Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Counter-intuitive climate change solution
Profitable approach to
cleaning the air
Date:
May 20, 2019
Source:
Stanford University
Summary:
A seemingly counterintuitive
approach -- converting one greenhouse gas into another -- holds promise for
returning the atmosphere to pre-industrial concentrations of methane, a
powerful driver of global warming.
A relatively simple process
could help turn the tide of climate change while also turning a healthy profit.
That's one of the hopeful visions outlined in a new Stanford-led paper that
highlights a seemingly counterintuitive solution: converting one greenhouse gas
into another.
The study, published in Nature
Sustainability on May 20, describes a potential process for converting the
extremely potent greenhouse gas methane into carbon dioxide, which is a much
less potent driver of global warming. The idea of intentionally releasing
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere may seem surprising, but the authors argue
that swapping methane for carbon dioxide is a significant net benefit for the
climate.
"If perfected, this
technology could return the atmosphere to pre-industrial concentrations of
methane and other gases," said lead author Rob Jackson, the Michelle and
Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor in Earth System Science in Stanford's School
of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.
The basic idea is that some
sources of methane emissions -- from rice cultivation or cattle, for example --
may be very difficult or expensive to eliminate. "An alternative is to
offset these emissions via methane removal, so there is no net effect on
warming the atmosphere," said study coauthor Chris Field, the Perry L.
McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
A problem and a possible
solution
In 2018, methane -- about 60
percent of which is generated by humans -- reached atmospheric concentrations
two and a half times greater than pre-industrial levels. Although the amount of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is much greater, methane is 84 times more
potent in terms of warming the climate system over the first 20 years after its
release.
Most scenarios for stabilizing
average global temperatures at 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels
depend on strategies for both reducing the overall amount of carbon dioxide
entering the atmosphere and removing what's already in the atmosphere through
approaches such as tree planting or underground sequestration. However,
removing other greenhouse gases, particularly methane, could provide a
complementary approach, according to the study's authors, who point to the
gas's outsized influence on the climate.
Most scenarios for removing
carbon dioxide typically assume hundreds of billions of tons removed over
decades and do not restore the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. In
contrast, methane concentrations could be restored to pre-industrial levels by
removing about 3.2 billion tons of the gas from the atmosphere and converting
it into an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to a few months of global
industrial emissions, according to the researchers. If successful, the approach
would eliminate approximately one-sixth of all causes of global warming to
date.
Methane is challenging to
capture from air because its concentration is so low. However, the authors
point out that zeolite, a crystalline material that consists primarily of
aluminum, silicon and oxygen, could act essentially as a sponge to soak up
methane. "The porous molecular structure, relatively large surface area
and ability to host copper and iron in zeolites make them promising catalysts
for capturing methane and other gases," said Ed Solomon, the Monroe E.
Spaght Professor of Chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
The whole process might take
the form of a giant contraption with electric fans forcing air through tumbling
chambers or reactors full of powdered or pelletized zeolites and other
catalysts. The trapped methane could then be heated to form and release carbon
dioxide, the authors suggest.
A profitable future
The process of converting
methane to carbon dioxide could be profitable with a price on carbon emissions
or an appropriate policy. If market prices for carbon offsets rise to $500 or
more per ton this century, as predicted by most relevant assessment models,
each ton of methane removed from the atmosphere could be worth more than
$12,000.
A zeolite array about the size
of a football field could generate millions of dollars a year in income while
removing harmful methane from the air. In principle, the researchers argue that
the approach of converting a more harmful greenhouse gas to one that's less
potent could also apply to other greenhouse gases.
While reducing greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels may seem unlikely in the near
future, the researchers argue that it could be possible with strategies like
these.
Story Source:
Materials provided
by Stanford University.
Original written by Rob Jordan, Stanford Woods Institute for the
Environment. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Related Multimedia:
The bad news about nudges: They might be backfiring
By Kate
Yoder on May 20, 2019
Nudges, those tweaks that use
behavioral science to help people make smarter decisions, are popular all
around the world. If you get a bill comparing your electricity use to your
neighbors’, you’re more likely to turn off that kitchen light or unplug
your TV. And if your employer automatically enrolls you in a retirement
savings plan, you might save more money for retirement. It’s using a little
change to have a big impact on your life.
