Category: Animals_Extinction_CN CONSEQUENCES_WATER_OCEANS NEWS_ARCHIVE Technology_MN

Just yards from the Fish 1, a 22-foot research vessel, a humpback whale about twice the size of the boat hurled itself out of the water, sending shimmering droplets in a broken necklace of splash.

An orbital NASA instrument designed mainly to advance studies of airborne dust and its effects on climate change has proven adept at another key Earth-science function – detecting large, worldwide emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

BP yesterday agreed to buy landfill gas producer Archaea Energy for $3.3 billion cash plus the assumption of $800 million in debt. The biggest winner is Daniel Rice IV, the 41-year-old chairman of Archaea, who with his brothers will receive more than $700 million in the deal.

Talking about carbon capture projects used to be a bit more theoretical. Sure, polluting companies would say, we would love to deploy this technology on a large scale, but the funding isn’t there. To make it plausible, many argued, carbon capture would need financial support from the government.

The Series E round, which brought in a staggering sum for an unconventional grid-storage hardware startup, will carry Form out of its current precommercial state. The company, which produces iron-air batteries, will double its staff headcount from its current level of 326 as it plows through the validation and testing required to sell a warrantied product. Simultaneously, Form is finalizing the location for its first commercial factory, which will begin manufacturing batteries in the U.S. within two years, CEO and co-founder Mateo Jaramillo told Canary Media.

Climate change is being fueled by the release of greenhouse gas emissions and those emissions are coming from every sector of the global economy: Electricity, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, industrial processes. Collectively, greenhouse gas emissions have generally been climbing for decades. Activists often advocate using less and consuming less as one potential solution to climate change — degrowth, it’s often called.

Imagine a clean energy future, and you might picture giant turbines twisting in the wind, or electric vehicles zipping quietly down the highway. Fossil fuels become relics, or disappear altogether.

Since the 1960s, fighting for the environment has frequently meant fighting against corporations. To curb pollution, activists have worked to thwart new oil drilling, coal-fired power plants, fracking for natural gas, and fuel pipelines. But today, Americans face a climate challenge that can’t be solved by just saying no again and again.

An underutilized natural resource could be just what the airline industry needs to curb carbon emissions.

Researchers at three institutions—the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Washington State University—report success in using lignin as a path toward a drop-in 100% sustainable aviation fuel.

Houston energy company NRG has sold its stake in a massive carbon capture project at a Fort Bend County coal-fired power plant to Japanese oil and gas company JX Nippon for $3.6 million, according to the law firm that helped guide the deal.