Australian startup Gelion is seeking to commercialize a non-flow zinc-bromide battery based on a stable gel replacing a flowing electrolyte. According to the manufacturer, the device is safe, robust and recyclable. //

but when the company began its deep design studies with an undisclosed global partner during the pandemic, it arrived at the conclusion the smartest way to commercialize the Endure battery would be to switch the design to a parallel plate lead-acid format.

The battery is described as suitable for for irrigation, water purification and desalination systems, remote communities, mining facilities and agriculture.

Two things preceded this decision. The first was the complexity of building new manufacturing capability, and the second was the fact access to capital for such an endeavor is effectively hamstrung in Australia due to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s rules.

“If you want to produce something in a factory here, you need to have a factory reference plant the same size or bigger that has been operating for two years and that allows you to have full emissions data of the factory. That means you can never build a new factory here for new technology because you’ve got to prove it somewhere and you can’t prove it here,” said Maschmeyer. “If you can hook onto something that already exists, it’s much better …"

The COP26 international climate-change negotiations have just begun in Glasgow, Scotland, and the vibes are … ambivalent. The leaders of Russia and China haven’t bothered to attend, but did promise to help end deforestation by 2030—though many observers are skeptical that they will keep their word. In the United States, President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan lost a powerful provision that would have helped convert the nation’s electricity grid to renewable energy, but still includes an unprecedented $555 billion to combat climate change. //

Brian O’Neill, the director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Maryland at College Park, has a clearer view of this question than most of us. He was one of the lead architects of the five different futures—called “shared socioeconomic pathways,” or SSPs—developed for the latest IPCC report. //

The path we seem to be on, at least for now, looks closer to SSP 2, which the authors call “Middle of the Road.” This is a world in which “social, economic, and technological trends do not shift markedly from historical patterns.” A world, in other words, in which we do not heroically rise to the occasion to fix things, but in which we also don’t get much worse than we already are. //

One thing he wants to make very clear is that all the paths, even the hottest ones, show improvements in human well-being on average. IPCC scientists expect that average life expectancy will continue to rise, that poverty and hunger rates will continue to decline, and that average incomes will go up in every single plausible future, simply because they always have. “There isn’t, you know, like a Mad Max scenario among the SSPs,” O’Neill said. Climate change will ruin individual lives and kill individual people, and it may even drag down rates of improvement in human well-being, but on average, he said, “we’re generally in the climate-change field not talking about futures that are worse than today.” //

But the world we are heading toward may be one in which the average human is living longer and making more money than ever, but some vulnerable humans and many nonhumans are collateral damage.

This is why many climate activists frame global warming as a problem of justice.

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Alex Epstein, founder of Center for Industrial Progress, joins Federalist Western Correspondent Tristan Justice to make “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” discuss the Biden administration’s out-of-touch climate goals, and explain why nuclear energy, which is often overlooked, could actually help solve American energy problems.

“We have restricted coal and natural gas in particular, as well as oil, so much on the promise that green energy would replace them and that has not happened. So when there’s an increased demand for energy, we need fossil fuels but you don’t have as many because they’re being restricted in terms of their production and transport,” Epstein said.

Epstein said the panic surrounding climate change and energy is “total distortion.”

“It’s really instructive that almost all the people talking about climate catastrophe in the future do not recognize the climate renaissance of the present,” Epstein said. “So I mentioned that if I would trust at all the solar and wind people if they acknowledge that solar and wind are a failure now, but they have some great argument about the future, but they claim their success now which means they’re definitely gonna be wrong about the future. Exact same thing with climate. If you acknowledge that we have the most livable climate ever, thanks to fossil fuels and what I call climate mastery, then I’ll listen to you if you say there’s a problem in the future, but if you portray today as unprecedented climate danger, then you are a total liar or just unbelievably ignorant.” //

Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was created in 1975, there have been ZERO nuclear plants that have gone through the entire regulatory process (plants built after that were approved before NRC was established).