These nudges seem pretty great
on the surface. But some may have unintended consequences when it comes to
policymaking, according to a new study in Nature Climate Change. Requiring
large utilities to automatically sign customers up for environmentally-friendly
energy could, in a twist of fate, erode support for substantive policies like a
carbon tax.
This raises a question
economists have been grappling with for years. Do people see nudges as
substitutes for larger, more effective policies? If so, they could backfire,
undermining support for serious action.
Over the course of six
experiments in the last couple of years, researchers at Carnegie Mellon tried
to find an answer. They asked participants to imagine themselves as
“policymakers” (like members of Congress; one experiment was conducted on
graduates of a public policy school). When a carbon tax was the only option
presented, 70 percent of participants were in favor of it. But when they were
also given the option of approving the clean-energy nudge, boom, support for
the tax dropped to 55 percent.
Similarly, the researchers
found participants liked the idea of expanding withholdings for Social Security
in order to increase benefits. But when they were given the option of requiring
large companies to sign their workers up for a retirement savings plan by
default, support for the Social Security idea fell.
Why’s that? One explanation is
that people tend to overestimate the power of nudges. Automatic enrollment in a
greener electricity plan generally has “a pretty small effect” on carbon
emissions, said David Hagmann, an author of the study and a postdoc at Harvard.
The idea of nudges was
popularized by Richard Thaler, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, and
Cass Sunstein, a legal expert who served in the Obama administration, in the
2008 book Nudge. “We are all too aware that for environmental problems,
gentle nudges may appear ridiculously inadequate — a bit like an effort to
capture a lion with a mousetrap,” they wrote in the chapter “Saving the
Planet.”
Nudges are supposed to be a
complement to beefier policies, not a replacement, but the Carnegie Mellon
study suggests they run the risk of being seen as a low-lift substitute.
Not that a carbon tax has made
a dent in U.S. emissions so far, either. Because, you know, they don’t exist in
the U.S (though there are cap-and-trade programs in California and the
Northeast). Carbon prices do exist elsewhere, like in Portugal, Sweden, and the
Canadian province of British Columbia. All the state-level attempts to pass
such a policy have failed so far, due to the usual suspects like political
division and industry
opposition. With climate denial’s grip on the Republican Party, it’s
uncertain whether any state could manage to pass a carbon tax anytime soon,
never mind Congress. And the carbon prices that already exist around the world
are considered too
low to be very effective on their own.
That said, scientists at the
U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change say putting a price on carbon
is “necessary,”
to curb emissions, along with other strong policies.
It makes sense that nudges are
politically popular by comparison: Implementing them comes cheap. Across
multiple policy areas, they’ve been shown to outshine conventional approaches
like subsidies or taxes measured by impact per
dollar spent.
And they do have the potential
to lower our carbon footprints. In Nudge, Thaler and Cass explain how an
object called the Ambient Orb — a small ball that glows red when your household
is using a lot of energy, and glows green when energy use is low — dramatically
lowered energy use in one experiment in California. “In a period of weeks,
users of the Orb reduced their use of energy, in peak periods, by 40 percent,”
they write.
But it’s concerning that
simply pondering the idea of a green-energy nudge could reduce support for
something meatier. Luckily, there’s a remedy: education! In the study, support
for a carbon tax stayed high when the researchers told participants that
revenue from the carbon tax would go toward reducing other taxes. Telling
people that the nudge was relatively ineffective also kept support for a carbon
tax from dropping, Hagmann said. (And it didn’t hurt support for using nudges.)
Still, the new research raises
other questions. Could small environmental policy wins like banning
plastic straws or plastic bags erode support for enacting more
far-reaching legislation?
Sorting out recycling and
compost certainly makes some people feel better, if also self-righteous (“That
obviously goes in the brown bin!”), but apparently a bunch of the stuff often
thrown into the recycling bin heads straight
to the dump. The larger problem of mass
consumption and waste remains.
Think of a gentle nudge like
ibuprofen. It may alleviate your headache, and that’s great! But it’s no cure
for chronic migraines that come from prolonged screen time.
