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The Other Solar Power: How Scientists Are Making Fuel From Sunlight and Air

Few activities swell our carbon footprint quite like flying. A one-hour flight on a twin-engine jet aircraft burns almost 6,000 pounds of kerosene and adds almost 19,000 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The environmental impact of air travel is so stark that Swedes even have a term for it: flygskam, or flight shame. But what if flying could be made zero carbon?

“We have developed a solar technology that is able to produce liquid fuels using just two ingredients: solar energy and ambient air,” says Aldo Steinfeld, a renewable energy expert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. “These hydrocarbon fuels release only as much carbon dioxide during combustion as was previously extracted from the air.”
 
  • Informative
Reactions: ggies07 and mspohr
Minnesota Attorney General Sues Exxon, Koch and API for Climate Deception - Resilience

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced the lawsuit at a press conference Wednesday. The lawsuit names as defendants ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute (API), and Koch Industries as well as Koch subsidiaries Flint Hills Resources LP and Flint Hills Resources Pine Bend. The lawsuit claims these organizations violated Minnesota consumer protection laws for orchestrating a campaign of deception around climate science and the danger of fossil fuels.
 
Racism Is Killing the Planet

Here’s why: You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can't have disposable people without racism.

We’re in this global environmental mess because we have declared parts of our planet to be disposable. The watersheds where we frack the earth to extract gas are considered disposable.

But let’s be real: White privilege offers no escape from climate chaos. Nobody reading this is going to get a spot on the SpaceX shuttle to Mars (if you think so, that’s white supremacy messing with your head). Earth is the only planet we get. And, thanks to polluters who profit from exploiting Black and brown communities, we’re in the process of making it uninhabitable.
 
Europe losing forest to harvesting at alarming rate, data suggests

Europe losing forest to harvesting at alarming rate, data suggests

Europe has lost a vastly increased area of forest to harvesting in recent years, data suggests, reducing the continent’s carbon absorption capacity and possibly indicating wider problems with the EU’s attempts to combat the climate crisis.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: SmartElectric
Heatwaves have become longer in most of the world since 1950s – study

Heatwaves have become longer in most of the world since 1950s – study

Heatwaves have increased in both length and frequency in nearly every part of the world since the 1950s, according to what is described as the first study to look at the issue at a regional level.

She said it was consistent with what climate scientists had long forecast – that a rise in heatwaves would be a clear sign of global heating – and the results should be a “clarion call” to policymakers that urgent action was needed to prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis
 
Stop making sense: why it's time to get emotional about climate change

Stop making sense: why it's time to get emotional about climate change | Rebecca Huntley

In his book Why We Disagree About Climate Change, the British professor Mike Hulme argues that this is one of the reasons we argue so much about the issue. “The sources of our disagreement with climate change lie deep within us, in our values and in our sense of identity and purpose,” he writes. “They do not reside ‘out there’, a result of our inability to grasp knowingly some ultimate physical reality.”

It follows that to help resolve, even to some degree, the conflict and disagreement about climate change in the community, we need to understand those different belief systems and the emotional responses and social forces that shape them. And take them into account when we communicate about climate change and what should be done.
 
Over 5,600 fossil fuel companies have taken at least $3bn in US Covid-19 aid

Over 5,600 fossil fuel companies have taken at least $3bn in US Covid-19 aid

“Federal aid should be going to help small businesses and frontline workers struggling as the result of the pandemic, not the corporate polluters whose struggles are a result of longstanding failing business practices,” said Melinda Pierce, Sierra Club legislative director.
 
Over 5,600 fossil fuel companies have taken at least $3bn in US Covid-19 aid

Over 5,600 fossil fuel companies have taken at least $3bn in US Covid-19 aid

“Federal aid should be going to help small businesses and frontline workers struggling as the result of the pandemic, not the corporate polluters whose struggles are a result of longstanding failing business practices,” said Melinda Pierce, Sierra Club legislative director.

I read that the Ayn Rand institute took PPP $$$. There's Irony for you...
 
Cory Doctorow: Full Employment

Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and insectborne pandemics.

These tasks will absorb more than 100% of any labor freed up by automation. Every person whose job is obsolete because of automation will have ten jobs waiting for them, for the entire foreseeable future. This means that even if you indulge in a thought experiment in which a General AI emerges that starts doing stuff humans can do – sometimes better than any human could do them – it would not lead to technological unemployment.

Keynes once proposed that we could jump-start an economy by paying half the unemployed people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in.

No one’s really tried that experiment, but we did just spend 150 years subsidizing our ancestors to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground. Now we’ll spend 200-300 years subsidizing our descendants to put them back in there.


 
Cory Doctorow: Full Employment

Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and insectborne pandemics.

These tasks will absorb more than 100% of any labor freed up by automation. Every person whose job is obsolete because of automation will have ten jobs waiting for them, for the entire foreseeable future. This means that even if you indulge in a thought experiment in which a General AI emerges that starts doing stuff humans can do – sometimes better than any human could do them – it would not lead to technological unemployment.

Keynes once proposed that we could jump-start an economy by paying half the unemployed people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in.

No one’s really tried that experiment, but we did just spend 150 years subsidizing our ancestors to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground. Now we’ll spend 200-300 years subsidizing our descendants to put them back in there.


IMHO a better tact would be to accept the reality that people need to be provided an income and find a way to fill their time with what they want to do (the horror); Even in the unlikely event this is true... then what? What provides employment after the cities are moved manually for some reason and the war against climate is won? Employment as a means of consumption is a lost cause because math.
 
Legal action threatened over Boris Johnson's 'unlawful' green recovery plans

Legal action threatened over Boris Johnson's 'unlawful' green recovery plans

Sunak will set out £3bn of green spending, focusing on improving energy efficiency in homes and public buildings, in his summer statement on Wednesday. But the letter contrasts this sum with the billions committed to airlines and carmakers in the taxpayer-funded coronavirus recovery package, and funding for fossil fuels.

“The proposed approach is quite clearly unlawful … it is no more than a fig-leaf for the government’s new deal for polluters,” wrote Plan B in a letter before action, a legal first step that gives ministers a chance to reply before instigating formal legal proceedings.