"Environmentalists should reduce their over-reliance on apocalyptic scenarios "that tend to create feelings of helplessness and isolation among would-be supporters," Shellenberger advises. "Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech is famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision that carried a critique of the current moment within it. Imagine how history would have turned out had King given an 'I Have a Nightmare' speech instead.” Indeed, the key to a revitalized environmental movement will be the application of a belief King often expressed: Warnings of impending catastrophe, along with shame, protests and lawsuits, all have a role to play, but any movement will fail if it cannot paint an intensely attractive vision of the future, one that appeals to the mind and to the spirit."

— Richard Louv, The Oregonian, March 28, 2005

One of the nation’s largest symbols of carbon capture technology — the Kemper project — has collapsed into a pile of debris, highlighting the strategy of one of the nation’s largest utilities as it aims to decarbonize its fleet.

The project, which was half of a multimillion-dollar power plant in Mississippi intended to gasify lignite coal and store its captured carbon emissions, was imploded by Southern Co.’s Mississippi Power unit earlier this month because the equipment was no longer needed. The facility, Plant Ratcliffe, captured worldwide attention and was supposed to host the first commercial-scale carbon capture project on a large coal plant in the United States.

NASA satellite data has shown that anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of improvements in key U. S. crop yields since 1940 could potentially be attributed to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to human activity, according to a new paper from Columbia University’s Charles A. Taylor and Wolfram Schlenker.

The authors noted that their findings are “on the very high end of the range found in the literature.”

“Taylor and Schlenker’s numbers are 10–100 times as large as previous estimates,” Richard S.J. Tol, a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex, told The Epoch Times via email. //

Their models were based on data from 2015 through 2020 collected by NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory- 2 (OCO-2) satellite, which they replicated with NOAA’s CarbonTracker system. They also used county-level data on corn, soybeans, and winter wheat yields from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service. Taylor and Schlenker found that an increase of 1 part per million of carbon dioxide raised corn yields by 0.5 percent, soybean yields by 0.6 percent, and wheat yields by 0.8 percent. //

They also noted that the potentially dramatic fertilizing effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide might not be so unexpected, given how it’s used in actual agricultural greenhouses.

“The gas has long been pumped into greenhouses to spur photosynthesis and increase the yield of horticultural crops. Optimal CO2 concentrations of 900 [parts per million] have been suggested, which is over twice current ambient levels,” the authors wrote.

Taylor and Schlenker’s approach contrasts with field- and laboratorybased studies on carbon dioxide enrichment. The authors argued that such experiments “are limited in the extent to which they reflect real-world growing conditions in commercial farms at a large geographic scale.”

This band of strong wind separates cold air from the Arctic from warmer air to the south, and it's responsible for transporting weather from west to east across the US, over the Atlantic, and into Europe. It controls how wet and warm these regions are.

But according to a recent study, the jet stream is shifting north as global temperatures rise. That's because the delicate balance of warm and cold air that keeps the stream in place is getting disturbed. If greenhouse-gas emissions continue unabated, the study found, the jet stream will break out of its normal range by 2060.

"The 'onset' of the jet stream's northward migration may have already begun," Matthew Osman, a researcher at the University of Arizona's Climate Systems Center who co-authored the study, told Insider.

So, exactly why is The New Yorker giving a huge platform to this person who is advocating criminal actions to further his political aims? They’re not just reporting on it; they’re actually asking the question: should one engage in “intelligent sabotage?” as though this is a rational choice. Apparently, violence and crime is okay — if it jibes with the political cause that you embrace.

Stephen L. Miller
@redsteeze
For those keeping track at home, both the New Yorker and the New York Times are debating and soft endorsing terror acts against national pipelines in the name of climate. //

Wayne_In_Akron
@Wayne_In_Akron
ATTN: @FBI

I'm pretty sure "sabotage" is still a crime and "How to blow up a pipeline" might be part of a "conspiracy" or being an "accessory".

