Month: October 2018

Earther: Y Combinator Is Funding Some Seriously Wild Ideas For Sucking Carbon Out of the Air

“It’s increasingly clear that we can’t maintain a stable climate without pulling carbon out of the air. But the technologies for doing so are are completely unproven at the scale needed. Which is why Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that’s invested in Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox and other wildly successful companies, is now looking to fund carbon capture companies working on some pretty outlandish ideas.”

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Colorado State University: Report: Carbon-removal strategies, not just reduced emissions, are critical to fighting climate change

“The report, which urges a substantial research initiative to advance such technologies posthaste, is co-authored by Colorado State University’s Keith Paustian, University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and Senior Research Scientist in the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory. Paustian was tapped to serve on a 17-member national committee whose goal was to develop a research agenda and recommended actions for effective carbon dioxide removal and reliable sequestration methods.”

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Wired: Carbon Capture Is Messy and Fraught—But Might Be Essential

“On paper, carbon capture is a simple proposition: Take carbon that we’ve pulled out of the Earth in the form of coal and oil and put into the atmosphere, and pull it out of the atmosphere and put it back in the Earth. It’s like hitting undo on the Industrial Revolution. And scientists can indeed yank CO2 out of thin air, except that the process is expensive, not very efficient, and morally complicated.”

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Khurram, A.; et al. (2018): Tailoring the Discharge Reaction in Li-CO2 Batteries through Incorporation of CO2 Capture Chemistry

Khurram, A.; He, M.; Gallant, B. (2018): Tailoring the Discharge Reaction in Li-CO2 Batteries through Incorporation of CO2 Capture Chemistry. In: Joule. DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2018.09.002.

“This work presents the design and study of a novel chemistry for post-combustion CO2 capture and conversion. We show that adding a CO2 capture agent such as an alkyl amine into an organic, Li+-containing electrolyte yields a new redox-active species that can be directly reduced at a catalyst-free carbon electrode in a Li-CO2 battery with high discharge voltage and capacity. The central advance reported herein is the first-time coupling of CO2 capture chemistry to nonaqueous electrochemistry, which opens up new avenues for realizing electrochemical CO2 transformations with high selectivity.”

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Nature: Real-life stories of online harassment — and how scientists got through it

“David Keith: Engage judiciously
[…] I do solar geoengineering experiments — notably, researching the chemical impacts of reflective particles that may be sprayed into the stratosphere to minimize incoming solar radiation interact with themselves and other compounds in the atmosphere. I make a distinction between harassers — people who send me more than 100 e-mails per year — and people in the mainstream environmental-science community who don’t agree with my research.”

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