Joe Biden, the TRANQUILIZER
A mental health assessment of
the Democratic Party suggests that identity politics had lately turned into an
identity crisis. Years of staying woke finally produced
hallucinations and violent outbursts. It was time to medicate the patient.
Enter, stage right, the Tranquilizer, smiling Uncle Joe Biden, the perfect
agent to quell an acute case of adolescent rebellion.
Mostly, the rank-and-file
don’t seem to know what to make of Uncle Joe’s arrival on the scene. It’s as if
they popped .5 milligrams of Xanax a half an hour ago and all the
intersectional strife that seemed so urgent last month just up and flew out of
the room, like so many leaf-nosed bats from a frightful cave of winds. The
chemical rush Uncle Joe provides is reflected in his impressive polling
numbers, lately cresting near 40 percent against his closest pursuer, Bernie
Sanders — the reincarnation of my 10th grade math teacher, and hence a
figure of horror and loathing — at about 18 percent in the polls. The rest of
the presidential pack just slogs down-low through the sucking muck of single
digits. Many of these are women candidates in a party determined to produce the
first president of the female persuasion. What’s up with that?
The salient psychodramatic
feature of the Democrats’ relationship with Mr. Trump is that he
represents Daddy’s in da house, a situation so alarming as to provoke a
nearly three-year-long fugue of patricidal fury among his detractors. In fact,
he’s an order of magnitude worse than Daddy… he’s more like Ole Massa…
living in that big White House… lumbering out the south portico in that
terrible capitalist business suit… the very cutting edge of
oppression and misogyny. Of the Democratic women running for president, so far
only Elizabeth Warren has gone after Mr. Trump with any real passion — and
then, like some stereotypical housewife trying to brain him with a frying pan.
It just bounces off his thick skull, and he moves on.
I call Mr. Trump the Golden
Golem of Greatness for a reason (several really) but mainly for his seemingly
implacable demeanor. He’s exactly like that folkloric figure from the mists
beyond the Pale of Settlement, an animate hunk of impassive clay communing with
spirits of the dead, blundering blindly about the land, scaring little children
and turning the peasants’ blood to ice-water. You might even say he was
conjured up by the very deacons of Wokesterism who now tremble at his every
thundering footstep.
Uncle Joe Biden is surely the
antidote to all that. He served eight years under the Wokester Deacon-in-Chief,
Mr. Obama, and cheerfully endured his ritual castration, rendering him harmless
to all who must-be-believed, and other sub-categories of the aggrieved and
oppressed. At 76, he is way older than anyone (anyone serious, that is) who
ever ran for President before, perhaps bordering even on feeble, and that’s
another plus: he couldn’t hurt a fly. At least not here in the States. He has
no plans, apparently, to try to make America great again — but he still has a
hearty appetite for international adventuring that might redound to the benefit
of the US War industry and its handmaidens on K Street and Capitol Hill.
And, of course, Uncle Joe goes
through these palliative motions of bringing tranquility to the Democratic
scramble, his smile fixed, teeth gleaming, hair perfect, hand a’pumping, as
ever more information emerges about the spectacular effrontery of his international
money-grubbing while vice-president. He did what in Ukraine in 2014?
And Uncle Joe’s son, Hunter, walked away with how many millions of dollars
after being appointed to the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings?
Uncle Joe even bragged to the
Council on Foreign Relations about how he browbeat Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko into firing their equivalent of Attorney General, who was about to
look into this fishy Burisma deal. And then there was the even bigger windfall
after Uncle Joe paid a call on China and Hunter’s shadowy company, Rosemont
Seneca, landed a billion dollar private equity deal (whatever that means)
from an equally shadowy company fronting for the Chinese government.
All of which means that Uncle
Joe Biden’s career as the Democratic tranquilizer may have about the half-life
of that Xanax tablet. The four pillars of the legacy media — The New York
Times, The WashPo, CNN, and NBC — don’t want to touch these stories,
but they are already out there, and nobody can stuff them back under the
carpet, not even the mighty censors of Twitter and Facebook.
