A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century review – self-help laced with pseudoscience


Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein attempt to show how human nature is at odds with modern society, but their science, and style, grates

Heying and Weinstein provide evolutionary self-help advice to address the mismatch between stone-age brains and high-tech society.

 Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters


Stuart Ritchie

THE GUARDIAN
Fri 24 Sep 2021 
Imagine discovering a fence in the middle of a desert. Not immediately seeing its purpose, you might think: “Let’s get rid of this useless fence!” But are you sure about that? Maybe you’re at the edge of a field of angry wildebeest, and by removing the fence you’ll leave yourself vulnerable to be crushed, Mufasa-style, in a stampede. Better to first find out why the fence is there before attempting to tear it down.

So goes the argument made by GK Chesterton in 1929: you should try to understand things before changing them. The evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein – whom some readers might remember from 2017, when they resigned from Evergreen College in Washington State after a dramatic culture-war flareup – have written a book that takes Chesterton’s fence as its central metaphor. By disregarding the facts of evolved human nature, they argue, the modern world in all its novelty has destroyed the proverbial fence, leaving us unhealthy, miserable and heading for societal collapse.

We eat the wrong food. We prescribe too many drugs. We raise and educate our children badly. Heying and Weinstein provide evolutionary self-help advice to address the mismatch between stone-age brains and hi-tech society. More respect for the evolved aspects of humanity will, apparently, cure what ails us.

Let’s accept for the sake of argument that modern society really is terribly bad for us (although, given vast increases in life expectancy, we shouldn’t). How do we know which parts of human nature are the ones we should take better account of? Heying and Weinstein’s answer is essentially everything. If it is something complex, costly (in terms of energy or materials), and has been around for a long time in evolutionary or cultural history, it’s probably an adaptation – there for a reason, and not a mere accident.

This does readers a disservice. The debate over “adaptationism” in biology is long-running, and is not going to be solved by glib reasoning like this. Heying and Weinstein lunge clumsily at evolution’s Gordian knot, fail even to nick it with their blade, yet still smugly tell their audience that they have sliced it right in half.

Still, if everything is an adaptation, there is a lot of advice to give. Some of it – offered in bullet points closing each chapter – is boilerplate (get more exercise; get more sleep); some is oddly specific (go barefoot more often); some is plain weird (don’t let markets get involved in music or comedy). Little of it appears to be based on actual research; the science is really, as the kids these days say, just a vibe.

Ancient Native American rock carvings depict deers being hunted. 

Photograph: Hal Beral/Getty Images

Not that the authors do much better when they engage with studies. They make alarming pronouncements based on flimsy data, such as when they say that water fluoridation is “neurotoxic” to children based on one reference to a “pilot study”. They lazily repeat false information from other pop-science books, such as the “fact” that all known species sleep (some, including certain amphibians, don’t!). The final chapter, in which they embrace the bonkers “degrowth” movement, contains what might be the single stupidest paragraph on economics ever written (claiming, bizarrely, that the invention of more efficient versions of products such as fridges would bring the economy to its knees).

Above all, Heying and Weinstein are really annoying. Their seen-it-all, know-it-all attitude is grating from around page five, and becomes increasingly irksome as they pontificate their way through each chapter. If only you knew as much about evolution as they do, you would know how to organise society. You would know to “steer clear” of genetically modified food (the millions of lives saved by such food apparently don’t warrant a mention). You’d know not to have casual sex. You’d know not to look at your smartphone so much. And so on.

And they haven’t merely solved the central questions of biology. They are also, apparently, the best teachers imaginable. Without embarrassment, they quote a student describing their classroom as “an ancestral mode for which I was primed, but didn’t even know existed”. Their towering self-regard gives them the false belief that all their arguments – including the book’s premise, which is just a repackaging of 18th-century Burkean conservatism with a faux-Darwinian paint job – are staggeringly innovative.

Where has all this evolutionary reasoning, this respect for Chesterton’s fences, led Heying and Weinstein? In the past months they have distinguished themselves as some of the most credulous proponents of Covid pseudoscience. Not only has Weinstein spread dangerous misinformation about mRNA vaccine safety, but both authors have enthusiastically joined the movement of internet cranks obsessing about the drug ivermectin and its “near-perfect” (Weinstein’s words) properties in preventing coronavirus infection (in reality, on ivermectin the jury is very much still out).

