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Daily Infographic | Learn Something New Every Day

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It's time to start looking after the environment. This is, after all, our only home. If we ruin the earth, we have no place to run. There are so many things, large and small, that we can do to reduce our impact on the environment. If each of us becomes aware of how our choices affect the environment, we can take action and reduce the damage.

Even the fabrics that we choose can make a difference. In fact, the fashion industry has recently been in the spotlight for becoming one of the largest contributors to global pollution. This infographic throws cold water on some supposedly eco-friendly fabrics and offers alternatives for the fashion-conscious environmentalist.

All of these fabrics, most of them made from natural fibers, carry a heavy environmental impact. Alternatives use fewer resources. Viscose, for example, is an artificial fiber, which is made from wood pulp. Forests are often cleared to make way for pulpwood plantations to produce the pulp for this fabric. The wood is also treated with hazardous chemicals that can enter the environment. Recycled polyester offers a great alternative as it helps to divert plastics from landfills around the world, and it makes a soft and silky fabric.

Cotton is a pesticide-intensive fiber. Pesticides are detrimental to human life and they are slowly killing off the insects that we need to sustain life on earth. Organic cotton, on the other, hand uses no pesticides and also requires no additional water.

Other sustainable fabrics include flax and hemp, harvested from plants that require fewer pesticides and less water. They are also fast and easy to grow. Let's make the right choices and save our planet.

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Choosing Fabrics That Can Save The Planet | Daily InfographicDaily Infographic

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It's time to start looking after the environment. This is, after all, our only home. If we ruin the earth, we have no place to run. There are so many things, large and small, that we can do to reduce our impact on the environment.

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Plastics contribute to climate change. How to cut back?

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As plastics corporations ramp up production, they are also promoting a failing recycling system.

Just 9% of plastics get recycled. Traditional plasticsare made from extracted oil and gas, and they contribute to the rising temperatures behind the climate crisis.

Environment experts are increasingly calling for a reduction in plastic use, as the waste accumulates in the oceans, poor countries and even human bodies. Plastics are also burned, as China - which once accepted the bulk of America's waste - has begun to refuse it. And more than a million Americans lived next to polluting incinerators.

Significant reductions will require systemic change, researchers say. But there are also some easy tips for individuals who want to cut back on plastics.

(If this list is overwhelming and you're not sure where to start, collect your plastic waste for a month and conduct an audit. Cut back on what you find the most of.)

1 Carry a reusable bottle, fork/spoon and bag

Be sure to use these items as many times as possible so they are worth the resources they take to create.

2 Refuse the lid on your coffee cup

Take a few sips before you leave the shop so you can avoid spilling. (Some coffee shops will say they are required to give you a lid, citing possible liability for burns.)

3 Choose products in glass or cans if they are an option. Recycle those materials

Plastics recycling is largely failing, but you should still try to recycle your waste plastics if they are accepted in your community. Make sure you are recycling correctly with this guide.

Glass and aluminum cans are much more likely to be recycled. Glass is most efficient when reused (ie with returnable milk bottles).

4 When possible, eat in the restaurant instead of taking it to go

Unless you have a physical disability, let your server know in advance that you won't need a straw.

5 If you order takeout or delivery, tell the restaurant you don't want plastic utensils or straws

This is an option on some food delivery apps.

6 Opt for products with less packaging. Say no to bagged lemons, apples, onions and garlic, and tea that comes in plastic packets

Choose more fresh produce for snacks to avoid individual plastic wrappers.

7 Shop from the bulk section and use your own containers

Some grocery stores will let you use pretty much any container, as long as you verify the weight of the empty container in advance.

8 Use bars of soap (also available for shampoo and shaving) instead of bottles and skip the plastic loofah

Find bars that are wrapped in paper, and for an extra environmental benefit, avoid palm oil.

9 Use a razor that requires replacing only the individual blades

The upfront expense may be daunting, but if you can afford it, you will save money over time. Note that TSA does not allow passengers to fly with individual blades.

10 Use a bamboo toothbrush or one with a replaceable head

The market for these products is growing rapidly. Most bristles will still have synthetic fibers, but you can at least avoid throwing away the brush's plastic arm every few months.

11 Buy concentrated cleaners that can be mixed with water in a reusable container.

You can find these in powder, gel and liquid form.

12 Choose frozen, concentrated juice that comes in cardboard tubes instead of the plastic jugs

Some of them taste good, and they are lighter to carry home.

13 Don't buy bottled water. Filter your own

"Bottled water is no safer than filtered tap water, but the industry doesn't have to disclose the results of its testing," according to the Environmental Working Group. The advocacy organization's Tap Water Database can help you select the best filter for your local water source.

14 Buy fewer clothes, or shop secondhand. Wash your clothes less so they last longer. Hang them to dry

Most clothing contains synthetic fibers made of plastic. These fibers shed in the wash and end up in waterways. Synthetic materials may have some advantages over natural ones, however, because they may last longer.

15 When shopping online, group as many items together as possible, so you can receive fewer plastic envelopes

You can also choose slower shipping times, which could reduce the climate footprint of your purchase.

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Recycling isn't working - here are 15 ways to shrink your plastic footprint

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Only 9% of plastics get recycled, and significant reductions will require systemic change - but there are easy tips for individuals to cut back

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What Ben & Jerry's is doing for climate change.

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The consensus of the global scientific community couldn't be more clear: Our world is already seeing the devastating effects of climate change and time is running out to act to avoid even more catastrophic consequences.

Climate Change is About Justice

Whether it's drought and devastating wildfires or accelerating rates of sea level rise and more powerful hurricanes, the real victims of a warming planet are not just polar bears and ice sheets, but people.

However, the effects of climate change are not felt equally. The cruel irony of the climate crisis is that people in the developing world-those who can least afford to adapt-will pay the steepest price for the 200 years of industrialization and pollution from the developed world. This truly is an issue of climate justice.

But There is Good News

While we know that the time to act is short, the good news is that we know what we need to do and have the technology to do it. With renewable energy sources like wind and solar, advancements in energy efficiency in homes and offices, electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, and regenerative agriculture that can capture greenhouse gas pollution, we have all the tools we need to get to work.

We also have a global movement led by young people who are tired of waiting for the grownups to take action. They have inspired millions of people, on every continent, to demand change.

The IPCC has said that avoiding the worst impacts of climate change and keeping warming below 1.5ºC would "require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society." While this may seem daunting, it's also an opportunity to create the clean-energy economy of the future.

Specifically, we must:

Put a price on carbon

Reduce carbon emissions (which means reducing fossil fuels) by at least 45% by 2030

Transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050

Stop using coal entirely

Leave fossil fuels in the ground

Divest fully from the fossil fuel industry

Stop deforestation of old growth tropical forests

Ensure support for developing countries' mitigation and adaptation

Adopt regenerative practices that turn agriculture from a source of greenhouse gas emissions to a carbon sink

What Does it Mean for Ben & Jerry's?

We understand that the greenhouse gas footprint of producing ice cream is significant. Each pint of ice cream we make produces roughly 3.3 lb. of greenhouse gases. We've worked hard over the years to reduce our emissions at all levels of our supply chain, but there is much more work to be done.

Our climate strategy is a long-range effort. In 2018, we had our climate targets approved by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi). SBTi helps companies set targets in line with the latest climate science, so that we as a business community can do our part to keep warming well below 1.5ºC. Our Science Based Targets include:

100% renewable energy by 2025

40% greenhouse gas intensity reduction by 2025

80% greenhouse gas intensity reduction by 2050

To find out how we're doing, check out our latest Social and Environmental Assessment Report (SEAR).

If it's melted, it's ruined. It's true for ice cream, and it's true for the planet.

It's going to take more than just the actions of individual companies and people to fight the climate crisis. We need to collectively call on our elected leaders to support a rapid transition to a clean-energy economy. We have all the tools we need-we just need the will to do it.

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The consensus of the global scientific community couldn't be more clear: Our world is already seeing the devastating effects of climate change and time is running out to act to avoid even more catastrophic consequences.

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It is vital to find alternative and sustainable sources of protein to meet the considerable challenge of ensuring food security for the future. Credit: Shutterstock

Does the idea of eating insects bug you?

Well, think about this: the United Nations predicts that by 2050, if current trends continue, the world's population will reach 9.8 billion. As a result, global demand for food and feed is expected to increase by 70 percent, putting additional pressure on already overexploited agricultural resources.

Global demand for meat in particular will continue to increase as dietary habits in developing countries change, due to rapid urbanization and economic growth.

The oceans are already over-exploited and climate change will have a profound impact on food production. Meanwhile, nearly one billion people worldwide suffer from chronic food deprivation.

Among the possible solutions, one is quietly making its way into the public's attention: eating insects.
Alternatives to animal protein
To meet current and future food challenges, the agri-food sector needs to be rethought. We need to find new ways to grow food, address inefficiencies and develop new approaches to production methods.

In addition to population growth, urbanization and the rise of the middle class in developing countries are increasing global demand for food, especially animal protein. The production of traditional feed ingredients such as cereals, fish meal and oilseeds must be reduced and substitutes found to make more efficient use of resources.

Some of the protein produced for livestock feed comes from sources that may be unsustainable and harmful to the environment. Credit: Shutterstock

The billions of animals raised each year for food are putting increasing pressure on land and water resources and contributing to climate change and other negative environmental impacts.

Livestock farming for meat production puts considerable pressure on global land and water use. At present, a large proportion of the protein produced for livestock feed comes from sources that are sometimes unsustainable and harmful to the environment.
Eating insects
To meet the considerable challenge of ensuring food security for the future, it is imperative to find alternative and sustainable sources of protein, both for direct human consumption and for animal feed. Insect-derived proteins are one possible solution. Insects, especially fly larvae, have many qualities that make them well adapted to animal feed.

For example, insects are already a natural source of food for pigs and poultry as well as for many fish species. In addition, insect larvae are generally high in protein and are rich in other beneficial nutrients such as fats, minerals and vitamins.

Sushi served with fried grasshoppers is popular in Thailand. Credit: Shutterstock

As a source of protein for direct human consumption, insects offer several advantages over traditional sources of meat. They have a significantly higher feed conversion rate than other livestock, which means they are more effective at converting the ingredients used to feed them into nutrients.

In addition, insect production is more environmentally friendly than conventional livestock production. Insects release much lower amounts of greenhouse gases and ammonia into the atmosphere per kilogram of meat than cattle or pigs.
Larvae that recycle
Insect larvae, in particular, are efficient consumers of a wide range of organic materials. They have the ability to "over-cycle" relatively low quality organic residues as feedstock into valuable proteins and lipids.

Although direct human consumption of insects is not widespread in Western countries, raising insects to transform organic waste streams offers an interesting opportunity to produce food ingredients for animal production. In particular, the larvae of the black soldier fly has a nutritional profile that makes them a potential ingredient to replace traditional food ingredients intended for human consumption.

Fried insects in a street kitchen in Bangkok, Thailand. Credit: Shutterstock

Multinational munching
The cultivation of insects raised specifically for domestic animals and fish has been the subject of sporadic assessments for several decades. However, the widespread adoption and commercialization of these approaches remains difficult. The methods are still artisanal and have been mainly developed and deployed in emerging countries with limited resources.

However, a convergence of factors has revived interest in this area, particularly from a number of multinationals in the agri-food sector. A combination of new municipal regulations limiting organic waste disposal and the need to find sustainable ingredients for animal feed have led to renewed interest in insects and their ability to transform organic waste into valuable food resources.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Eating insects is good for you and the planet, researchers insist

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Does the idea of eating insects bug you? Well, think about this: the United Nations predicts that by 2050, if current trends continue, the world's population will reach 9.8 billion. As a result, global demand for food and feed is expected to increase by 70 percent, putting additional pressure on already overexploited agricultural resources.

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This website would be your source to educate classmates about a local youth activist group.

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SVYCA is a youth-led nonprofit that empowers teens and young adults to combat climate change with impactful education and policy initiatives.

Youth Voices say Vote for Science in 2020!

Our youth climate activists urged 2020 voters to support candidates who prioritized climate and promised to fight for their futures.

We bring together high school students, college students, and young adults that are inspired to make a difference in averting the climate crisis. Participants learn about and develop pathways to meaningful action in their local community.

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SVYCA is a youth-led nonprofit that empowers teens and young adults to combat climate change with impactful education and policy initiatives. Our youth climate activists urged 2020 voters to support candidates who prioritized climate and promised to fight for their futures.

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Anne Cohen dropped into the ocean off the coast of the Phoenix Islands expecting to find desolation. It was 2018, and a powerful El Niño weather system two years earlier had warmed the waters around this mid-Pacific atoll by nearly 3 °C. Coral reefs simmered in the heat.

Such feverish temperatures cause the tiny animals that make up a reef to expel the colourful, symbiotic algae that nourish them. They bleach, starve and die. On her expedition to the islands, part of the nation of Kiribati, Cohen found greyish reefs in which almost 70% of corals had expired.

But she also found reason for hope.

"We'd come across these areas, I'm talking about several square kilometres, with super-high coral cover and super-high coral diversity," recalls Cohen, a marine scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Healthy taupe coral branches sprouted from a field of blonde and rose plates, while schools of gold-and-magenta anthias fish flitted to and fro.

Such places give ocean ecologists hope that even as the climate warms, corals still have a fighting chance. When these scientists hear that 70-90% of reefs could be gone by mid-century, they focus on the 30% that might live. And they're taking action to save those reefs for the future. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people depend on reefs for food, tourism income and protection from ocean storms.

Researchers and conservationists are testing many strategies to help corals. Some approaches - such as breeding or genetically manipulating corals to tolerate climate change, or sprinkling reefs with beneficial microbes - have yet to prove themselves outside of the laboratory.

But scientists are already trying out other ideas in the wild: growing and replanting corals in damaged reefs, for instance, and helping them to breed. And there's another tactic getting attention - finding the reefs that have the best natural chances of survival and helping them to stay alive. There are downsides to both of these approaches, however: breeding is impractical at large scales, and some researchers worry that focusing only on naturally resilient reefs will constrain conservation to a few niche locations.

Conservationists say that it will take a variety of strategies to save coral reefs, but the time is now. "The next decade is really our window," says Lizzie McLeod, who works in reef management at the Nature Conservancy in Alexandria, Virginia.

Half the globe's reefs are already gone. Carbon pollution heats up the ocean and turns it more acidic, making it difficult for the delicate creatures to build their calcium carbonate skeletons. Human activities such as fishing, dredging, pollution and development have also caused serious harm.

The efforts to save particular reefs are offering some hope, researchers say, but these solutions are only a stop-gap. "Unless we curb carbon emissions, none of this is going to make any difference whatsoever," says Iliana Baums, a molecular ecologist at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in University Park.

Helping hands

In the Caribbean Sea, a one-two punch of climate change and disease has hit reefs hard. "The Florida reef tract has been going downhill for the last 40 years or so," says Erinn Muller, science director of the Elizabeth Moore International Center for Coral Reef Research & Restoration at the Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium in Sarasota, Florida. "We really haven't seen any natural recovery."

So conservationists from Mote and other organizations are taking matters into their own hands. Over the past several years, the Mote laboratory's reef-restoration teams have planted almost 70,000 pieces of coral from five main species off the Florida Keys. The goal of this project, and others like it around the world, is not to replant reefs entirely, but to provide enough new corals to allow them to reproduce themselves.

Mote's coral nannies start with artificial, ocean-based nurseries. They create tree-like structures by hanging fishing line from buoys and attaching plastic branches. Then they dangle individual corals from those branches.

Once the danglers reach about the size of a basketball, divers carve out softball-sized chunks. Then Muller and her colleagues test the corals, ensuring that some in each batch have the genes to resist dangers such as diseases, heat or acidification, before the restoration crew plants them on the sea floor.

The reef begins to recover within a year, says Muller, and more fish and invertebrates move in. Eventually, the planted chunks will fuse into larger corals. From their experiences with past plantings, the researchers know that the corals will be big enough to spawn within a couple of years.

This works for fast-growing, branching corals. But some mound and boulder corals expand slowly - just a couple of millimetres per year. Mote researchers speed that up by cutting the corals into tiny pieces and affixing them to small, round tiles with stems, like a ceramic flower. In the lab's on-shore tanks, the fingernail-sized fragments grow up to 50 times faster than the full-sized corals, reaching 3 centimetres across in a few months.

To replant them, the restoration team finds a large coral head from which the animals have disappeared but left their limestone skeletons. Divers drill about 20 holes in that dead coral, and poke in the stems of the coral-tile flowers. Eventually, the pieces grow together, 're-skinning' the dead coral and restoring it to spawning in two to three years.

"It's a way to jump-start the reef," says Emily Hall, a chemical ecologist at Mote. The lab places thousands of these coral-flowers every year, says Muller, and typically achieves more than 80% survival.

The microfragmentation approach is promising, says Dirk Petersen, executive director of the coral conservation non-profit organization SECORE International in Bremen, Germany. But he has doubts about re-skinning. The old coral head might have new residents that could harm or compete with the coral-flowers, he says, and organisms that killed the original inhabitants might still be present.
Romancing the reef
Mote, SECORE and others are also helping corals to reproduce. By assisting breeding, reef managers can make not just more corals, but more diverse populations. Some larvae will be heat-tolerant, some resistant to acidified waters. Nature will select those that match a given reef's conditions.

It was in pursuit of this diversity that Baums went to the Caribbean island of Curaçao in August. She and her colleagues from SECORE teamed up with local conservationists to perform in vitro fertilization for elkhorn coral ( Acropora palmata).

The affair began a couple of hours after sunset, under a full moon. Corals spewed their gametes into the water. Sperm and eggs were so thick, they formed a slick on the surface. Baums and the other divers secured nets over the colonies to collect the gametes.

Because gametes are viable only for a few hours, the team had to race to pair up compatible eggs and sperm. "We have used a bench on the beach as an improvized laboratory," says Petersen. The low-tech lab can boost fertilization rates to 90% or higher.

Then, SECORE placed the embryos in the nursery, a floating pool in the sea that is protected from predators. A few days later, larvae settled on 3D-printed, starfish-shaped structures. When the corals reach about fingernail size, divers will wedge these substrates into the crevices of needy reefs. Petersen says this approach has also been tested in reefs off Mexico, Florida, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Bonaire, Australia, Palau and Guam.

Although these restoration measures are beneficial in deeply damaged reefs, they are difficult and costly to deploy at scale. Consider Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which is close to the size of Italy. Heatwaves in 2016 and 2017 bleached half the corals. Although some restoration is happening, surviving corals in larger areas have to help themselves, says Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville. "Billions of tougher corals survived, and they're breeding."

Come hell or hot water

Fortunately, the Great Barrier Reef's neighbourhood is better off than the Caribbean's. "The Indo-Pacific is still in great shape," says Emily Darling, a conservation scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Toronto, Canada.

In August, a large team led by Darling published an analysis of 2,584 Indo-Pacific reefs. The good news is that 86% of those reefs were dominated by large species such as branching, plating and boulder corals, the types that create fish habitats and shield shorelines from storms.

The bad news is that these species are also the most sensitive to heat.

Darling and her colleagues identified a group of almost 450 reefs that had been affected very little by recent warming events and had retained more than 10% coral cover - the minimum at which the reef can build more skeleton than it's likely to lose (but still well below the area's coral cover in decades past). "Right now, I would really target those to save," says Darling.

Cohen, too, is on a quest to find resilient reefs and make sure they are protected in her Super Reefs project (see 'The reef half full').

Her team has found three ways in which reefs beat the heat. Some corals live in naturally warm environments and are genetically adapted to deal with scorching temperatures. For example, reefs off Palau's Rock Islands withstood major heatwaves in 1998 and 2010. In the nearby barrier reef, where the water is typically cooler, coverage dropped to 5-6%. Other reefs are simply lucky in location. Some benefit from cold currents that protect them from hot spells. Others are served by currents that provide a constant plankton buffet. Even if they bleach, these corals remain well-fed and survive.

"So far," says Cohen, "most of the super reefs we've found have been by accident." To find more, she's using hydrodynamic modelling of currents to identify likely spots, and developing underwater robots that can identify areas with living corals and hover over them to gather data. "I'm convinced there are super reefs in most places," she says.

The next step will be to protect them. For example, Cohen is working with the Nature Conservancy and the government of the Marshall Islands to identify resilient reefs in the nearby waters, and to ensure that the nation includes some of these corals in any new marine protected areas.

Another researcher on the hunt for resilient reefs is Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a marine scientist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He borrowed an algorithm from the world of finance to find them.

Investors want a diverse portfolio that balances risk and reward. Hoegh-Guldberg joined forces with other coral specialists and economists to apply the same logic to the world's reefs. For example, being in the predicted path of cyclones might put a reef at high risk, but having good tolerance for climate change, or being well-connected to other reefs that could need re-seeding, would give it a high benefit profile.

Considering 30 such factors, the group identified 50 ocean regions scattered throughout the tropics, each about 500 square kilometres, as conservation priorities. If the rest of the world's reefs are wiped out, these reefs might be able to kick-start repopulation, assuming the climate stabilizes, Heogh-Guldberg says.

Some find the idea of singling out survivors troubling. "I hope it doesn't come to the point that we have to pick and choose one reef over another," says Hall. "I think all reefs are important."

Mónica Medina, a coral-reef biologist at Penn State, called the idea of relying on naturally robust corals "dangerous" at an October meeting of science writers held at her university. Corals that are resilient in one habitat might not thrive elsewhere, she pointed out, and the idea can lull people into thinking that reefs don't need other assistance.

Both Heough-Guldberg and Cohen stress that they don't intend for only these special reefs to receive conservation attention. In his '50 Reefs' project, Heogh-Guldberg is simply hedging his bets by identifying some promising targets. "You have a good chance of winning, no matter what."

Social science

In one of his 50 regions, off Madagascar, the wildlife charity WWF is helping protect a beautiful reef. Broad table corals rise in layers, and sea turtles prowl the clear waters. Although there are some signs of bleaching from past stress, the reef has mostly recovered, says Gabby Ahmadia, a marine conservation scientist with the WWF in Washington DC. But there aren't quite as many fish as there ought to be.

The way to solve that fish deficit is as much about local people as it is about marine ecology, she says. Conservation groups have helped locals to set up boutique tourism. The Nosy Hara marine national park pays community rangers to keep an eye on the corals. Fishers across Madagascar teach each other protective practices.

Conservationists are applying similar strategies in several places, customized to the people and the environment. It's societal action, not biology, that will ultimately save reefs, Hughes says. "They'll die again if we don't first fix water pollution, overfishing and ever-rising emissions."

Nonetheless, conservationists cling to hope for the future - albeit tempered with realism. "I think we can resolve this crisis," says Petersen. "I'm also sure that reefs will look different than they do now." Coral ecologists might have to sacrifice species diversity to rescue the whole ecosystem. Petersen compares future reefs to modern, managed forests, which host a narrower mix of trees than untouched forests, but still provide habitats for wildlife and help to cleanse water and air.

Another reason for hope is that reefs have made it through other challenges. Reef-building corals are part of a lineage that is more than 400 million years old. They've endured global water temperatures that have swung between 10 and 32 °C, and carbon dioxide levels up to quadruple those of today. But they've never before had to endure such rapid warming.

The current pace of climate change could stretch corals beyond their adaptive limits. Even if nations succeeded in limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above 1990 levels, the target of the 2018 Paris agreement, 70-90% of reefs would be lost, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And that target is looking more and more unrealistic. If the climate warms by 2 °C, the panel projects losses of greater than 99%.

Still, researchers are confident that with human assistance, and a global drop in emissions, reefs can rise again. "Corals 'know' how to recover, they know how to regenerate themselves," says Hoegh-Guldberg. "Corals are almost made for this."

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These corals could survive climate change - and help save the world's reefs

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Ocean warming threatens to wipe out corals, but scientists are trying to protect naturally resilient reefs and are nursing some others back to health. Ocean warming threatens to wipe out corals, but scientists are trying to protect naturally resilient reefs and are nursing some others back to health.

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Eco-fashion has become a big, booming business that is no longer limited to niche designers. Sustainable and recyclable materials are now making their way into boardrooms and onto catwalks. Just as eating organic went from niche market to expansive trend, sustainable fashion is becoming more readily available and affordable.

But what exactly is eco-fashion?

What is Eco-Fashion?

Eco is short for ecology, or the study of interactions between organisms and their environment. Eco-fashion is any brand or line that attempts to minimize the impact on the environment, and often the health of the consumers and the working conditions for the people that are making the clothes. Imagine organic cotton, durable, recyclable fabrics, plant-based dyes and a fair wage for the manufacturers and suppliers.

In the best of conditions, ethical fashion sounds awesome.

However, it is not quite as simple as that. Ethical fashion can be branded just by being sustainable, which means the crop used for making the garments can be regrown or replanted once it is harvested. There is also no such thing as a 100% eco-friendly piece of clothing, because all clothing takes water and energy.

Beware of Greenwashing

You know that sustainable fashion is "in" when H&M gets in on the action. The budget brand has a sustainable line, which they call the Conscious Collection.

But can we really look good and do good at the same time, as H&M says?

H&M's new green campaign doesn't come without its critics, who suggest that disposable clothing is never going to be a solution for helping the planet. Fast fashion, at its very nature, is not known for making a positive environmental impact, even if H&M did set up a recycling program.

To put it in perspective, Lucy Siegle, a journalist at The Guardian who writes about sustainability, estimates that it will take H&M up to 12 years to re-use or recycle 1,000 tons of clothing waste. Companies are looking for ways to improve this technology in the long-term.

Meanwhile, H&M produces that same volume of clothing within days.

Of course, H&M is not our only option. There are designers that have gotten in on the trend, including Anne Salvatore Epstein, who wanted a more organic lifestyle once she became pregnant with her child in 2005 and Stella McCartney, who is known for her vegan, ethical clothes that range from baby-doll dresses to chunky knit sweaters. Stella has been quoted as saying, "we address...ethical or ecological...questions in every other part of our lives except fashion. Mind-sets are changing, though, which is encouraging."

9 Sustainable Fashion Tips

It is quite hard to tell these days what is eco-friendly and what is just fashion. However, to stay conscious at all times can take quite a bit of homework. Below we outline some tips to help you stay responsibly fashionable:

Buy fewer, higher quality clothing. Reduce is the first of the 3 Rs, so do the planet a favor by buying fewer, better quality clothes. You may be spending more at first, but if you break it down to cost-per-wear, it's worth it. The fit will be better and the clothes will last longer than three washes of a fast fashion sweater.

Repair loved garments. Greenpeace suggests that it may be better to repair your garments instead of recycling them and continuing the buying-purging cycle. The Waste and Resource Action Program (or WARP) agrees, estimating that extending the life of your clothes for just three months will lead to a 5-10% reduction in the carbon, water and waste footprints caused by an unsustainable rate of fashion production and consumption.

Shop consignment stores. There are many fabulous finds at consignment stores. You can find new items that were one individual's buyers remorse, or gently loved designer clothing at low prices. Good for your wallet and the planet!

Buy from your neighbors. A lot of cities now have Facebook buy and sell clothing groups that you can join. Browse through your neighbours clothing from the comfort of your home. You can even try to bargain for a better deal, trade clothes or sell your old garments for some extra cash.

Create a capsule wardrobe. A capsule wardrobe is a collection of essential, timeless clothing items that you rotate with seasonal items. These wardrobes average around 30 pieces, including shoes and accessories. This ensures that you'll only wear clothes that you love and will decrease the time it takes to get dressed in the morning. Brass Clothing is one company who is setting out to achieve this for every woman.

Buy vegan leather. The process of transforming animal skin into leather requires high levels of energy and toxic chemicals. Vegan leather not only cruelty-free, but it's better for the planet too.

Shop from sustainable clothing brands. Everlane is a company that focuses on transparent pricing, high quality fabrics and sustainable manufacturing. Kowtow sells 100% certified organic and fairtrade clothing. For a list of more sustainable fashion brands, check out this list by the Style Bee.

Organize a clothing swap. Organizing a clothing swap with your friends or coworkers is a fun way to socialize while recycling loved garments.

Many of us have a need for the new and the world is designed to make us crave more. Sustainable fashion can even contribute to the excess; with everything from IPhone covers to eco-friendly dog pee pads declaring that buying their product will help to reduce waste. It is up to you to decide if that is really true, or if everything is best in moderation, including eco-fashion.

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What Is Eco-Fashion And How To Be Responsibly Fashionable - Nature's Path

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Eco-fashion has become a big, booming business that is no longer limited to niche designers. Sustainable and recyclable materials are now making their way into boardrooms and onto catwalks. Just as eating organic went from niche market to expansive trend, sustainable fashion is becoming more readily available and affordable.

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Can We Cool the Planet?

NOVA: Season 47, Episode 15

As global temperatures rise, scientists look to geoengineering solutions, from planting trees to sucking carbon out of the air, as a means to cool the planet.

Air date : October 28, 2020

Can We Cool the Planet? | NOVA | PBS

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/can-we-cool-the-planet/

Oct 28, 2020 · As global temperatures rise, scientists are exploring solutions from planting trees to sucking ...Duration: 53:31
Posted: Oct 28, 2020

Dec 1, 2020 · As global temperatures continue to rise, scientists are wondering if we need solutions that go ...Duration: 53:39
Posted: Dec 1, 2020

Oct 28, 2020 · NOVA | Episode | Can We Cool the Planet? As global temperatures rise, scientists are ...Duration: 53:31
Posted: Oct 28, 2020

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds. Can We Cool the Planet? NOVA: Season 47, Episode 15 As global temperatures rise, scientists look to geoengineering solutions, from planting trees to sucking carbon out of the air, as a means to cool the planet.

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Drinking Nasty Swamp Water (to save the world)

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In 2018, a 30-minute documentary was premiered in San José, Costa Rica's capital and my hometown. The film followed the early efforts of a handful of marine biologists who are fighting coral bleaching. They grow tiny bits of coral in underwater nurseries and once they're big enough move them back to the reef, hoping to restore it.

Their pace is slow, possibly too slow to keep up with bleaching due to climate change. Warming waters swipe entire reefs in a matter of weeks. The biologists need months to nurture enough corals to restore a couple of square meters. Reef restoration seems like an impossible task, but they are relentless. It must be done to give corals a chance, so they are doing it.

It's the same principle guiding young climate activists, atmospheric scientists and climate essayists. As author Rebecca Solnit wrote in 2016: "We don't know what is going to happen, or how, or when, and that very uncertainty is the space of hope."
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In the dark movie theatre, I felt a new bond with the scientists carrying baby corals and the filmmakers chasing after them. We are, indeed, losing this battle. They understand that, I believe, but in a tropical gulf thousands of miles away from where diplomats and politicians decide our carbon policies and international accords, a group of stubborn biologists and documentarists were refusing to give up. They were earning their own hope, one coral at a time.

I think of these dogged coral reef scientists whenever I'm asked, "What gives you hope?" in the context of climate change.

It's a question full of nuance. Weighing it up, you have to consider the slew of recent record-breaking heatwaves, but also the indomitable force of schoolchildren protesting for their futures. It acknowledges our dire situation, yet suggests there might be a way forward. As climate change awareness goes mainstream - along with the feelings of anxiousness, pain and grief that come with it - this question has quickly become code for: "Where can I find hope?"

The answer, coming from both the climate movement and psychology, is clear: within yourself.

Several months ago, teenage activist Greta Thunberg scolded European MPs for failing to understand this. "You can't just sit around waiting for hope to come," she said last February in Brussels. "Then you are acting like spoiled irresponsible children. You don't seem to understand that hope is something that you have to earn."

That was a new concept for me: earning hope. Years of environmental campaigns trained me to believe hope existed somewhere out there, and I only had to look for it. For instance, Al Gore's Climate Reality tells us that 2018 gave us teenagers striking, new advances in solar panel technology and entire nations announcing divestment from fossil fuels. Meanwhile the Green New Deal is gaining traction in the US.

But Thunberg was suggesting that these developments are not cause for hope. Nothing we'll read about online should make us hopeful, because scrolling for hope by browsing through social media from your sofa won't cut it. I think that's even selfish. Those achievements are the result of exhausted youths, overworked scientists and grieving activists. For each green bill presented in a legislative body, there's an anxious, underslept staffer who needs backup. Can one hope from the sidelines?

"A lot of times, when I hear people say 'Yeah, I'm hopeful or I'm optimistic', they're basing their hope and their optimism on someone else's back, someone else's actions," says climate justice essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar.

Real, good, useful hope has nothing to do with positive news. Instead, it is profoundly linked with action: both ours and that of others alongside us. It's a sentiment that resonates with me. There's only one way to earn hope, and that's rolling up our sleeves.
Hope, not optimism
In her book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit argues that hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It's something restless, alive. "It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency," she writes.

This matches the mainstream psychological understanding of hope. Psychologists believe it emerges out of two elements: personally determined goals and pathways to reach them. It can be a driving force, but it has to come from within.

That's one of the differences between hope and optimism, says Matthew Gallagher, the psychologist who literally edited the handbook on hope.

"Optimism is a more general expectation that good things are going to happen," he says, "even if you don't know how they'll happen." Hope, meanwhile, has positive expectations about the future but is driven by our capacity to identify goals and set strategies to achieve them, he says.

There's little reason to be optimistic about climate change. We are set to overshoot our self-imposed temperature targets and carbon emissions started creeping up again in 2018. The transformation we must undergo is unlike anything we've seen before. The case for climate pessimism, and why it's useful, is actually stronger.

And for the people in the frontlines - the Arctic communities, the small-town fishermen in the Tropics and the displaced people of colour in coastal America - hope is not even on the horizon. When survival is your number one priority, the future you need to solve is today. Hope is a luxury.

But we want to know everything will be OK. Ours is a techno-optimistic society where electric cars are touted as a solution. That addiction to optimism has made the climate movement increasingly distrustful of hope. "I don't think hope is a super motivating emotion," says Heglar, who feels environmentalism has over-relied on it. "I think anger drives you to action, but hope puts you back to sleep."

This is something I can relate to. If I believe falling solar panel prices and new international agreements will carry the day on their own, why should I bother to cut my own carbon footprint? Heglar and others are warning against this unfounded, passive hope. "We need courage, not hope," writes Nasa scientist Dr Kate Marvel.
Grounding hope
Despite this, the search for hope still has an extraordinary pull. Because we often use hope and optimism interchangeably, scholars have come up with another distinction that is perhaps easier for dinner-table conversations. "There are different kinds of hope, because hope is a very complicated emotion," says Jennifer Marlon, a climate researcher at Yale.

Her team surveyed hundreds of Americans about climate change and came up with a two-type taxonomy: false and constructive hope. People who rely on false hope believe God or nature will make this problem go away, and that humanity need not take the lead. People who adopted a mindset of constructive hope, in contrast, believe that transformation must emerge from us.

But on climate change, automatically expecting a better world because society acts in a certain way isn't enough. We defeated Nazism, eradicated polio and reversed the hole in the ozone layer, right? Why not climate change?

Because it's not that simple, writes Norwegian psychologist Per Espen Stoknes. Overestimating society's powers can be as dangerous as false hope, because we start telling Disney-like stories in the midst of a global crisis. "[We expect] Star Wars' sixth movie, where the little bears [ewoks] show up and together we defeat the evil empire," he says.

His antidote is healthy skepticism. Stoknes argues we should settle our hope in our values - in what we believe is right and needed. Our actions can't be based on the expectations of a happy ending. That outcome is outside of our control. If emissions keep rising, we risk deflation and action can dry up. Our values, however, persist.

This view of grounded hope embraces the unknowns and accepts uncertainty as the natural habitat of hope. "You're no longer dependent or addicted to optimism," says Stoknes. "You can be pessimistic and yet full of hope."
Hoping together
In her 2004 essay The Art of Good Hope, Princeton philosopher Victoria McGeer brushes away both wishful thinking and wilful stubborn determination. She warns that wishful hopers depend on external forces, while wilful hopers overestimate their own powers. One pathway she suggests is to balance these extremes through communities.

Our earliest lessons of hope and agency were provided by our parents, our very first clan. With them we learned that we can walk, read, ride a bicycle or swim ten feet. But learning to hope as adults in our increasingly individualistic societies requires new scaffolding, argues McGeer. It involves empowering ourselves in part through empowering others with the energy of a responsive hope. In this way, hope is a deeply social phenomenon.

"If you're feeling hopeless about climate change, get involved with people who are actively involved in doing things," says McGeer.

One of the most visible groups at the moment are school strikers. Even adults are rallying around them in search of hope. Atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe was asked what gave her hope so frequently that she decided to start polling the audience at her talks with the same question. Six months and 500 responses later, the top answer was young people.

In some cases, the drive to praise youth activism might be a case of "scrolling for hope", which comes with the risk of falling back into passivity. But Hayhoe believes those already engaged see youths as fellow comrades, not as others to lay the burden onto.

"When you see a new voice enter the arena you don't put down your sword. "You say: 'Oh, my goodness, there's a little bit of help'," says Hayhoe. Those already engaged are not leaving the burden to the kids, they're "redoubling their efforts because of the children."

Personally, I would not call myself hopeful. "There's so much science and so little will," read my final dispatch from my first climate conference, six years ago. Not much has improved since 2013. Writing about the climate crisis often seems futile. I'm guessing the same goes for forest firefighters, flood planners at coastal cities and progressive lawmakers.

But after reading and talking about hope for months, I have a different view. Hope hurts, and feels at times pointless, yet we have to keep doing it. It's the only way. "Hope is meaning-focused coping," says Maria Ojala, senior lecturer in psychology at Örebro University in Sweden who did her PhD in how hope and doubt permeate kids' environmentalism. She believes positive and negative emotions about climate change are not mutually exclusive. "It's 'and' instead of 'or'," says Ojala.

No individual will bend the emissions curve alone. No writer, modelling team, no forest firefighter, no environmental lawyer will carry the day. But if you're looking for hope, there might be a space in constructing something together - in responsive hope. No single coral restoration programme will heal the wounds inflicted on reefs around the world, but perhaps networks offer a way forward. That collective goal, and the space of uncertainty in that "perhaps", is our hope.
Climate Emotions
Climate change is harming the planet, and it may be harming our mental health too.

From fear and anxiety to hope and healing, BBC Future's Climate Emotions series examines our complex responses to climate change, and how those responses will shape our ability to deal with the environmental challenge we face.

--
Diego Arguedas Ortiz is a science and climate change reporter for BBC Future. He is @arguedasortiz on Twitter.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "The Essential List". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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Is it wrong to be hopeful about climate change?

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In 2018, a 30-minute documentary was premiered in San José, Costa Rica's capital and my hometown. The film followed the early efforts of a handful of marine biologists who are fighting coral bleaching. They grow tiny bits of coral in underwater nurseries and once they're big enough move them back to the reef, hoping to restore it.

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There is no question that the climate crisis is here right now. But there is good news: every day we see more individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments responding to the crisis.

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Despite the onslaught of climate disasters, there is more momentum for political action now than ever before.

Climate disasters started early in 2020-and kept on coming.

The catastrophic fires in Australia in early 2020 were a holdover from 2019, but they were soon followed by flooding in Indonesia, a super cyclone hitting the coast of India and Bangladesh, and then more flooding, this time in Kenya and wide swaths of Central and West Africa.

Next came the record-breaking fires in the Brazilian Amazon, South America's Pantanal wetlands, California and Colorado, followed by a historic hurricane season in the Atlantic, including two apocalyptic hurricanes in Nicaragua and Honduras.

With terrible symmetry, 2020 ended with bushfires consuming more than half of K'gari, a World Heritage site and island off the coast of Queensland, Australia.

A popular refrain on social media notes that while 2020 was among the hottest on record and one of the worst years for climate disasters, it is also likely to be among the coolest and calmest for years to come. During a speech at Columbia University in December, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres put it bluntly: " The state of the planet is broken."

But now is not the time for despair.

Hope Is Found in Uncertainty

All this bad climate news has the potential to generate climate despair, numbing those watching the next tragedy unfold.

Climate despair is a growing phenomena, noted in the popular media and in academic research in public health, education, ethics, and philosophy. Psychologists even coined the term " solastalgia " to denote distress caused by environmental damage and loss. Climate despair is feeling with certainty that "we're screwed," that the worst impacts of climate change are inevitable and can no longer be stopped.

Despair feels reasonable given what we're learning about climate change and seeing in the news. But it is a temptation that should be resisted.

Rebecca Solnit argues that hope is found in uncertainty -that the future is not set. Even given torrents of bad news, there are a number of reasons for hope. And 2020 could indeed be the turning point.

It has to be.

Science, Politics, and Hope

To be clear, climate despair does not square with current scientific understandings. We are in trouble, not screwed.

