Recent News (Since March 23)
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Advancing towards sustainability: Turning carbon dioxide and water into acetylene - Mar 27, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Earth |
| Such is the case of acetylene (C2H2), an essential hydrocarbon with a plethora of applications. This highly flammable gas is used for welding, industrial cutting, metal hardening, heat treatments, and other industrial processes. In addition, it is an important precursor in the production of synthetic resins and plastics, including PVC. Since the production of C2H2 requires fossil fuels as feedstock, a more environmentally friendly synthesis route is urgently needed. Against this backdrop, a research team based on an academia–industry collaboration between Doshisha University and Daikin Industries, Ltd., Japan, has been developing a new and promising strategy to produce C2H2 using carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) as raw materials. Their latest study, which included Assistant Professor Yuta Suzuki from Harris Science Research Institute and Professor Takuya Goto from the Department of Science of Environment and Mathematical Modeling of Graduate School of ... |
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Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products - Mar 27, 2024 MIT - Energy |
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How Elon Musk Became 'Kind of Pro-China’ - Mar 27, 2024 New York Times - Climate Section |
| Mr. Musk helped create China’s electric vehicle industry. But he is now facing challenges there as well as scrutiny in the West over his reliance on the country. When Elon Musk first set up Tesla’s factory in China, he appeared to have the upper hand. He gained access to top leaders and secured policy changes that benefited Tesla. He also got workers accustomed to long hours and fewer protections, after clashing with U.S. regulators over labor conditions at his California plant. The Shanghai factory helped make Tesla the most valuable car company in the world and Mr. Musk ultrarich. But Tesla is now struggling. Mr. Musk helped create his competition, Chinese E.V. makers that are taking market share and becoming a security concern for the United States and Europe. Tesla benefited from a Chinese policy it helped shape. In California, where Tesla launched its first car in 2008, the company has profited from an emissions mandate that allows it to sell ... |
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How Patagonia and Seventh Generation include banks in their climate action plans - Mar 27, 2024 Greenbiz |
| Corporate cash deposits are a huge source of carbon emissions, and sustainability leaders need to engage their bankers. Most companies don’t report the "hidden" carbon emissions generated by how their corporate cash deposits are invested, but it’s larger than many realize. If Apple, Google and Salesforce included that data in their disclosures, their total emissions would rise by 128 percent, 207 percent and 206 percent, respectively, according to an analysis published this week by a group of NGOs. Their analysis found that non-financial companies in the United States cumulatively hold $7 trillion in cash and investments. The cumulative emissions enabled by those cash holdings account for more than 20 percent of all U.S. emissions, according to the Carbon Bankroll 2.0 report. By engaging with their financial partners to decarbonize those portfolios, those corporations could facilitate major emissions reductions, the report concluded. Emissions linked to ... |
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Hyundai to invest more than $50 bn in South Korea in major EV push - Mar 27, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Technology |
| Hyundai on Wednesday revealed plans to invest more than $50 billion in South Korea by 2026, with a huge chunk dedicated to boosting the development and production of electric vehicles. Along with its affiliate Kia, Hyundai is the world's third-largest automaker by sales, but the South Korean giant lags in the EV sector behind Elon Musk's Tesla and Chinese firm BYD. Hyundai is keen to break into the global EV top three, saying last year that it was aiming to boost electric car production to more than 3.6 million units by 2030. With the 68 trillion won ($50.5 billion) investment announced Wednesday, Hyundai Motor Group said it wants to "secure future growth engines in an uncertain business environment through constant change and innovation". "The automotive sector, including future mobility projects, accounts for... 63 percent of the Group's total investment," it added. Under the plan, Hyundai will create 80,000 jobs in South Korea and build three ... |
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They Grow Your Berries and Peaches, but Often Lack One Item: Insurance - Mar 27, 2024 New York Times - Climate Section |
| Farmers of fruits and vegetables say coverage has become unavailable or unaffordable as drought and floods increasingly threaten their crops. Farmers who grow fresh fruits and vegetables are often finding crop insurance prohibitively expensive - or even unavailable - as climate change escalates the likelihood of drought and floods capable of decimating harvests. Their predicament has left some small farmers questioning their future on the land. Efforts to increase the availability and affordability of crop insurance are being considered in Congress as part of the next farm bill, but divisions between the interests of big and small farmers loom over the debate. The threat to farms from climate change is not hypothetical. A 2021 study from researchers at Stanford University found that rising temperatures were responsible for 19 percent of the $27 billion in crop insurance payouts from 1991 to 2017 and concluded that additional warming substantially ... |
