As someone who works in the energy field, I have been stoked to see these types of advancements in the past few years. When I first got into this field and would research green energy products, there was a limited field of players. Now there are so many start ups coming up with brilliant products that I can't even keep track! What a wonderful problem to have.
One of my favorite books is "The Wizard and the Prophet", and it's great to see more and more companies following in Norman Borlaug's footsteps and finding new ways the science/tech fields can serve humanity.
If anyone out there is feeling a bit down about the general state of the tech industry, I highly encourage you to look into jobs in the green energy field. It's an exciting space filled with lots of passionate, mission-driven folks. (And, in case you're wondering, most of us aren't the neurotic, perpetually angry types that dominate the activist space. We're pretty chill people who just want a healthy and affordable planet.)
> If anyone out there is feeling a bit down about the general state of the tech industry, I highly encourage you to look into jobs in the green energy field. It's an exciting space filled with lots of passionate, mission-driven folks. (And, in case you're wondering, most of us aren't the neurotic, perpetually angry types that dominate the activist space. We're pretty chill people who just want a healthy and affordable planet.)
I’d second this - I’m not in green energy, but I am in a field that looks to have a substantially positive climate/environmental impact. If you’re feeling particularly existential about the world right now, there’s a real sense of relief from knowing your work is aligned with your values and where you want the world to go.
i'd love to have your optimism. whenever i looked at the job market in this area ("green" tech) most, if not all, of what i found was around carbon offsetting, which is something that has failed to convince me so far
Carbon offsetting is needlessly and cynically attacked by the same people who talk about wind power killing birds or not recycling the blades.
Yes, it's not a perfect unicorn magic solution, but the basic idea of putting a price on carbon and letting the genuinely hard to decarbonise sectors pay for the low hanging fruit in other areas is deeply powerful.
If you think that market forces are a powerful tool, then carbon offsets are a similar thing.
In many ways it's "effective altruism" for carbon (though that movement is under a bit of a cloud lately).
That's one type of offset, by one provider. And others dispute the 90% figure since in the study it 10% that are rated good and only a third "useless" (for carbon, they may have biodiversity co-benefits).
So yeah, not magic, just a boring bit of economics that lets people work together efficiently via a market based process, with the chance of waste and graft that entails if not regulated well.
"Not regulated well" is almost guaranteed when it's an invented market. There are bound to be infinite loopholes, as people aren't good at creating markets with no missing or unintended consequences.
All markets are "invented". That's why countries have regulations about how how much of various poisons you can put into baby food. Otherwise people will sell you poisoned baby food because that is sometimes cheaper than non poisoned baby food.
Private property is a regulation. You can't even barter if the other guy has no concept of ownership, he'll just take it from you. Markets are invented by regulations.
I think at this point we're talking about laws, not regulations. You can come down off a mountain with a couple of stone tablets and that's enough to get going with barter, as barter is individuals deciding how much things are worth to them.
Conversely, the carbon market is invented: there is no natural value of the negative externality of pollution, so we invent one. And, as it's invented, it's riddled with holes.
> Carbon offsetting is needlessly and cynically attacked by the same people who talk about wind power killing birds or not recycling the blades.
well i don't really understand how you can lump all those together but ok... they're still not the same.
as others have pointed out, it doesn't seem hard (or hard enough) to scam in this business sector - i.e. having the same assets accounting for different offset purchases, or just conflating assets bought for different puroses with offsetting. furthermore, it just deviates us from what should be the true goal: reduce fossil fuel consumption. not to mention how big business just offload this shady business cost to the end consumer.
Youtube clickbait is exactly the kind of thing where "Downside of thing you thought was good" is likely to thrive. It's practically a genre (there's also "positive aspect of thing you thought was bad" for balance).
Fundamentally, there's a paper trail. Disney has bought credits from The Nature Conservancy. If it turns out that those credits are a scam, then we know who sold them and who bought them. There's a whole business plan setting out the case that can be reviewed by independant third parties or governments as time goes by. There's an actual forest you can visit. We can see what a market price is, and be suspicious of people claiming to have a low price compared with anyone else. We can sue companies that claim to provide one thing but don't deliver.
This is all very boring and nerdy. But it works, after a fashion. Even the videos you link, they're only really able to exist because of that paper trail.
I was going to compare this with the "additionality" debate around buying "green" energy, and remembered that Google did some good work on making sure they were getting additionality from the renewables they purchased, here's their stance on the offsets they buy:
If Google doesn't fit then there's probably some organisation that you trust to not mess this up that has done similar.
