Hot →

Hot:

“Australia's weather bureau says Tuesday was the hottest day on record across the country. The Bureau of Meteorology recorded the average maximum across the nation as 40.9 degrees Celsius”.

This follows its driest and second warmest spring on record.

It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what a world with an out-of-control climate looks like. Just turn on the telly and look at the Aussie news.

Bushfires.

Smoke.

Respiratory illness.

Drought.

Or watch the start of Interstellar. Same same.

Meanwhile Australia continues to export one billion kg of coal per day.

That’s 2.6 billion kg of CO2 when burned, going straight into the atmosphere.

Believe it or not, increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has the effect of raising the temperature on Earth.

This is called the greenhouse effect.

This lesson was brought to you today by the Australian government and Adani Australia.

Not everyone in Australia has their head in the sand →

As you know, one of my pet peeves is the Australian government green-lighting a new coal mine.

And not just any coal mine, the biggest in Australia.

Meanwhile, Australia looks like a coal furnace with the windows shut:

AP Photo/Rick Rycroft

And let’s not forget that Australia currently exports one billion kg of coal per day. That corresponds to 2.6 billion kg of CO2 straight into the atmosphere when burned.

Per day.

To stay consistent with their “thoughts and prayers” BS, the Australian government is currently trying to “change the narrative” by pushing through a religious discrimination bill, which—unlike what you may think—lets religious people discriminate against whoever the hell they want, without consequences.

As long as they do it “nicely”.

Meanwhile, not everyone in Australia has their head in the sand.

There is an extremely well-organized campaign to stop Adani’s abominable Carmichael coal mine:

“The list of companies walking away from Adani’s toxic brand and climate-wrecking mega mine keeps growing. 59 companies, including 16 major insurers, have now ruled out working with Adani. But Lloyd’s of London is still working with Adani to help the mining giant find insurance for its disastrous project. Let’s flood the Lloyd’s office with calls now and let them know that allowing insurers to underwrite Adani’s coal mine is a risk we cannot afford!”

Another current target is Siemens, the industrial mega-company with $90 billion USD annual revenue (random fact: Siemens is also the company building the epic new Austrian night trains) that is slated to build rail infrastructure for the mine project.

Due to activist pressure, Siemens’ boss has just come out and said that he didn’t know about the contract with Adani.

Be that as it may or may not, what he does next is the important bit. He’s currently “thinking about it”.

If you would like to hassle Siemens on this, just put your name and email address here, and then click send!

The Stop Adani campaign is being backed up by the Australian Conservation Foundation, Friends of the Earth, and Market Forces—a group that targets businesses funding fossil fuels.

I’d bet on fossil fuel-related board meetings getting increasingly fun over the next couple of years as pure morality-free Capitalism, entrenched interests, and industry ambivalence to planetary destruction fight for their sad little lives.

The 25th UN climate talks basically achieved nothing →

For context, this is where we are right now on the political front:

“Current targets would put the world on track for 3C of warming, which scientists say would ravage coastal cities and destroy agriculture over swathes of the globe”.

Brazil, India and China were accused of holding up progress.

It’s all about “climate credits” and the shifting around of CO2 emission quotas of rich and poor countries.

Executive summary: Pissing into the wind.

Another fun quote:

“Research published during the two weeks of talks showed that greenhouse gas emissions have risen 4% since the Paris accord was signed in 2015, and the world will need to cut carbon by more than 7% a year in the next decade to heed scientific advice”.

You can see how screwed we are because that is so not going to happen.

The tiniest glimmer of hope came from Europe kind of committing to zero net carbon by 2050.

Europe called it the European Green Deal and it’s coming with heaps of cash—hundreds of billions of euros.

Poland—which basically lives and breathes coal—was allowed to opt out.

