I’m still not sure how I will disseminate the information I have compiled, but I’m going to just jump in. At the moment I’m fascinated with soil regeneration as a way to capture carbon and solve problems like raging wildfires, till farming/factory farming climate damage and that pesky “cows are the problem” myth (spoiler alert, it’s not the cows it’s the factory farming). There will definitely be Wooly Mammoth information and beaver rewilding to restore areas.
I’m going to embed some brief videos interspersed in this post so you can see where I’m headed.
Carbon Cowboys – Roots So Deep is the same team that produced Cabon Nation they bring all the feelz with this series of videos.
I also have sources on the latest in battery technology, issues and solutions to battery recycling, new wind turbine news, and of course everyone’s favorite, the major leaps in EV range and charging infrastructure.
I’m adding this one because we were talking about solid state batteries in the last Climate post.
I will mostly be posting videos – because they are short and easy to digest. Plus if you head over to the Youtube link, there are always resources in the description, so you can delve deeper. I’ll post article links when I find them exciting and accessible. I will also post links to resources for climate solutions.
I’m not going to pretend any of these posts are going to be a deep dive into technical explanations, that’s not what I’m trying to do.
This is the trailer for a PBS series available on YouTube. I’ll have to be creative with this one because it won’t even let me embed the trailer (boo!), but it’s worth the click-over. Click on the image to see the video on YouTube.
My goal, and it’s pretty simple, is to highlight all the good people out there working on how to solve the climate crisis. No one has a silver bullet, some ideas are going to go bust, while others will probably surprise even those who worked on developing them.
I am trying to counter our natural doomism, which leaves us frozen in apathy and unable to fight the good fight. And speaking of fighting, we may have a climate activist weighing in on things we can do and helping break down the IRA benefits available. I’m not going to fully commit him right now, as his life is cra-cra and I’d rather have him fighting IRL if that’s all he has time for at the moment. But I welcome any contribution he has time to make.
Compare and contrast: Ducks in the rain and dogs on a rainy day
Critter photos because I know what you guys really want
With all that being said, I’m not going to police the comments (I don’t have the energy) but if they devolve into “that will never work” “I know better than whomever” or “it’s all hopeless” I will stop posting these. It’s difficult enough to find time to put posts together only to have the discussion derailed by the third comment.
Other than that, I’m looking forward to sharing good news stories of climate activism and solutions.
For today, this is an open thread. If you want to share any links to good climate news info in the comments, I’ll check them out.
Balloon Juice – It’s That Time Again (Daytime Peeps Version)
glc
As it’s an open thread I’ll share an unrelated article which caught my eye.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trump-proofing-europe
TBone
Thank you for doing this and somewhat OT (but really Women of Earth) Comment of the Day (so far):
“Operation Swift Kick in the ’Nads: it’s on.”
Now that’s off my chest, I can concentrate on other Good news!
TBone
I subscribe to this to counter doomerism and they frequently have good climate news. I’ll have to check through it:
https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews/
See: ‘Planet’ section.
Yutsano
Solid state batteries are going to happen. There may be several solutions to the conundrums in the video (yes I did my homework and watched it) but it doesn’t seem so insurmountable that these batteries start showing up in the late 2020s. I only hope we can get other technologies like true atmospheric carbon capture and the death of coal by then.
RevRick
Doomerism is actually a reactionary force, which only benefits those who have vested interest in perpetuating the way things are.
Peke Daddy
@TBone: Another place to go for news on solutions. http://Rmi.org
Yutsano
Here’s some (unrelated) good news: the child tax credit might be getting restored to its regular amount.
TBone
Our family farm goes back generations (I have very old, crumbly tintype photos of my ancestors, and one not so very old of two ancestors on the front porch with a McKinley campaign sign) and alas it was recently sold. My grandfather (taught high school biology for 40 years) and my great uncle (Lt. Col. Army Corps of Engineers) both gardened up to their last days and made sure to pass down much knowledge and wisdom of the old ways and how important it is for kids to know about all the things. I also volunteered at Ridley Creek State Park Colonial Plantation (living history museum) waaaay back when before it became too snooty. I learned SO much, from planting fish guts with the maize, to spinning wool and dipping candles, I could go on and on, but the passing down the generations of knowledge to those coming up is so very, very important is my point. God Bless Michele Obama!