Actions taken now and in the next decade, individually and collectively, can make a difference. The news on climate impacts and climate science may feel like a march of doom, but climate scientists argue that it's not too late to act and there is uncertainty in the extent of climate impacts we have guaranteed ourselves. We have not reached the point of no return.

In some ways, climate despair is the new climate denial, dulling the sense of urgency and blunting the momentum for action. The discourse paralyzes when paralysis is what we can least afford. The discourse of despair strengthens the grip of the status quo and can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So hope is good science, and that's good for politics. Opportunities to expand the space of uncertainty at the root of hope are right in front of us. While the climate impacts have been terrible in 2020, there has never been as much momentum for political action on climate change as there is now:

* The first truly global social movement dedicated to climate action and climate justice has gained in size and strength, beginning with Greta Thunberg's Fridays for the Future and spreading to the Sunrise Movement in the U.S. and climate justice movements around the world.

* Large-scale capital continues to flee from fossil fuel investments, which are rapidly losing value. According to a recent study by political scientists Jeff Colgan, Jessica Green, and Thomas Hale, this shifting financial ground promises to upend the politics of climate change in important ways, as vested interests lose political power.

* The initial pandemic response demonstrated how societies and economies can pivot quickly in response to an emergency. The longer-term plans for post-pandemic recovery provide an enormous window of opportunity to " build back better," although this idea does not have universal uptake.

* The Paris Agreement survived the withdrawal of the U.S., which is poised to rejoin after Joe Biden is sworn in as president. Momentum around the agreement was clear at the Climate Ambition Summit where 75 countries announced new national commitments.

* The ranks of countries that have made net-zero commitments is swelling, and a new report suggests that the cumulative effect of countries' recent pledges (if fully achieved) could keep warming to 2.1 C by 2100, putting a key Paris Agreement goal within reach.

These trends don't guarantee that we have turned the political corner. The forces arrayed against the kind of changes we need are vast and powerful. It will take an enormous amount of energy, resources, and action for these promising trends to fulfill their potential and turn the tide of climate change.

But they can disrupt the status quo. They can create space for catalytic action. They can enhance the uncertainty that keeps despair at bay. They provide hope.

Reject Despair

This motivating hope, or what political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon calls commanding hope, is not just scientifically valid and politically astute, it is the only viable moral choice.

The iron law of climate change is that those least responsible for causing the problem face the worst consequences. The opposite is true as well-those most responsible for causing climate change tend to be the safest from it. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% of the population globally " are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity."

Too many people and communities do not have the luxury of saying "isn't that a shame, too bad we can't do anything" about climate change. They aren't safe, and it's not their fault.

Rejecting despair, embracing the uncertainty of hope, is the least that individuals, communities, and societies that are relatively safe from climate change owe vulnerable communities.

With 2020 left behind, there is hope in facing the climate crisis, for movement toward a just transition to an equitable low-carbon world. Seeing that hope fulfilled in 2021 and beyond means summoning courage, joy, and sometimes even rage, fiercely clinging to and expanding the uncertainty of the future.

Most importantly, 2021 needs to be the year known for acting, individually and collectively, with the urgency and scale the climate crisis demands.
This story originally appeared in The Conversation and is republished here with permission.
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Reasons for Hope on Climate Change in 2021

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Despite the onslaught of climate disasters, there is more momentum for political action now than ever before. Climate disasters started early in 2020-and kept on coming. The catastrophic fires in Australia in early 2020 were a holdover from 2019, but they were soon followed by flooding in Indonesia, a super cyclone hitting the coast of India and Bangladesh, and then more flooding, this time in Kenya and wide swaths of Central and West Africa.

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We're just over halfway through 2020, and it's hard to overstate just how challenging the ride has been.

As the year opened, record-breaking fires - exacerbated by climate change - were devastating habitats and communities across Australia. Then came the COVID pandemic. And then the large, powerful, and necessary protests against systemic racism across the US.

Our challenge now is to carry the gravity of the pandemic and the ongoing fight for justice with us while continuing our work to solve the climate crisis and create a truly just and healthy future for all. But we know that work can be hard to undertake when the world around you seems, at best, in the throes of an especially dark and complicated moment.

But if you're wondering if there's anything left to be hopeful about in 2020, we've got some good news for you - there are still many, many reasons to be optimistic about a just, sustainable, clean energy future, and we'd like to share nine of our favorite reasons with you. (Look out for Leading the Way highlights to learn about some of our amazing Climate Reality Leaders who are working in these areas!)

Get ready for a good news deluge!

1. Coal is Burning Out, and Oil and Gas Aren't Far Behind

First, let's talk about the rapid decline of coal and the impending fall of oil and natural gas, which will do so much more than just reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The fall in fossil fuels will also make our communities cleaner and safer, and reduce susceptibility to respiratory illnesses like COVID-19.

Air pollution already takes around 4.2 million lives worldwide each year, and may be making COVID-19 worse in several complex ways - and the life-threatening effects of pollution are much worse in low-income communities and communities of color, which are often located near fossil fuel infrastructure.

A transition to clean energy means a transition to cleaner air, cleaner water, and healthier families, and utility providers around the world are learning that fossil fuels just don't make good economic sense anymore.

Take Inland Empire Energy Center in Menifee, California- just one example of a natural gas power plant being demolished years ahead of schedule because it can't compete economically with electricity from wind and solar.

Leading the Way: Back in 2017, Climate Reality Leaders training in Bellevue, Washington teamed up with the local Carbon Free PSE campaign to urge the Colstrip Power Plant to shut down its last two coal units. Thanks to that mobilization, the coal-burning facility committed to shutting down those coal units 20 years earlier than originally planned.

2. Renewables are the New Cool

How are we replacing all that lost energy production from fossil fuels?

With cheap, clean, renewable energy sources!

In the last decade, as clean energy technology has grown vastly more efficient and productive, utility providers and businesses around the globe have jumped on board the renewables bandwagon for the most reliable of reasons - renewable sources of energy are just more cost effective.

Over the last decade, wind energy prices have fallen 70 percent and solar photovoltaics have fallen 89 percent on average in the US. Globally, the cost of solar PV has fallen by 99 percent over the last four decades.

Solar is now cost competitive with fossil fuel energy, even without government subsidies.

In 2019, there were more renewable installations than coal, gas, and nuclear additions combined - and that was for the fifth year in a row. And lest you think the biggest GHG emitters aren't coming around, China and India are both taking the lead in installing large-scale solar.

Off-grid solar systems are also taking off (with sales up from 0.9 million in 2010 to 23.5 million in 2018), which is great news for rural and off-grid communities the world over.

Energy storage - an essential component of a renewables-based grid - is also surging. In 2018, global annual energy storage additions more than doubled, and the cost of lithium-ion batteries dropped by 85 percent from 2010-2018.

Leading the Way: Trained Climate Reality Leaders have the opportunity to advocate for renewable energy through Climate Reality's 100% Committed campaign, and some of them have really run with the opportunity. Tim Guinee, with the help of the entire Hudson Valley and Catskills chapter of Climate Reality, has secured 100 percent renewable energy commitments from over 100 businesses, schools, and cities.

3. Efficiency is Everything

All that is amazing news, but to reduce GHG emissions quickly enough to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis, we still need to use less energy.

Good news can be found here, too, as the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has estimated that in 2018 about $240 billion was invested in energy efficiency projects across the building, transport, and industry sectors.

IRENA also estimates that with ambitious government climate action, energy efficiency could account for more than 21.3 million jobs by 2050.

Leading the Way: Climate Reality Leader Alicia Dolce is passionate about energy efficiency in the built environment - she is currently the executive director of the CT Green Building Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting sustainable building practices, and also own a company that builds energy efficient homes.

4. EVs Are Racing to the Front

Transportation is the second-largest emitting sector globally, and vehicles are another major source of harmful air pollution. So what's the good news here? Electrical vehicles (EVs) are taking off! With more and more renewables on the electricity grid, EVs can greatly reduce the carbon footprint of our transportation.

The electric share of total vehicle sales is still small, but it is rising fast. By 2040, projections show over half of all passenger vehicles sold will be electric. Thanks in part to the plummeting costs of lithium-ion batteries, within just a few years, EVs could cost the same or less as internal-combustion vehicles, and many countries (including China, India, Canada, and France) have announced plans to phase out gas engines by 2030 or 2040. On top of that, many cities are also committed to electrifying public transportation, and businesses are transitioning to electric fleets - with that kind of momentum, it's likely just a matter of time before EVs are the leading form of transport.

Leading the Way: A major distributor of EVs in the US, the Xenon Motor Company, was founded by a Climate Reality Leader - Susan Jones, who also set three Guinness World Records on the electric car, scooter, and bicycle during her famous Ride The Future Tour.

5. Agricultural Solutions are Growing Fast

Agriculture holds a rare position in the fight against the climate crisis. As it's managed now, global agricultural production is a major contributor to global GHG emissions. And yet, some of our most powerful tools for storing carbon (and keeping it out of our atmosphere) are agricultural in nature. Regenerative agriculture has the capacity to restore vast tracts of land and switch them from carbon sources to carbon storage, while at the same time making farmland (and farming communities) more resistant to the impacts of climate change.

Farmers are already leading the way and working together to support these solutions - and it isn't just small farmers, either. For example, General Mills is taking several steps that support regenerative agriculture, including working to educate and train its farmers.

Even the US government is getting on board - the 2018 farm bill incentivized climate-conscious farming practices.

Leading the Way: Climate Reality Leader JJ Johnson, chair of The Climate Reality Project: Chattanooga, Tennessee Chapter, founded an online community for farmers who are passionate about soil health and regenerative agriculture; he now works as a regenerative field data engineer.

5. The Youth Are Here and Their Mission is Clear

So the solutions exist! We can reduce GHG emissions and get cleaner air, cleaner water, and a more sustainable food system out of the bargain.

But what are we doing to get our leaders to support these ideas so that the transition happens quickly enough to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis?

Let me tell you - there's a lot happening.

Unless you've been living under a retired coal plant, you've heard about the global youth movement - last September they led a record-breaking strike with over 10 million participants worldwide.

Some young adults are entering government, to try and make a difference from right inside the halls of power. Take for example, the two young Iowa legislators - one a Republican and one a Democrat - who are working together to take climate action in their state. They're both part of the growing future caucus movement in the US, which is committed to helping young leaders bridge political divides and come together on issues like the climate crisis.

Leading the Way: Many young Climate Reality Leaders like Haven Coleman, Alexandra Villasenor, Jamie Margolin, and Jerome Foster II have created their own organizations, coalitions, and media outlets to push for urgent solutions.

6. Businesses and Governments Support Clean Energy

Lest you think the entire battle is uphill, there are already many governments and multi-national companies that have made their commitment to clean energy clear.

The list of businesses that are in support of climate action is long because corporations everywhere have realized clean energy is a smart investment.

Take RE100, for example. It's an initiative that brings together corporate leaders who've made a commitment to 100 percent renewable electricity, and as of February 2020, 225 corporations have joined RE100. They include 3M, eBay, Facebook, IKEA, GM, Microsoft, Fujitsu, Google, Tesco, Visa, and Walmart.

Governments of all sizes are getting in on the action, too.

Projected declines in coal use in China and India could reduce global carbon emissions by roughly 2-3 billion metric tons by 2030.Countries like Iceland, Costa Rica, Norway, and Paraguay are already at or near 100 percent renewable power.

In the US, over 150 cities have made public commitments to a transition (or have already made the transition) to 100 percent renewable energy. On top of that, 15 states, along with Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, have made pubic commitments to source at least 50 percent of their electricity from clean energy.

It is up to us to reach out to business leaders and government officials and urge them to make and keep these commitments, but make no mistake - momentum is on our side.

Leading the Way: Climate Reality Leaders have the skills and support to contact leaders and influencers and push for big changes. Climate Reality Leader Sarah Haley, along with other members of The Climate Reality Project: Charlotte, North Carolina chapter, worked together to mobilize their community. Thanks to that work, they successfully got the city of Charlotte to commit to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030.

7. Educators Are Making the Grade

In some the parts of the world - not least of all the US - science denial has been a real obstacle to change. But for every politician who can't tell weather from climate, there are many, many teachers working hard to increase science literacy and fight denial. And it's a good thing, too - research indicates that climate education plays a critical role in helping society reach important "social tipping points" in the fight against the climate crisis.

The UN has called on countries to commit to climate education as part of its effort to combat the crisis, and Italy and Mexico have already made pledges to do so. New Zealand already has a countrywide climate curriculum.

In the US, Washington State is supporting climate education by connecting teachers with training opportunities and environmental organizations.

Leading the Way: In 2019, a Washingtonian, Climate Reality Leader, and education expert by the name of Laura Tucker published a book, along with Lois Sherwood, called Understanding Climate Change for Grades 7-12, which has been a valuable resource for teachers in Washington and beyond.

8. Natural Solutions Are Looking Pretty

We're fighting the climate crisis to protect our families, communities, and future generations. But we're also doing it to protect the places we love: the oceans and mountains and forests that sustain our planet and enrich our lives.

And it turns out that the thing we're trying to save will also be the key to saving us.

Natural climate solutions include both conservation and restoration, and incorporate an array of smart land management practices that together accomplish something amazing - enabling Mother Nature herself to be the most powerful and efficient carbon sequestration system we've ever known.

Just by enabling Mother Nature to do more of what she already does best, in the US alone we could remove as much as 21 percent of the nation's net annual carbon pollution. That's roughly equal to all the emissions from cars and trucks on US roads last year.

Many conservation organizations are focused on these solutions, working to protect natural ecosystems like forests, grasslands, wetlands, and more, while others are turning resources and innovation toward reforestation and land restoration efforts. For example, tech companies are partnering with conservation groups to use drones to plant millions of trees a year.

Leading the Way: Climate Reality Leader and India Branch Manager Aditya Pundir and his fellow Climate Reality Leaders helped to start a nationwide tree planting drive in India. Since 2016, the branch has planted over 51,000 trees.

9. The Transition Can Be Just

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that what is true for the climate crisis is true for this health crisis - low-income families and communities of color get hit the hardest.

And while renewables are a major source of new jobs, we can't leave behind the people who are currently make a living in fossil fuel industries as we push for a green recovery from the current economic crisis.

The great news here is that when we bring everyone along on the road to a better future, we all benefit - and that a just transition and a green recovery are both possible.

But a better future isn't going to happen without advocates who are willing to speak up.

Leading the Way: Climate Reality Leaders and chapter members in The Climate Reality Project: Pittsburgh and Southwestern PA Chapter are actively working with the People Over Petro campaign to push back against the expansion of petrochemical infrastructure in their own communities.

This global movement for climate action is growing, and there are many, many more reasons to hope than the ones outlined here. But we can't let this momentum waiver - especially not now.

Across the country, everyday Americans are joining Climate Reality chapters and working together for practical climate solutions like those you've just read about in communities from sea to shining sea.

These friends, neighbors, and colleagues are bringing clean energy to their towns, fighting fracking developments and petrochemical infrastructure, and so much more. Most of all, they're making a real difference for our climate when it matters - and you can too.

Join a Climate Reality chapter today and join the fight for a sustainable future

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We're just over halfway through 2020, and it's hard to overstate just how challenging the ride has been. As the year opened, record-breaking fires - exacerbated by climate change - were devastating habitats and communities across Australia. Then came the COVID pandemic. And then the large, powerful, and necessary protests against systemic racism across the US.

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"I don't think it will be the humans. I think we'll go quite early on," says Julie Gray with a laugh. I've just asked Gray, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Sheffield, which species she thinks would be the last ones standing if we don't take transformative action on climate change. Even with our extraordinary capacity for innovation and adaptability, humans, it turns out, probably won't be among the survivors.

This is partly because humans reproduce agonisingly slowly and generally just one or two at a time - as do some other favourite animals, like pandas. Organisms that can produce many offspring quickly may have a better shot at avoiding extinction.

It may seem like just a thought experiment. But discussing which species are more, or less, able to survive climate change is disturbingly concrete. As a blockbuster biodiversity report stated recently, one in every four species currently faces extinction. Much of this vulnerability is linked to climate change, which is bringing about higher temperatures, sea level rise, more variable conditions and more extreme weather, among other impacts.

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Some caveats are in order. While the seriousness of climate change is undeniable, it's impossible to know exactly how those effects will play out for species vulnerability, especially far into the future. Methods of forecasting vulnerability are ever evolving, while limited and inconsistent data, plus the complex interactions of policies, land-use changes, and ecological effects, mean that projections aren't set in stone. Climate change vulnerability assessments have had biases and blind spots (just as humans do more generally). (Read more about how our cognitive biases prevent climate action). Moreover, the indirect effects that are responsible for many climate change impacts on populations, such as in the food chain, are more complex to model than direct effects.

Another source of uncertainty has to do with life forms' capacity to adapt. Take ectotherms (cold-blooded animals like reptiles and amphibians), which have historically been slower to adapt to climatic change than endotherms. For one thing, they are less able to adjust their body temperatures. But there are exceptions, like the American bullfrog, which may actually find more habitable environments as a consequence of warming.

And, of course, there is an alternative: we humans could get our acts together and stop the climate crisis from continuing to snowball by adopting policies and lifestyles that reduce greenhouse gases. But for the purposes of these projections, we're assuming that's not going to happen.
Tenacious trends
Even with the uncertainties, we can make some educated guesses about broad patterns.

Heat tolerant and drought resistant plants, like those found in deserts rather than rainforests, are more likely to survive. So are plants whose seeds can be dispersed over long distances, for instance by wind or ocean currents (like coconuts), rather than by ants (like some acacias). Plants that can adjust their flowering times may also be better able to deal with higher temperatures. Jen Lau, a biologist at Indiana University Bloomington, suggests that this may give non-native plants the advantage when it comes to responding to climate change.

We also can look to history as a guide. The fossil record contains signs of how species have coped with previous climatic shifts. There are genetic clues to long-term survival too, such as in the hardy green microalgae that adapted to saltier environments over millions of years - a finding only made in September 2018 by Fatima Foflonker of Rutgers and colleagues.

Importantly, though, the uniquely devastating nature of the current human-made climate crisis means that we can't fully rely on benchmarks from the past.

"The climate change that we see in the future will differ in many ways from the climate change that we've seen in the past", notes Jamie Carr, an outreach officer for the Climate Change Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission.

The historical record does point to the tenacity of cockroaches. These largely unloved critters "have survived every mass extinction event in history so far", says Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a soil biogeochemist at the University of California, Merced. For instance, cockroaches adapted to an increasingly arid Australia, tens of millions of years ago, by starting to burrow into soil.

This shows two characteristics, says Robert Nasi, the director general of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR): an "ability to hide and protect in buffered conditions (e.g. underground)" and a long evolutionary history, as in general "ancient species appear more resilient than younger ones". These are among the traits that, Nasi says, are linked to surviving large catastrophic events which triggered major changes in climate.

Cockroaches also tend to not be picky eaters. Having broad diets means that climate change will be less of a threat to the food sources of species that are not too fussy about their food, such as rats, opportunistic birds, and urban raccoons.

As a comparison, take an animal like the koala. Koalas eat primarily eucalyptus leaves, which are becoming less nutritious due to increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. As a result, climate change is increasing their risk of starvation.

As well as having a specialised diet, koalas have low genetic diversity - one reason that chlamydia has ravaged wild koala populations. These are worrying traits in terms of extinction risk. "In many cases, specialised species are those that we expect to see disappear first," says Carr. This extends to species in microhabitats like high elevation montane forests, or those in narrow ranges, like some tropical birds or small-island plants. Also vulnerable are species that depend on pristine environments.

That's compared to the "early successional" species that succeed in disturbed habitats, such as grasslands and young forest. These species "might do well under climate change because they thrive in states of change and transition", says Jessica Hellmann, who leads the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. "For example, deer (in the US) are common in suburban areas and thrive where forests have been removed or are regularly disturbed."

Species that Carr calls "mobile generalists", which can move and adapt to different environments, are likely to be more durable in the face of climate change. While this adaptability is generally positive, it might come at a cost to other parts of an ecosystem. Invasive species like cane toads, which are poisonous, have led to local extinctions of other species like quolls (carnivorous marsupials) and monitors (large lizards) in Australia. And Hellmann says that the versatility of invasive plant species "leads to the worry that, in addition to losing vulnerable species, a warmer world will be a weedier world". The weeds typically found along roadsides may be especially long-lasting in comparison with other plants.

Of course, many organisms are intrinsically less mobile. Most plants will be unable to move quickly enough to keep pace with rapid heating, although they've done so in response to the slower climatic changes of the past.
Buffer zones
The good news is that some specialised species might have a buffer known as climate change refugia: areas that are relatively protected from climate change's consequences, such as deep sea canyons. Although deep sea zones are heating up and declining in oxygen concentrations, Jonathon Stillman, a marine environmental physiologist at San Francisco State University, suggests that deep sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems, specifically, might be one bright spot in an otherwise mostly bleak situation.

"They are pretty much uncoupled from the surface of our planet and I doubt that climate change will impact them in the least," he says. "Humanity didn't even know they existed until 1977. Their energy comes from the core of our Earth rather than from the Sun, and their already extreme habitat is unlikely to be altered by changes happening at the ocean surface."

Similarly, Douglas Sheil, a tropical forest ecologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, suggests that "at some point in the future the only vertebrate species surviving in Africa might be a blind cave fish deep underground". As in the deep sea hydrothermal vents, "many species remain undiscovered and thus unknown - Europe's first cave fish was only found in Germany in 2015."

Thermophiles (heat-adapted organisms) living in extreme environments like volcanic springs are also likely to be less affected by surface temperature changes. Indeed, the organisms best able to live in severe circumstances are microbes, as noted by many of the scientists I've surveyed. Computer modelling suggests that only microbes would be able to survive increasing solar intensity. Soil biogeochemist Berhe says of archaea, one of the major types of microbes, "these critters have figured out how to live in the most extreme of environments".

Not quite as tiny but also nearly indestructible are tardigrades, commonly known as water bears. Environmental physiologist Stillman enthuses: "They can survive the vacuum of outer space, extreme dehydration, and very high temperatures. If you are a Star Trek fan, you have learned about them in a sci-fi setting, but they are real creatures that live across most habitats on Earth."

The future will have not only more extreme environments, but also more urban, human-altered spaces. So "resistant species would likely be the ones that are well attuned to living in human-modified habitats such as urban parks and gardens, agricultural areas, farms, tree plantations, and so on", says Arvin C Diesmos, a herpetology curator at the Philippine National Museum of Natural History.

CIFOR's Nasi sums it up. "The winners will be very small, preferably endotherms if vertebrates, highly adaptable, omnivorous or able to live in extreme conditions."

In the words of the IUCN's Carr, "It doesn't sound like a very pretty world."

Of course, to some extent we already know what's needed to limit the bleakness of the future natural world. This includes reducing greenhouse gases; protecting biodiversity; restoring connectivity between habitats (rather than building endless dams, roads and walls); and reducing interrelated threats like pollution and land harvesting. Even species that are close to extinction, like Saiga antelopes, can be brought back from the brink with enough conservation effort. To reflect the power of sustained conservation, scientists are developing a Green List of species on the road to recovery and full health, to complement the IUCN's Red List of threatened species.

The political barriers are daunting. But scaling them, it seems, would beat surrendering the planet to the microbes.
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The animals that will survive climate change

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"I don't think it will be the humans. I think we'll go quite early on," says Julie Gray with a laugh. I've just asked Gray, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Sheffield, which species she thinks would be the last ones standing if we don't take transformative action on climate change.

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Animals show their creativity to adapt to climate change | Sustainability for all

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Climate change and alarming temperature swings have caused some animals to develop new behaviors that allow them to adapt to the effects that global warming is having on the planet

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Watch all of them to count as your 4.

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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster | TED-Ed

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A new video series that cuts through the complexity to explain a plan to solve climate change.

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Feeding Bill Gates a Fake Burger (to save the world)

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Safe nuclear
Tides
Solar
Geothermal
Hydrogen

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Harnessing human energy
Wind in cities
Piezoelectricity

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Dietary changes
Transportation
Around the house
Travel

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Make gas reflect the true costs
Cap and trade
Carbon tax

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Holding corporations accountable
Governments required to help
Rights of nature

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Greta Thurmberg
Silicon Valley Youth Climate Action

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Science fiction
Artists around the world

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How to talk to deniers

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Despite being greener than solar energy, nuclear power doesn't often feature in a green, renewable future.
Nuclear energy is more divisive than traditional renewables, like solar and wind, and polling cites two reasons for this: fear of an accident, and what to do with the waste.

There's also the cost: financial-advisory firm Lazard estimated that nuclear plants cost significantly more to build than either wind or solar farms.

But what if there was a way around those problems? Bill Gates thinks he's found one, and it's called TerraPower.

Founded by Gates in 2006, the company recently announced it plans to build small, advanced nuclear power stations across the United States. These nuclear power stations are remarkably different from anything currently in use. That's because they rely on a new source of nuclear energy: a traveling wave reactor.

What is TerraPower?

Aside from Gates' involvement, the company has also picked up some funding from the US government, but Gates is listed on TerraPower's website as the sole founder and chairman.

Despite being a decade old, the company hasn't built anything, but that's okay when you are owned by a billionaire there's time to lay groundwork.

Alongside CEO Chris Levesque, CTO John Gilliend, and others, Gates is using TerraPower to investigate the potential of a traveling wave reactor to transform nuclear power - and perhaps rehabilitate its image.

A traveling wave reactor. The rods are at the orange cylinders at the bottom. TerraPower

TravelingWhat Reactor?

To understand a traveling wave reactor, it's important to understand how it differs from a traditional nuclear reactor. Most reactors today are "light water" reactors, and they operate by splitting uranium atoms to generate energy in a process known as fission.

Fission is a tricky process that typically doesn't happen spontaneously in nature (although it can). Uranium is made up of two isotopes, known as U-235 and U-238. While only 0.7 percent of uranium is U-235, this is the isotope the nuclear process needs to work. Enrichment artificially enhances the amount of U-235 within uranium, and it can reach as high as 90 percent concentration in weapons.

Enriched uranium can be incredibly dangerous, especially in weapons-grade form, which is known as Highly Enriched Uranium. That's due to the ease with which it can be converted into a weapon. Low Enriched Uranium, which would be used by TerraPower and others, is far safer, only using uranium enriched as high as 20 percent.

After enrichment, what's left after raising the levels of U-235 past 5 percent is known as "depleted uranium." Depleted uranium is found at the end of an enrichment process, before the enriched material is put into a reactor to be converted into nuclear energy.

It has its own dangers, especially if ingested or inhaled, and its uses, for example in radiation shields in medical equipment. Over time, its radiation levels increase, making it dangerous to keep around. But it never reaches the dangers of high-level enriched uranium, which could kill a person within days. Rather, a person could hold depleted uranium in their hands and be just fine. Primarily, it's waste.

A traveling wave reactor would give depleted uranium a new lease of life - as fuel.

Can a nuclear reactor use depleted uranium as fuel?

A traveling wave reactor's core, which TerraPower calls the technology's "true innovation," uses a mixture of U-235 and depleted uranium, according to the company's website. Enriched uranium rods are surrounded by depleted uranium rods. Serving as what TerraPower describes as an "initiator," the enriched uranium kickstarts the titular traveling wave reaction, "a slow-moving chain reactor of concentric waves of fission."

Surrounding the reactor core are several sights that would be familiar in any nuclear reactor: a cooling system (albeit with sodium instead of the more common water), and a fuel-handling machine to shuffle in new rods.

What are the advantages?

According to TerraPower, there are many. They rest on the fact that a traveling wave reactor uses depleted uranium, which eliminates the need for what is known in nuclear-speak as "reprocessing" - the separation of plutonium and uranium from other elements of nuclear waste. Called "dangerous, dirty, and expensive" by the Union of Concerned Scientists, reprocessing all of the nuclear reactor fleets in America would cost over $4 billion.

TerraPower "eliminates the need for reprocessing," which in turn "reduces proliferation concerns, lowers the overall cost of the nuclear fuel cycle, and helps to protect the environment by making use of a waste byproduct," according to the company.

Why hasn't it happened yet?

At first, TerraPower didn't plan to build in the US. In 2015, the company inked a deal with the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation to begin building an experimental traveling wave reactor outside of Beijing.

But the deal came with some serious complications: namely, politics. By January 2019, tensions were rising between China and the Trump administration, and US restrictions on technology deals with China forced the collapse of the deal.

"We're regrouping," CEO Chris Levesque told the Wall Street Journal at the time. "Maybe we can find another partner."

Reflecting on the project's collapse in a year-end letter, Gates wrote: "We may be able to build it in the United States.

TerraPower's hypothetical plant, as seen on its website. A Natrium plant, meant to be smaller, might look different. TerraPower

What's next for TerraPower?

The company's new plan, which also involves new partner GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, is to build a series of small traveling wave reactor plants across the US throughout the 2020s. These plants, which the company calls Natrium, would run full-time, but wouldn't always contribute to the grid.

Rather, they would act as a complement to established renewables, like solar and wind, only feeding an energy grid when those sources of energy can't do it on their own. When solar and wind are running at full capacity, the plants will instead feed their energy into storage for future use, according to the company.

TerraPower estimates that each Natrium plant would cost $1 billion each to build, according to the company's website. That price is still stubbornly high. But, again, this is where it helps to have a billionaire founder.

This article was corrected to better reflect several elements of the process leading to nuclear energy. These corrections include the enrichment process, the dangers of enriched uranium, the water-based of nature most nuclear cooling systems and how Natrium plants would operate in relationship to energy grids. Inverse regrets the errors.

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TerraPower: why Bill Gates thinks nuclear energy is the future

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Despite being greener than solar energy, nuclear power doesn't often feature in a green, renewable future. Nuclear energy is more divisive than traditional renewables, like solar and wind, and polling cites two reasons for this: fear of an accident, and what to do with the waste.

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If the term "renewable energy" brings to mind a sea of solar panels or towering wind turbines, you're not alone. It's becoming more and more common to capture energy from the sun and wind. That's because these "clean" energy sources generate electricity without polluting our air. Just as important is that they don't release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That greenhouse gas traps the sun's heat and contributes to our changing climate.

But solar and wind power have one big downfall: They're not always available. The sun only shines during the day. Wind comes and goes. There are very few places where wind is constant enough to generate electricity all the time. And as easy as it sounds, storing energy for later use has proven a major challenge.

But ocean waves? As anyone who's stayed near a beach can tell you, waves crash onto shore morning, noon and night. And that makes them ideal for generating energy around the clock. Now scientists are figuring out just how much energy waves could offer.

When wind blows across the surface of water, it creates waves. If you've ever seen white caps on an ocean or some lake on a windy day, you've seen this in action. The wind causes water at the surface to bob up and down. Even though it seems as though the water is traveling from one place to another, it doesn't actually go very far. Rather, it moves in circles - up, up, up to the top of the wave, then down, down, down the other side.

That's true, at least, when the water is very deep, such as out in the ocean. Those gently bobbing waves are called "swells." But waves change when they get close to shore.

As the water gets shallower, it can't travel in circles anymore. The ground gets in the way. The water bumps up against the ocean floor, squashing the circle into an oval. Much like a person tripping over something, the water "trips" over the ground. The top part lurches past the bottom. The wave "breaks," crashing closer to the beach.

Wave energy systems use the water's movement to make electricity. Some types of these devices harness the power of breaking waves. Others make use of swells. Still others use the pressure of waves near the ocean floor. Yet all have the same goal: Convert wave energy into electrical energy. That electricity can be used to power the electric grid. That's the network of cables that transmits electricity to homes and buildings so we can use it.

Wave power is restricted to areas near the ocean. After all, the cables that carry electricity can only be so long. But 40 percent of the world's population lives within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of the ocean. That means a whole lot of lights, TVs and tablets could be powered by waves.

With all that promise for wave power, researchers are testing how well different types of generators convert ocean energy to electricity. Along the way, they're trying to make sure that sea life won't be harmed in the process.

Power where it's needed

The first step to creating wave power? Figuring out the best place to put those energy converters.

Not all coastal areas work for generating wave power. The shape of the land beneath the sea changes the size and shape of waves. Wave-energy converters also are costly. The best spots should have plenty of wave action, but not so much that converters might be damaged in a storm.

To figure out the best sites, scientists turn to computer models. Joao Morim Nascimento and Nick Cartwright are environmental engineers in Australia. Both work at Griffith University in Southport, Queensland. An environmental engineer works to reduce pollution and waste. The pair wanted to find good places for wave-energy converters along their country's southeast coast. It's home to several large Australian cities. Since so many people live near the coast, this area could be great for wave power.

The researchers started out with an existing computer model called SWAN. (That name stands for Simulating WAves Nearshore.) SWAN was developed by researchers at the University of Delft in The Netherlands. It predicts the strength and location of ocean-wave energy. To do so, it factors in things like wind, features on the ocean floor and interactions among multiple waves.

Morim Nascimento and Cartwright adapted SWAN to apply to southeast Australia. They added details about the water's depth out to within 50 kilometers (31 miles) from shore. They also put in data on the region's winds and waves. Then they tested the model using data from buoys in the ocean. The engineers tweaked the model until it closely predicted the amount of wave energy being recorded by the buoys.

Andrew Cornett/Univ. of Ottawa

The model helped the team find "hotspots" - places with what Cartwright describes as an "abundance of wave energy." Each site is within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of shore in water no more than 22 meters (72 feet) deep. These are ideal, he explains, because it is easier and cheaper to get the power to shore from these sites than it would be from farther out.

"There is more than enough natural energy there in the ocean," he says. "The challenge is to harness and convert enough of it into power" that people can use. Part of that challenge is the ocean itself. Waves constantly pound at the equipment. The hardware also can experience some extreme weather. Very large storm waves can damage the converters, Cartwright says. And, he adds, salty seawater corrodes, or breaks down, any metal parts.

Ingvald Straume/Wikimedia Commons ( CC0)

Sea carpet

Scientists and engineers are trying lots of different ways to overcome these challenges. Their ideas have led to many types of designs. Some converters float on the surface, tethered to wave-generators on the ocean floor. Others have one end anchored to the sea bottom with the other free to flip from side to side as waves wash over it. Still others use air or water pressure to generate electricity.

One of the newest systems looks a bit like a flat carpet. Mohammad-Reza Alam and his team at the University of California, Berkeley designed the converter to mimic a muddy seafloor. Places with lots of mud are good at absorbing incoming waves, Alam explains. Fishermen in shallow seas often head for muddy areas when rough weather hits. Boats hanging out there are protected from big waves as they ride out a storm.

If mud can absorb that much energy, Alam reasoned, then an energy converter that acts like mud should do the same. That would make it extremely efficient at harvesting wave power.

The "carpet" part of his converter is made from a smooth sheet of rubber. It rests near the seafloor, where it can bend and flex right along with the waves. As it moves up and down, it pushes posts in and out of a piston pump. The pump converts the piston's movement into electricity, which then travels along a cable to the electric grid.

The carpet is able to remove almost all of the energy from the waves, Alam says. And it would be able to power lots of homes. Each hour, he says, "every square meter of the carpet can get about 2.5 kilowatts [of electricity] out of water near the coast of California." That's twice the amount of electricity used each hour by a typical American home

"If we want to get the same power from solar," Alam says, "we need 14 square meters [151 square feet] of solar panels." That's 14 times as much! He says a full-size wave carpet would probably be about 10 meters (33 feet) wide by 20 meters (66 feet) long. So it should be able to generate 500 kilowatts of electricity per hour - enough to power more than 400 homes - around the clock.

Other locations, such as northern Europe, have more energetic waves. So a wave carpet there could generate more electricity, Alam notes. On the flip side, weaker waves in places like the Gulf of Mexico couldn't pump as much electricity into the electric-power grid.

Anchored to the sea floor, the whole structure lies just above the seabed. So it's completely out of sight. That's important to many people who spend time at the beach. They don't like to see big energy-generating structures (like wind turbines) when they're out for a swim or sail. In fact, many wind farms are located far from shore, so that people enjoying the beach don't see them. The wave carpet, however, can be close to shore. That means the cables that carry electricity to the grid can be much shorter. And the electricity generated by the carpet should therefore cost less.

Good for the environment?

There's no question that finding new sources of renewable energy is good for the environment. Less pollution and fewer greenhouse gases are good for people, plants and animals. But clean energy sources can still cause problems.

Wind turbines can get in the way of migrating birds and bats, for example. (Some estimates say hundreds of thousands of these animals may die each year from collisions with the massive spinning blades.) The lower height of wave-energy converters means they probably wouldn't interfere with migrating animals. But "we do need to consider their interaction with the marine environment carefully," says Deborah Greaves. She is an ocean engineer at the University of Plymouth in England.

One concern is about any ecological impacts of absorbing all of that energy from incoming waves. (After all, that's how they generate electricity - by converting wave energy into electrical energy.) Energy tapped from the waves will reduce how much energy will remain as the waves continue in toward shore. They will be smaller, at least for some distance. Smaller waves could lead to less mixing of nutrients within the water column (that's the water between a particular bit of ocean bottom and the surface above it). And that could impact with species that live there, Greaves says. "But it can also be a benefit," she adds. After all, "wave-energy converters can help provide some coastal protection" by reducing erosion.

The electric generators also could affect how wildlife interact. Many birds and marine mammals hunt for fish in areas that might be ideal sites for wave converters. It's possible that converters could even attract fish to them if the smaller critters they eat seek refuge there. That could, in turn, attract hungry predators. This might help boost marine life in the area. But fish, seals and other animals might also get tangled up in long cables that anchor surface-floating energy converters. So researchers must study where they want to install these converters to make sure they won't harm local ecosystems.

Another concern: The converters will make noise. This can be a problem for fish, dolphins and other animals that rely on sound to find food or to communicate. The deep rumble of a boat and the loud ping of sonar cause all kinds of problems for ocean animals. These critters may struggle to find food or become disoriented. However, Greaves says, wave converters are unlikely to create high levels of noise. The noisiest part would happen when the converters are initially installed at some site. Once they start running, they should be fairly quiet.

On the plus side, converters might become the base for an artificial reef if algae, mussels, barnacles or corals take hold of the structure and begin to grow. Such reefs provide protection for fish and other marine life. That could increase the diversity of marine life in the area. They could be helpful, as long as those critters don't interfere with the wave converter's movement.

"From the vast resources of the ocean, wave energy has the potential to make a huge contribution towards our clean energy needs of the future," Greaves says. But, she cautions, it "needs to be done in a sustainable way, in harmony with the marine environment."

