The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.
How much power does it take?
The world | 5,000 gigawatts |
The United States | 1,000 gigawatts |
Mid-size city | 1 gigawatt |
Small town | 1 megawatt |
Average American house | 1 kilowatt |
Traveling wave reactor
TerraPower’s reactor could run on many different types of fuel, including the waste from other nuclear facilities. The reactor would produce far less waste than today’s plants, would be fully automated —eliminating the possibility of human error—and could be built underground, protecting it from attack. Finally, the design would be inherently safe, using some ingenious features to control the nuclear reaction; for example, the radioactive fuel is contained in pins that expand if they get too hot, which slows the nuclear reaction downand prevents overheating. Accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics.
One inventor I admire is working on a battery that uses liquid metals instead of the solid metals employed in traditional batteries. The idea is that liquid metal lets you store and deliver much more energy very quickly—exactly the kind of thing you need when you’re trying to power an entire city. The technology has been proven in a lab, and now the team is trying to make it cheap enough to be economical and prove that it works in the field. Others are working on something called flow batteries, which involve storing fluids in separate tanks and then generating electricity by pumping the fluids together. The bigger the tanks, the more energy you can store, and the bigger the battery, the more economical it becomes.
→ Why we nee reinforced concrete
Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, although no one who lives around here actually calls it that; to locals, it’s the 520 bridge, named for the state highway that runs across it. At more than 7,700 feet, it’s the longest floating bridge in the world. Although it’s true that concrete can be made that way—solid enough to absorb nuclear radiation in the walls of a hospital—it can also be used to make hollow shapes, like the 77 airfilled, watertight pontoons that support the 520 bridge. Each weighs thousands of tons, is buoyant enough to float on the surface of the lake, and is sturdy enough to support the bridge and all the cars It’s rust-resistant, rot-proof, and nonflammable, which is why it’s part of most modern buildings Steel is strong, cheap, durable, and infinitely recyclable. It also makes a terrific partner with concrete: Insert steel rods inside a block of concrete, and you’ve got a magical construction material that can withstand tons of weight and also won’t break apart when you twist it. That’s why we use reinforced concrete in most of our
buildings and bridges.
To make steel:
Pure iron and carbon, but iron available as iron oxide, when heated forms 1 ton of steel + 1.8 ton co2
To make concrete:
mix together gravel, sand, water, and cement.
→ first 3 are easy, to make calcium—need limestone, limestone releases co2
types of plastics :-
The polypropylene in yogurt containers, for example—to more surprising uses like the acrylic in paint, floor polish, and laundry detergent, or the microplastics in soap and shampoo, or the nylon in your waterproof jacket, or the polyester in all those regrettable clothes I wore in the 1970s.
But when we make a plastic, around half of the carbon stays in the plastic
But when you’re looking for temperatures in the thousands of degrees, electricity isn’t an economical option—at least not with today’s technology, coal is.
A new process called molten oxide electrolysis: Instead of burning iron in a furnace with coke, you pass electricity through a cell that contains a mixture of liquid iron oxide and other ingredients. The electricity causes the iron oxide to break apart, leaving you with the pure iron you need for steel, and pure oxygen as a by-product. No carbon dioxide is produced at all.
- Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot
of innovation.
- Get that electricity from a power grid that’s been
decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation.
- Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions.
And so will this.
- Use materials more efficiently. Same.
Borlaug did it by developing varieties of wheat with bigger grains and other characteristics that allowed them to provide much more food per acre of land—what farmers call raising the yield. (Borlaug found that as he made the grains bigger, the wheat couldn’t stand up under their weight, so he made the wheat stalks shorter, which is why his varieties are known as semi-dwarf wheat.)
→ In a process called enteric fermentation, bacteria inside the cow’s stomach break down the cellulose in the plant, fermenting it and producing methane as a result. The cow belches away most of the methane, though a little comes out the other end as flatulence.
The methane they burp and fart out every year has the same warming effect as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 4 percent of all global emissions.
Burping and farting natural gas is a problem that’s unique to cows and other ruminants, like sheep, goats, deer, and camels. But there’s another cause of greenhouse gas emissions that’s common to every animal: poop.
