Solutions for climate change

Started by seafoid, September 26, 2019, 04:30:39 PM

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seafoid

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/26/trees-could-replace-air-con-buildings-around-trees-cooler-study/

Trees should be used to replace air conditioning, a new study by the Forestry Commission has said.
The research, supported by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, showed that areas with many trees were as much as 4 degrees cooler as places in the same city without vegetation.
By following the guidelines and advice published including selecting trees which are best for cooling, and planting them near offices, the researchers found that air conditioning could be reduced in cities by up to 13 per cent, saving £22million a year and reducing the city's carbon footprint.
They pointed to the hot summer of 2018 and argued that residents in cities could have greater comfort during heatwaves if more trees are planted in towns and cities. The Met Office recently predicted that the UK could experience four heatwaves over 30 degrees by 2050.
Scientists found that larger trees with a greater amount of leaf area, dense crowns and high transpiration rates are the best at local cooling.
Research by the University of Reading found that some of the best trees for local cooling in London were the London Plane tree, the Sessile Oak and the Cherry Tree.
These trees should be planted, they said, in an area which means people can walk or  sit under them and benefit from the shade, and additional foliage should be planted in a way which shades homes and buildings from the sun.
Trees help areas cool through a process called evapotranspiration, which is where water produced during respiration evaporates from the leaves of trees, cooling the air.
The Forestry Commission said: "In collaboration with Ricardo Energy & Environment and Uppsala University, Sweden, we have identified which tree characteristics are linked to the greatest cooling and have proposed a methodology that can be used by urban planners and tree managers to compare and select tree species according to their cooling ability.
"With the University of Reading, we have published information on the evaporative cooling provided by urban forests. Using a mathematical model, we explain that air-conditioning unit energy consumption may fall by up to 13 per cent in Inner London due to the evapotranspiration provided by its trees and that this benefit may lead to annual savings of up to £22 million."
The trees selected, they said, should also be drought tolerant as they will be planted in hot and dry areas in inner cities.
The Forestry Commission in Edinburgh contributed to the research,  and found that between 2011 and 2014, air temperatures around Kensington Gardens, were measured finding a cooling of up to 4°C when compared to streets nearby with less vegetation
"f**k it, just score"- Donaghy   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbxG2WwVRjU

seafoid

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/09/25/green-taliban-will-sweep-away-liberal-order-unless-get-grip/

We have cracked the challenge of renewable electricity. Solar is cheaper than coal in most southern latitudes. The distortions of China's Silk Road - Beijing's way of shunting excess industrial capacity abroad - is the chief reason why new coal power plants are still being built in South East Asia. As of late 2019, at '2 cent' solar costs, they are no longer uncompetitive.
The latest auctions for UK offshore wind came in as low as £39.50.  Few had thought this possible even by mid-century. Germany has got the message. It is now ramping up its offshore wind target to 20 gigawatts by 2030.
Energy storage for weeks at a time is in sight at costs that match and may soon undercut gas peaker plants to balance intermittent renewables. Highview Power's 4GW liquid air project in Texas will compete toe-to-toe with cheap US shale gas, providing wind back-up at levelized costs below $100 per megawatt/hour. It is aiming for $50 within a decade.