Power Words
More About Power Words

algae Single-celled organisms, once considered plants (they aren't). As aquatic organisms, they grow in water. Like green plants, they depend on sunlight to make their food.

atmosphere The envelope of gases surrounding Earth or another planet.

bat A type of winged mammal comprising more than 1,100 separate species - or one in every four known species of mammal.

buoy A floating device anchored to the bottom of a body of water. A buoy may mark channels, warn of dangers or carry instruments to measure the environment.

carbon The chemical element having the atomic number 6. It is the physical basis of all life on Earth. Carbon exists freely as graphite and diamond. It is an important part of coal, limestone and petroleum, and is capable of self-bonding, chemically, to form an enormous number of chemically, biologically and commercially important molecules.

carbon dioxide (or CO ₂) A colorless, odorless gas produced by all animals when the oxygen they inhale reacts with the carbon-rich foods that they've eaten. Carbon dioxide also is released when organic matter burns (including fossil fuels like oil or gas). Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere. Plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen during photosynthesis, the process they use to make their own food.

climate The weather conditions that typically exist in one area, in general, or over a long period.

computer model A program that runs on a computer that creates a model, or simulation, of a real-world feature, phenomenon or event.

constant Continuous or uninterrupted.

coral Marine animals that often produce a hard and stony exoskeleton and tend to live on reefs (the exoskeletons of dead ancestor corals).

corrode (adj. corrosive) A chemical process that weakens or destroys normally robust materials, such as metals or rock.

diversity A broad spectrum of similar items, ideas or people. In a social context, it may refer to a diversity of experiences and cultural backgrounds. (in biology) A range of different life forms.

dolphins A highly intelligent group of marine mammals that belong to the toothed-whale family. Members of this group include orcas (killer whales), pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins.

ecology (adj. ecological) A branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. A scientist who works in this field is called an ecologist.

ecosystem A group of interacting living organisms - including microorganisms, plants and animals - and their physical environment within a particular climate. Examples include tropical reefs, rainforests, alpine meadows and polar tundra. The term can also be applied to elements that make up some an artificial environment, such as a company, classroom or the internet.

electricity A flow of charge, usually from the movement of negatively charged particles, called electrons.

engineer A person who uses science to solve problems. As a verb, to engineer means to design a device, material or process that will solve some problem or unmet need.

environment The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity (or even the placement of things in the vicinity of an item of interest).

environmental engineer A person who uses science to study and solve problems in ecosystems - from forests to the human body.

erosion (v. erode) The process that removes rock and soil from one spot on Earth's surface, depositing it elsewhere. Erosion can be exceptionally fast or exceedingly slow. Causes of erosion include wind, water (including rainfall and floods), the scouring action of glaciers and the repeated cycles of freezing and thawing that occur in many areas of the world.

factor Something that plays a role in a particular condition or event; a contributor.

flex To bend without breaking. A material with this property is described as flexible.

generator A device used to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy.

greenhouse gas A gas that contributes to the greenhouse effect by absorbing heat. Carbon dioxide is one example of a greenhouse gas.

grid (in electricity) The interconnected system of electricity lines that transport electrical power over long distances. In North America, this grid connects electrical generating stations and local communities throughout most of the continent.

mammal A warm-blooded animal distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for feeding their young, and (typically) the bearing of live young.

marine mammal Any of many types of mammals that spend most of its life in the ocean environment. These include whales and dolphins, walruses and sea lions, seals and sea otters, manatees and dugongs - even polar bears.

metal Something that conducts electricity well, tends to be shiny (reflective) and malleable (meaning it can be reshaped with heat and not too much force or pressure).

model A simulation of a real-world event (usually using a computer) that has been developed to predict one or more likely outcomes. Or an individual that is meant to display how something would work in or look on others.

network A group of interconnected people or things. (v.) The act of connecting with other people who work in a given area or do similar thing (such as artists, business leaders or medical-support groups), often by going to gatherings where such people would be expected, and then chatting them up. (n. networking)

nutrient A vitamin, mineral, fat, carbohydrate or protein that a plant, animal or other organism requires as part of its food in order to survive.

population (in biology) A group of individuals from the same species that lives in the same area.

predator (adjective: predatory) A creature that preys on other animals for most or all of its food.

pressure Force applied uniformly over a surface, measured as force per unit of area.

reef A ridge of rock, coral or sand. It rises up from the seafloor and may come to just above or just under the water's surface.

renewable energy Energy from a source that is not depleted by use, such as hydropower (water), wind power or solar power.

sea An ocean (or region that is part of an ocean). Unlike lakes and streams, seawater - or ocean water - is salty.

sonar A system for the detection of objects and for measuring the depth of water. It works by emitting sound pulses and measuring how long it takes the echoes to return.

species A group of similar organisms capable of producing offspring that can survive and reproduce.

sustainable An adjective to describe the use of resources in a such a way that they will continue to be available long into the future.

tablets (in computing) A small, hand-held computer that can connect to the Internet and that users can control using a touch screen. An Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy and Amazon Kindle Fire are all examples of tablets.

transmit (n. transmission) To send or pass along.

turbine A device with extended arm-like blades (often curved) to catch a moving fluid - anything from a gas or steam to water - and then convert the energy in that movement into rotary motion. Often that rotary motion will drive a system to generate electricity.

waste Any materials that are left over from biological or other systems that have no value, so they can be disposed of as trash or recycled for some new use.

wave A disturbance or variation that travels through space and matter in a regular, oscillating fashion.

weather Conditions in the atmosphere at a localized place and a particular time. It is usually described in terms of particular features, such as air pressure, humidity, moisture, any precipitation (rain, snow or ice), temperature and wind speed.

wind turbine A wind-powered device - similar to the type used to mill grain (windmills) long ago - used to generate electricity.

Alison Pearce Stevens is a former biologist and forever science geek who writes about science and nature for kids. She lives with her husband, their two kids and a small menagerie of cuddly (and not-so cuddly) critters.

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Ocean energy could be the wave of the future

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If the term "renewable energy" brings to mind a sea of solar panels or towering wind turbines, you're not alone. It's becoming more and more common to capture energy from the sun and wind. That's because these "clean" energy sources generate electricity without polluting our air.

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From our footsteps to our button presses, humans are constantly expending energy, and researchers are tapping into these movements to power the world around us.

Harvesting energy from one's surroundings or activities rather than from a battery or a wall outlet has some key advantages: The electricity sources are free and the devices are more mobile. This is particularly useful for medical electronics like insulin pumps and pacemakers. Energy harvesters could also prolong battery life in smartphones and laptops.

The idea isn't new. Crystal radios, for example, have been around since the start of the 20th century and do not need a dedicated power source, since they scavenge electricity from radio waves. But current energy harvesting strategies are not very efficient, and the energy in our environment is diffused widely, meaning bright lights, large temperature gradients or long, brisk walks are needed to produce an appreciable amount of power, which may still not be very much.

Now researchers are findings new ways to increase harvest efficiencies and lower costs. Developers are also making electronics that use much less power, so that one day your phone may run on the rustling in your pocket and a few finger taps when you make a call.

At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, scientists demonstrated a device last month that uses viruses to translate pressure into electricity. The device relies on piezoelectricity, a phenomenon where an electrical charge is produced in a material when it is mechanically deformed or stressed. In this case, the team used an engineered M13 virus that typically infects bacteria to make the material.

The fun starts at 50 nanoamps
The device can produce 6 nanoamps of current and 400 millivolts of potential, roughly one-quarter the output of a triple-A battery and enough to briefly activate a small monochrome liquid-crystal display with a square-centimeter sized generator when pressed. The researchers published their report in Nature Nanotechnology.

Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a researcher in the materials science division at LBNL and one of the report's co-authors, explained that viruses can reproduce themselves and form nanometer-scale structures on their own, making them an attractive low-cost alternative to conventional piezoelectric devices, which can use expensive or toxic chemicals. The virus material can also be sprayed onto a surface, potentially turning any wall or floor into an energy harvester from footsteps and vibrations.

Right now, the virus generator is too weak to provide any practical power, though the researchers are making improvements and say they are not far off from a useful product.

"If we get 50 to 70 [nanoamps], then it's rock 'n' roll time. Then it's a lot of fun," Ramesh said.

Researchers in the United Kingdom also recently developed a piezoelectric generator, a knee brace that scrounges electrons from walking. As the wearer's knee bends, four metal vanes in the device are "plucked," which then vibrate like a guitar string and produce electricity.

Currently, the device produces about 2 milliwatts of power, but researchers expect to reach 30 milliwatts with a few tweaks.

Michele Pozzi, the project's lead researcher and a research fellow in energy harvesting at the School of Applied Sciences at Cranfield University, said in a release that he expects the device to cost £10 per unit when production is ramped up. The findings were published earlier this month in Smart Materials and Structures.

But can it power a television?
Still, even with the energy harvesters on the market, the big hurdle is getting enough usable electricity to power a sensor, lamp or screen. This means producing more electricity than the device needs so it has enough to store and remain consistently operational.

"In some cases, you may be only harvesting a microwatt or so," said David Freeman, chief technologist in the power supply solutions group at Texas Instruments. "If your device requires a microwatt, you aren't doing anything for anybody."

For Texas Instruments, the solution is to make the devices that use less electricity as well as to make harvesters more efficient.

"It's only within the last three, four or five years that the [harvesters] reported enough electricity to be useful and the energy of the devices were low enough to work," Freeman said.

One potential use for harvesters is building sensors that can monitor air quality. Operators can wirelessly collect that information to efficiently heat or cool their spaces. "The target for most of these applications is 'peel-and-stick,'" explained Freeman, noting that the best location for a sensor may be far away from any electrical wiring. Such locations may also be hard to get to, so changing a battery frequently would be too inconvenient, making them ideal uses for harvesters.

To this end, the company is making integrated circuits and microprocessors that need much less energy.

"Every generation uses less power than the generation before," Freeman said. "As we continue to push the power down needed by these devices, then it makes the harvesting piece more practical."

According to Freeman, the dominant harvesting technology is small photovoltaic panels, since vibrational and radio harvesters don't yet capture enough power to run both the sensor and the transmitter. The company recently made a prototype wireless keyboard that runs on indoor lighting with a battery life that matches the operating life of the device, roughly three to five years. In addition, Texas Instruments is developing sensors to monitor industrial equipment and roadways, where the regular movement frequencies may be more suited to vibrational harvesters.

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

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Scientists Harness Human Power for Electricity

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From our footsteps to our button presses, humans are constantly expending energy, and researchers are tapping into these movements to power the world around us. Harvesting energy from one's surroundings or activities rather than from a battery or a wall outlet has some key advantages: The electricity sources are free and the devices are more mobile.

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https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgkpkn/piezoelectricity-wind-energy-trees-vibration-resonance

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View Slideshow

Imagine if a world full of forests generated all the energy we need. That dream could become reality with a new form of wind power production that turns tree movement into clean energy. The technology hinges upon piezoelectricity - the electric charge produced from a vibration applied to any material. According to a new report in the Journal of Sound and Vibration, the movement of trees in the wind produces vibrations that could be successfully converted into energy.

The study, administered by engineers at Ohio State's Laboratory of Sound and Vibration Research, found that it is possible to convert a random range of vibrations into a viable energy source through the natural vibrational energy of tree-like structures. The natural frequency is like a wall that absorbs and stores the energy from higher frequencies, just like a small ripple of water that accumulates into a large swell.

RELATED: Virginia Tech's New Piezoelectric Charger Can Power Your Cell Phone With a Simple Shake

This complex science is dependent upon wind (which as we know, can be completely random) turbulently whipping a leaf or small branch around and that power being contained into a larger, powerful low-frequency sway of the tree itself. The engineers tested tiny artificial forests using small tree-like L-shaped steel beams wrapped with polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), a piezoelectric material. The researchers were able to produce about 2 Volts of energy.

Piezoelectricity can be produced from a variety of materials - from tapping on a keyboard to a swaying skyscraper. In fact, the concept has already been patented using keyboard covers. It's a huge step forward in renewable energy, and we're anxious to see how it folds.
via Motherboard

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ohio state\'s laboratory of sound and vibration research

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Engineers have found a way to harvest wind energy from trees

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View Slideshow Imagine if a world full of forests generated all the energy we need. That dream could become reality with a new form of wind power production that turns tree movement into clean energy. The technology hinges upon piezoelectricity - the electric charge produced from a vibration applied to any material.

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The Clothes On Your Back

The scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology that created a fabric that can harvest energy generated from sunlight and motion are getting more attention for their textile with a new feature in the Los Angeles Times.

"The objective was to harvest energy from our living environment, for example, human walking or muscle movement and fabric; the goal is to drive small electronics," said Zhong Lin Wang, a nanotechnologist from Georgia Tech who authored the study, told the newspaper. "And this research recently attracted a lot of attention because these days, flexible electronics, wearable electronics, have become very popular and fashionable today. But each of them needs a power source."

To harvest energy from the Sun, the fabric uses dye-sensitized solar cells formed into long fibers. Fiber-shaped triboelectric nanogenerators are used to harvest energy made through movement. Finally, fiber-shaped supercapacitors store energy in electrochemical form. The fiber-shape and combination of these three elements make it possible for the material to be flexible enough to be added onto typical garments.

So long, dead batteries!

As our smartphones have yet to pack the same battery power as our trusty old 3210s, having clothes that can charge them is a pretty great alternative. Under sunlight, the solar fibers provide most of the power. Indoors, motion-generated energy takes over. There's also no need to do anything dramatic to gather power; you simply wear the clothes and go about your day. "Our idea is to try to use whatever is available, whenever it's available," Wang adds.

Charging your phone or smartwatch on the go isn't the only thing this fabric can do. The fibers could be woven into existing textiles, such as cotton, so that existing clothes could have energy-harvesting capabilities. Theoretically, this could also usher in the development of interactive garments or advancements in flexible screens, medical monitoring devices, and possibly even innovations in robotics.

Right now, the team has about 225 square centimeters (35 square inches) of the fabric, and it's about as flexible as woven straw. Eventually, they hope to be able to make it more durable, improve performance, and make the fibers even thinner, so that it offers the same flexibility as cloth.

As a Futurism reader, we invite you join the Singularity Global Community, our parent company's forum to discuss futuristic science & technology with like-minded people from all over the world. It's free to join, sign up now!

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Energy-Harvesting Fabric Could Make Dead Batteries a Thing of the Past

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Researchers have created about 225 square centimeters of a fabric equipped with fibers than can harvest and store energy from the sun and everyday motion. The textile could be used to power gadgets or lead to innovations in flexible screens, medical monitoring devices, and possibly even robotics.

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High-Performance Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters and Their Applications

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High-Performance Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters and Their Applications

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Context & Scale

With the rapid advances in wireless sensors, implantable electronics, and wearable devices, the demand for high-power-density and long-lifespan power sources is becoming increasingly stronger. Energy harvesting, emerging as an alternative energy solution to batteries, holds great potential to achieve self-powered autonomous operations of such low-power electronic devices, and thus has recently attracted much attention from both academia and industry. The piezoelectric effect is widely adopted to convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, due to its high energy conversion efficiency, ease of implementation, and miniaturization. This paper presents a comprehensive and critical review of state-of-the-art research on piezoelectric energy harvesting. From the viewpoint of applications, we are most concerned about whether an energy harvester can generate sufficient power under variable excitation. Therefore, here we concentrate on methodologies leading to high power output and broad operational bandwidth. A variety of designs, nonlinear methods, optimization techniques, and harvesting materials are reviewed and discussed in depth. The study also evaluates different figures of merit and presents a systematic performance comparison on recently proposed energy harvesters. Furthermore, we identify four promising applications: shoes, artificial pacemakers, tire pressure monitoring systems, and bridge and building monitoring. The excitation characteristics of each application are analyzed and corresponding harvesting methods discussed.

The piezoelectric energy-harvesting technology has experienced significant progress in the past 10 years. However, research on energy harvesters is mostly conducted without specific applications, and reliability and system integration have not been well examined. More research is expected to deal with these issues to facilitate in turning decades of research efforts on energy harvesting into tangible benefits in our daily life.

Energy harvesting holds great potential to achieve long-lifespan self-powered operations of wireless sensor networks, wearable devices, and medical implants, and thus has attracted substantial interest from both academia and industry. This paper presents a comprehensive review of piezoelectric energy-harvesting techniques developed in the last decade. The piezoelectric effect has been widely adopted to convert mechanical energy to electricity, due to its high energy conversion efficiency, ease of implementation, and miniaturization. From the viewpoint of applications, we are most concerned about whether an energy harvester can generate sufficient power under a variable excitation. Therefore, here we concentrate on methodologies leading to high power output and broad operational bandwidth. Different designs, nonlinear methods, optimization techniques, and harvesting materials are reviewed and discussed in depth. Furthermore, we identify four promising applications: shoes, pacemakers, tire pressure monitoring systems, and bridge and building monitoring. We review new high-performance energy harvesters proposed for each application.

Recommended articles Citing articles (0)
View Abstract

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High-Performance Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters and Their Applications

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With the rapid advances in wireless sensors, implantable electronics, and wearable devices, the demand for high-power-density and long-lifespan power sources is becoming increasingly stronger. Energy harvesting, emerging as an alternative energy solution to batteries, holds great potential to achieve self-powered autonomous operations of such low-power electronic devices, and thus has recently attracted much attention from both academia and industry.

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sfenvironment.org - Our Home. Our City. Our Planet

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There are currently (5) small wind turbine installations in San Francisco. One can consider purchasing a small wind turbine if the proposed site has wind speeds of at least 10 mph or 4.4 m/s (meters per second), and the average electricity bill is over a $150 per month. It is important to make any energy conservation and efficiency changes at the site before looking into a small wind turbine.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) recommends obtaining and reviewing product literature from several manufacturers, and researching those you want to pursue to ensure they are recognized businesses. It is important to find out how long the warranty lasts and what it includes, and ask for references of customers with installations similar to the one you may be considering. Ask system owners about performance, reliability, maintenance and repair requirements, and whether the system is meeting their expectations.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1) How do wind turbines work?
The blades of a wind turbine spin when wind passes through them; this motion causes a shaft to rotate inside of a generator, which then produces electricity.

2) What is a small wind turbine?
Small wind turbines, also known as "small wind generators," are used for residential or commercial buildings. The City and County of San Francisco defines small wind turbines as having a rated capacity of 50 kilowatts (kW) or less.

3) What is "urban wind"?
"Urban wind" refers to wind energy technologies that are appropriate for urban environments.

4) What is the difference between a "Horizontal-Axis" and "Vertical-Axis" wind turbine?
The vast majority of wind turbines are three-bladed, "propeller-shaped" devices that spin around an axis that is parallel - or horizontal - to the ground. These are called "horizontal-axis wind turbines," or "HAWTs." A "vertical-axis wind turbine," or "VAWT," has a rotor that revolves around an axis that is perpendicular - or vertical - to the ground, similar to a barbershop pole or corkscrew. Many variations of HAWTs and VAWTs exist or are under development. HAWTs utilize a horizontally mounted rotor shaft on top of a tower and have blades resembling propellers. VAWTs have rotor shafts that are oriented vertically and are often produced in Darrieus (egg-beater) or Savonius (wind scoop) configurations.

5) What turbine size do I need for my building?
The size of your turbine depends on how much electricity you use. A single-family home in SF uses approximately 5,232 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year (about 436 kWh per month). A commercial building's electricity use can be significantly higher depending on the building, and would therefore require bigger wind turbines. Depending upon the average wind speed in the area, a wind turbine rated in the range of 1-5 kW would be required to make a significant contribution to meet this demand.

6) How much does a wind system cost?
Small wind energy systems can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000 depending on the kW size. Well-sited small wind turbines can usually pay for themselves within 15 years, about half their serviceable lifetimes, if the right incentives are applied. VAWTs are relatively new to the market which means that prices for the systems are not readily available, but prices can range from around $5,000 to $15,000, not including installation costs.

7) How do I determine the wind resource at my site?
Wind experts recommend the installation of anemometer, a device that measures wind direction and speed, for at least 12 months. The anemometer is usually installed on a pole or tower where a small wind turbine can be placed. Anemometers are typically installed for a year because wind has seasonal changes; for example, when winds tend to be stronger in the spring. The SF Environment is currently developing a SF Wind Map to help San Franciscans get a better understanding of their wind resource in their neighborhood.

8) How are small wind turbines mounted?
Because wind speeds increase with height, the wind turbine should be mounted on a pole or tower. In general, the higher the pole or tower, the more power the wind system can produce. The pole or tower can also raise the turbine above the air turbulence that can exist close to the surface because of obstructions such as buildings, trees, and hills.

9) Can I connect my system to the utility grid?
Small wind energy systems can be connected to the electricity distribution system - these are called grid-connected systems. If the turbine cannot deliver the amount of energy you need, the utility makes up the difference. However, you should contact your utility before connecting to their distribution lines to address any power quality and safety concerns. Your utility can provide you with a list of requirements for connecting your system to the grid.

10) How reliable are wind turbines? Will I have to perform much maintenance?
Most small turbines have only 2-3 moving parts and are designed for a long life (20 - 30 years). However, as with any other hard-working machine, it must be operated safely and in compliance with the manufacturers specifications and parts must be maintained and occasionally repaired.

11) Are there any federal or state incentives for small wind turbines?
Owners of small wind systems can receive an uncapped federal investment tax credit for 30% of total installed costs. At the state level, the California Energy Commission's (CEC) Self-Generation Incentive Program offers rebates for wind systems at $1.19 per watt, up to 3 MW.

12) How do I apply for a small wind turbine permit in San Francisco?
The SF Department of Building Inspections (DBI) is currently accepting applications for small wind turbine permits. Permits for small wind turbines have been prioritized by DBI as written in the revision of the AB-004. Residents can apply for rooftop and ground level installation permits. DBI is also required to inspect the proposed site before a permit can issued. See the Panning Department's standards for the review of applications here. Wind permitting fees are reported in the range of $1,000 to $5,000, depending on whether public notification is required, by vendors who have completed projects in San Francisco.

13) Is there anything I should watch out for when buying a small wind turbine?
Most of the popular models of small HAWTs operate at about the same efficiency. The energy production you should expect will be closely related to the swept area of the rotor blades, which is based on the diameter of the rotor. If you are offered a HAWT that promises to power your whole house with a turbine that is much smaller than conventional products, ask for more details. Because VAWTs are just starting to enter the marketplace, their efficiencies are much harder to predict. Always get several bids from different companies and ask for references from prior customers.

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Buying a Small Wind Turbine, A Consumer Guide and FAQ

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There are currently (5) small wind turbine installations in San Francisco. One can consider purchasing a small wind turbine if the proposed site has wind speeds of at least 10 mph or 4.4 m/s (meters per second), and the average electricity bill is over a $150 per month.

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In urban areas, municipal governments, business owners, and residents generally have limited options when it comes to renewable energy. Distributed solar generation, popular in suburbs and rural areas, shows some promise in certain urban applications. Another option for city-dwellers is to select a renewable electricity rate from their utility. These plans are largely backed by the renewable energy credits purchased by the electricity companies from wind generating facilities in rural areas. This leads to the challenge of developing wind generation in urban settings.

For many years, the infrastructure required to harness wind has not lent itself to urban environments. The most prevalent issue has been the size of conventional wind turbines. Wind turbines take up a large amount of real estate and are considered by some to be eyesores and obstructions to the visual landscape. In addition, they can be noisy, cause disconcerting shadow flickers, and require consistent, non-turbulent winds of certain speeds that are uncharacteristic of urban environments. As a result, photovoltaic solar panels are the logical choice for renewable energy generation in urban areas. Fortunately, technology and design have teamed up to advance the state of wind generation in our cities.
Vertical Axis Wind Turbines Advantages
One of the main technological advances increasing the viability of wind energy in urban applications is the improvement of the vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) design. The bladed towers that most people envision when thinking of wind energy are horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs). HAWTs do have advantages including more mature technology, higher rotation speeds, and lower cost. As such, HAWTs have been the favored wind generation technology.

However, VAWTs have attributes that could position them as being preferable to HAWTs in urban applications. Those attributes include quieter operation and their ability to better deal with variable wind currents. VATWs do not need to be pointed into the wind to be effective. This is advantageous given the oft-variable nature of city winds. Unlike HAWTs, the generator and gearbox do not need to be mounted near the blades and can be situated at the base, improving both the profile of the turbine and maintenance accessibility. As the technology progresses, new designs and installation techniques have mitigated the shortcomings of VAWTs such as low rotational speeds and lower power coefficients.

In working towards feasible urban applications, the focus has largely been on VAWT micro wind turbines. These smaller turbines vary from the truly micro-sized installations with as little as 1 kW output to larger models with outputs exceeding 20 kW. Ideally, newer turbines should be self-starting, ultra-quiet, provide smooth torque, and be highly efficient so usable energy can be delivered at modest wind speeds. Until recently, most urban micro turbines have been of the well-recognized Darrieus or Savonius types. However, in the quest to improve performance, new designs are emerging. Some of these designs are modifications of VAWT designs while others are completely new.
Design Variations
The Giromill is a variation of the Darrieus or 'eggbeater' turbine. Rather than the Darrieus' curved airfoils, the Giromill is outfitted with vertical blades. An advanced version of this is the Cycloturbine. It features blades that are each able to rotate around their respective vertical axis and thus always have an angle of attack relative to the wind. As a result, maximum torque is achieved and delivered smoothly. These movable blades also allow the Cycloturbine to self-start at very low wind speeds. Disadvantages include the need for a wind direction sensor and a complex blade pitching mechanism that adds weight to the turbine. The wind direction sensor need has been addressed with the development of a self-actuating pitch control system.

Helical turbines are another variation of the Darrieus turbine. In this design, the blades are curved into a helix so that the turbine's torque is spread evenly. This is an important modification as Darrieus turbines are known to suffer from torque ripple and cyclical stress. The twisted Savonius, meanwhile, is a Savonius modified to have long, helical scoops for the same reason.

While these designs exhibit features that lend them to urban use, the greatest advances have come from turbines developed from the ground up for use in urban spaces. The McCamley MT01 Mk2, for example, exhibits nearly all the traits ideally suited for city use. Its direct drive design can withstand strong, irregular wind gusts and it fits easily on rooftops with a sturdy eight-legged support structure. A rooftop wind farm could easily be created with these turbines. Rated at 12 kW, this technology is scalable up to 24 kW.
Technology Meets Design
French company New Wind has created an ingenious design named Tree Vent that cleverly solves not only the problem of where to place micro turbines in an urban environment but also addresses the issue of them being considered an eyesore by some. Their "turbine trees" are exactly what they sound like. The 36-foot tall steel structures are designed to look like trees with their "leaves" being tiny green VAWTs. The turbines operate almost silently and the cables, generators, and other components are hidden away, integrated into the tree structure. Each unit puts out a modest 3.1 kW, however, their design could be the perfect one for some urban installations. This is an example of how renewable energy does not have to look bad.

One of the most exciting new micro turbines purpose-designed for urban environments is the Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine. One of the few non-VAWT examples, the Liam F1 is based on the Archimedes screw principle. Long used as highly efficient water turbines, the application to wind energy has yielded similarly impressive results. With a claimed efficiency of 80%, this design provides the same power as considerably larger units. It creates very little operational noise and is designed to always face into the wind.

To offset the inability of micro wind turbines to produce large power outputs, some manufacturers have developed hybrid solar/wind units. One example is the SolarMill by Windstream Technologies. The SolarMill consists of Savonius VAWTs mated to solar panels. This rooftop-mounted system is scalable to the energy needs of the user. Additional turbines and solar panels can be added to increase the power output.
Moving Forward
The performance and cost effectiveness of wind turbines in urban environments is still being evaluated. Reliable performance data is too scarce to provide a conclusive answer, as many of the case studies have been done by manufacturers rather than independent parties. A lack of standardization and certification could lead to dissatisfied customers or technology that simply is not viable. Conversely, if the quickly advancing technology is combined with more field trials, the technology can be refined.

Studies confirm that the current technology is suitable for small-scale energy generation in locations where there is no space for large turbines. In addition, complementing solar technology with micro wind turbines can boost electricity yield and ensure power can be generated when weather conditions are unfavorable to one technology or the other. Aside from the energy produced, building and business owners can use wind generation to enhance their renewable energy profile. Public perceptions of urban wind technology can be further enhanced through successful installations and education.

As for the turbines themselves, they have the proven ability to provide on or off-grid energy. Bringing the technology to a level where the return on investment is attractive to a larger demographic is necessary to optimize the design and operation of turbines for urban wind generation. With technological advancements, the likelihood of increased usage of urban wind turbine installations seems very promising.

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Wind Generation in Urban Settings - Renewable Energy World

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In urban areas, municipal governments, business owners, and residents generally have limited options when it comes to renewable energy. Distributed solar generation, popular in suburbs and rural areas, shows some promise in certain urban applications. Another option for city-dwellers is to select a renewable electricity rate from their utility.

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Manufacturing chemicals creates a huge amount of greenhouse-gas emissions, both from the heat needed to drive production and from by-products of the reactions themselves. But new technology emerging from the lab could transform these conventional industrial methods.

A Rice University spinout is pursuing a novel way of producing hydrogen and other chemicals by relying on nanoparticles that enable light, rather than heat, to power the reactions. Syzygy Plasmonics will disclose on Monday that it's raised $5.8 million, in a funding round co-led by MIT venture firm The Engine and the GOOSE Society of Texas. (See " Investing in tech that's worth the wait.")

The Houston-based startup will use the funds to build a pilot-scale plant for producing hydrogen. The company believes the technology could reduce the emissions usually generated in the process by as much as half.

Hydrogen is a $130 billion market today, mainly used in oil refining, chemical production, and steelmaking. Many believe it has growing promise for energy storage as well, as a way of powering vehicles and balancing the electricity grid.

The vast majority of hydrogen is produced from natural gas, using a process known as steam reforming that uses heat, pressure, and chemical catalysts to convert the gas into hydrogen and, problematically, carbon dioxide. Between this by-product and the heat from fossil fuels, the process emits more than 800 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to the combined emissions of the United Kingdom and Indonesia, as the International Energy Agency noted in a recent report.

Syzygy's founders believe they can address a big part of problem this by swapping the chemical catalysts for a new type of photocatalyst developed by and licensed from Rice University.

A plasmonic photocatalyst developed at Rice University.

Researchers have been investigating photocatalysts for decades. So far, however, they're only used in limited applications, like water and air purification, in part because they haven't proved very efficient at driving chemical reactions.

Rice professors Naomi Halas and Peter Nordlander, two of the company's cofounders, figured out a way to combine so-called plasmonic nanoparticles, a promising category of photocatalysts, with traditional catalysts. In a 2016 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that this coupling approach delivered high light absorption and efficient reactions, and was highly customizable for particular applications.

Syzygy believes that by relying on these hybrid nanoparticles and building a specialized reactor, it can run the hydrogen production process using LEDs, which could be powered by wind, solar, or hydroelectric power. That would eliminate the need for the fossil fuels burned to produce steam and additional heat in the traditional process, which account for around half of the emissions.

It wouldn't address the emissions from the carbon dioxide created as a by-product, though the company did receive a US Department of Energy grant to explore ways to do that as well. The company believes similar photocatalysts could be used to produce cleaner versions of other industrial products made with catalysts, potentially including synthetic fuels and fertilizers.

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How nanoparticles that harvest light could curb climate emissions

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Manufacturing chemicals creates a huge amount of greenhouse-gas emissions, both from the heat needed to drive production and from by-products of the reactions themselves. But new technology emerging from the lab could transform these conventional industrial methods. A Rice University spinout is pursuing a novel way of producing hydrogen and other chemicals by relying on...

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(Pocket-lint) - While smartphones, smart homes and even smart wearables are growing ever more advanced, they're still limited by power. The battery hasn't advanced in decades. But we're on the verge of a power revolution.

Big technology and car companies are all too aware of the limitations of lithium-ion batteries. While chips and operating systems are becoming more efficient to save power we're still only looking at a day or two of use on a smartphone before having to recharge.

While it may be some time before we get a week's life out of our phones, development is progressing well. We've collected all the best battery discoveries that could be with us soon, from over the air charging to super-fast 30-second re-charging. Hopefully, you'll be seeing this tech in your gadgets soon.

NAWA Technologies has designed and patented an Ultra Fast Carbon Electrode, which is says is a game-changer in the battery market. It uses a vertically-aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) design and NAWA says it can boost battery power ten fold, increase energy storage by a factor of three and increase the lifecycle of a battery five times. The company sees electric vehicles as being the primary beneficiary, reducing the carbon footprint and cost of battery production, while boosting performance. NAWA says that 1000km range could become the norm, with charging times cut to 5 minutes to get to 80 per cent. The technology could be in production as soon as 2023.

Researchers at the University of Texas have developed a lithium-ion battery that doesn't use cobalt for its cathode. Instead it switched to a high percentage of nickel (89 per cent) using manganese and aluminium for the other ingredients. "Cobalt is the least abundant and most expensive component in battery cathodes," said Professor Arumugam Manthiram, Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Texas Materials Institute. "And we are completely eliminating it." The team says they have overcome common problems with this solution, ensuring good battery life and an even distribution of ions.

While the emission-reducing properties of electric vehicles are widely accepted, there's still controversy around the batteries, particularly the use of metals like cobalt. SVOLT, based in Changzhou, China, has announced that it has manufactured cobalt-free batteries designed for the EV market. Aside from reducing the rare earth metals, the company is claiming that they have a higher energy density, which could result in ranges of up to 800km (500 miles) for electric cars, while also lengthening the life of the battery and increasing the safety. Exactly where we'll see these batteries we don't know, but the company has confirmed that it's working with a large European manufacturer.

Looking to overcome the problem of unstable silicon in lithium-ion batteries, researchers at University of Eastern Finland have developed a method to produce a hybrid anode, using mesoporous silicon microparticles and carbon nanotubes. Ultimately the aim is to replace graphite as the anode in batteries and use silicon, which has ten times the capacity. Using this hybrid material improves the performance of the battery, while the silicon material is sustainably produced from barley husk ash.

Monash University researchers have developed a lithium-sulphur battery that can power a smartphone for 5 days, outperforming lithium-ion. The researchers have fabricated this battery, have patents and the interest of manufacturers. The group has funding for further research in 2020, saying that continued research into cars and grid use will continue.

The new battery technology is said to have a lower environmental impact than lithium-ion and lower manufacturing costs, while offering the potential to power a vehicle for 1000km (620 miles), or a smartphone for 5 days.

IBM Research is reporting that it has discovered a new battery chemistry that is free from heavy metals like nickel and cobalt and could potentially out-perform lithium-ion. IBM Research says that this chemistry has never been used in combination in a battery before and that the materials can be extracted from seawater.

The performance of the battery is promising, with IBM Research saying that it can out-perform lithium-ion in a number of different areas - it's cheaper to manufacture, it can charge faster than lithium-ion and can pack in both higher power and energy densities. All this is available in a battery with low flammability of the electrolytes.

IBM Research points out that these advantages will make its new battery technology suitable for electric vehicles, and it is working with Mercedes-Benz amongst others to develop this technology into a viable commercial battery.

While lithium-ion batteries are everywhere and growing in use cases, the management of those batteries, including determining when those batteries have reached the end of their life is difficult. Panasonic, working with Professor Masahiro Fukui of Ritsumeikan University, has come up with a new battery management technology that will make it a lot easier monitor batteries and determine the residual value of lithium-ion in them.

Panasonic says that its new technology can be easily applied with a change to the battery management system, which will make it easier to monitor and evaluate batteries with multiple stacked cells, the sort of thing you might find in an electric car. Panasonic that this system will help the drive towards sustainability by being able to better manage reuse and recycling of lithium-ion batteries.

Research has demonstrated a charging method that takes us a step closer to extreme fast charging - XFC - which aims to deliver 200 miles of electric car range in about 10 minutes with 400kW charging. One of the issues with charging is Li plating in batteries, so the asymmetric temperature modulation method charges at a higher temperature to reduce plating, but limits that to 10 minutes cycles, avoiding solid-electrolyte-interphase growth, which can reduce battery life. The method is reported to reduce battery degradation while allowing XFC charging.

This alternative type of lithium-ion battery uses silicon to achieve three times better performance than current graphite li-ion batteries. The battery is still lithium-ion like the one found in your smartphone, but it uses silicon instead of graphite in the anodes.

Scientists at the University of California Riverside have been focused on nano silicon for a while, but it's been degrading too quickly and is tough to produce in large quantities. By using sand it can be purified, powdered then ground with salt and magnesium before being heated to remove oxygen resulting in pure silicon. This is porous and three-dimensional which helps in performance and, potentially, the life-span of the batteries. We originally picked up on this research in 2014 and now it's coming to fruition.

Silanano is a battery tech startup that's bringing this technique to market and has seen big investment from companies like Daimler and BMW. The company say that its solution can be dropped into existing lithium-ion battery manufacturing, so it's set for scalable deployment, promising 20 per cent battery performance boost now, or 40 per cent in the near future.

While wireless inductive charging is common, being able to capture energy from Wi-Fi or other electromagnetic waves remains a challenge. A team of researchers, however, has developed a rectenna (radio wave harvesting antenna) that is only several atoms think, making it incredibly flexible.

The idea is that devices can incorporate this molybdenum disulphide-based rectenna so that AC power can be harvested from Wi-Fi in the air and converted to DC, either to recharge a battery or power a device directly. That could see powered medical pills without the need for an internal battery (safer for the patient), or mobile devices that don't need to be connected to a power supply to recharge.

You could be the source of power for your next device, if research into TENGs comes to fruition. A TENG - or triboelectric nanogenerator - is a power harvesting technology which captures the electric current generated through contact of two materials.

A research team at Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute and the University of Surrey have given an insight into how this technology might be put into place to power things like wearable devices. While we're some way from seeing it in action, the research should give designers the tools they need to effectively understand and optimise future TENG implementation.

Great minds over at the University of California Irvine have cracked nanowire batteries that can withstand plenty of recharging. The result could be future batteries that don't die.

Nanowires, a thousand times thinner than a human hair, pose a great possibility for future batteries. But they've always broken down when recharging. This discovery uses gold nanowires in a gel electrolyte to avoid that. In fact, these batteries were tested recharging over 200,000 times in three months and showed no degradation at all.

Solid state batteries traditionally offer stability but at the cost of electrolyte transmissions. A paper published by Toyota scientists writes about their tests of a solid state battery which uses sulfide superionic conductors. All this means a superior battery.

The result is a battery that can operate at super capacitor levels to completely charge or discharge in just seven minutes - making it ideal for cars. Since it's solid state that also means it's far more stable and safer than current batteries. The solid-state unit should also be able to work in as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius and up to one hundred.

The electrolyte materials still pose challenges so don't expect to see these in cars soon, but it's a step in the right direction towards safer, faster-charging batteries.

Graphene batteries have the potential to be one of the most superior available. Grabat has developed graphene batteries that could offer electric cars a driving range of up to 500 miles on a charge.

Graphenano, the company behind the development, says the batteries can be charged to full in just a few minutes and can charge and discharge 33 times faster than lithium ion. Discharge is also crucial for things like cars that want vast amounts of power in order to pull away quickly.

There's no word on if Grabat batteries are currently being used in any products, but the company has batteries available for cars, drones, bikes and even the home.

Scientists at Rice University have made a breakthrough in micro-supercapacitors. Currently, they are expensive to make but using lasers that could soon change.

By using lasers to burn electrode patterns into sheets of plastic manufacturing costs and effort drop massively. The result is a battery that can charge 50 times faster than current batteries and discharge even slower than current supercapacitors. They're even tough, able to work after being bent over 10,000 times in testing.

Prieto believes the future of batteries is 3D. The company has managed to crack this with its battery that uses a copper foam substrate.

This means these batteries will not only be safer, thanks to no flammable electrolyte, but they will also offer longer life, faster charging, five times higher density, be cheaper to make and be smaller than current offerings.

Prieto aims to place its batteries into small items first, like wearables. But it says the batteries can be upscaled so we could see them in phones and maybe even cars in the future.

The Jenax J.Flex battery has been developed to make bendable gadgets possible. The paper-like battery can fold and is waterproof meaning it can be integrated into clothing and wearables.

The battery has already been created and has even been safety tested, including being folded over 200,000 times without losing performance.

uBeam uses ultrasound to transmit electricity. Power is turned into sound waves, inaudible to humans and animals, which are transmitted and then converted back to power upon reaching the device.

The uBeam concept was stumbled upon by 25-year-old astrobiology graduate Meredith Perry. She started the company that will make it possible to charge gadgets over the air using a 5mm thick plate. These transmitters can be attached to walls, or made into decorative art, to beam power to smartphones and laptops. The gadgets just need a thin receiver in order to receive the charge.

StoreDot, a start-up born from the nanotechnology department at Tel Aviv University, has developed the StoreDot charger. It works with current smartphones and uses biological semiconductors made from naturally occurring organic compounds known as peptides - short chains of amino acids - which are the building blocks of proteins.

The result is a charger that can recharge smartphones in 60 seconds. The battery comprises "non-flammable organic compounds encased in a multi-layer safety-protection structure that prevents over-voltage and heating", so there should be no issues with it exploding.

The company has also revealed plans to build a battery for electric vehicles that charges in five minutes and offers a range of 300 miles.

There's no word on when StoreDot batteries will be available on a global scale - we were expecting them to arrive in 2017 - but when they do we expect them to become incredibly popular.

Alcatel has demoed a mobile phone with a transparent solar panel over the screen that would let users charge their phone by simply placing it in the sun.

Although it's not likely to be commercially available for some time, the company hopes that it will go some way to solving the daily issues of never having enough battery power. The phone will work with direct sunlight as well as standard lights, in the same way regular solar panels.

A car has managed to drive 1,100 miles on a single battery charge. The secret to this super range is a type of battery technology called aluminium-air that uses oxygen from the air to fill its cathode. This makes it far lighter than liquid filled lithium-ion batteries to give car a far greater range.

The Bill Gates Foundation is funding further research by Bristol Robotic Laboratory who discovered batteries that can be powered by urine. It's efficient enough to charge a smartphone which the scientists have already shown off. But how does it work?

Using a Microbial Fuel Cell, micro-organisms take the urine, break it down and output electricity.

Researchers in the UK have built a phone that is able to charge using ambient sound in the atmosphere around it.

The smartphone was built using a principle called the piezoelectric effect. Nanogenerators were created that harvest ambient noise and convert it into electric current.

The nanorods even respond to the human voice, meaning chatty mobile users could actually power their own phone while they talk.

Power Japan Plus has already announced this new battery technology called Ryden dual carbon. Not only will it last longer and charge faster than lithium but it can be made using the same factories where lithium batteries are built.

