Name a carbon capture technology that is fully proven, used the world over, pumps out oxygen, and improves wellbeing at the same time? There’s only one answer: trees. As trees grow they feed on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and trap it in the form of wood: as long as the wood exists, the carbon is captured and not released back into the atmosphere. This makes wood not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative, as a building material.
When I met the architect Andrew Waugh earlier this year, on assignment for the BBC, I was struck by the simplicity of the solution he is proposing. Waugh likes to build with wood. As a young architect he used to be, he admits, something of a show-off, with a penchant for fast cars and sexy designs. Now he drives an unassuming electric car (less Tesla, more hatchback) and builds functional, commercial tower blocks out of wood. The reason is climate change. He wants wood to replace concrete and steel as the world’s primary building material, and in so doing grow more forests, and sequester more carbon. …
Unlike climate change, air pollution is hyper-local — and somewhat in your control
We often speak of climate change and air pollution in one breath, but in fact, the two problems differ in significant ways. While carbon emissions from one country contribute to the changing climate globally, the same is not so true of air quality. There are some transboundary air quality issues, with one country’s pollution blowing over their borders into neighboring states, but for the most part, the pollution is hyper-local. The most dangerous particles are the smallest ones, nanoparticles, which only exist within meters of their source (typically traffic fumes). The lifespan of nitrogen dioxide is also typically no more than a day, and often much less, meaning it can’t get very far — you won’t find any in remote rural regions. …
Wave energy has had many false dawns. But now a company from Finland has a working 2MW prototype up and running in Portugal. Has wave power finally been cracked?
Wave energy is generated by using the power as a wave rolls towards shore to spin a turbine or pump hydraulic pistons. The energy is determined by wave speed, wave height, and the ‘fetch’ — the distance over which the wave has travelled. …
One image, two very different responses. A group of combine harvesters process across a vast, dusty field, harvesting a crop that expands beyond the horizon. One take, when tweeted by a farming union (I cannot name them because they have since deleted the tweet), was how it highlighted the natural beauty of the agricultural countryside. Another response, from the animal welfare charity Compassion in World Farming, is rather that such scenes are evidence of “a faceless, heartless, relentless machine… Intensive farming causes immense harm to wildlife and is one of the biggest drivers of species extinction on the planet.”
The scene above also depicts a battleground. Feeding a world population expected to grow by 2.2 billion by 2050 will involve huge changes in agricultural production and diet. Currently, just four crops — wheat, soy, rice and corn — are grown on almost half the world’s agricultural lands. These four crops are typically vast monocrops with high levels of fossil-fuel derived fertiliser and pesticide leading to low-levels of biodiversity. …
Autonomous cars are coming — but this could be bad news for the air we breathe. During Tesla’s recent “autonomy day”, Elon Musk boasted that autonomous taxis will roll out as soon as next year (2020). Buying anything other than a car without fully autonomous software and hardware will be like “owning a horse”, said Musk. He envisages that all Tesla owners will soon sit back and let their car drive for them — and when they aren’t using it, let it ply the streets as a ‘Robotaxi’, earning the owner money while they sleep. …
At my local train station, diesel plumes shimmer in the air above each train that pauses to disgorge both passengers and particulate pollution. In London’s Marylebone station — my usual end destination — trains revving their engines at the start of their journey blow thick puffs of black smoke, like smokers clearing their lungs first thing in the morning.
Breathing diesel fumes is bad news. I spent a lot of time researching diesel pollution for my upcoming book about air pollution, Clearing The Air. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) named diesel exhaust as a probable carcinogen way back in the 1980s. By 2012, the IARC upgraded diesel to ‘definitely ’ carcinogenic to humans. Diesel has big advantages for transport operators, because it is relatively cheap and efficient compared to petrol. …
There’s a lot of doom and gloom about the pace of decarbonisation. But it is happening, and we should celebrate the victories. Here’s my top 10 reasons to be cheerful about renewable energy taking over from fossil fuels.
Forget Nuclear Fusion. There’s a future energy source that has been proven, piloted, and is accessible to any coastal nation. Salinity gradient power — more simply known as ‘blue energy’ — is an idea that has been kicking around since the 1950s. When the mouth of a river meets the sea, huge volumes of freshwater meet salty seawater. As the salinity of the seawater mixes into the freshwater, the two waters diffuse quickly to reach an equilibrium. This mixing process releases energy: as much, in fact, as the same volume of water falling from a 250 meter high hydroelectric dam.
The potential power available was estimated in the 1970s (based on average ocean salinity and global river discharges) to be between 1.4 and 2.6TW …
Ok, it sounds like something out of Austin Powers (“sharks with fricking laser beams on their heads!”). But the future of sea fishing could well be electric pulses and laser beams, not nets, hooks and metal chains.
Commercial sea fishing has long been criticised as unsustainable and ecologically damaging, especially for bottom-dwelling species. The current catch methods of choice include bottom-trawling, beam-trawling and dredging. Bottom trawl nets as long as a football fields and as wide as a three-storey buildings drag along the ocean floor, catching everything in their path and crushing bottom-dwelling species like crabs and coral. According to Greenpeace, “one thing all trawlers have in common is that they basically core a hole through the ocean [and] catch a lot of things they’re not trying to catch — unmarketable fish, marine mammals, even seabirds.” Meanwhile dredging and beam trawling do much the same, only with the addition of solid metal chains, bars and rakes as, literally plowing the ocean-floor, devastating ocean ecosystems. …
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