These Covid positions, along with Heying and Weinstein’s advocacy of the still-unproven lab-leak hypothesis, gel nicely with the “don’t-play-God”, “mind-the-unforeseen-consequences”, “stick-to-the-traditional” worldview that the book promotes. But they are also that worldview’s best refutation. If respecting those metaphorical fences could get people killed during a pandemic, maybe our instinct to smash them down was right after all.

Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science is out in paperback (Bodley Head). A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein is published by Swift.

Africa is not a monoculture, we reject the plan to make it one

Efforts to impose industrial agriculture on African countries threaten the sustainability of African food production.


Million Belay
General Coordinator of AFSA
22 Sep 2021

Farmer Nzyava, 49, works on her land in Katwa, near Butembo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo on October 5, 2019 [File: Reuters/Zohra Bensemra]

Organisers of this year’s African Green Revolution Forum claim the annual gathering that ended on September 10 provided a “single coordinated African voice” in advance of the upcoming United Nations Food Systems Summit. That voice sings the praises of capital-intensive technological innovation, with the host Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) playing conductor and trying to keep donors, governments, companies and UN agencies singing the same tune.

A very different choir, featuring a diverse range of voices, sang a very different song outside the virtual halls of the Forum. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), representing some 200 million small-scale food producers in its continent-wide network, directly challenged AGRA’s claim to represent Africa.

Millions of African farmers, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, pastoralists, women’s networks, youth networks, consumer organisations, faith-based institutions, and other civil society organisations, gathered under the leadership of AFSA, sent a letter to AGRA donors on September 7 signed by 160 international organisations demanding an end to funding for failing Green Revolution projects.

We have spoken out about what we want from agriculture and life: food that is both healthful and nourishing and produced in a way that is not harmful to the environment and is culturally suitable.

In the West, everyone has a solution for Africa.

Philanthrocapitalists like Bill Gates, Western governments, aid organisations, embassies, colleges, corporations and certain members of our governments are pushing industrial agriculture on us. They are spending billions to sway governments and turn Africa into a dump site for agrochemicals, genetically modified organisms and outdated technology.

They propose a Green Revolution and point to India as an example of success. Yet the truth is that India’s Green Revolution was never the raging triumph that its proponents claimed, as ongoing farmer protests demonstrate. In India, the Green Revolution has primarily benefitted wealthy farmers, put millions of farmers into debt, degraded their environment, affected their health, and eroded their local seed production and culture. The Green Revolution there has been a colossal disaster.

The importation of this failing and destructive approach to food, agriculture and the environment into Africa must be challenged. And it has been challenged.

A wide range of African organisations has come together to demand change. In June the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) sent letters to AGRA donors asking for evidence of AGRA’s effectiveness in raising yields, incomes and food security. We received few responses and no evidence. Faith leaders also wrote to the Gates Foundation and got neither an acknowledgement nor a response.

There is a massive push under way, using the African Union Commission (AUC) in collaboration with AGRA and international donors, to modify the laws and regulations governing our seeds. The groundwork is being laid for corporate-led agriculture to thrive. This will breed dependency, deteriorate our health and the environment, undermine our culture and subjugate us to the will of a few.

We have had enough. Our struggle against the attempts to impose on us industrial agriculture will continue because we believe agroecology is a realistic strategy for improving our nutrition, increasing production, enhancing biodiversity, raising resilience and boosting farmer income.

The West has made very little investment in agroecology in Africa because the goal is to take Africa down the path of industrial agriculture. This must end.

As our open letter to AGRA donors notes, it is urgent to change course and turn to a development model based on truly sustainable practices, equity and justice.

I recently declined an invitation to speak at AGRA’s Green Revolution Forum. This is why:

We at AFSA disagree with the Green Revolution’s approach on a basic level. The strategy has indebted our farmers, ruined our environment, harmed our health and undermined our seeds and culture.

We object to the flurry of initiatives to amend our seed laws, biosafety standards, and institutionalise fertiliser rules and regulations that seek to entrench Africa’s overreliance on corporate agriculture.