The latest auctions for UK offshore wind came in as low as £39.50.  Few had thought this possible even by mid-century. CREDIT: TELEGRAPH
"We have a clear path to zero-carbon power from wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal covering 75pc to 85pc of the world's needs. The last 15pc is harder," said Mr Liebreich.
"All road transportation up to 200-300 miles is going electric. By 2025 mayors in European and US cities will have banned diesel vans for deliveries," he said.
Daimler says it has no plans to design an internal combustion engine for its cars ever again. All investment is going into electric vehicles. An era has ended.
Amazon is ordering 100,000 electric vans from Rivian. The bus fleet of every city in China will be electrified by 2025.
The next frontier is green hydrogen made from solar or wind by electrolysis. This is harder to crack but the top US universities are all over it. So are London hedge funds. BNEF thinks the levelized cost will drop to $24 MWh by 2030, and to $15 by 2050.
This opens the way to limitless production of hydrogen for shipping, long-haul road freight, and railways, or for replacing coke in steel making. Once the cost is low enough huge offshore islands could produce limitless amounts of energy from wind and solar for synthetic fuels.
Heating, farming, and land use will be last but nothing is beyond our innovation. The National Farmers Union has plans for net zero emissions in British agriculture by 2040.
There is no necessary macro-economic 'cost' to this great transformation. Economic systems are not like family budgets.
Net zero is better understood as an economic accelerant. A report this week by the UN's economic arm (UNCTAD) estimates the fiscal multiplier of a Global Green New Deal at 1.3 to 1.8. The spending generates a positive economic return. It soaks up excess capital and drives investment.
UNCTAD thinks it could lift annual growth by 1pc in rich countries and 1.5pc to 2pc in developing states. It is what the world needs to escape its post-Lehman low growth malaise. It shifts stimulus from asset bubbles to real economy jobs that reverse inequality. 
Some will dispute the figures. The UN is avowedly Left Keynesian. But this is the discussion we should be having.
Regardless of the climate emergency, we have reached a juncture where fossil fuels are no longer competitive. They will be priced out of the market over the 2020s and 2030s, casualties of Schumpeter's creative destruction. But it will not be fast enough.
We can speed this up with 'regulatory forcing' and changes to the incentive structure, above all Pigovian carbon taxes adapted to each economy. The market will do the rest with swift efficiency.
What we must not do is carry on with business as usual.  As Greta says, our remaining safe carbon budget will be gone in under nine years. That way lies the temptation of green political tyranny.
"f**k it, just score"- Donaghy   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbxG2WwVRjU

Eamonnca1

This one's very relevant to Ireland where animal agriculture produces a bigger share of greenhouse gas emissions than in most EU countries:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612452/how-seaweed-could-shrink-livestocks-global-carbon-hoofprint/

Seaweed could make cows burp less methane and cut their carbon hoofprint
A diet supplemented with red algae could lessen the huge amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cows and sheep, if we can just figure out how to grow enough.
by James Temple
Nov 23, 2018

In a wooden barn on the edge of campus at the University of California, Davis, cattle line up at their assigned feed slots to snatch mouthfuls of alfalfa hay.

This past spring, several of these Holstein dairy cows participated in a study to test a promising path to reducing methane emissions from livestock, a huge source of the greenhouse gases driving climate change. By adding a small amount of seaweed to the animals' feed, researchers found, they could cut the cows' methane production by nearly 60%.

Each year, livestock production pumps out greenhouse gases with the equivalent warming effect of more than 7 gigatons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same global impact as the transportation industry. Nearly 40% of that is produced during digestion: cattle, goats, and sheep belch and pass methane, a highly potent, albeit relatively short-lived, greenhouse gas.

If the reductions achieved in the UC Davis study could be applied across the worldwide livestock industry, it would eliminate nearly 2 gigatons of those emissions annually—about a quarter of United States' total climate pollution each year.

Ermias Kebreab, an animal science professor at UC Davis who leads the work, is preparing to undertake a more ambitious study in the months ahead, evaluating whether smaller amounts of a more potent form of seaweed can cut methane emissions even further. Meanwhile, some businesses have begun to explore what could be the harder challenge: growing it on a massive scale.

"Very, very high reductions"
The problem is the digestive process of cattle and other ruminants, known as enteric fermentation. Microbes in their digestive tracts break down and extract energy from the carbohydrates in fibrous grasses. But the same process also generates hydrogen, which a separate set of microorganisms feed on, producing methane.

About 95% of the gas escapes through the mouth and nostrils, while the rest exits in the other direction.

Researchers have explored a number of potential paths to lowering livestock emissions, including selective breeding (some animals are less gaseous than others), vaccines, microbiome transfers, various dietary supplements, and more efficient feeds—all with varying results, says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, senior agriculture analyst with the Breakthrough Institute, a research center focusing on technological solutions to environmental problems.