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Two coral snakes recorded battling for prey in a scientific first - Mar 27, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Earth |
| Kleptoparasitism, or food theft, is a well-documented behavior in many animal species, but is seldom reported among snakes in natural habitats. The observation, detailed in a recent study published in Herpetozoa by Henrik Bringsøe and Niels Poul Dreyer, showcases the two Micrurus mipartitus snakes engaging in a tug-of-war over the limbless amphibian. Elapid snakes are venomous and among the deadliest serpents in the world. There are more than 400 species comprising a very diverse group of snakes such as mambas, cobras, kraits, taipans, tiger snakes, death adders, sea snakes and coral snakes. The battle occurred in the dense rainforests of Valle del Cauca, western Colombia. Surprisingly, in the tussle, one snake also bit the body of the other. However, the researchers suggest this was likely accidental. After 17 minutes of observation, the losing coral snake released its bite hold on the caecilian. The winner then moved away from the losing snake, ... |
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Vast Vienna wastewater heat pumps showcase EU climate drive - Mar 27, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Technology |
| In a large hall on the outskirts of Vienna, shiny pipes carry treated wastewater through three giant heat pumps, part of Austria's drive to reduce carbon emissions and its dependence on Russian gas, with more and more European cities eyeing this alternative. The plant - billed as Europe's most powerful one - is churning out district heat to up to 56,000 Vienna households, with operator Wien Energie planning to double its capacity to 112,000 households by 2027. "It is very clear that we have to restructure our energy system to become independent of fossil fuels or of different individual countries," Wien Energie manager Linda Kirchberger told AFP. Heat pumps work along the same principle as refrigerators, only it is the heat that is sought and not the cold. Household heat pumps have been enjoying surging interest, but they can also be implemented on a larger scale for city heating systems. Kirchberger said the plant was garnering a lot of interest from ... |
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Why Tennessee lawmakers are pushing a bill to keep government from spraying the sky - Mar 27, 2024 Washington Post - Climate and Environment |
| Republican state lawmakers are going after a new threat they say could cause harm to the environment - and playing into a baseless claim at the same time. In a Tennessee bill passed by the state Senate last week, lawmakers targeted geoengineering, an experimental - and controversial - practice not yet in use that could help cool the planet amid climate change. But the text of the bill can also be seen as referring to “chemtrails,” plumes of toxic chemicals that believers of the unfounded claim say governments and corporations are spewing into the sky. Now, the confusion between solar geoengineering and chemtrails threatens to muddy the waters around nascent geoengineering research, chilling potential studies, scientists say. It’s the latest example of how spreaders of disinformation can latch on to reality to pursue their agenda, confounding public opinion on the issue. Also last week, Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) - who has posted on ... |
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You can start applying for the American Climate Corps next month - Mar 27, 2024 Skeptical Science |
| This story by Naveena Sadasivam and Kate Yoder was originally published by Grist and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The long-awaited jobs board for the American Climate Corps, promised early in the Biden administration, will open next month, according to details shared exclusively with Grist. The program is modeled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, launched in 1933 to help the country make it through the Great Depression. The positions with the new corps could range across a number of fields including energy-efficiency installations, disaster response preparedness, recycling, and wildfire mitigation. The White House plans to officially launch an online platform in April. At first, only a couple of hundred jobs will be posted, but eventually up to 20,000 young people are expected to be hired in the program’s first year. Interested ... |
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A nanoscale look at how shells and coral form reveals that biomineralization is more complex than imagined - Mar 26, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Earth |
