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While these fuels power much of the creation of electricity around the world, as well as most transport and heating, they all need to either be left in the ground or 100% of their emissions. Below is a roundup of a group of articles of importance on these subjects.
Uk’s £22 billion carbon capture pledge follows surge in lobbying by fossil fuel industry, records show
Continue reading “Oil, Gas and coal roundup ( more in future)”This is a long-term project. Our hope is that with help the number of destinations will grow fast. For now, I have created this page. Generally, there is a future places section on all country pages, so these can also be accessed from there. The aim here, is for myself (and other people as the site grows) to be able to write pages about specific destinations, before we have any links to help you with your wild travel in that destination.
Now the article (click here to read) goes on and on about this, talking about Musks previous perspective on Hydrogen, the roads being full of this future “stupid fuel” and how this might impact tesla future (suggesting dual fuel would be good – it did not help Toyota).
So, while this article came out in early November, the fact check that I have looked at came out in December (I am sure that there was an earlier one). Click here to read the fact-check but it is outlined below.
It is thought that the rumours came from various online videos and articles, with one specific piece frequently regularly cited. However, despite the fact-checkers tried to find this cited evidence, they were unable to find any about a Model H. Further more, large tech companies did not report this.
Given Elon Musk’s historic disgust on the use of Hydrogen in cars, it should take a lot of evidence to suggest that this was right. Furthermore, the suggestion that Tesla would have fully switched by 2025, rather than offering both is particularly ridiculous.
Is this false story good for Eldario24? Well, clearly it had a moment in the sun, but certainly I will not be bookmarking them. I believe that they should be punished for their behaviour.
Unfortunately, this is an article that does not need much work. Unless we find an insane quantity of hydrogen buried under the ground somewhere (and it would have to be infinite to really count), the question is, how much electricity does it take to make 1kg of hydrogen and how far can the car drive on it? If this is more than an electric car, then perhaps Norway has a point.
Continue reading “Norway has released an engine that runs on hydrogen – does this end electric cars future?”Who are these so called experts? What is there expertise in, and do other experts agree? Their expertise does not appear to have much backing it.
This engine weighs just under 11kg, and they believe that, as it delivers better efficiency and emission control, all within a sleek design. In the literature, so much is made of the efficiency of this engine, but that misses the point. They suggest that this efficiency closes the gap between combustion engines and electric ones.
This misses the point: electric cars are zero carbon at use. Therefore, the cleaner the grid gets, the lower the carbon will be. As such, it is all very well to compare electric cars now, to an experimental engine that will be in cars in a generation or two. However, in 2 generations, it is thought that most countries will have further greened their grid, leaving the electric car still ahead.
We drive an electric car, and as we pay our electricity company for 100% clean electricity, our carbon emissions are essentially zero (particularly, as we bought the car second hand). One could, quite rightly, argue that not all the electricity that we use comes from zero carbon electricity – instead, we use whatever electricity is being created at the time. But that is the point- our supplier buys enough zero carbon electricity to cover all our use, therefore, if they were supplying everyone in the country a 100% zero carbon electricity, they would have to buy enough green electricity for everyone. That could only be done by all the electricity in the country being green.
So, in short – suggesting an uber efficient small ICE engine used 10-20 years in the future is more efficient than an electric car driven on the grid now, is not a fair comparison. It is like comparing the price of apples now, to the price of futures in oranges next year. Do not buy into it. If every person in the UK drove an electric car, carbon emissions would be far lower, than if everyone drove the most efficient ICE car that has, or ever will be made (this seems pretty obvious, do not get hoodwinked).
Continue reading “So-called experts are claiming that the first ultra-compact engine which has just been unveiled, will be the end of EVsTransport roundup: cleaner cars and planes”In Finland, a so-called sand battery (it is actually full of crushed soapstone) has been built, which is capable of storing around 100MW of heat. The crushed soapstone is a by protudct of a fireplace production factory nearby. It is true that this heat battery is large, with a height of around 13m and width of 15m, but it can in theory be buried in the ground. It takes 2000 tonnes to fill this heat battery, but this is just 40 waste trucks worth.