But there's growing momentum behind the seaweed approach, thanks to almost shockingly effective results in initial scientific studies. In 2014, Australian researchers found that low doses of a red algae known as Asparagopsis taxiformis virtually eliminated methane production in lab experiments. Field trials with live sheep cut emissions as much as 80%, while the UC Davis experiment, the first on live cattle, showed a 58% reduction on average when a related seaweed made up 1% of their diet.

More milk and meat
Kebreab grew up in Eritrea, an East African country on the coast of the Red Sea that struggles with recurrent droughts and famines. The continual shortage of milk or meat inspired him to study livestock, in the hope of finding sustainable ways to produce more of both.


JAME TEMPLE
Kebreab first began researching the methane problem more than a decade ago. But the recent work on seaweed was prompted, in part, by California's passage of a law in 2016 that called for reducing the state's methane emissions by 40%. That's placed real pressure on businesses to find effective and affordable ways of doing so, particularly among the Central Valley's cattle and dairy farmers. The statute focuses primarily on the related but smaller problem of reducing methane from livestock manure—for which there are some available means to make and measure progress. But cutting emissions from cow burps would also count toward meeting that mandate.

"As soon as SB-1383 came online, the interest level increased hugely—and it's concentrated in California," Kebreab says.

One negative side effect in the initial UC Davis study is that the cattle did decrease the amount they were consuming each day. That's a big deal, since the more the cows eat, the more milk or meat they produce. Kebreab suspects the issue was simply taste: seaweed is very salty. The researchers ultimately mixed it with molasses to help the medicine go down.

But crucially, in the initial study, they used a form of seaweed that's not as potent as the red algae employed in the initial Australian lab experiments. Kebreab intends to use that strain in the follow-up trial, and he believes it could cut more emissions even at a lower dose.

In the months ahead, Kebreab will oversee a six-month experiment with 24 beef cattle. He plans to closely evaluate whether the effect on methane persists at the same level over a longer time period, as well as whether the supplement affects health, weight, and the quality of the meat.

Theoretically, as long as cattle don't notice the taste (or get used to it), the seaweed should help them put on weight. Blocking methane production should mean that more of the consumed carbohydrates get directed to the task of building tissue. If so, farmers could see an economic return on the up-front cost of this supplement—though it may or may not be the most cost-effective option for packing on weight.

But there's another concern: how to get the 200 kilograms of red seaweed they need for the study. It has yet to be produced on a commercial scale, and doing so could prove tricky.

Getting to scale
Australis Aquaculture, a producer of ocean-farmed Asian sea bass based in Greenfield, Massachusetts, is attempting to find a way through a research project in Vietnam, dubbed Greener Grazing.

The red algae grows naturally in the wild, but it will take a heavy human hand to produce it at the speed and scale necessary to serve even a fraction of the global livestock industry. And so far, the seaweed has resisted attempts to get it to reproduce, says Josh Goldman, the company's founder.


GREENER GRAZING

Greener Grazing and its collaborators are pursuing several paths to solve the problem. If they crack it, the company will move to the next step of attempting to grow seaweed off the coast of Vietnam. The plants would be placed within the type of plastic tube netting used to grow oysters, and suspended a few feet underwater—just deep enough to be protected from waves, but close enough to the sun for photosynthesis to drive growth.

Meanwhile, DSM, the giant Dutch conglomerate, is working on a synthetic additive for the cows. A paper its researchers coauthored found that a methane inhibitor known as 3-nitrooxypropanol, or 3NOP, cut emissions by 30% in lactating Holsteins. The study noted that milk production wasn't affected during the 12-week experiment, and as a bonus, the "spared methane energy" helped generate tissue, resulting in higher body weights.

DSM Nutritional Products reportedly hopes to commercialize the animal feed and has already applied for US Food and Drug Administration approval to sell it in the United States.

While the reductions aren't nearly as dramatic as those seen in the early tests of seaweed, a large company with existing manufacturing plants and distribution channels could potentially scale up production faster and drive down costs further than the aquaculture approach, Kebreab says.