Perhaps you've got some "informants" who might be able to infiltrate The @NewYorker or you might even consider some proactive steps.

When we finally flew over the front of the enormous glacier after weeks of travelling, I found myself staring down at an epic vision of shattered ice. //

I was surprised how moved I was by what I'd seen. In the weeks it took to travel home, I tried to process my emotions.

I thought about the men and women who had set our camp, who flew the planes, cooked the meals, processed the rubbish and groomed the ice runways. And I thought about the scientists who have been studying the processes at work for decades.

Our research trip was only possible because of a huge chain of human enterprise culminating with the hardworking people in the UK and US whose taxes paid for it all. //

Satellite monitoring shows that the overall rate of ice loss from West Antarctica has increased five-fold over a 25-year period. This one glacier - Thwaite's glacier - alone now accounts for 4% of global sea level rise.

Needless to say, this acceleration is a result of us humans polluting the air with greenhouse gases. That fact explodes any impression that the ice is overwhelming. The opposite is true, we are overwhelming the ice. //

But I will not forget what I saw in Antarctica. It reminds us that climate change is a process that is likely to take centuries to play out, and tens of thousands of years to reverse.

Consider this: the last time CO2 levels were this high is reckoned to have been around four million years ago and it is estimated that the sea level then could have been as much as 30-40 metres higher than it is now.

That's a measure of how important the climate issue is and also explains why I'm so pleased to be given this opportunity to play a role in covering it for the BBC.

Tackling global warming will be the central project of the 21st Century and it is an incredible privilege to have been given a front row seat.

Akio Toyoda is right about one thing — Japan’s economy is heavily reliant on exports. It is common knowledge that manufacturing electric cars requires fewer workers than manufacturing vehicles with infernal combustion engines. Fewer parts means fewer workers. It’s as simple as that. //

For every job at the factory, there are 6 more among suppliers, sales people, clerical workers, banks and loan companies, and service operations, to name a few. Electric cars, with their lower demand for service and repairs, are going to play havoc with service departments at dealerships and with independent repair shops. //

Akio Toyoda is looking to save his own skin. He chooses to ignore the IPCC 6 report and all the other scientific studies that warn the Earth is getting dangerously hot for human beings. He is worried about his munificent salary and the value of his stock options instead of focusing on the problem — a lot of people are going to wake up dead over the next several decades because of global heating and the pollution from burning fossil fuels that shortens life spans.

Decaying wood releases around 10.9 gigatons of carbon worldwide every year, according to a new study by an international team of scientists.

This is roughly equivalent to 115 percent of fossil fuel emissions.

Co-author of the study Professor David Lindenmayer from The Australian National University (ANU) says it’s the first time researchers have been able to quantify the contribution of deadwood to the global carbon cycle.

“Until now, little has been known about the role of dead trees,” Professor Lindenmayer said.

“We know living trees play a vital role in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But up until now, we didn’t know what happens when those trees decompose. It turns out, it has a massive impact.”

Professor Lindenmayer said the decomposition is driven by natural processes including temperature and insects.

The sixth report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is alarming—but not surprising.

The panel’s first assessment of scientific research on climate change in 1990 found that burning fossil fuels substantially increases the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases—including carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, and nitrous oxide—causing a rise in the global mean temperature and warming up the world’s oceans.

“Consequent changes,” the first report said, “may have a significant impact on society.” //

Policy makers, scientists, and concerned citizens who pick up the final version of the report might be surprised by one thing, though: It is dedicated to an evangelical Christian who said the root problem of climate change is sin.

“Looking after the Earth is a God-given responsibility,” John Houghton once wrote. “Not to look after the Earth is a sin.”

Houghton, who died of complications related to COVID-19 in 2020 at the age of 88, was the chief editor of the first three IPCC reports and an early, influential leader calling for action on climate change.