It will serve as a thermal battery, with pipes running through it. It can be heated in the Summer when there is cheap or even free power, and then water run through pipes in the material can extract the energy in winter, powering a district heating network – greatly reducing the emissions from heating houses in the whole area (it is estimated that it will reduce emissions by 70%)
The Soapstone leftover, was a wasted product, and before was just thrown away, so this is a far better use. This “sand” battery can hold heats of around 500 degrees for months if required, and is thought to completely eliminate the need for oil in the network heating system. it equates to roughly 1 month of heating requirements in summer, and 1 week in winter. Costing around $200,000, compared to $1,600,000 for the equivalent lithium battery, it is a good deal. While it is true that it would take around 30 of these to keep the town going for a year and it only supports 100 houses and a public swimming pool, but there is huge quantities of similar waste created around the globe, and therefore is capable of doing far more than one would think.
Simulations of the same idea, in Seoul have suggested at up to 39% savings. It is thought, that as the deployment of solar increases, there will be huge amounts of excess power to be pumped into things like this. Some countries have wonderful quantities of excess electricity in the summer, and while we need to ramp up the quantity of solar wild and other zero carbon electricity, this gives us a route to a zero carbon world.
UK scientists created the worlds first diamond battery, capable of giving power for thousands of years. It is made from synthetic diamonds, which contain a radioactive element called carbon 14. The battery makes electricity from this radiation, much in the way that solar panels work. This battery would still be at 50% power after 5000 years. From devices that need powering in your body, to deep in the sea or in space.
At the end of their lives, these batteries can go back to the manufacturers to be recycled. There is much work being done on this, not least looking at other radioactive elements, to increase the power output.
Carbon nanotubes store triple the energy of lithium batteries. New research shows that twisted nanotubes can store high densities of energy – triple that of lithium weight for weight. It is thought that these could power things like medical implants. Of course, this is great, though only adds to the potential long list of things that nanotubes can do if we can learn to reliably create them in the future. In bigger sizes, it is calculated that these carbon nanotubes can store 15,000 times more per unit mass, than steel springs.
These are both areas which I write on, regularly, so check back for more news. I should also note, that these roundup articles should allow a return to focusing on wildlife rather than clean tech soon.
The problem with stopping deforestation, is that for the majority of the world we are far removed from rainforests (from where I sit in the UK, I would have to travel 3250km (over 2000 miles) to the nearest rainforest, which is an area on mainland India). Indeed, rainforest is generally something that only survives in developing countries.
This means that, for most people, they either live far removed from the rainforest, and so cant see it impacting them, or they live near a rainforest, but are struggling to provide for their family and those around them. It is quite true that many people in both the first and third world would like the rainforest to survive – indeed, should you talk to people in the west, many are very worried about the survival of the great apes, who are rapidly loosing land.
The problem is simple. Those living in the third world are living hand to mouth, so unless they work in tourism, the rainforest is often an inconvenience that makes life harder.
In 2023 a total of 6.4 hectares of forest were destroyed – more than 25,000 square miles. However, more concerning is the fact that 62.6 million hectares of forest (almost quarter of a million square miles) was degraded – for road building, logging, and forest fires. Degraded land is often less good for carbon storage, as well as conservation of the worlds wild species. It is often, then not long, before someone comes along a removes the rest of the plants so that the land can be used for something else.
And what was this deforestation for (other than logs)? Beef, soy, palm oil paper and nickel.
The Brazilian Amazon is one of the bright spots, where since the election of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, deforestation has fallen 62%. Unfortunately, in the same time period, Indonesia’s deforestation is up 57%
It seems hard to see how the world will meet its goal of cutting deforestation to zero by 2030 as most countries have pledged. Also, despite reductions in deforestation, the Amazon has had one of the hardest years in terms of forest fires – something that only gets more likely as rainforests are lost, and climate change increases the temperature in many parts of the world. It is a sad fact, that there is often not a great deal of temperature difference between a rainforest which is functioning, and one that dries out and becomes a fire hazard.