> Conclusion
>In addition to improving our efficiency and investing in green power, we will continue to purchase
carbon offsets to bring our carbon footprint down to zero. However, not all carbon offsets are
created equal and ensuring that a carbon offset represents actual greenhouse gas reductions can be
a long process.
> Carbon offsets are still very new. In fact, it’s entirely possible that how we offset our emissions
a few years from now will be very different from how we do it today. Our offsets may be more
personalized, more local and rely on emergent technologies that have a global impact. Google hopes
to be part of the evolution of these new offsets, and will continue to foster current offset projects
through research, collaboration and investment
> If it turns out that those credits are a scam, then we know who sold them and who bought them.
This falls under the category of "not even wrong." The problem with carbon offsets is that they are irrevocable. Company A buys offsets from Provider Z. They do so because Z offers them for the lowest price -- say, alleged reforesting in the Brazilian Amazon. Years later, it turns out that no trees were planted, and Z was a scam from the beginning.
Company A doesn't care! Carbon offsets are irrevocable under every scheme. A got to produce about as much CO2 as they were going to anyway (not much less, because the fake carbon offsets they purchased were artificially cheap bc they were a fraud), and Provider Z gets away with it bc they live in a developing country with poor enforcement of regulations.
As long as offsets are irrevocable, there will be an inevitable race to the bottom to sell cheap, fake offsets. Carbon offsets are a great example of a fake solution that economists love but do nothing to solve the underlying problem.
Poor countries are more likely to find their transition to clean energy being funded by rich countries paying carbon fees and looking for impactful ways to cut carbon.
Less carbon, more green energy, everyone is happy.
It's insisting that rich people can't offset that leaves both the rich and the poor (both between and within countries) worse off, as in other situations without market pricing to allow trade.
If anyone out there is feeling a bit down about the general state of the tech industry, I highly encourage you to look into jobs in the green energy field.
There are so many things this world needs smart people doing. A slowdown in the tech sector might just be the catalyst.
I'd love to know as well, especially for software engineers.
I'm wondering if there are opportunities in this field for distributed systems experts, but not a necessity.
There's a lot of adjacent software industry. E.g. I work for a company that makes management software for offshore wind farms. The channels to find jobs in this field are the regular ones like LinkedIn.
From my reading of the press release, the novelty in this work is that they've found a process that works with "ordinary" chemicals, temperatures and pressures, so it can be scaled up economically.
I say "ordinary", because it might very well be working with mildly toxic chemicals at 80°C and 7 bar pressure or whatnot, so far outside the range of (at least economic) feasibility in the home lab.
That should not worry anybody though, the fabrication process is at least as dangerous. I've worked a lot with various kinds of epoxy (and yes, also to make windmill blades) and reading the MSDS on your typical resin is enough to make you wonder if you even want to use this stuff at all.
Looking in my workshop, nearly 100% of the "stuff in solution" there have solvents you do not want to breath. Then you do a bit of skiing and you see the composition of the waxes. You do a bit of woodworking and home improvement and you look at the composition of the glues. They are full of deadly compounds. So yes, we should not worry but still handle with care.
My simple advice: if you see on the product that it should be used in a well ventilated place, do it!
That is very true. I'm surprised many people seem not to care.
I use mostly safer compounds in my workshop (platinum-cure silicones, polyurethane resins, and occasionally good grade epoxy), but I still put on a proper mask, glasses, and gloves. Especially when working with my daughter. Those half-mask respirators are surprisingly comfortable (I found them easier to wear than N95/FFP2 masks).
The main problem is that over time you become more and more sensitive to it. So even if initially you have no response don't be surprised if after some time of using it regularly you have really bad allergic reactions to even mild exposure.
Yup. Anecdotal story, a friend of my father was making a boat for himself and he became so sensitized to epoxy that he had to stop working on it and hire somebody else to finish it for him.
(For boatbuilding, the usual choice is polyester resin rather than epoxy, which is nasty in other ways. You don't wanna be inhaling those styrene vapors all day long.)
I'm no professional boatbuilder, but I've been helping out friends and family with DIY glassfiber boat repairs and improvements. So yes, I have experience of both polyester resin and epoxy. They have their own issues, as discussed in this thread.
Epoxy is highly allergenic (or whatever the word is), so you should be pretty careful about using nitrile gloves or similar when working with it. Personally I don't find the smell particularly bad, and it's not very strong, at least compared to polyester resin.