DSM didn't respond to an inquiry from MIT Technology Review.

Beyond California
Kebreab is collaborating with Joan Salwen, a Stanford fellow who founded Elm Innovations, a social venture working to raise money for seaweed research efforts and collaborate with the livestock industry.

Salwen readily acknowledges that more research needs to be done on the health effects of the seaweed—on livestock and humans alike—and that it's still unclear whether these strains can be scaled up in an economically feasible way. Moreover, earning returns on the product in a state like California, where farmers face regulatory mandates, will be quite different from selling it in poor parts of the world that also contribute to methane emissions.

But if all goes well, Salwen hopes, early markets fostered by strong climate policies could help expand production and drive down costs elsewhere.

Walking back from the barn, Kebreab mentions that venture capitalists have been visiting the campus to learn more about the research and opportunities. He's been eager to share, given the amount of investment that would be required to get a red seaweed industry off the ground.

"The more money you have, the quicker we can get it to market," he says.

But Kebreab himself doesn't have any entrepreneurial ambitions.

"I just like working with the animals," he says.

RadioGAAGAA

I've also seen Aussie research on the use of seaweed with very impressive results - this isn't the original, but it'll do:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-19/environmental-concerns-cows-eating-seaweed/7946630

QuoteNew research carried out in north Queensland could drastically reduce the impact the agricultural industry has on the global environment.

Professor of aquaculture at James Cook University in Townsville, Rocky De Nys, has been working with the CSIRO studying the effects seaweed can have on cow's methane production.

They discovered adding a small amount of dried seaweed to a cow's diet can reduce the amount of methane a cow produces by up to 99 per cent.

"We started with 20 species [of seaweed] and we very quickly narrowed that down to one really stand out species of red seaweed," Professor De Nys said.

The species of seaweed is called Asparagopsis taxiformis, and JCU researchers have been actively collecting it off the coast of Queensland.
i usse an speelchekor

lenny

Quote from: RadioGAAGAA on September 26, 2019, 07:59:19 PM
I've also seen Aussie research on the use of seaweed with very impressive results - this isn't the original, but it'll do:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-19/environmental-concerns-cows-eating-seaweed/7946630

QuoteNew research carried out in north Queensland could drastically reduce the impact the agricultural industry has on the global environment.

Professor of aquaculture at James Cook University in Townsville, Rocky De Nys, has been working with the CSIRO studying the effects seaweed can have on cow's methane production.

They discovered adding a small amount of dried seaweed to a cow's diet can reduce the amount of methane a cow produces by up to 99 per cent.

"We started with 20 species [of seaweed] and we very quickly narrowed that down to one really stand out species of red seaweed," Professor De Nys said.

The species of seaweed is called Asparagopsis taxiformis, and JCU researchers have been actively collecting it off the coast of Queensland.

Would it work for humans? I work with someone who contributes a lot of methane to the greenhouse gases.

Eamonnca1

Dried seaweed is a delicious snack. I wonder if sushi eaters kick out less methane.

omaghjoe

Safely say seaweed like most leafy plants would cause flatulance in humans.

We should have plenty of seaweed soon enough anyroad but it will be needed to pull the carbon out off the atmosphere as it did rather dramatically during the eocene.

As far as the cows diet go I thought I heard that grass was way better than alfalfa and maize anyway for methane emissions and that Irish agriculture had way lower carbon emissions that the US which is more fodder based with way less pasture grazing.

Anyway grazing leads me on to this guy
https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change/up-next?language=en
Thought it was interesting... alot of people think hes a bullshitter tho it seems, but I can see his logic. I feel that the principle is right tho more plants will act as carbon sinks and the best way to do that is to manage the land in such a way that it will also be productive for humans. Permaculture is a more holistic and sustainable way to do this

omaghjoe

#7
Quote from: seafoid on September 26, 2019, 04:34:41 PM
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/09/25/green-taliban-will-sweep-away-liberal-order-unless-get-grip/

