Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Naomi Klein and Youth Environmental Leaders to Join Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez in Iowa for Climate Crisis Summit
"We've never seen
something like this in U.S. history. In 2020, Green New Deal voters could
determine who wins the Iowa caucuses, and from there the presidency."
Monday, November 04, 2019
Author and environmentalist
Naomi Klein, U.S. Youth Climate Strike co-founder Isra Hirsi, and Sunrise
Movement leader Zina Precht-Rodriguez are among those slated to join Sen.
Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Iowa on Saturday for a "Climate
Crisis Summit" focused on the urgent need for a Green New Deal.
"The climate crisis is an
international challenge and we are ready to take it on with a Green New
Deal," Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said Monday in
a tweet promoting
the summit, which is set
to take place at Drake University in Des Moines.
The event, as Vox reported Monday,
is part of the Sanders campaign's push to win the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses with an
ambitious climate message and policy platform. In August, Sanders unveiled
a sweeping
Green New Deal proposal calling for a 10-year mobilization to transition
the U.S. economy to 100 percent renewable energy while creating 20 million
decent-paying union jobs in the process.
"Sen. Bernie Sanders
wants to be the new climate candidate of the 2020 presidential race—and his
campaign is betting it can win them Iowa," Vox reported Monday.
The youth-led Sunrise Movement
tweeted in response to Vox's story that the country has "never seen
something like this."
"In 2020, Green New Deal
voters could determine who wins the Iowa caucuses, and from there the
presidency," the group said.
The Sanders campaign said in a
statement that the summit on Saturday "is set to be one of the largest
gatherings in Iowa to confront climate change." The event will feature
national climate leaders like Hirsi and Precht-Rodriguez as well as local Iowa
activists.
"Sen. Sanders probably
has the most intensive climate plan on the circuit right now," Hirsi
told Vox. "I think a lot of young people are hearing Sanders' message
and waking up."
"The climate crisis is
everything," Hirsi added. "It's healthcare, it's racial justice, it's
criminal justice—everything. It's our lives on the line; lives are already
being lost because of it."
The day after the Climate
Crisis Summit, Sanders plans to go on a "Green Jobs Tour" across
Iowa's conservative fourth congressional district.
Bill Neidhardt, the Sanders
campaign's deputy state director in Iowa, predicted the Vermont senator's bold
climate message will have broad appeal among Iowa voters.
"Climate is typically
seen as an issue for young voters but we reject the notion that climate only
engages young voters," Neidhardt told Vox. "We think a strong
focus on climate, especially on the economic issues, can really turn the
tide."
Engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide from air
The process could work on the
gas at any concentrations, from power plant emissions to open air
October 25, 2019
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
A new way of removing carbon
dioxide from a stream of air could provide a significant tool in the battle
against climate change. The new system can work on the gas at virtually any
concentration level, even down to the roughly 400 parts per million currently
found in the atmosphere.
A new way of removing carbon
dioxide from a stream of air could provide a significant tool in the battle
against climate change. The new system can work on the gas at virtually any
concentration level, even down to the roughly 400 parts per million currently
found in the atmosphere.
Most methods of removing
carbon dioxide from a stream of gas require higher concentrations, such as
those found in the flue emissions from fossil fuel-based power plants. A few
variations have been developed that can work with the low concentrations found in
air, but the new method is significantly less energy-intensive and expensive,
the researchers say.
The technique, based on
passing air through a stack of charged electrochemical plates, is described in
a new paper in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, by MIT
postdoc Sahag Voskian, who developed the work during his PhD, and T. Alan
Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering.
The device is essentially a
large, specialized battery that absorbs carbon dioxide from the air (or other
gas stream) passing over its electrodes as it is being charged up, and then
releases the gas as it is being discharged. In operation, the device would
simply alternate between charging and discharging, with fresh air or feed gas
being blown through the system during the charging cycle, and then the pure,
concentrated carbon dioxide being blown out during the discharging.
As the battery charges, an
electrochemical reaction takes place at the surface of each of a stack of
electrodes. These are coated with a compound called polyanthraquinone, which is
composited with carbon nanotubes. The electrodes have a natural affinity for
carbon dioxide and readily react with its molecules in the airstream or feed
gas, even when it is present at very low concentrations. The reverse reaction
takes place when the battery is discharged -- during which the device can
provide part of the power needed for the whole system -- and in the process
ejects a stream of pure carbon dioxide. The whole system operates at room
temperature and normal air pressure.