In the end though, this was the year humanity finally realised that the UN climate talks are just one big annual joke. In case you missed it, here’s the plot showing the dates of all 25 UN conferences and the atmospheric concentration of CO2:

It’s just going to get messier from here in as on-the-ground reality hits pithy pathetic politics.

And the elephant in the room: Is the epic inequality around the world (and within countries) consistent with a real battle against climate change, or will mass civil unrest accelerate in 2020?

Fun times ahead methinks.

[Cover photo credit: Óscar del Pozo/AFP via Getty Images]

Is it just me or is it icy in here? →

From the Washington Post:

“The Greenland ice sheet’s losses have accelerated so fast since the 1990s it is now shedding more than seven times as much ice each year, according to 89 scientists who use satellites to study the area”.

Or if you like numbers:

“The sheet’s total losses nearly doubled each decade, from 33 billion tons per year in the 1990s to an average now of 254 billion tons annually. Since 1992, nearly 4 trillion tons of Greenland ice have entered the ocean, the new analysis found, equivalent to roughly a centimeter of global sea-level rise”.

For fun, let’s pretend the 33 billion tons are the baseline, and consider the now 254 billion tons annually. That’s 221 billion tons per year more than in the 1990s. What does that really mean?

One US ton is 2000 lb, or 907 kg.

If you do the math, today’s excess melt over and above the 1990s level is…

6.4 MILLION KG OF WATER PER SECOND.

That’s just over two Olympic swimming pools per second of extra water in the ocean.

Two more. Two more. Two more. Two more. Two more…

Come back tomorrow at the same time and 550 billion kg of water will have melted away.

Fun times.

[Photo credit: Annie Spratt/Unsplash]

New European rules are creating low-cost high speed trains

With Europe opening up domestic train lines to competition next year, low cost high speed rail connections are on the way—if not here already.

In France, the low-cost ouigo trains have been on the rails since 2013. They’re still trains from the state railway company, but are acting as a kind of protective force against new entrants entering the market from next year onwards.

And customers win.

And planes lose.

Spain is about to launch its low-cost high speed Avlo trains for the same reason (the French and Italians are already lined up to take on Spanish domestic routes).

Spain has more than 3000 km of high speed track in action, second only to China!

Some of these new low-cost trains have seats slightly closer together than typical European trains. I’d still prefer a normal train, but I can see these low-cost ones appealing to many people who simply refuse to even consider the train while low-cost airlines remain stupidly/criminally cheap.

I wonder what the time-cost trade-off works out to be between taking Ryanair vs taking a low-cost train? How many hours more would people be willing to travel from A to B in a civilized train rather than in a navy blue Ryanair nightmare?

By the way, all these ongoing high speed developments mean some pretty cool stuff, like that you can already get from Paris to Seville in one day by train! I don’t mean 24 hours, I mean one “day” day. You just have to be brave with the 7 minute connection in Barcelona.

(I’m sure at some point they’ll clean that connection up to make it a more relaxing possibility. What an epic trip, especially in summer when it would be almost entirely in daylight.)

What’s more, when Spain finishes its new high speed line up towards the border with France on the Atlantic side, this might provide an even faster through-route to the south of Spain (maybe closer to 10 hours than 13). Another fantastic scenic trip down the continent.

Here’s a 2020 challenge for all of my European friends: how about a year of train-only European travel?

Are you up for it?

Let's not beat around the (burning) bush →

In a nutshell:

“Emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide from fossil fuels hit a record high in 2019, researchers said Tuesday, putting countries farther off course from their goal of halting global warming”.

Is there any “good” news?

“The United States and the European Union both managed to cut their carbon dioxide output this year, while India’s emissions grew far more slowly than expected”.

Or if we’re slightly desperate:

“And global emissions from coal, the worst-polluting of all fossil fuels, unexpectedly declined by about 0.9 percent in 2019, although that drop was more than offset by strong growth in the use of oil and natural gas around the world”.

Quite why Australia needs a new coal mine that doesn’t even go online for another year is beyond me.