The batteries use carbon materials which mean they are more sustainable and environmentally friendly than current alternatives. It also means the batteries will charge twenty times faster than lithium ion. They will also be more durable, with the ability to last up to 3,000 charge cycles, plus they are safer with lower chance of fire or explosion.

Scientists in Japan are working on new types of batteries that don't need lithium like your smartphone battery. These new batteries will use sodium, one of the most common materials on the planet rather than rare lithium - and they'll be up to seven times more efficient than conventional batteries.

Research into sodium-ion batteries has been going on since the eighties in an attempt to find a cheaper alternative to lithium. By using salt, the sixth most common element on the planet, batteries can be made much cheaper. Commercialising the batteries is expected to begin for smartphones, cars and more in the next five to 10 years.

The Upp hydrogen fuel cell portable charger is available now. It uses hydrogen to power your phone keeping you off the gird and remaining environmentally friendly.

One hydrogen cell will provide five full charges of a mobile phone (25Wh capacity per cell). And the only by-product produced is water vapour. A USB type A socket means it will charge most USB devices with a 5V, 5W, 1000mA output.

It's not uncommon for lithium-ion batteries to overheat, catch on fire and possibly even explode. The battery in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is a prime example. Researchers at Stanford university have come up with lithium-ion batteries with built-in fire extinguishers.

The battery has a component called triphenyl phosphate, which is commonly used as a flame retardant in electronics, added to the plastic fibres to help keep the positive and negative electrodes apart. If the battery's temperature rises above 150 degrees C, the plastic fibres melt and the triphenyl phosphate chemical is released. Research shows this new method can stop batteries from catching fire in 0.4 seconds.

Lithium-ion batteries have a rather volatile liquid electrolyte porous material layer sandwiched between the anode and cathode layers. Mike Zimmerman, a researcher at Tufts University in Massachusetts, has developed a battery that has double the capacity of lithium-ion ones, but without the inherent dangers.

Zimmerman's battery is incredibly thin, being slightly thicker than two credit cards, and swaps out the electrolyte liquid with a plastic film that has similar properties. It can withstand being pierced, shredded, and can be exposed to heat as it's not flammable. There's still a lot of research to be done before the technology could make it to market, but it's good to know safer options are out there.

Harvard scientists have developed a battery that stores its energy in organic molecules dissolved in neutral pH water. The researchers say this new method will let the Flow battery last an exceptionally long time compared to the current lithium-ion batteries.

It's unlikely we'll see the technology in smartphones and the like, as the liquid solution associated with Flow batteries is stored in large tanks, the larger the better. It's thought they could be an ideal way to store energy created by renewable energy solutions such as wind and solar.

Indeed, research from Stanford University has used liquid metal in a flow battery with potentially great results, claiming double the voltage of conventional flow batteries. The team has suggested this might be a great way to store intermittent energy sources, like wind or solar, for rapid release to the grid on demand.

IBM and ETH Zurich and have developed a much smaller liquid flow battery that could potentially be used in mobile devices. This new battery claims to be able to not only supply power to components, but cool them at the same time. The two companies have discovered two liquids that are up to the task, and will be used in a system that can produce 1.4 Watts of power per square cm, with 1 Watt of power reserved for powering the battery.

Oxford-based company ZapGo has developed and produced the first carbon-ion battery that's ready for consumer use now. A carbon-ion battery combines the superfast charging capabilities of a supercapacitor, with the performance of a Lithium-ion battery, all while being completely recyclable.

The company has a powerbank charger that be fully charged in five minutes, and will then charge a smartphone up to full in two hours.

Scientists at Sydney University believe they've come up with a way of manufacturing zinc-air batteries for much cheaper than current methods. Zinc-air batteries can be considered superior to lithium-ion, because they don't catch fire. The only problem is they rely on expensive components to work.

Sydney Uni has managed to create a zinc-air battery without the need for the expensive components, but rather some cheaper alternatives. Safer, cheaper batteries could be on their way!

Researchers at the University of Surrey are developing a way of you being able to use your clothing as a source of power. The battery is called a Triboelectric Nanogenerators (TENGs), which converts movement into stored energy. The stored electricity can then be used to power mobile phones or devices such as Fitbit fitness trackers.

The technology could be applied to more than just clothing too, it could be integrated into the pavement, so when people constantly walk over it, it can store electricity which can then be used to power streelamps, or in a car's tyre so it can power a car.

Engineers at the University of California in San Diego have developed a stretchable biofuel cell that can generate electricity from sweat. The energy generated is said to be enough to power LEDs and Bluetooth radios, meaning it could one day power wearable devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers.

Samsung has managed to develop "graphene balls" that are capable of boosting the capacity of its current lithium-ion batteries by 45 per cent, and and recharging five times faster than current batteries. To put that into context, Samsung says its new graphene-based battery can be recharged fully in 12 minutes, compared to roughly an hour for the current unit.

Samsung also says it has uses beyond smartphones, saying it could be used for electric vehicles as it can withstand temperatures up to 60 degrees Celsius.

Scientists at WMG at the University of Warwick have developed a new technology that allows current Lithium-ion batteries to be charged up to five times faster that current recommended limits. The technology constantly measures a battery's temperature far more precisely than current methods.

Scientists have found that current batteries can in fact be pushed beyond their recommended limits without affecting performance or overheating. Maybe we don't need any of the other new batteries mentioned at all!

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Future batteries, coming soon: Charge in seconds, last months and power over the air

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(Pocket-lint) - While smartphones, smart homes and even smart wearables are growing ever more advanced, they're still limited by power. The battery hasn't advanced in decades. But we're on the verge of a power revolution. Big technology and car companies are all too aware of the limitations of lithium-ion batteries.

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Power Technology | Energy News and Market Analysis

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In the wake of 'hydrogen and fuel cell day' in the US on 8 October, MEED took a closer look at the hydrogen economy.

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Most observers of current events will be aware of the growing transportation trend towards electric cars, and many will certainly have heard the name Tesla. Indeed, such is the fervour that it can be hard at times to remember the alternatives and that one of these is hydrogen technology.

The 'hydrogen economy' refers to the idea of transforming our existing hydrocarbon-based infrastructure - from static power generation to a full range of transportation applications - to run on hydrogen in order to cut carbon and carbon dioxide emissions.

This transformation can occur wherever hydrocarbons are used as fuel, but there is particular interest in the potential transport applications, where fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) are seen as a particularly viable alternative to conventional hydrocarbon-powered vehicles.

Hydrogen_Infographic (1)

Inside a fuel cell

A fuel cell works much like an electric battery, converting chemical energy into electrical energy using the movement of charged hydrogen ions across an electrolyte membrane to generate current. There they recombine with oxygen to produce water - a fuel cell's only emission, alongside hot air.

Although less efficient than electric batteries, today's fuel cells compare favourably with internal combustion engine technology, which converts fuel into kinetic energy at roughly 25 per cent efficiency. A fuel cell, by contrast, can mix hydrogen with air to produce electricity at up to 60 per cent efficiency.

FCEVs also present relatively low barriers to entry in terms of societal changes, as they operate and perform similarly to conventional vehicles, refuelling at stations in minutes and driving for 500 to 600 kilometres on a single tank, all with no harmful emissions.

Making hydrogen

The hydrogen fuel itself can be produced with ever-increasing cost-effectiveness through electrolysis, by splitting water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms. This generates two useful gases and, when powered by green energy, makes hydrogen production a carbon-neutral act.

At present, however, just 2 per cent of the 600 billion cubic metres of hydrogen manufactured each year around the world is produced by water electrolysis, while 98 per cent is produced from natural gas, with carbon dioxide as a by-product.

More than 90 per cent of this hydrogen is used as a building block for fertilisers or is consumed within the oil, refining and wider petrochemicals industry.

The development of the hydrogen economy, therefore, relies on government investment in the initial phases. Investment in both hydrogen production and distribution infrastructure is needed, alongside the renewable power projects required to supply carbon-neutral energy.

For the moment, the scarcity of such infrastructure represents the single largest obstacle to the adoption of hydrogen technology.

Middle East trials

Efforts are nevertheless underway to bridge this capacity gap, not least in the Middle East.

While there is a long way to go, work is currently underway on the regions' first solar-powered water electrolysis plant at the Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum Solar Park, in a joint scheme by Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (Dewa), Siemens and Expo 2020 Dubai.

This project will have the capacity to produce 240kg of hydrogen a day - enough to fill the tanks of 50-passenger FCEVs and power them for a total of 30,000km - and is set to deliver hydrogen to the Expo 2020 site for several applications, including a pilot FCEV transport solution.

The Toyota Mirai, the world's most popular FCEV, was meanwhile launched in the UAE back in October 2017, when the country's first hydrogen station was opened by local Toyota distributor Al-Futtaim Motors, Abu Dhabi's Masdar City and France's Air Liquide.

Although pilots, these regional projects are backed by the increasingly evident reality of the hydrogen economy in Asian markets and particularly Japan, where 100 refuelling stations have already been established, and the government aims to have 800,000 FCEVs on the road by 2030, alongside a 90 per cent reduction in the cost of hydrogen by 2050.

Electric competition

The fact remains, however, that recent funding into the research and development of electric vehicle (EV) technology has vastly outstripped that of water electrolysis and fuel cell technology.

This situation has been driven by the rapid development of more efficient and cost-effective electric battery technology, lowering the potential costs of electrified transport systems.

EV and hybrid vehicles have an additional edge in terms of overall energy efficiency. Batteries now lose only about 17 per cent of the initial input of electrical energy through inefficiencies when charging and discharging, while the cycle of using electrical energy to split water into its constituent atoms and recombining hydrogen with air inside a fuel cell wastes more than 50 per cent.

Installing EV charging points at key locations, such as at facility car parks, is also simpler and promises governments more immediate and obvious returns than the more complex task of establishing hydrogen distribution infrastructure.

The upshot of this is that, to date, while EV and plug-in hybrid vehicle sales number in the millions, the most popular model of FCEV, the Toyota Mirai, has sold just 5,000 units.

Finding the right niche

However, while passenger FCEVs have recently lost ground to electric vehicles, interest in hydrogen technology is growing both for a range of niche transport market segments and other applications.

FCEV technology could be especially useful for commercial applications where bulkier vehicles need to travel long distances, carry heavy loads and refuel with minimal downtime.

To this end, hydrogen trials have been conducted on everything from public buses and forklifts to trains, planes and boats. For such applications, especially with the larger craft, electric batteries would need to be problematically large.

In the short to medium term, hydrogen could also be used to replace some of the compressed natural gas used in domestic applications, with minimal changes to existing infrastructure.

A study by Swansea University in the UK found that up to 30 per cent of domestic gas could be safely replaced with hydrogen, thereby reducing carbon emissions by 18 per cent, with no changes to existing infrastructure.

In Europe, the 'EUTurbines' group of manufacturers has pledged to make their gas turbines run on up to 20 per cent hydrogen gas by 2020, and develop turbine technology to allow all manufactured units to run, or be retrofitted to run, on 100 per cent hydrogen gas, and be carbon-neutral, by 2030.

Rising efficiencies

Globally, the cost of hydrogen is already coming down, partly in line with the fall in the cost of renewable energy, but also due to improvements in water electrolysis and hydrogen fuel cell technology.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency expects the cost of producing hydrogen to fall by a further 30 per cent by 2030, but the rapid reduction in the cost of recent photovoltaic solar energy projects in the Middle East could mean the local cost of commercially producing hydrogen will fall even faster.

As investment in hydrogen infrastructure grows and net costs continue to fall, the hydrogen economy could prove to be an indispensable tool in the transition away from hydrocarbons.

Related Report:

Solar Thermal Power in China, Market Outlook to 2030, Update 2018 - Capacity, Generation, Investment Trends, Regulations and Company Profiles

This article is sourced from Power Technology sister publication www.meed.com, a leading source of high-value business intelligence and economic analysis about the Middle East and North Africa. To access more MEED content register for the 30-day Free Guest User Programme.

GlobalData is this website's parent business intelligence company.

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Hydrogen fuel cell: overview of where we're at in hydrocarbon replacement

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In the wake of 'hydrogen and fuel cell day' in the US on 8 October, MEED took a closer look at the hydrogen economy. -------------------------------------------- Most observers of current events will be aware of the growing transportation trend towards electric cars, and many will certainly have heard the name Tesla.

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Climate change can be overwhelming. Here’s how to think about your effects on the environment and the steps you can take to lessen that impact.

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Every action has a cost. That's as true for driving a car as it is for growing food and delivering it to your dinner plate. A team of researchers has just tallied the costs of producing meat versus other types of foods for human diners. They find that meat production - from farm to fork - releases more climate-warming pollution that does producing fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains. A lot more.

Their calculations suggest that people could do a lot to slow global warming if they limited how much meat they eat.

There are plenty of "costs" to producing any goods, including food. Sure, people pay money for the food as well as the fuel needed to get groceries to the store or restaurant. But those are just the most visible costs. Producing things also takes resources. For foods, this includes the water used to irrigate crop fields. It also includes the fertilizer and chemicals that boost plant growth and fight pests. And don't forget the gasoline and diesel that fuel plows and also those trucks that take crops to market.

Along with those resources are wastes: pollution. Manure is one obvious pollutant associated with meat production. But there are others, including the air pollutants spewed by tractors that plow fields and the trucks that move feed to the animals and animals to the slaughterhouse. Peter Scarborough at the University of Oxford in England, and his colleagues decided to tally some of the less-visible pollution created by food production.

They focused on greenhouse gases. In the atmosphere, these gases trap heat from sunlight. Lately they've been trapping too much, causing a sort of mild, global fever. Overall, food production accounts for one-fifth of this type of pollution.

One greenhouse gas emitted through the production of our food is carbon dioxide, or CO ₂. It's released by the burning of fossil fuels, such as gasoline and natural gas. They are used to power farm machinery, to take foods to market (and home), to store foods awaiting processing and to cook foods. The researchers also tallied methane. Fermentation in the guts of ruminant livestock - mostly cows - releases this gas. And the scientists calculated the nitrous oxide released during the plowing and fertilizing of crop fields.

All three gases are important. CO ₂ is the greenhouse gas released in the highest volume. But methane and nitrous oxide stay in the atmosphere far longer than CO ₂ does. As such, they are more potent, molecule for molecule, in warming Earth's atmosphere.

A computer converted the methane and nitrous-oxide emissions for each person's diet into its carbon-dioxide "equivalent." That's the amount of CO ₂ needed to warm Earth's atmosphere by the same amount as the methane or nitrous oxide would.

Switching from meat-rich meals to vegetarian ones would reduce the average meat eater's CO ₂ equivalents - also known as its carbon footprint - by 1,230 kilograms (about 1.4 U.S. tons) per year, the new study calculated. Scarborough's team presented its findings in the July issue of Climatic Change.

How they calculated food's 'carbon footprint'

In the 1990s, a survey asked 65,000 adults what they typically had eaten throughout the past year. Scarborough's team fed those data into a computer. The researchers also included the amount of greenhouse gases linked with producing nearly 100 common foods. Then the computer matched those greenhouse-gas amounts to the mix of foods each person had reported eating.

Some people had eaten lots of meat. Others hadn't. Some had been big fish eaters. Others weren't. All people ate some plant-based foods, such as salads, grains, bread, beans or fruit. Some reported being vegetarians. That means they downed only plant-based foods with the exceptions of possibly eggs, fish or milk. Others, vegans, reported eating no meat, poultry, fish or dairy foods (including cheese, butter and yogurt).

The diet of someone whose meals included an average of 50 to 99 grams (1.8 to 3.5 ounces) of meat each day would be responsible for the daily release of 5.6 kilograms (12.4 pounds) of CO₂ equivalents, according to the new analysis. Vegans would contribute only 2.9 kg (6.4 lbs) of CO ₂ equivalents, the researchers calculated. Indeed, those vegans had the lowest diet-linked greenhouse-gas emissions. Vegetarians had the next lowest emissions, followed by people who ate fish but no red meat or poultry.

Scientists don't expect many people will give up eating meat entirely. In fact, in England the trend has been in the opposite direction. The share of people there who consider themselves vegetarians or vegans fell from 5 percent in 2000 to just 2 percent by 2010. Over the same period, meat consumption climbed 7.8 percent - to 84.2 kg (186 lbs) per person.

U.S. data show that as of 2012, 4 percent of men and 7 percent of women considered themselves vegetarians. However, Americans continue to consume more meat than people in the United Kingdom and Europe. Each year the average American adult downs about 120 kg (265.7 lbs) of meat.

Still, the new study "demonstrates that reducing the intake of meat and other animal-based products can make a valuable contribution to climate change mitigation," its authors conclude. And there's another advantage to reducing meat consumption, the researchers point out. Compared to meat, more plant-based food calories can be grown on a plot of land - and with less water and other resources. In places where many people are going hungry, as they are in large parts of the world, raising meat may make it harder to ensure that everyone gets enough to eat.

Beyond greenhouse gases

"I think it's interesting," Danielle Nierenberg said of the new study. She's president of Food Tank, a food-policy organization based in Washington, D.C. Looking at greenhouse gases is important, she says. But, she adds, it's just one of many environmental costs of foods.

"The more we think about what we're eating, and food's role in sustainability or in climate change, that's a good thing," she says. But, she adds, "more needs to be done to be sure that

we're capturing everything." By that she means scientists want to be sure that they are not missing important environmental "costs" of producing food.

Those costs may have to do with the resources. Some crops are water hogs, which can be a problem in areas with little rain. Others may require a lot of processing - using water and plenty of expensive energy - to clean, cook-up, package or deliver foods to grocery shoppers.

And then there are a range of less visible environmental problems. Animals may harden the soils, making the land less likely to soak up water when it rains. Often farmers rely on weed killers and pest killers to improve the size of their crop harvests. Many of those chemicals can be toxic to wildlife and people. Some fertilizers can pollute groundwater. Plowing fields can lead to erosion. That can diminish the fertility of soils.

Finally, Nierenberg notes, even for meat, "not all meat is created equal." Some farmers pen cattle in feedlots to fatten them quickly. This requires feeding them an unnatural diet and releases a lot of animal wastes (poop and pee) into a small area. In contrast, some farmers graze their cattle on pastures. Allowing the animals to eat grass and over a broad expanse of land helps ensure that the soil is protected and that native plants are not trampled to death.

There can also be a similar range of environmental differences in the way plant-based foods are farmed. Some can be less wasteful and less polluting than others.

Scarborough's team took a good first step in tallying costs, Nierenberg says. But, she argues, more details will be needed about how foods are grown to truly know which foods - or farm practices - take the biggest toll on Earth's total environment.

Power Words

atmosphere The envelope of gases surrounding Earth or another planet.

carbon dioxide (abbrev. CO ₂) A gas produced by all animals when the oxygen they inhale reacts with the carbon-rich foods that they've eaten. This colorless, odorless gas also is released when organic matter (including fossil fuels like oil or gas) is burned. Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere. Plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen during photosynthesis, the process they use to make their own food.

carbon dioxide equivalents In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide (CO ₂) works as a heat-trapping gas - often called a greenhouse gas. Many other gases - such as methane and nitrous oxide and hydrofluorocarbons - also trap heat, but their lifetime in the atmosphere can be far longer than carbon dioxide's. So to compare the warming potential associated with those other pollutants, scientists often convert them into what they term CO ₂ equivalents. That's the amount of CO ₂ needed to warm Earth's atmosphere by the same amount as those longer-lasting warmers would.

carbon footprint A popular term for measuring the global warming potential of various products or processes. Their carbon footprint translates to the amount of some greenhouse gas - usually carbon dioxide - that something releases per unit of time or per quantity of product.

climate The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.

ecosystem A group of interacting living organisms - including microorganisms, plants and animals - and their physical environment within a particular climate. Examples include tropical reefs, rainforests, alpine meadows and polar tundra.

fermentation The metabolic process of converting carbohydrates (sugars and starches) into short-chain fatty acids, gases or alcohol. Yeast and bacteria are central to the process of fermentation. Fermentation is a process used to liberate nutrients from food in the human gut. It also is an underlying process used to make alcoholic beverages, from wine and beer to stronger spirits.

fertilizer Nitrogen and other plant nutrients added to soil, water or foliage to boost crop growth or to replenish nutrients that removed earlier by plant roots or leaves.

fossil fuels Any fuel (such as coal, oil or natural gas) that has developed in the Earth over millions of years from the decayed remains of bacteria, plant or animals.

greenhouse gas A gas that contributes to the greenhouse effect by absorbing heat. Carbon dioxide is one example of a greenhouse gas.

methane A hydrocarbon with the chemical formula CH4 (meaning there are four hydrogen atoms bound to one carbon atom). It's a natural constituent of what's known as natural gas. It's also emitted by decomposing plant material in wetlands and is belched out by cows and other ruminant livestock. From a climate perspective, methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is in trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere, making it a very important greenhouse gas.

molecule An electrically neutral group of atoms that represents the smallest possible amount of a chemical compound. Molecules can be made of single types of atoms or of different types. For example, the oxygen in the air is made of two oxygen atoms (O ₂), but water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H ₂ O).

nitrogen oxides Pollutants made up of nitrogen and oxygen that form when fossil fuels are burned. The scientific symbol for these chemicals is NOx (pronounced "knocks"). The principle ones are nitric oxide (NO) and nitrous oxide (NO ₂).

pollutant A substance that taints something - such as the air, water, our bodies or products. Some pollutants are chemicals, such as pesticides. Others may be radiation, including excess heat or light. Even weeds and other invasive species can be considered a type of biological pollution.

sustainability To use resources in a way that they will continue to be available in the future.

vegan A person who subscribes to a fairly extreme form of vegetarianism. Vegans do not eat animal products of any sort, including meat, milk or eggs. Some vegans also avoid use of animal products in their clothing (such as leather, wool or even silk).

vegetarian A person who does not eat red meat (such as beef, bison or pork), poultry (such as chicken or turkey) or fish. Some vegetarians will drink milk and eat cheese or eggs. Some will eat the flesh of fish only, not mammals or birds. Vegetarians get the vast majority of each day's calories from plant-based foods.

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Your food choices affect Earth's climate

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Every action has a cost. That's as true for driving a car as it is for growing food and delivering it to your dinner plate. A team of researchers has just tallied the costs of producing meat versus other types of foods for human diners.

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They're Healthy. They're Sustainable. So Why Don't Humans Eat More Bugs?

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A cricket farm in Madagascar provides insect protein for famine relief and conservation. How much further could it go?

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It is vital to find alternative and sustainable sources of protein to meet the considerable challenge of ensuring food security for the future. Credit: Shutterstock

Does the idea of eating insects bug you?

Well, think about this: the United Nations predicts that by 2050, if current trends continue, the world's population will reach 9.8 billion. As a result, global demand for food and feed is expected to increase by 70 percent, putting additional pressure on already overexploited agricultural resources.

Global demand for meat in particular will continue to increase as dietary habits in developing countries change, due to rapid urbanization and economic growth.

The oceans are already over-exploited and climate change will have a profound impact on food production. Meanwhile, nearly one billion people worldwide suffer from chronic food deprivation.

Among the possible solutions, one is quietly making its way into the public's attention: eating insects.
Alternatives to animal protein
To meet current and future food challenges, the agri-food sector needs to be rethought. We need to find new ways to grow food, address inefficiencies and develop new approaches to production methods.

In addition to population growth, urbanization and the rise of the middle class in developing countries are increasing global demand for food, especially animal protein. The production of traditional feed ingredients such as cereals, fish meal and oilseeds must be reduced and substitutes found to make more efficient use of resources.

Some of the protein produced for livestock feed comes from sources that may be unsustainable and harmful to the environment. Credit: Shutterstock

The billions of animals raised each year for food are putting increasing pressure on land and water resources and contributing to climate change and other negative environmental impacts.

Livestock farming for meat production puts considerable pressure on global land and water use. At present, a large proportion of the protein produced for livestock feed comes from sources that are sometimes unsustainable and harmful to the environment.
Eating insects
To meet the considerable challenge of ensuring food security for the future, it is imperative to find alternative and sustainable sources of protein, both for direct human consumption and for animal feed. Insect-derived proteins are one possible solution. Insects, especially fly larvae, have many qualities that make them well adapted to animal feed.

For example, insects are already a natural source of food for pigs and poultry as well as for many fish species. In addition, insect larvae are generally high in protein and are rich in other beneficial nutrients such as fats, minerals and vitamins.

Sushi served with fried grasshoppers is popular in Thailand. Credit: Shutterstock

As a source of protein for direct human consumption, insects offer several advantages over traditional sources of meat. They have a significantly higher feed conversion rate than other livestock, which means they are more effective at converting the ingredients used to feed them into nutrients.

In addition, insect production is more environmentally friendly than conventional livestock production. Insects release much lower amounts of greenhouse gases and ammonia into the atmosphere per kilogram of meat than cattle or pigs.
Larvae that recycle
Insect larvae, in particular, are efficient consumers of a wide range of organic materials. They have the ability to "over-cycle" relatively low quality organic residues as feedstock into valuable proteins and lipids.

Although direct human consumption of insects is not widespread in Western countries, raising insects to transform organic waste streams offers an interesting opportunity to produce food ingredients for animal production. In particular, the larvae of the black soldier fly has a nutritional profile that makes them a potential ingredient to replace traditional food ingredients intended for human consumption.

Fried insects in a street kitchen in Bangkok, Thailand. Credit: Shutterstock

Multinational munching
The cultivation of insects raised specifically for domestic animals and fish has been the subject of sporadic assessments for several decades. However, the widespread adoption and commercialization of these approaches remains difficult. The methods are still artisanal and have been mainly developed and deployed in emerging countries with limited resources.

However, a convergence of factors has revived interest in this area, particularly from a number of multinationals in the agri-food sector. A combination of new municipal regulations limiting organic waste disposal and the need to find sustainable ingredients for animal feed have led to renewed interest in insects and their ability to transform organic waste into valuable food resources.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Eating insects is good for you and the planet, researchers insist

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Does the idea of eating insects bug you? Well, think about this: the United Nations predicts that by 2050, if current trends continue, the world's population will reach 9.8 billion. As a result, global demand for food and feed is expected to increase by 70 percent, putting additional pressure on already overexploited agricultural resources.

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Today, airplanes pump a lot of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But someday, carbon dioxide sucked from the atmosphere could be used to power airplanes.

A new iron-based catalyst converts carbon dioxide into jet fuel, researchers report online December 22 in Nature Communications. Unlike cars, planes can't carry batteries big enough to run on electricity from wind or solar power. But if CO ₂, rather than oil, were used to make jet fuel, that could reduce the air travel industry's carbon footprint - which currently makes up 12 percent of all transportation-related CO ₂ emissions.

Past attempts to convert carbon dioxide into fuel have relied on catalysts made of relatively expensive materials, like cobalt, and required multiple chemical processing steps. The new catalyst powder is made of inexpensive ingredients, including iron, and transforms CO ₂ in a single step.

When placed in a reaction chamber with carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas, the catalyst helps carbon from the CO ₂ molecules separate from oxygen and link up with hydrogen - forming the hydrocarbon molecules that make up jet fuel. The leftover oxygen atoms from the CO ₂ join up with other hydrogen atoms to form water.

Tiancun Xiao, a chemist at the University of Oxford, and colleagues tested their new catalyst on carbon dioxide in a small reaction chamber set to 300° Celsius and pressurized to about 10 times the air pressure at sea level. Over 20 hours, the catalyst converted 38 percent of the carbon dioxide in the chamber into new chemical products. About 48 percent of those products were jet fuel hydrocarbons. Other by-products included similar petrochemicals, such as ethylene and propylene, which can be used to make plastics.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

A version of this article appears in the January 30, 2021 issue of Science News.

Previously the staff writer for physical sciences at Science News, Maria Temming is the assistant editor at Science News for Students. She has bachelor's degrees in physics and English, and a master's in science writing.

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A new iron-based catalyst converts carbon dioxide into jet fuel

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Today, airplanes pump a lot of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But someday, carbon dioxide sucked from the atmosphere could be used to power airplanes. A new iron-based catalyst converts carbon dioxide into jet fuel, researchers report online December 22 in Nature Communications.

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Also known as "geoengineering," it is the intentional large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system to counter climate change.

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Student scientists

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This has been a year full of the unexpected. COVID-19 has forced people indoors, closed schools and killed more than 220,000 Americans. Besides the pandemic, there have been hurricanes, wildfires, protests and more. Behind some of these upheavals, though, is an unfolding event that shows no sign of stopping: climate change.

Climate change is contributing to many of the disasters that have been changing lives around the world. Here we meet students who have been using science to help people better understand and deal with the effects of our changing climate.

Their research helped place them among 30 finalists at the 10 th Broadcom MASTERS. MASTERS stands for Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars. It's a research program open to middle-school investigators. Society for Science & the Public (which publishes Science News for Students) created the event. Broadcom Foundation, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., sponsors it.

Some of the kids developed systems to help keep people safe as climate change makes life more unpredictable. Others developed ways to save precious resources, such as water and oil. And one student applied lessons from a study done in a cereal bowl to model melting glaciers.

Fighting fire and flood with science

Like many Californians, Ryan Honary, 12, has personal experience with wildfires. A student at Pegasus School in Huntington, he was with his father at an Arizona tennis tournament when he saw wildfires raging across his home state on TV. "The hills that were burning looked just like the hills behind my house," Ryan recalls. "I called my mom and asked if she was okay." Once he knew that she was, he asked his dad why wildfires got out of control so often. "We're planning to send people to Mars but we can't detect wildfires," Ryan says.

That's when Ryan decided to create a way to detect wildfires early - before they get out of control. He linked together a series of Raspberry Pi computers. Some of these tiny units were fitted to detect smoke, fire and humidity (how much water is in the air). Their sensors relayed data wirelessly to another Raspberry Pi. This slightly bigger computer served as a mini meteorological station. He estimates that each sensor would cost around $20, and the mini stations would cost $60 each.

Ryan brought his entire system to a park and tested it by holding the flame from a lighter in front of each sensor. When these sensed a fire, they informed the detector. It then alerted an app that Ryan built for his phone. While creating that app, Ryan talked with Mohammed Kachuee. He's a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kachuee helped Ryan use machine learning to train his app with data from the large 2018 Camp Fire. The app took lessons from how this fire had traveled over time. Using those data, the app "learned" to predict how flames at future events might spread.

Someday, Ryan hopes his sensors might be deployed throughout his state. "Five of the worst fires in California just happened in the last three months," he notes. "So it's pretty obvious that global warming and climate change is just making the fire problems worse."

Stronger hurricanes are another symptom of a warming climate. Heavy rain and storms can produce sudden floods that appear and disappear locally within minutes. One such flash flood provided a memorable experience for Ishan Ahluwalia, 14.

It was a rainy day in Portland, Ore. "My family was driving on a highway," recalls the now ninth grader at Jesuit High School in the city. "We were driving at the speed limit." But a sudden sheet of water on the road made the car swerve. It was hydroplaning. This occurs when water builds up beneath a tire, he explains. With no friction, the tire slips "and the car slips as well." This can lead to accidents.

Ishan was surprised that there was no system in a car to sense when tires were about to slide. So he went to his garage and put a small tire on a treadmill. He hooked the wheel up to a computer with an accelerometer inside. As the treadmill moved and the wheel rolled, he ran water down the belt to make synthetic rain. The computer then measured the friction between the wheel and the belt as differing amounts of rain fell.

Then, like Ryan, Ishan used machine learning. "In middle school, my science teachers really helped me get the project off the ground," he says. But the next step was to talk to an engineer who works at nearby Oregon Health and Science University. With that engineer's guidance, Ishan trained the system he built to associate different types of weather with how much water was on the road. It could then link those water levels with a car's ability to maneuver.

If installed in a car, Ishan says, this system might offer a notice in green, yellow or red to warn people when they faced a risk of losing control of steering or braking. It also could help people drive more safely as heavy rains and flooding become more common.

Saving water and stopping snails

Just as it's possible to have way too much rain, it's also possible to have far too little. Pauline Estrada's home, in Fresno, Calif., is in one such drought-prone region. The eighth grader at Granite Ridge Intermediate School saw nearby farmers watering their fields. In dry regions like hers, no drop would be wasted. So she sought a way to help growers predict when their plants truly needed water. Right now, Pauline says, farmers measure soil moisture to see if their plants are thirsty. But, she notes, that doesn't show if the plant itself is suffering.

Luckily, this 13-year-old had a rover lying around. She had built the robot vehicle from a kit. The teen also built an infrared camera. It makes images at light wavelengths the human eye can't see. Infrared light often is used to map heat. A hotter plant is a drier plant, Pauline explains. When a plant has enough water, she says, "it lets water go through its leaves." This cools the air on the surface of the leaf. But if the plant is dry, it will hold in water, and the leaf surface will be hotter.

Pauline attached the camera to her rover and drove it around pepper plants that she grew in pots. Sure enough, her roving camera could spot when these plants needed water. Then, with the help of Dave Goorahoo, a plant scientist at Fresno State University, she ran her rover around pepper plants in a farm field.

Her Infra-Rover currently scans only one plant at a time. Pauline hopes to scale up her system to observe many at once. She also plans to work on a system to predict when hot plants will need water - before they get parched. "It's important to not waste water during climate change," she says. Water them when they need it, she says, not before.

Once those crops are grown, they'll need to be shipped to hungry people the world over. Many will travel on huge cargo ships powered by large amounts of fossil fuels. In fact, cargo ships account for three percent of all carbon dioxide emitted into the air each year.

Those ships would burn less fuel if they encountered less friction at sea, known as drag, reasoned Charlotte Michaluk. The 14-year-old is now a ninth grader at Hopewell Valley Central High School in Pennington, N.J. A scuba diver since sixth grade, Charlotte knew that one source of drag was stuff growing on the hulls of ships. Barnacles, snails and other organisms contribute to this biofouling. Their lumpy bodies increase drag, making ships work harder and burn more fuel.

Charlotte opted to design a new, more slippery coating for a ship's hull so that fewer creatures would be able to hitch a ride. She tested different materials in the aquatic version of a wind tunnel. Charlotte loves woodworking and crafting. "My family knows where I've been in the house based on my trail of crafting materials," she says. She designed a ramp that she could coat with different materials. Then she measured the force of the water flowing off different metal and plastic coatings to calculate their drag.

One material proved really good at reducing drag. Called PDMS, it's a type of silicone - a material made of chains of silicon and oxygen atoms. Charlotte also tested some surfaces that had been based on mako shark skins. The sharklike drag-limiting scales, known as denticles, worked well at cutting the ramp's drag.

But would they also prevent other creatures from latching on? To find out, Charlotte went hunting for small bladder snails in local streams. She put the snails in her water tunnel and observed how well they were able to cling to different surfaces. PDMS and the fake mako skin prevented snails from sticking.

"Biofouling is a really big problem," she says. Affected ships will consume more fossil fuels. And that, she explains, "contributes to global warming." She hopes her discoveries might someday help ships slip more easily through the water - and save fuel.

Eyes on ice

It might seem like a kid from Hawaii wouldn't spend a lot of time thinking about glaciers. But Rylan Colbert, 13, sure does. It started when this eighth grader at Waiakea Intermediate School in Hilo first saw news of an experiment on how dams might collapse. Those tests had studied how piles of rice cereal collapsed in milk.

The cereal was puffed rice. But Rylan was soon thinking about ice. "I think I had shaved ice [a popular treat in Hawaii] the day before and I was thinking about it," he says. "And that led me to thinking about glaciers" and how their collapse might affect polar regions.

Rylan decided to study if shaved ice would collapse into water as the rice cereal had in the study he had read about. For a little guidance, he emailed Itai Einav. He's a coauthor of the rice cereal study at the University of Sydney in Australia. Einav emailed back and became "kind of my mentor," Rylan says.

Using a refrigerator in his father's lab at the University of Hawaii, Rylan filled beakers with a layer of gravel. Then he added a layer of shaved ice to serve as his model glacier. "The density of the shaved ice was about the density of freshly fallen show," he says. That's really important, he says; it simulates how glaciers develop. "That's the start of the process."

He set a microscope on its side in the fridge to monitor exactly what happened. "To simulate global warming, I pumped water under the shaved ice and it compacted," Rylan notes. He tested water pumped in at -1° Celsius (30° Fahrenheit) and then again at 8 °C (46 °F). That warmer water simulated a warming ocean.

Ice with warmer water below it compacted seven percent faster than ice atop very cold water, Rylan showed. He hopes his research might help people understand how glaciers form (or don't), as the world warms.

Doing more scientific research around climate change is key, he believes. Eventually, he says, "it'll hit home with somebody and they'll say, 'Hey, let's stop this.'"

Pauline hopes that more research also will prompt more action. "We should take all measures to prevent [climate change] as much as possible," she says. "At the rate it's going, it's going to destroy the planet."

And going for the win

Charlotte Michaluk was among the top winners in this year's competition. For her work, she took home a $10,000 Talent Award for demonstrating excellence in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM). This award also recognizes her for exhibiting the leadership and technical skills necessary to excel in the 21st Century STEM workforce and to "build a better community for tomorrow."

Ishana Kumar took home the top $25,000 Samueli Foundation Prize. The 12-year-old from Chappaqua, N.Y., studied whether a type of eye fatigue affects someone's perceptions of "imaginary colors." Her award also recognizes her leadership, collaboration and critical-thinking.

Other $10,000 winners in this year's contest included:

Julian Olschwang, 14, of Los Angeles, Calif., who developed a low-cost glove that could convert sign language to text or speech.

Kai Vernooy, 14, of Niskayuna, N.Y. For his qualifying project, Kai studied gerrymandering and how to draw voting districts that are more fair.

Zoe Weissman, 14, of Plantation, Fla. Her qualifying project sought to identify natural alternatives to opioids pain killers.

Power Words
More About Power Words

accelerometer: An instrument for measuring vibrations or a change in the rate of movement. These sensors typically can measure movement changes in all three dimensions (front-to-back, side-to-side and up-and-down).

app: Short for application, or a computer program designed for a specific task.

atom: The basic unit of a chemical element. Atoms are made up of a dense nucleus that contains positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons. The nucleus is orbited by a cloud of negatively charged electrons.

biofouling: The attachment of living organisms, such as algae, barnacles and bacterial slime to pipes, ship hulls, buoys and other materials that make contact with the water.

Broadcom MASTERS: Created in 2011 by the Society for Science & the Public, Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering Rising Stars) is the premier middle school science and engineering fair competition. Broadcom MASTERS International gives select middle school students from around the world a unique opportunity to attend the Regeneron International Science & Engineering Fair.

climate: The weather conditions that typically exist in one area, in general, or over a long period.

climate change: Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests.