"The greatest advantage
of this technology over most other carbon capture or carbon absorbing
technologies is the binary nature of the adsorbent's affinity to carbon
dioxide," explains Voskian. In other words, the electrode material, by its
nature, "has either a high affinity or no affinity whatsoever,"
depending on the battery's state of charging or discharging. Other reactions
used for carbon capture require intermediate chemical processing steps or the
input of significant energy such as heat, or pressure differences.
"This binary affinity
allows capture of carbon dioxide from any concentration, including 400 parts
per million, and allows its release into any carrier stream, including 100
percent CO2," Voskian says. That is, as any gas flows through the stack of
these flat electrochemical cells, during the release step the captured carbon
dioxide will be carried along with it. For example, if the desired end-product
is pure carbon dioxide to be used in the carbonation of beverages, then a
stream of the pure gas can be blown through the plates. The captured gas is
then released from the plates and joins the stream.
In some soft-drink bottling
plants, fossil fuel is burned to generate the carbon dioxide needed to give the
drinks their fizz. Similarly, some farmers burn natural gas to produce carbon
dioxide to feed their plants in greenhouses. The new system could eliminate
that need for fossil fuels in these applications, and in the process actually
be taking the greenhouse gas right out of the air, Voskian says. Alternatively,
the pure carbon dioxide stream could be compressed and injected underground for
long-term disposal, or even made into fuel through a series of chemical and
electrochemical processes.
The process this system uses
for capturing and releasing carbon dioxide "is revolutionary" he
says. "All of this is at ambient conditions -- there's no need for
thermal, pressure, or chemical input. It's just these very thin sheets, with
both surfaces active, that can be stacked in a box and connected to a source of
electricity."
"In my laboratories, we
have been striving to develop new technologies to tackle a range of
environmental issues that avoid the need for thermal energy sources, changes in
system pressure, or addition of chemicals to complete the separation and
release cycles," Hatton says. "This carbon dioxide capture technology
is a clear demonstration of the power of electrochemical approaches that
require only small swings in voltage to drive the separations."
In a working plant -- for
example, in a power plant where exhaust gas is being produced continuously --
two sets of such stacks of the electrochemical cells could be set up side by
side to operate in parallel, with flue gas being directed first at one set for
carbon capture, then diverted to the second set while the first set goes into
its discharge cycle. By alternating back and forth, the system could always be
both capturing and discharging the gas. In the lab, the team has proven the
system can withstand at least 7,000 charging-discharging cycles, with a 30
percent loss in efficiency over that time. The researchers estimate that they
can readily improve that to 20,000 to 50,000 cycles.
The electrodes themselves can
be manufactured by standard chemical processing methods. While today this is
done in a laboratory setting, it can be adapted so that ultimately they could
be made in large quantities through a roll-to-roll manufacturing process
similar to a newspaper printing press, Voskian says. "We have developed
very cost-effective techniques," he says, estimating that it could be
produced for something like tens of dollars per square meter of electrode.
Compared to other existing
carbon capture technologies, this system is quite energy efficient, using about
one gigajoule of energy per ton of carbon dioxide captured, consistently. Other
existing methods have energy consumption which vary between 1 to 10 gigajoules
per ton, depending on the inlet carbon dioxide concentration, Voskian says.
The researchers have set up a
company called Verdox to commercialize the process, and hope to develop a
pilot-scale plant within the next few years, he says. And the system is very
easy to scale up, he says: "If you want more capacity, you just need to
make more electrodes."
Story Source:
Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Original written by David L. Chandler. Note: Content may
be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Sahag Voskian, T. Alan
Hatton. Faradaic electro-swing reactive adsorption for CO2 capture. Energy
& Environmental Science, 2019; DOI: 10.1039/C9EE02412C
'System deadlock': Joker artistically diagnoses modern world's ills – Zizek
3 Nov, 2019 20:31 /
Updated 18 hours ago
Seen as a potential validation
for violent glory seekers, the 'Joker' movie turns out to be not an incitement
for violence but a judgement on the modern political system's flaws,
philosopher Slavoj Zizek says.
The much acclaimed Todd
Phillips movie starring Joaquin Phoenix has received its fair share of
criticism from almost everyone, from the woke community to the US Army, who all
believed it could prompt some "evil" people to commit acts of
violence.