His concerns about greenhouse gases, rising temperature averages, dying coral reefs, blistering heat waves, and increasingly extreme weather were informed by his training at as atmospheric physicist and his commitment to science. They also come out of his evangelical understanding of God, the biblical accounts of humanity’s relationship to creation, and what it means for a Christian to follow Christ. //

As Houghton saw it, some religions teach that the Earth and the material world are evil. But the Bible teaches that creation is good, and depicts humans as gardeners divinely commissioned to cultivate and care for the world.

“We are more often exploiters and spoilers rather than gardeners,” Houghton wrote. “Some Christians have misinterpreted the ‘dominion’ given to humans in Genesis 1.26 as an excuse for unbridled exploitation. However, the Genesis chapters, as do other parts of scripture, insist that human rule over creation is to be exercised under God, the ultimate ruler of creation, with the sort of care exemplified by this picture of humans as ‘gardeners.’”

Houghton began to reach out to evangelical leaders to talk to them about the coming ecological crisis. He was influential in convincing Richard Cizik, John Stott, and Rick Warren to make climate change a priority and talk about it as a spiritual problem. //

According to Malcolm, who is now preparing for ministry in the Church of England and writing a doctoral dissertation on theology and climate grief, Houghton thought it was it was impossible to convince people to protect something they didn’t love. He wanted Christians to learn to love their environment and let climate change science move them to repentance.

“Our desire to be gods drives a great deal of the destruction around us,” she said. “There is something in the work of climate science that reveals the consequence of our sin, troubles those in power, and calls for us to sit with that, but also be aware that an alternative is possible—an alternative to our sin.”

Houghton didn’t live to see the release of the sixth IPCC report or to promote it to evangelical Christians. But the scientific assessment dedicated to his memory echoes a core theme of Houghton’s life’s work: Now is the time, it says, to turn from the path of destruction.

If you listen to electric vehicle naysayers, switching to EVs is pointless because even if the cars are vastly more efficient than ones that use internal combustion engines—and they are—that doesn't take into account the amount of carbon required to build and then scrap them. Well, rest easy because it's not true. Today in the US market, a medium-sized battery EV already has 60–68 percent lower lifetime carbon emissions than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine. And the gap is only going to increase as we use more renewable electricity.

That finding comes from a white paper (.pdf) published by Georg Bieker at the International Council on Clean Transportation. The comprehensive study compares the lifetime carbon emissions, both today and in 2030, of midsized vehicles in Europe, the US, China, and India, across a wide range of powertrain types, including gasoline, diesel, hybrid EVs (HEVs), plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs), battery EVs (BEVs), and fuel cell EVs (FCEVs). (The ICCT is the same organization that funded the research into VW Group's diesel emissions.)

Nuclear energy is far safer than its reputation implies. It's also clean and reliable -- yet power plants are being phased out around the world. //

A quick thought experiment. What would the climate change debate look like if all humanity had was fossil fuels and renewables -- and then today an engineering visionary revealed a new invention: nuclear energy. That's the hypothetical posed to me by Dietmar Detering, a German entrepreneur living in New York.

"I'm sure we'd develop the hell out of it," he said, before sighing. "We're looking at a different world right now." //

Detering thinks nuclear energy could be the key to solving the climate crisis. A former member of Germany's Green Party, Detering now spends his spare time as co-chair of the Nuclear New York advocacy group. He's part of a wave of environmentalists campaigning for more nuclear energy.

Though the word evokes images of landscapes pulverized by atomic calamity -- Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima -- proponents like Detering and his colleague Eric Dawson point out that nuclear power produces huge amounts of electricity while emitting next to no carbon.

