Perpetual Innovation

Category: CO2

  • Pain in the Ash: Spill spews tons of coal ash into NC Dan River – CNN.com

    Spill spews tons of coal ash into North Carolina’s Dan River – CNN.com:

    Oh what a pain it is! … A Pain in the Ash, so to speak.

    One of the dirty little secrets of Coal is the ash!. The massive 2008 spill in TVA should have been a bit of a wakeup call. But this phone has been ringing for centuries. There’s impurities in coal, including sulfur and heavy metals like lead and arsenic. See the EPA letter on the TVA spill. And coal power releases 100 times as much radiation into the environment as a nuclear power plant. High concentrations of uranium and thorium are released into the environment around a plant from the fly ash. See APA on this ash issue.

    The other secrets are that about 10,000 people die in mines per year, most of them coal, and often in China. There’s the impact to air and water that many estimates impact the health of hundreds of millions of people.

    The bull in the China closet, of course, is — well — China. They burn more than half of the world’s coal right now. PRC is still opening still are opening 1 to 2 coal power plants per week, unless that has changed. And they are much less worried about how much pollution escapes into the air and water. The summer Olympics were distinctive for the air pollution, and athletes trying to compete in smog.

    This smog and pollution is “shared” with neighboring countries, and the world at large. Even the Americas on occasion get a beautiful sunset, complements of the Peoples Republic.

    As well, coal is a huge greenhouse gas producer of CO2, something that is invisibly shared with the whole of the planet… and no one knows what the true costs and full consequences are. But we do know that CO2 as a greenhouse gas lasts about 100 years, so whatever the impacts are, they will be very, very, very long lasting.

    Many economist suggest a tax on something that has distinctive, negative externalities. Maybe coal would be a candidate!? Taxes on cigarettes are an example. A gradual tax domestically seems logical. Maybe the rest of the world should tax all the coal that gets exported to China, as well. How about an import tax on those products that are primarily produced by dirty Chinese electricity?

    The dirty little secrets of coal are getting out. It’s been 2 centuries that coal has ruled the power infrastructure. It is time to seriously address this “open” secret.

    If you are a stockholder or a customer of Duke, it is time to give the Duke a nudge, and elbow, or even a brisk kick in the ‘ash!…

    ‘via Blog this’

  • How China’s economy is choking on smog | Talking Numbers – Yahoo Finance

    How China’s economy is choking on smog | Talking Numbers – Yahoo Finance:

    Imagine your favorite city closed down because of the weather, maybe a blizzard… Many of China’s cities can have the same problem, but it is because of smog pollution.

    This is a country that burns more coal than the rest of the world, combined.

    Nice thing is that they share this pollution with their neighbors.

    Plus the burning of coal is a gigantic producer of CO2 emissions.

    At what point does this pollution start to curb the 7% economic growth that the company continues to experience?  Certainly down from decades of more than 10% growth, but it is hard to grow with the traffic congestion and pollution slowing down ad periodically stopping the economy.

    Things that are not sustainable, like rapid growth, have a way of producing their own remedy.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • Rising levels of acids in seas may endanger marine life, says study | Environment | The Guardian

    Rising levels of acids in seas may endanger marine life, says study | Environment | The Guardian

    Ouch!

    This has been a growing concern. The rapid increases in the CO2 levels — blasting past 400ppm as we speak — that has several scary consequences.

    First, there’s the greenhouse gas (GHG) thing and the rising temperatures of the air and land.

    Second, the excess CO2, at least some of it, is absorbed into the oceans. This increases the acidity of the oceans. Higher acid levels could wipe out shell fish, coral reefs and other things/animals that are critical for the health of the oceans (and of the planet).

    Here’s what the article and the scientists said:

    Hans Poertner, professor of marine biology at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and co-author of a new study of the phenomenon, told the Guardian: “The current rate of change is likely to be more than 10 times faster than it has been in any of the evolutionary crises in the earth’s history.”
    Seawater is naturally slightly alkaline, but as oceans absorb CO2 from the air, their pH level falls gradually. Under the rapid escalation of greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification is gathering pace and many forms of marine life – especially species that build calcium-based shells – are under threat.

    Ouch!

  • Holding back the oceans… The Cost of Energy… Compounding and getting worse.

    Holding back the ocean (via The Cost of Energy)

    The inevitability of sea level rise (emphasis added): Small numbers can imply big things. Global sea level rose by a little less than 0.2 metres during the 20th century – mainly in response to the 0.8 °C of warming humans have caused through greenhouse…

  • The Keeling Curve | How Much CO2 Can The Oceans Take Up?

    The Keeling Curve | How Much CO2 Can The Oceans Take Up?: “Recent estimates have calculated that 26 percent of all the carbon released as CO2 from fossil fuel burning, cement manufacture, and land-use changes over the decade 2002–2011 was absorbed by the oceans. (About 28 percent went to plants and roughly 46 percent to the atmosphere.) During this time, the average annual total release of was 9.3 billion tons of carbon per year, thus on average 2.5 billion tons went into the ocean annually.”

    So… of the 9.3 billion in CO2 emissions, the oceans have been absorbing about 26%. But, as in all things that reach saturation, this cannot be expected to continue.

    We do know that CO2 will go into the air, since the atmosphere gets first go at fossil fuel emissions. So the Greenhouse gasses might start to rise much, much faster.

    This certainly looks like a no-win.

    ‘via Blog this’