| They also found variety in the types of building blocks present. Scientists expected to see "amorphous" precursors, minerals that lack a repeating atomic structure. They did—but they also found "crystalline" precursors, minerals that are more structured and orderly. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications. "One fascinating observation is that coral skeletons and mollusk mother-of-pearl form with exactly the same precursors, yet they evolved completely separately from one another," said Pupa Gilbert, a visiting faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She noted that the two species began making biominerals long after they diverged from one another on the tree of life. "That's cool because it means making a biomineral that way, with so many precursors, is an evolutionary advantage—energetically, thermodynamically, or some other way," Gilbert said. "As a physicist, I find it fascinating ... |
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A New Law Would Remove Many Architectural Protections in Miami Beach - Mar 26, 2024 New York Times - Climate Section |
| Lawmakers say preservationists held too much power over decisions on whether buildings should be demolished and what should be allowed to replace them. The oceanfront Eden Roc Hotel is an icon of Miami Modernist architecture, a style that epitomized the postwar glamour and grandeur of Miami Beach. Two turquoise panels wrap the white facade. The oval canister perched atop the building resembles a cruise ship’s funnel. Crooners like Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, and Sammy Davis, Jr., stayed and played there. But a new Florida law could make it easier for hotels like the Eden Roc and other architectural icons along Miami Beach’s coastline to be demolished. The battle pits the pressures of development and climate change against the benefits of historical preservation, in a city that has long paved over its past and prizes the new, shiny, and glitzy. Supporters say the law addresses environmental and safety challenges of aging properties after the deadly ... |
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Accelerating China's transition to carbon neutrality and clean air - Mar 26, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Earth |
| A recent report published in Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, reveals the Synergetic Roadmap on Carbon Neutrality and Clean Air for China. This comprehensive report offers a detailed analysis and updates on China's ambitious efforts to synergize air pollution control with carbon neutrality objectives. At the core of the 2022 Roadmap Report is a detailed strategy targeting key sectors such as energy, industry, and transportation, marking significant strides towards sustainability in China. A hallmark achievement detailed in the report is the dramatic increase in renewable energy usage, with non-fossil fuel sources outpacing coal for the first time, heralding a major shift towards greener energy. This change is further underscored by notable decreases in the production of carbon-intensive industries like steel and cement, and a surge in electric vehicle penetration, indicating a significant transformation in China's energy consumption and production ... |
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Albedo can reduce climate benefit of tree planting: New tool identifies locations with high climate-cooling potential - Mar 26, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Earth |
| This new study by researchers at Clark University in the United States alongside scientists from The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and ETH-Zurich, published today in the journal Nature Communications, provides a global analysis of where restoration of tree cover is most effective at cooling the global climate system, considering not just the cooling from carbon storage but also the warming from decreased albedo. Because comprehensive maps of the consequences of albedo change were not previously available, these carbon-only estimates tend to identify too many options in landscapes—particularly semi-arid settings and snowy, boreal regions—where changes in albedo would significantly offset, or even negate, the carbon-removing benefits provided by these trees. "The balance of carbon storage versus albedo change that comes from restoring tree cover varies from place to place, but until now we didn't have the tools to tell the good climate solutions from the bad," ... |
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At a glance - Human fingerprints on climate change rule out natural cycles - Mar 26, 2024 Skeptical Science |
| On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "Human fingerprints on climate change rule out natural cycles". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there. The passage of time reveals many things. Consider for a moment the myth in the box above. It is dated 2008 and says, "Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over." Fifteen years on from that date and we can say, with complete confidence, "utter rubbish" (or words to that effect). In a temperature record stretching back into the late 19th Century, the ten hottest years have all occurred since ... |
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Behavior of ant queens found to be shaped by their social environments - Mar 26, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Earth |