This separates it from fossil fuels, which are consistent but dirty, and renewables, which are clean but weather dependent. Contrary to their apocalyptic reputation, nuclear power plants are relatively safe. Coal power is estimated to kill around 350 times as many people per terawatt-hour of energy produced, mostly from air pollution, compared to nuclear power. //

But many scientists and experts believe nuclear power is necessary to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. "Anyone seriously interested in preventing dangerous levels of global warming should be advocating nuclear power," wrote James Hansen, a former NASA scientist credited with raising awareness of global warming in the late '80s, in a 2019 column. //

In the public imagination, nuclear power presages disaster. But the numbers tell a different story. Estimates of deaths from nuclear incidents range from less than 10,000 to around 1 million. As you can infer, it's a highly contested number -- but in either case dwarfed by the death toll from fossil fuel pollution. Around 8.7 million premature deaths were caused by fossil fuel pollution in 2018 alone, according to a February Harvard study.

Last year, a pipeline carrying compressed carbon dioxide mixed with hydrogen sulfide ruptured, engulfing the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, in a green haze, leaving many residents convulsing, confused, or unconscious. That explosion serves as a vivid warning about the risks posed by what could be the next generation of pipelines to crisscross the US, in a new investigation by HuffPost and the Climate Investigations Center. //

The story is a scathing investigation of the company, Denbury, that operates the pipeline, which did little to nothing to warn local officials and residents about the danger they faced, according to Zegart’s reporting. It’s also probably the closest thing to a PSA on the risks other communities could face if proposals to build out tens of thousands of miles of CO2 pipelines come to fruition.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gassing-satartia-mississippi-co2-pipeline_n_60ddea9fe4b0ddef8b0ddc8f

Since Gore’s 2006 propaganda piece, there have probably been hundreds of films over the past 15 years that have focused on the global warming climate change crisis. Maybe if they’d decide on a name to call it, it might help.

Just how many more of these films do we really need? //

2017 New York Times article had this to say about the dearth of filmmaking focused on the climate crisis:

So, said Mr. Hoffman, the University of Michigan professor, we need “more movies, more TV, more music.”

“We have to touch people’s hearts on this,” he said. “It’s critical.”

Four years later, and Ms. Greta Thunberg is bemoaning the same thing.

Although agreeing with Thunberg, Nesbo acknowledged the topic is “not an easy sell,” particularly because we are in the middle of the climate crisis with no idea how it will end.

“If you look at all the crises in the world, you see that much of the storytelling doesn’t take place

Blue hydrogen’s Achilles’ heel is the methane used to produce it. Methane is the dominant component of natural gas, and while it burns more cleanly than oil or coal, it’s a potent greenhouse gas on its own. Over 20 years, one ton of the stuff warms the atmosphere 86 times more than one ton of carbon dioxide. That means leaks along the supply chain can undo a lot of methane’s climate advantages.

Anyone who lives in an area with old pipelines knows that gas leaks are an unfortunate reality. Methane is a small molecule, and it’s great at finding cracks in the system. Gas wells and processing facilities are also pretty leaky. Add it all up, and anywhere between 1-8 percent of all energy-related methane escapes into the atmosphere, depending on where and how it's measured. //

“Combined emissions of carbon dioxide and methane are greater for gray hydrogen and for blue hydrogen (whether or not exhaust flue gases are treated for carbon capture) than for any of the fossil fuels,” Howarth and Jacobson wrote. “Methane emissions are a major contributor to this, and methane emissions from both gray and blue hydrogen are larger than for any of the fossil fuels.”

The media frames the climate crisis as if there were no solutions or action to be taken. //

• Yes, the climate news is bad, but there's action to be taken.
  Our hopelessness comes from a media system that doesn't place the blame on corporations to protect their bottom line.
  We have to change our media diet if we want to feel less hopeless about climate change.
  P.E. Moskowitz is an author, runs Mental Hellth, a newsletter about capitalism and psychology, and is a contributing opinion writer for Insider. //

The climate crisis news is constant: Wildfires start earlier and earlier in the year in California, extreme weather floods places not built to handle extreme weather, the Arctic is melting, and the world keeps getting hotter — all with no sign of stopping. And now the UN has said we can't avoid many of the worst impacts of global warming, no matter how hard we try.