COVID-19: A name given the coronavirus that caused a massive outbreak of potentially lethal disease, beginning in December 2019. Symptoms included pneumonia, fever, headaches and trouble breathing.

crop: (in agriculture) A type of plant grown intentionally grown and nurtured by farmers, such as corn, coffee or tomatoes. Or the term could apply to the part of the plant harvested and sold by farmers.

density: The measure of how condensed some object is, found by dividing its mass by its volume.

denticles: Microscopic, toothlike scales covering the bodies of sharks and rays.

develop: To emerge or to make come into being, either naturally or through human intervention, such as by manufacturing.

drag: A slowing force exerted by air or other fluid surrounding a moving object.

drought: An extended period of abnormally low rainfall; a shortage of water resulting from this.

engineer: A person who uses science to solve problems. As a verb, to engineer means to design a device, material or process that will solve some problem or unmet need. (v.) To perform these tasks, or the name for a person who performs such tasks.

field: An area of study, as in: Her field of research was biology. Also a term to describe a real-world environment in which some research is conducted, such as at sea, in a forest, on a mountaintop or on a city street. It is the opposite of an artificial setting, such as a research laboratory. (in physics) A region in space where certain physical effects operate, such as magnetism (created by a magnetic field), gravity (by a gravitational field), mass (by a Higgs field) or electricity (by an electrical field).

fire: The burning of some fuel, creating a flame that releases light and heat.

force: Some outside influence that can change the motion of a body, hold bodies close to one another, or produce motion or stress in a stationary body.

fossil fuel: Any fuel - such as coal, petroleum (crude oil) or natural gas - that has developed within the Earth over millions of years from the decayed remains of bacteria, plants or animals.

friction: The resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over or through another material (such as a fluid or a gas). Friction generally causes a heating, which can damage a surface of some material as it rubs against another.

glacier: A slow-moving river of ice hundreds or thousands of meters deep. Glaciers are found in mountain valleys and also form parts of ice sheets.

global warming: The gradual increase in the overall temperature of Earth's atmosphere due to the greenhouse effect. This effect is caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons and other gases in the air, many of them released by human activity.

graduate student: Someone working toward an advanced degree by taking classes and performing research. This work is done after the student has already graduated from college (usually with a four-year degree).

granite: A type of hard igneous rock, which contains coarse-grained inclusions (essentially mini rocks within a rock) of various minerals, chiefly quartz, feldspar and mica.

high school: A designation for grades nine through 12 in the U.S. system of compulsory public education. High-school graduates may apply to colleges for further, advanced education.

hull: (in transportation) The main body of a large or heavy vehicle, such as a boat or tank. (in botany) The outer shell or coat of a fruit or a seed.

humidity: A measure of the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. (Air with a lot of water vapor in it is known as humid.)

hurricane: A tropical cyclone that occurs in the Atlantic Ocean and has winds of 119 kilometers (74 miles) per hour or greater. When such a storm occurs in the Pacific Ocean, people refer to it as a typhoon.

hydroplaning: (v. hydroplane) The uncontrolled sliding of a vehicle as its tires run into more water than can be displaced by their treads. At high speeds on wet roads, the water buildup can elevate the front tires a bit, separating them from the road. Under these conditions, the vehicle loses traction.

infrared: A type of electromagnetic radiation invisible to the human eye. The name incorporates a Latin term and means "below red." Infrared light has wavelengths longer than those visible to humans. Other invisible wavelengths include X-rays, radio waves and microwaves. Infrared light tends to record the heat signature of an object or environment.

internet: An electronic communications network. It allows computers anywhere in the world to link into other networks to find information, download files and share data (including pictures).

machine learning: A technique in computer science that allows computers to learn from examples or experience. Machine learning is the basis of some forms of artificial intelligence (AI). For instance, a machine-learning system might compare X-rays of lung tissue in people with cancer and then compare these to whether and how long a patient survived after being given a particular treatment. In future, that AI system might be able to look at a new patient's lung scans and predict how well they will respond to a treatment.

microscope: An instrument used to view objects, like bacteria, or the single cells of plants or animals, that are too small to be visible to the unaided eye.

middle school: A designation for grades six through eight in the U.S. educational system. It comes immediately prior to high school. Some school systems break their age groups slightly different, including sixth grade as part of elementary school and then referring to grades seven and eight as "junior" high school.

model: A simulation of a real-world event (usually using a computer) that has been developed to predict one or more likely outcomes. Or an individual that is meant to display how something would work in or look on others.

organism: Any living thing, from elephants and plants to bacteria and other types of single-celled life.

oxygen: A gas that makes up about 21 percent of Earth's atmosphere. All animals and many microorganisms need oxygen to fuel their growth (and metabolism).

pandemic: An epidemic that affects a large proportion of the population across a country or the world.

scuba diving: A form of underwater diving in which the person carries special equipment in order to breathe, including a tank of air and a breathing mask. The word scuba is short for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.

sensor: A device that picks up information on physical or chemical conditions - such as temperature, barometric pressure, salinity, humidity, pH, light intensity or radiation - and stores or broadcasts that information. Scientists and engineers often rely on sensors to inform them of conditions that may change over time or that exist far from where a researcher can measure them directly. (in biology) The structure that an organism uses to sense attributes of its environment, such as heat, winds, chemicals, moisture, trauma or an attack by predators.

shark: A type of predatory fish that has survived in one form or another for hundreds of millions of years. Cartilage, not bone, gives its body structure.

silicon: A nonmetal, semiconducting element used in making electronic circuits. Pure silicon exists in a shiny, dark-gray crystalline form and as a shapeless powder.

silicone: Heat-resistant substances that can be used in many different ways, including the rubber-like materials that provide a waterproof seal around windows and in aquariums. Some silicones serve as grease-like lubricants in cars and trucks. Most silicones, a type of molecule known as a polymer, are built around long chains of silicon and oxygen atoms.

simulate: To deceive in some way by imitating the form or function of something. A simulated dietary fat, for instance, may deceive the mouth that it has tasted a real fat because it has the same feel on the tongue - without having any calories. A simulated sense of touch may fool the brain into thinking a finger has touched something even though a hand may no longer exists and has been replaced by a synthetic limb. (in computing) To try and imitate the conditions, functions or appearance of something. Computer programs that do this are referred to as simulations.

weather: Conditions in the atmosphere at a localized place and a particular time. It is usually described in terms of particular features, such as air pressure, humidity, moisture, any precipitation (rain, snow or ice), temperature and wind speed. Weather constitutes the actual conditions that occur at any time and place. It's different from climate, which is a description of the conditions that tend to occur in some general region during a particular month or season.

Bethany Brookshire is the staff writer at Science News for Students. She has a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology and likes to write about neuroscience, biology, climate and more. She thinks Porgs are an invasive species.

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Student scientists work to help all of us survive a warmer world

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This has been a year full of the unexpected. COVID-19 has forced people indoors, closed schools and killed more than 220,000 Americans. Besides the pandemic, there have been hurricanes, wildfires, protests and more. Behind some of these upheavals, though, is an unfolding event that shows no sign of stopping: climate change.

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You can interview Gwen Azar about her work with this group as a project.

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SVYCA is a youth-led nonprofit that empowers teens and young adults to combat climate change with impactful education and policy initiatives.

Youth Voices say Vote for Science in 2020!

Our youth climate activists urged 2020 voters to support candidates who prioritized climate and promised to fight for their futures.

We bring together high school students, college students, and young adults that are inspired to make a difference in averting the climate crisis. Participants learn about and develop pathways to meaningful action in their local community.

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SVYCA is a youth-led nonprofit that empowers teens and young adults to combat climate change with impactful education and policy initiatives. Our youth climate activists urged 2020 voters to support candidates who prioritized climate and promised to fight for their futures.

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Argonne National Laboratory: A federal laboratory owned by the U.S. Department of Energy, outside of Chicago, Ill. It was formally created on July 1, 1946. Today, its roughly 1,400 scientists and engineers (and 1,000 students) conduct research across a broad range of fields, from biology and physics to materials science, energy development and climate studies.

atmosphere: The envelope of gases surrounding Earth or another planet.

atom: The basic unit of a chemical element. Atoms are made up of a dense nucleus that contains positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons. The nucleus is orbited by a cloud of negatively charged electrons.

carbon: The chemical element having the atomic number 6.

carbon dioxide: (or CO ₂) A colorless, odorless gas produced by all animals when the oxygen they inhale reacts with the carbon-rich foods that they've eaten. Carbon dioxide also is released when organic matter burns (including fossil fuels like oil or gas). Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere. Plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen during photosynthesis, the process they use to make their own food.

catalyst: A substance that helps a chemical reaction to proceed faster. Examples include enzymes and elements such as platinum and iridium.

chemical: A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (bond) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made when two hydrogen atoms bond to one oxygen atom. Its chemical formula is H ₂ O. Chemical also can be an adjective to describe properties of materials that are the result of various reactions between different compounds.

chemical engineer: A researcher who uses chemistry to solve problems related to the production of food, fuel, medicines and many other products.

chemical reaction: A process that involves the rearrangement of the molecules or structure of a substance, as opposed to a change in physical form (as from a solid to a gas).

climate change: Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests.

environment: The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity (or even the placement of things in the vicinity of an item of interest).

ethanol: A type of alcohol, also known as ethyl alcohol, that serves as the basis of alcoholic drinks, such as beer, wine and distilled spirits. It also is used as a solvent and as a fuel (often mixed with gasoline, for instance).

fossil fuel: Any fuel - such as coal, petroleum (crude oil) or natural gas - that has developed within the Earth over millions of years from the decayed remains of bacteria, plants or animals.

green: (in chemistry and environmental science) An adjective to describe products and processes that will pose little or no harm to living things or the environment.

greenhouse gas: Any of several gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect by absorbing heat. Carbon dioxide and methane are two examples of such gases.

hydrogen: The lightest element in the universe. As a gas, it is colorless, odorless and highly flammable. It's an integral part of many fuels, fats and chemicals that make up living tissues. It's made of a single proton (which serves as its nucleus) orbited by a single electron.

metal: Something that conducts electricity well, tends to be shiny (reflective) and malleable (meaning it can be reshaped with heat and not too much force or pressure).

molecule: An electrically neutral group of atoms that represents the smallest possible amount of a chemical compound. Molecules can be made of single types of atoms or of different types. For example, the oxygen in the air is made of two oxygen atoms (O ₂), but water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H ₂ O).

monitor: To test, sample or watch something, especially on a regular or ongoing basis.

oxygen: A gas that makes up about 21 percent of Earth's atmosphere. All animals and many microorganisms need oxygen to fuel their growth (and metabolism).

platinum: A naturally occurring silver-white metallic element that remains stable (does not corrode) in air. It is used in jewelry, electronics, chemical processing and some dental crowns.

recycle: To find new uses for something - or parts of something - that might otherwise be discarded, or treated as waste.

petroleum (and other fossil fuels) or relatively rare elements and minerals.

social distancing: A term for the intentional separation of people to limit the chance that a disease can be passed from one to another.

voltage: A force associated with an electric current that is measured in units known as volts. Power companies use high-voltage to move electric power over long distances.

X-ray: A type of radiation analogous to gamma rays, but having somewhat lower energy.

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New solution for carbon dioxide: Turn it into 'green' fuel

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Argonne National Laboratory: A federal laboratory owned by the U.S. Department of Energy, outside of Chicago, Ill. It was formally created on July 1, 1946. Today, its roughly 1,400 scientists and engineers (and 1,000 students) conduct research across a broad range of fields, from biology and physics to materials science, energy development and climate studies.

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Talking about climate change, energy and conservation is tough. The science can seem complex. So people need to communicate information clearly. Even when they do that, their audience does not always listen. Biases, attitudes and experiences can color their perceptions. Even when people do listen, they may not believe what they hear or want to make changes in their own lives.

Shahzeen Attari studies how people respond to information about climate change. As a scientist at Indiana University Bloomington, she also explores other aspects of how people choose to use energy, water and other resources. Her work is interdisciplinary research. In her case, it involves multiple fields of psychology, engineering and environmental science.

Attari was born in Mumbai, India. She grew up, however, in Dubai. It is part of the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. She came to the United States as a college student and has lived there since then. In this interview, Attari shares her experiences and advice with Science News for Students. (This interview has been edited for content and readability.)

What inspired you to pursue your career?

Growing up in Dubai, I saw how a desert was quickly transformed into a metropolis, or major city. This happened over a very short time span of about 10 years. So I realized growing up that humans have a very strong and direct impact that can transform nature.

In college, I volunteered for the Nature Conservancy during one spring break. I realized the natural environment is beautiful and magical. I wanted to understand how to protect nature.

I also worked in interdisciplinary science labs in college. They basically combine different fields of research to answer questions that sit in the middle of those fields. That gave me a thirst and love for interdisciplinary research.

All these things changed the way I thought about problems. Since then, I've been working systematically, trying to understand how people think about climate change and the actions needed to address the problem. And I want to know how we can effectively communicate with people about those topics.

How did you get where you are today?

I studied physics and math in my college engineering program. That was at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In graduate school I studied engineering and public policy and civil and environmental engineering. I went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. For my PhD thesis, I studied how people perceive how much energy and water their appliances use.

There have been challenges. In general, people at universities have preferred research that fits into clean, distinct buckets. My research just does not do that. So, I have had to look for places that nurture interdisciplinary research. And it's hard to work in multiple fields. You have to learn about and gather all the expertise across those fields. Then you need to use that knowledge to solve a problem. That has been really challenging.

Also, women and people of color at universities can experience sexism and racism, based on who we are. But I've been blessed with amazing mentors and institutions that nurture diversity.

At times, I felt I had to be very careful about what I did. Dubai is not a completely free state. (Some people in the United Arab Emirates have been arrested for criticizing the government, for example. And women have fewer legal privileges than men.) And in the United States, I was an immigrant. I didn't have citizenship rights until I finally became a citizen, last December. By then I had lived in the United States for about 20 years.

Now, there's this freeing sense of becoming more of a scientist and an activist at the same time. There are some scientists who just want to be scientists. I think that needs to change. More scientists need to play a role in communicating with the public and policy makers. We need this most of all in areas like climate change.

How do you get your best ideas?

Inspiration for almost all of the projects I've worked on has come from personal challenges and experiences. A lot of it starts from my own curiosity to understand what's going on with a problem.

As a PhD student, I knew about physics. But even with my training, it was hard for me to quickly understand how much energy different appliances and actions used. I wondered how other people think about that. That became my PhD research.

Then I went to talk about that research at a conference. Someone in the audience stood up. "Hey, you just flew [on an energy-guzzling airplane] to this meeting," he said. "I don't want to listen to anything you have to say." That was really interesting to me. Why didn't he want to listen to what I had to say? That led to another series of papers. I wanted to understand how scientists' behaviors affect how people judge them.

What's one of your biggest successes?

I'm very proud of the papers that grew out of the challenge at that conference. I worked on them with Dave Krantz and Elke Weber at Columbia University. People judge researchers on our energy footprints, we learned. What we do in our personal lives affects how effective our communication is.

We found that scientists who have a bigger "carbon footprint" for home energy use are less likely to change people's beliefs and behaviors. People are also less likely to support policies to cut carbon emissions if the scientist telling them about the policy has a high carbon footprint.

What's one of your biggest failures, and how did you get past that?

I'm not the type of scientist that just wants to do science for science's sake. I want to do science that has broader impacts and that makes a positive change. But I do not feel like my research has helped enough with the problem of climate change. Sometimes I feel like I need to do so much more. I've had to work on not taking these failures personally.

What do you do in your spare time?

I go on really long hikes with my dog, Savannah. She's a hound dog from a shelter. She just flies through the woods, and she has a knack for finding timber rattlesnakes.

Courtesy of S. Attari

I also love reading science fiction. A lot of these stories talk about the future and time travel and different societies. I love getting lost in the fantasy of these different worlds. They help us reimagine what our world could look like. So now I've started a whole new line of research, trying to get people to think about the future. What do they want the future to look like? And what are the pathways of getting there?

What piece of advice do you wish you had been given when you were younger?

I wish someone had told me that failure is okay. As researchers, we get rejected all the time - from getting grants, publishing papers, working on projects and more. Every time you fail, you just have to pick yourself up and start running again.

I learned this through my mentors in college: Follow the questions you want answered, based on your background and personal interests. As a scientist, you can go a really long way talking to people and learning from people. And if something is not in your tool basket, learn from people around you who know about those tools.

And if no one's done it before, that's kind of cool, too.
This Q&A is part of a series exploring the many paths to a career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It has been made possible with generous support from Arconic Foundation.

Power Words
More About Power Words

behavior: The way something, often a person or other organism, acts towards others, or conducts itself.

bias: The tendency to hold a particular perspective or preference that favors some thing, some group or some choice. Scientists often "blind" subjects to the details of a test (don't tell them what it is) so that their biases will not affect the results.

carbon: The chemical element having the atomic number 6. It is the physical basis of all life on Earth. Carbon exists freely as graphite and diamond. It is an important part of coal, limestone and petroleum, and is capable of self-bonding, chemically, to form an enormous number of chemically, biologically and commercially important molecules. (in climate studies) The term carbon sometimes will be used almost interchangeably with carbon dioxide to connote the potential impacts that some action, product, policy or process may have on long-term atmospheric warming.

carbon footprint: A popular term for measuring the global warming potential of various products or processes. Their carbon footprint translates to the amount of some greenhouse gas - usually carbon dioxide - that something releases per unit of time or per quantity of product.

climate: The weather conditions that typically exist in one area, in general, or over a long period.

climate change: Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests.

conservation: The act of preserving or protecting something. The focus of this work can range from art objects to endangered species and other aspects of the natural environment.

energy footprint: A popular term for measuring the climate-altering (global warming) potential of various energy technologies or energy choices. An energy footprint translates to the amount of some greenhouse gas - usually carbon dioxide - that something (such as an auto or airplane) releases per unit of time or per quantity of product (such as plastic or steel) made.

engineer: A person who uses science to solve problems. As a verb, to engineer means to design a device, material or process that will solve some problem or unmet need.

engineering: The field of research that uses math and science to solve practical problems.

environment: The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity (or even the placement of things in the vicinity of an item of interest).

environmental engineer: A person who uses science to study and solve problems in ecosystems - from forests to the human body.

field: An area of study, as in: Her field of research was biology. Also a term to describe a real-world environment in which some research is conducted, such as at sea, in a forest, on a mountaintop or on a city street. It is the opposite of an artificial setting, such as a research laboratory. (in physics) A region in space where certain physical effects operate, such as magnetism (created by a magnetic field), gravity (by a gravitational field), mass (by a Higgs field) or electricity (by an electrical field).

graduate school: A university program that offers advanced degrees, such as a Master's or PhD degree. It's called graduate school because it is started only after someone has already graduated from college (usually with a four-year degree).

interdisciplinary: An adjective that describes some field of research or some endeavor that involves or bridges two or more different disciplines. Examples of those disciplines that might be involved are biology, engineering, medicine, chemistry, materials science and psychology.

major: (in education) A subject that a student chooses as his or her area of focus in college, such as: chemistry, English literature, German, journalism, pre-medicine, electrical engineering or elementary education.

mentor: An individual who lends his or her experience to advise someone starting out in a field. In science, teachers or researchers often mentor students or younger scientists by helping them to refine their research questions. Mentors also can offer feedback on how young investigators prepare to conduct research or interpret their data.

moral: An adjective that refers to a code of behavior that aspires to do what's right (not wrong) and to treat others as you would hope they would treat you.

perception: The state of being aware of something - or the process of becoming aware of something - through use of the senses.

physics: The scientific study of the nature and properties of matter and energy. Classical physics is an explanation of the nature and properties of matter and energy that relies on descriptions such as Newton's laws of motion. Quantum physics, a field of study that emerged later, is a more accurate way of explaining the motions and behavior of matter. A scientist who works in such areas is known as a physicist.

policy: A plan, stated guidelines or agreed-upon rules of action to apply in certain specific circumstances. For instance, a school could have a policy on when to permit snow days or how many excused absences it would allow a student in a given year.

timber: Trees grown as a source of wood for human needs.

tool: An object that a person or other animal makes or obtains and then uses to carry out some purpose such as reaching food, defending itself or grooming.

Citations

Journal: S. Attari et al. Climate change communicators' carbon footprints affect their audience's policy support. Climatic Change. Vol. 154, June 2019, p. 529. doi: 10.1007/s10584-019-02463-0.

Science News: B. Bower. " Shahzeen Attari explores the psychology of saving the planet." Science News. September 26, 2018.

Journal: S. Attari et al. Statements about climate researchers' carbon footprints affect their credibility and the impact of their advice. Climatic Change. Vol. 138, September 2016, p. 325. doi: 10.1007/s10584-016-1713-2.

Journal: S. Attari et al. Energy conservation goals: What people adopt, what they recommend, and why. Judgment and Decision Making. Vol 11, July 2016, p. 342.

Journal: S. Attari et al. Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 107, September 14, 2010, p. 16054. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1001509107.

Kathiann Kowalski reports on all sorts of cutting-edge science. Previously, she practiced law with a large firm. Kathi enjoys hiking, sewing and reading. She also enjoys travel, especially family adventures and beach trips.

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This engineer wants to motivate you to fight climate change

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Talking about climate change, energy and conservation is tough. The science can seem complex. So people need to communicate information clearly. Even when they do that, their audience does not always listen. Biases, attitudes and experiences can color their perceptions.

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The idea seemed so catchy and simple. Plant more trees to trap a lot of the planet-warming carbon spewed by human activities. How much? Try some 205 metric gigatons of carbon! (Giga is a prefix meaning billion.) You'd have to plant many, many, many trees. One group of scientists claims the Earth might have enough room for that huge number. However, other scientists now say no.

The big number is "dangerously misleading," warned Pierre Friedlingstein and four colleagues. Friedlingstein is a mathematical modeler at the University of Exeter in England. This group is not the only one to say the number is bloated.

The debate started with a study in the July 5 Science. In it, Jean-François Bastin and Tom Crowther of ETH Zurich in Switzerland and their coauthors estimated that Earth has as much as 0.9 billion hectares of land suitable for planting new trees. The number came from using pictures of Earth taken from space. Then the scientists used computer programs to find places more trees might grow. Adding up all these places gave an area about the size of the United States.

These new trees should be able to soak up some of the extra carbon dioxide warming the planet. (That extra carbon dioxide comes from such common acts as burning fossil fuels in cars and factories.) Once mature, the new trees could store about one-third as much carbon as humans' life styles have created since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Or that's what the team calculated.

That claim caught the attention of a world starved for hopeful news about our warming climate.

Scientists, however, had worries. Big ones. Altogether, more than 70 scientists worked on critiques. Most appeared October 18 in Science (along with a response from Crowther's team).

Here are five takeaways from the debate, and what it says about the climate benefits of extreme tree planting.

1. Tree planting is not the one big solution for the climate crisis.

Both the critics and the authors of the original paper agree on that statement. The main solution to the climate crisis is to stop releasing greenhouse gases. And action should start as soon as possible.

Burning fossil fuels - coal, oil and natural gas - are a leading source of the carbon released as carbon dioxide. Just don't release it to begin with, writes Simon Lewis and his colleagues. Lewis is a forest ecologist in England at University College London.

Crowther's and his team say they agree. In fact, they admit that their paper was not clear about this. In their answer to critics, they call cutting the releases an "urgent need."

2. Estimates of how much carbon trees can trap might be greatly exaggerated.

Capturing 205 metric gigatons or carbon would be "an astounding accomplishment," says Joseph Veldman. He is a plant ecologist. He works at Texas A&M University in College Station. However, that 205 sounds far too high, he and 45 other scientists say. A more realistic number, they say, may be only a fifth as high. (More on why later.)

In a separate analysis, Lewis of University College and his colleagues say they should cut the 205 at least in half. Three other responses also said the 205-gigaton estimate looked high but didn't say by how much.

3. People will probably never choose to plant trees on all bits of "available" land.

The original estimate included tundra and also gaps in far northern forests. However, planting trees there might make climate change worse.

That's because trees reflect less solar energy than snow, grasses or even bare ground. The ability to reflect energy is known as the trees' albedo. If trees in these places absorb a lot of the sun's energy, instead of reflecting it, they could further warm themselves and the planet. Just taking out these risky, snowy northern places would cut 52.8 metric gigatons of from the original July 5 estimate. That cut by itself lowers the original estimate by about a quarter.

Attempting to plant trees in some "available" spots - such as Yellowstone National Park in the United States - could run into fierce opposition. Why? Many people see value in keeping those areas as they are today. Veldman's group, for instance, cut another 53.5 metric gigatons from the July 5 estimate to leave tropical grasslands as they are. Some of the animals in those ecosystems are "already gravely threatened," they note. Turning their homes into forests would hurt. Plus, getting rid of a grassland could upset the lives of people who live there now. They might need to find new water sources, places to hunt game or let their livestock graze.

Western Arctic National Parklands/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Crowther did not exactly disagree. He just said these decisions were "beyond the scope" of the original survey. His goal had been to show where more trees could grow, not where they should grow.

4. Soil carbon and some other details could matter.

There's carbon already in soil, even without trees growing on it. For instance, it can come from other kinds of dead plants or animals. Yet Crowther's numbers did not adjust for this, three critiques noted. Ignoring that soil carbon would make adding trees seem like a bigger change than it really would be.

Critics looked hard at other details too. There's already carbon stored in the living nonwoody plants, such as grasses, already growing on land. The estimate did not account for that either. That gap too could have made the July 5 estimate too high, critics said.

5. Planting trees could still be a good thing as long as it's done thoughtfully.

Perhaps epic tree planting won't have impacts as big as some had hoped. But even if that July 5 estimate is 90 percent too high, planting trees in appropriate places could reap big benefits.

Indeed, tree planting has long been recognized as valuable, notes one team led by Alan Grainger. This global-change geographer works at the University of Leeds in England. At least the Crowther paper is calling fresh attention to the idea, his team notes.

Power Words
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atmosphere The envelope of gases surrounding Earth or another planet.

biology The study of living things. The scientists who study them are known as biologists.

carbon The chemical element having the atomic number 6. It is the physical basis of all life on Earth. Carbon exists freely as graphite and diamond. It is an important part of coal, limestone and petroleum, and is capable of self-bonding, chemically, to form an enormous number of chemically, biologically and commercially important molecules.

carbon dioxide (or ₂ CO )A colorless, odorless gas produced by all animals when the oxygen they inhale reacts with the carbon-rich foods that they've eaten. Carbon dioxide also is released when organic matter burns (including fossil fuels like oil or gas). Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere. Plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen during photosynthesis, the process they use to make their own food.

climate The weather conditions that typically exist in one area, in general, or over a long period.

climate change Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests.

coauthor One of a group (two or more people) who together had prepared a written work, such as a book, report or research paper. Not all coauthors may have contributed equally.

colleague Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.

compound (often used as a synonym for chemical) A compound is a substance formed when two or more chemical elements unite (bond) in fixed proportions. For example, water is a compound made of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. Its chemical symbol is H ₂ O.

disrupt (n. disruption) To break apart something; interrupt the normal operation of something; or to throw the normal organization (or order) of something into disorder.

ecology (adj. ecological) A branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. A scientist who works in this field is called an ecologist.

ecosystem A group of interacting living organisms - including microorganisms, plants and animals - and their physical environment within a particular climate. Examples include tropical reefs, rainforests, alpine meadows and polar tundra. The term can also be applied to elements that make up some an artificial environment, such as a company, classroom or the internet.

forage To search for something, especially food. It's also a term for the food eaten by grazing animals, such as cattle and horses.

forest An area of land covered mostly with trees and other woody plants.

fossil fuel Any fuel - such as coal, petroleum (crude oil) or natural gas - that has developed within the Earth over millions of years from the decayed remains of bacteria, plants or animals.

geography The study of Earth's features and how the living and nonliving parts of the planet affect one another. Scientists who work in this field are known as geographers.

geological Adjective to describe things related to Earth's physical structure and substance, its history and the processes that act on it. People who work in this field are known as geologists.

global warming The gradual increase in the overall temperature of Earth's atmosphere due to the greenhouse effect. This effect is caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons and other gases in the air, many of them released by human activity.

greenhouse gases Gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect by absorbing heat. Carbon dioxide and methane are two examples of such gases.

habitat The area or natural environment in which an animal or plant normally lives, such as a desert, coral reef or freshwater lake. A habitat can be home to thousands of different species.

Industrial Revolution A period of time around 1750 that was marked by new manufacturing processes and a switch from wood to coal and other fossil fuels as a main source of energy.

latitude The distance from the equator measured in degrees (up to 90). Low latitudes are closer to the equator; high latitudes are closer to the poles.

livestock Animals raised for meat or dairy products, including cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens and geese.

mature (adj.) Connoting an adult individual or full-grown and fully developed (non-juvenile) form of something. (verb) To develop toward - or into - a more complex and full-grown form of something, be it a living thing, a technology or an idea.

natural gas A mix of gases that developed underground over millions of years (often in association with crude oil). Most natural gas starts out as 50 to 90 percent methane, along with small amounts of heavier hydrocarbons, such as propane and butane.

precipitation (in chemistry) The creation of a solid from a solution. This can occur if there is too much of a chemical to dissolve completely into a solution. It also can be a sign that some chemical reaction is taking place. (in meteorology) A term for water falling from the sky. It can be in any form, from rain and sleet to snow or hail.

solar energy The energy in sunlight that can be captured as heat or converted into heat or electrical energy. Some people refer to wind power as a form of solar energy. The reason: Winds are driven by the variations in temperatures and the density of the air, both of which are affected by the solar heating of the air, ground and surface waters.

species A group of organisms that share many genetic and physical traits, and that are more closely related to each other than to any other group. Among some animals, for instance, this might involve individuals that can mate and produce viable offspring. Naming something as a species helps give different people a consistent way of talking about the same group of living organisms. This is true for scientists, for people making laws or for anyone who wants to understand the relatedness of organisms.

STEM An acronym (abbreviation made using the first letters of a term) for science, technology, engineering and math.

survey To view, examine, measure or evaluate something, often land or broad aspects of a landscape. (with people) To ask questions that glean data on the opinions, practices (such as dining or sleeping habits), knowledge or skills of a broad range of people. Researchers select the number and types of people questioned in hopes that the answers these individuals give will be representative of others who are their age, belong to the same ethnic group or live in the same region. (n.) The list of questions that will be offered to glean those data.

tundra A cold, usually lowland area in far northern regions. The subsoil is permanently frozen. In summer, a tundra's top layer of soil thaws and can support low-growing mosses, lichens, grasses, shrubs and trees (some only a few centimeters high).

NGSS:

HS-ESS2-2, HS-ESS2-4, HS-ESS2-6, HS-ESS3-3, HS-ESS3-4, HS-ESS3-5, HS-ESS3-6, HS-ETS1-1, HS-ETS1-4, HS-LS2-1, HS-LS2-2, HS-LS2-7, MS-ESS3-1, MS-ESS3-3, MS-ESS3-4, MS-ESS3-5, MS-ETS1-1, MS-ETS1-2

Susan Milius is the life sciences writer, covering organismal biology and evolution, and has a special passion for plants, fungi and invertebrates. She studied biology and English literature.

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5 things to know about the climate-saving benefits of tree planting

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The idea seemed so catchy and simple. Plant more trees to trap a lot of the planet-warming carbon spewed by human activities. How much? Try some 205 metric gigatons of carbon! (Giga is a prefix meaning billion.) You'd have to plant many, many, many trees.

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How densely packed your neighborhood is can affect the health of our planet, a new study finds.

Scientists measured the impact that people have on the environment using a "yardstick" that they call a carbon "footprint." That footprint reflects the amount of carbon dioxide - a greenhouse gas - that is spewed into the atmosphere as a result of someone's daily activities. Carbon footprints tend to be low for city dwellers. Living in a suburb outside a city, however, can turn that footprint into a bootprint.

Energy researchers Christopher Jones and Daniel Kammen published their findings Dec. 13 in Environmental Science and Technology.

The scientists, both at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated carbon footprints for people in every zip code across the United States. To do that, they summed up how much energy and other resources went into providing each person with their transportation, food and housing. Jones and Kammen also looked at items people would typically buy and the amount of water people used.

People living in city centers had small footprints, the researchers found. "It is much easier to have a low carbon impact if your family's home is close to where you work, shop and play," explains Jones. Living within walking or biking distance cuts back on the amount of carbon dioxide associated with moving people by cars. And cities with extensive bus and subway networks allow people to travel great distances while keeping releases of climate-altering greenhouse gases low.

Not everyone can afford to live in the city, however. And not everyone wants to. Rings of suburbs have popped up around major cities across the world. Suburbs offer more space, allowing people to build larger homes. Suburbs may offer better schools for a family's kids. But those homes are typically well beyond walking distance from where their owners work, play or learn. So people who live in suburbs often drive long distances. There's also the matter of heating and cooling big homes.

All of these factors can bump up carbon footprints so that they exceed those of city dwellers, Jones and Kammen report. The difference is substantial. The average household in a large city releases about 40 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The average suburban household, however, releases closer to 50 tons of carbon dioxide per year. That's a 25 percent increase over city dwellers.

The new findings are an important contribution to climate research, says Matthew Kahn. An environmental economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, he was not involved with the study. Kahn would like to see the analysis applied to other parts of the world - Europe, India and China, for instance. That would give scientists a better feel for how culture might mix with location to influence our carbon footprints.

You may not have any control over the location of your home. Still, everyone can take steps to shrink their carbon footprints, says Jones. That's because how much we pollute is influenced not just by where we live, but also how we live.

To shrink your footprint, start small, he says. Turn off lights when they're not in use. Recycle or reuse things instead of throwing them away. These might not seem like steps that will have a big impact. And as people get used to making small changes, the leap to bigger ones will get easier. Also avoid buying things you don't need. After all, the process of making new items also produces more pollution, explains Jones.

Power Words

atmosphere The envelope of gases surrounding Earth or another planet.

carbon dioxide A gas produced by all animals when the oxygen they inhale reacts with the carbon-rich foods that they've eaten. This colorless, odorless gas also is released when organic matter (including fossil fuels like oil or gas) is burned. Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere. Plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen during photosynthesis, the process they use to make their own food.

carbon footprint The amount of carbon dioxide released into the air as a result of daily human activities. The footprint includes direct emissions such as those from a car's tailpipe. It also includes carbon dioxide released during the manufacture of items purchased or used in the home (including electricity, fuel and building materials).

environmental economist Someone who studies the financial value of things in the environment (including clean water and dirty air, for instance), and how human activities (such as transportation use or purchases) can have an effect on the environment and the use of natural resources.

greenhouse gas A gas that contributes to the greenhouse effect by absorbing heat. Carbon dioxide is one example of a greenhouse gas.

Alison Pearce Stevens is a former biologist and forever science geek who writes about science and nature for kids. She lives with her husband, their two kids and a small menagerie of cuddly (and not-so cuddly) critters.

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How densely packed your neighborhood is can affect the health of our planet, a new study finds. Scientists measured the impact that people have on the environment using a "yardstick" that they call a carbon "footprint." That footprint reflects the amount of carbon dioxide - a greenhouse gas - that is spewed into the atmosphere as a result of someone's daily activities.

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The best climate policy - environmentally and economically - limits emissions and puts a price on them. Cap and trade is one way to do both.
It's a system designed to reduce pollution in our atmosphere.

Cap and trade reduces emissions, such as those from power plants, by setting a limit on pollution and creating a market.

The cap on greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming is a firm limit on pollution. The cap gets stricter over time.

The trade part is a market for companies to buy and sell allowances that let them emit only a certain amount, as supply and demand set the price. Trading gives companies a strong incentive to save money by cutting emissions in the most cost-effective ways.

Caps limit harmful emissions

The government sets the cap across a given industry, or ideally the whole economy. It also decides the penalties for violations.

Carbon dioxide and related pollutants that drive global warming are main targets of such caps. Other pollutants that contribute to smog can also be capped.

In carbon dioxide's case, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas mixes into the upper atmosphere and has a global effect. Reducing emissions locally lowers levels around the world.

Companies are allowed to emit set amounts

The total amount of the cap is split into allowances, each permitting a company to emit one ton of emissions. (You'd have to drive 2,400 miles, roughly the distance between New York and Las Vegas, to emit that much carbon dioxide.)

The government distributes the allowances to the companies, either for free or through an auction.

The cap typically declines over time, providing a growing incentive for industry and businesses to reduce their emissions more efficiently, while keeping production costs down.

Trading can lead to cuts in pollution sooner

Companies that cut their pollution faster can sell allowances to companies that pollute more, or "bank" them for future use.

This market - the "trade" part of cap and trade - gives companies flexibility. It increases the pool of available capital to make reductions, encourages companies to cut pollution faster and rewards innovation.

Because there are only so many allowances available, total pollution drops as the cap falls.

As companies use established techniques to lower emissions, such as adopting energy-efficient technology, entrepreneurs see opportunity.

Ever wonder why you don't hear about acid rain anymore? Thank cap and trade, which slashed levels of sulfur dioxide to solve the problem - at a fraction of the projected cost.

Cap and trade is lowering emissions globally

A market-based approach like cap and trade allows countries to make more ambitious climate goals.

Environmental enforcement officials, trained by EDF, conduct an on-site inspection at a factory in China.

China, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, launched the initial phase of a national carbon market in 2017 with help from EDF.

The new emissions trading system is expected to be the world's largest, dwarfing all existing programs, and is a central component of China's strategy to tackle climate pollution.

The national program builds on pilot emissions trading systems, which have included elements of cap and trade and are already underway in seven cities and provinces in China.

They cover more than 2,600 companies in regions with a population of more than 258 million.

In the European Union's Emissions Trading System, capped emissions from stationary structures were 29% lower in 2018 than when the program started in 2005.

In the United States, California's climate policies have led to a steady decline of the state's carbon dioxide pollution. The centerpiece is the cap-and-trade program, which EDF has helped design and implement.

California's emissions from sources subject to the cap declined 10% between the program's launch in 2013 and 2018. Meanwhile, the state's economy is thriving.

Cap and trade makes even deeper cuts possible when countries cooperate, such as the United States and Canada. California and Quebec connected their systems in 2014, building a strong market that shows great potential.

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The best climate policy - environmentally and economically - limits emissions and puts a price on them. Cap and trade is one way to do both.

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The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) created a short video explaining the true costs of our oil dependency by following a single gallon of gasoline refined and consumed in California. According to the video, this single gallon of gasoline emits 25 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions and a single driver in the United States creates about 10,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions every year. In order to absorb this pollution, each driver would need an acre of forest. To absorb the pollution generated by all of the drivers in the U.S., we would need a forest the size of California, Nevada and Arizona combined.

To calculate the amount of pollution generated from gasoline, CIR considered every step in the consumption process, including the extraction of crude oil from the ground and the evaporation of toxic chemicals, like benzene, when you undo the gas cap or lift the nozzle. After accounting for all of the costs of gasoline use, the CIR suggests that the actual price should be closer to $15. This price, however, does not reflect the cost of externalities, like oil spills, water pollution and reduced crop yields, in addition to increased rates of asthma and respiratory diseases caused by air pollution.

This is why the Environmental Protection Agency is arguing to reduce toxic chemicals in gasoline, which would make it even more expensive to fill up your tank. But, the EPA argues, the public health and environmental benefits of the Clean Air Act of 1990 far outweigh the costs by a margin of four to one.

Other countries, working to bear the cost of gasoline use, enact "eco taxes" to direct funding toward social programs and renewable energy. Germany, for example, charges about $1 per gallon as an eco tax in order to fund these programs. Germans pay more than $8 a gallon for gasoline and in Netherlands, gasoline is close to $9.

Here is a chart of gasoline prices from around the world by GOOD magazine. Here is another chart by The Economist showing the change of fuel prices in the last two years.

What many nations realize, GOOD explains, is that oil is a finite resource, and they are utilizing gasoline taxes to reduce oil imports, create more efficient transportation systems, and better prepare for longer-term oil price volatility. And at $4 per gallon of gasoline, we haven't even started to address the true costs of gasoline.
Photo by kikashi.

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The True Cost of Gasoline: $15 Per Gallon

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The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) created a short video explaining the true costs of our oil dependency by following a single gallon of gasoline refined and consumed in California. According to the video, this single gallon of gasoline emits 25 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions and a single driver in the United States creates about 10,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions every year.

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Coal-fired power plant near Becker, Minnesota. Photo by Tony Webster/Flickr

Experts often debate the pros and cons of a carbon tax versus a cap-and-trade system in the United States, and they will do so again at an event in Washington DC tomorrow. A carbon tax directly establishes a price on greenhouse gas emissions-so companies are charged a dollar amount for every ton of emissions they produce-whereas a cap-and-trade program issues a set number of emissions "allowances" each year. These allowances can be auctioned to the highest bidder as well as traded on secondary markets, creating a carbon price.

So what's the best policy to rein in U.S. emissions?

WRI researchers recently analyzed this question in our issue brief, Putting a Price on Carbon: Reducing Emissions. We found that while there are legitimate reasons to favor one form of pricing carbon over the other, if well designed, either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program can be the centerpiece of U.S. efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What Are the Key Similarities Between a Carbon Tax and Cap-and-Trade?

Carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs share several major advantages over alternative policies. Both reduce emissions by encouraging the lowest-cost emissions reductions, and they do so without anyone needing to know beforehand when and where these emissions reductions will occur. Both policies encourage investors and entrepreneurs to develop new low-carbon technologies. And both policies generate government revenue (assuming emissions allowances are auctioned under cap-and-trade) that can be used in productive ways.

What Are Some Important Advantages of Each?

Real differences exist among carbon taxes and cap-and-trade policies, and each has distinct advantages. The United States has made commitments to the international community that it will reduce its annual greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. By setting an emissions cap that declines over time, a cap-and-trade policy can increase certainty that emissions will fall below the predetermined emissions targets.

A carbon tax offers stable carbon prices, so energy producers and entrepreneurs can make investment decisions without fear of fluctuating regulatory costs. In addition, if emissions reductions are cheaper than expected-which might occur if, for example, an economic downturn causes emissions to fall-then a tax provides a continuing price signal whereas cap-and-trade does not encourage reductions beyond the emissions target.

What Are the Key Disadvantages?

Critics focus on certain disadvantages of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade, but their arguments are unpersuasive if policies are well-designed. While a carbon tax does not offer the same degree of emissions certainty as cap-and-trade, sufficient stringency can be achieved with a tax through design elements like a "ratcheting mechanism" that would adjust the tax upward if the initial emissions reductions are too low. In any case, as we show in the issue brief, if technological progress continues to reduce the costs and availability of clean energy, a carbon tax is likely to cause emissions to fall more than predicted by the simulation models that shape our policy expectations.

