Category: Technology_MN

Screens brighten with the flow of words. Perhaps they are emails, hastily scrawled on smart devices, or emoji-laden messages exchanged between friends or families. On this same river of the digital, millions flock to binge their favorite television programming, to stream pornography, or enter the sprawling worlds of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, or simply to look up the meaning of an obscure word or the location of the nearest COVID-19 testing center.

Research and development powerhouses the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and Battelle are teaming up, announcing today a new partnership with industry and other key stakeholders to accelerate the demonstration and deployment of new low-carbon clean energy technologies.

Today, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) announced $44 million in funding to develop and scale promising technologies to help address climate change as part of an exploration of cutting-edge and emerging solutions, including carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Employing innovative financing strategies—including grants, investments, and making carbon removal purchases directly from companies—is part of CZI’s approach to accelerating action on climate change.

Grist reporter Jesse Nichols traveled to a factory in Oregon, that’s building a new type of battery.
Sitting in a row outside of the factory, these giant batteries are the size of freight containers. Powered by vats of iron and saltwater, they’re called iron flow batteries. And they’re part of a wave of cleantech inventions designed to store energy from the sun and the wind, and solve a problem that has stumped the energy world for more than 150 years.

U.S. President Joe Biden wants to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to fight climate change, a plan that will require not just steep cuts in carbon output but also wider use of negative emissions technologies that can clear up the emissions that remain.

Latest study underscores how satellites are exposing emissions sources around the globe. ‘It’s a harbinger of what’s to come,’ one expert says.

The impact of climate change is being felt locally and globally. Rising to the challenge, the United States is now taking on ambitious emission reduction targets. It recently rejoined the Paris Agreement in 2021 and has set national targets to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52% by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050. [1]

A first-of-its-kind “green” Shell facility in Alberta is emitting more greenhouse gases than it’s capturing, throwing into question whether taxpayers should be funding it, a new report has found. Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage facility captured 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the hydrogen produced at its Scotford complex between 2015 and 2019. Scotford refines oil from the Alberta tar sands.

The Earth is warming rapidly as a result of human-caused emissions. Some scientists think re-engineering the atmosphere to deflect more of the sun’s heat could help. Others are warning that such a move would be both dangerous and unethical.

It’s been compared to everything from a holy grail to fool’s gold: the ultimate solution to clean, readily available energy or an expensive delusion diverting scarce money and brainpower from the urgent needs of rapidly addressing climate change.