Posts Tagged ‘carbon capture’
“You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet”*…
The first two installments of what will be an on-going series from ProPublica and Drilled, covering fossil fuel companies in the 1990s who, even as they denied the reality of climate change, were quietly funding research that favored climate fixes that would protect their businesses…
An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that fossil fuel companies have been funding climate research at prestigious U.S. universities for more than 30 years. Their support has helped amplify the work of scientists who promote the idea that we can stop the climate crisis without breaking our dependence on oil, gas, and coal.
The research produced by those schools in turn shaped global climate models, as well as the policy and technology solutions adopted by governments around the world.
Ultimately, it fostered a misperception that climate change could be solved without dramatically curtailing fossil fuels — a notion that has delayed emissions cuts by decades.
Corporate funders sponsored entire centers, paid the salaries of researchers, kept offices on campus and in some cases had veto power over projects.
Companies maintain they are supporting innovation and needed science. Universities say that with safeguards, sponsorship enhances research programs while preserving academic independence.
Still, the impact of funding constitutes a pattern that Benjamin Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at University of Oxford, called the “colonization of academia.”…
“Why Carbon Capture Can’t Conceivably Solve Climate Change“- For decades, oil companies have funded universities’ research into climate change “solutions” that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas. Carbon capture is one of their favored ideas. One snag: It won’t fix the climate crisis. From Katie Worth and Lucas Waldron.
“How Oil Execs Shaped A Landmark Climate Study“- BP created an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels. Its key work, a paper known as “Wedges,” shaped climate discourse for a generation. From Maddie Stone.
As the first piece concludes…
Climate experts know about the costs, technical troubles, and failures of CCS [Carbon Capture and Sequestration] test projects.
Yet many of them have continued to boost the technology, even as they have downplayed solutions showing greater progress.
For example, the same modelers who overestimated the potential of geological carbon storage repeatedly underestimated solar power — one of the energy technologies that would allow more oil to remain in the ground.
A distressing– but critically important– read. How the fossil fuel industry turned the plan to solve climate change into a plan to save itself: “Carbon Captured,” from @propublica.org and @drilledmedia.bsky.social.
And as a reminder that, while climate change is certainly reason enough, it’s by no means the only reason to care: “Five Americans die every hour from toxic vehicle emissions, study finds.”
* Bill McKibben
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As we face facts, we might give ourselves a short break on this, the anniversary of “Raspberry Beret,” by Prince & The Revolution, hitting #1 on the charts in 1985.
Here is the official video (now in 4K). Directed by his Purple Majesty himself, it features graphics and animation from Drew Takahashi, George Evelyn, and the crew at Colossal Pictures.
“In every grain of sand there is the story of the earth”*…
A pair of palm-tree-fringed coves form two narrow notches, about a quarter of a mile apart, along the shoreline of an undisclosed island somewhere in the Caribbean.
After a site visit in early March, researchers with the San Francisco nonprofit Project Vesta determined that the twin inlets provided an ideal location to study an obscure method of capturing the carbon dioxide driving climate change.
Later this year, Project Vesta plans to spread a green volcanic mineral known as olivine, ground down to the size of sand particles, across one of the beaches. The waves will further break down the highly reactive material, accelerating a series of chemical reactions that pull the greenhouse gas out of the air and lock it up in the shells and skeletons of mollusks and corals.
This process, along with other forms of what’s known as enhanced mineral weathering, could potentially store hundreds of trillions of tons of carbon dioxide, according to a National Academies report last year. That’s far more carbon dioxide than humans have pumped out since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike methods of carbon removal that rely on soil, plants, and trees, it would be effectively permanent. And Project Vesta at least believes it could be cheap, on the order of $10 per ton of stored carbon dioxide once it’s done on a large scale.
But there are huge questions around this concept as well…
Scientists are taking a harder look at using carbon-capturing rocks to counteract climate change, but lots of uncertainties remain: “How green sand could capture billions of tons of carbon dioxide.”
* Rachel Carson
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As we contemplate carbon, we might send airy birthday greetings to F. Sherwood Rowland; he was born on this date in 1927. A chemist whose research focused on atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics, he is best-remembered for his discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion– for which he shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
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