Critics of cap-and-trade point to problems that actual cap-and-trade programs like the European Union Emissions Trading Schedule and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have confronted, such as weak emissions caps, volatility in emissions allowance prices, and overly generous allocations of emissions allowances to regulated entities. But these are problems with the design of a cap-and-trade program, and each has a straightforward solution. Emissions caps can be set more stringently, price floors and ceilings can avoid volatility, and emissions allowances can be auctioned instead of given away. Indeed, California's cap-and-trade program has made important strides in addressing these concerns, for example by establishing a price floor in its auction of allowances.

So What's the Bottom Line?

For sure, there are additional advantages and drawbacks to carbon taxes and cap-and-trade that we have not addressed. Still, in the words of Jean Tirole, the 2014 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, these details are "of second order importance" compared to addressing the risks of climate change.

A large and growing group of economists, scientists, policy makers and businesses support using a price on carbon to achieve the greater climate policy ambition we need. But getting the U.S. Congress to pass a carbon pricing policy will be extraordinarily difficult due to the powerful corporate and ideological opposition. Uncompromising stances on policy preferences are unhelpful and divisive. The benefits of carbon pricing are not worth sacrificing for the goal of achieving any specific policy.

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Carbon Tax vs. Cap-and-Trade: What's a Better Policy to Cut Emissions?

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Experts often debate the pros and cons of a carbon tax versus a cap-and-trade system in the United States, and they will do so again at an event in Washington DC tomorrow. A carbon tax directly establishes a price on greenhouse gas emissions-so companies are charged a dollar amount for every ton of emissions they produce-whereas a cap-and-trade program issues a set number of emissions "allowances" each year.

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Move money from banks that support the fossil fuel industry

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Move money from banks that support the fossil fuel industry

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In its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Department of Defense described climate change as a national security threat. In its 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Department of Defense called climate change a "threat multiplier" that will amplify and worsen poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions.

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In its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Department of Defense described climate change as a national security threat. In its 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Department of Defense called climate change a "threat multiplier" that will amplify and worsen poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions.

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Overton Window

Joseph P. Overton identified an important framework for climate activists to understand: the Overton Window, which defines the range of public policies that are okay to talk about without getting a lot of flak.

If a policy is in the Overton Window, the media will cover it and government will consider implementing it. Policies outside the Overton Window will be labeled "extreme" regardless of how good or needed they may be.

What's in the window changes over time and people can have a big impact here. Consider Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. When Sanders received national attention for things like Medicare for All, tuition-free public colleges and $15 minimum wage, they were initially ridiculed in the media because they were outside the Overton Window. However, by the end of the campaign, these ideas had moved into the Overton Window. Florida, for example, while voting for President Trump in the 2020 general election, also passed a minimum wage of $15/hour.

The impact of the Sanders Campaign should hearten us - citizen action can move ideas into the Overton Window!

The Green New Deal, a framework for addressing climate change, has moved substantially due to the efforts of the Sunrise Movement, Senator Edward Markey and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - congressional sponsors of the Green New Deal - and many other activists and non-corporate politicians. President Joe Biden was moved to support a bigger climate action package than when his campaign began. THIS! believes that the effort to move the Green New Deal into the center of the Overton Window is a top priority.

Our actions as citizens can help make this happen. In general the more people are exposed to an idea, the more they will consider it. Most people take some time to change their views. It is important to give people "acceptance time" during which they can try on new opinions, values and beliefs.

So we must expand the conversation about the climate crisis and get as many people as possible talking about it. As Texas Tech climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe notes, "If you don't talk about climate, why would you care? And if you don't care, why would you act? Action starts with conversation."

Dick Lamm's 4 Stages of Policy Development

The importance of conversation is reflected in the four-step process for public policy change described by former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm:

Stage 1: No Talk - No Action

No one is talking about a problem or taking action because it is not yet seen as a problem. This described climate change for many years.

Stage 2: Talk - No Action

People are beginning to see the problem and talking about it but little to no substantive action is being taken to address it. This is a frustrating time for activists who are ahead of the curve on this issue: "It's just talk! No one is doing anything about it!" But Lamm's insight is that this is a stage we need to go through to get to the next two stages.

Stage 3: Talk - Action

Now people are acting because they see the problem clearly.

Stage 4: No Talk - Action

There is no longer need for talk because the problem is widely recognized and significant action is being take to address it. Think of driving drunk. It used to be something that was jokingly, even affectionately portrayed in movies and TV shows but now we don't need to talk about it. It is settled public policy. If you drive drunk, you go to jail.

With the climate crisis, we are a long way from Stage 4 (No Talk - Action), but we have to move toward it as rapidly as we can. The more people we can get talking about climate change, the better, even if they begin as skeptics.

THIS! will launch a Climate Conversationalist training program soon to help move the climate crisis and the Green New Deal into the Overton Window. Stay tuned

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How Policy Changes - THIS! is What We Did

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Overton Window Joseph P. Overton identified an important framework for climate activists to understand: the Overton Window, which defines the range of public policies that are okay to talk about without getting a lot of flak. If a policy is in the Overton Window, the media will cover it and government will consider implementing it.

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The natural world has been a source of inspiration for artists since time immemorial. The Earth is a running thread that links together the prehistoric cave paintings of Chauvet, Katsushika Hokusai's great wave, and Ana Mendieta's 20th-century land works. In recent years, however, as wildfires ignite across the globe, ocean levels rise, and entire ecosystems collapse, artists have been faced with the ever-increasing and inescapable effects of our climate crisis. Now, the radiant majesty of a Georgia O'Keeffe flower or the unperturbed wilderness of a Thomas Cole landscape can feel of another time-or another world entirely.

Reflecting on these ecological perils, many contemporary artists have become climate activists, using their work as a platform to raise awareness and imagine a more sustainable future. While this year's self-isolated Earth Day is a strange one to say the least, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that global, collectivized action against existential threat is possible. And art can be a beacon of hope, lighting the way and compelling us to act. Here, we share 10 contemporary artists who are impactful leaders in this space.

To celebrate this year's Earth Day, renowned conceptual artist Olafur Eliasson is launching a new artwork that will guide us away from our narrow, human-centric view of our planet. Titled Earth Perspectives, the participatory work reenvisions human constructs like maps, the globe, and space by including the perspectives of plants, animals, and other natural elements. "On Earth Day," said Eliasson in a press release, "I want to advocate-as on any other day-that we recognise these various perspectives and, together, celebrate their coexistence."

Earth Perspectives is far from Eliasson's first foray into climate activism. His presentation at the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit powerfully demonstrated art's ability to provoke emotional, visceral responses to climate change-something that data points and statistics often struggle to do. To illustrate the importance of firsthand experience when creating awareness and impact, he began by explaining his 2014 installation Ice Watch. The piece saw the Danish-Icelandic artist and a team of geologists transport 12 blocks of melting glacial ice to Paris's Climate Change Conference. "To take all the data, news, and scientific papers and turn it into something you can touch is, I think, incredibly effective," he said.

Ice Watch, which most recently traveled to London in 2018, is a continuation of Eliasson's lifelong belief that art creates spaces for us to engage in both individual and collective experiences. Last year, he was appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador for climate action by the United Nations Development Programme. In his new role, Eliasson is committed to continuing his advocacy for urgent climate action.

In addition to his creative practice, Eliasson also founded a solar energy company called Little Sun with engineer Frederik Ottesen in 2012. Their mission is to displace fossil fuel lighting in communities living without electricity and to raise awareness of energy access and climate action.

Though Mary Mattingly's artistic practice is expansive-traversing photography, sculpture, installation, and performance-she is arguably best known for , a barge-turned-floating edible landscape that launched in New York in 2016. Open to the public, the ongoing public art piece and vigilante garden invites communities to pick their own produce, addressing the city's food deserts and reconnecting neighbors with local ecologies.

By situating Swale on the water, Mattingly was able to ingeniously circumvent a New York City law that makes it illegal to grow or pick food on public land. "I grew up in an agricultural town outside of NYC where the drinking water was polluted," Mattingly stated on her website. "That framed my understanding of clean water as an increasingly rare resource that needed to be protected. Swale came out of a need to connect with and rely upon New York's waterways and public land in order to better care for it, and by proximity, each other."

The project gained so much momentum that in less than a year after launching, a New York City Parks commissioner opened its own public edible garden in Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx. Currently under consideration as a pilot program, the initiative is the first time New York City Parks is allowing people to publicly forage in almost 100 years.

Mattingly's other works similarly interrogate the systemic and political frameworks impacting our relationship to the environment. In a 2018 commission for Brooklyn's BRIC titled What Happens After?, the artist disassembled a military vehicle, tracing it back to its most fundamental mineral elements. In doing so, Mattingly exposed exploitative strip mining practices, highlighting the unseen environmental consequences of war. Meanwhile, her most recent project, The Ecotopian Library (2020), asks people around the world to contribute to a collective toolkit that will help create better futures out of a climate-changed world.

John Akomfrah's Purple (2017) is widely considered the British artist and filmmaker's most ambitious work to date. The immersive 6-channel video installation was filmed across 10 countries, exploring the incremental and interconnected effects of climate change on a global scale. " Purple has grown out of a series of frustrations and dissatisfactions," Akomfrah said in an interview with ICA Boston. "This is not the 18th century anymore-it's not unlimited landscapes and unlimited space to explore ad infinitum, wasting away, trashing away as we go along."

As the work unfolds, lush, cinematic shots of landscapes altered by climate change are cut together with archival footage, spoken word, and music. This bricolage style of remixing is distinctive to Akomfrah and fellow members of the Black Audio Film Collective. Described by the artist as "a person of color's response to the Anthropocene," Purple is a continuation of his recent investigations into the way colonialism and the African diaspora relate to natural history. Other such works include his Vertigo Sea (2015) and Tropikos (2016).

"Climate change...is not just a white, European fixation, though it is often presented that way," Akomfrah explained in a 2017 interview with The Guardian. "When I stand on a street in Accra, I can feel that it is a city that is literally at boiling point. It is way hotter than it was in the 1960s or even the 1980s. We need to start looking at climate change in radically different ways, not just as part of a western-based development narrative."

Purple debuted at London's Barbican, traveled to ICA Boston, and was the opening work at the landmark exhibition"The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030-2100" at Moscow's Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in 2019. The workdemonstrates the overwhelming scope and real impact climate change is having on a planetary scale.

In 2015, Interview Magazine asked Agnes Denes whether her concerns about the environment had changed since the 1960s and '70s. "No," she responded. "It's just that some of the things I talked about 40 years ago have become reality."

One of the first pioneers of environmental art, Denes has been warning us about our unsustainable relationship with the planet for over half a century. A recent retrospective at The Shed felt like long-overdue recognition for the artist, who is now 89. A foil to her male counterparts within the early land art movement, Denes was always more invested in how her work could minimize humanity's ecological footprint.

The greatest exemplar of this is undoubtedly her 1982 piece Wheatfield-A Confrontation. To realize this work, Denes cleared two acres of land in Lower Manhattan, filled it with 200 truckloads of soil, and sowed a wheat field by hand. As the crop grew, so did an arresting new landscape; amber waves of pastoral grain contrasted against the stark glass labyrinth of the Financial District on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other. Now iconic, Wheatfield has sadly only grown more prescient with time.

After four grueling months of maintenance (Denes recalls the piece nearly killing her), the wheat was reaped and harvested. The crop yielded over a thousand pounds of grain, which traveled to 28 cities around the world in an exhibition titled "The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger." Audiences were encouraged to take seeds from the show and plant them.

Denes's miraculous ability to synthesize science, philosophy, linguistics, ecology, and psychology into a cohesive whole is a through line in all of her work. Rice/Tree/Burial, a piece first realized in New York's Sullivan County in 1968, is a three-step ritual Denes developed as an exercise in what she termed "eco-logic." It involves planting rice to represent life, chaining trees for interference and decay, and burying her poetry to symbolize concept and creation. Meanwhile, her monumental Tree Mountain - A Living Time Capsule (1992-96) in Western Finland is a literal forest. Dedicated by the Finnish government in 1996, the work is legally protected for the next 400 years.

A trained architect, Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno invents ways we might better inhabit and adapt to a climate-changed world. Like Denes, Saraceno's practice is a poetic alchemy of disciplines including art, science, and sociology, all woven together to create proposals for a more sustainable existence. His greatest muse is the spider; the entangled but logical networks of its webs form the basis of Saraceno's interconnected practice.

In addition to his arachnophilia, the artist is also fascinated with flight. "How can we find a way to levitate, without any violence to the earth?" he asked in a 2018 New York Times profile. Over the past decade, Saraceno has been developing what he calls "collaborations with the atmosphere" within his project Aerocene (2015-present). This international, interdisciplinary community of artists is united by a core utopian vision-life in the atmosphere, free of borders, and travel without fossil fuels or emissions. Through this collective, Saraceno has created floating, solar-powered museums made entirely of recycled plastic bags ( Museo Aero Solar, 2007-present), and in 2015, the group broke a world record for the first and longest fully solar-powered flight.

Saraceno's expansive oeuvre includes collaborations with scientific institutions such as MIT and London's Natural History Museum, and has been exhibited at major art events and institutions around the world, including the Palais de Tokyo, 2019's Venice Biennale, and 2018's Art Basel in Miami Beach.

Last year, Saraceno was one of six artists commissioned by the state of California to create the world's largest permanent public installation of art themed around climate change. The installation is slated to open in late 2021.

By drawing on the social histories imbued in our landscapes, Allison Janae Hamilton makes it irrefutably clear that when it comes to natural disaster, people of color are always on the front lines.

In a 2018 commission for the Storm King Art Center, Hamilton installed a tower of tambourines on an island. Titled The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm (2018), the haunting work memorializes the thousands of black migrant workers killed and buried in unmarked mass graves due to two historic storms-the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 and the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928. In recognizing these victims, Hamilton sheds light on how these climate-related disasters often reveal preexisting social inequities.

Through her investigations of American landscapes-particularly those of the American South-climate change has taken on an inevitable and necessary role. With a style that's been described as "southern gothic," Hamilton's immersive works employ folktales, hunting and farming signifiers, African American nature writing, and Baptist hymns. Hamilton illuminates how the natural world can expose deeply embedded histories of race and inequity.

Hamilton told artnet News in December 2019 that "the environment really is a story of people and lived experience; not just the science behind it all." She added, "It's really important to look at who the most vulnerable people are, and as natural disasters like hurricanes and other occurrences grow more and more intense, [to ask] 'How are they illuminating and shedding light on the already existing social disasters?'"

Since the 1980s, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been taking aerial photographs of industry's impact on Earth's landscapes. On a 2010 expedition documenting agriculture's effect on northern Spain, he observed how the abstracted topography seen from above reminded him of Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937). "The colors and the shapes were like nothing I'd ever seen before," he told magazine.

Like Picasso's 1937 masterpiece, Burtynsky's arresting large-scale images of the scarred Earth inspire both awe and devastation. By providing a bird's-eye view, he reveals a terraformed planet. This macro-level understanding of our impact is paradigm-shifting, fundamentally changing the way we perceive the impact of industries like agriculture, mining, and urbanization. Recognized for producing works that "powerfully alter the way we think about the world and our place in it," Burtynsky was awarded with a TED Prize in 2005.

In recent years, Burtynsky has collaborated with filmmakers Nicholas de Pencier and Jennifer Baichwal to create a multidisciplinary body of work for The Anthropocene Project. The initiative seeks to investigate humanity's impact on the planet through art, film, virtual reality, augmented reality, and scientific research. In 2018, they released the documentary ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch.

Like many of the artists on this list, Mel Chin has a conceptual practice that seems to know no bounds. His earliest environmental work is Revival Field, an ongoing project that began in 1991. In it, Chin utilizes specific plants to extract heavy metals from contaminated soil at a Superfund site in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Developed in collaboration with since-retired USDA senior research agronomist Dr. Rufus Chaney, Revival Field helped pioneer and validate the practice of "green remediation"-a holistic approach that ensures environmental solutions to industrial waste are as sustainable as possible.

Chin compared his approach to Revival Field to a sculptor carving away at marble. He once told Art21, "If [pollution] could be carved away, and life could return to that soil and then a diverse and ecologically balanced life, then that is a wonderful sculpture. But we have to create the chisels, and we have to create the tools, and we have to isolate the problem: where the block of pollution is, so we can carve it away."

By 1993, Chin and Dr. Chaney were able to successfully conclude the first phase of Revival Field. The plants had successfully absorbed high levels of cadmium from the soil into its leaves and stems, creating a low-tech and environmentally sustainable alternative to artificial remediation methods.

Another ongoing project, Operation Paydirt (2006-present), invites community members to express and actualize a future free of lead poisoning. By drawing their own versions of hundred-dollar bills-what Chin has termed "fundreds"-citizens assert the value of their voices when it comes to their local environments. Meanwhile, his most recent project Unmoored (2018) utilized augmented reality to allow people to visualize what Times Square might look like should global warming continue its course. Floating amidst oversized plankton under a canopy of boats, the piece asks its audience: "How will you rise?"

After spending the greater part of his career documenting the rapidly increasing effects of climate change, British artist and filmmaker David Buckland realized that the creative community needed to band together to respond. And so, in 2001, he established Cape Farewell, an international nonprofit bringing together creatives, scientists, and activists to generate and inspire ideas for a more sustainable society.

Cape Farewell's ongoing programming includes commissions, events, and, most notably, expeditions that invite artists and scientists to collaborate on ecological projects around the world, from the Andean rainforests to frigid coasts of Svalbard, Norway. In 2008, the nonprofit brought Laurie Anderson, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sophie Calle, and 41 other participants to the Arctic, allowing them to observe the receding landscapes firsthand.

In 2015, the nonprofit organized a cultural response to the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris by launching ArtCOP21. Organized as "a global festival of cultural activity on climate change," the initiative included over 550 events that took place across Paris and in 54 other cities around the world. Through installations, exhibits, concerts, and screenings, ArtCOP21 gave audiences a unique opportunity to engage in the climate conversation through culture.

Other artists who are members of Cape Farewell include Mel Chin, Gary Hume, Rachel Whiteread, Lucy and Jorge Orta, and Antony Gormley.

Fascinated by the spectacle of man-made destruction, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang devoted an entire 2014 exhibition at Shanghai's Power Station of Art to shedding light on China's environmental devastation. "In ancient times, people were more respectful of the environment," Cai told The Guardian that year. "The problems we have now are a symptom of the times where people are more aggressive and materialistic and are exploiting nature's resources to make money for their own means."

The exhibition, "The Ninth Wave," was titled after a painting by 19th-century Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky depicting a ship at the mercy of a tempestuous sea. In the work, Cai illustrates a reversed power dynamic-how in this century, nature exists at the mercy of mankind's whims.

To initiate the show's opening, Cai sailed a dilapidated fishing vessel, piled high with sculptures of sick endangered species, from his hometown of Quanzhou to Shanghai. This morbid recreation of Noah's ark was partially inspired by the shocking 2013 incident where 16,000 dead pigs were found floating in Shanghai's Huangpu River. "My feeling was like everyone's," Cai said in an interview with NPR. "This was so unacceptable, so many dead pigs floating on the river. It's an outrageous thing." The pigs had been dumped in the river by farmers in Zhejiang, a province upstream from Shanghai known for its pig farming industry.

Though Cai had originally planned to sail his ship down the same river, he hadn't received permission from the Chinese government. As a compromise, after briefly navigating along Shanghai's waterfront district, Cai's ship was ultimately carried to the Power Station by barge. There, it became the centerpiece of the sobering exhibition that included works like The Bund Without Us (2014),a massive scroll exploded by gunpowder, illustrating a Shanghai waterfront devoid of human life and overtaken by nature. Meanwhile, the installation Silent Ink (2014) offered a similar meditation on traditional Chinese landscape paintings, observing how far removed from nature the nation has become.

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10 Artists Tackling Climate Change in Their Work | Artsy

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To address our climate crisis, many contemporary artists have used their work as a platform to raise awareness and imagine a more sustainable future.

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What is the MAHB?

The goal of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) is to create a platform to help global civil society address the interconnections among the greatest threats to human well-being: climate disruption, loss of biodiversity (and thus ecosystem services), land-use change and resulting degradation, global toxification, ocean acidification, decay of the epidemiological environment, an economic system based on growth, pressure from increasing population, and resource wars (which could go nuclear). The manifestation of these interactions is often referred to as "the human predicament."
The MAHB Mission Foster, fuel and inspire Develop and implement strategies for shifting human cultures and institutions towards practices that promote a future in which people can live peaceful and productive lives. a global dialogue on how interconnected biogeophysical and socio-economic systems contribute to, and are affected by, the existential threats facing humanity and, the threat of collapse as a result of the manifestations of the human predicament
The MAHB offers six unique tools to civil society concerned with the major threats to humanity:

1. Alliance of individuals and organizations concerned about the existential threats to civilization

2. of a world moving rapidly towards sustainability in 2050. The snapshot of the future is being designed to inspire and unite the diverse MAHB membership; it will provide a shared purpose that is exciting and inspiring-working towards core goals rather than against current injustice and destructive behaviors.

3. Scholars working across disciplines to build the knowledge that is necessary for civil society and governments to act in ways that will have the highest positive impact quickly.

4. The MAHB website aspires to become the "go to" place for the best literature, multi-media materials, analysis, movies, and editorials on the interconnected issues threatening humanity and it's life support systems.

5. Activities: The MAHB website catalogs and makes available ideas for high impact action for those Nodes and Associates seeking additional ideas. Nodes and Associates post their activities, accomplishments, and strategies for shifting human behavior in ways that support a sustainable and equitable future.

6. If we are to reverse the degradation of the systems that support civilization, we need to act now. The MAHB aspires to make available the tools necessary for fostering a contagion, a passion for action.

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What is the MAHB? The goal of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) is to create a platform to help global civil society address the interconnections among the greatest threats to human well-being: climate disruption, loss of biodiversity (and thus ecosystem services), land-use change and resulting degradation, global toxification, ocean acidification, decay [...]

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Greta Thunberg: Who is the climate activist and what has she achieved?

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The climate activist has been arrested in Sweden and the UK as a result of her protests.

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We build grassroots political power for the climate movement.

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For some people, the awakening comes in science class.

In the Reddit thread titled "Former climate change deniers, what changed your mind?" the most popular comment comes from chucklesthe2nd (probably not his real name). Chuck, as we'll call him, essentially inherited his dad's views on climate change.

"I grew up actively and obnoxiously denying climate change because my dad told me it wasn't real," Chuck wrote last year. Then, during a high school science course, he learned about feedback loops: "It suddenly hit me. As the atmosphere heats up, more CO2 is released, which heats up the atmosphere, which releases more CO2, which heats up the atmosphere, which releases more CO2, which heats up the atmosphere, which releases more CO2......etc."

It looks like Chuck is at the forefront of an encouraging trend. A recent Monmouth poll found that 78% of Americans believe climate change is real and leading to sea-level rise and more extreme weather. That's up from 70% three years ago. The headline-grabbing takeaway: a majority of Republicans - 64% - are now believers, a 15-point jump from 2015.

To learn more about these converts, researchers at Yale and George Mason crunched the numbers from a blend of responses to surveys conducted between 2011 and 2015. They found that 8% of Americans said they had recently changed their opinion on the matter, according to a new analysis from Yale University and George Mason University. Nearly all of the recent converts said global warming had become a bigger concern for them.

But who are these people, anyway, and what's their deal? Let's take a closer look.

Welcome, friends!

"All kinds of people are changing their minds" and accepting the science, regardless of age, education level, or political affiliation, said Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale and an author of the new analysis. "I was surprised to see how consistent it is."

There are some clear trends. One interesting tidbit: 11% of adults 65 or older reported that they'd recently shifted their views, more than any other age group.

Photograph: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

So do retirees just have more time to read the news or what? It might have something to do with having been around for longer. With age comes wisdom, as the saying goes, or at least perspective. "You have a longer baseline," Marlon said. "I'm noticing that myself - I remember what the winters were like when I was growing up, and there was really more snow."

There also appears to be a gender dynamic: women were 4% more likely than men to say they had recently shifted their opinion. (The hard part about changing your mind is, of course, admitting that you were wrong.)

Photograph: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

To try to explain this gender gap, Marlon pointed to a Yale analysis from 2018 that showed American women tend to be a bit more worried about global warming than men. Women also report having less certainty about the science behind it. The less sure we are about our opinions, the more easily we can be swayed by evidence.

Reality bites

Researchers combed through open-ended survey responses and identified three main reasons why Americans were shifting their perspectives on climate change. They'd either personally experienced the effects of global warming, like extreme weather and warmer seasons, or realized how serious the problem was, or simply become more informed (hey, that's Reddit Chuck!).

Photograph: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

"We seem to have more major storms," one responder said. Another noted, "We don't get as much snow." Others said they wanted their grandchildren to be able to see glaciers, or that they'd seen more about global warming on TV.

It's in line with other research that shows extreme weather is turning into the latest symbol of climate change. Over the past decade, the number of free associations people made linking climate change with the weather has quadrupled, according to analysis from Yale and the University of Westminster, London.

Want to convince a climate skeptic?

A word of warning: people don't change their minds easily about controversial issues.

Marlon recommends helping people make the connection themselves. People overwhelmingly report in surveys that they want to learn more about climate change, she said. They just might not have the time or initiative to look up that information.

Keep in mind that it's not exactly easy to admit that you're wrong. If a friend shares fake news about climate change, it's probably more effective to reach out to them in private than to attack them in front of their friends and family on Facebook. "To some extent, changing your mind can appear to be losing face," Hugo Mercier, coauthor of The Enigma of Reason, told WBUR's Here & Now. "It may be easier for them to change their mind if they do it less publicly," he said.

You might have to prepare yourself for some thorny conversations. Note that climate change isn't just about facts - it's also about politics. While a majority of Republicans already believe climate change is happening, caused by human activity, and worth addressing, many conservatives are skeptical about climate policy because it's seen as liberals' pet issue. "This tribalism leads to political fights over differences between the parties that either do not exist or are vastly exaggerated," wrote the psychology professors Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman in the New York Times.

Hundreds of other studies have shown that the best way to get people to stop demonizing each other is to introduce them to the actual human beings they disagree with, as I wrote last month. So if you're trying to get someone to open their mind, you might consider the idea of a having tough, nuanced conversation ... and actually hearing them out.

Good, old-fashioned, respectful debate? I'd take that over a rage fest or shout-a-thon any day.
This story originally appeared in Grist

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How to change the minds of climate deniers

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For some people, the awakening comes in science class. In the Reddit thread titled "Former climate change deniers, what changed your mind?" the most popular comment comes from chucklesthe2nd (probably not his real name). Chuck, as we'll call him, essentially inherited his dad's views on climate change.

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Climate change deniers belittle science and ignore public opinion, but there might be ways the media can help.

In a study of videos showing the effects of climate change, Mina Tsay-Vogel, codirector of the Boston University College of Communication (COM) Communication Research Center, found that factors such as the location of an ecological event and the complexity of scientific language used in reporting can sway viewers' opinions. The research could help organizations battle skepticism of human-made climate change-and inspire more people to go green.

Working with Suchi Gopal, a BU College of Arts & Sciences professor of Earth and environment, and Rohan Kundargi (GRS'13,'16), Tsay-Vogel found that videos focusing on far-flung or global changes-a NASA study of carbon dioxide in the planet's atmosphere, for example-were less effective than those that showed something happening down the street, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

According to the researchers, proximity was tied to certainty. The farther away a climate-related event was perceived to be, the less certain viewers were that humans were causing it. That made them feel less responsible for doing something about it and "lowered their own perceived ability to influence global climate change outcomes," says Tsay-Vogel, a COM assistant professor of communication.

Seeing climate impacts at a world level reduced viewers' motivation to take action and "lowered their own perceived ability to influence global climate change outcomes." -Mina Tsay-Vogel

That didn't surprise her, but the boundary between local and global did. Tsay-Vogel and her team had commissioned scientists and professors to categorize the videos by complexity and location. In a dry run of the study, they noticed participants perceived the proximity of a threat differently from the professionals. Experts classified events in the southern United States as far away from the Northeast, but viewers in Boston considered them close to home.

"Because it was still taking place in the United States, our participants felt like it was significantly closer than the experts had thought," says Tsay-Vogel. An organization hoping to swing views on climate change in coastal Maine might not have much luck talking about rising tides in Asia, but showing the Florida Keys being swamped by ever-higher sea levels could work.

There was an additional nuance to the importance of location. "We also tested whether the events were perceived to be personal to participants," says Tsay-Vogel. The more a viewer felt emotionally detached from an issue, "the lower their self-efficacy and responsibility to influence global climate change." An animal lover, for instance, would react differently if a video showed environmental changes hurting animals, no matter the location. "They might feel as if those events are closer to them personally, even if spatially they are taking place out in Antarctica."

The technical language in a video also influenced how certain people were about climate change and whether they thought they could help save the planet. The researchers showed them videos with simple words and others filled with jargon, like the "plastic polypropylene" and "thermosets" used by one TED Talks speaker. Viewers were more engaged with the complex videos and found them more meaningful, says Tsay-Vogel. "When you dumb down a particularly severe issue like climate change, that might seem like you're not giving it full credit in terms of its level of importance."

The study was completed using self-reported data, but Tsay-Vogel and Gopal are discussing adding a high-tech element to their research. The Communication Research Center has facial expression analysis equipment that would allow them to "see whether participants' muscles-the way that they're contracting and moving-are showing signs of joy, surprise, frustration, confusion and other emotions." The researchers are also eyeing the center's virtual reality gear to study how participants would react when they're thrown into environmental events around the world and can witness ice caps melting or forest fires raging.

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How to Convince a Climate Change Skeptic | The Brink | Boston University

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Climate change deniers belittle science and ignore public opinion, but there might be ways the media can help. In a study of videos showing the effects of climate change, Mina Tsay-Vogel, codirector of the Boston University College of Communication (COM) Communication Research Center, found that factors such as the location of an ecological event and the complexity of scientific language used in reporting can sway viewers' opinions.

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Here are some strategies for a hard conversation.

Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a writer in The New York Times Opinion section.

Clockwise from top left: Al Gore; the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe; Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma; and Greta Thunberg. Credit... Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Lexey Swall for The New York Times, Joe Buglewicz, Mark Abramson for the New York Times, Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times, Brittainy Newman/The New York Times

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Happy New Year! It's 2020, and the forecast for this next decade is cloudy with an apprehension of doom. According to the United Nations, the world has only until 2030 to cut carbon dioxide emissions down to roughly half those of 2010 levels to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the more ambitious target of the Paris Agreement. (The world has already warmed by about 1 degree Celsius since the 19th century.) The outlook, in the words of a United Nations report released in November, is "bleak."

Daunting as the problem may be, millions of people still don't accept the premise of its existence: Depending on how you ask, only about half to two-thirds of Americans believe that climate change is caused by humans, according to the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center.

The question: How do you convince someone that climate change is real? Should you even try?

If you want to convince someone about climate change, don't lead with data, writes Katharine Hayhoe in The Times. Dr. Hayhoe is a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, and she's also an evangelical Christian, two identities she realized after moving from Canada were "supposed to be entirely incompatible" in the United States. Understanding why that's the case is crucial when attempting to convert climate change skeptics, she writes, explaining:

It turns out, it's not where we go to church (or don't) that determines our opinion on climate. It's not even our religious affiliation. Hispanic Catholics are significantly more likely than other Catholics to say the earth is getting warmer, according to a 2015 survey, and they have the same pope. It's because of the alliance between conservative theology and conservative politics that has been deliberately engineered and fostered over decades of increasingly divisive politics on issues of race, abortion and now climate change, to the point where the best predictor of whether we agree with the science is simply where we fall on the political spectrum.

In her experience, Dr. Hayhoe has found that the best way to neutralize the partisan charge on climate change is not by appealing to science - which some prominent Republicans, such as Senator Ted Cruz, have cast as a competitor to religion - but by emphasizing shared values. "For some, this could be the well-being of our community," she writes. "For others, our children; and for fellow Christians, it's often our faith."

In such conversations, it may be important to remember how your interlocutor's values differ from your own. In Vice, Maggie Puniewska points to the moral foundations theory, according to which liberals and conservatives prioritize different ethics: the former compassion, fairness and liberty, the latter purity, loyalty and obedience to authority. Ms. Puniewska writes:

If you're trying to convince someone who leans left, you can stick with the polar bear and keep tugging at their heart strings with talk of how unfair it will be to our children if the world is poisoned, but if you're with a conservative, it's wise to change up your approach - science has found that personalized climate-related messages work better.

For example, research has found that conservatives are more likely to support a pro-environmental agenda when presented with messages containing themes of patriotism and defending the purity of nature.

For many skeptics, Neha Thirani Bagri has written in Quartz, delineating the myriad potential harms of unmitigated climate change is not an effective strategy. Instead, it can be more productive to illustrate the potential benefits that mitigation may carry. She writes:

A comprehensive study published in 2015 in Nature surveyed 6,000 people across 24 countries and found that emphasizing the shared benefits of climate change was an effective way of motivating people to take action - even if they initially identified as deniers. For example, people were more likely to take steps to mitigate climate change if they believe that it will produce economic and scientific development. Most importantly, these results were true across political ideology, age, and gender.

People are more likely to listen to a message when it comes from someone they trust, Alexander Maki has argued in The Washington Post, and messages about climate change are no different. "For example," he writes, "experimental research discovered that when free-market enthusiasts who are concerned about government regulation hear from experts who emphasize how companies are developing climate responses, they are more likely to accept climate science."

Who makes for the best messenger depends, naturally, on the intended recipient. A study published in Nature in May, for example, found that when it comes to parents, children may be especially effective persuaders:

Because climate change perceptions in children seem less susceptible to the influence of worldview or political context, it may be possible for them to inspire adults toward higher levels of climate concern, and in turn, collective action. Child-to-parent intergenerational learning - that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviors from children to parents - may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern.

While leading with data and studies can cause people to shut down, Ms. Puniewska writes, talking about the scientific consensus around climate change in general can help, acting as a kind of gateway to greater trust in the conclusions of climate science. (This rhetorical strategy has found a prominent champion in Greta Thunberg, who implores people to "listen to the scientists" first and foremost.) She explains:

In a 2015 study published in PLOS One, Maibach and colleagues found that telling people that experts agreed on climate change increased the chances that those individuals would accept that climate change was happening, was human-caused, and presented a real threat. Extra encouraging: That strategy was also particularly influential on Republicans, though liberals might also need a nudge.

To the extent that a person's denial of climate change stems from mistrust of science in general, however - 13 percent of Americans have little to no confidence in scientists, according to a 2019 Pew survey - invoking expertise may never bear fruit.

Attempting to convert deniers is not the most productive way to fight climate change, argue Marcus Hedahl and Travis N. Rieder in Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. In their view, climate change is a problem less of individual belief than of collective action, a failure that can be remedied only through public policy. The most efficient route toward enacting such policy, the authors argue, lies not in convincing deniers to believe in climate change but in galvanizing those who already do. They write:

With a significant majority of voters supporting taxing or regulating greenhouse gases, those who want to spur climate action ought to focus instead on getting a critical mass of climate believers to be appropriately alarmed. Doing so, we contend, may prove more useful in creating the political will necessary to spur bold climate action than would engaging directly with climate deniers.

There's no one way to talk to people about climate change, the Columbia University climate scientist Kate Marvel has written in The Times, "but dialogue, language and mutual respect matter."
Have you had a successful climate conversation? How did you convince the other person? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
Watch Katharine Hayhoe's TED Talk on how to have a discussion about climate change. [TED]

"Actually, Republicans Do Believe in Climate Change," write social psychologists Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman. [The New York Times]

"How Six Americans Changed Their Minds About Global Warming." [The New York Times]

Who funds climate change denial? Tik Root, Lisa Friedman and Hiroko Tabuchi follow the money. [The New York Times]

Here's what readers had to say about the last edition: The 2010s, reviewed.
Vicki: "I'm surprised 'Moonlight' wasn't mentioned as a best film of the decade. I am a straight, white, 50-something-year-old woman who was able to see the world as a gay, black, young man through this film. I've enjoyed many films over the years, but this one was simply magic. I was ecstatic to see it win the Best Picture Oscar and it has made me a huge fan of Mahershala Ali."

Larry: "I am disappointed that none of the four guest commentators mentioned climate change, either as a best book or as an issue that will have major ramifications but isn't sufficiently appreciated yet. Climate change will most likely change our future more - and for the worse - than any other single phenomenon."

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Opinion | So You Want to Convince a Climate Change Skeptic (Published 2020)

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Here are some strategies for a hard conversation. Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a writer in The New York Times Opinion section. This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it Tuesdays and Thursdays. Happy New Year! It's 2020, and the forecast for this next decade is cloudy with an apprehension of doom.

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Twenty-year-old Nathan Baring is a third-generation Alaskan. Within his lifetime, he has seen winters shorten, cod fisheries collapse and cultural traditions suffer. He grieves for an Arctic that is disappearing before his eyes. "There is a very distinct loss of place here," he says.

Baring decided to take action. He is one of 21 young plaintiffs who, in 2015, filed a lawsuit seeking to force the US government to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. A federal appeals court dismissed the case, known as Juliana v. United States, in January.

But other attempts to fight climate change in the courts have been more successful. This week, the UK Court of Appeal blocked plans to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport, saying that allowing the expansion would violate the country's obligations to the Paris climate agreement.

Such decisions are inspiring and instructing activists and municipalities around the world as they attempt to force action against climate change. As litigants fight scores of such cases, recent rulings such as these make one thing clear. "There is no silver litigation bullet for climate change," says Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York.

On 18 February, the International Bar Association released a model for how to litigate climate change, laying out legal arguments and precedents that might help future plaintiffs. What is likely to succeed seems to vary around the world, however - and as plaintiffs learn from their experiences in the courts, they are adjusting their tactics. The Heathrow case is the first major ruling based on the Paris agreement and could spur more suits that rely on those obligations. In other parts of the world, plaintiffs are increasingly focusing on seeking damages from polluters themselves.

A matter of trust

The Juliana case is one of more than two dozen cases that have been brought around the world on the basis of 'public trust' arguments, which say that the state has a duty to protect public resources from harm. Such arguments are closely linked to the idea that the fundamental right to life is inextricably tied to a healthy environment. Although the US court found that the plaintiffs had been harmed by the government's inaction on climate change, the judges ultimately ruled that it was not within the court's power to legislate climate policy.

But outside the United States, the human-rights approach is the legal strategy that has had the most success so far in forcing governments' hands, says John Knox, an expert on international environmental law at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Suits based on these types of argument have been brought on every inhabited continent.

In Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands, a case brought by an environmental group and nearly 900 Dutch citizens in 2015, the Dutch supreme court mandated that the government achieve a 25% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels by the end of 2020 to protect its citizens from the harms of a warming climate system. And in Demanda Generaciones Futuras v. Minambiente, Colombia's Supreme Court ordered the government to implement protective measures to halt deforestation in the Amazon - that case was brought by 25 young Colombians. Like Juliana, both cases rested on the idea that the right to life is endangered by threats to the environment. Their success suggests that we can expect to see more suits brought by citizens against their governments, says Knox. Meanwhile, climate activists are watching closely to see how these governments comply with the court-ordered actions.

Damage limitation

So why did Juliana fail where similar cases have succeeded? Its scope - asking the courts to force the US government to not only stop permitting and subsidizing fossil-fuel use, but to also implement a plan for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels - meant it was "always going to be a long shot", says Ann Carlson, who studies environmental law at the University of California, Los Angeles. The court was reluctant to make these sorts of complex policy decisions. And given the increasingly conservative makeup of many US federal courts, Carlson thinks it is unlikely that future cases based on similar arguments will succeed.

Instead, Gerrard and Carlson anticipate that US activists and municipalities will pivot from targeting governments to going after the producers of emissions themselves - a strategy seen as more pragmatic because it seeks to impose cash penalties, which can, in some cases, be used for climate-mitigation efforts.

At least a dozen cases in the United States are now taking this tack. In County of San Mateo v. Chevron Corp., several Californian cities and counties are seeking funds from major fossil-fuel corporations to fund infrastructure for sea-level-rise adaptation. Oral arguments in the latest appeal were heard on 5 February, but a ruling has yet to be handed down. And several other individuals and localities, including the state of Massachusetts, are currently suing ExxonMobil and other companies for allegedly deceiving consumers about the risks of fossil-fuel use.

Although these damage-seeking cases are most popular in the United States, similar arguments for compensation are beginning to be made elsewhere. In November 2015, a Peruvian farmer named Saúl Lliuya brought a case in German courts against the German utilities company RWE, the largest emitter of CO ₂ in the European Union. Lliuya, who lives near a glacial lake, alleges that RWE's emissions are partially responsible for the dangerously high water levels seen at the lake as nearby glaciers have melted. He is seeking 0.47% of the costs of flood-protection measures for his town, equal to RWE's proportion of global CO ₂ emissions from 1751 to 2010.

Although the case was initially dismissed, an appeals court has since ruled that Lliuya's complaint was admissible, and the court has ordered the parties to submit expert evidence - the first time such a case has moved to the evidentiary stage. The case is "very interesting" in its approach, Gerrard says, and victory could spur similar lawsuits around the world.

Although the recent ruling in Juliana was disappointing for plaintiffs, they say that they are heartened by the court's finding that they had been harmed by the government's inaction on climate change. They are currently preparing to appeal the ruling, and are still optimistic about getting a chance to argue their case in front of a jury. "We have many paths forward," Baring says. "This is certainly not the end of the road for us."

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Climate lawsuits are breaking new legal ground to protect the planet

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Twenty-year-old Nathan Baring is a third-generation Alaskan. Within his lifetime, he has seen winters shorten, cod fisheries collapse and cultural traditions suffer. He grieves for an Arctic that is disappearing before his eyes. "There is a very distinct loss of place here," he says. Baring decided to take action.

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A landmark climate-change lawsuit brought by young people against the US government can proceed, the Supreme Court said on 2 November. The case, Juliana v. United States, had been scheduled to begin trial on 29 October in Eugene, Oregon, in a federal district court. But those plans were scrapped last month after President Donald Trump's administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene and dismiss the case.

The plaintiffs, who include 21 people ranging in age from 11 to 22, allege that the government has violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by failing to prevent dangerous climate change. They are asking the district court to order the federal government to prepare a plan that will ensure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls below 350 parts per million by 2100, down from an average of 405 parts per million in 2017.

By contrast, the US Department of Justice argues that "there is no right to 'a climate system capable of sustaining human life'" - as the Juliana plaintiffs assert.

Although the Supreme Court has now denied the Trump administration's request to the dismiss the case, the path ahead is unclear. In its 2 November order, the Supreme Court suggested that a federal appeals court should consider the administration's arguments before any trial starts in the Oregon district court.

Lawyers for the young people said they would push the district court to reschedule the trial next week.

"The youth of our nation won an important decision today from the Supreme Court that shows even the most powerful government in the world must follow the rules and process of litigation in our democracy," said Julia Olson, co-counsel for the plaintiffs, in a statement reacting to the Supreme Court decision.

A new generation

Although climate change is a global problem, lawyers around the world have brought climate-change-related lawsuits against local and national governments and corporations since the late 1980s. These suits have generally sought to force the sort of aggressive action against climate change that has been tough to achieve through political means.

Many of the cases have failed, but in 2015, a citizen's group called the Urgenda Foundation won a historic victory against the Dutch government. The judge in that case ordered the Netherlands to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions to at least 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, citing the possibility of climate-related damages to "current and future generations of Dutch nationals" and the government's "duty of care ... to prevent hazardous climate change". A Dutch appeals court upheld the verdict last month.

Over the past few years, the Dutch case has emerged as a model for climate lawsuits in other countries, says Gillian Lobo, a lawyer who specializes in climate-change-related cases at ClientEarth in London. More recently, she says, the Juliana lawsuit has inspired its own copycats - some of which have progressed further than Juliana itself. "It is a global phenomenon," Lobo says.

One case modelled on the Juliana lawsuit has already produced a striking victory. In January, 25 young people sued the Colombian government for their right to a healthy environment, in a case called Demanda Generaciones Futuras v. Minambiente.

The Colombian Supreme Court found in the plaintiffs' favour in April. Not only did it order the government to take steps to reduce deforestation and climate change, it also ruled that the Colombian Amazon rainforest is "a subject of rights" that is entitled to "protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration".

Fuzzy future

The young plaintiffs in the Juliana case allege that they have already suffered harm as a result of climate change. Seventeen-year-old Jaime and her family left their home on the Navajo Nation Reservation in Cameron, Arizona, in 2011 because the natural springs on which they depended for water were drying up. Fifteen-year-old Jayden's home in Louisiana was severely damaged by flooding in 2016, and 19-year-old Vic's school in White Plains, New York, closed temporarily in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy hit.

US climate hawks hope that the Juliana plaintiffs will ultimately prevail, but President Donald Trump's administration is mounting a multipronged defence. The Justice Department denies that the district court in Oregon has jurisdiction over the broad sweep of federal policies at issue, and that the rights to life, liberty and property set out in the F﻿ifth Amendment to the Constitution translate into the right to a stable climate.

In any case, the department argues, no meaningful redress is possible, given that drastically reducing emissions in the United States might not move the needle on climate change much if other countries' greenhouse-gas output grows. This echoes the argument made in 2007 by the Supreme Court's chief justice, John Roberts, when he dissented from the court's decision in a pivotal climate case, Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency. The court's ruling, which Roberts protested, forced the agency to regulate carbon emissions as a pollutant.

Andrea Rodgers, co-counsel for the Juliana plaintiffs, says that the Trump administration hasn't challenged the fact that humans are changing the climate. "They haven't presented experts to contest what our scientists are saying about ice melt or sea-level rise or terrestrial impacts or how climate change happens or ocean acidification," she says.

To win, Rodgers says, "we have to show that the United States government is liable, but also that there is a remedy that the judge can order". The United States has seen its greenhouse-gas emissions drop in recent years, as the country shifts its energy mix away from coal and towards renewable sources, but as of 2016, it remains the second-largest emitter after China.

James Hansen, a climatologist at Columbia University in New York City and a long-time climate activist, is an expert witness in the case - but he is also a plaintiff, representing "future generations" not yet born. (His 20-year-old granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, is also a plaintiff.)

Hansen has been fighting for action on climate change since he first testified on the subject before the US Senate in 1988. He says that if the Juliana plaintiffs lose their case, he will simply try another way. "We need to win as soon as possible," Hansen says, "but if we lose, we don't give up - we come back with a stronger case."

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US Supreme Court allows historic kids' climate lawsuit to go forward

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A landmark climate-change lawsuit brought by young people against the US government can proceed, the Supreme Court said on 2 November. The case, Juliana v. United States, had been scheduled to begin trial on 29 October in Eugene, Oregon, in a federal district court.

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A court of appeal in The Hague has upheld a precedent-setting judgment that ﻿forces the Dutch government to step up its efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the Netherlands.

In 2015, a district court in The Hague had ruled in favour of the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch citizens' climate-change group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of 886 plaintiffs.

The foundation asked for more-stringent government action to protect the low-lying country from the harmful effects of climate change. The government appealed against the verdict, arguing that courts have no right to take decisions on this matter.

The appeal judges disagreed. On 8 October, the court of appeals confirmed that the government must take measures to cut domestic greenhouse-gas emissions to at least 25% below 1990 levels by 2020.

The Netherlands has pledged to reduce emissions by 49% by 2030, but has so far achieved only a 13% drop from 1990 levels. The court cites the state's legal duty of care for its citizens, which is enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights.

The ruling coincides with a landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlining the drastic global action required to stabilize Earth's climate at a safe level.

And similar court cases are now ongoing in several countries, including the United States, Belgium, Norway and Ireland.

"Climate litigation has become a powerful tool in holding decision-makers accountable for climate inaction," says James Thornton, the London-based chief executive of ClientEarth, an international group of environmental lawyers. "This is the climate case that started it all, inspiring similar lawsuits worldwide."
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Dutch court rules that government must help stop climate change

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A court of appeal in The Hague has upheld a precedent-setting judgment that ﻿forces the Dutch government to step up its efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the Netherlands. In 2015, a district court in The Hague had ruled in favour of the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch citizens' climate-change group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of 886 plaintiffs.

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INVISIBLE HAND - Rights of Nature Documentary

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1972

Southern California Law Review published law professor Christopher Stone's seminal article, "Should trees have standing - toward legal rights for natural objects." Stone described how under the existing structure of law, nature was considered right-less, having no legally recognized rights to defend and enforce.

Sierra Club vs. Morton: If ships and corporations could be recognized by courts as legal personalities, wrote Justice Douglas, ecosystems under "the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life" ought to be able to sue to preserve themselves. Specifically, a federal rule could be fashioned to permit litigation in the name of everything from rivers and beaches to groves of trees and even air, to preserve those inanimate objects "where injury is the subject of public outrage."

1989

Professor Roderick Nash, published The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. He explains how, throughout history, the right-less - slaves, women, others - have struggled to expand the body of legal rights to include themselves. Nash provides a context for how and why the body of rights is moving in the direction of expanding to include nature.

2003

Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice, was published. Authored by South African attorney Cormac Cullinan, with Berry, he opens up a new front on the Rights of Nature - adding a significant spiritual and moral element to the legal and historic discussion begun by Stone and Nash.

September 19, 2006

CELDF worked with the small community of Tamaqua Borough, in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, as it sought to ban waste corporations from dumping toxic sewage sludge in the community. CELDF assisted Tamaqua to draft a Rights of Nature law which banned sludging as a violation of the Rights of Nature. With the vote of the Borough Council, Tamaqua became the very first place in the United States, and the world, to recognize the Rights of Nature in law.

Since 2006, CELDF has assisted over three dozen communities in ten states in the United States to develop local laws codifying the Rights of Nature.

2008

CELDF was invited to meet with delegates to Ecuador's Constituent Assembly that were tasked with drafting the country's new constitution. At their request, CELDF drafted Rights of Nature constitutional provisions. In September 2008, the people of Ecuador voted in support of the proposed constitution, becoming the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its national constitution.

December 2009

April 22nd, Earth Day 2010

2010 - present

September 2010

November 2010

An ordinance recognizing the Rights of Nature - drafted with the assistance of CELDF - was passed unanimously by the City Council in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of a ban on shale gas drilling and fracking. This the first major city in the U.S. to codify the legally enforceable Rights of Nature.

December 2010

Law of the Rights of Mother Earth (Spanish: Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra) is a Bolivian law (Law 071 of the Plurinational State), that was passed by Bolivia's Plurinational Legislative Assembly.[1][2]

2011

The first Rights of Nature lawsuits were decided in Ecuador under the country's constitutional provisions, upholding the rights of ecosystems. The first case, heard by the Provincial Court of Justice of Loja, featured the Vilcabamba River as plaintiff. Thus, the river itself was able to defend its own rights to 'exist' and 'maintain itself' - as it sought to stop a government highway construction project that was interfering with the natural flow and health of the river. The court ruled that the project be stopped.

2011 - 2015

June 2012

A first step in recognizing the rights of nature at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - adopted the outcome document entitled "The future we want" (resolution 66/288), in which planet Earth and its ecosystems recognized as our home and that some countries recognize the rights of nature to promote sustainable development.

October 2012

Bolivia adopted its Law Under the Mother Earth and Integral Development for Living Well. Passed by Bolivia's Plurinational Legislative Assembly, the law recognizes Rights of Mother Earth in statutory law.

2012

It was announced that the national government of New Zealand had reached agreement with the Whanganui River iwi, a local Maori people, to recognize a legal persona for the Whanganui River.

2012

A campaign was launched in India by Ganga Action Parivar and the Global Interfaith WASH Alliance-India to recognize rights of the Ganga River. CELDF is partnered with the organizations to draft the National Ganga River Rights Act.

April 2013

Mora County, NM became the first county in the United States to pass an ordinance banning all oil and gas extraction. Drafted with assistance from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), the Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance establishes a local Bill of Rights - including a right to clean air and water, a right to a healthy environment, and the rights of nature - while prohibiting activities which would interfere with those rights, including oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," for shale gas.

September 2013

2014

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature sponsored the world's first Rights of Nature Tribunal in Quito, Ecuador. Subsequent tribunals have now been held, including in December 2015 at the U.N. climate change talks in Paris.

2014

The Colorado Community Rights Network proposed a state constitutional amendment which would authorize communities to establish the Rights of Nature in law. CELDF assisted the Network to draft the amendment and is working with Networks in Oregon, Ohio, and New Hampshire to take similar steps.

November 2014

November 2014

ATHENS, OHIO: Residents of Athens, OH, overwhelmingly asserted their rights to clean air, water, and to local self-governance, banning fracking and frack wastewater injection wells through the adoption of a Community Bill of Rights. They join Yellow Springs, Oberlin, Mansfield, and Broadview Heights, OH, which also adopted Community Bills of Rights banning fracking, beginning in 2012.

September 2015

UN adopts 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development & ends summit with this film

Goal 8, target 12.8: people everywhere will have the awareness of sustainable development and harmony with nature

February 28, 2016

April - June 2016

1. The importance of applying Earth Jurisprudence principles to inspire citizens and societies to reconsider how they interact with the natural world in order to implement the Sustainable Development Goals in harmony with nature.

2. The need to recognize the intrinsic value of nature and to shift our perceptions, attitudes and behaviours from anthropocentric or human-centred, to non-anthropocentric or Earth-centred in which the planet is not considered to be an inanimate object.

3. The support for Earth Jurisprudence in laws, ethics, institutions, policies and practices, including a fundamental respect and reverence for the Earth and its natural cycles.

August 2016

The first Experts' Summary Report on Harmony with Nature addressing Earth Jurisprudence was published (A/71/266)

Pg. 4 - "economic growth for some has been achieved at the expense of the natural world, as well as of many human populations. Paired with unsustainable consumption and production patterns, the current economic system has relentlessly altered the dynamics and functioning of the entire Earth system to a degree never before seen in human history."

"At the core of the current anthropocentric worldview, the Earth is viewed as a source of raw materials to be commercialized, exploited, modified, altered and privatized. This has significantly affected the health of the Earth, our life - giving source, and, by default, the well - being of humankind. Rising rates of poverty, famine and inequality reflect complex social realities that are intricately interwoven into the present ecological crisis, which, in itself, reflects a poverty of spirit."

Pg. 5 - Fostering of Ecocentric democracy: "Groups and communities using decision-making systems that respect the principles of human democracy while explicitly extending valuation to include the intrinsic value of non-Human Nature, with the ultimate goal of evaluating human wants equally to those of other species and living systems that make up the Ecosphere."

Pg 7 - "The first step is to include the rights of Nature in our governance systems, not by advancing its interests within the capital system as resources to be exploited, but by recognizing the fundamental legal rights of ecosystems and species to exist, thrive and regenerate...The human right to life is meaningless if the ecosystems that sustain us do not have the legal right to exist."

February 2016

The Green Party of England and Wales adopted a Rights of Nature policy platform. CELDF assisted Green Party members to draft the provisions, which call for lawmaking to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, and elevate nature's rights over corporate rights.

September 2016

The General Council of the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin approved an amendment to their tribal constitution to recognize the Rights of Nature. The full Ho-Chunk membership will vote on the amendment in 2017. CELDF worked with Ho-Chunk tribal members to draft the amendment.

March 2017

New Zealand - passes law declaring Whanganui River a living entity; recognizing the spiritual and holistic "personhood" of the Whanganui River and Te Urewera (which now have no "owners") as part of the State's ongoing settlement process with the Maori peoples. The Maori people consider that the river and forest are their ancestors, and that they have the responsibility and the privilege to care for them as family members.7

only river in world with such right, but for only five days before...

State of Uttarakhand in India - Himalayan state's high court granted similar status to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, then a few days later to the Ganges and Yamuna glaciers that feed them. The law includes other parts of the natural ecosystem, extending these rights to "virtually every creation of nature"

"The ruling and the New Zealand law are variants of 'rights of nature' measures with theoretical roots dating back to the 1970s. They appear in the United States, too: More than three dozen US localities have ordinances ascribing varying types of rights to nature, or to specific natural objects. Their rise is in some ways a monument to the global exchange of ideas, with US activists advising national legislatures in Ecuador and Bolivia, whose laws in turn emboldened jurisdictions in the US and elsewhere.

September 2017

January 2018

The municipality of Paudalho in the State of Pernambuco, Brazil officially adopted the Rights of Nature into local law.

The Ponca Nation in what is now Oklahoma became the first tribal nation in the U.S. to adopt Rights of Nature into tribal law.

September 2018

December 2018

The White Earth band of the Chippewa Nation adopted the "Rights of the Manoomin" law securing legal rights of manoomin, or wild rice, a traditional staple crop of the Anishinaabe people. This is the first law to secure legal rights of a particular plant species.

January 2019

January 2019

The National Lawyers Guild adopted Rights of Nature into the preamble of the Guild Constitution. It now reads: "We seek to unite the lawyers, law students, legal workers and jailhouse lawyers of America in an organization which shall function as an effective political and social force in the service of the people, to the end that human rights and the rights of ecosystems shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests..."

February 2019

Toledo, OH passes the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) with 61% of the vote and establishes rights of nature for Lake Erie. It stands as the first time a community voted specifically for a body of water to be granted personhood, rather than a community rights bill with a rights of nature statute attached to the regions ecosystem. LEBOR was immediately challenged by Wood County farmers, Mark, Melody, andTyler Drewes of Drewes Farms, who filed suit on the constitutional plausibility of the bill in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio Western Division. A decision on whether the court case is not yet finalized.

2019

National Lawyers Guild in the United States amended the organization's constitution to include the rights of nature, stating "human rights and the rights of ecosystems shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests...."

Uganda enacted the National Environmental Act of 2019 in which nature is recognized as having "the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution."

Residents of Exeter, New Hampshire, in the U.S., enacted a law securing the rights of nature, including the right to "a stable and healthy climate system."

Residents of Nottingham, New Hampshire, in the U.S., enacted a law securing the rights of nature, including the right to be free from "chemical trespass."

High Court in Bangladesh recognized legal rights of rivers.

Yurok tribe in the U.S. initiated efforts to recognize legal rights of the Klamath River.

Colombia, the Plata River was recognized as a "subject of rights."

A bill to recognize Rights of Nature was introduced into the Congress of the Philippines.

A workshop on the rights of nature was held in the Swedish Parliament, the Riksdag.

Rights of Nature and Future Generations Bill was introduced into the Parliament of Western Australian. It recognizes rights for "Nature, including all ecosystems, ecological communities and native species," as well as "present and future generations."

Dutch municipality of Nordeast-Fryslan passed a motion that proposes granting special rights to the Wadden Sea. It also proposed an independent governance authority for ecosystem protection.

Municipality of Florianopolis passed a law recognizing rights of Nature

Congress of the State of Colima approved an amendment to the state constitution recognizing the Rights of Nature.

A state constitutional amendment was introduced into the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Amendment language contains: "The right to local self-government includes, without limitation, the power to enact local laws: (1) protecting health, safety and welfare by establishing the rights of people, their communities and nature and by securing those rights using prohibitions and other means; and (2) establishing, defining, altering or eliminating the rights, powers and duties of corporations and other business entities operating or seeking to operate in the community."

Federal lawsuit filed by Ohio communities, arguing systematic repression of qualified local Rights of Nature ballot initiatives.

First time in U.S. history, the rights of a specific ecosystem were argued in federal court in defense of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. Groups and individuals from across the globe show support.

First time in U.S. history, in March 2020, a state was successfully pressured to enforce a local Rights of Nature law, in Grant Township, Indiana County, Pennsylvania.

Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin asserted that the Menominee River has the right to exist naturally, flourish, evolve, remain unpolluted and carry out its natural ecosystem functions.

Curridabat, Costa Rica afforded citizenship to pollinators, trees and native plants.

Nez Perce Tribe General Council passed a resolution recognizing the SnakeRiver as a living entity that has rights, including the right to exist, flourish, evolve, flow, regenerate - and a right to its restoration."

2020

Spanish municipality of Los Alcázares approved an initiative to recognize the rights of Mar Menor, a lagoon.

Ecuadorian Constitutional Court agreed to hear a case based on the Rights of Nature enshrined in Ecuador's Constitution. It will hear arguments in a case to protect the Los Cedros Protected Forest from mining.

Alliance for the Sacred Sites of Earth Gaia released the Declaration for the Protection of Sacred Natural Sites in 2020. It asserts: "Sacred Natural Sites require the highest form of legal protection through the recognition of rights of Nature."

Blue Mountain Council of New South Wales, Australia, resolved to integrate the rights of nature in its municipal planning and operations.

Tŝilhqot'in Nation enacted a "ʔEsdilagh Sturgeon River Law." It states: "The Aboriginal title and rights of the Tŝilhqot'in people includes the tu [waters] in our territory, including ʔElhdaqox [the Sturgeon River]. Nen [lands] and tu cannot be separated but are interconnected." It recognizes that "People, animals, fish, plants, the nen, and the tu have rights in the decisions about their care and use that must be considered and respected."

*** A portion of this timeline includes sections from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

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What Are Rights of Nature? A Rights of Nature Timeline & Legal Examples

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1972 Southern California Law Review published law professor Christopher Stone's seminal article, "Should trees have standing - toward legal rights for natural objects." Stone described how under the existing structure of law, nature was considered right-less, having no legally recognized rights to defend and enforce. Sierra Club vs.

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Can human engineering play a supporting role to nature? That's a question that grows in relevance and urgency, given the gap between where global emissions stand and where they need to be, posthaste. The sheer quantity of excess greenhouse gases means natural processes can't do it all when it comes to carbon sequestration. Select nascent technologies show some promise to supplement terrestrial, coastal, and ocean sinks.

Remove carbon. Do something with it. Those are the central premises of engineered sinks. Remove can mean pulling carbon from the concentrated exhaust of a power plant or industrial process, which falls under the umbrella of "carbon capture." Remove can also mean pulling carbon out of the air, where it's much less concentrated.

Where carbon goes next is the other critical piece of the equation. It can be stored or buried-pairing "capture" and "storage." Carbon can also be used-cycled quickly, perhaps for adding bubbles to a beverage or to make more sustainable jet fuels. Or it can be locked up for a long while, perhaps in concrete or through the ancient practice of baking biomass into biochar, then buried. This so-called "semi-permanent sequestration" is most powerful.

Could recaptured carbon become a commodity? Something of value? Perhaps. For now, solutions in this sector are primarily "coming attractions," and issues of cost, scale, and the energy required all remain in the balance.

NOTE: Project Drawdown has assessed a very limited set of solutions for engineered sinks to date. This solution set will expand in the future (e.g., direct air capture).

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Can human engineering play a supporting role to nature? That's a question that grows in relevance and urgency, given the gap between where global emissions stand and where they need to be, posthaste. The sheer quantity of excess greenhouse gases means natural processes can't do it all when it comes to carbon sequestration.

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Land is a critical component of the climate system, actively engaged in the flows of carbon, nitrogen, water, and oxygen-essential building blocks for life. Carbon is the core of trees and grasses, mammals and birds, lichens and microbes. Linking one atom to the next, and to other elements, it's the fundamental material of all living organisms. Plants and healthy ecosystems have an unparalleled capacity to absorb carbon through photosynthesis and store it in living biomass.

In addition, soils are, in large part, organic matter-once-living organisms, now decomposing-making them an enormous storehouse of carbon. Land can therefore be a powerful carbon sink, returning atmospheric carbon to living vegetation and soils. While the majority of heat-trapping emissions remain in the atmosphere, land sinks currently return 26% of human-caused emissions to Earth-literally.
How can we help sequester more carbon in biomass and soil? What can we do to support and enhance natural processes, including the capacity of land to renew?
These questions matter not only for emissions but for a diversity of human needs-and for maintaining a healthy diversity of flora and fauna. Because soil with more carbon content can also be more productive and resilient, these questions are critical for building a thriving food system, too.

Climate solutions that enhance land-based sinks cluster around waste and diets, ecosystem protection and restoration, improved agriculture practices, and prudent use of degraded land.

Address Waste and Diets

Reducing food waste and shifting to plant-rich diets are two critical interventions to prevent deforestation. Lower demand for food and farmland spares nature from additional clearing, indirectly protecting carbon sinks.

Protect and Restore Ecosystems

"Let nature be nature" is a powerful principle-let peatlands, grasslands, and forests continue to do what they do best by protecting them from human disturbance. Where ecosystems have been degraded, restoration can help them recuperate form and function, including absorbing and storing more carbon over time.

Shift Agriculture Practices

What and how we grow, graze, or harvest can be a means to cultivate biomass and regenerate soil carbon. An array of "regenerative agriculture" methods are being rediscovered and developed worldwide, and show promising results. The integration of trees into farming through agroforestry practices is particularly powerful. All solutions that sustainably raise yields on existing farmland can also reduce the pressure to clear other areas.

Use Degraded Land

Lastly, degraded lands can be put to use in ways that revive productivity, increase biomass, and promote soil carbon sequestration-all while producing wood, fiber, or food.

There is significant overlap in the solutions that stop land-based sources of greenhouse emissions and those that support land-based carbon sinks. Their unique power is doing both at the same time. All of them are critical to coming back into balance with the planet's living systems.

NOTE: Land sinks absorb roughly 29% of the carbon dioxide emissions pumped into the atmosphere each year. When we consider other greenhouse gases, including methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases, land absorbs approximately 26% of the total emissions. (Global Carbon Project analysis adjusted to include all greenhouse gases at 100-year global warming potential.)

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Land is a critical component of the climate system, actively engaged in the flows of carbon, nitrogen, water, and oxygen-essential building blocks for life. Carbon is the core of trees and grasses, mammals and birds, lichens and microbes.

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Physicist: Like any plumbing fix: it depends on the pipe.

Evangelista Torricelli, the first to measure the weight of the air above us, once famously wrote that "Noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d'un pelago d'aria." ("We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air."). That's a really good way to think about the atmosphere. It's held in place around the Earth in exactly the same way that the oceans are held where they are; air has weight and gravity holds it down. Gravity doesn't suddenly go away above the atmosphere. In low Earth orbit (where most satellites can be found) gravity is almost as strong as it is on the surface. So if you pump air or CO2 or any kind of matter above the Kármán Line (the generally agreed upon, but arbitrary, boundary of space), it will still be subject to gravity and will fall. You'll have yourself a CO2 fountain.

If you build your pipe straight up from one of the poles, then it'll be fountain-like even when it's millions of miles tall. More importantly, there are no materials that can support such a pipe (it's important, when building a CO2 pump to the stars, to be realistic). However, a pipe built up from the equator would swing as the Earth turns, and that changes things a lot. Shorter pipes (a mere several thousand km tall) will still act like fountains, but eventually that swinging motion becomes important.

Space elevators operate on exactly this idea; combating gravity using the Earth's rotation. So figuring out what happens to the CO2 flying out of the top of a very tall pipe boils down to figuring out what would happen if you stepped out of a space elevator at the same height. And since it is entirely possible (but difficult) to build space elevators, this plan could work. In fact, since that elevator would need to be made from carbon nanotubes (no other material is known to be strong enough), we'd be using carbon to get rid of carbon. That's almost like being efficient!

Douglas Adams once sagely observed that " There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. ... Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties. " Ordinarily this is difficult, but if the tower you throw yourself off is at least around 30,000 km from the center of the Earth, then by the time you get to the ground it won't be there. Sweeping out a larger circle every day than a point on the ground means the platform you jump from will be moving sideways faster. Once it's fast enough, when you throw yourself at the ground you'll literally miss and find yourself in an orbit that skims just above the surface of the Earth at perigee (at the lowest) and returns up to the height of the platform at apogee (at the highest). Lacking an official name, I do hereby declare this to be the "Adams Line".

Below the Adams Line, all of the CO2 pumped out of the pipe will fall back to Earth. Above the Adams line the released CO2 will find itself in orbit, and we'll have given Earth a ring system. This wouldn't be a permanent solution. All of the material in a ring system needs to "stay in its own lane" and orbit in a near-perfect circle (hence: "ring") or things will run into each other, lose energy, drop into lower orbits and eventually return to Earth. A whole series of overlapping elliptical orbits swerving from the height of the pipe to as low as Earth's surface would be a very messy, very unstable ring system.

But the higher the pipe, the more circular the orbit. Once the top of the pipe reaches geosync, it's in orbit. If you were to step off of a platform you wouldn't fall, you'd just drift. Gas released at this height wouldn't swerve between altitudes as it orbited Earth, it would more or less stay where it is and instead would slowly fill up the thin ring that forms geosync. The most expensive and sought-after orbits around Earth would get dirtied up and be far less useful for satellites, but it's a small price to pay.

We actually have examples of "pipes" releasing gas into their own orbits, so we know more or less what it would look like. Several of the moons in our solar system are geologically active and, having much lower gravity, eruptions from their surfaces don't necessarily fall back to the ground.

So between the Adams Line and geosynchronous orbit we'd have a temporary ring system, perhaps giving us time to think up an even crazier plan, and above geosync we'd have a fairly stable ring system (no ring systems are entirely stable). But if we want to get rid of Earth's CO2 forever, and not just orbitally sequester it, we need it to escape from Earth's gravity entirely.

At geosync objects orbit Earth once per day. Below that they orbit faster and above that they orbit slower (for example, the Moon, which is way beyond geosync, takes a month to orbit). So if the pipe is taller than about 42,000 km, the CO2 it releases will actually fly upward before falling into orbit, and the taller the pipe, the higher that orbit will be. Beyond about 53,000 km, the top of the pipe will be moving at escape velocity; the CO2 that comes out will fly away from Earth to find its way into orbit around the Sun.

Interesting fun-fact: as measured from the center of any planet, the height of the "Fling Line" is always the cube root of 2 (≈1.26) times the height of geosynchronous orbits. The Fling Line is a really good goal for anyone planning to build a space elevator, because it's a free ticket to everywhere.

You might worry about some small amount returning to Earth, but you should be equally worried about someone in Antarctica having bad breath; there's a lot of room for that problem to diffuse.

So that there is the answer. If you want to solve global warming, you can just gather up and pump CO2 straight up about 53,000 km. Easy peasy.

The weakness of brilliant plans like this isn't feasibility (this could technically be done), it's the naysayers who point out that the cure might be worse than the disease. After all, carbon is an essential part of the Earth's biological and chemical systems. We've added about half-again as much CO2 into the atmosphere in the last few centuries, taking us from below 300 ppm to about 400 ppm today. There's been 400 ppm of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere before now, most recently in the Micene 10 million years ago. Way back then life on Earth was doing alright (we got grasslands and kelp forests out of it, which isn't terrible). Having a bunch of CO2 around isn't necessarily bad; like highway driving, the danger doesn't come from any particular situation so much as sudden changes in situation. Given that, suddenly and irreversibly chucking a third of Earth's CO2 into space has a fair chance of being a really bad idea.

Answer Gravy: If you're wondering where the various heights came from, you'll be thrilled to know that you can figure out the height of both the Adams Line and Fling Line (not the official names), with nothing fancier than algebra.

A Keplerian orbit (a regular elliptical or hyperbolic orbit) can be described as:

where r is the distance from the center of the Earth (or whatever you happen to be orbiting), e is the eccentricity (e=0 for a circle, 0<e<1 for an ellipse), is the angle between the lowest point in the orbit and the present position, and p is (basically) a convenient place holder that determines the overall size of the orbit.

If and are the initial tangential (sideways) and radial (up/down) velocities, h is the initial radius, and is the initial angular position, then you can solve for the orbit using:

Normally you don't know what the initial angular position is, you just know how high you are and how you're moving.

This is a slightly streamlined version of the solution that can be found here. Jumping off of a platform that's h above the center of the Earth and attached to said Earth means that , where t is the length of one sidereal day (the time it takes Earth to fully rotate once). This is just the distance (the circumference of a large circle, 2πh) over time (one day, t). Since you're stepping off of a platform, your initial radial velocity is zero, . Finally, since the question is about the minimum height you could step off such that you would miss the Earth, you're stepping off at the highest point in the orbit and then dropping, so . Normally you need both the second and third equations, but knowing you're staring at the highest point means you already know what is. One less equation to worry about!

Use the second equation to solve for e:

and then plugging that into the first equation gives us the orbit:

If you plug in , you find that the height of the platform is in fact the height of the platform:

It's good to double check. But to actually figure out what h is (this was the whole point) you want the lowest point in the orbit to be the Earth's radius, R=6371 km (any lower and you hit the ground).

This is a fourth degree polynomial in h, and while it is technically possible to solve this by hand, you never want to solve this by hand. So plugging in the gravitational constant, , and all of the details about Earth, , , , and then giving this to a computer to solve for you, you find that one of the four solutions makes sense: h=29,825 km. So if you have to jump into an empty swimming pool, that's a good height to do it.

The height of the Fling Line (not an official name), f, is a bit easier. You don't have to mess around with orbits, you just have to set the speed your platform is moving at a given height, , equal to the escape velocity at that height, :

You can calculate the height of geosync, s, by setting the centrifugal force equal to the gravitational force for an object orbiting exactly once per (sidereal) day, t:

So that's a cute, probably useless fact; for any planet, the Fling Line is always at times the radius of geosyncronous orbits.

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Q: Could we get rid of CO2 if we pumped it through a pipe into space?

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Physicist: Like any plumbing fix: it depends on the pipe. Evangelista Torricelli, the first to measure the weight of the air above us, once famously wrote that "Noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d'un pelago d'aria." ("We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air.").

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For the first time, scientists have injected carbon dioxide into ancient lava flows and watched it solidify, demonstrating that capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or a power plant smokestack and safely storing it underground may be a realistic way to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change, according to research published Friday.

Scientists working at the Wallula Basalt Pilot Project in Washington State turned liquefied carbon dioxide into solid rock by injecting the gas into basalt formations. Over a span of about two years, the carbon dioxide solidified into a mineral called ankerite, according to the study conducted by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers. The research was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Commercial carbon sequestration would involve capturing carbon dioxide emissions from electric power plants and storing them underground. Credit: Bill Burris/flickr

"This study further supports the idea that one of the major rock types on the planet - basalts - can be used to store carbon dioxide permanently and safely," said study lead author Pete McGrail, a carbon dioxide and climate change researcher at PNNL.

Carbon capture and storage may be critical to helping prevent global warming from exceeding 2°C (3.6°F), either by capturing emissions from their source or by directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But scientists worry that storing captured carbon underground as a liquid or a gas may not be safe because stored carbon dioxide could explosively leak into the atmosphere through fissures in the earth or be exposed to terrorism risk, creating a climate catastrophe.

To solve that problem, researchers have been studying ways to store carbon dioxide underground as a solid, especially in basalt formations.

Basalt is a volcanic rock that makes up roughly 70 percent of the earth's surface. When it is exposed to carbon dioxide and water, a chemical reaction occurs, converting the gas to a chalk-like solid material. Scientists previously thought the chemical reaction would take thousands of years to occur, but new research shows it can happen within a few years.

"Basalt storage is unique in the geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide because the principal trapping mechanism is a chemical reaction that locks the carbon dioxide away as a carbonate mineral that can never leak or return to the atmosphere," McGrail said.

Earlier this year, researchers at the CarbFix project in Iceland were able to pump a geothermal power plant's carbon dioxide-rich volcanic gases into deep underground but recently formed basalt formations and chemically solidify them in about two years.

A core sample from the Wallula carbon storage project in Washington state showed that carbon dioxide injected deep underground into basalt rock turned into the carbonate mineral ankerite in less than two years (inset). Credit: American Chemical Society

The Wallula project is the first to show carbon dioxide could be solidified in the ancient basalts that are more common globally, said Paul Olsen, an earth and environmental sciences professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University who is unaffiliated with either study.

"The recent highly successful CarbFix project in Iceland showed that the conversion of carbon dioxide into limestone could be very fast, but that project used the much more recent lava flows of Iceland and it was not clear the process would work on ancient lava flows such as those that are widespread in many places on land near major cities and their associated power plants," Olsen said. "It was also the first major test using liquefied carbon dioxide that is relatively easy to transport."

The Wallula project's success shows that commercial-scale carbon sequestration from electric power plants is possible, albeit more research needs to be done to show how the process could be scaled for use commercially around the world.

"It is not a total solution to the problem by any measure," Olsen said. "It is, however, one part of a solution, especially as a bridge until fossil fuel-burning power plants can be replaced by renewable sources of energy or even nuclear."

McGrail said there is no risk of the solidified carbon dioxide to dissolve in water and escape back into the atmosphere.

Jeffrey Bielicki, a professor of geodetic engineering at Ohio State University, said one of the challenges researchers face in proving the feasibility of safe carbon sequestration is the difficulty of reproducing lab results in the real world.

"The fact that this is a field study that occurred in real-world conditions is very encouraging," he said. "Each advance such as this moves us closer to increasing the numbers of commercial-scale carbon dioxide storage operations."

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Scientists Take Big Step Toward Safely Burying CO2

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For the first time, scientists have injected carbon dioxide into ancient lava flows and watched it solidify, demonstrating that capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or a power plant smokestack and safely storing it underground may be a realistic way to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change, according to research published Friday.

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Storing billions of tonnes of CO2 underground would be a "safe and effective" way to help limit the effects of climate change, a new study says.

The research suggests that large amounts of CO2 could be stored under the ground or sea with only a small risk of surface leakage in the following 10,000 years. However, if CO2 storage is poorly managed, higher amounts of leakage can be expected.

The findings help dispel common "misconceptions" about the dangers associated with CO2 storage, a scientist not involved in the study tells Carbon Brief.

Digging a hole

Carbon capture and storage ( CCS) is a process whereby CO2 is " captured " from the air and then transported to a storage site - which could be, for example, a depleted oil or gas field or a deep rock reservoir beneath the sea.

Though the technology is currently restricted to a few small pilot projects, many view its large-scale development as an essential step to limiting the effects of future climate change.

In its most recent assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC) concluded that avoiding dangerous climate change would cost twice as much without CCS.

One barrier to the development of CCS is the costs associated with directly capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. Another barrier is the fear that, once underground, stored CO2 could leak out into the atmosphere.

It is this second barrier that is addressed by the new research, which is published in Nature Communications.

To address the question of leakage, the researchers developed a new model - known as the Storage Security Calculator - which looks at what would happen if 12bn tonnes of CO2 were injected under the ground and left for 10,000 years. The 12bn-tonne target reflects the EU's ambition for CO2 storage by 2050.

The findings suggest that - providing a suitable storage site is chosen - the risk of CO2 leakage would be minimal, says lead author Dr Juan Alcalde, a geologist at the University of Aberdeen. In a video filmed at the sidelines of this year's European Geosciences Union ( EGU) General Assembly, he explains the study's main findings to Carbon Brief.

Leaky sponge

To understand what would happen to CO2 stored underground, the researchers considered all the ways it could escape back into the atmosphere ("leakage inputs") and all the ways of permanently trapping it underground ("immobilisation inputs"). A schematic summary of these inputs is shown in the diagram below.

The first way that stored CO2 could leak is through the wells used for CO2 injection (2a on the diagram), Alcalde says:

"Anything can go wrong; accidents happen and they're usually fixable but a little portion of CO2 will leak back to the surface, so we account for that."

To calculate the total risk of leakage from injection wells, the researchers considered how many wells would be needed and looked at the available data from CCS projects to see how often such leaks occur.

The second leakage risk comes from abandoned wells that were once used for oil and gas production (2b). In areas that have experienced large amounts of oil and gas extraction, abandoned wells pose the highest risk to CO2 storage, Alcalde says:

"In the US, in Texas and Pennsylvania, there's loads of wells drilled - it's almost like a sponge. Perhaps the leak through abandoned wells is very small and very minimal, but if you've got thousands of them in your area, that can create a bigger effect."

To assess the risk posed by abandoned wells, the researchers assessed available data on the global distribution of abandoned wells, as well as rates of leakage recorded in previous studies of the hydrocarbon industry.

The third way CO2 could escape into the atmosphere is through natural faults in the land (2c). However, it is likely that developers would check for such land features before depositing CO2, Alcalde says, making the risk minimal.

The three ways that CO2 could become permanently trapped underground include residual trapping, when CO2 gets trapped in the small gaps between rocks; solubility trapping, which occurs when CO2 dissolves in water; and mineral trapping, the conversion of CO2 into solid mineral.

These methods are controlled by natural physical processes and can take hundreds or even thousands of years to trap CO2, Alcalde says:

"Mineralisation is the ultimate aim because the CO2 becomes pretty much a rock - it's never going to come back to the surface."

Future forecast

The researchers then looked at how much leakage could occur in three scenarios, including where CO2 is stored in an offshore site (analogous to a potential site beneath the North Sea), a "well-regulated" onshore site (which the authors say is analogous to a potential site in Texas) and a "poorly-regulated" onshore site.

The poorly-regulated scenario represents the "highly unlikely" event of CO2 being stored in regions with poorly regulated oil and gas industries, the researchers say.

Each scenario assumes that CO2 storage begins in 2020 and ends by 2050, although the model runs 10,000 years into the future. The charts below show the expected leakage from each baseline scenario in model simulations.