The Definition of The Kilogram Just Changed Forever
Tomorrow The Definition of The
Kilogram Will Change Forever. Here's What That Really Means
MICHELLE STARR
19 MAY 2019
Finally, 130 years after it
was established, the kilogram as we know it is about to be retired. But it's
not the end: tomorrow, 20 May 2019, a new definition will be put in place - one
that's far more accurate than anything we've had until now.
After the shift was
unanimously voted
in at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles at
the end of last year, the change is now finally about to become official. Le
kilogramme est mort, vive le kilogramme.
Most people don't think about
metrology - the science of measurement - as we go about our day. But it's
vastly important. It's not just the system by which we measure the world; it's
also the system by which scientists conduct their observations.
It needs to be precise, and it
needs to be constant, preferably based on the laws of our Universe as we know
it.
But of the seven base units of
the International
System of Units (SI), four are not currently based on the constants of
physics: the ampere (current), kelvin (temperature), mole (amount of substance)
and kilogram (mass).
"The idea,"
explained Emeritus Director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures
(BIPM) Terry Quinn to ScienceAlert, "is that by having all the units based
on the constants of physics, they are by definition stable and unaltering in
the future, and universally accessible everywhere."
For example, a metre is
determined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a
second. A second is determined by the time it takes for a caesium atom to
oscillate 9,192,631,770 times.
A kilogram is defined by… a
kilogram.
No, literally. It's a kilogram
weight called the International
Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK), made in 1889 from 90 percent platinum
and 10 percent iridium, and kept in a special vault in the BIPM headquarters.
In fact, the kilogram is the
only base unit in the SI still defined by a physical object.
There are copies of the IPK in
various locations around the world, which are used as national standards and
occasionally sent back to France to be compared against the prototype.
And that's where things get
interesting - the mass of these copies has been observed to be drifting away from
that of the IPK locked away in the vault. It's unclear whether the
copies were losing mass or the IPK was
gaining mass, but neither scenario is ideal for scientific precision, even
if we're dealing with mere micrograms.
For the last
few years, metrologists have been talking about the need for a new
standard. Now, they're finally ready to redefine the kilogram based on the
Planck constant, the ratio of energy to frequency of a photon, measured to its
most precise value yet only
last year.
"It is only now that we
can define the kilogram in terms of a constant of physics - the Planck
constant, the speed of light and the resonant frequency of the caesium
atom," Quinn explained.
"Why all three? This is
because the units of the Planck constant are kgm2s-1, so we need first to have
defined the metre (in terms of the speed of light) and the second (in terms of
the caesium atom in the atomic clock)."
So under the new definition,
the magnitude
of a kilogram would be "set by fixing the numerical value of the
Planck constant to be equal to exactly 6.626 069… × 10–34 when it is
expressed in the SI unit s–1 m2 kg, which is equal to J s."
That won't make any
perceivable difference to most people's lives at all - a kilogram of apples
before the change is still going to be a kilogram of apples after the change -
but it will make a difference to metrologists in particular, and scientists in general.
Because, as noted, base unit
standards can rely on other base units. The candela, the ampere, and the mole
will be redefined to greater accuracy based on the kilogram. And, as for
scientists...
"[The new definition]
will considerably improve the understanding and elegance of teaching about
units," Quinn said. "It will open up the way to unlimited
improvements in accuracy of measurements, it will improve greatly the accuracy
and extend the possibilities of making accurate measurements at very small and
very large quantities."
It will be the end of an era,
truly - and also the beginning of a new one.
As for the IPK itself, the
small piece of metal that has been so important for so many years will continue
to be kept in the same conditions it always has, under two bell jars in a
climate-controlled vault.
That's partly to honour its
legacy; but scientists will always be scientists. It will also be studied
"in future years and decades we can observe how much its mass
changes," Quinn said, this time against the new, immutable definition of
the kilogram. So finally we'll be able to tell for sure if it has actually been
losing mass all this time.
Quinn also noted that, while
it may look complex, the new system can actually be easily understood by
anyone. He himself built a simple
balance out of Lego in his basement that can measure directly against
the Planck constant, within 5 percent.
"School children,"
he said, "will be able to have immense fun with this."
The new kilogram definition
will come into effect on World
Metrology Day: 20 May 2019.
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