Month: February 2017

Marketplace: Changing carbon from waste into gold

“For the most part, fighting against climate change means keeping as much carbon out of the air as possible, whether that means generating energy from solar and wind sources or capturing the carbon that comes out of less-clean sources. Strategies for captured carbon include liquefying it and storing it underground. Some companies, though, are turning that waste carbon into a revenue source. At its facilities in Los Gatos, California, the company Blue Planet takes the carbon dioxide that factories collect, runs it through tiny nanotubes in their machines and converts it into carbonate. The limestone rock that results will be used as a necessary component of concrete.”

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Geoengineering Monitor: Pulling carbon out of the air: NETS, BECCS, and CDR

“Geoengineering Monitor has long reported on the speculative concept of “negative emissions”, together with certain favored approaches such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) – a geoengineering technique which recent studies show would have significant negative impacts on biodiversity, food security, and livelihoods. To get a better sense of the technologies under discussion, we sent a correspondent to a “Carbon Dioxide Removal / Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs)” workshop earlier this month, co-sponsored by fora associated with American University, University of California – Berkeley, and Arizona State University.”

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Call for Session Proposals: Climate Engineering Conference 2017 (extended deadline)

Deadline: 10. March 2017

“Climate Engineering Conference 2017: Critical Global Discussions. Call for Session Proposals:[nbsp]Deadline extended to March 10, 2017. – The Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) is organising a second international conference on climate engineering, aiming to once again bring together the research, policy and civic communities. The conference will be held in Berlin, Germany, from October 9 – 12, 2017.”

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Gunderson, Ryan; et al. (2017): Ideological obstacles to effective climate policy. The greening of markets, technology, and growth

Gunderson, Ryan; Stuart, Diana; Petersen, Brian (2017): Ideological obstacles to effective climate policy. The greening of markets, technology, and growth. In Capital [&] Class 2 (7), 030981681769212. DOI: 10.1177/0309816817692127.

“In light of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, this project synthesizes and advances critiques of the possibility of a sustainable capitalism by adopting an explicit ‘negative’ theory of ideology, understood as ideas that conceal contradictions through the reification and/or legitimation of the existing social order. Prominent climate change policy frameworks – the ‘greening’ of markets (market-corrective measures), technology (alternative energy, energy efficiency, and geoengineering), and growth (the green growth strategy) – are shown to conceal one or both of the two systemic socio-ecological contradictions inherent in the current social formation.”

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Low, Sean (2017): Engineering imaginaries: Anticipatory foresight for solar radiation management governance

Low, Sean (2017): Engineering imaginaries: Anticipatory foresight for solar radiation management governance. In The Science of the Total Environment 580, pp.[nbsp]90–104. DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.07.200.

“This paper reports on the project Solar Radiation Management: Foresight for Governance (SRM4G), which aimed to encourage an anticipatory mode of thinking about the future of an engineered climate. Leveraging the participation of 15 scholars and practitioners heavily engaged in early conversations on SRM governance, SRM4G applied scenario construction to generate a set of alternative futures leading to 2030, each exercising different influences on the need for – and challenges associated with – development of SRM technologies.”

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FCEA Blog: What a “post-truth” media ecology means for climate engineering research

By Holly Jean Buck. “I’ve been thinking about this since I did an interview with Dane Wigington of Geoengineering Watch. [nbsp]Dane is one of the most influential figures in chemtrail circles. He can also claim much broader impact. Information-seekers who type in “geoengineering” will find geoengineeringwatch.org on the front page of Google results. Ordering of search results does influence people. These results reflect two facets of our new media ecology: (1) in this media ecosystem, a small number of people can claim a large part of the discursive sphere, and (2) news is narrowcast rather than broadcast, with polarization growing from repeated exposure to similar sources.”

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Panel Discussion on Geoengineering: Launch of Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative (C2G2) (Audio stream)

Audio stream of the event. “C2G2 serves a vital purpose: connecting and mobilizing actors from many sectors of society to look at the very real possibilities of engineering the climate–a prospect which offers great potential but also great peril. This discussion tackles geoengineering from different perspectives, including those of scientists, the Red Cross, and Greenpeace.”

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Center for Carbon Removal: Debunking 3 Soil Carbon Myths

“While there has been noteworthy progress on soil policy, there is still a great deal of work to be done to support the development and implementation of soil carbon sequestration practices in a realistic, verifiable manner. Progress, however,[nbsp]is hindered by a number of myths about soil carbon that continue to circulate, both from advocates and skeptics. Below we debunk three common misconceptions about soil carbon and set the facts straight about the efficacy of soil carbon sequestration as a tool to fight climate change.”

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Boettcher, Miranda; Schäfer, Stefan (2017): Reflecting upon 10 Years of Geoengineering Research. Introduction to the Crutzen + 10 Special Issue

Boettcher, Miranda; Schäfer, Stefan (2017): Reflecting upon 10 Years of Geoengineering Research. Introduction to the Crutzen + 10 Special Issue. In Earth’s Future. DOI: 10.1002/2016EF000521.

“In this introduction, we briefly outline the arguments made in Paul Crutzen’s 2006 contribution and describe the key developments of the past 10 years. We then proceed to give an overview of some of the central issues in current discussions on geoengineering, and situate the contributions to this special issue within them. In particular, we contend that geoengineering research is characterized by an orientation toward speculative futures that fundamentally shapes how geoengineering is entering the collective imagination of scientists, policymakers, and publics, and a mode of knowledge production that recognizes the risks which may result from new knowledge and that struggles with its own socio-political dimensions.”

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