Carbon emission reduction: News and technology

[macdoc]

remember, solar panels require a lot of stuff that is hard to mine and very polluting, and I don't know if old panels can be recycled.

such as??
are you confusing them with lithium batteries?

What is the main raw material for solar panels?
silicon
Most solar panels are made of silicon, which is the main component in natural beach sand. Silicon is abundantly available, making it the second most available element on Earth. However, converting sand into high grade silicon comes at a high cost and is an energy intensive process.27 Mar 2024

What are solar panels filled with?
Solar panels - 20 things you need to know | GreenMatch
The vast majority of available PV modules use silicon as their main component. This is good because there is plenty of silicon – it is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust. The silicon cells manufactured from one ton of sand produce as much electricity as burning 500,000 tons of coal.

perhaps pick another target to kvetch about ....do you have ANY idea how much sand is in the Gobi Desert.

[JimC]

Better that the parasites they carry go extinct. The mossies themselves (no matter how annoying they are to us when they bite) are an integral part of various ecosystems.

When I was younger, I could hear the high pitched whine of a mosquito. Now (at least without my hearing aids), no chance. Same with bats on a summer's evening...

[Brian Peacock]

But bats don't wear hearing aids!

[pErvinalia]

remember, solar panels require a lot of stuff that is hard to mine and very polluting, and I don't know if old panels can be recycled.

such as??
are you confusing them with lithium batteries?

What is the main raw material for solar panels?
silicon
Most solar panels are made of silicon, which is the main component in natural beach sand. Silicon is abundantly available, making it the second most available element on Earth. However, converting sand into high grade silicon comes at a high cost and is an energy intensive process.27 Mar 2024

What are solar panels filled with?
Solar panels - 20 things you need to know | GreenMatch
The vast majority of available PV modules use silicon as their main component. This is good because there is plenty of silicon – it is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust. The silicon cells manufactured from one ton of sand produce as much electricity as burning 500,000 tons of coal.

perhaps pick another target to kvetch about ....do you have ANY idea how much sand is in the Gobi Desert.

Best not to take Crumple seriously. His posts are basically performance "art".

[Svartalf]

try to produce electricity from sunlight with pure silicon.... it has to be doped with rare earths and such to become photoelectric, and while the amount per squarefoot may seem negligible, overall production requires tons of the stuff

[Brian Peacock]

Rich countries could raise $5tn of climate finance a year, study says

Rich countries could raise five times the money that poor countries are demanding in climate finance, through windfall taxes on fossil fuels, ending harmful subsidies and a wealth tax on billionaires, research has shown.

Developing nations are asking for at least $1tn (£750bn) a year of public funds to help them cut greenhouse gases and cope with the impacts of extreme weather.

Rich countries are mooting potential sums much lower than this, in conventional climate finance such as low-interest loans from the World Bank and similar institutions. But they are also discussing potential new forms of finance, such as a levy on shipping and on frequent flyers. Brazil, which currently has the presidency of the G20, is pushing for a wealth tax of about 2% on billionaires.

Research by the pressure group Oil Change International, published on Tuesday, shows that rich countries could generate $5tn a year from a combination of wealth and corporate taxes, and a crackdown on fossil fuels.

A wealth tax on billionaires could generate $483bn globally, while a financial transaction tax could raise $327bn. Taxes on sales of big technology, arms and luxury fashion would be another $112bn, and redistributing 20% of public military spending would be worth $454bn if implemented around the world.

Stopping subsidies to fossil fuels would free up $270bn of public money in the rich world, and about $846bn globally. Taxes on fossil fuel extraction would be worth $160bn in the rich world, and $618bn globally.

Laurie van der Burg, the public finance lead at Oil Change International, said: “Last year, countries agreed to phase out fossil fuels. Now it’s time for rich countries to pay up to turn that promise into action. There is no shortage of public money available for rich countries to pay their fair share for climate action, at home and abroad. They can unlock trillions in grants and grant-equivalent climate finance by ending fossil fuel handouts, making polluters pay, and changing unfair financial rules.”

Alejandra López Carbajal, the director of Transforma Climate Diplomacy, said: “There is an attempt by developed countries to frame the new climate finance negotiations in a context of public finance scarcity, while in reality there are enough resources to address the climate crisis.”...

$1tn is about 2% of G7 GDP btw.

[pErvinalia]

Commie!

[Brian Peacock]

[macdoc]

More positive news as UK closes last coal plant but I am suspicious they are burning wood pellets as carbon neutral and that's not correct.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-30/ ... /104378430
good read
snip

if I was going to play devil's advocate to my arguments that I'm proposing here, wood pellet, biomass, and biomass in general in the European Union is a full 60% of what they classify as renewable energy.

snip

And then secondly, when it comes down to comparative emissions, published scientific studies have told us that burning biomass for power emits about 20% more carbon than coal. That is a very, very, very conservative number. And it's three times the amount produced by a natural gas plant per kilowatt of electricity.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal- ... rning-wood

pretty scammy all around.

[Brian Peacock]

More positive news as UK closes last coal plant but I am suspicious they are burning wood pellets as carbon neutral and that's not correct.

indeed.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Maybe this will make a difference, or maybe it's a mirage.

'Capturing carbon from the air just got easier'

Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide humans produce is key to lowering atmospheric greenhouse gases and slowing global warming, but today's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases.

Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million (ppm), 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preexisting global averages.

A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions. The porous material—a covalent organic framework (COF)—captures CO2 from ambient air without degradation by water or other contaminants, one of the limitations of existing DAC technologies.

"We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air—just outdoor air—into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO2. Everything," said Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper that appeared online Oct. 23 in the journal Nature.

Yeah, the paper is behind a paywall.

[Brian Peacock]

Need more info - like the energy requirements and base resources needed to produce it, overall cost per Kt/Carbon, and can the tech be scaled quickly.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Need more info - like the energy requirements and base resources needed to produce it, overall cost per Kt/Carbon, and can the tech be scaled quickly.

Indeed, the possible 'mirage' part. I've been looking for a preprint of the paper or some other open access version. Not to say that the paper would provide the important particulars you mention.

[macdoc]

The article is quite detailed enough and the take away is terrific. I'm quite confident in the inventor

"I am excited about it because there's nothing like it out there in terms of performance. It breaks new ground in our efforts to address the climate problem," he added.

According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO2 from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO2 for storage underground.

UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper's first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.

I'd be most interested in the physical transformation of 200 gm of the material into 20kg of end product...captured carbon.
It releases the carbon at a relatively low temp so the material can be recycled

When 400 ppm CO2 air is pumped through the COF at room temperature (25 °C) and 50% humidity, it reaches half capacity in about 18 minutes and is filled in about two hours. However, this depends on the sample form and could be speeded up to a fraction a minute when optimized. Heating to a relatively low temperature -- 60 °C, or 140 °F -- releases the CO2, and the COF is ready to adsorb CO2 again. It can hold up to 2 millimoles of CO2 per gram, standing out from other solid sorbents.

[pErvinalia]

Brian won't like that, as it will mean business as usual.