We have cracked the challenge of renewable electricity. Solar is cheaper than coal in most southern latitudes. The distortions of China's Silk Road - Beijing's way of shunting excess industrial capacity abroad - is the chief reason why new coal power plants are still being built in South East Asia. As of late 2019, at '2 cent' solar costs, they are no longer uncompetitive.
The latest auctions for UK offshore wind came in as low as £39.50.  Few had thought this possible even by mid-century. Germany has got the message. It is now ramping up its offshore wind target to 20 gigawatts by 2030.
Energy storage for weeks at a time is in sight at costs that match and may soon undercut gas peaker plants to balance intermittent renewables. Highview Power's 4GW liquid air project in Texas will compete toe-to-toe with cheap US shale gas, providing wind back-up at levelized costs below $100 per megawatt/hour. It is aiming for $50 within a decade.

The latest auctions for UK offshore wind came in as low as £39.50.  Few had thought this possible even by mid-century. CREDIT: TELEGRAPH
"We have a clear path to zero-carbon power from wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal covering 75pc to 85pc of the world's needs. The last 15pc is harder," said Mr Liebreich.
"All road transportation up to 200-300 miles is going electric. By 2025 mayors in European and US cities will have banned diesel vans for deliveries," he said.
Daimler says it has no plans to design an internal combustion engine for its cars ever again. All investment is going into electric vehicles. An era has ended.
Amazon is ordering 100,000 electric vans from Rivian. The bus fleet of every city in China will be electrified by 2025.
The next frontier is green hydrogen made from solar or wind by electrolysis. This is harder to crack but the top US universities are all over it. So are London hedge funds. BNEF thinks the levelized cost will drop to $24 MWh by 2030, and to $15 by 2050.
This opens the way to limitless production of hydrogen for shipping, long-haul road freight, and railways, or for replacing coke in steel making. Once the cost is low enough huge offshore islands could produce limitless amounts of energy from wind and solar for synthetic fuels.
Heating, farming, and land use will be last but nothing is beyond our innovation. The National Farmers Union has plans for net zero emissions in British agriculture by 2040.
There is no necessary macro-economic 'cost' to this great transformation. Economic systems are not like family budgets.
Net zero is better understood as an economic accelerant. A report this week by the UN's economic arm (UNCTAD) estimates the fiscal multiplier of a Global Green New Deal at 1.3 to 1.8. The spending generates a positive economic return. It soaks up excess capital and drives investment.
UNCTAD thinks it could lift annual growth by 1pc in rich countries and 1.5pc to 2pc in developing states. It is what the world needs to escape its post-Lehman low growth malaise. It shifts stimulus from asset bubbles to real economy jobs that reverse inequality. 
Some will dispute the figures. The UN is avowedly Left Keynesian. But this is the discussion we should be having.
Regardless of the climate emergency, we have reached a juncture where fossil fuels are no longer competitive. They will be priced out of the market over the 2020s and 2030s, casualties of Schumpeter's creative destruction. But it will not be fast enough.
We can speed this up with 'regulatory forcing' and changes to the incentive structure, above all Pigovian carbon taxes adapted to each economy. The market will do the rest with swift efficiency.
What we must not do is carry on with business as usual.  As Greta says, our remaining safe carbon budget will be gone in under nine years. That way lies the temptation of green political tyranny.
He makes some good points but I stopped reading when he said hydro power was carbon free

omaghjoe

#8
 British Polar research ship RRS Sir David Attenborough launched today should help  "tackle climate change"..... except no one is pointing out that its diesel powered!
Dont understand why they didnt go nuclear with it....even just for practical reasons working in the most remote areas of the planet for long periods it would be very useful power source.

Gabriel_Hurl

#9
I'm going to shout abuse and spread conspiracy theories online about a 16 year old Swedish girl.  ::)


In all seriousness - the second biggest producer of C02 in the world is the production of concrete.

