Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

Paywalled, so excerpting the key paragraphs of a discussion about capturing carbon from corn ethanol production for use as motor fuel:

If you just follow the carbon, it started in the atmosphere and ended up underground. In between, the corn sucked up carbon through photosynthesis; when it was processed into ethanol, about a third of that carbon went into the fuel, a third was left behind as dried grain, and the remainder was captured as it wafted out of the fermentation tank and stashed underground. “That is, in a broad sense, how that looks like carbon removal,” Daniel Sanchez, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies biomass carbon removal, told me.

But if you zoom out, the picture changes. For the carbon to get from the atmosphere to the ground, a few other things had to happen. The corn had to be grown, harvested, and transported in trucks to the plant. It had to be put through a mill, cooked, and then liquified using heat from a natural gas boiler. And this was all in service, first and foremost, of producing ethanol to be burned, ultimately, in a car engine. If you account for the CO2 emitted during these other steps, the process as a whole is putting more into the atmosphere than it’s taking out.

This is what the decision by the Republican justices to allow "gratuities" for public officials creates an incentive for.

Creatures of Place is an insight into the wonderful world of Artist as Family: Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, and their youngest son, Woody. Living on a 1/4-acre section in a small Australian town, Meg and Patrick have designed their property using permaculture principals.

They grow most of their own food, don't own cars and ride their bikes instead, use very little electricity, and forage food and materials from their local forest.

This is relevant because more and more often there's suggestions that Parkinson disease (affecting even thirty year young people!) is related to the use of Glyphosate.

• https://www.euronews.com/health/2023/11/17/france-to-continue-compensating-farmers-with-parkinsons-disease-linked-to-glyphosate-use
• https://www.parkinsons.org.uk/research/research-blog/research-explained/pesticides-and-parkinsons

The right wing has ripped up the consensus on the climate crisis. In this documentary short, we examine how radical groups based in and around 55 Tufton Street have fought net zero.

Archived copies of the article: archive.today ghostarchive.org web.archive.org

It's almost like the fact that they became practical meant that they could no longer be waved about as a delay tactic, so the right-wing press started bashing renewables.

Archived copies of the article: archive.today ghostarchive.org web.archive.org

One method of making electricity cleanly to address climate change has been quietly advancing and on Tuesday it hit a milestone.

A California utility is backing the largest new geothermal power development in the U.S. — 400 megawatts of clean electricity from the Earth’s heat — enough for some 400,000 homes.

Southern California Edison will purchase the electricity from Fervo Energy, a Houston-based geothermal company, Fervo announced.

The company is drilling up to 125 wells in southwest Utah.

Clean electricity like this reduces the need for traditional power plants that cause climate change. The boost could go a long way toward bringing down the cost of a new generation of geothermal energy, said Wilson Ricks, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University.

“If these purchases help to get this technology off the ground, it could be massively impactful for global decarbonization,” he said. Decarbonization refers to switching out things that produce carbon dioxide and methane, which cause the climate to change, in favor of machines and methods that don’t.

Today the world still relies mainly on fossil fuels for round-the-clock power. This new deal shows that clean power can meet a growing demand for electricity, said Sarah Jewett, vice president of strategy at Fervo.

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Title taken from the article version of this newsletter