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Category: Renewable energy/fossil fuels

U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds

Reuters reports: Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green. President Joe Biden’s administration is reviewing policies on biofuels as part…

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Wood burners emit more particle pollution than traffic, UK data shows

Wood burners emit more particle pollution than traffic, UK data shows

The Guardian reports: Wood burning in homes produces more small particle pollution than all road traffic in the UK, according to revised government data. The new data significantly cuts the estimated proportion of small particle pollution that comes from wood burners from 38% to 17%. But wood burning pollution remains a “major contributor” to particle pollution, another government report said. Road transport is responsible for 13% of particle pollution. The data shows tiny particle pollution, called PM2.5, produced by wood…

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Reinventing the electric grid is crucial for solving the climate crisis

Reinventing the electric grid is crucial for solving the climate crisis

Integrating solar panels with farming can provide partial shade for plants. Werner Slocum/NREL By Charles F. Kutscher, University of Colorado Boulder and Jeffrey Logan, University of Colorado Boulder In the summer of 1988, scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels was dangerously warming the planet. Scientific meetings were held, voluminous reports were written, and national pledges were made, but because fossil fuels were comparatively cheap, little concrete action was taken to reduce carbon emissions….

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Coming soon to this coal county in Kentucky: Solar, in a big way

Coming soon to this coal county in Kentucky: Solar, in a big way

The New York Times reports: For a mountain that’s had its top blown off, the old Martiki coal mine is looking especially winsome these days. With its vast stretches of emerald grass dotted with hay bales and ringed with blue-tinged peaks, and the wild horses and cattle that roam there, it looks less like a shuttered strip mine and more like an ad for organic milk. The mountain is poised for another transformation. Hundreds of acres are set to be…

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Will nuclear fusion ever power the world?

Will nuclear fusion ever power the world?

Steffi Diem tells Gizmodo: If funding for fusion energy development continues to increase, then yes, fusion will power the world in the future. Since the 1990s, funding for fusion research in the United States has been for the science of fusion, not for the development of an energy source. The rest of the world has a wide portfolio of fusion research as well, and we are all racing to harness the power of fusion. Major recent advances in technology and…

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Hopes grow that nuclear fusion is finally for real and could help address climate change

Hopes grow that nuclear fusion is finally for real and could help address climate change

The Boston Globe reports: It’s been compared to everything from a holy grail to fool’s gold: the ultimate solution to clean, readily available energy or an expensive delusion diverting scarce money and brainpower from the urgent needs of rapidly addressing climate change. For decades, scientists have been trying to harness the energy that powers stars, a complex, atomic-level process known as nuclear fusion, which requires heating a plasma fuel to more than 100 million degrees Celsius and finding a way…

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How the U.S. lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy

How the U.S. lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy

The New York Times reports: Tom Perriello saw it coming but could do nothing to stop it. André Kapanga too. Despite urgent emails, phone calls and personal pleas, they watched helplessly as a company backed by the Chinese government took ownership from the Americans of one of the world’s largest cobalt mines. It was 2016, and a deal had been struck by the Arizona-based mining giant Freeport-McMoRan to sell the site, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which now…

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An international power struggle over cobalt rattles the clean energy revolution

An international power struggle over cobalt rattles the clean energy revolution

The New York Times reports from Kisanfu, Democratic Republic of Congo: Just up a red dirt road, across an expanse of tall, dew-soaked weeds, bulldozers are hollowing out a yawning new canyon that is central to the world’s urgent race against global warming. For more than a decade, the vast expanse of untouched land was controlled by an American company. Now a Chinese mining conglomerate has bought it, and is racing to retrieve its buried treasure: millions of tons of…

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Biden administration plans wind farms along nearly the entire U.S. coastline

Biden administration plans wind farms along nearly the entire U.S. coastline

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration announced on Wednesday a plan to develop large-scale wind farms along nearly the entire coastline of the United States, the first long-term strategy from the government to produce electricity from offshore turbines. Speaking at a wind power industry conference in Boston, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said that her agency will begin to identify, demarcate and hope to eventually lease federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Maine and off the…

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Can the world’s most polluting heavy industries decarbonize?

Can the world’s most polluting heavy industries decarbonize?

Fred Pearce writes: We know how to decarbonize energy production with renewable fuels and land transportation with electric vehicles. Blueprints for greening shipping and aircraft are being drawn up. But what about the big industrial processes? They look set to become decarbonization holdouts — the last and hardest CO2 emissions that we must eliminate if we are to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. In particular, how are we to green the three biggest globally-vital heavy industries: steel, cement, and ammonia,…

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Can nuclear fusion put the brakes on climate change?

Can nuclear fusion put the brakes on climate change?

Rivka Galchen writes: Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you’ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let’s say also that you’re not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had…

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Clean hydrogen could replace fossil fuels for almost everything. But should it?

Clean hydrogen could replace fossil fuels for almost everything. But should it?

Grist reports: As countries around the world firm up their commitments to cut carbon emissions, many are turning to an emerging solution with an uncertain future: hydrogen gas. This lesser-known fuel has been called the “Swiss Army knife” of climate solutions. It has the potential to replace fossil fuels in industrial processes, transportation, buildings, and power plants, and does not emit any greenhouse gases when it’s burned. But this idea of an emissions-free hydrogen-fueled world is a long way off….

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We’re finally catching a break in the climate fight

We’re finally catching a break in the climate fight

Bill McKibben writes: So far in the global warming era, we’ve caught precious few breaks. Certainly not from physics: the temperature has increased at the alarming pace that scientists predicted thirty years ago, and the effects of that warming have increased even faster than expected. (“Faster Than Expected” is probably the right title for a history of climate change so far; if you’re a connoisseur of disaster, there is already a blog by that name). The Arctic is melting decades…

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From 4% to 45%: Energy Department lays out ambitious blueprint for solar power

From 4% to 45%: Energy Department lays out ambitious blueprint for solar power

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration on Wednesday released a blueprint showing how the nation could move toward producing almost half of its electricity from the sun by 2050 — a potentially big step toward fighting climate change but one that would require vast upgrades to the electric grid. There is little historical precedent for expanding solar energy, which contributed less than 4 percent of the country’s electricity last year, as quickly as the Energy Department outlined in…

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It’s not a competition, but renewables are beating nuclear anyway

It’s not a competition, but renewables are beating nuclear anyway

Nathaniel Bullard writes: Energy giant BP Plc has been publishing its annual review of global energy statistics for seven decades. (I’ve been reading it — and digesting its data — for about a fifth of that time.) The latest edition published in July is, understandably, quite focused on the largest year-on-year decline in primary energy consumption since 1945. But there’s another finding worth noting: 2020 was the first year in which renewable power generation (excluding hydro) surpassed nuclear power generation….

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Fossil fuel companies are quietly scoring big money for their preferred climate solution: carbon capture and storage

Fossil fuel companies are quietly scoring big money for their preferred climate solution: carbon capture and storage

Inside Climate News reports: Over the last year, energy companies, electrical utilities and other industrial sectors have been quietly pushing through a suite of policies to support a technology that stands to yield tens of billions of dollars for corporate polluters, but may do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These policies have fast-tracked environmental reviews and allocated billions in federal funding for research and development of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technologies that pull carbon dioxide out of…

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