That is why the diverse constituencies represented by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa are raising their voices outside the Green Revolution Forum. Africa is not a monoculture and we do not want it to become one.

Africa does not speak with a single voice, certainly not that of the Green Revolution Forum. Its diversity of voices is as rich as the diversity of the continent’s landscapes, cultures and food traditions. Those voices want to sing, not in monotones but in harmony, with one another, with nature, and with government leaders and donors who value that diversity and support it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.


Million Belay
General Coordinator of AFSA
Dr Million Belay is the General Coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA).

Bitcoin miners align with fossil fuel firms, alarming environmentalists

“When people don’t see pollution, they don’t think it’s there,” one expert said.

Bitcoin mining has brought money to fossil fuel plants that previously were struggling.

Chelsea Stahl / NBC News; Getty Images

Sept. 25, 2021
By Olivia Solon

Four years ago, the Scrubgrass power plant in Venango County, Pennsylvania, was on the brink of financial ruin as energy customers preferred to buy cheap natural gas or renewables. Then Scrubgrass pivoted to Bitcoin.

Today, through a holding company based in Kennerdell, Pennsylvania, called Stronghold Digital Mining that bought the plant, Scrubgrass burns enough coal waste to power about 1,800 cryptocurrency mining computers. These computers, known as miners, are packed into shipping containers next to the power plant, the company stated in documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its initial public offering. Coal waste is a byproduct from decades of mining in the region, left behind in enormous black piles. Stronghold estimated that it’s currently burning about 600,000 tons of it per year at Scrubgrass.

According to the SEC filings, Stronghold plans to operate 57,000 miners by the end of 2022 — an expansion that requires buying up two additional coal waste power plants in the region.

What happened at Scrubgrass highlights a growing trend within the crypto world that alarms some environmentalists. Bitcoin mining is breathing new life into America’s aging fossil fuel power plants, creating a demand environmentalists say discourages investment in renewable energy sources at a time when shifting away from carbon-emitting sources of energy is essential.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, essentially a shared database of transactions, where entries must be confirmed and encrypted. The network is secured by “miners” who use powerful computers to compete in an enormous guessing game that ultimately verifies the transactions. If a computer “wins” the game, it’s rewarded with a newly created bitcoin, currently worth about $40,000. The process consumes a lot of electricity, and the computers generate a lot of heat, which means they require industrial cooling systems that need even more energy.

Because of this, the Bitcoin network currently consumes more electricity than many small countries, including the Philippines, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

“Bitcoin mining is essentially waste by design,” said Alex de Vries, a Dutch economist, researcher and founder of Digiconomist, a site that tracks the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. “It’s a system where participants are forced to waste resources to provide some level of security on the network. The more value bitcoin has, the more money it’s worth, the more we spend on resources.”

The trend has accelerated in recent months after the Chinese government cracked down on bitcoin mining, which until May was home to about two-thirds of global bitcoin mining capacity, according to research firm Rystad Energy. On Friday, China went so far to announce that all cryptocurrency transactions were illegal, which delivered another blow to the industry. But the mining crackdown already led to an influx of bitcoin mining operations into the United States, with several states, including Texas and Kentucky, welcoming them with open arms, cheap electricity and tax incentives.

“These miners don’t just need cheap energy, but a stable source of power because their machines need to run 24/7, and fossil fuel sources are best suited for it,” de Vries said. “Miners are reviving gas plants and idle coal mines in places like New York and Montana.”

Stronghold officials declined to comment because the company is currently in an SEC-mandated quiet period ahead of its initial public offering. But in a recent filing, it described its operations as “environmentally-beneficial,” pointing to Pennsylvania's classification of waste coal power generation as a “Tier II alternative energy source.” This classification allows Stronghold to benefit from state subsidies.

Waste coal piles are an environmental hazard filled with contaminants that leach into waterways, killing fish and other wildlife, and they sometimes spontaneously catch fire, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Burning it as fuel in a power plant like Scrubgrass helps clean up the waste piles, but it emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as well as other dangerous greenhouse gases.

“Simply put, we employ 21st century crypto mining techniques to remediate the impacts of 19th and 20th century coal mining in some of the most environmentally neglected regions of the United States,” the company stated in the filing.