Polyester, yes it smells bad, and as I mentioned in my parent comment that's styrene vapors you're inhaling, which is a known carcinogen. If I were to do some bigger job with polyester, I'd definitely want some pretty hefty breathing filter. But for the occasional one-off thing, particularly if you can do it outdoors, meh..
Mostly a gut feeling: Anything someone can grow sensitive to, such as this or smoke or anything, should at least be very carefully examined as a cause of harm generally.
That's partly about concentration. I've heard of people becoming allergic to lavender, which is normally pretty unlikely, because they imprudently used the concentrated oil on their skin.
AFAIK most allergies/hypersensitives are for harmless things; animals, pollen, and different types of food. So basing what we grow sensitive to might not be the best test to see if a product can cause harm
If you get resin on your skin and it starts curing under your skin your immune system will have to get rid of the stuff under your skin and because it is so difficult to get rid of cured resins your immune response will be incredibly sensitive.
Carbon fiber wind turbine blades are the future - see this from DOE at Sandia researchers (US national labs have a very good materials science development program):
> "Wind blades containing carbon fiber weigh 25% less than ones made from traditional fiberglass materials. That means carbon fiber blades could be longer than fiberglass ones and, therefore, capture more energy in locations with low wind. A switch to carbon fiber also could extend blade lifetime because carbon fiber materials have a high fatigue resistance."
Carbon fiber could plausibly be made without reliance on any fossil fuel inputs. The chemical synthesis pipeline is (working backwards):
atmospheric CO2 + H2O -> CO + H2 (Fischer-Tropsch) -> -> butane
This is basically replacing petrochemistry with aero/hydro-chemisty to generate all the feedstocks. Once you get past the initial step (CO2 capture, conversion to carbon monoxide, and reduction with water-sourced hydrogen at high temp & pressure) it's basically just providing simple hydrocarbon feedstocks (non-fossil-sourced) into existing chemical processes developed by organic chemists over the past century or so.
Also, if you just bury the worn-out carbon-fiber blades in stable landfills, they don't degrade over time, so it's also removing carbon from the atmosphere (very slowly, of course, and not really enough to be very noticeable).
That's very interesting, but is it cost effective to get carbon out of the atmosphere rather than to drill it out of the ground?
Put another way, you can either build 10 wind turbines with atmospheric carbon fiber, or 11 turbines with carbon fiber made from petrochemical feedstocks. Which option ultimately has a bigger reduction in CO2 emissions over the lifetime of the turbines?
It seems obvious that if synthesizing butane from atmospheric CO2 was anywhere near economic after applying a carbon tax, global warming would not be an existential threat. I'd love to be wrong, obviously...
Climate change isn't an existential threat if all governments and international corporations follow a carbon (more precisely GHG) pricing scheme.
The crisis is that its politically hard to coordinate that agreement and transition and we've not made as much use of the last four decades as we could have. Potentially passing irreversible tipping points.
Depends on where you are! On Mars, for example, it's going to be far more cost effective to get carbon from the Martian atmosphere and water from the subsurface than to ship carbon feedstocks from Earth.
Currently, these technologies are approaching parity on cost fairly quickly. It's basically at the prototype stage presently, so much more expensive, but widespread adoption and economies of scale could change that within several decades. The upfront costs are quite high, similar to any petrochemical complex, i.e. in the multi-billion-dollar range for any facility capable of significant industrial-scale output.
> Currently, these technologies are approaching parity on cost fairly quickly. It's basically at the prototype stage presently, so much more expensive, but widespread adoption and economies of scale could change that within several decades.
Sorry, but how could that possibly work from even a first principles perspective? Oil is literally just pumped out of the ground, whereas you have to overcome the entropy of highly disperse atmospheric CO2, and then you have to add the enthalpy of the hydrocarbons!
But then, you have to distill it and strip out the sulfur and other elemental contaminants and fractionate it and crack it... one benefit of starting off with pure CO2 and water is the ability to selectively make pure hydrocarbon fractions (or at least fairly restricted spreads of chain lengths) without having any waste.
Also, there's the distribution issue - this could all be done regionally, so transport costs will go way down. The only thing needed is excess energy to dump into the process (equatorial zones would be good for solar PV inputs, etc.)
I know spacex had trouble finding autoclaves big enough for carbon fiber tanks. I would expect windmill blades need to be even bigger and hence need a bigger autoclave. So that would be a major challenge.
Then again this is a huge market, and the mentioned gains are quite big. So the economic benefits might be big enough that someone dares build an autoclave for carbon fiber windmill blades.
