Attention greenhouse gas emitters: There’s a new eye in the sky that will soon be photographing your carbon footprint and selling the images to any and all. It’s a micro-satellite dubbed “Claire” (clear, bright, and clean in French) by its Montreal-based developer, GHGSat. This microwave-oven-sized pollution paparazzo rocketed to a 512-kilometer-high orbit in mid-June care of the Indian Space Agency, with a mission to remotely measure the plumes of carbon dioxide and methane wafting up from myriad sources on Earth’s surface. Claire’s targets include power plants, natural gas fracking fields, rice paddies, and much more—just about any emissions source that someone with a checkbook (corporations, regulators, activists) wants tracked, according to GHGSat president Stéphane Germain. Continue reading “Micro-Satellite Spies on Carbon Polluters”
Does Electrification Really Cause Economic Growth?
Electrification is credited with delivering a seemingly endless list of social and economic goods. Nations that use more power tend to have increased income levels and educational attainment and lower risk of infant mortality, to name but a few. So I was baffled to stumble across a pair of economic analyses on electrification in India and Kenya, posted last month, that cast serious doubt on what has long assumed to be a causal link between the glow of electricity and rural development. “It is difficult to find evidence in the data that electrification is dramatically transforming rural India,” concludes Fiona Burlig, a fourth-year UC Berkeley doctoral student in agricultural and resource economics who coauthored the India study. “In the medium term, rural electrification just doesn’t appear to be a silver bullet for development.” Continue reading “Does Electrification Really Cause Economic Growth?”
Beetles, Cacti, Killer Plants Inspire Efficiency
What do you get when you mix a desert beetle, a pitcher plant, and a cactus? Pick the right parts and you get an extremely slippery surface with an uncanny capacity to condense and collect water, according to research reported today in the journal Nature. The advance could be a big deal for the energy world because, when it comes to energy efficiency, condensation lies somewhere between a necessary evil and a major drag. Nuclear, coal, and thermal solar power plants, for example, require large heat exchangers to condense the steam exiting from their turbines so that they can raise a new round of hotter steam. For other devices, such as wind turbines and refrigerator coils, condensation is the first step towards energy-sapping ice formation. Continue reading “Beetles, Cacti, Killer Plants Inspire Efficiency”
How Paris Happened and Why It Matters
One month after the terror attacks that traumatized Paris, the city has produced a climate agreement that is being hailed as a massive expression of hope. On Monday the U.K. Guardian dubbed the Paris Agreement, “the world’s greatest diplomatic success.” Distant observers may be tempted to discount such effusive language as hyperbole, yet there are reasons to be optimistic that last weekend’s climate deal finally sets the world on course towards decisive mutual action against global climate change. The birthing process clearly sets Paris apart from earlier efforts at global climate action, such as the Kyoto Protocol crafted in 1997. Only last-minute intervention by then U.S. Vice President Al Gore clinched a deal at Kyoto, and its impact faded as major polluters declined to ratify the treaty or dropped out. High-level diplomacy to secure a Paris deal, in contrast, began building in earnest last year with a bilateral climate agreement between U.S. President Barack Obama and China’s Xi Jinping—representing the largest climate polluters. Global buy-in grew over the following 12 months as one nation after another anted in with their own emissions reduction plans.
Paris Talks Face a Credibility Gap
Three weeks before the start of the Paris climate talks, negotiators working to craft an international agreement to curb global greenhouse gas emissions are staring into a wide gulf between what countries are willing to do and what they need to do. Most countries have stepped up with pledges to meaningfully cut carbon emissions or to at least slow the growth of emission totals between 2020 and 2030. However, national commitments fall short of what’s needed to prevent the average global temperature in 2100 from being any more than 2 degrees Celsius warmer than at the start of this century—the international community’s consensus benchmark for climate impact. Worse still, national pledges employ a hodgepodge of accounting methods that include some significant loopholes that ignore important emissions such as leaking methane from U.S. oil and gas production and underreported coal emissions from China. How promised reductions will be verified post-Paris is “a big debate right now and it makes a massive difference in the numbers,” says Jennifer Morgan, global director for the climate program at the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization.
Solar Towers Not Avian Annihilators
Solar power towers have had a reputation as alleged avian vaporizers since preliminary reports of birds being burned in mid-air at California’s Ivanpah solar thermal plant. Their reputation was muddied even more during tests early this year at SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes power tower, whose intense beams of reflected light recently began generating power in Nevada. California public radio station KCET reported that as many as 150 birds were killed during one six-hour test in January. It is obviously upsetting to imagine birds ignited in the name of renewable energy. But avian mortality is a downside common to many modern human creations—including buildings, highways, and powerlines. Full data on bird mortality at Ivanpah, macabre as it might be, shows the death rate to be small and likely of little ecological significance. “The data does support a low level of avian mortalities and hopefully, through adaptive management and deterrence, it will go even lower,” says Magdalena Rodriguez, a senior environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Continue reading “Solar Towers Not Avian Annihilators”
Startup Time for Fukushima’s Frozen Wall
Japan’s TEPCO — operator of the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant — is about to flip the switch on its infamous ‘ice wall’ intended to divert flowing groundwater around its crippled reactors and thus stem groundwater contamination at the site. The widely mischaracterized and maligned installation—which is a barrier of frozen soil rather than a wall of ice—has every chance of delivering the hoped for results, according to radiation cleanup experts at U.S. national laboratories and feedback from initial system tests. “The frozen barrier is going to work,” predicts Brian Looney, senior advisory engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina and co-author of an independent assessment of TEPCO’s frozen barrier. Continue reading “Startup Time for Fukushima’s Frozen Wall”
Peter Fairley 