Stronghold

According to public filings, Stronghold works closely with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to prioritize higher-risk coal waste piles, including those already burning or contaminating waterways, to burn as fuel for its power plants, removing harmful particulates that would be released into the atmosphere from piles that ignite spontaneously.

Rob Altenburg, senior director for energy and climate at PennFuture, a nonprofit organization focused on clean energy, said he believes the state is taking the wrong approach to handling the enormous piles of waste coal and that burning it in power plants just makes a visible problem invisible.

“When it burns, they don’t see big towers of black soot,” he said. “And when people don’t see pollution, they don’t think it’s there.”

Jamar Thrasher, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said that the waste piles “continue to pollute our land, streams and air even while they sit there” and that “currently one of the most effective ways to remediate these piles is to consume them using the best available technology present at these plants like Scrubgrass to create electricity.” He added that “unfortunately, like other forms of electric generation using coal, natural gas and oil, this does result in emission of air pollutants which must be balanced against the environmental benefits provided by this form of generation.”

Altenburg and other air quality advocates prefer alternative approaches to remediation, including planting sea grass on top of waste piles to secure the surface and mitigate leaching problems or moving the waste coal into a lined landfill that prevents any leaching into waterways — a move the coal refuse lobby ARIPPA estimated would cost about $30 per ton.

Altenburg said he believes if the state diverted generous subsidies being given to the coal waste plants and considered the social cost of carbon emissions, it could also pay for remediation. But that would be politically unpopular.

“It’s much easier for our Legislature to pass a tax cut for a business than a bill spending money on environmental cleanup, even if the latter is more cost effective,” he said.

This year, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council recommended that the state’s alternative energy standards, which currently permit subsidies to waste coal plants, be reformed to phase out fossil fuel energy sources like waste coal plants unless they use carbon capture technology.
Chinese migration

Since China kicked bitcoin miners out in the spring, the proportion of bitcoin being mined using renewable energy sources has fallen as miners have migrated to countries with more fossil fuel-reliant energy grids, said Pete Howson, bitcoin expert and senior lecturer in international development at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom.

Many miners turned to China’s neighbors, including Kazakhstan and Abkhazia, recognized by most countries as part of Georgia, both of which have energy grids powered almost entirely by fossil fuels.

Others sought larger, more stable energy markets.

“A lot ended up in North America because there was enough cheapish power, and they could do deals with fossil fuel companies,” said cryptocurrency expert David Gerard.

Until the crackdown, bitcoin mining company Poolin did the vast majority of its mining in China, using mostly fossil fuels in Inner Mongolia and hydroelectric power in Sichuan.

The day after China announced the ban, Poolin Vice President Alejandro De La Torre headed to Texas.

“A very important factor for mining is the cost of electricity, and in Texas it’s very cheap. There’s a lot of oil, as well as wind power and solar,” he said. “There’s also a friendly political environment for bitcoin mining.”

In June, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted his excitement that Texas would be the next “crypto leader” as cryptocurrency kiosks rolled out in grocery stores.

Cryptocurrency advocates in Houston host a monthly Bitcoin meetup, which in August saw about 200 representatives from oil and gas companies and bitcoin mining companies gather to discuss energy trading,CNBC reported.

De La Torre, who attended the meetup, said Poolin is particularly drawn to using natural gas, a byproduct of the oil industry, that is otherwise being burnt off in flares.

“The narrative is that bitcoin mining is destroying the Earth,” he said. “But we can set up a machine that captures flared gas and runs it through a generator to make electricity. It takes the pollutant away from the atmosphere to create power used for mining.”
Endless expansion

While Poolin has moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to Austin, Texas, its employees have been flying across the other states to see whether they can find cheap energy deals or incentives for setting up operations.

“Kentucky has very attractive incentives,” he said. “That’s where all the coal power plants were located, and many have shut down. This means there’s a lot of electrical infrastructure that’s not being used.”

In late March, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear signed a pair of bills offering tax breaks to cryptocurrency miners who set up shop in the state.

Signs of this type of alignment are happening across the United States.