Fun fact of the day: the US still pumps out 14% of global CO2 with only 4% of the population.

And in case you missed it, here’s the plot of the dates of the previous 24 UN Climate Summits against atmospheric CO2 concentration:

And another jewel hot off the press: European shipping emissions (container and cruise ships) are not included in Europe’s carbon reduction calculations!

And are equivalent to around 1/4 the total emissions from cars in Europe.

If these examples of collective delusion don’t get you down you’re a stronger person than me.

[Cover photo credit: Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times]

London to Paris →

An analysis of trains vs planes on the London-Paris route over time:

“While she concludes there was still a market for airlines, she found that the number of seats had declined from 4.84 million in 1996 to 2.7 million in 2019 and warned further falls are likely”.

I can’t see the death spiral stopping for planes on this route.

Though—reality check—there are still 46 flights a day plying it, which—let’s be frank—is an abomination.

The Eurostar only takes 2 hr 16 mins now.

Someone needs to put this flight connection out of its misery.

The first step would be to only allow people to fly it if they had an onward flight at the destination airport.

Going the whole way José would involve one hell of a messy debate about the economics of “hub” airports. That’s not a fun one.

One last thing to note: This article was on a website about flying, not trains.

“Given the network of high-speed trains across Europe, London-Paris will not be the only route where congestion and flight shaming are making airlines nervous”.

That’s a sign to look out for as we move forward.

CNN comes to the same conclusion →

I’m going to presume CNN is reading my blog.

“Replacing short-haul flights with trains frees up landing and departure slots at busy airports that can be used for more lucrative long-haul services. They also make the airline look greener, even if there's no long-run difference to its carbon footprint”.

Well, it would be worse, actually.

More crazy talk:

“KLM makes no secret of the business sense behind cutting short haul Amsterdam-Brussels flights, but insists the move will help long-term sustainability and a "fly responsibly" campaign that advises passengers to pack light and offset the carbon emissions of their travel”.

What a load of hogwash dipped in poo.

And wait, there’s more!

“By eliminating one in five of its Amsterdam-Brussels flights departing Schiphol Airport, KLM will play a part in the Dutch air transport sector's overall mission to reduce C02 emissions by 35% by 2030, she adds”.

This only works if they don’t replace that flight with a long-haul flight. Which they will do when they think no-one is looking.

But lots of people are looking.

Coal power is becoming uninsurable →

From the Guardian:

“The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time US companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd’s of London and Asian insurers as the “last resort” for fossil fuels, according to a new report”.

More precisely:

“At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9tn, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry’s global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments”.

Aspirational thinking:

“Peter Bosshard, one of the Unfriend Coal campaign co-ordinators, said: “We hope within two to three years it will be so difficult to obtain insurance that most coal projects won’t be able to go forward”.

Peter has a way with words:

“We’ve seen the acceleration [in firms pulling out of coal] for a good reason – people are freaking out.”

Yep.

Meanwhile, Australia is still going ahead with its new coal mine.

And still burning.

Two million hectares scarred by fire so far, including 20% of the Blue Mountains world heritage area.

Talk about having your head in the tar sands.

[Coal mine photo credit: Dominik Vanyi/Unsplash]

New pics of the Austrian night trains of the future →

Cool new pics of the Austrian night trains coming for 2022. Here’s a view of the wagon with individual pods:

There’s a mirror that folds down to a table, a reading lamp, power plugs, etc.

And on the top level beds, there’s a window as well as a sliding partition to the next pod along:

That’s pretty cool if you know the person. Might be a bit tricky to squeeze through, but that may not be the point.

The private two-bed cabins with private bathroom look pretty neat too:

All of the juicy details can be found here.

Very cool.

Be careful what you wish for →

Flybe, renamed Virgin Connect:

“Connect Airways chief executive Mark Anderson said the airline could stop flying between airports where the journey can be made easily by train or car…]

[…”Maybe there are some routes in the future, as I look at the future of Virgin Connect and how we’re connecting people to their world, that we will potentially not fly.