I kind of doubt it. carbon fiber has pretty bad impact resistance which is necessary because the blades are spinning quickly enough that dust over time erodes the leading edge
> "Leading edge erosion (LEE) is a phenomenon where the leading edge of a wind turbine blade is eroded due to rain, hail, UV, sand, dust, and numerous airborne particulates. Since wind turbine blades are built to last over 2 decades, this erosion exposes the fiberglass beneath and ultimately impacts the blade’s life causing the turbine to produce less energy over time."
Fossil plants emit radionuclides (coal) and, obviously, lots of other things. But dismissing fiber inhalation risk from their replacement because fossil plants are bad is pure sophistry.
Hmm, we make aircraft, including supersonic ones, out of carbon fiber. So surely the problem is manageable somehow? If nothing else, put some metal plates on the leading edges?
most of the time an airplane is at altitude where there is a lot less stuff in the air. (and when they're at low attitudes, they are going a lot slower)
> Also, if you just bury the worn-out carbon-fiber blades in stable landfills
I think it's probably better to just burn the carbon fiber. As you point out, it's not a significant amount of carbon, and it's a tidier solution with less risk of unintended consequences. If you want to capture and store carbon, burn it in a trash burning power plant that captures CO2. Then you have a more general-purpose solution for CO2 capture that you can feed any other carbon-based waste. (Of course, Reuse, Reuse and Recycle first, but eventually everything degrades to the point where it's best to burn it. This also helps pull out environmental toxins and heavy metals from materials we've made)
There's an interesting project in Norway to test trash burning with pure oxygen. The gas in the chamber will in effect be a mix of O2 and CO2. The released CO2 is recycled and the O2/CO2 mixture is controlled to optimize the temperature. This makes the trash burning, the cleaning of the exhaust and the CO2-capture more efficient.
Carbon fiber is indeed superior in many ways, but it’s also very expensive. At least that’s the impression I get from it being used only in expensive cars.
So it seems to only be worth it if it doesn’t increase the total cost of a new wind turbine by too much compared to the added efficiency.
It is more expensive, because the process to produce it is less mature than metal alloy based solutions.
For example BMW invested a lot of money into carbon fiber production development and can now use some of the knowledge and technology in more mainstream products starting with iX SUV.
Carbon fiber certainly has advantages vs. fiberglass. But this article was about the resin material, which forms, depending on the application, maybe around 50% of the weight. But maybe it's possible to produce epoxy resin by starting from atmospheric CO2 and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis as well, IDK.
Of course, glass fiber wins here, being just molten rock extruded through a nozzle (well, quite simplified, but you get the idea). No expensive hydrocarbon synthesis required.
The important magic is that carbon and hydrogen given enough pressure will form hydrocarbons (basically as dead plankton deep below the tectonic plate did), so doing it the brute force way is simple, but very energy intensive.
Split CO2 to CO and O, split H2O to H2 and O.
CO + H is syngas, used as feedstock for synthetic fuels.
Then using a metal catalyst (iron or cobalt for example) and heat and pressure good old "organic chemistry" does the rest, various hydrocarbons form (and water as residual by product). This reaction itself gives off heat, so at least this part doesn't need that much energy.
I read somewhere that the waste from old recreational boats hull is several order of magnitude higher than from wind turbine even if we install as much as needed to produce all of our electricity.
Not to be a contrarian but I would just like to note that we can't install wind turbines to produce all electricity needed. Wind turbines only produce electricity when the wind blows and thus can only be part of the energy infrastructure. Even countries like Denmark who has invested heavily in wind since early 90s still only gets a low total amount from wind and has coal powered power plants as backbone energy source. The sensationalist headlines showing 40% electricity production (not total energy) from wind is only in peak periods.
I doubt it is possible to cover the total energy needs without a reliable source like a power plant. I am all for green energy, but reliability and cost are equally important parameters.
those “models” are mostly garbage because they ignore a massive contraint in most areas that are not Australia - transmission. this is completely ignored and all these “predictions” only ever consider energy supply while assuming perfect transmission.
So yes, it is actually quite difficult to get to even 95% renewable energy for an entire year and to do it for multiple years with unpredictable and changing weather is harder still. Also, not every place is Australia.
The thing is net operators will continuously learn and adapt as renewables grow. More transmission lines, dynamic load management, storage at critical points etc. will be implemented as the share in renewables grows.
I didn't say it will be quick, but I think for example that Europe having 95% renewable electricity generation by 2043 is an achievable goal.