In New York, a former coal power plant on the shores of Seneca Lake converted to natural gas and has started bitcoin mining. Greenidge Generation, the company behind the power plant, on its website described its mining operation as “more than twice as efficient” as the global standard and “100% carbon neutral” through offsets. However, local residents said the power plant is polluting the air and heating the lake, as previously reported by NBC News. A full thermal study won’t be produced until 2023.

The CEO of Greenidge told NBC News in July that the lakeshore facility was operating within its federal and state environmental permits and had created 31 jobs.

In Montana, near the border with North Dakota, a Colorado startup called Crusoe Energy Systems is using natural gas, a byproduct of oil production, as a fuel to generate electricity for bitcoin miners in on-site storage containers. The gas Crusoe is using, bought from the oil field’s owner, Kraken Oil & Gas, would otherwise be burnt off in flares, emitting CO2 and other pollutants. Selling the gas to crypto miners is a win-win for miners and energy companies, proponents say. The process still generates CO2, but it also creates something of value.

De Vries views the process — which is being replicated around the world, including by Gazprom in Siberia — differently.

“Turning a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction profitable can extend the longevity of the power source, potentially making it operate longer than it otherwise would,” he said.

Howson agreed.

“Instead of building renewable infrastructure to power clean energy,” he said, “bitcoin mining is creating an incentive for fossil fuel power plants to become more profitable and continue doing what they are doing.”

Olivia Solon is a senior reporter on the tech investigations team for NBC News.

FALSE EQUIVALENCY FISSON = FUSION

Will We Accept Nuclear Fusion When It Comes?

James E. Hanley – September 24, 2021




In the past two months, researchers have made two significant breakthroughs towards making nuclear fusion technologically and commercially viable. In California, scientists at the National Ignition Center hit a hydrogen capsule with laser beams, creating about ten quadrillion watts of energy, although for only 100 trillionths of a second. And in Massachusetts, MIT scientists started up a new superconducting electromagnet, necessary to contain nuclear plasma for fusion. While their previous magnet used 200 million watts of energy, this one used only about 30 watts. That’s less energy than your laptop uses.

But will the American public accept fusion energy when it becomes viable? The public antipathy towards nuclear power is so great that as utilities shut down aging nuclear power plants, they do not replace them. Four years ago, South Carolina gave up on longstanding plans to build the V. C. Sumner nuclear plant. Two units scheduled to begin operating this November at the Vogtle power plant in Georgia are the first new nuclear energy units built in the last thirty years.

The U.S. produces about four trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, and demand continues to grow. Almost 800 billion kilowatt-hours, 19% of the total, came from nuclear energy. As existing plants shut down, we need to replace this energy production. Nuclear is the best alternative available for our long-term energy needs. It is reliable, controllable on-demand, and produces no CO2.

Generation IV nuclear plants also promise to be walk-away safe, running down instead of running out of control if left unattended. Designed as small modular reactors, they can be placed in underground containment units, further enhancing their safety and reducing nuclear’s cost. An additional advantage is that they will not produce plutonium as a byproduct, so they cannot produce nuclear weapons materials as many existing plants do. (If Iran focused on Generation IV technology using thorium, they could alleviate our concerns about their real intentions.) And yet, public opposition to nuclear power is so strong that few people understand these advantages, and no American utility is willing to undertake the political risk of experimenting with these new models.

Fusion energy, made by fusing light-weight hydrogen atoms instead of splitting heavier elements, would make even Generation IV technology obsolete. It is the holy grail of a safe, non-polluting, reliable, and almost limitless energy source. Fusion reactors will require the continuous addition of fuel to keep up the reaction, so a runaway reaction cannot occur. In addition, the waste product is not highly radioactive, but is simply helium. Therefore, like Generation IV reactors, they also cannot be used to produce material for nuclear weapons.

But only 29% of Americans have a favorable view of nuclear energy, with almost half having an unfavorable view. And only 16% think we should continue to build new nuclear reactors. And despite nuclear power having no carbon footprint from energy production, progressives did not include it as part of their green new deal.

Nuclear power has been more environmentally friendly than most people realize. Most environmental nuclear contamination in the United States has resulted from weapons production, particularly at the Hanford Site along the Columbia River in Washington, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the recently cleaned up Rocky Flats plant in Colorado. Compared to the environmental damage from coal mining and coal ash waste, nuclear energy production is nearly pristine. Fusion energy will be even more so.