“We will potentially say ‘Actually this makes more sense by train or this makes more sense by road’, and maybe in the future we’ll get behind that as well.”

Very curious to signal your responsibility as a "sustainable” airline by suggesting people switch from flying to driving.

However to be fair, for a car with four passengers in a country with lots of coal and/or gas in the electricity generation mix (e.g., UK = 45%), it can become competitive with a train.

A car with one dude in it: never.

In France’s energy mix? Never:

Source: RTE Results 2017

Ok, so Virgin Connect is considering cancelling some of its short-haul flights.

It took a Yellow Vest protestor at a public talk on aviation emissions at La Base in Paris to drive home to me the fact that we should be careful what we wish for.

If an airline permanently cancels a specific A to B flight, it frees up a slot at both the departure and arrival airports.

It is what happens next with these slots that is important, not the cancellation itself.

What if the airline fills the short-haul flight’s slot with a long-haul one? Or sells it to another company that intends to do so?

The environmental problem just got worse, not better.

The solution, as put forth by my Yellow Vested buddy, is that the slot has to be closed.

Permanently.

Otherwise we’re just pissing in the wind.

One final quote from the Virgin Connect article:

“He added that airlines have made “great progress” in improving their sustainability in recent years, but acknowledged that the industry “has more work to do in improving its carbon footprint”.

This is the kind of shit cigarette company executives peddled for years.

Happy trains, new trains, and more (trains)

Here’s a round-up of news from Trainlandia mostly schlepped from the Man in Seat 61’s twitter feed:

People are switching to the train for London-Glasgow trips:

“The proportion of people travelling between London and Glasgow by rail rather than air has reached a record level, according to Virgin Trains.

“In the 12 months to July 2019, 29% of passengers chose to travel with the train company rather than fly”.

Rail passengers rose by 57,000 and air passengers declined by 81,000 on this route. The flight time is about 1 hr 15 mins + airport shenanigans, while the train takes around 4 hr 30 mins.

European train operators are having to increase capacity:

“The Swiss Federal Railways, along with Deutsche Bahn (DB), the French state railways SNCF and the Italian counterpart Trenitalia are offering additional international rail services to meet increased demand. Also, the Swiss and Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) plan to further develop night train services between Switzerland and Austria”.

For the French:

“Also starting next month, the French TGV Lyria will operate 15 double-decker trains on the routes from Zurich, Lausanne and Geneva to Paris – replacing the current single-decker trains. The timetable will also be expanded. These moves will increase the daily capacity from 4,500 to 18,000 seats. All passengers will get free WLAN, and those in “first-class business” will receive hot meals at their seats”.

From 4,500 to 18,000 seat capacity, that’s no statistical blip!

Slightly older news I missed: very cool “staycation” advertising campaign by Deutsche Bahn. They used machine learning to match famous foreign landmarks with the closest-looking place in Germany:

“German Rail, with Ogilvy Germany and Getty Images, used a lookalike algorithm to identify German locations that resembled iconic international landmarks.

“Then using Facebook data, German Rail targeted travel enthusiasts interested in specific destinations on Instagram and Facebook. Finally, through geo-tagging technology and Google Search, the audience was served video ads updated with real-time prices, comparing two gorgeous locations (one in Germany and one aboard), detailing the cost of travel from their closest airport to the foreign country. The campaign video juxtaposed the thousands of euros it cost to travel to destinations such as Venice, Vancouver, or Tokyo with the €19 ($21) train journey to visit the next best thing, a German lookalike location. During the first 13 days of the campaign 750 unique ads were created”.

Here’s one example:

That’s some clever shit.

And last but not least, here’s a website that helps you find a cocktail bar before boarding your European night train.

Unsurprisingly, it’s called “Night trains and bars”.

