How to Change a Planet: 'The Plan B Post'
The Plan B Post is your free, weekly update on the progress humanity's making at cutting carbon pollution and cooling the earth with geo-engineering. June 5, 2024 edition.
How to Change a Planet
Print Mag
The energy transition isn’t happening fast enough, and Tatiana Schlossberg wants ocean carbon removal to work AND direct air capture to work. They scare her “so much less than doing nothing or solar geoengineering (rationally or not).” She writes, “I try to remain hopeful that there are enough people taking enough different approaches with enough care and due diligence to make things happen in a responsible and safe way.”
Don’t miss: This IEA report outlines progress in renewable energy
The IEA
Global annual renewable capacity additions increased by almost 50% to nearly 510 gigawatts (GW) in 2023, the fastest growth rate in the past two decades. But, projects to produce clean hydrogen are falling far behind targets. There is so much in this report. You don’t want to miss it.
Cleaner ship emissions are a good thing. Also, they aren’t.
NewScientist
“If our calculation is right, that would suggest this decade will be really warm,” because of “termination shock” from the reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions from ships since 2020, says scientist Tianle Yuan at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Combined with background warming due to rising greenhouse gas concentrations, the added heat could mean 2023’s record-breaking temperatures are now the norm, he says.
• More about the shipping emissions termination shock in Forbes here.
• Neal Stephenson’s novel, Termination Shock on Amazon.
The “no geoengineering ever” voices explain their rationale.
Bay Area Kron4
Mary Church said, “Geoengineering our planet does nothing to solve the root causes of climate change. Geoengineering experiments, like the Marine Cloud Brightening project in the Bay Area, set a dangerous precedent and risk legitimizing a highly-speculative and harmful technology.” Church is with the Center for International Environmental Law. See their geoengineering page here for more on their stance.
Six carbon dioxide removal startups win places in 12-week accelerator
NA Clean Energy
They are still early-stage, but startups Aeon Blue, Ebb Carbon, Elysia, Heimdal, Holocene, and Parallel Carbon are pioneering exciting solutions for carbon pollution. Read more in the press release from incubator operator Black & Veatch.
Rainmaking startup gets more than $6 million.
CrunchBase
The news increasingly sounds like sci-fi. The latest futuristic headline: Rainmaker Technology is an El Segundo, California, startup that just raised a $6.3 million seed round to develop cloud seeding techniques to cause rain. Cloud seeding can work, but there is room to improve cost, reliability, and effectiveness. Rainmaker hired its first engineers this year and now seems poised to get out into the field later in 2024 — and make it rain.
The amazing race: 24 startups compete on C02 removal
Energy.gov
The Biden Department of Energy is handing out $1.2 million to 24 startups to accelerate CO2 removal. These companies are semi-finalists in a competition to deliver CO2 removal credits directly to the DoE. They use direct air capture with storage, biomass with carbon removal and storage, enhanced rock weathering and mineralization, and planned or managed carbon sinks.
Is China past ‘peak carbon?’
CarbonBrief
Carbon Brief says, China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions may have peaked and in fact fell by 3% in March 2024, ending a 14-month surge that began when the economy reopened after the nation’s “zero-Covid” controls were lifted in December 2022.