Brexit and its impact on the climate

Skitterphoto

Thursday the 23rd of June 2016 will be remembered as a historical day. In a referendum, the Brits voted to leave the European Union –or at least 52% did. For the first time since the six founding members kick-started the European project for economic collaboration and peace building in 1958, a member state leaves the family.

The result sent shock waves through the world. A lot has been said and written and one thing is very clear: the United in United Kingdom is at an all-time low. The impacts of the Brexit on the climate have mainly stayed under the radar. I’ll do my best to present you some food for thought.

photo: Reuters/Toby Melville

photo: Reuters/Toby Melville

(more…)

More

Civil disobedience in 2016: the war on fossil fuels has begun

photo: Eamon Ryan

Three weeks after the official signing ceremony of the Paris Agreement in the U.N. headquarters in New York, 177 countries have signed the document agreed upon during COP 21 in Paris last year. As I explained in more detail in a previous post, the agreement will only take force when 55 of the countries effectively adopt it in their national parliament. Currently we’re stuck at 16 — covering a dreadful 0.04% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Time to raise the pressure on policy makers. Under the banner of Break Free, climate activists around the world have opened the war on fossil fuels. During 12 days in May, civil disobedience actions target some of the world’s most polluting and dangerous fossil fuel projects.

(more…)

More

The ABC of climate change: Carbon Capture Storage

Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) is an integrated set of technologies that prevent carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere during the combustion of fossil fuels. It is mainly mentioned in the context of large power plants running on coal, gas or biomass.

There are three main steps to avoid CO2 escaping into the air:

  1. Seperate the carbon dioxide from the other exhaust gases
  2. Compress and transport the CO2 via pipelines to a suitable site for geological storage, typically salt caves, old mines etc
  3. Inject the CO2 deep underground, often at depths of more than one kilometer
Graphical representation of the Carbon Capture and Storage process (graph: University of Nottingham)

Graphical representation of the Carbon Capture and Storage process (graph: University of Nottingham)

CCS is not a new technology and has been applied since the mid nineties, although the amount of CO2 captured and stored remains marginal.

Carbon Capture and Storage got renewed attention when the IPCC’s latest progress report (fall of 2014) announced that the technology was crucial if we want to limit Earth’s temperature rise below 2°C by 2100. They estimated that big emissions cuts would cost more than double when not applying CCS technologies.

Although some say that CCS will allow us to keep consuming fossil fuels at an increasing rate, that is not really true. The processes itself are energy intensive so the overall efficiency of the energy generation process including the carbon capture goes down significantly. In addition, there are concerns regarding the long-term storability and possible leakage of the CO2 out of the caves and rock formations.

More

The Moment of Truth

Very soon we will find out the truth. No, I’m not talking about whether John Snow comes back in season 6 of Games of Thrones or not. I’m thinking about the Paris Agreement and if it will become reality any time soon.

If you’ve not been living under a rock the last year, I don’t have to remind you the historical day of December 12th 2015. For the first time in human history, all 195 countries in the Conference of Parties (COP) adopted a globally binding climate agreement.

In the months after, I’ve heard a cacophony of opinions on the agreement. One calls the Paris climate conference one large play with a very disappointment conclusion, the other a big victory for mankind. I invite you to (re-) read my reflections on COP21 –I didn’t change my mind in the meantime.

That being said, you might be wondering if the agreement has died a silent death. Not at all. But before the Paris Agreement can kick into action, we have to get trough a whole procedure of signing and ratifying. Bear with me.

(more…)

More

5 years after Fukushima: is nuclear dead?

photo: Energy Council

Since the nuclear accident in the Japanese Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant in March 2011, nuclear power popularity has dropped around the world. In Germany, the public reaction lead to an hastened nuclear phase out.  China and India slowed down their nuclear roll-out, Switzerland suspended the licensing for three new plants. Japan itself deferred all its plants until the structure of regulations for nuclear power plants was reviewed by a government’s commission. Is nuclear power dead? And should we regret that? Read on to find out.

(more…)

More

Students help Elon Musk’s dream become reality

If he wasn’t already, Elon Musk is rapidly becoming the rock star of all technology addicts. You might think that spending tons of his personal fortune to found electrical car company Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX would be enough, but Musk wouldn’t be Musk if he wasn’t always working on something new and exciting.

Back in 2013 he published a 57-page long white paper with the proposal of Hyperloop Alpha, a futuristic transport system that should bring people in no time from LA to San Fransisco at a speed of 700 miles per hour (more than 1100 km/h). He later admitted that it was the terrible LA traffic that brought him to think about a revolutionary new way of transportation.

The white-paper was not a business proposal, Musk rather threw the idea in the tech community in the hope someone would start doing something with it. Despite the fact that many people were quite skeptical about the idea, two start-ups have started to work on their own version of the Hyperloop.

Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. — Elon Musk

This is more or less the idea. The Hyperloop is a new high-speed ground transport system that consists of a tube on (earthquake resistant) pylons that connects two major cities. A pod is racing at a speed of more than 700 miles per hour through the tube, reducing the duration of a trip from for example LA to San Fransisco to just 30 minutes. In order to reach such high speeds, the tube would be at under-pressure to reduce friction with the air. The pod would be floating on an air cushion and be accelerated by magnetic induction. The whole system is supposed to be driven by solar panels on the top of the tube. Pretty neat, huh?

With a price tag of 6 billion dollars, the system would be cheaper than the high speed train that is currently being built on the track Musk had in mind in his original proposal.

Elon Musk's original Hyperloop Alpha proposal in 2013

Elon Musk’s original Hyperloop Alpha proposal in 2013 (photo: Elon Musk)

The whole idea remained a bit under the radar of the larger public, until SpaceX announced a Hyperloop pod design competition for students last summer. The reaction was huge. Within one week, no less than 700 entries were submitted and this number grew to 1 751 by the time the registration closed the 15th of September.

A few weeks ago, 123 selected teams got the chance to present their designs at Texas A&M University. The stakes were high: the best implementations won a test ride of their pod on the (still under-construction) test track near the SpaceX’s headquarters. MIT ran away with the first price, a team from TU Delft in the Netherlands were next runner-up. In total twenty-two teams are awarded a test trip next summer to try-out their design.

With this competition the Hyperloop comes a bit closer to reality. “The public wants something new,” Musk told the participants at the end of the competition. “And you’re going to give it to them.”

Will we be travelling in from Amsterdam to Paris in no time soon? Well, probably not. The competition is in the first place an opportunity for engineering students to show off what they got and stimulate the discussion on future transportation. Musk didn’t promise to invest in one of the ideas, although he hinted that it was not unlikely to happen in the future. “There are a lot of crazy ideas out there, but when ideas are associated with someone like Elon Musk it feels like, OK, this is something,” told Anshuman Kumar, leader of the Hyperloop team at Carnegie Mellon University to Bloomberg. So who knows… Elon Musk never stops surprising us. And this time he has the next generation of engineers on board!

More

Subscribe to the weekly update!

Explore the archives

Follow the Shift on:
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Google
  • Subscribe via RSS
  • Twitter