It comes with a European night train map and these trains’ timetables.

So now all that’s left to do is go forth and train.

Bon voyage :)

[Photo credit: Derek Story/Unsplash]

Lewis the Koala died →

The Koala rescued from the flames of an Australian bush fire has died.

If you want to relive the traumatic video of its rescue, it’s here.

"I didn't realise they could cry out. It was just so heart-rending and I knew I needed to get him out of there as quickly as possible," Ms Doherty told Nine News”.

As it was getting worse, not better, the vets decided to euthanize it.

“Today we made the decision to put Ellenborough Lewis to sleep,” it said on Facebook.

“We placed him under general anaesthesia this morning to assess his burns injuries and change the bandages.

“We recently posted that ‘Burns injuries can get worse before they get better’.

“In Ellenborough Lewis’s case, the burns did get worse, and unfortunately would not have gotten better.”

Just awful.

And a grim line from the end of the BBC’s article:

“The blazes continue to burn and officials warn that the worst of Australia's season is still to come”.

From an earlier post—still relevant:

On each day these fires burn, Australia continues to export more than one million tonnes of coal.

That’s one billion kilograms, per day.

Burned, that produces around 2.6 billion kilograms of CO2.

That CO2 goes into the atmosphere, 100% man-made.

The atmosphere gets hotter.

The temperature rises.

Droughts become more frequent in Australia. Its forests become drier and burn more frequently, over longer periods of the year.

Australia green-lights a new coal mine.

Jobs are created.

Australia burns.

Coal use predicted to drop by 3% in 2019 →

In a report from the BBC:

“This year looks set to see the largest fall in electricity production from coal on record, according to a new report.

“The reduction is estimated to be more than the power generated from coal in Germany, Spain and the UK combined.

“It is projected to drop by 3% - which is a fall of 300 terawatt hours”.

In particular, there were record reductions in the US, EU, and South Korea.

It’s confusing in China, because they are still building new coal plants and yet these are being used less than ever—a “utilization rate” of only 49%.

Here’s a graphic showing the world’s annual changes in coal use:

You can see the hit that happened after the 2008 financial crisis, and also another one back in 2015.

Just be careful, the bars show the change with respect to the previous year. To get back to coal’s electricity production in 1986—for example—you’d need to have the summed height of orange bars going down equal to the summed height of the purple bars going up. Clearly, we’re still quite far off.

And because this kind of drop has happened three times in the past 11 years, it would be premature to jump for joy.

The Australian government is certainly betting on coal requirements increasing again. Otherwise, why would it be building a new coal mine?

[By the way, here’s the report the articles above were based on.]

[Coal mine photo credit: Dominik Vanyi/Unsplash]

Tesla batteries only losing 1% of capacity per year on average →

“What happens to a Tesla battery after a few years of driving and charging? As you can see in the chart below, a new car starts off giving over 100% of the EPA range, but from there the battery does indeed deteriorate over time—however by seven years old the average Tesla battery still provides around 93% of its original capacity and range”.

This is fairly amazing for a battery:

Can you imagine your phone’s battery only losing 1% of capacity per year?

Yeah right.

Since battery capacity is more a function of distance driven (distance = recharge = decreasing capacity) than years, here’s a plot of that:

So at 196,000 miles (315,000 km), the trend line corresponds to a charge of 90%.

This would mean a remaining capacity of 50% after around a million miles (more than 1.5 million km).

For the average American, that works out to be 76 years of driving!

However, I would probably consider modeling with a polynomial curve rather than a straight line towards the right-hand side, as it seems to be curving down—i.e., a small acceleration in battery capacity loss. Probably less than 50% remaining after the first million.

At what remaining capacity does the battery become technically “useless”?

Probably depends on the user. If you never ever drive out of town, you’ll still be able to use a battery with 20% capacity remaining. But if you have frequent or occasional long trips to take, low remaining capacity will become a bummer at some point.