Opposition to nuclear power has been a staple of the environmental movement for decades, and NIMBYism has created persistent challenges to siting power plants. A significant portion of the enormous cost of nuclear power plants has come from fighting the legal battles associated with siting and approval. So environmentalists are gaslighting us when they cite the cost of nuclear power as a reason to oppose it.

It is true, though, that nuclear power is not currently one of the least expensive energy sources. Even Generation IV technologies, although more cost-effective, will not make it the cheapest. At present, the market favors natural gas as having the best combination of cost and reliability. Some renewables are less costly, but they are limited in potential and reliability unless we add storage capacity for times when they are unavailable. Advocates rarely factor in this cost, but an honest accounting must.

Fusion has the potential to cost only one-fourth the current price of nuclear energy, half the cost of natural gas, and be cheaper than onshore wind. All this is in addition to its safety, reliability, and lack of pollution. And by using the most abundant element on earth, hydrogen, it provides a limitless future.

The only question is whether our politics allows us to accept this good fortune.


James E. Hanley is an independent non-partisan scholar. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Oregon, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship under 2009 Economics Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, and twenty years of teaching Political Science and Economics at the collegiate level.

WHENEVER SOMEONE CLAIMS TO BE NON PARTISAN OR A POLITICAL THEY ARE A CONSERVATIVE IN DISGUISE

The Department of Defense will build a prototype mobile nuclear microreactor to meet energy demands of US military

This Nov. 29, 2018, file photo, shows the Transient Test Reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory about 50 miles west of Idaho Falls, in eastern Idaho. The U.S. Department of Defense is taking public comments on its plan to build an advanced mobile nuclear microreactor prototype at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho. 

AP Photo/Keith Ridler, File


A Defense Science Board recommended the department use small modular reactors to meet its growing energy needs.

In early 2022, the Department of Defense will review final prototype designs from two teams.
Critics told the Associated Press that adversaries could target the microreactors during transport.

The US Department of Defense is taking public comment on a prototype mobile nuclear microreactor that it plans on assembling at the Idaho National Laboratory, the Associated Press reported.

The department's colossal energy consumption — 30 terawatt hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons of fuel per day — is projected to increase significantly over the next few years, according to the project's environmental impact statement.

A Defense Science Board commissioned by the department recommended it deploy small modular reactors to meet its increasing energy needs, the environmental impact statement said. The Idaho National Laboratory defines micronuclear reactors as small nuclear reactors that produce roughly 1-50 megawatts and can operate independently from electric grids.

Two teams, BWXT Advance Technologies from Virginia and X-energy from Maryland, are developing final designs for the prototype, which will be reviewed by the department in early 2022, according to a March press release. Following the completion of the project's environmental analysis, one of the teams may be selected to build and demonstrate a prototype, the release said.

"A safe, small, transportable nuclear reactor would address this growing demand with a resilient, carbon-free energy source that does not add to the DOD's fuel needs, while supporting mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments," a March press release from the Department of Defense said.

Still, critics expressed fears to the Associated Press that microreactors could be targeted by US adversaries, particularly during their transportation.

"In my view, these reactors could cause more logistical problems and risks to troops and property than they would solve problems," Edwin Lyman, director of the nonprofit Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Associated Press. "And unless the Army is willing to spend what it would take to make them safe for use, especially in potential combat situations or foreign operating bases, then I think it's probably unwise to deploy nuclear reactors in theaters of war without providing the protection they would need."

This Google-Funded Project Is Tracking Global Carbon Emissions in Real Time

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez
-Sep 24, 2021

It’s crunch time on climate change. The IPCC’s latest report told the world just how bad it is, and…it’s bad. Companies, NGOs, and governments are scrambling for fixes, both short-term and long-term, from banning sale of combustion-engine vehicles to pouring money into hydrogen to building direct air capture plants. And one initiative, launched last week, is taking an “if you can name it, you can tame it” approach by creating an independent database that measures and tracks emissions all over the world.