TaMara
@TBone: I should add this to my compiled info to share, but when the Soviet Union fell, Cuba was basically shoved back into the 1800s for their farms. No equipment, no fertilizers, no pesticides They went back to all the old techniques and besides having some of the most sought-after organics in the area to export, they found that once the runoff stopped the coral reefs began to regenerate.
I should look up some links, but the rain has turned to heavy snow and I need to tend to that mess. But when I was in Havana they had an entire display of the accomplishments.
Ryan
“No one has a silver bullet, some ideas are going to go bust”
Elmo could have gone bust. America bailed him out, and he fared better than Solyndra.
Ruckus
I know that there is a lot we can do for the environment and we are actually doing a lot of it, but I’m going to ask the question – How much is out of our control? The number of humans on the planet is not going to become smaller without a lot of damage to something/someone. We can mitigate some but I ask the question – How much better can we make it without drastically changing the way we live and without wiping out a significant number of humans? I’d bet not so much. The world seems like we could make it easier, better but then ride the LA transit train system with me and see the number of humans that don’t seem to have a place to live, or the number of retired people that are living longer. What will this world look like if we do nothing, or if we do everything that some see as the least possible? I’m not saying I have an answer, I don’t, but shouldn’t we at least consider this from an angle other than that of the privileged?
TaMara
From Rain to Snow: A Duck Story
Kirk
@Ruckus: I think we /can/ control a lot, but we are not /willing/ to control those things.
Doing so requires embracing both delayed gratification and a willingness to consider others at least as important as oneself – particularly others who will be around long after we’re gone.
“Mine, now, all of it,” is instead the dominant mantra.
Redshift
@Ryan: Solyndra (and the fact that it still gets mentioned in news stories) bugs me to this day. The whole point of the program that funded it it was to give a chance to ideas that had potential but were too risky to get market funding. If some of them hadn’t failed, it would have meant they were doing it wrong.
TBone
@TaMara: way cool 😎
TerryC
Thank you. My life is lived on 17.5 acres of mostly previously tilled and farmed land just inside the Ann Arbor school district. Since 2013 we have planted more than 16,000 trees to begin reforesting those parts of the land. I don’t know how to post images here but the before and after photos are wonderful. It’s the best feeling to be able to be out there almost every day doing something fun and healthy but also important.
TBone
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxep-9BQ6Uo
TBone
@Peke Daddy: sign up complete, thank you!
TBone
@TerryC: thank you! There are a lot of orgs that will plant a tree or provide seed or necessary animals to those in need for a small donation. My aunt made such a donation in my name for a gift at my request.
TBone
Geothermal heat (and cool) and micro hydro energy production are topics I hold dear as well. I read that leaps and bounds are being made with regard to drilling for geothermal heating, they can now do it in previously impossible spots. Can’t remember where I read that.
Quadrillipede
Kind of curious about how doomerism overlaps or interacts with learned helplessness.
I don’t think they have to be exactly the same thing, but the end result is pretty similar.
NotMax
FYI.
TaMara
@TerryC: Please send me the photos at whats4dinnersolutions (at) live (dot) com and I’ll include them in future posts! Also any info you want to share! This is great
Redshift
@Ruckus: The thing that makes me cautiously optimistic about climate change these days is (ironically) economics as a tool. There are lots of things that could be done, ways people ought to change how they live to address the problem, but we all know you’re not going to be able to convince enough individuals to do them.
But government policies that work through economic forces have the power to change lots of behavior whether or not people are doing it for the “right” reason. We’re extraordinarily lucky that renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels; if it wasn’t we’d probably be screwed. But since we do have the the prospect of a future that is better and cheaper, we just have to have government policies to get us over the hump of changing over (and pay the costs of that for those who can’t.)
And yeah, it sucks that in this country, EVs are starting out as luxury vehicles and SUVs because that’s what’s most profitable, but other car innovations have started the same way and come down to affordable vehicles (and that’s an American thing, there are plenty of other countries where that’s not true.) But the benefits of the transition aren’t just for the privileged — cutting the pollution from fossil fuel use and especially production will benefit the less privileged way more. And TaMara’s previous post had info about programs in the IRA to bring clean tech to the non-privileged, which needs to be done to get through this.
JeanneT
I’ve been watching the Carbon Cowboy short vids for a while now: the approach they’re trying makes so much sense and seems to benefit every critter involved. I hope the research bears it out.