Yet, the film's critics have
apparently overlooked the underlying message of the movie, world-renowned
philosopher Zizek told RT, adding that it is not about some mentally-challenged
person, but about the "hopelessness" of our "best ever"
political order itself, which many still simply refuse to accept.
Daily life has become a horror
movie
We should congratulate
Hollywood and the viewers on two things: that such a film that, let's face it,
gives a very dark image of highly developed capitalism, a nightmarish image
which led some critics to designate it a 'social horror film', came out.
Usually, we have social films, which depict social problems, and then we have
horror films. To bring these two genres together, it is only possible when many
phenomena in our ordinary social life become phenomena which belong to horror
films.
It is even more interesting to
see how reactions to the film provide a whole specter of political cohesions in
the US. On the one hand, conservatives were afraid that this film would incite
violence. It was an absurd claim. No violence was triggered by this film. On
the contrary, the film depicts violence and awakens you to the danger of
violence.
As it is always the case, some
politically correct people feared that the film used racist clichés and
celebrates violence. It is also unfair. One of the most interesting positions
was that of Michael Moore, a leftist documentarist, who celebrated the film as
an honest depiction of reality of those poor, excluded and not covered by
healthcare in the US.
His idea is that the film
explains how figures like Joker can arise. It is a critical portrayal of
reality in the US, which can give birth to people like Joker. I agree with him
but I would also like to go a bit further.
'Deadlock of nihilism'
I think what is important is
that the figure of Joker in the end, when he identifies with his mask, is a
figure of extreme nihilism, self-destructive violence and a crazy laughter at
others' despair. There is not positive political project.
The way we should read 'Joker' is
that it very wisely abstains from providing a positive image. A leftist
critique of 'Joker' could have been: "Yes, it is a good
portrayal of reality in the poor slums of the US but where is the positive
force? Where are democratic socialists, where are ordinary people organizing
themselves?" In this case, it would have been a totally different and a
pretty boring film.
The logic of this film is that
it leaves it to the spectators to do this. The movie shows sad social reality
and a deadlock of the nihilist reaction. In the end, Joker is not free. He is
only free in a sense of arriving at a point of total nihilism.
It is up to us to decide what
we should do.
I designated the figure of
Joker in a kind of Kazimir Malevich, the Russian avangardist, position when he
did this famous painting of the Black Square. It is a kind of minimal protest –
a reduction to nothing. Joker simply mocks every authority. It is destructive
but lacks a positive project. We have to go through this path of despair.
It is not enough to play the
game of those in power. That is the message of 'Joker'. The fact that they
could be charitable like Bruce Wayne's father in this latest movie is just a
part of the game. You have to get rid of all these liberal stupidities that
obfuscate the despair of the situation.
Yet, it is not the final step
but a zero level of clearing the table to open up the space for something new.
This is how I read the film. It is not a final decadent vision. We have to go
through this hell. Now, it is up to us to go further.
Social alarm clock
The danger of explaining just
the backstory is to give a kind of a rational explanation that we should
understand the figure of Joker. But Joker does not need this. Joker is a
creative person in some sense. The crucial moment in the film for his subjective
change is when he says: "I used to think my life was a tragedy. But now I
realize, it's a comedy."
Comedy means for me that at
that point he accepts himself in all his despair as a comical figure and gets
rid of the last constraints of the old world. That is what he does for us. He
is not a figure to imitate. It is wrong to think that what we see towards the
end of the film – Joker celebrated by others – is the beginning of some new
emancipatory movement. No, it is an ultimate deadlock of the existing system; a
society bent on its self-destruction.
The elegance of the film is
that it leaves the next step of building a positive alternative to it to us. It
is a dark nihilist image meant to awaken us.
Are we ready to face reality?
The leftists who are disturbed
by 'Joker' are 'Fukuyama leftists'; those who think that
the liberal democratic order is the best possible order and we should just make
it more tolerant. In this sense, everyone is a socialist today. Bill Gates says
he is for socialism, Mark Zuckerberg says he is for socialism.
The lesson of 'Joker' is that
a more radical change is needed; that this is not enough. And that is what all
those democratic leftists are not aware of. This dissatisfaction that grows up
today is a serious one. The system cannot deal with it with gradual reforms,
more tolerance or better healthcare.
These are signs of the need
for more radical change.
The true problem is whether we
are ready to really experience the hopelessness of our situation. As Joker
himself said at a certain moment in the film: "I laugh because I have
nothing to lose, I am nobody."
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