How?
When poop decomposes, it releases a mix of powerful greenhouse gases—mostly nitrous oxide, plus some methane, sulfur, and ammonia. About half of poop-related emissions come from pig manure, and the rest from cow manure. There’s so much animal poop that it’s actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation any new technology and without a significant Green Premium. It turns out the amount of methane produced by a given cow depends a lot on where the cow lives; for example, cattle in South America emit up to five times more greenhouse gases than ones in North America do, and African cattle emit even more. If a cow is being raised in North America or Europe, it’s more likely to be an improved breed that converts feed into milk and meat more efficiently.
Plant-based meat: plant products that have been processed in various ways to mimic the taste of meat But rather than growing up on a farm, it’s created in a lab. Scientists
start with a few cells drawn from a living animal, let those cells multiply, and then coax them into forming all the tissues we’re used to eating. All this can be done with little or no greenhouse gas emissions, aside from the electricity you need to power the labs where the process is done. The challenge with this approach is that it’s very expensive, and it’s not clear how much the costs can come down.
When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.
To grow crops, you want tons of nitrogen—way more than you would ever find in a natural setting. Adding nitrogen is how you get corn to grow 10 feet high and produce enormous quantities of seed. Oddly, most plants can’t make their own nitrogen; instead, they get it from ammonia in the soil, where it’s created by various microorganisms. A plant will keep growing as long as it can get nitrogen, and it’ll stop once the nitrogen is all used up. That’s why adding it boosts growth important invention that most people have never heard of.*
Here’s the rub: Microorganisms that make nitrogen expend a lot of energy in the process. So much energy, in fact, that they’ve evolved to do it only when they absolutely need to—when there’s no nitrogen in the soil around them. If they detect enough nitrogen, they stop producing it so they can use the energy for something else. So when we add synthetic fertilizer, the natural organisms in the soil sense the nitrogen and stop producing it on their own. Producing nitrogen, need ammonia, which get by burning natural gas, which produce greenhouse gas Nitrogen doesn’t get absorbed by plants, only half of the nitrogen gets absorbed rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide Technically, it’s possible to get crops to absorb nitrogen much more efficiently than they do, if farmers have the technology to monitor their nitrogen levels very carefully and apply fertilizer in just
the right amount over the course of a growing season. But that’s an expensive and time-consuming process, and fertilizer is cheap. there’s more carbon in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined some breakthrough inventions T
here are a few things that will help, such as advanced satellite-based monitors that make it easier to spot deforestation and forest fires as they’re happening and
to measure the extent of the damage afterward.
In what part of the world will you plant the tree?
On balance, trees in snowy areas cause more warming than cooling, because they’re darker than the snow and ice beneath them and dark things absorb more heat than light things do. On the other hand, trees in tropical forests cause more cooling than warming, because they release a lot of moisture, which becomes clouds, which reflect sunlight. Trees in the midlatitudes—between the tropics and the polar circles—are more or less a wash. keep these two facts about gasoline in mind: It packs a punch, and it’s cheap
Here’s the problem: Corn-based ethanol isn’t zero carbon, and depending on how it’s made, it may not even be low carbon. Growing the crops requires fertilizer. The refining process, when the plants get turned into fuel, produces emissions too. And growing crops for fuel takes up land that might otherwise be used for growing food—
possibly forcing farmers to cut down forests so they have someplace to grow food crops.
The city of Shenzhen, China—home to 12 million people—has electrified its entire fleet of more than 16,000 buses and nearly two-thirds of its taxis best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline Because we can’t electrify our cargo trucks, the only solutions available today are electrofuels and advanced biofuels.
the bigger the vehicle you want to move, and the farther you want to drive it
without recharging, the harder it’ll be to use electricity as your
power source—becomes a law.
the fuel that container ships run on—it’s called bunker fuel—is dirt cheap, because it’s made from the dregs of the oil-refining process Heat pumps take advantage of the fact that gases and liquids change temperature as they expand and contract. The pumps work by moving some coolant through a closed loop of pipes, using a compressor and special valves to change the pressure along the way so that the coolant absorbs heat from one place and gets rid of it somewhere else. In the winter, you move heat from outdoors into your home (this is possible in all but the very coldest climates); in the summer, you do the opposite, pumping heat from inside your house to the outdoors.