I do not dispute the forecasts - i've made several myself. I'm simply disputing that "possible" implies "simple" or "easy".
When you say Europe reaching 95% renewables, what you are referring to is western europe. The road to even 50% renewables is much more difficult in eastern europe. The further away you move from the Benelux countries, Germany, the nordics, the more coal there is, the more gas there is and the less transmission there is. Building transmission lines takes decades from start to finish.
It looks like it could be used for any purpose that requires some form of cover. Bus stop for example. Why not even use it for housing, given the materials are inert enough.
According to TFA, this method works not only on existing in-operation blades, but means landfilled blade material can be repurposed for remanufacture. That means less extraction of raw materials in the first place—presuming the chemical process isn’t obscenely resource-intensive.
This would also be interesting for custom car shops, aircraft manufacturers, and many other industries which work with composites, which create a significant amount of epoxy waste.
It is very cool someone is working to address this problem rather than pretending it doesn't exist. Now we also need to discover a solution to a problem of turbine blades lasting much less than their design life in a marine environment (especially when freezing weather is common). Allegedly many blades fail after few years rather than expected 15~25. Unfortunately, there isn't even any published research showing real life numbers. How can we address a problem when we don't even know how serious is it?
Nobody was "pretending it doesn't exist." Perform a quick google search and you'll see mainstream press coverage of researchers and entrepreneurs have been working on the problem and also collecting data for quite some time.
> Allegedly many blades fail after few years rather than expected 15~25
[Citation required]. Unless you're referring to leading edge damage, which has already been determined to largely be caused by excessive speed during heavy precipitation, and thus can be controlled: https://wes.copernicus.org/articles/3/729/2018/
I'm so tired of people trying to 'gotcha' green energy.
The negative development in our service business underscores that we have much work ahead of us to stabilize our business and return to profitability," said Siemens Gamesa Chief Executive Jochen Eickholt, who joined from Siemens Energy last year.
I can't take an article seriously that starts like this:
> The greenies’ dream of “clean” (except for millions of dead birds) energy from wind farms is dying in the face of the poor economics (even with tax subsidies) and unreliable technology
Stupid greenies! I was right to be sceptic, look at the end:
> It is beyond the time to end subsidies for wind power. Not only has atmospheric CO2 risen without serious consequence, the doomsaying models proven consistently wrong, but the financial thumb on the scale via subsidies has encouraged development of a technology that is still immature, if it ever will be viable.
The project name sounded familiar: CETEC. It has taken a fair amount of googling to realise that it is not Setec (astronomy) and there are still secrets.
Good, that sounds like a whole lot better than grinding them up and using them as concrete/asphalt filler. I wish that sort of re-use is more clearly separated from actual recycling. It's obviously not a long term solution, and with obvious downsides. Actually turning old blades into new ones without leftovers is a huge leap into making renewables actually renewable.
Large, strong, fairly environmentally inert structures are still useful even if the electrical generating portion is obsolete. The only thing preventing them from being sliced and diced and used for all sorts of stuff (and reducing the amount of actual waste by a ton) is politics.
Grinding the blades to use as filler is indeed one of the downcycling routes currently in use for old blades. It is energy intensive and there is limited demand for the filler because it has to compete with other very low cost materials, so the economics are not usually favourable.
Holey schmoley. The environmentalists have become obsessed with "keeping stuff out of landfill". "Keeping stuff out of landfill" has become the primary goal of many environmental movements.
There is nothing wrong with stuff going into landfill. In fact in many cases, putting things in landfill is the ideal outcome.
Obsessively trying to keep stuff out of landfill leads to unintended consequences that are much worse for the environment than putting it in landfill.
Consider waste plastics. People go crazy with the idea that waste plastic ends up in landfill, so they become obsessed with "recycling". But it's simply impossible to recycle the vast ocean of plastic waste.
So what they are doing now is putting plastic waste into PLASTIC ROADS, and calling this "recycling".
And then cars and trucks grind microplastics out of the plastic roads and into the water, air, land, food, animals and people. The plastic would have been much more safe in a landfill, where its toxic effects are constrained ot the area of the landfill. But hey "at least the plastics aren't in landfill, right?".
Every time you hear about the plastic waste issue it always comes with someone fretting about "keeping it out of landfill", like landfill is our most precious land that must not contaminated with waste plastic. It's just wrong.
Put waste plastic in landfill, stop pretending we can "recycle" an ocean of waste plastic into stuff.