TaMara
@JeanneT: And while we wait for that data, it sure seems like the economics works out in favor of those involved.
Quadrillipede
If this BBC Earth Science video is accurate, we’re losing our planetary reserves of gold, helium, nitrogen (that isn’t N₂ gas) and phosphorous, at varying rates (either into space or the sea), so any long term solutions will need to get better at not doing that:
TBone
@NotMax: I live an hour away from State College and frequently drive through our State Forests. This past year I came home in tears one day, drought was so bad and we even had a wildfire burn down the side of a mountain here last summer. Rain distribution pattern-change over the entire planet is one of the so unfair things to poor nations and poor nature WRT to climate change. Trees “coughing” aaaarrrggghhhh
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: One thing to understand that people of our generation have a hard time internalizing is that world population growth is rapidly decelerating. We used to think that wouldn’t happen without some kind of draconian punitive measures, or letting global catastrophes run their course… but it is happening, mostly because when societies reach a certain fairly minimal comfort level, women don’t want to (or have to) pump out a dozen babies any more. Current projections have world population reaching a maximum somewhere between 10 and 11 billion late in the 21st century, and then declining.
Now, that’s still a lot of people and they can do a lot of damage. And declining populations have their own risks. But the idea that growth will continue to exponentiate until the great crash happens doesn’t seem to be the case any more.
TBone
@Redshift: agree 👍
NotMax
@TBone
Remembering how sad it was to see what the gypsy moths wrought in the forested Poconos. Could at times actually hear the sound of them in their multitudes munching.
SomeRandomGuy
Peke Daddy
@Ruckus: Think about what humans can do as the trimtab, a smaller rudder which allows a larger rudder, too big for humans to move by itself, to be moved.
Quadrillipede
I suppose that having solid technical proposals for mitigating climate change but a lack of political will, is a better place to be than having full agreement on the necessity, but no idea how to make the science of decarbonization happen at all.
Peke Daddy
@SomeRandomGuy: Small modular renewables and storage are way cheaper and far more quickly implemented than nuclear energy of any kind. Efficiency is even cheaper and faster. This is what it can do.
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/02/the-us-added-1-2-million-evs-to-the-grid-last-year-electricity-use-went-down/
Marcopolo
I am going to reup (from an earlier climate thread) that Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future” is a great fiction/non-fiction look at what we can do to get out of the hole we’ve dug. He did tons of research/talking to experts so it is very grounded in reality. The book starts off with a horrific event where a heat wave leads to a lot of folks perishing. That’s the catalyst for creating The Ministry for the Future through the UN because there needs to be an agency/outfit/group representing/arguing for the needs of future generations & life on earth that doesn’t have a voice in the current system (things like plants and animals and ecosystems). I highly recommend it though it is hard to get through that first inciting event.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
I am a long term optimist though I suspect things will get worse for the rest of my life (like 2050 if I live right). As some folks have mentioned, one of the biggest near term challenges is going to be making sure folks in the lower economic strata get the assistance they need to deal with climate related problems.
West of the Rockies
Excellent post! And excellent link, TBone!
karen gail
So we gave up one use plastic bags and now it is nearly impossible to find anything that isn’t in plastic bottle; at one time mayonnaise jars were a source of canning jars that were given away without expectation of being returned.
We could go back to glass bottles and jars; but then plastic makers wouldn’t be getting richer.
TaMara
@karen gail: Weight is also an issue with glass vs plastic – when you break down the petroleum, you have to figure in the cost of transport.
There are some resources out there that do just that, I’ll try and track them down.
karen gail
@TBone: Rare those who still have family farms; in my family alone one was “lost” when state decided that the county road in front of farm was “perfect” place for interstate and flat area house and barn were on was “perfect” place for rest area. One was organic with descendants of original homesteaders, golf course replaced the farm across the way; lost organic certification due to chemicals used on golf course. The one that hurts the most since I spent my childhood learning basic skills from great grandparents, the city just continued to grow and the land was taxed at subdivision rates while still a working farm.
TBone
@NotMax: yeah, I still deal with an overwhelming number of black flies because of that! They’re EVERYWHERE from Spring through Autumn but don’t bother me. Hubby feels different about it though. They give the cats sumthin’ to do also too.
TBone
@Marcopolo: the first 2 chapters are intense.
NotMax
@karen gail
Still a working farm/museum in Queens, NY. As noted at the link, “since 1697.”