An extreme example is Seattle’s Bullitt Center, which lays claim to being one of the greenest commercial buildings in the world. The Bullitt Center was designed
to naturally stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, reducing the need for heating and air-conditioning, and features other energy-saving technologies such as a superefficient elevator. At times, it can generate 60 percent more energy than it consumes, thanks to solar panels on its roof, although it’s still plugged into the
city’s electric grid and draws power at night and during especially cloudy stretches that CGIAR is not a single organization but a network of 15 independent research centers, most of them referred to by their own confusing acronyms. The list includes CIFOR, ICARDA, CIAT, ICRISAT, IFPRI, IITA, ILRI, CIMMYT, CIP, IRRI, IWMI, and ICRAF.
It was at a CGIAR lab in Mexico that Norman Borlaug did his groundbreaking work on wheat, sparking the Green Revolution.
Generally, rice plants respond to flooding by stretching out their leaves to escape the water; if they’re underwater long enough, they expend all their energy trying to escape, and they essentially die of exhaustion. Scuba rice doesn’t have that problem: It’s got a gene called SUB1 that kicks in during a flood, making the plant dormant—so it stops stretching— until the waters recede. CGIAR isn’t just focused on new seeds. Its scientists have also created a smartphone app that allows farmers to use the camera on
their phones to identify specific pests and diseases attacking cassava, an important cash crop in Africa. It’s also created programs for using drones and ground sensors to help farmers determine how much water and fertilizer their crops need. Next is preparing for and responding to emergencies. We need to keep improving weather forecasts and early-warning systems for getting out information about storms. Here’s some more low-hanging fruit, so to speak: mangrove forests. Mangroves are short trees that grow along coastlines, having adapted to life in salt water; they reduce storm surges, prevent coastal flooding, and protect fish habitats. All told, mangroves help the world avoid some $80 billion a year in losses from floods, and they save billions more in other ways. Planting mangroves is much cheaper than building breakwaters, and the trees also improve the
water quality. They’re a great investment There are various ways we could do that. One involves distributing extremely fine particles—each just a few millionths of an
inch in diameter—in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Scientists know that these particles would scatter sunlight and cause cooling, because they’ve watched it happen: When an especially powerful volcano erupts, it spews out a similar type of particle and measurably drives down the global temperature. Another approach to geoengineering involves brightening clouds. Because sunlight is scattered by the tops of clouds, we could scatter more sunlight and cool the earth by making the clouds brighter, using a salt spray that causes clouds to scatter more light. And it wouldn’t take a dramatic increase; to get the 1 percent reduction, we’d only need to brighten clouds that cover 10 percent of the earth’s area by 10 percent. What’s now known as the Great Smog of London killed at least 4,000 People once—technology, policies, and markets—we can encourage innovation, spark new companies, and get new products into the market fast. Innovation is not just a matter of inventing a new machine or some new process; it’s also coming up with new approaches to business models, supply chains, markets, and policies
Technologies needed Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon Grid-scale electricity storage that can last a full season
Electrofuels
Advanced biofuels
Zero-carbon cement
Zero-carbon steel
Plant- and cell-based meat and dairy
Zero-carbon fertilizer
Next-generation nuclear fission
Nuclear fusion
Carbon capture (both direct air capture and point capture)
Underground electricity transmission
Zero-carbon plastics
Geothermal plastics
Pumped hydro
Thermal storage
Drought- and flood-tolerant food crops
Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil
Coolants that don’t contain F-gases
Soyndra scandal
Think about all the good that comes from medical research funded by the National Institutes of Health. The NIH publishes its results so scientists around the world can benefit from the work, but its funding also builds up capacity in American universities that are, in turn, connected to both start-ups and big companies.
The result: an American export—advanced medical expertise—that creates a lot of high-paying jobs at home and saves lives around the world. If you’re building a new home
or renovating an old one, you can opt for recycled steel and make the home more efficient by using structural insulated panels, insulating concrete forms, attic or roof radiant barriers, reflective insulation, and foundation insulation.