The entire environmental movement is focused on mopping when it should be turning off the tap.
> So what they are doing now is putting plastic waste into PLASTIC ROADS, and calling this "recycling".
As a pro-conservation minded person I'm in sympathy with this viewpoint, a concentrated landfill could be less damage than an expanse of plastic in roads. But the article is suggesting an economical circular reuse:
> The newly discovered chemical process shows that epoxy-based turbine blades, whether in operation or sitting in landfill, can be turned into a source of raw material to potentially build new turbine blades
> So what they are doing now is putting plastic waste into PLASTIC ROADS, and calling this "recycling".
That's why it's not really called "recycling" but downcycling. It does not re-enter the "cycle". It just goes in a different (and arguably worse) landfill.
The argument for recycling is also not usually that landfills grow, but that stuff on landfills is not used for new things and the materials that are now missing have to be covered by oil, mining, etc, all the stuff "environmentalists" worry about.
It doesn't matter how it is precisely called. It still creates a huge concern in the same of being environmentally good.
Roads are the worst place as they are constantly open to the elements and mechanical wear and are washed over and over by rain water.
Using it for housing is a different and possible a better scenario given that environmental risks are taken into account at the end of the life when the material is disposed (or recycled or up/down cycled) after demolition.
Decades ago I figured it might be worthwhile to buy up mining rights to landfills. Cos yes, they are concentrated processed materials, albeit kinda mixed up. But then every state legislature would be trying to stick you with a bill for cleanup.
There could be unintended consequences. It sounds like the recycling involves caustic chemicals. Does the recycling operation produce toxic waste or use a tremendous amount of energy? Someone needs to do a lifecycle assessment to know the full impact. Sometimes recycling is worth it, sometimes not.
Near my house is an outdoor playground with a spongy floor made of recycled tires and god knows what else that STINKS during the day. There’s no way they know the origin of all of the materials they’ve made into this playground sausage that kids are touching and breathing all day.
Anyone have tips on where to put my energy into fighting things like this? I guess I can start locally but anything else?
"Profiling and potential cancer risk assessment on children exposed to PAHs in playground dust/soil: a comparative study on poured rubber surfaced and classical soil playgrounds in Seoul "
"substances of concern that were recently detected in recycled tire rubber samples.3 The nine chemicals are benzo(a)pyrene, hexavalent chromium, zinc, 4-methyl--pentanone, benzothiazole, lead, dibutyl phthalate, diethylhexyl phthalate, and 4-tert-octylphenol. UC staff identified acute, subchronic, and chronic TRVs, where available, for the oral, inhalation, and dermal routes"
The solution is to produce less of it. Any other solution unless there is a way to decompose something back into useful molecules is just a stay of execution.
> unless there is a way to decompose something back into useful molecules
There is, and it's called "plasma gasification". The main reason it hasn't become popular is because it's not profitable. But it is a legitimate technique that can enable actual recycling of plastic.
Couple plasma gasification with green energy, and we can use all the plastic we want, as long as we're willing to pay the cost of properly recycling it.
There was some work done on using solar furnaces to use them for the destruction of very toxic substances. 100,000:1 solar concentrators or something to that effect.
A (deceased) friend of mine had an even better idea: resource extraction tax. Never mind VAT but instead tax for the use of virgin resources and leave the rest untaxed. The recyclers would put the miners out of business.
I fear this could also have plenty of unintended consequences. Depending on the tax, maybe more things will start being shipped in Teflon coated cardboard.
None of that stuff really matters directly though. What matters is actual impact on the environment. Things like pollution, habitat destruction, etc. That's what should be taxed/discouraged.
If someone can extract resources with no environmental cost, I would definitely NOT want to penalize them.
Another inconvenient truth is that immediate global climate concerns need to take priority over the localized toxic mining, manufacturing, and waste problems that might be associated with renewables and electric vehicles.
We really don't have time to care whether broken solar panels end up in landfills or whether lithium mining ruins some picturesque landscapes in Australia.
Spodumene mines in Australia already exist at scale. So, the landscape in question has already been opened up for mining, and the question was asked (and answered) in time past.
This isn't really as big a deal as some people like to say here (Oz) where greenfield but plausible coal strip mines are a valid high risk question, and are being aggressively opposed and with good reason.
TL;DR its like the PETA campaign against Kangaroo meat/leather: misplaced activism. The lithium mining environmental concern isn't the problem.
I thought it was the processing, rather than the mining, which came with toxic downsides? But in any case, the Chinese have been undercutting everyone for two decades. Lower costs and massive capital investments.