;)
TBone
@West of the Rockies: thank you 😊
TBone
@karen gail: I’m sorry. I know how much that truly SUCKS.
Barry
@TerryC: “Thank you. My life is lived on 17.5 acres of mostly previously tilled and farmed land just inside the Ann Arbor school district.”
[ears perk up]. Native here, currently living so close to Huron High that I can hear the football games.
Geminid
Got scale? From a January 25 article at the Elektrek news site:
This project was built on private land and land belonging to Edwards Air Force Base. It features 1.9 million First Solar PV panels and 120,720 LG Chem, Samsung and BYD long-duration energy storage batteries connected by 400 miles of wire. Customers will include among others, the City of San Jose, Pacific Gas and Electric and Starbucks.
Dan B
@Marcopolo: Direct assistance for lower income people is vital. We got Solar PV and Ductless heat pumps in 2010. I had the cash to do so. The solar has been paid off and I get $2,000 per year. Most houses in this neighborhood are identical but only one other, out of 60, has solar. Seattle has run out of clean energy so will City Light invest in solar and wind for local homes, businesses, and institutions? It’s looking like wind from eastern Washington and Montana which requires hundreds of miles of new transmission lines. How many local projects could be financed? How many low income families could get $2,000+ per year?
TerryC
@Barry: I’m diagonally SW at the far end of the district close to Saline.
Quadrillipede
I watched the solid state battery video. As a non-car owner, I was slightly nonplussed by the extremely car-centric focus. But I guess batteries specified for cars ought to have wider operating temperature ranges etc, so these batteries would need little modification to be useful for storing energy from (carbon-neutral) solar, hydroelectric and wind generators, so that the stored energy can be released when the generators aren’t operational. (A solar support battery would only need a large enough capacity to store 10-14 hours worth of energy for it to plausibly put out a 24-hour energy supply during the summer, wind/hydro probably need larger batteries/longer storage due to less regularity of charging cycles.)
Maybe some kind of hybrid solar/wind/hydro/battery plant could be useful for some applications.
Now I’m off to try to figure why they’re using Lithium as the cathode (maybe it’s because its the lightest metal element, and ionizes at a lower energy than any other metal would…)
Dan B
@Quadrillipede: There are lots of exciting battery and / or energy storage systems that are too heavy to be optimal for transport. Sodium batteries are one that’s slightly heavier than Lithium and Sodium is readily available. They don’t catch fire like Lithium Ion batteries and cost less. There are others. And there are lots of articles and videos.
Matt McIrvin
@Peke Daddy: Nuclear advocates keep insisting there’s some level of decarbonization at which we’ll need nuclear as the reliable baseload supply that everything else is built on. It might still be true.
But that level keeps getting more extreme–people used to think that solar and wind couldn’t be more than a few percent of power generation without their intermittency fatally destabilizing the grid, but it seems like it can be way more than that now. I think we may still need it at some point. Right now, nuclear isn’t going anywhere because it’s not fiscally advantageous, not because of political opposition.
KBS
@TaMara: Thanks so much for these posts! I’m doing what I can locally, and I look for positive solutions wherever I can.
@Marcopolo: I loved Ministry for the Future. I guess the first chapter is rough for a lot of people; it didn’t phase me because I already worry about events at that scale.
cain
@TBone: wasn’t the fish guts thing the pilgrims learned from the natives ?
Geminid
@Quadrillipede: I noticed that some of the 120,000 batteries employed in the Davis Sanborn project reported on at #47 come from Chinese EV giant BYD.
Scientists and engineers are working on sodium cathode batteries, trying to bring them up to the efficiency of lithium batteries. The sodium batteries will be heavier but would still be good for stationary applications, and sodium is more easily obtained than lithium.
kalakal
I have been an advocate for Salter’s Duck
for many a year. In a typical tale of bureaucratic incompetence and Tory stupidity development was axed in the early 80s. There’s an awful lot of waves in the sea. I’d love to see more work done on that concept
glc
@Marcopolo:
@KBS:
You might want to look at Doctorow’s “The Lost Cause” as well.
Less ambitious (much more narrowly focused, and short) but the authors think along broadly similar lines.
Doctorow doesn’t like the term “optimistic”. He prefers “hopeful.” Whatever one calls it, he and KSR consistently look for ways forward, starting from where we are. (Old joke – “If you want to go there, I wouldn’t start from here.”)
