If the images of wildfire decimating millions of acres of prime forest, record-breaking tornados sweeping through unexpected regions in the wrong season wreaking havoc, a horrific day+ frozen stoppage on the I-95, more mega-hurricanes than we have ever experienced and seemingly never-ending drought on our prime farmland are not enough, stay tuned; it gets a whole lot worse from here. Mixing the above with a roiling ebb and flow pandemic and U.S. political instability that actually threatens the survivability of the nation, and you can see the lovely mess at the beginning of the third decades of the 21st century. And no, record precipitation in December was, rather literally, only a drop in our “we need water desperately” bucket. It’s easy to forget about the mastodon in the room as the worlds number one priority, far and away: climate change.
Unfortunately, it cannot be relegated solely to a few bigger nations, although that is where most of the carbon effluents are released by the careless greed of mankind. Alternative energy is not replacing traditional sources fast enough to make the difference the planet needs. We’re even seeing new coal plants coming online in China. Inasmuch as it is quantitively clear that the worst man-caused carbon emissions are generated by a relatively small “worst of the worst” number of polluters, containing and shutting down these obvious sources are a good first step. See my December 6th Coal Me Irresponsible and August 5th Demon Coal blogs.
Inasmuch as alternative energy is unlikely to meet this planet’s expected power demands, we do have to look at demon nuclear energy more realistically. My May 23rd Carbon-Based Emissions Suck blog addressed a ground-up redesign of liquid sodium-based nuclear reactor, being developed with a significant investment from Microsoft founder, Bill Gates. Safer, more efficient, and capable of generating less nuclear waste. Very different from the unstable sodium-based reactors of old, which generated this recent criticism from Los Angeles Times OpEd contributor, Michael Hiltzik (January 6th): “Far from an advanced new technology, sodium-cooled reactors date from the very dawn of the nuclear power age. They were considered as an alternative to water-cooled reactors for submarine power plants, for example, by Adm. Hyman Rickover, the founder of America’s nuclear navy.
“Rickover, whose rigorous standards for technology and crew training made the nuclear navy a success, ordered a prototype sodium reactor for the submarine Seawolf. Almost instantly, the technology demonstrated its flaws… While the Seawolf was still at the dock, the reactor sprung a leak. ‘It took us three months, working 24 hours a day, to locate and correct’ the leak, Rickover told a congressional committee in 1957.” But that was 65 years ago. Current technology has rendered most of those arguments moot. Still, Hiltzik tells us, there are “93 reactors currently in operation in the U.S. — reactors in which a radioactive core heats water, producing steam to drive electricity-generating turbines” – including California’s perilously located Diablo Canyon facility that sits between San Francisco and Los Angeles on a maze of recently discovered serious earthquake fault lines. See also my May 27th Not My Fault – The Nuclear Option blog.
But generating electrical power, using alternative energy, is going to be insufficient no matter how rapidly we are able to deploy the necessary technologies… and we know we are way behind anyway. Some environmentally friendly programs really seem to make us think we are making a difference… but in reality, not much. For example, the benefits of so-called “carbon credits” – selling tax credits generated by efficient companies to companies that cannot or will not meet carbon-limiting goals – are at best questionable. See my April 17th Laughing All the Way to the Carbon Bank blog. When we shove effluents from burning coat underground for future generations to deal with, we really should allow that practice create a notion of “clean coal,” which simply does not commercially exist. Underground carbon storage may be an ugly necessity, for now.
No, we have to go beyond controlling carbon emissions; we need to take steps – even beyond preventing the loss of forests and sea plants – to remove carbon from our air. There are new technologies that can accomplish that reality, but the plants are big and expensive. “The world’s largest facility dedicated to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere [came online in September] in Iceland, a major milestone for the nascent direct air capture industry.
“Constructed by the Swiss company Climeworks AG with support from Microsoft Corp., Swiss Re and other prominent corporate customers, the landmark facility [Pictured above] is expected to pull 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually and store it permanently underground.” ClimateWire on eeNews.net, September 7th. Back to shoving the effluents underground. But there is a more ubiquitous architectural approach to carbon removal that just might catch on and take us closer to where we need to be. Adele Peters, writing for the January 8th FastCompany.com, featured one such solution:
“‘When we think about direct air capture today . . . we think of these very large-scale industrial facilities, which we know are going to be necessary in order to meet the scale of the climate crisis and to meet our carbon removal goals,’ says Giana Amador, cofounder and policy director of Carbon180 [a nonprofit focused on carbon removal]. ‘But we also think there’s a role for smaller-scale innovative projects that are integrated into communities.’…
“The nonprofit considered how [modestly priced] equipment, which uses large fans to pull air into filters that extract the CO2, could be added to a neighborhood park, for example, or built into a grocery store running on rooftop solar power. In an apartment building, the technology could be added into the building’s heating and ventilation system to filter CO2 out of the indoor air, helping to improve indoor air quality. Captured CO2 could potentially be used in an on-site greenhouse to grow local food.”
The answers require a mixture of severe national priorities, accelerated implementation of alternative energy, and a combination of macro and micro solutions deployed everywhere. Grassroots solutions like: solar panels and wind turbines where we can, geothermal and ocean-motion capture power generation where obvious, and local carbon removal technology where feasible (and certainly on new commercial building). Time is not on our side.
I’m Peter Dekom, and climate change needs an aggressive and ubiquitous effort from all of us, from top to bottom, to stop the acceleration of horribles we increasingly face every day.
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