loop is the best disaster insurance policy money can buy."

I found Arun's work to be especially bracing because of the book I'm touring now, The Lost Cause, a solarpunk novel set in a world in which vast public investment is being made to address the climate emergency that is everywhere and all at once:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

There is something profoundly hopeful about the belief that we can do something about these foreseeable disasters – rather than remaining frozen in place until the disaster is upon us and it's too late. As Rebecca Solnit says, inhabiting this place in your imagination is "Completely delightful. Neither utopian nor dystopian, it portrays life in SoCal in a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it."

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/2023/11/28/re-re-reinsurance/#useless-price-signals

[greenfutures]

Hawaii on Thursday agreed to take action to decarbonize its transportation system by 2045 to settle a lawsuit by 13 young people alleging the U.S. state was violating their rights under its constitution with infrastructure that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

Democratic Governor Josh Green announced the "groundbreaking" settlement at a news conference attended by some of the activists and lawyers involved in the lawsuit, which they called the first-ever youth-led climate case seeking zero emissions in transportation.

[batw1nggg]

komaeda doesnt like anything too sweet so ive always seen his taste in drinks as being like. tea and coconut water and like straight almond milk. but i do think the one exception to this is his crippling blue ram addiction he’s got alcoholism lite

[vfdinthewild]

"Electricity is the most efficient and best vector for decarbonization; combined with circular economy approach solutions, we will achieve..."

-via the Schneider Electric website

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Inside a cinder block office building perhaps best known for the Hindu temple and table tennis club next door, a startup company is testing what may be one of the hottest new developments in clean energy technology.

At the back of a small warehouse laboratory buzzing with fans and motors, an MIT spinoff company called Electrified Thermal Solutions is operating something its founders call the Joule Hive, a thermal battery the size of an elevator.  

The Hive is a large, insulated metal box loaded with dozens of white-hot ceramic bricks that convert electricity to heat at temperatures up to 1800 degrees Celsius—well beyond the melting point of steel—and with enough thermal mass to hold the heat for days.

As the price of renewable energy continues to plummet, one of the biggest challenges for the clean energy transition is finding a way to convert electricity to high temperature heat so societies don’t have to continue burning coal or natural gas to power heavy industries. Another thorny issue is finding a way to store energy—in this case heat—for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

“If you are running an industrial plant where you’re making cement or steel or glass or ceramics or chemicals or even food or beverage products, you burn a lot of fossil fuels,” Daniel Stack, chief executive of Electrified Thermal Solutions, said. “Our mission is to decarbonize industry with electrified heat.”

The industrial sector accounts for nearly one-fourth of all direct greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., which drive climate change, according to the EPA. Thermal batteries powered by renewable energy could reduce roughly half of industry’s emissions, according to a 2023 report by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a nonprofit, and its affiliated Renewable Thermal Collaborative. 

Additional emissions come from chemical reactions, such as carbon dioxide that is formed as an unwanted byproduct during cement production, and from methane that leaks or is intentionally vented from natural gas pipes and other equipment. 

The challenge to replacing fossil fuel combustion as the go to source for heat, is that there aren’t a lot of good options available to produce high temperature heat from electricity, Stack said. Electric heaters, like the wires that turn red hot in a toaster, work well at low temperatures but quickly burn out at higher temperatures. Other, less common materials like molybdenum and silicon carbide heaters can withstand higher temperatures, but are prohibitively expensive.

As a grad student at MIT, Stack wondered if firebricks, the bricks commonly used in residential fireplaces and industrial kilns, could be a less expensive, more durable solution. Bricks do not typically conduct electricity, but by slightly altering the recipe of the metal oxides used to make them, he and ETS co-founder Joey Kabel were able to create bricks that could essentially take the place of wires to conduct electricity and generate heat.

“There’s no exotic metals in here, there’s nothing that’ll burn out,” Stack said standing next to shelves lined with small samples, or “coupons,” of brick that he and his team have tested to find the ones with the best heating properties.