Month: July 2023

Could Drones Decarbonize Fourth of July?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough smoke for the whole summer.

New York Times:

The American practice of setting off fireworks on July 4 stretches back to the first Independence Day celebration in Philadelphia in 1777. Today, it’s a beloved tradition that almost seems impossible to replace.

But with concerns over air quality, wildfires and supply chains, some cities are doing just that.

This year Salt Lake City is replacing its fireworks with synchronized dancing drone displays to avoid worsening air quality and setting off more wildfires. Boulder, Colo., is switching to drones, too, and Minneapolis is opting for lasers, simply because those technologies have been easier to source than fireworks in recent years.

And as wildfire smoke from Canada again blanketed much of the United States last week, New York City officials debated whether to set off fireworks on the 4th but, as of Monday night, had not called them off.

Across the border, Montreal canceled July 1 Canada Day fireworks, citing poor air quality from the more than 100 wildfires burning across Quebec.

They’re definitely going to compound those existing sources of air pollution,” said Grace Tee Lewis, an epidemiologist at the Environmental Defense Fund who specializes in air pollution and public health.

Fireworks cause a spike in a form of air pollution called particulate matter, the same type of pollution that is elevated from wildfire smoke. While there’s not much research on the risks of fireworks specifically, particulate matter less than 2.5 microns wide (about one-30th the width of a human hair) is known to enter people’s lungs and bloodstreams and cause breathing problems and inflammation. Children, older people and those with existing health conditions like asthma and chronic heart disease should take special care, Dr. Tee Lewis said.

“Watch it from a distance,” she recommended. “The closer you are, the more particulate matter exposure you’re going to have.”

Dr. Tee Lewis added that since the spread of the coronavirus, more people may be more vulnerable to air pollution, especially people suffering from long Covid or heart complications as a result of their infections. For those determined to get their pyrotechnic fix, wearing the same N95 face masks that protect against the virus is one way to protect yourself from smoke and air pollution, she said.

Continue reading “Could Drones Decarbonize Fourth of July?”

El Nino’s Delayed Atlantic Impact

Normally we expect Atlantic hurricanes to be suppressed during El Nino years, but this June featured a very active Atlantic, with especially warm Sea Surface temps.
If normal El Nino expectations hold, that activity may not continue.

Michael Lowry for Eye on the Tropics:

The abnormal warming of the waters in the central and eastern Pacific around the equator – an event widely known as El Niño – shows no sign of pulling back.

Waters this week across the El Niño monitoring region of the Pacific are running over a degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above the long-term averages, which may not sound impressive, but it’s the type of warmth that signals a growing ocean fever.

The threshold for El Niño is set at 0.5 degrees Celsius above average, so when water temperature anomalies approach 1.0 to 1.5 degrees Celsius, El Niño is maturing. This is the case this summer. Yet despite rivaling the pace of the 2015 and 1997 El Niño events – two of the strongest on record – we’ve yet to see the upside of El Niño show face in the Atlantic, where it typically deters storm activity by way of storm-busting wind shear, especially across the Caribbean and western Atlantic.

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First Lab Grown, ahem,..Cultivated Meat Served in America

Look forward to trying this, hope it works.
Futurist Tony Seba has called this a Disruption in the making (below). He’s been right before.

MIT Technology Review:

Soon, the menu in your favorite burger joint could include not only options made with meat, mushrooms, and black beans but also patties packed with lab-grown animal cells.

Not only did the US just approve the sale of cultivated meat for the first time, but the industry, made up of over 150 companies, is raising billions of dollarsto bring products to restaurants and grocery stores. 

In theory, that should be a big win for the climate. 

One of the major drivers for businesses focusing on cultivated (or lab-grown, or cultured) meat is its potential for cleaning up the climate impact of our current food system. Greenhouse-gas emissions from the animals we eat (mostly cows) account for nearly 15% of the global total, a fraction that’s expected to increase in the coming decades.

But whether cultivated meat is better for the environment is still not entirely clear.

That’s because there are still many unknowns around how production will work at commercial scales. Many of the startups are just now planning the move from research labs to bigger facilities to start producing food that real, paying customers will finally get to eat.

Exactly how this shift happens will not only determine whether these new food options will be cheap enough to make it into people’s carts. It may also decide whether cultivated meat can ever deliver on its big climate promises.

Raising livestock, especially beef, is infamously emissions intensive. Feeding animals on farms requires a lot of land and energy, both of which can produce carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, cows (along with some other livestock, like sheep) produce large amounts of methane during digestion. If you add it all up and take a global average, one kilogram of beef can account for emissions roughly equivalent to 100 kilograms of carbon dioxide. (Exact estimates can vary depending on where cows are raised, what they’re fed, and how farms are run.)  

At a cellular level, cultivated meat is made from basically the same ingredients as the meat we eat today. By taking a sample of tissue from a young animal or fertilized egg, isolating the cells, and growing them in a reactor, scientists can make animal-derived meat without the constraints of feeding and raising animals for slaughter.

The USDA just gave two California-based companies, Eat Just and Upside Foods, the green light to produce and sell their cultivated chicken products. This makes the US the second country to allow sales of meat grown in labs, after Singapore.

Continue reading “First Lab Grown, ahem,..Cultivated Meat Served in America”

Canadian Smoke Part of a Wake Up Call for North Americans

Fox Weather – Canadian Fires could burn all summer.
Dread settling in that the new normal is an unpredictable no normal.

New York Times:

Canada’s wildfires have burned 20 million acres, blanketed Canadian and U.S. cities with smoke and raised health concerns on both sides of the border, with no end in sight. The toll on the Canadian economy is only beginning to sink in.

The fires have upended oil and gas operations, reduced available timber harvests, dampened the tourism industry and imposed uncounted costs on the national health system.

Those losses are emblematic of the pressure being felt more widely as countries around the world experience disaster after disaster caused by extreme weather, and they will only increase as the climate warms.

What long seemed a faraway concern has snapped into sharp relief in recent years, as billowing smoke has suffused vast areas of North America, floods have washed away neighborhoods, and heat waves have strained power grids. That incurs billions of dollars in costs, and also has longer-reverberating consequences, such as insurers withdrawing from markets prone to hurricanes and fires.
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Nonetheless, Mr. Sawyer and his colleagues did try to model it out. In a report last year, they calculated that climate-related costs would mount to 25 billion Canadian dollars in 2025, cutting economic growth in half. By midcentury, they forecast a loss of 500,000 jobs, mostly from excessive heat that lowers labor productivity and causes premature death. Then there are the increased costs to households, and higher taxes required to support government spending to repair the damage — especially in the north, where thawing permafrost is cracking roads and buildings.

It is too early to know the cost for the current fires, and several months of fire season remain. But the consulting firm Oxford Economics has forecast that it could knock between 0.3 and 0.6 percentage points off Canada’s economic growth in the third quarter — a big hit, especially since hiring in the country has already slowed and households have more debt and less savings than their neighbors to the south.

“We already think we’re teetering into a downturn, and this would just make things worse,” said Tony Stillo, director of economics for Canada at Oxford. “If we were to see these fires really disrupt transportation corridors, disrupting power supply to large population centers, then you’re talking about even worse consequences.”

Estimates of the overall economic drag are built on damage to particular industries, which vary with each disaster.

The recent fires have left some lumber mills idle, for example, as workers have been evacuated. It’s not clear how widespread the damage will be to forest stocks, but provincial governments tend to reduce the amount of timber they allow to be harvested after large blazes, according to Derek Nighbor, chief executive of the Forest Products Association of Canada. Infestations of pine beetles, which have flared up as milder winter temperatures fail to kill off the pests, have curtailed logging in British Columbia.

Continue reading “Canadian Smoke Part of a Wake Up Call for North Americans”

Will El Nino Set Off Climate Dominoes?

I generally push back against “doomerism”, and agree with Michael Mann (below), and I think, most mainstream scientists, that worst case scenarios need not be inevitable.
But this summer, man…

Guardian:

“Very unusual”, “worrying”, “terrifying”, and “bonkers”; the reactions of veteran scientists to the sharp increase in north Atlantic surface temperatures over the past three months raises the question of whether the world’s climate has entered a more erratic and dangerous phase with the onset of an El Niño event on top of human-made global heating.

Since April, the warming appears to have entered a new trajectory. Meanwhile the area of global sea ice has dropped by more than 1 million sq km below the previous low.

“If a few decades ago, some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon, we are now witnessing our climate changing at a terrifying rate,” said Prof Peter Stott, who leads the UK Met Office’s climate monitoring and attribution team. “As the El Niño builds through the rest of this year, adding an extra oomph to the damaging effects of human-induced global heating, many millions of people across the planet and many diverse ecosystems are going to face extraordinary challenges and unfortunately suffer great damage.”

The El Niño climate pattern emerges when normal easterly winds weaken and warm water spreads across the whole Pacific.