Quadrillipede
This gave me vague memories of seeing a segment of a Tomorrow’s World(?) episode around the time. Seemed pretty cool, but then over the 30 or so years since I kind of lost track of it…
(Although Tories ruining everything is an evergreen political theme.)
KBS
@glc: Thanks, I’ll check it out!
karen gail
@TaMara: I suppose weight might be a strong factor but glass is reusable, I am old enough to remember collecting enough soda bottles to get money to buy myself a cold drink from neighborhood store. We managed for years, though I do admit to not wanting to go back to glass lenses in my glasses since they were so heavy that had groves in ears from weight.
I know that plastic is suppose to be recyclable but most states just put in landfills. Or people just drop plastic bottles anywhere and they end up in lakes, rivers and ocean.
Geminid
@kalakal: A lot of work is being done on wave energy, but at the r&d level. One project is being constructed off the Oregon coast by Oregon State University and the Department of Energy. It features a designated test bed where researchers can anchor their wsve energy henerators, with cables leading back to on-shore testing facilities. There is much more being done elsewhere.
Tidal energy is being harnessed for electrical generation already. One of the biggest projects is in Scotland. Fabricators built a 500 ton turbine in Dundee and floated it to a mooring in the Tay(?) River. The special barge used for this operation was the first “ship” built in Dundee in decades.
Bill Arnold
@TBone:
The USA Department of Energy has been doing some of the pushing on Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) This is a useful introduction:
The Future of Enhanced Geothermal Systems in the United States (PDF, 23 slides, Lauren Boyd, Senior Advisor – Geothermal Technologies Office (part of the USA DOE), September 28, 2023)
It’s basically using the (natural) means that also makes helium a renewable resource, if you want 10s of millions of years; radioactive decay of long-half-life radioactive isotopes.
It’s potentially a very large amount of very reliable baseload power, available potentially in much of the worlld. An alternative to nuclear power if one is concerned about long stretches of bad weather for wind/solar, or winter at high latitudes. One advantage is that energy companies that currently drill for oil or do drilling for fracking could drill instead for hot rock, kilometers down.
Geminid
@Bill Arnold: Between developing geothermal wells and exploring for geologic hydrogen, there will be a lot of deep drilling going on. If I was an investor I might be looking at drilling equipment manufacturers. People will keep drilling for oil and natural gas for the next ten years anyway.
Chris T.
@Geminid:
Yeah, but how many megawatt-hours?
Whenever you read these things, think “mph” wherever you see “MW”. This car goes 875 mph! That’s really fast! This battery stores three thousand mph! Wait, what?
Do they mean the battery can supply 3 GW of energy for five seconds, or do they mean it can supply, say, 900 MW of energy for about 3 hours? Watt-hours are a “distance” unit, and watts are a “speed” unit. So, you can go 875 watts (mph), that’s great, but if you can only keep it up for a few seconds, you’re not going to make it from New York to LA.
Chris T.
@Dan B:
You mean $2k/yr in avoided electric-usage charges? That’s not bad at all, about $167 per month.
I’m not that far north of you (Bellingham-ish) but our house is in a heavily-shaded forest-y bit so at least at the moment, solar PV doesn’t pencil out here. With the panel prices dropping and electric rates rising, though, maybe at some point…
(I put 5.5 kW of CEC-rating, or about 6.5 kW “raw”, of panels on the Oakland house, which I’m sure is still going strong and at California electric rates will easily pay for itself many times over.)
Geminid
@Chris T.: I’m guessing the folks at Electrek are aware of these issues, and their reporter may even address them in this article. If they do not and you are really interested, you can probably find the answers to these questions by researching this particular project or projects like it.
MomSense
@karen gail:
I am not a mayo person but my mom and kids are. I make small batches of it myself in one of the many glass jars I already have. It’s so easy to make delicious mayonnaise. I use an immersion blender which fits in the jar and you don’t have to worry about slowly incorporating the olive oil.
Doris H.
Really appreciate the information! Great to have hope on this issue.
nickdag
I love the purpose of these posts! I’m glad you do them.
I’m also particularly interested in energy, so the battery resources are appreciated.
Some other front pager linked to this the other day, and I encourage everyone to take a look at this wonderful slide deck. While there’s some bad news in it, there’s a lot more really exciting & positive news. Twitter was all aflutter about this the other day. Lots of interesting comments and highlights out there.
https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations