Taken together, the new trees and cycleways, community facilities and social housing, homes and workplaces all reflect a potentially transformative vision for urban planners: the 15-minute city. “The 15-minute city represents the possibility of a decentralized city,” says Carlos Moreno, a scientific director and professor specializing in complex systems and innovation at University of Paris 1. “At its heart is the concept of mixing urban social functions to create a vibrant vicinity”—replicated, like fractals, across an entire urban expanse.
Seaweed can play a huge role in fighting climate change by absorbing carbon emissions, regenerating marine ecosystems, creating biofuel and renewable plastics as well as generating marine protein. Until recently, this centuries old industry has mainly farmed seaweed for food in Asia, with China as the world’s biggest producer of seaweed, accounting for 60% of global volume. But over the past decade, global seaweed production has doubled—with an estimated value of $59.61 billion in 2019—as interest in seaweed as a food source, carbon sink option and renewable product from consumers, farmers, researchers, and business leaders blossoms. The coast of British Columbia, where Druehl has spent his adult life, is a hotspot of seaweed biodiversity and yet the industry here is only just taking off. A seaweed industry could bring jobs to the area, amidst mass layoffs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Could this remote, seaweed-rich corner of the world turn seaweed into climate solutions for the future? Druehl is optimistic: “I think we’re going to pull it off.”
Vast areas of the abyssal (13,000 to 20,000 feet deep) seafloor, like the 1.8 million square-mile Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Baja California, are covered in potato-sized polymetallic nodules. These form over millennia as water-soluble manganese from sediment pore water on the seafloor causes insoluble manganese hydroxide to precipitate on pieces of fish bones or teeth. These hydroxide materials then scavenge soluble copper, cobalt, and nickel from these same mineral-rich waters.
Each nodule is a BEV starter kit composed of 29.2 percent manganese, 1.3 percent nickel, 1.1 percent copper, and 0.2 percent cobalt. The rest is ammonium sulphate (fertilizer). It's easier and cleaner to isolate the metals from nodules than from land-based ores.
If you must use a disposable container, check the label for instructions on how to recycle it. Containers made of one material are best, and among those, paper, aluminum and steel cans, and No. 1 (soft drink and water bottles, cooking oil containers) and No. 2 plastic (milk jugs, laundry detergent bottles) are most likely to be bought up by manufacturers. Look up recycling programs that collect hazardous waste like batteries and electronics. Many recycling programs will tell you to rinse out condiment or peanut butter containers — but it’s likely that they still won’t be resold, so stick with glass containers whenever possible. Thin plastic containers like yogurt cups or clamshell containers are often made of No. 5 plastic, which doesn’t usually have value after it’s used.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know whether that iced coffee cup you recycled will ever see the light of day again. The best way to make sure it doesn’t end up in the ocean or incinerated abroad? Don’t use one in the first place.
But when Stettler and his team analyzed flight data they obtained of Japan airspace, they found that most contrail warming was caused by just 2 percent of flights. And most of those flights originated in the late afternoon—because as the sun goes down, cooling can no longer offset the warming.
“And the warming effect persists throughout the evening, into the night.”
But what if the contrails that contribute the most to warming could be eliminated? Such a change could be achieved if aircraft avoided flying in the thin layers of humidity where contrails form.
“By changing the altitude only by a couple of thousand feet, either up or down, it would no longer form a contrail. And so what we found in this study was that by changing the altitude of less than 2 percent of flights, we could actually get rid of just under 60 percent of the warming effect due to contrails.”
In October, the Air Force Research Lab announced a $100 million program to develop hardware for a solar power satellite. It’s an important first step toward the first demonstration of space solar power in orbit, and Mankins says it could help solve what he sees as space solar power’s biggest problem: public perception. The technology has always seemed like a pie-in-the-sky idea, and the cost of setting up a solar array on Earth is plummeting. But space solar power has unique benefits, chief among them the availability of solar energy around the clock regardless of the weather or time of day.
It can also provide renewable energy to remote locations, such as forward operating bases for the military. And at a time when wildfires have forced the utility PG&E to kill power for thousands of California residents on multiple occasions, having a way to provide renewable energy through the clouds and smoke doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Developed by Israeli firm Eviation, the plane will be able to carry nine passengers for up to 1,046 km.
The aircraft has one main pusher-propeller on the tail and one on each wing. Eviation says the shift to electric could significantly reduce operating costs, while eliminating greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the technologies driving this process is light detection and ranging (LiDAR) mounted on aircraft or drones. LiDAR tech is getting to the point where it can penetrate tropical forest canopies and give an accurate, 3-D snapshot of the forest.
Satellite imagery is also useful in determining the density of the forest and surrounding areas.
“We are working on a project in Brazil, its 70,000 hectares, you can’t monitor that in person,” Saez Gil said.
That remote-sensing data is then fed into AI technologies which crunch the data into a reliable figure of how much carbon is being sequestered.
Essentially, Heliogen created a solar oven — one capable of reaching temperatures that are roughly a quarter of what you'd find on the surface of the sun.
The breakthrough means that, for the first time, concentrated solar energy can be used to create the extreme heat required to make cement, steel, glass and other industrial processes. In other words, carbon-free sunlight can replace fossil fuels in a heavy carbon-emitting corner of the economy that has been untouched by the clean energy revolution.
In the past, Space10 has tackled problems such as creating sustainable and affordable homes in densely populated urban centers, prototyping a solar-powered neighborhood, and developing autonomous vehicles to serve as moving co-working spaces, cafés, grocery stores, and healthcare centers.
This is the first time that Space10 has come to India. The Delhi lab will be unlike previous pop-ups, partly because it will be open for significantly longer, allowing the local mix of artists, designers, and technologists to spend more time developing solutions to problems. Delhi is a fast-growing city that’s experiencing a web of issues, many of which are accelerated by the detrimental effects of climate change.
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