Given the overwhelming negativity, it makes sense that people are either in denial about the magnitude of the problem, or end up feeling hopeless, defeated, and without recourse. The media spent the last few decades simply convincing people the issue was real. But that war has been won: Only 10% percent of Americans don't believe in the climate crisis at this point.

Now, we face a new problem: None of us know what to do.

While a large majority of Americans agree we need to act on the climate crisis, no one seems to know exactly what we should do, except push our government to do more. 40% of people who believe in climate change feel "helpless" about it.

But this helplessness is not an inevitable result of the severity of the crisis — severe as it may be. Instead, it's a conditioned response to a world in which the most powerful politicians and corporations want to cast the issue as too difficult and overly complex. To protect their bottom line, those in power want to obfuscate what should be an obvious truth: We can only stop global warming if we end fossil fuel extraction. And we can only do that through direct action, protest, and political revolt.

Wyoming’s political leadership, while making no bones about their total support for coal, announced that Bill Gates’ advanced nuclear venture, TerraPower, had selected Wyoming and a yet-to-be-determined retiring Rocky Mountain Power coal plant, as the site to build and operate the first sodium-cooled advanced Natrium™ reactor, with matching funding from the DOE’s ARDP program.

The Governor’s plan to test the conversion of coal plants to new nuclear is being supported with a combination of private and federal funding as well as advance work by Wyoming’s legislature, which passed HB 74 with overwhelming bipartisan support, allowing utilities and other power plant owners to replace retiring coal and natural gas electric generation plants with small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). The bill was signed by the Governor immediately and is now House Enrolled Act 60.

Wyoming will see the development of a first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear power plant that validates the design, construction and operational features of the Natrium technology and enables Wyoming, which currently leads the country in coal exports, to get a lead in the form of energy best suited to replace coal—built right at coal plants, potentially around the world. This conversion path not only reuses some of the physical infrastructure at the coal plant but also takes advantage of the skilled people and supporting community that have been operating that plant. //

What makes this announcement truly “game-changing and monumental” in the Governor’s own words, is just how cost-effective and efficient converting a coal plant to advanced nuclear might be. According to the Polish study, retrofitting coal boilers with high-temperature small modular nuclear reactors as a way to decarbonize the plant can lower upfront capital costs by as much as 35% and reduce the levelized cost of electricity by as much as 28% when compared to a greenfield installation.

Journalists, experts, and elected officials are today blaming heat wave deaths, forest fires, and electricity shortages in New York, California, and Texas on climate change, but the underlying cause of those events is lack of air conditioning, lack of electricity, and the failure to properly manage forests, not marginal changes to temperatures.

It’s true that there have been more heat waves in the United States since 1960, and that higher temperatures dry out the dead wood in forests, contributing to a greater area burned by forest fires. “Climate dries the [wood] fuels out and extends the fire season from 4-6 months to nearly year-round,” US Forest Service scientist Malcolm North explained to me last summer.

But what determines whether people die in heat waves is whether or not they have air conditioning, not whether temperatures rose to 111° instead of 109°. Proof of that comes from the fact that heat-related deaths declined in the US by 50% to 75% since 1960 thanks entirely to air conditioning, even as heat waves grew in frequency, intensity, and length.

What determines whether a fire in a forest is high-intensity or low-intensity is the amount of wood fuel. Climate change is “not the cause of the intensity of the [mountain forest] fires,” stressed North. “The cause of that is fire suppression and the existing debt of wood fuel.”

And what determines whether or not there is enough electricity is whether there are sufficient “baseload,” reliable power plants and fuels, not marginally higher use of air conditioners. The people who manage electricity grids knew perfectly well that it could be hot last summer, hot this summer, and that a cold snap like the one that occurred in Texas in February was likely, since worse cold snaps had occurred in the past.

The main reason there aren’t enough reliable power plants is because progressive activists, scientists, and journalists successfully persuaded policymakers to shut them down, not build them, or not operate them.