Thankfully, some companies are getting ahead of the game and trapping the carbon dioxide into the concrete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeKUlEOJ0p0

Clov

Very interesting discussion here with the former chief scientific advisor to the British government

https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2019/160-david-king-on-climate-repair
"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit"

trileacman

I would estimate fraudulent renewable schemes are as big if not a bigger industry than genuinely effective renewable technologies. Everyone knows the "cash for ash" scandal but I'm sure if any are aware of just how bad it is. There's countless examples of RHI burners warming empty buildings. I know of several that literally heat a building where the doors are left open to let the heat escape, the boilers are such money spinners that it's preferable to let the heat out than to turn them off. Worst of all not only is this a dead loss of public expenditure but cash for ash is not a zero sum carbon scheme. It takes countless gallons of diesel and consumable fuels to plant, harvest, dry and then transport the wood pellets. None of this is recaptured by the willow.

Anaerobic Digestors are worse, this heavily subsidised area takes huge volumes of fossil fuels to attain miserable returns. AD almost quite literally turns oil through a series of inefficient processes into electricity. There are several in the area that I live and their wastefullness is very hard to fathom. Basically crops are tilled, fertilised and harvested to then be composted and then fermented into methane and then converted to electricity. The nutrient waste then has to be spread on the ground again, usually in in unsuitable conditions as there is such a large volume of it. Anyone who thinks the collection of said crops is negligible really needs to sit on a modern tractor for a day and see the diesel they consume in a working day. The tilling, fertilising (which also is produced by the burning of fossil fuels), harvesting and spreading of the waste is all done by machinery. I simply do not see the efficiency of this. Burning an obscene amount of diesel oil to make it back in electric simply doesn't add up. Add to this that AD plants have fuelled the rise of large scale and large polluting factory farms and it's a recipe for disaster. It's every bit as bad as the RHI scandal except it's not as blatant a scam so people and the media aren't interested in running with it bar the select few:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/16/green-energy-subsidies-fuel-rise-of-northern-ireland-mega-farms

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/newton-emerson-if-you-thought-cash-for-ash-was-bad-wait-for-bung-for-dung-1.3746018?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fnewton-emerson-if-you-thought-cash-for-ash-was-bad-wait-for-bung-for-dung-1.3746018

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4078820/The-great-green-guzzler-Monster-digesters-meant-guzzle-waste-churn-eco-friendly-energy-fed-CROPS-produce-pitiful-levels-power-cost-216m-subsidies-HARM-environment.html

I loathe to link the daily mail but their points are succinct and they contain evidence from David Mc Kay who was one of the pre-eminent experts on climate change. He made important points that very few people seem to realise in the following article, planting a few more trees, adding a few solar panels and building a few wind farms simply aren't going to cut it.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/cif-green/2009/apr/29/renewable-energy-david-mackay

QuoteNow let's imagine that technology switches and lifestyle changes manage to halve British energy consumption to 60kWh per day per person. How big would the wind, nuclear, and solar facilities need to be to supply this halved consumption?

If we wanted to get one-third of our energy from each of these sources we would have to build wind farms with an area equal to the area of Wales, 50 Sizewells of nuclear power and solar power stations in deserts covering an area twice the size of greater London.

That's at half current consumption. At standard consumption we'd have to build wind farms twice the size of wales, 100 nuclear plants and power stations (in the desert!) four times the size of wales. Simultaneously.

Fantasy Rugby World Cup Champion 2011,
Fantasy 6 Nations Champion 2014

trileacman

McKay also stated that biofuels, of which we've pumped billions of taxpayers money into, simply "don't add up".
Fantasy Rugby World Cup Champion 2011,
Fantasy 6 Nations Champion 2014

five points

Quote from: trileacman on September 27, 2019, 11:13:23 AM
I would estimate fraudulent renewable schemes are as big if not a bigger industry than genuinely effective renewable technologies. Everyone knows the "cash for ash" scandal but I'm sure if any are aware of just how bad it is.

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
- Ronald Reagan

RadioGAAGAA

Quote from: five points on September 27, 2019, 11:52:12 AM
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
- Ronald Reagan

Says you from your computer that runs on electric from the national grid. No doubt after using water at some point today that came from water board pipes.

:rolleyes:
i usse an speelchekor