You can almost imagine an exchange market for people with different requirements for battery range at different points in their lives. However, Tesla currently doesn’t have swappable batteries, so you’d have to swap the car too, which might be awkward.

More details and plots can be found in this article.

Bitcoin as a symbol of human stupidity →

I’m no fan of Bitcoin.

It’s rich people paying smart people to do tricky technological stuff to make the rich people richer and the smart people richer too. All in a regulatory bubble that lets it happen.

Articles like this just highlight the level of abomination we’re talking about:

“Whinstone US Inc., a Louisiana-based developer of high-speed data centers, and Northern Bitcoin AG, a Germany-based bitcoin mining firm, have merged to open a 100-acre bitcoin mining farm in the U.S. state of Texas".

“Jointly announced Monday, Whinstone and Northern Bitcoin said the farm would be the “largest bitcoin mining facility worldwide with a capacity of one gigawatt.” One gigawatt is equal to 1,000 megawatts”.

So, they’re going to fill one hundred acres of land with computers and then run them to “mine” bitcoin.

One gigawatt capacity means that if the “farm” runs at full speed, it uses one gigawatt of electricity every hour.

Let’s have fun and calculate the “farm’s” daily CO2 emissions if it’s running at 50% capacity.

It will be in Texas whose energy mix (2017 data) produces 1166 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour.

1166 pounds is around 529 kg.

One day’s CO2 emissions for this “farm” running at 50% capacity (i.e., 500 megawatts) are therefore:

529 x 500 x 24 = 6.3 million kgs of CO2 per day.

That’s 2.3 billion kg of CO2 per year. Without even taking into account the CO2 emissions of building 100 acres of computers.

And all this is legal.

If this isn’t evidence 101 that CO2 emissions are massively underpriced, I don’t know what is.

Meanwhile, people are trying to cure cancer, feed the planet, save forests from destruction, live an honest life.

And we let this shit go on on the sideline.

It’s wrong.

The A word →

A is for Apocalypse. B is for Banana.

It turns out I have a milder form:

“Have you ever known someone who cited the Anthropocene in a dating profile? Who doled out carbon offset gift certificates at the holidays? Who sees new babies and immediately flashes to the approximately 15 tons of carbon emissions the average American emits per year? Who walks around shops thinking about where all the packaging ends up? You do now”.

The article goes all over the place, but here’s one takeaway:

“There is dismissiveness about whether individual choices like how we consume and transport ourselves matter: Why cancel that trip to Europe if it’s too late anyway and if everyone is still addicted to fossil fuels? But Lou Leonard, a founder of One Earth Sangha, a Buddhist group focused on the crisis, told me that living like climate change is real and that we can do something about it are signals to others — and can help shift cultural norms. Who would have thought Burger King would one day serve delicious plant-based meat?”

It also turns out that “eco-psychologist” is now an actual job:

“Zhiwa Woodbury, an eco-psychologist, believes that we are collectively experiencing climate trauma, of which we are both perpetrators and victims — our assault on the biosphere is an assault on ourselves. Altering habits like how we eat can make people feel more empowered and less overwhelmed, he said, and can shift our relationship with the natural world. After all, the belief that natural resources exist for our heedless exploitation got us to this point in the first place (and made us none the happier). “It makes us feel good that we’re doing something and it gets back to the idea of shared responsibility,” Mr. Woodbury said. “The idea that individuals are powerless only exists because we’ve made them feel powerless.”

We’re all in this together.

[Photo credit: Dark Labs/Unsplash]

Big breakthrough in turning sunlight into intense heat →

Very exciting news on the interwebs.

A secretive start-up with Bill Gates as one of its investors has just come out of stealth mode.

Heliogen is their name, and extreme heat generation is their game.

