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This amazing gadget is the best technology we have for trapping CO2

by CharlaHoyt Posted on February 4, 2015

This amazing gadget is the best technology we have for trapping CO2

By on 4 Feb 2015commentsShare

Here’s a shocker. It looks like one of the best weapons we have right now in the fight-to-the-death cage match that is combatting climate change is — drumroll please — planting trees!

This news comes from a report out of the University of Oxford comparing different ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere — which is a great thing to do, because it buys us more time to get our shit together and figure out how to stop pumping out so much of the stuff in the first place.

It turns out that one hectare of forest can sequester around 3.7 tons of CO2 per year at a cost of less than 100 dollars per ton, according to the report. Plus, trees can do other cool things like improve soil quality. Aren’t trees great? If only we’d known this before!

Other carbon capturing contenders include grabbing CO2 emissions from biomass-burning plants, sucking CO2 directly out of the air, and putting lime in seawater to make it absorb more CO2. On a larger scale, all of these options would destroy trees in a contest of who can capture the most CO2, but these more techie methods come with political hurdles and high costs. Realistically, the researchers say, these options might not make a significant impact until 2050.

But fear not, treehuggers. Your beloved forests won’t have to bear this burden alone until then. Dirt also has a role to play in the more immediate carbon capture game. With better agricultural land management, we can increase the amount of organic carbon in soil. We can also burn biomass into a carbon-dense biochar and store it in soil.

So trees and dirt are where it’s at for the next few decades, the researchers say, and perhaps by mid-century, we’ll be ready to pull out the big guns.

But lest we forget, the researchers at Oxford remind us:

 “It is clear that attaining negative emissions is in no sense an easier option than reducing current emissions. To remove CO2 T on a comparable scale to the rate it is being emitted inevitably requires effort and infrastructure on a comparable scale to global energy or agricultural systems. Combined with the potentially high costs and energy requirements of several technologies, and the global effort needed to approach the technical potentials discussed previously, it is clear that very large-scale negative emissions deployment, if it were possible, is not in any sense preferable to timely decarbonisation of the energy and agricultural systems.”

Guess it’s time to plant some trees and start the revolution!

Source:
Stranded Carbon Assets and Negative Emissions Technologies Working Paper

, University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

Scientists Seeking to Save World Find Best Technology is Trees

, Bloomberg Business.

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This amazing gadget is the best technology we have for trapping CO2

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Gregory Clark Says We Humans Suck at Social Mobility

by HildegardTraylo Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Gregory Clark writes interesting books. His last one, A Farewell to Alms, made a contentious argument about why, after a hundred centuries of zero average economic progress, growth suddenly exploded around 1800 in the tiny island of England and then spread throughout Europe and the world. Basically, Clark argues that the Industrial Revolution started in England because of “accidents of institutional stability and demography….and the extraordinary fecundity of the rich and economically successful. The embedding of bourgeois values into the culture, and perhaps even the genetics, was for these reasons the most advanced in England.”

Bourgeois values! Genetics! Rich people reproducing faster than poor ones! That was bound to piss off some people. I myself found it pretty fascinating, but I also felt like Clark was drawing some pretty spectacular conclusions from some pretty scant data. Sadly, I read Farewell to Alms on one of the original Kindle reading devices, and thus found it virtually impossible to follow. It relies heavily on tables and charts, and those rendered so poorly that I had a hard time following Clark’s argument. Shortly after that I ditched my Kindle.

I’ve since replaced it with a succession of tablets, all of which render the book just fine. But I’ve never gone back to reread it, and now Clark has a new book out, The Son Also Rises.1 His latest big idea is that status is remarkably stable over periods of centuries. Families that were well off in 1700 are, on average, still pretty well off. Basically, we suck at social mobility. Josh Harkinson interviewed him for Mother Jones:

MJ: How do you measure status?

GC: I have a number of different measures for different societies. So for England, where we have some of the best data, we know everyone who went to Oxford and Cambridge from 1200 to the present. That tells us who the educational elite were in England over 800 years, and then we can ask, “What are the names that are showing up in that elite, and how persistent is their appearance in this elite?”

….We find that there is a very strong persistence of elite families at the universities. In recent years, the universities have tried to become more meritocratic and more democratic: They admit students based on performance on national exams. They don’t give any privilege to the fact that your parents went there. And public financing for tuition is now available. But what we find is that elite families persist at Oxford and Cambridge at the same rate as they did in the 19th century. It hasn’t managed to change the rate of social mobility.

Clark uses this strategy of following family names in other countries as well, and comes to similar conclusions. Is this legit? Are family names enough to figure out who’s going up and who’s going down? I have my doubts, but I haven’t read the book. And I have to say that my personal experience is a data point in favor of Clark’s thesis. Many years ago I got interested in genealogy and started digging up my family tree. Roughly speaking, I managed to go back about 200 years through most of my branches. And one of the things that intrigued me was just how homogeneous it all was. Some of my ancestors were better off than others, but mostly within a pretty narrow band. As near as I can tell, none of them were destitute and none of them were rich. They were small farmers, shopkeepers, linen drapers, sign painters, electricians, and stonecutters. Over seven or eight generations, social mobility has been pretty close to zero.

So maybe there’s something to this. I’ll let you know what I think if I end up reading the book.

1Yes, he’s apparently stuck on Hemingway puns. This is undoubtedly a rich vein for economists. Next up: To Have and Halve Not. Followed by For Whom the Swell Toils and The Gold Plan and Me.

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Gregory Clark Says We Humans Suck at Social Mobility

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Permafrost is even less perma than we thought

by marinavhunt Posted on February 22, 2013

Permafrost is even less perma than we thought

By Susie Cagle

Hey, so, about that layer of long-frozen soil covering almost a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere’s land surface? You know, the stuff that’s started melting and freaking out climate scientists but often isn’t calculated into global warming metrics?

U.N./Christopher Arp

Near Alaska, a chunk of permafrost breaks off into the Arctic Ocean.

Yeah, so, uh, according to a new study published this week in the journal Science, that may be melting way faster than we thought. From Climate Central:

If global average temperature were to rise another 2.5°F (1.5°C), say earth scientist Anton Vaks of Oxford University, and an international team of collaborators, permafrost across much of northern Canada and Siberia could start to weaken and decay. And since climate scientists project at least that much warming by the middle of the 21st century, global warming could begin to accelerate as a result, in what’s known as a feedback mechanism. …

[E]nvironmental scientist Rose Cory, of the University of North Carolina, focused on sites in Alaska where melting permafrost has caused the soil to collapse into sinkholes or landslides. The soil exposed in this way is “baked” by sunlight, and said Cory in a press release, “(it) makes carbon better food for bacteria.”

In fact, she said, exposed organic matter releases about 40 percent more carbon, in the form of CO2 or methane, than soil that stays buried. “What that means,” Cory said, “ is that if all that stored carbon is released, exposed to sunlight and consumed by bacteria, it could double the amount of this potent greenhouse gas going into the environment.”

Permafrost that’s been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years is already starting to melt in the Arctic, not just raising global temps but also razing towns. Y’all up there in the Yukon may consider a move to an ironically warmer area, preferably on high ground. The rest of us will just cower in fear in place.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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