The immediate impact is on marine life which is unaccustomed to waters that have warmed by several degrees in some areas. More worrying still, the extra energy in the ocean, which is the world’s biggest heat absorber, may bring fiercer-than-usual storms, more destructive rain dumps and longer, hotter heatwaves.

When the extremes in the north Atlantic started to be registered in April, the hope was that this would prove a temporary blip. In May, however, the average temperature in the region was the highest since records began in 1850. On 12 June, the climatologist Brian McNoldy stirred up a Twitter storm by calculating that, based on past data, there was a one in 256,0000 chance of this happening.

Continue reading “Will El Nino Set Off Climate Dominoes?”

Geologic Hydrogen – More than a Fairy Tale

A “fairy circle” in Brazil from which natural hydrogen leaks.

This story keeps on developing, and the implications make one’s head spin.

Engie:

In  some  countries,  strange  circular  areas can be seen where, compared to their surroundings, vegetation is much less dense or even non-existent. Even today  no  one  has  come  up  with  a  convincing explanation for their origin and so these so-called “fairy circles” are often associated   with   stories   and   legends.   Surprisingly, a lot of these circles are also the site  of  hydrogen  gas  emissions,  which  means  that this gas that we manufacture using various processes  as  part  of  the  energy  transition  is  actually naturally present below ground.
In  some  countries,  strange  circular  areas can be seen where, compared to their surroundings, vegetation is much less dense or even non-existent. Even today  no  one  has  come  up  with  a  convincing explanation for their origin and so these so-called “fairy circles” are often associated   with   stories   and   legends.   Surprisingly, a lot of these circles are also the site  of  hydrogen  gas  emissions,  which  means  that this gas that we manufacture using various processes  as  part  of  the  energy  transition  is  actually naturally present below ground.
If certain hypotheses as to the exact mecha-nisms  at  play  are  still  the  subject  of  debate,  certain clues suggest that water plays a major role in the natural hydrogen cycle. This can be observed  at  underwater  faults  where  water  contributes to the oxidization of ferromagne-sian  minerals  (in  the  newly  created  and  still  extremely hot rocks) and the resulting produc-tion of hydrogen. This rapid chemical reaction takes place at a relatively shallow depth.

Satellite view of a “fairy ring”, a formation from which natural hydrogen escapes. Here in France.

EuroActiv:

While carrying out work to check the risk of firedamp pockets in the abandoned mines of the Lorraine region in May, La Française d’Énergie (FDE) discovered a large deposit of natural hydrogen, igniting hopes that it could be a game changer in Europe’s energy transition.

For years, researchers and businesses in the private sector have been looking for rare natural hydrogen, otherwise known as native or white hydrogen, due to its potential as a clean and renewable energy source.

“If confirmed, this would be the largest potential natural hydrogen discovered to date in Europe,” Philippe de Donato, co-director of research at the GeoRessouces laboratory at the University of Lorraine, told France 3 Grand-Est at the end of May.

Continue reading “Geologic Hydrogen – More than a Fairy Tale”

European Energy Prices Dip to Negative

One analyst predicted that this will happen every weekend this summer.

Renew Economy:

Wholesale electricity prices went into negative territory across much of western Europe over the weekend, and for the entire day in Germany, according to energy analysts.

Energy analyst and commentator Gerard Reid noted the negative pricing and posted a screen shot on LinkedIn of prices quoted on the epexspot exchange.

“Free electricity across all of Europe today … any takers?” Reid wrote on his LinkedIn post, before adding: “PS: It will be the same every weekend in summer!”

Australian electricity markets are already used to long periods of negative prices, particularly during the day when rooftop solar sucks up much of the domestic demand, leaving large scale wind, solar and the remaining thermal generators to battle to be dispatched.

Solutions include more storage and demand management (switching more loads to times when renewables are producing their highest. 

In a later post on LinkedIn, Charlotte Johnson, the global head of markets at KrakenFlex, noted that the weekend was a “record breaking moment” for widespread negative prices, with day ahead prices for delivery negative for over 70% of the day.
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“With the government targeting 50GW of offshore wind by 2030 and 70GW of solar by 2035 these events are likely to increase in frequency as correlated weather patterns leads to price cannibalisation (particularly when some older subsidies incentivise generation throughout these periods).

“Negative pricing should really be an incentive for renewable generators to employ control systems that are able to curtail generation in real-time and a clear market signal for the importance of flexible technologies -battery storage and electric vehicles