| The common perception is that the queen's only task is to lay eggs—and that this attribute is an inherent trait, not influenced by external factors. In contrast, recent research undertaken at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has demonstrated that in certain ant colonies, the social environment can play a crucial role in shaping the behavioral specialization of the queens. "With regard to the ant species we studied, it is social factors that control whether queens become specialized or not. Our findings challenge the widely accepted notion of social insect queens as inherently specialized egg-laying machines," stated Dr. Romain Libbrecht. Concept of insect societies as superorganisms consisting of specialized individuals It is generally assumed that social insect colonies consist of queens that monopolize reproduction and sterile workers responsible for all non-reproduction-related tasks, such as the care of the brood (eggs and ... |
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Birds, bees and even plants might act weird during the solar eclipse - Mar 26, 2024 Washington Post - Climate and Environment |
| A total eclipse isn’t just a spectacle in the sky. When the moon consumes the sun on April 8, day will plunge into twilight, the temperature will drop - and nature will take notice. Reports abound of unusual animal and plant behavior during eclipses. A swarm of ants carrying food froze until the sun reemerged during an 1851 eclipse in Sweden. A pantry in Massachusetts was “greatly infested” with cockroaches just after totality in 1932. Sap flowed more slowly in a 75-year-old beech tree in Belgium in 1999. Orb-weaving spiders started tearing down their webs and North American side-blotched lizards closed their eyes during an eclipse in Mexico in 1991. Plenty of scientists see eclipses as rare opportunities to bolster anecdotal reports by studying how nature responds - or doesn’t - to a few minutes of dusk in the middle of the day. That’s why teams across the country produced a swarm of studies about plant and animal behavior during the last total eclipse to cut ... |
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Building energy management platform uses AI and statistical methods to optimize operations - Mar 26, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Technology |
| Buildings exhibit varying levels of energy consumption depending on their use, location, and the characteristics of their users, even down to different floors and zones within the same building. In light of initiatives such as carbon neutrality and RE100, many buildings are now implementing renewable energy solutions like solar panels, fuel cells, and energy storage systems. Furthermore, as the usage of high-end electrical appliances continues to grow, it has become crucial to manage building energy for efficient consumption effectively. Existing Building Energy Management System (BEMS) technologies primarily rely on simple monitoring of energy usage and the experience of building managers to operate the system. This approach makes it difficult to efficiently manage the increasingly diverse distributed resources within buildings and various types of power consumption. Moreover, it limits real-time status diagnostics of distributed resources for addressing malfunctions. |
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Chinese EV giant BYD announces record annual profit for 2023 - Mar 26, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Technology |
| Chinese battery and automotive giant BYD achieved a record profit in 2023, annual results showed Tuesday, despite fierce competition in the country as demand for electric vehicles grows. The Shenzhen-based company is now moving quickly overseas - including into countries in Southeast Asia but also further afield in Latin America and Europe - as a price war continues to be waged in China, the world's largest automotive market. BYD overtook Elon Musk's Tesla in the fourth quarter of 2023 to become the world's top seller of EVs. The firm recorded a net profit of 30 billion yuan ($4.16 billion) last year, according to a filing to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, up 80.7 percent year-on-year from 16.6 billion yuan in 2022, reaching an all-time high. The figure is in line with a forecast issued by the firm in late January of 29-31 billion yuan. Originally specializing in the design and manufacture of batteries, the company began diversifying into the ... |
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Chinese EV makers challenging market leaders at auto show in Bangkok - Mar 26, 2024 PHYS.ORG - Technology |
| Companies like BYD, XPeng and Great Wall Motors are quickly growing their sales in Thailand, challenging longstanding market leaders like Toyota, Isuzu and Ford, as they expand exports across the globe. And Thailand, one of the biggest markets in Southeast Asia, a region of more than 600 million people, has made developing its EV market a priority. Tesla launched sales in late 2022, offering its popular Model 3 and Model Y at prices aimed at competing with rivals like China's BYD. BYD, or Build Your Dreams, displayed a wide range of its EV lineup, including its Dolphin, a pure EV that it says runs 490 kilometers (about 300 miles) on a single charge and is priced at 859,999 Thai baht ($23,700). At the higher end of the spectrum is the Seal, promising 580 kilometers (about 360 miles) on a charge and costing nearly 1.6 million baht (about $44,000). BYD sold 30,650 EVs in Thailand last year, followed by 12,777 sold by Neta, a brand of Chinese electric ... |
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