Having said all this… a study in Indonesia has found that controlled low-intensity logging doesn’t have to negatively impact a forest in terms of carbon storage or food availability – this in turn means that much wildlife can survive.
The problem often is that if the land is in private hands, then low- intensity logging is not going to happen. If the landowner has decided to deforest, they will raze the land. In national parks, in theory low intensive logging would be possible, but this would require people to control the logging, and this is the issue that we have in the first place. Unfortunately, despite the pledge by 140 countries, deforestation is coming back.
In a related subject, the Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto has stated that palm oil expansion won’t deforest because palm oil has leaves. There are many issues with this, but perhaps primarily amongst them, when forests are cut down, they are usually replaced with grass lands for grazing cattle – these are also covered in leaves. This is obviously stupid – it may well be a better thing, that the rainforest is going to be replaced with plantations, but it has been shown that palm oil plantations take up a tiny proportion of the carbon that rainforests take up.
In another article, there was a finding that macaques living in palm oil plantations have an alarming infant mortality. Unfortunately, these macaques are not unique in being threatened by palm oil, but others include orangutans, elephants, tigers, pangolins, bonobos, and Irrawaddy dolphins.
While palm oil may be a better vegetable oil than other crops, it still looks like it will lead to us loosing most of our rainforests, unless a grip on this is found.
I have spent a great deal of time, recently, working on a variety of areas of the website that I hope to become important in the near future (including members areas). During this time, I miss writing on these subjects, so I would open tabs on news articles that had caught my eye – when I turned my attention back, there were more than 1000 tabs. Several hundred are wildlife news, which I will deal with in the near future, but the rest have been grouped. There is a long video embeded in the bottom of the page, which gives similar information but in more detail, if you would prefer (produced by the electric viking)
This grouping is stories about Toyota, and its various moves which appear to clearly show their moves to make the climate worse not better.
Continue reading “Toyota was a climate hero in the 1990s, why is it now to exact opposite?”As the temperature rises in the Amazon, Amazonian dolphins are struggling to survive. Several hundred have died in and around lake Tefe where the temperature has reached 39 degrees Celsius – for reference, a hot bath is anything above 37 degrees (at 44 degrees, people start to scald).
Their bodies along with many thousands of fish, are floating on the surface. The lake is particularly hot, as a drought has led to much of the water drying up, allowing the remaining water to take the temperature of the air more quickly. While disease and sewage contamination are being checked, the hugely high temperature has a huge impact on the bodies of everything living in the water, so even if the eventual death is caused by something else, the heat would likely have killed the dolphins in the near future anyway.
Brazil is not the only country which is struggling in this way, it is happening world wide. It is true that the world has just left the El nino period, which always has higher temperatures, but still, many species like the Amazon dolphins (which is already endangered) cannot face this pressure for long, without being pushed far closer to extinction.
Scientists claim to have had a 20 minute conversation with a humpback whale named Twain. By playing a recorded contact call, they encouraged Twain to approach the boat and circle it, responding to the contact call in a “conversational way”. Twain repeatedly matched aspects of the recorded call, in his response.
It seems odd that this would not be a regular part of their research, but at the current time it is not, and is thought to be the first communication of this sort between humans and a humpback whale.
It is thought that this behaviour supports our current way of looking for alien life of intelligence – like the humpback whale, aliens will be inquisitive enough to come and see what the species is that is making so much noise (the project is known as WHALE SETI). The project is using sensitive equipment to record whale sounds, and then using AI to analyse it.
Some discoveries include the identification of certain repetitive pattens and variations, which suggests an intent in the communications. We have already noted high levels of intelligence in animals like whales and dolphins, quite different to intelligence in humans. Unfortunately, the whales were not the aim of the research, and while the work may well be built on, in perhaps one day understanding more of what whales say, this project was to give insight into future attempts to communicate with aliens, not a current attempt to actually communicate with whales on earth.
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