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Meanwhile little if any snow fall is predicted for the East Coast this year.
Weird right?
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It’s the La Nina, so not unprecedented…
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We always get some. Haven’t seen a significant drop in 4 years.
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Man, I wonder what got edited out of this article. It’s a start, yeah, but it is dang underwhelming.
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There’s someone alive working at the company since 1900?
Pardon - that elides coal. Earlier.
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“ With no natural predators, illegally dumped goldfish can multiply rapidly, and because they are hardy, long-lived, and destructive, their impact on ecosystems can be severe. Goldfish can survive the bitterly cold water temps and low oxygen levels during Minnesota winters, can live up to 25 years, and, like their relatives the common carp, stir up sediment, uproot plants, and compete with native fish for food and shelter. “They’re perhaps the only vertebrate animals that can live without any oxygen, which is remarkable,” Peter Sorensen, a fisheries biologist professor at the University of Minnesota told Minnesota Public Radio News. “They can go what we call totally anaerobic, and they just live off sugars and produce alcohol.” This allows them to survive even in shallow lakes that completely freeze over in winter.”
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Proper control of methane emissions from landfill (or manure, or sewage sludge) has an insanely outsize impact on global warming emissions- Methane has a Global warming potential of around 80 times that of Carbon Dioxide, so capturing it already has a big impact. If you then use that methane to generate power, and that displaces some fossil carbon from the energy mix, the impact is amplified again.
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Of course it will. For the votes.
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“Yes, and.”
The technology (which is pretty low-tech and simple) has been around for–embarrassingly–years. But its profitability is nowhere near that of fossil fuels, which has historically been all about uh, yeah, petroleum. Imagine how many countries the U.S. would have not invaded if only a decentralized biogas energy culture had managed to be A Thing.
This had had my attention for a coupla decades:
… because of permafrost thawing, etc. Because yeah
… such an objectively worse effect on climate and atmosphere than CO2.
Methane methane methane.
It (ok, methane hydrate) is now the source of the military buildup and scrapping that is going on in the South China Sea these days, per Charles C. Mann, an author who does his homework, and whose books I have shamelessly plugged on this bbs:
https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/jan/22/wizard-and-prophet/
tl;dw
the shortcut to the part I mention:
see also:
I can’t tell if the U.S. military-industrial complex thinks they want China to leave it in the ocean, or want it for themselves, or what. Maybe the distinction is not important.
I am not good at all-things-chemistry, so I will leave the musings to others here about whether China can even manage to use methane in a way that doesn’t worsen climate change.
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Glad you mentioned Biogas. There’s another thing that makes it even more effective- if you’re using the righ feedstock, then the residue left after producing methane can also be used as fertilizer, which saves further energy, as the production of fertilizer is another incredibly energy hungry and carbon intensive process.
Another nice synergy with this technology is that water and sewerage utilities can use it to make the shift from being major consumers of energy to producing their own power and offsetting their energy requirements.
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Austin still gets a few things right. (Getting things web-ready for Onebox ain’t one of them.)
https://www.austintexas.gov/department/dillo-dirt-treatment-process
windrows and windrows of fertilizer in the making there:
http://www.biomassmagazine.com/plants/view/6520
This ambitious paper attempts to scope global use. Bless their hearts.
I’ve supported charities working on biogas as an alternative to wood-burning (addressing deforestation, human health, and more), and their annual newsletters let me know that biogas is apparently regarded in North America as something for crazy Euros and “developing countries.”
:headdesk:
OMG there’s a… conference for this? hey wow:
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NorCal mutants, you’re up next. Stay safe!
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If the methane is getting released into the atmo anyway, then burning it blunts the impact and lets you extract some energy along the way. If it is sequestered and you are extracting it to burn it, then some is going to leak and you are still adding CO2 to the equation, so no I am 99% sure that this is a big fat L for us.
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