I think we all agree that at a first glance this sounds pretty boring and unimportant. So before we all doze off—yours truly included—here’s why it matters:

“…cement and steel rely on large amounts of continuous high-temperature heat, and […] there are very few viable low-carbon sources of such heat. Collectively, these industrial processes represent around 20 percent of global carbon emissions”.

So where does Heliogen come in?

“Heliogen’s technology is based on concentrating solar power (CSP). That’s where hundreds of mirrors in a field are all angled to reflect sunlight onto a tower, inside of which is a steam turbine. The heat from the sunlight turns fluid (usually water) to steam, which runs the turbine, which generates power”.

This CSP stuff mostly died out in the 2010s because solar panels got cheaper, faster.

Also, it could only get up to temperatures of around 560°C.

That’s hot enough to make electricity, but not hot enough to help directly produce concrete and steel.

Heliogen has started to get heat over 1000°C using fairly awesome trickery.

How did they do it?

It’s pretty damn cool. They found a way to make sure that all of the mirrors are always pointing at exactly the same spot on the tower, thus concentrating the heat better.

They did it by putting four cameras on the tower and measuring the intensity of the light halo at four equidistant points around each mirror. If the four values are the same, the mirror is pointing in the right direction. Otherwise, the mirror is ever so slightly tilted, in real-time, to fix it.

This is continuously being done to all of the mirrors at the same time. Very, very cool. Apparently the computational power to do it wasn’t even available five years ago. (We’ll let slide what energy is powering the computers for today—is some electricity siphoned off from the tower?)

Right, so that’s what they’re doing. But why the hell is it such a game changer?

First, this kind of heat (1000°C and up) can be used to produce cement and steel, and is also useful in the chemical industry. Imagine if you could get this heat with little or no CO2 emissions.

Game changer.

But it gets crazier still.

If Heliogen can get the temperature up to 1500°C—which is their goal—it gets epic. They will be able to directly generate liquid fuels to be used in the place of fossil fuels. What the what?!

“This is a relatively new engineering development, being perfected by Swedish researchers as we speak. It goes like this: a new, state-of-the-art material called ceria (CeO2) is heated to about 1,500° C, at which point it releases a pure stream of oxygen. Then, at about 1,000° C, water and carbon dioxide are introduced. The ceria wants its oxygen back, so it breaks the water and carbon dioxide up into hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and oxygen, and absorbs the oxygen. What’s left is a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, otherwise known as “syngas.”

“Basically, you start with H2O + CO2 and you end up with a mix of H + CO. As it happens, every hydrocarbon (fossil) fuel in the world, from kerosene to gasoline, from boat fuel to jet fuel, is built around some combination of H and CO, which means synfuel can be refined into any fuel, for any purpose. If the CO2 that feeds into the process is drawn from the ambient air via direct air capture (DAC), which is still a big if for now, then the resulting fuels can be said to be carbon-neutral, a huge improvement on the carbon-intensive fuels now in use”.

So that’s the remaining catch for the fuel generation application. Getting enough CO2 out of the air in a low-carbon way to fuel the process to make the fuel, which when burned just puts the CO2 that was in the atmosphere already back into the atmosphere: carbon neutral. Got it? Else: read again!

And let’s not forget that Heliogen is going to need a way to store the intense heat for days or times when the sun ain’t shining. They say they’re working on it.

Still, big news like this doesn’t come through every day, and it sure feels like a nice change from watching Australia burn to the ground while simultaneously constructing its new coal mine.

[All of the quotes above come from this magnificent article by David Roberts at Vox.]

A funny little way to lower energy use

I just booked a hotel room in Paris.

Without even asking for it, they offered me three ways to take 1€ off the final price:

Use less water. Use less heat. Don’t use the TV.

I took two of them. Two euros off. Just like that.

Nice little nudge.

I’m sure it doesn’t have much effect on the hotel’s bottom line.

But it probably does lead to a small drop in energy use.

Any drop is a good drop.

[Photo credit: Christian Buehner/Unsplash]