On the charts, the black lines show the total CO2 injected, the grey lines show the when the injection ceases, the red shading shows the proportion of CO2 that is leaked, the blue lines show the proportion of CO2 that is permanently trapped, and the green dashed lines show the total proportion of CO2 that is retained underground.

The results show that the offshore baseline scenario is expected to experience the smallest amount of leakage (0.53% of total stored CO2), while a poorly-regulated onshore scenario is expected to have the largest (11.3%).

The charts below show the spread of the results from 10,000 different simulations in the model. Each simulation made slightly different assumptions about the model parameters, including the fraction of CO2 injection wells that would leak, the number of abandoned wells that whose whereabouts are unknown and the leakage rate from natural pathways.

Grey bars show the number of model runs reaching different proportions of CO2 leakage, while the red line corresponds to the baseline scenario (as above).

For the offshore scenario, the charts show 95% of the model runs project CO2 leakage of less than 6% by the end of the study period. In contrast, for the well-regulated onshore scenario, 95% of the runs project leakage of less than 26% in the next 10,000 years.

The expected CO2 leakage is highest in the poorly-regulated onshore scenario, with 95% of the model runs projecting CO2 leakage of up to 33%.

The amount of leakage remains relatively low under poor regulation as a proportion of CO2 becomes trapped due to physical processes, such as mineralisation, the researchers say.

'Important' study

The findings show that "CO2 storage is safe", says Alcalde:

"The technology is there, we know it works, we now know it's safe and therefore it's the time to go ahead and do it."

However, other researchers are less confident about the potential of CCS. For example, a previous research paper published in 2010 modelling CO2 storage over 100,000 years found the technology could lead to "delayed warming in the atmosphere as well as oxygen depletion, acidification and elevated CO2 concentrations in the ocean". Study author Prof Gary Shaffer, from the University of Copenhagen, writes:

"Geological storage may be more effective in delaying the return to the conditions of a business-as-usual projection, especially for storage in offshore sediments.

"However, leakage of 1% or less per thousand years from an underground stored reservoir, or continuous resequestration far into the future, would be required to maintain conditions close to those of a low-emission projection with no sequestration."

The new study "puts to rest fears about CO2 storage", says Prof Martin Blunt, chair in petroleum engineering at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research. He tells Carbon Brief:

"It's an important study because it helps deal with common misconceptions regulators, the public and scientists not working in the field have with CO2 storage.

"CO2 storage is not like nuclear waste, which will corrode and eventually leak out of anything it's stored in. Unlike nuclear waste, CO2 becomes safer and more secure the longer it stays in the ground due to a range of physical processes, such as mineralisation."

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World can 'safely' store billions of tonnes of CO2 underground

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Storing billions of tonnes of CO2 underground would be a "safe and effective" way to help limit the effects of climate change, a new study says.

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Climate change is one of the most challenging problems that humanity has ever faced. At stake are hundreds of millions of lives, innumerable species and ecosystems, the health and viability of the economy, and the future habitability of this planet.

Fortunately, climate change is solvable. We have the technologies. We have the science. We now need the leadership-and the courage to change course.

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Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the main drivers of global warming. While climate change cannot be stopped, it can be slowed.

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Project Drawdown's mission is to help the world stop climate change-as quickly, safely, and equitably as possible.

We do this by advancing effective, science-based climate solutions and strategies; fostering bold, new climate leadership; and promoting new climate narratives and new voices.

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Project Drawdown's mission is to help the world stop climate change-as quickly, safely, and equitably as possible. We do this by advancing effective, science-based climate solutions and strategies; fostering bold, new climate leadership; and promoting new climate narratives and new voices.

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We are experts and everyday people, fighting for change together.

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Geoengineering is the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's natural systems to counteract climate change.

There is wide range of proposed geoengineering techniques. Generally, these can be grouped into two categories:

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) or Solar Geoengineering

SRM techniques aim to reflect a small proportion of the Sun's energy back into space, counteracting the temperature rise caused by increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which absorb energy and raise temperatures. Some proposed techniques include:

Albedo enhancement. Increasing the reflectiveness of clouds or the land surface so that more of the Sun's heat is reflected back into space.

Space reflectors. Blocking a small proportion of sunlight before it reaches the Earth.

Stratospheric aerosols. Introducing small, reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect some sunlight before it reaches the surface of the Earth.

Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) or Carbon Geoengineering

GGR techniques aim to remove carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, directly countering the increased greenhouse effect and ocean acidification. These techniques would have to be implemented on a global scale to have a significant impact on greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Some proposed techniques include:

Afforestation. Engaging in a global-scale tree planting effort.

Biochar. 'Charring' biomass and burying it so that its carbon is locked up in the soil.

Bio-energy with carbon capture and sequestration. Growing biomass, burning it to create energy and capturing and sequestering the carbon dioxide created in the process.

Ambient Air Capture. Building large machines that can remove carbon dioxide directly from ambient air and store it elsewhere.

Ocean Fertilisation. Adding nutrients to the ocean in selected locations to increase primary production which draws down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Enhanced Weathering. Exposing large quantities of minerals that will react with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and storing the resulting compound in the ocean or soil.

Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement. Grinding up, dispersing, and dissolving rocks such as limestone, silicates, or calcium hydroxide in the ocean to increase its ability to store carbon and directly ameliorate ocean acidification.

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Oxford Geoengineering Programme // What is Geoengineering?

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Geoengineering is the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's natural systems to counteract climate change. There is wide range of proposed geoengineering techniques. Generally, these can be grouped into two categories: solar radiation management (SRM), and carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

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Geoengineering is the idea of applying planetary engineering to Earth. This can be traced to the early years of the Cold War, when scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union devoted considerable funds to controlling the weather as part of their military strategy. Some early geoengineering proposals included the damming of the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bering Strait as a way to warm the Arctic, making Siberia more habitable.

The climate change crisis has seen interest in geoengineering reignited. Governments around the world are thinking seriously about how the climate can be manipulated to slow or even stop runaway climate change. Some geoengineering proposals focus on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Some examples include: ocean fertilisation, where iron dust dumped into the open ocean would trigger vast algal blooms that would absorb large quantities of carbon dioxide - this has been trailed with limited success. Crops modified to increase carbon uptake; forests planted specifically to absorb carbon dioxide; and carbon capture and storage - also trialed with limited success.

Other geoengineering solutions focus on stopping solar heat from entering the atmosphere. Examples of this approach include: spraying seawater thousands of metres into the air to seed the formation of stratocumulus clouds that will deflect sunlight; installing sun-shields or mirrors in space to reflect the sun; or injecting sun-blocking particulates into space.

Sounding all a bit crazy? Sound like we are sweeping another problem under the already lumpy carpet?

There are plenty of people in the science community, who think these are terrible ideas that we should leave well alone. Isn't it our tweaking of our climate that has got us into this mess in the first place? Should we consider attempting further tweaking of our climate to cover up our other mistakes?

But there is also a growing group of scientists who think that we have left it too late to address climate change in any other way. They believe that climate change is now out of our control, that current actions will be too slow and ineffective, and that we need a Plan B: they believe our planet needs geoengineering.

Tweaking the climate through geoengineering won't mean that the climate will be "fixed" and returned to how it was before. Instead the best hope for Plan B is that the climate will be stabilised and the worst impacts of climate change will be avoided.

But there will still be winners and losers, and like climate change, no one can say who those winners and losers might be.

Want to learn more? Click here to return to the climate change toolbox

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Geoengineering - Climate Control? - Cool Australia

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Geoengineering is the idea of applying planetary engineering to Earth. This can be traced to the early years of the Cold War, when scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union devoted considerable funds to controlling the weather as part of their military strategy.

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Scientists agree that we need to swiftly and dramatically cut emissions of heat-trapping gases. Also necessary: safely and sustainably removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and accelerating investments to prepare for the impacts of climate change.

These measures are essential. But because they may not be enough to avoid substantial climate disruption, some researchers are also looking to better understand the risks and benefits of solar geoengineering.

Solar geoengineering refers to proposed approaches to cool the Earth by reflecting solar radiation back to space. The two main approaches being researched are stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and marine cloud brightening (MCB).

The Union of Concerned Scientists opposes the deployment of solar geoengineering because it poses unacceptably high environmental, social, and geopolitical risks. Instead, UCS supports continued modeling research, observational studies, and strong, inclusive public participation in decision-making over whether and how further research should include possible small-scale outdoor experiments.

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Scientists agree that we need to swiftly and dramatically cut emissions of heat-trapping gases. Also necessary: safely and sustainably removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and accelerating investments to prepare for the impacts of climate change. These measures are essential.

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Please consider donating to keep this work moving forward.

Every contribution helps us champion the Rights of Nature

Make a recurring donation Make a one-time donation

About CELDF's Center for the Rights of Nature

CELDF is assisting civil society, indigenous peoples, communities, and governments to advance laws and policies for the protection of Nature and the environment. This includes providing legislative and policy drafting, legal research, public engagement and education, ongoing support during global crises, and trainings.

Communities in the United States and the country of Ecuador have also worked with CELDF to establish the first global laws protecting Nature. Today, we are working in India, Nepal, Australia, Cameroon, Colombia, the United States, and other countries to establish similar laws.

To learn more, please continuing reading below, and check out these helpful resources.

CELDF's work on ecosystem rights recognition has been featured in mainstream and independent press publications across the globe, including:

What ARE the Rights of Nature?

Environmental degradation is advancing around the world. The United Nations has warned that we are heading toward "major planetary catastrophe." For this reason, there is a growing recognition that we must fundamentally change the relationship between humankind and nature.

Making this fundamental shift means acknowledging our dependence on nature and respecting our need to live in harmony with the natural world. It means securing the highest legal protection and the highest societal value for nature through the recognition of nature's rights and associated human rights.

The global Rights of Nature movement is gaining momentum. Read our Timeline.

The Human Right to a Healthy Environment

Many nations have expanded their body of legal rights to recognize a human right to a healthy environment, including Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, and Finland. However, global warming is accelerating and ecosystems are pushed to collapse.

Does Rights of Nature Mean 'Personhood'?

One common misconception - including within elements of the Rights of Nature movement - is that organizers are advancing legal personhood for ecosystems. The truth is more complex. Read this conversation with The Guardian.

Rights of Nature Going Statewide

As the number of communities advancing Community Rights - including the Rights of Nature - grows, CELDF is assisting them in joining to form statewide Community Rights Networks. We are also partnering with these Networks to draft constitutional amendments to establish provisions for communities and Nature. Today, Colorado, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Ohio are advancing such constitutional amendments.

In 2019, Toledo, Ohio adopted the Lake Erie Bill of Rights - the first Rights of Nature law for a specific ecosystem. In March of 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) revoked a permit for a frack waste injection well in Grant Township. DEP officials cited Grant Township's Home Rule Charter banning injection wells as grounds for their reversal.

Indigenous Traditional Knowledge

Aboriginal nations and communities retain sovereignty and knowledge over the natural ecosystems they have evolved with. To recognize and follow the natural laws of nature necessitates the elevation particularly of the Traditional Knowledge of local indigenous communities.

Rights of Nature Taking first International Steps

Following the first communities in the United States enacting Nature rights laws over a decade ago, the initiative became a growing global movement.

In 2008, CELDF was invited to meet with the Ecuador Constituent Assembly as they drafted a new constitution. We assisted the Assembly with constitutional provisions regarding Nature's defense. Ecuadorians adopted their new constitution by an overwhelming majority, making Ecuador the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its constitution.

Ecuador's Rights of Nature constitutional provisions - found in Chapter 7 - state: "Nature, or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes. All persons, communities, peoples and nations can call upon public authorities to enforce the Rights of Nature."

Watershed International Cases

The first cases have now been brought and litigated in Ecuador, where the courts upheld and affirmed the constitutional rights of ecosystems.

They include a lawsuit brought by Richard Frederick Wheeler and Eleanor Geer Huddle in the name of the Vilcabamba River. The river was a plaintiff in the case, seeking to enforce its own constitutional rights to exist and thrive. The healthy functioning and flow of the river was being impacted by a government road-widening construction project.

In 2011, the Provincial Justice Court of Loja ruled in favor of the Vilcabamba River. This marked the first time since that a court upheld Nature's constitutional right to protection.

Rights of Nature Expanding Globally

Following Ecuador's constitutional process, people and civil society in other countries learned about the movement. Today, CELDF's International Center for the Rights of Nature is working in India, Nepal, Australia, Cameroon, Colombia, the United States, and other countries. We assist people, communities, and groups in advancing the protection of Nature's rights.

Bolivia

In 2010, Bolivia hosted the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. At the conference CELDF assisted in drafting the proposed Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, modeled on the U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth has been presented to the U.N. General Assembly for its consideration.

Over the past several years, CELDF has also traveled to Nepal, India, Colombia, and Australia. We have presented on Nature rights initiatives and help people and civil society launch related campaigns.

Nepal

In Nepal, CELDF has been working with environmental and indigenous groups, and meeting with Parliamentarians. The goal is to amend the Nepal Constitution to recognize the Rights of Nature.

India

In 2014, CELDF traveled to Rishikesh in Uttarakhand, India, to partner with the Global WASH Alliance-India and Ganga Action Parivar. Together we developed the National Ganga River Rights Act. This is now being proposed to Prime Minister Modi's administration. The Act would recognize rights of the Ganga River Basin and the people of India to a healthy river ecosystem.

United Kingdom

CELDF also assisted the Green Party of England and Wales to develop a Rights of Nature policy for their national party platform. The policy was adopted in February 2016.

Check out our Timeline on how this movement has grown.

A healthy environment is "one of the basic human rights."

- Rachel Carson

Enforcing and Defending the Rights of Nature in the U.S.

In 2014, Grant Township, in the State of Pennsylvania, enacted a CELDF-drafted Community Bill of Right, recognizing the Rights of Nature. An oil and gas corporation sued the community to overturn the law.

In November 2014, CELDF filed a motion for the Little Mahoning Watershed to intervene in the lawsuit. This is the first time an ecosystem in the United States sought to defend its rights as recognized in municipal law. Its intervention is meant to defend its own legal right to exist and flourish. That case is ongoing.

In Highland Township, Pennsylvania, CELDF is also serving as legal counsel for a local watershed. The goal is to defend its rights not to have frack waste injected in its ecosystem.

The Opposition

Wherever we work, the communities face harsh backlash from corporate and state interests. Learn more about one example, the backlash to organizing in Ohio.

CELDF Helping Advance a Movement

Solidarity is essential. Read a letter of support, signed by Rights of Nature leaders and advocates from across the globe, showing support for organizing efforts to defend the rights of Lake Erie.

WEBINARS

CELDF frequently hosts and contributes to global conversations on the RIghts of Nature. Watch one.

Fight for the rights of nature, today.

Corporate-claimed "rights" to profits come at the cost of ecosystem rights to flourish. Please give today to help CELDF advance Rights of Nature. CELDF uses every dollar of your donation for this fight.
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Contribute to the Conversation

Are you working on Rights of Nature, environmental racism, indigenous governance, imaginative forms of community self-governance, state preemption, community engagement? Is your community impacted by issues around police accountability, houselessness, immigration, criminal justice reform, gender equality, racial inequality, healthcare access, equity in education, living wages, access to clean air and water, climate and environmental degradation? We welcome your guest blog contributions, to add and enlighten our conversations. The challenges we face demand solidarity, creativity, deep knowledge sharing, synthetic thinking, historical understanding, and a fusion of expertise and perspective. We, at CELDF, understand that we can broaden our vision by giving you the space to express yours.

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Every contribution helps us champion the Rights of Nature Make a recurring donation Make a one-time donation CELDF is assisting civil society, indigenous peoples, communities, and governments to advance laws and policies for the protection of Nature and the environment. This includes providing legislative and policy drafting, legal research, public engagement and education, ongoing support during global crises, and trainings.

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Why a V-shaped plane may make a whole lot of sense

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Delft University of Technology and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines are partnering to develop a radical new v-shaped plane -dubbed the Flying-V - that could cut fuel use by 20% if it ever flies.

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Welcome to the Wild Law special interest group page. We invite you to join our group, attend our events and get actively involved! If you are interested please get in touch.

What is Wild Law?

Wild Law is a phrase coined by the lawyer and author Cormac Cullinan to describe a holistic approach to law and governance. This approach is based on principles of ecology, that all of life is an interconnected web of which human beings are only a part. It seeks to align law with ecology and the science of living systems. The current system of law and governance places human beings at the centre, and views us as separate from Nature. This view promotes the exploitation of Nature by seeing it as a resource base largely for the benefit of humans. This has led to the multiple environmental crises we now face.

Events - What's coming up and what does the group do?

Due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic and restrictions, we will not be able to run the 2021 Wild Law weekend. So, instead, we will be holding two Not the Wild Law weekend seminars on 9 April and 23 October between 11 and 4. If you have any ideas for themes or speakers do please contact us.

The 2020 Wild Law weekend did not go ahead this year due to the Coronavirus pandemic. We hope to be able to run some events in 2021.

The 2019 Wild Law conference on a theme of ' Wild Law and Activism' was held at the University of Sussex on Saturday 9 November.

The 2018 Wild Law conference was a joint event held with Bristol University on 21 September 2018. We were delighted to welcome expert speakers for a day of stimulating debate. Please see the link below to the speakers' slides from the event.

>Wild Law Conference 21 September 2018 - Speakers' slides

>Wild Law podcast with Planet Pod

Our events aim to promote the understanding of Wild Law and related concepts and attitudes, through fostering discussion and initiatives around how we can improve our relationship with Nature through Law. Our Wild Law Weekends hope that by being immersed in a more natural environment, participants can get a better understanding of the issues and develop creative ways of connecting Nature with Law. All members are encouraged to propose and help organise activities. Please contact us to join the group, which is open to all UKELA members.

Wild Law weekends

Our Wild Law weekends are always a popular highlight of the year. Usually held in late May, we take the opportunity to head outdoors for a couple of days of walking and discussion, staying in comfortable hostel accommodation.

The 2020 Wild Law weekend has been postponed until May 2021. More details will be released in early 2021.

The 2019 Wild Law weekend took place in late May at Boggle Hole Youth Hostel, near Whitby in North Yorkshire. A mixed group of 22 delegates enjoyed an exhilarating weekend of walks, talks and companionship in the beautiful coastal countryside.

Our 2018 Wild Law weekend took place in the Lake District from 25 to 28 May based at the Coniston Coppermines youth hostel at the foot of Old Man of Coniston, now a World Heritage site. Read John Hunt's notes about the weekend below.

>John Hunt's Wild Law weekend 2018 notes

Please take a look at Matthew Terry's film of the 2017 Ben Nevis weekend (with thanks also to Simon Boyle) https://youtu.be/cgQeTzdF5R4

Since 2005, we have held weekends and events in many wonderful locations, including the Lake District, Northumberland, the Isle of Arran, the shores of Loch Lomond, the hills of Derbyshire, the South Downs, and many more. Read about them below.

>Wild Law weekend report by Colin Robertson
>Previous Wild Law weekends history

Organising a Wild Law weekend - policy and guidelines

Giving legal personality to Ben Nevis

Colin Robertson suggested the idea of giving Ben Nevis legal personality as UKELA Wild Law members joined members of the John Muir Trust for an evening at the Nevis Centre on Saturday 27 May 2017.
>Ben Nevis article

Does Wild Law already exist in Law?

In 2009, UKELA published the report 'Wild Law: is there any evidence of Earth Jurisprudence in Existing Law and Practice?' See below for link to report.

It looked selectively at environmental laws around the world and concluded that while some contained elements of Wild Law, none could be completely described as "wild." However, environmental law is evolving, Wild Law has moved on. Laws that recognise Nature's inherent rights to exist, thrive, and renew her natural cycles exist in the following places:

>Wild Law Research report 2009

>Read more about Wild Law in current law

For further reading and background about Wild Law and Earth Jurisprudence, follow the links below.

>Read more about our Wild Law activities and history

>Wild Law friendly organisations

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Welcome to the Wild Law special interest group page. We invite you to join our group, attend our events and get actively involved! If you are interested please get in touch. What is Wild Law? Wild Law is a phrase coined by the lawyer and author Cormac Cullinan to describe a holistic approach to law and governance.

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Joe Biden for President: Official Campaign Website

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Karen Scrivener: A concrete idea to reduce carbon emissions

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Concrete is the second most-used substance on Earth (behind water), and it's responsible for eight percent of the world's carbon footprint. Cement researcher Karen Scrivener shares the research behind a pioneering new kind of cement known as LC3, which could slash carbon emissions from this crucial building material by 40 percent, if adopted at scale.

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You'll have to sift through to find sources of hope, but they are there!

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TED Talks are influential videos from expert speakers on education, business, science, tech and creativity, with subtitles in 100+ languages. Ideas free to stream and download.

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Christiana Figueres and Chris Anderson: How we can turn the tide on climate

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Witness the unveiling of Countdown, a major global campaign to cut greenhouse gas emissions. TED has partnered with scientists, policy makers, organizations, activists and more to create an initiative that everyone in the world can be part of. Check out http://countdown.ted.com to learn how you can get involved - and help turn the tide on climate.

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The Chinese national carbon trading scheme is a cap and trade system for carbon dioxide emissions set to be implemented in the 2020s. This emission trading scheme (ETS) creates a carbon market where emitters can buy and sell emission credits. From this scheme, China can limit emissions, but allow economic freedom for emitters to reduce emissions or purchase emission allowances from other emitters. China is currently the largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG) and many major Chinese cities have severe air pollution. If fully implemented, China would be the largest market in carbon trading. The scheme eventually plans to limit emissions from six of China's top carbon dioxide emitting industries, including coal-fired power plants. China was able to gain experience in drafting and implementation of an ETS plan from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where China was part of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). From this experience with carbon markets, and lengthy discussions with the next largest carbon market, the European Union (EU), as well as analysis of small scale pilot markets in major Chinese cities and provinces, China's national ETS will be the largest of its kind and will help China achieve its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) from the Paris Agreement.

China promised in the Conference of Parties to reduce their carbon intensity per unit of GDP by 60-65% by 2030. To achieve this, they decided to use market-based mechanisms. They developed the Clean Development Mechanism, which consists in a "bottom up" architecture. China has learned from the European Union, whose carbon trading market is currently twice as big, along with California in the United States, to implement mechanisms such as cap and trade. The idea is to create an international market through exchanges where allowances are traded and carbon emissions get monitored and reported.

In the 2010s the nation implemented seven pilot carbon markets in various zones that thrive on production of cement, electricity, heat, petroleum and oil extraction. These zones are: Beijing, Chongqing, Guangdong, Hubei, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin, which represent 25% of China's total GDP. These stationary activities are known for being the most polluting and the largest emitters of GHG. Since the pilot plan started, it is estimated that 40.24 million metric tons of carbon dioxide has been traded.[needs update ]

These pilot zones proved the cap and trade efficiency. Cap refers to a permitted amount of emissions, if the industry exceed said limitation, it would require an allowance. Allowances can be traded, auctioned or even given away for free, depending on the case. Through cap and trade, it is believed that both competitiveness and possibly carbon leakage will be reduced. Each cap and allowance was assigned to the cities according to their purpose,[clarification needed ] production rates, or ability to pass along the costs of carbon along the consumer chain. The caps of greenhouse gas emissions vary from 30-350 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year when the price for carbon varies from $1.4-$13.00 US dollars per ton of carbon dioxide. There also are 2 types of allowances: new entry vs. governmental. The new entry allowances are for those who are in need for growth and are freely distributed, whereas the governmental allowance is a fixed, stable fraction that must be sold or auctioned.

There are also conditions that each zone must uphold, mainly regarding monitoring, reporting and verification. Each zone has their own mechanism of doing so, but they all face the same kind of penalties if failing to do so. These penalties include: a reduction of free allowances, a threat to publicizing said status in order to create social pressure, a 2-year restricted access to special funds for energy research and if an excess of emission were to take place, the zone's government or company would have to pay 3 times the original allowance price.

There are challenges to China achieving these goals. The country will have to ensure that there will not be any overlap with already existing policies on prevention, reduction and consumption of pollutants. The country will also have to strictly monitor and enforce the scheme, and make sure that there is end to end transparency. There will also need to be special attention to carbon leakage and on price volatility. Since the pilot cities began this project, the price of carbon and caps has fluctuated. The government will also need to make sure that there is an efficient trade and exchange of allowances on the spot market. There will also need to be an plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to achieve their Paris agreement.

On the other hand, policy makers face a struggle to allocate allowances. For the free allowance, they need to think about whom to give them to. for the auctioned ones, they need to think about the type of auction that is most convenient, and for the combined ones, all of the above.

Prior to the conception and design of China's national carbon trading scheme, carbon emission trading (CET) had never been done in China. With no CET experience to draw from, in late 2011 the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) approved two provinces and five cities of varying degrees of economic development as pilots. In the Notice on Launching Pilots for Emissions Trading System (ETS), the NDRC approved Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hubei, Guangdong, and Shenzhen as ETS pilots. Shenzhen was the first pilot to launch, on June 18, 2013, and was soon followed by the other designated pilots, which all completed their first compliance period by June 2015. All of the pilots with compliance data had compliance rates of over 96%, with Shanghai having the highest compliance rate at 100% and Tianjin having the lowest compliance rate at 96.5%. In order to aid the design of implementation details in China's national carbon trading scheme, each of the pilots was given the freedom to decide values for trading scheme parameters such as allowance allocation, coverage of sectors, and punishment mechanisms. They also vary in their approach to transactions, issues with price uncertainty, and managing risk. To assess the success of one pilot's trading scheme versus another, market performance was considered.

The pilots' approach to allowance allocation were largely based on historical emissions for most sectors except the power sector, which was allocated an allowance based on benchmarks and production. Guangdong was the only pilot to implement auctioning allowances for its power sector. Additionally, all pilots except Hubei allowed allowance rollover into the next compliance period. To standardize monitoring, reporting, and verification of carbon data, the NDRC issued monitoring and reporting regulations. Enterprises were required to monitor and report their emissions, which was compared to a report from a third-party verification agency. Discrepancies in the reports above a threshold would require a re-verification. For most pilots, this threshold was set at a difference of 10% or 100 thousand tons. Funding required for verification was supplied by the local government rather than the enterprise, in order to reduce the compliance burden.

Five of the pilot programs allowed individuals to participate in carbon trading while two only allowed enterprises to do so. Transaction formats varied slightly but were all in spot markets with no carbon futures. In all pilots, enterprises needed to pay the cost of trading, which was a two-way charging scheme.[clarification needed ] In order to ensure stability in the carbon market, each pilot set a price limit based on the closing price of carbon in the previous compliance period, as well as limits on maximum allowance holdings for enterprises. Each pilot implemented varying degrees of fines for faking carbon data or withholding data. Shenzhen was the only pilot to implement a variable fine, setting it as three times the market clearing price times the excess emissions. Other pilot programs charged a flat fee. All pilots deducted the excess emissions from the next period's allowance for the enterprise in question.

From the pilot program's inception to May 2015, 20.27 MtCO2e had been traded for a total value of 720 million CNY.[needs update ] The carbon price for Shenzhen and Guangdong were the greatest, ranging from 60 to 80 CNY.[needs update ] The price fluctuated more in Shenzhen and Tianjin when compared to other pilots, especially near the compliance period deadline and near the beginning of new periods. The transitive behavior of the carbon market is a result more so of trading entities' understanding of policy and the timing of carbon data acquisition rather than market demand. From the pilot program data, China should improve on the designs of the pilot programs in order to achieve a stable and stimulated national carbon market.

The scheme set the initial carbon allowances to 3-5 billion tonnes per year. Comparing this to the EU-ETS scheme, it is almost twice as much as the EU allowance. By the time of July 2016, EU-ETS is the world's largest carbon trading system, with a carbon market of two billion tonnes per year. the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced that eight sectors would be included in this market, these eight sectors are petrochemicals, chemicals, building materials, steel, ferrous metals, paper-making, power-generation and aviation. The companies that participate in this market are compulsory to use more designated amount of energy. The current number is 10,000 tonnes of standard coal equivalent of energy per year. According to seven pilot cities (7 trial carbon market in China) average price, the launch price would be set to be around 5 dollars per ton, which would generate a revenue of $0.17 to $1.16 billion in the first trading year. The expected carbon trading volume would increase to 7-58 billion dollars per year after 2020 since more market would be introduced to the carbon trading system.

The first auction for vintage 2016 allowances happened in Guangdong on September 21. This was held by the China Emission Exchange of Guangdong. The settlement price was $1.48 per ton, exceeding the set floor price (reserve) of $1.40 per ton for the 500,000 tonnes auctioned. In the future, China's carbon trading allowance would expect to be increase to 3-5 billion tonnes of CO2, which would bring a revenue of around 60-400 CNY.

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Chinese national carbon trading scheme - Wikipedia

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The Chinese national carbon trading scheme is a cap and trade system for carbon dioxide emissions set to be implemented in the 2020s. This emission trading scheme (ETS) creates a carbon market where emitters can buy and sell emission credits.

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DETROIT--()--There is a growing acceptance and desire for full-electric vehicles, but high expectations for the technology the auto industry must address. Bosch, a leading global supplier of technology products and services, released a research study today based on a survey conducted among 1,000 U.S. based new car buyers, aged 18 and older, who purchased/leased at least one vehicle within the last five model years, and intend to purchase/lease a new vehicle again.

New car buyers believe full-electric vehicles are coming...and soon

According to the study, new car buyers show an increasing willingness to adopt full-electric vehicles in the near future. Specifically,

62 percent of new car buyers believe they will own at least one full-electric vehicle in their household within 10 years or less

Of those who anticipate having a full-electric vehicle in their household at any point in their lifetime, 71 percent believe all of their household vehicles will be full-electric vehicles within 15 years

Further, 62 percent of new car buyers would be interested in purchasing a full-electric vehicle at an additional cost of $10,000 (after tax credits) over the same vehicle with a gasoline engine.

The auto industry must address the high expectations of new car buyers

While new car buyers are open to the idea of owning a full-electric vehicle, there are considerably high expectations that the auto industry must address. As the research showed, existing new car buyers' perceptions do not match the current production of and options for full-electric vehicles as well as capabilities of today, particularly in terms of range and time to recharge.

Expectation: New car buyers think today's full-electric vehicles travel approximately 300 miles on a single charge

Reality: Today's full-electric vehicles travel less than 200 miles on a single charge

Expectation: New car buyers want full-electric vehicles to travel approximately 400 miles on a single charge

Reality: Today's full-electric vehicles travel less than 200 miles on a single charge

Expectation: New car buyers expect it takes eight hours to fully charge an electric vehicle from a standard household outlet

Reality: It takes eight-22 hours to fully charge an electric vehicle from a standard 110-volt household outlet

The top five full-electric vehicle purchase criteria

The survey further revealed new car buyers' top purchase criteria for full-electric vehicles, which consisted of

1. Reliability

2. Distance between re-charging stops

3. Time required to re-charge

4. New car purchase price

5. Cost of repair/maintenance

These top five criteria were followed closely by costs to re-fuel and insure.

The era of choice remains

Despite the growing acceptance of full-electric vehicles among new car buyers, a significant subset of respondents, 32 percent, indicated they are not interested in purchasing or leasing a full-electric vehicle within the next 15 years, signaling a preference toward other powertrain options.

As consumers decide between traditional gasoline powered vehicles and full-electric vehicles, Bosch is primed to continue offering advanced solutions for multiple powertrains. Ultimately, this allows consumers the freedom to choose what's best for their lifestyle.

"For more than 130 years, we've been ahead of the curve in providing our customers with the most advanced powertrain technology," said Mike Mansuetti, president of Robert Bosch LLC. "So whether customers desire a traditional internal combustion engine, a full-electric vehicle, or a hybrid of the two, automakers continue to turn to Bosch for the leading technologies for the powertrains of today - and the future."

For more information on Bosch's electrification strategy, visit: http://electrifieddrive.bosch-mobility-solutions.us/.

EXPERIENCE BOSCH AT NAIAS 2017 in Detroit, Michigan, USA: At NAIAS 2017, Bosch is presenting automated, connected and electrified technologies with a focus on how vehicle electrification is becoming more desired and accessible. For more information on Bosch's electrification strategy, visit: http://electrifieddrive.bosch-mobility-solutions.us/.

BOSCH BOOTH: Monday to Thursday, January 9-12, 2017, on Level Three, Rooms 336-338, Cobo Center.

About Bosch

Having established a regional presence in 1906 in North America, the Bosch Group employs some 31,000 associates in more than 100 locations, as of December 31, 2015. In 2015, Bosch generated consolidated sales of $14 billion in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. For more information, visit www.boschusa.com, www.bosch.com.mx and www.bosch.ca.

The Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services. It employs roughly 375,000 associates worldwide (as of December 31, 2015). The company generated sales of $78.3 billion (70.6 billion euros) in 2015. Its operations are divided into four business sectors: Mobility Solutions, Industrial Technology, Consumer Goods, and Energy and Building Technology. The Bosch Group comprises Robert Bosch GmbH and its roughly 440 subsidiaries and regional companies in some 60 countries. Including sales and service partners, Bosch's global manufacturing and sales network covers some 150 countries. The basis for the company's future growth is its innovative strength. Bosch employs 55,800 associates in research and development at roughly 118 locations across the globe. The Bosch Group's strategic objective is to deliver innovations for a connected life. Bosch improves quality of life worldwide with products and services that are innovative and spark enthusiasm. In short, Bosch creates technology that is "Invented for life."

Exchange rate: 1 EUR = $1.1095

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Acceptance and expectations of full-electric vehicles

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DETROIT--()--There is a growing acceptance and desire for full-electric vehicles, but high expectations for the technology the auto industry must address. Bosch, a leading global supplier of technology products and services, released a research study today based on a survey conducted among 1,000 U.S.

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Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: SVDC General Meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

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Register here for our August SVDC Zoom Membership Meeting on Monday, April 19th From 7:00pm - 8:30pm Learn how you can take action in 2021 in the spirit of our very first Earth Day over 50 years ago! Speakers include Laura Deehan, State Director of Environment California, CEO of Silicon Valley Clean Energy, Girish Balachandran, and SVYCA student and youth leaders.

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Climate change is increasingly becoming part of everyday conversations. For those who want to join the discussions, there is no shortage of books that give detailed background and context on the subject. The question is, which to read?

Science News staff members have reviewed several books published this year to guide you to which ones you might like. Many of these offerings address perhaps the most pressing question: With limited time to act, what's the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert the most dire impacts of climate change?
The Future We Choose
Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Knopf, $23
Four and a half years after 195 nations agreed to limit global warming by 2100 to 2 degrees Celsius, the world has fallen behind on its commitments ( SN: 11/26/19). But all is not yet lost, two architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement argue in this bracing call to arms aimed at those who fear it's too late. Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac paint two side-by-side visions of the world in 2050: a hot, pollution-choked hellscape rife with water wars and nationalist paranoia, and a hopeful, forested world of high-speed trains, energy efficiency and community-based agriculture.

Achieving that second future requires a mind-set shift away from pessimism and the idea of resource availability as a zero-sum game, Figueres and Rivett-Carnac say. They offer 10 general actions for readers to take, including avoiding fossil fuels and engaging in politics. The final chapter provides a template for actions readers can take today, this week and all the way out to 2050.

In this imagined history of the next 30 years, meteorologist Eric Holthaus plots a path toward zero carbon emissions ( SN: 1/31/20). We won't get there with solar panels and electric vehicles alone, he says, criticizing those as market-based mechanisms that reinforce the status quo. Instead, success requires a political and economic revolution. Holthaus imagines natural disasters as catalysts for collective action, global systems for climate migration and reparations, and economies driven by human need rather than want.
The 100% Solution Solomon Goldstein-Rose
Melville House, $17.99
Critics have long dismissed such a vision, arguing that it would upend society, cost too much and require an ambitious global agreement that seems politically impossible. But those arguments ignore the fact that doing nothing to address climate change will be even costlier and more politically damaging down the road, Holthaus says. (And those criticisms may be crumbling now as the coronavirus pandemic shows societies engaged in expensive and disruptive collective action for the public good.)
A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety
Sarah Jaquette Ray
Univ. of California, $16.95
The book ends with a series of tips, exercises and checklists to help readers imagine this new future and create their own action plans.

After running a campaign focused on climate change, Solomon Goldstein-Rose was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature in 2016 at the age of 22. He served one term and then turned to climate activism full time. In this concise book, he draws on his experiences to draft a five-pillar framework for reaching negative carbon emissions by 2050.

Because most new emissions come from rapidly developing countries, solutions must be economically viable for everyone, Goldstein-Rose points out. He argues that a "World War II-style mobilization" of technology development can get us there. Central to his plans, which he claims are feasible to achieve in the next 30 years, are scaling up nuclear power, improving battery storage and rolling out "greener" industrial processes.

If thinking about climate change makes you (a) depressed, (b) worried, (c) guilty or (d) all of the above, this bookmight be for you. Drawing on her expertise as an environmental humanities scholar, Sarah Jaquette Ray outlines how environmentally conscious citizens can cultivate a healthy mind-set and strong interpersonal relationships for taking action on climate change.
Beyond Global Warming
Syukuro Manabe and Anthony J. Broccoli
Princeton Univ., $35
To deal with climate change-related fear and sadness, she suggests mindfulness practices. To avoid burnout, she advocates setting attainable goals, like reducing personal emissions or collaborating on environmental projects with local community members.
Click the book titles or covers to buy from Amazon.com. Science News is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Please see our for more details.
Emotional intelligence is important for engaging with other people's feelings about climate change, too. Ray reminds readers that people react to information based more on how they feel about the messenger than the message. So prioritize building trust and common ground - perhaps by focusing on local issues or framing climate change as a public health problem - over simply winning debates with skeptics.

Paleobiologist Hope Jahren's succinct examination of "how we got to climate change" is both sweeping and straightforward. Ranging across human history, and everywhere from Mesopotamia to Minnesota, the book explores how the same ingenuity and industrious spark that has allowed humans to squeeze ever more food and energy from the Earth also set the stage for the current climate crisis.

Jahren relays the enormous scale of human consumption conversationally: "Since 1969 the nations of the globe have burned enough coal to fill a grave the size of Texas." But she's frank about who exactly is responsible for the lion's share of this consumption and its consequences. Again and again, she ties the developed world's insatiable thirst for more to our imperiled planet.

The end of the book touches on several big interventions that might curb climate change, such as mass tree planting or geoengineering, but Jahren argues these won't fix the root cause of climate change: overconsumption. So she offers practical actions individuals can take that all fall under the umbrella of using less and sharing more.

In 1894, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius made a startling announcement. His calculations suggested that a two- or threefold increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide could alter global temperatures on a scale comparable to the difference between cold glacial and warm interglacial periods.

Climate scientists have since devised increasingly complex models to understand humans' impact on climate, weaving together observations and equations to simulate changes on land, in the oceans and in the atmosphere ( SN: 1/7/20). Climate modeler Syukuro Manabe and atmospheric scientist Anthony J. Broccoli describe the evolution of these models.

Packed with data and graphs, and based on a graduate course taught by Manabe, the book is not a light read. But it gives an in-depth, science-rich understanding of this crucial field.

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These 6 books explore climate change science and solutions

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Science News staff read recent books about climate change to help guide you to which ones you might like.

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The economics of climate change and tech innovation win U.S. pair a Nobel

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Climate change and tech innovations inspired the new Nobel Memorial Prize winners in Economic Sciences.

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A big analysis of environmental data strengthens the case for plant-based diets

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A new study calculates the bonus for the planet of choosing more foods from plants.

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Joaquín Rodríguez-López designs batteries for a sustainable energy future

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Electrochemist Joaquín Rodríguez-López is finding better ways to store wind and solar power.

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How to cut your food's climate footprint - BBC Reel

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As the world's population rises, the impact of food on the climate is going up. Fuelled by resource-draining practices and our increasing demand for environmentally-damaging meat, what we eat has never mattered more to the planet's health.

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People have created different a number of different ways to capture energy from the wind, sun and Earth. Renewable energy sources include solar energy, wind energy, geothermal energy, biomass energy, hydroelectric energy and more.

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Previously the staff writer for physical sciences at Science News, Maria Temming is the assistant editor at Science News Explores. She has bachelor's degrees in physics and English, and a master's in science writing.

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A redesign for zinc-air batteries could make them rechargeable | Science News

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Swapping out the electrolyte in zinc-air batteries helps these next-gen power sources last longer.

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In a climate crisis, is geoengineering worth the risks?

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Some scientists say the world needs to reconsider some human-made ideas to cool the climate as dire warnings about the looming crisis ramp up.