Compared to massive crop failure, mass starvation, wide scale species extinction, and resulting resource conflict, the toxic byproducts and landfill of wind/solar are inconsequential. Even the risk of nuclear (increased radiation from failures, proliferation) is bearable if we can decarbonise faster.
Spodumene is roasted and treated with acid to make the lithium salts needed. It does use water, and heat (energy) and you have waste water settlement ponds.
Atacama lake deposits are different, and have a different treatment path which I think has a higher risk to a fragile ecology in salt-pan type evaporation and depletion of a high-altitude water table.
I'm kind of hedging: I want to believe our (AU) spodumene waste cycle issues are both different and smaller (we can use PV to do the heating, and its recyclable water) but I think thats unknown. A geologist/ecologist could say.
> Put waste plastic in landfill, stop pretending we can "recycle" an ocean of waste plastic into stuff.
> The entire environmental movement is focused on mopping when it should be turning off the tap.
I'm not sure how much of your general screed I agree with ... but this is very much on point. We know that plastics are hard to recycle, expensive to recycle, and what is recycled is hard and expensive to actually use. We need to look for alternatives to plastic use in the first place. And this needs to be legislated. There's no need whatsoever for that pack of five tomatoes to be put in a plastic tray and then wrapped in more plastic.
It is, but the carbon actually in the plastic is a small portion of the total carbon used in the production process. Chucking it in landfill in a situation where you could otherwise substitute for new plastic means that the cost of chucking it in landfill is the total carbon cost of the new thing.
Recycling plastic is almost never worth it. You have to plan for it while designing the original artifact manage the chain of custody, and finally find an application that can actually use the reprocessed plastic.
I read a position piece on plastics. Claimed that the best solution was to burn all plastics, to generate electricity, which would be fed into the grid. Claimed that optimally burned (right temp, pressure, and O2) that the resulting smoke could be treated to be minimally impact the environment and burning prevented all of the harmful chemicals (numerous biologically chemicals like bpa, bpc, etc) from getting into the soil and water table.
It sounded promising, and does sound better then ending up in the ground or oceans. No idea if the science supports this though.
Most plastics can be incinerated pretty quickly, releasing quite a bit of energy. The only downside is the release of CO2, but that should be reasonably easy to capture.
And you'd avoid creating massive toxic landfills. Just putting stuff in a big pile and hoping nothing bad happens to it isn't really a solution.
Landfill (and nuclear power) are the two things you can champion to be a climate change denier and support fossil fuels while not saying the stuff that makes you sound like a total loon out loud.
Oh I'm not attacking renewables and recycling, I'm just championing those sadly overlooked technologies the dumb green hippies have ignored! Don't listen to them, they're all stupid and communist. They can't do maths and science and are probably female. They can't handle the manly truth about climate change like me.
Except they've not been ignored. Landfill is at the bottom of the waste hierarchy because it's not as good as the other options. Nuclear isn't going to make up the majority of energy production because it's not as good as solar and wind. There are lots of scientific papers that go into this in mind numbing depth.
I know the fossil-funded "news" and "politics" organisations you follow told you this was all a hoax and a conspiracy, but turns out, they were lying to you. At some point you're going to have to deal with that and face reality rather than spiral further into conspiracy land.
Uh no. While keeping stuff out of a landfill may not be the optimal short term goal you appear to be neglecting the fact that we live on a planet with finite non-renewable resources. This means that keeping things out of a landfill will, at some point down the line, become an existential matter.
The destiny of stuff in landfill is to be burned/recycled when the earth crust get melted back in millions of years.
The more I look the more the environmental movement is a complete scam. In almost all mesure we are still tiny on the surface of the earth.
Make some exceptions for fluorinated compound leaking into water, high grade nuclear waste, ocean overfishing, habitat destruction/diversity reduction.
> Make some exceptions for fluorinated compound leaking into water, high grade nuclear waste, ocean overfishing, habitat destruction/diversity reduction.
What's your reason for excluding the biggest one of all: greenhouse gases released by human activities. It sounds like you are just artfully denying global warming by that omission, without saying it outright.
CO2 is not that big of a problem on a reasonable timescale. It’s largely overblown.
The CO2 increase is greening the earth (make plant grow more in harsh dry conditions) slightly increase temperature, increase humidity and plant growth also.
I am not worried a bit about global warming anymore, it’s another media/research/government feedback loop were more attention bring more money that bring more attention.
