X-Prize for turning carbon emissions into useful products

There are a number of ideas for turning carbon dioxide into concrete, carbon nanotubes, or other useful products:

Four teams are working on ways to use carbon dioxide in concrete: CarbonCure Technologies Inc. of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; Carbon Upcycling UCLA, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles; Montreal-based Carbicrete; and Carbon Capture Machine Ltd. of Aberdeen, Scotland…

Another four teams are making fuel, plastics or chemical feedstocks: India-based Breathe; C4X of Suzhou, China; CERT, from the University of Toronto; and Huntington Beach, California-based Newlight Technologies.

Two teams are making carbon nanotubes and nanoparticles, which are used in a broad range of products: C2CNT of Ashburn, Virginia, and Carbon Upcycling Technologies of Calgary.

Exxon vs. climate

Exxon is getting in trouble in Massachusetts:

Exxon Mobil Corp. suffered another legal defeat in its attempt to dodge state investigations into whether the company’s public comments about climate change misled investors for years.

Massachusetts’ top court on Friday affirmed a judge’s decision that Exxon must hand over documents dating back to 1976 to Attorney General Maura Healey. The court also agreed that Exxon’s 300 Mobil-branded franchise service stations in the state give Healey jurisdiction over the Texas-based company.

Weighing in on the overall environmental threat at the heart of the dispute, the court wrote that Healey’s investigation concerns climate change “caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions — a distinctly modern threat that grows more serious with time, and the effects of which are already being felt in Massachusetts.”

test tube dog food

It makes sense that dog food would be the first serious commercial application of synthetic meat.

I can’t help thinking of the yeast vats in Isaac Asimov’s 1953 Caves of Steel. That idea has almost literally come true.

Bethencourt compares his company’s production of “clean” protein to that of sake—imagine giant fermentation tanks—right down to using the same ingredient to fuel its protein growth. Koji, a fungus, is the Japanese version of baker’s yeast. It grows rapidly inside tanks, along with sugar and nutrients, at the right balmy temperature. The result is a plant-based protein with a close match to eggs or animal-based meat. Because koji is widely consumed by humans, it already has a GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) designation. Wild Earth’s supply chain is simple—it uses only a handful of ingredients—and easily traceable.

space hotel opening by 2022?

This article is about a space hotel possibly opening in 2022. Sounds cool but apparently ideas like this have come and gone in the past, with no space hotels actually materializing. Still, seems like a cool idea – if going into space is on your bucket list but being an astronaut is not a realistic career choice, this starts to seem like something within the realm of possibility in a typical person’s lifetime. Right now the projected price is, well, astronomical, but you can imagine that coming down in future decades as prices for new technology tend to do.

Then again, I’m watching The Expanse right now and maybe near-future space travel doesn’t look all that fun.

happy financial crisis anniversary

Happy 10-year anniversary to the 2008 financial crisis! The Week has a short summary of what caused it.

The bursting of the U.S. housing bubble triggered a chain reaction that nearly brought down the global financial system. Between 1997 and 2006, a combination of low interest rates, relaxed lending regulations, and government policies designed to encourage home buying fueled a housing boom that saw the average price for a U.S. home increase by 124 percent. Amid the speculative frenzy, financial institutions issued hundreds of billions of dollars in questionable loans to so-called subprime borrowers with poor credit histories. Borrowers’ ability to repay didn’t matter to lenders, because they were able to get subprime mortgages off their books by repackaging them into wildly complex derivative financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. Corporate and institutional investors gobbled up these offerings, which not only offered attractive returns but also received high safety ratings from the major credit-rating agencies. In 2007 and 2008, the inevitable wave of foreclosures finally arrived — exposing the entire financial system to catastrophic losses…

The worst financial panic since the Great Depression. Already dangerously over-leveraged from years of risky bets, banks were unable to absorb the huge losses. The first big domino to fall was the investment bank Bear Stearns, which collapsed in March 2008. Later, Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, and the government bailed out insurance giant AIG, which had sold enormous amounts of credit default swaps insuring the bad investments. As panic spread, lending and investment screeched to a halt, and the country was plunged into the worst financial crisis since the stock market collapse of 1929…

The U.S. government took extraordinary measures to prevent a full-scale economic collapse. Under President George W. Bush, Congress approved a $700 billion bailout purchasing toxic assets to restore confidence in the market; under President Barack Obama, it authorized a $787 billion stimulus package to stimulate spending in the private sector. But massive damage had already been done. The economy slipped into a deep recession. The Dow Jones industrial average and the S&P 500 lost more than half their value. Unemployment peaked at roughly 10 percent by October 2009.

They say the system is safer now because of Dodd-Frank. Well, Dodd-Frank is under savage attack by our current administration, so I would not be too confident the system is safe. The article also explains that even though the economy has come back on average, Americans of average income and below are still feeling the effects and may never fully recover to where they would have been without the crisis.

March 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • One large sprawling city could be roughly the economic equivalent of several small high-density cities. This could potentially be good news for the planet if you choose in favor of the latter, and preserve the spaces in between as some combination of natural land and farm land.
  • The problems with free parking, and solutions to the problems, are well known. This could potentially be good news if anything were to be actually done about it. Self-parking cars could be really fantastic for cities.
  • The coal industry continues to collapse, and even the other fossil fuels are saying they are a bunch of whining losers. And yes, I consider this positive. I hope there aren’t too many old ladies whose pensions depend on coal at this point.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

renewable energy economics

Coal is already starting to get squeezed out by the dropping cost of renewable energy and battery storage, and natural gas is next, according to Bloomberg.

“Some existing coal and gas power stations, with sunk capital costs, will continue to have a role for many years, doing a combination of bulk generation and balancing,” said Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF. “But the economic case for building new coal and gas capacity is crumbling…”

One new factor: lithium-ion batteries have enjoyed a 79 percent drop in costs since 2010, making the idea of storing energy a possibility the coming years. The price per megawatt-hour for generating from wind farms built on land fell 18 percent in the first half of 2018 to $55 while photovoltaics dropped 18 percent to $70…

The cheapest solar and wind costs can now be found in China and India, which are also among the worst polluters. The tumbling costs will continue until at least until 2040 for both renewable energy sources worldwide and they’ll become cheaper than coal and gas within five years, the report showed.