Now, there is an increase in CO2, it’s man made, it will increase the temperature, but that doesn’t mean it’s the biggest problem that we have. We have to be carefull, sort the problems by their importance, timescale, cost to fix, etc. (Bjorn Lomberg)
Another thing that make it non problematic is the massive increase in solar efficiency and reduction in cost. Just based on cost solar will rapidly replace coal in almost all places (Look into Tony Seba work) The increase in technological knowledge also mean that in 50-100 years we will be so far away that CO2 will not be an issue anyway.
I used to think it was a big deal, but the more I dig, the more I find it won't ever be a problem for humanity.
I am still a big fan of Solal PV, EV, (renewable are still good)
The current assumption of the climate apocalypse is:
We are going into a brick wall, it’s our fault, we have to put this as first priority.
While there is some truth to that, we are also going into a brick wall in many differents ways.
What is the most important?
How much ressource should we allocate to each one?
In how long will this be a problem?
How to assess if we are making progress with our measures?
How many poor people today are we ready to sacrifice to reduce CO2 now (raising energy prices, reducing fertilizers)
The improvement in growth of plant was an unintended positive consequence of our action. The deserts are greening, we should at least take notice.
From what I see, the rapid improvement of technology: solar, ev and other will make climate change a non issue.
Turbine blades have previously been challenging to recycle due to the chemical properties of epoxy resin, a resilient substance that was believed to be impossible to break down into re-usable components. This has led to many technology leaders attempting to replace or modify epoxy resin with alternatives that can be more easily treated. Vestas’ solution is enabled by a novel chemical process that can chemically break down epoxy resin into virgin-grade materials. The chemical process was developed in collaboration with Aarhus University, Danish Technological Institute, and Olin the partners of the CETEC project, a coalition of industry and academia established to investigate circular technology for turbine blades.
It turns cured epoxy in to... something. I wish they said what. There's still all the fibers to deal with as well, is that resuable too after the process?
"virgin materials", in this case, would mean epoxy monomers, which would be very interesting chemically - polyepoxide bonds are really strong, which is the source of their utility, so reversing that bond without pyrolizing or otherwise damaging the polyepoxide structure would be a very interesting feat of chemistry and chemical engineering.
I wonder if they're testing it on pure cured blocks of epoxy, or actual samples of turbine rotors - often these kinds of processes end up having a loss fraction in real world usage, which would be understandable. I'm just an armchair chemist, but I do see a lot of epoxy resin used all over the place, so breaking it down completely would be pretty extremely useful, and certainly make me a lot less reticent to use it.
"Burn it all and filter" is basically pyrolysis - use high temperatures to break chemical bonds and turn complex substances into much simpler substances which can then be reused.
Problem is the energy input required for those high temperatures. It costs money to consume that energy, quite often more money than you make by reselling the simpler substances that come out the end of your pyrolysis process.
can you please go into some details about the "clearly overblown" part? do you think that the IPCC models/predictions are too inaccurate, or you doubt that we are a turning point where we might be able to influence the outcome, compared to decades later when there will be entirely too much GHG in the atmosphere?
In a nutshell I think we are in an bubble of climate/CO2 focus.
We look at all the signs that go in that direction(climate apocalypse) and throw out all the ones that that point in the other side.
We are in a feedback loop where more awareness create more funding who find more "evidence" who create more funding.
On the other side, the scientists who express doubts are labeled "deniers" are cast out of their professions, get their funding cut out.
The government get an easy excuse for every problems: climate change ! the media get clicks and headlines, the research get funding, etc.
Going to solar electricity is a good thing, EV too, big fan and investor in all of those. But I think we should focus more on human flourishing and that at the speed of transformation we have (solar panels price) we will be fine with climate.
I like Tony Seba on Solar/Wind/Battery transition of energy and Bjorn Lomberg on the priorities for our world.
The industry is already switching away from Balsa-wood to PET, Older blades contained somewhere between 1-3% balsa-wood. Ecologically conscious wind generator producers used certified(FSC) balsa-wood.
One of my favorite books is "The Wizard and the Prophet", and it's great to see more and more companies following in Norman Borlaug's footsteps and finding new ways the science/tech fields can serve humanity.
If anyone out there is feeling a bit down about the general state of the tech industry, I highly encourage you to look into jobs in the green energy field. It's an exciting space filled with lots of passionate, mission-driven folks. (And, in case you're wondering, most of us aren't the neurotic, perpetually angry types that dominate the activist space. We're pretty chill people who just want a healthy and affordable planet.)