Climate TRACE, which stands for tracking real-time atmospheric carbon emissions, is a collaboration between nonprofits, tech companies, and universities, including CarbonPlan, Earthrise Alliance, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, former US Vice President Al Gore, and others. The organization started thanks to a grant from Google, which funded an effort to measure power plant emissions using satellites. A team of fellows from Google helped build algorithms to monitor the power plants (the Google.org Fellowship was created in 2019 to let Google employees do pro bono technical work for grant recipients).

Climate TRACE uses data from satellites and other remote sensing technologies to “see” emissions. Artificial intelligence algorithms combine this data with verifiable emissions measurements to produce estimates of the total emissions coming from various sources.

These sources are divided into ten sectors—like power, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture—each with multiple subsectors (i.e., two subsectors of agriculture are rice cultivation and manure management). The total carbon emitted January 2015 to December 2020, by the project’s estimation, was 303.96 billion tons. The biggest offender? Electricity generation. It’s no wonder, then, that states, companies, and countries are rushing to make (occasionally unrealistic) carbon-neutral pledges, and that the renewable energy industry is booming.

The founders of the initiative hope that, by increasing transparency, the database will increase accountability, thereby spurring action. Younger consumers care about climate change, and are likely to push companies and brands to do something about it.

The BBC reported that in a recent survey led by the UK’s Bath University, almost 60 percent of respondents said they were “very worried” or “extremely worried” about climate change, while more than 45 percent said feelings about the climate affected their daily lives. The survey received responses from 10,000 people aged 16 to 25, finding that young people are the most concerned with climate change in the global south, while in the northern hemisphere those most worried are in Portugal, which has grappled with severe wildfires. Many of the survey respondents, independent of location, reportedly feel that “humanity is doomed.”

Once this demographic reaches working age, they’ll be able to throw their weight around, and it seems likely they’ll do so in a way that puts the planet and its future at center stage. For all its sanctimoniousness, “naming and shaming” of emitters not doing their part may end up being both necessary and helpful.

Until now, Climate TRACE’s website points out, emissions inventories have been largely self-reported (I mean, what’s even the point?), and they’ve used outdated information and opaque measurement methods. Besides being independent, which is huge in itself, TRACE is using 59 trillion bytes of data from more than 300 satellites, more than 11,100 sensors, and other sources of emissions information.

“We’ve established a shared, open monitoring system capable of detecting essentially all forms of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions,” said Gavin McCormick, executive director of coalition convening member WattTime. “This is a transformative step forward that puts timely information at the fingertips of all those who seek to drive significant emissions reductions on our path to net zero.”

Given the scale of the project, the parties involved, and how quickly it has all come together—the grant from Google was in May 2019—it seems Climate TRACE is well-positioned to make a difference.

Image Credit: NASA

Bill Gates invests $ 50 million in agricultural robots

Silicon Valley startup Iron Ox recently raised $ 50 million in a round led by the tycoon's Breakthrough Energy Ventures

.
By Entrepreneur en Español 

September 24, 2021

This article was translated from our Spanish edition. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Bill Gates continues to invest in companies related to the environment. Now the founder Microsoft put his money into a startup that develops robots that can grow plants in a sustainable way.

Chesnot | Getty Images & Iron Ox vía web

According to a report Iron Ox, a Silicon Valley startup, recently managed to raise $ 50 million in a round led by the tycoon's Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

The startup is developing robots, which are integrated into a hydroponic system, which consumes 90% less water than traditional farms.

Hydroponics refers to soilless agriculture, it is a method of growing plants using mineral solutions.

“World-class investors know that humanity's most important quest is to reverse climate change. To get there, we cannot settle for increasingly sustainable crops, and we cannot ask consumers to commit to taste, convenience or value, "Iron Ox CEO and Co-Founder Brandon Alexander said in a statement. .

The robots have sensors that allow them to measure the nitrogen and acidity levels of the water, with the aim of achieving healthy plant growth. The technology company has crops of strawberries, Thai basil, and is developing those of tomatoes, parsley and coriander. Iron Ox operates farms in Northern California and, earlier this year, began construction of a new one measuring approximately 49.7 thousand square feet in Lockhart, Texas.

Bill Gates and renewable energy

Recently, Breakthrough Energy announced that it managed to raise close to $ 1 billion to develop clean energies that will be key to fighting climate change. Among the seven investment corporations are large companies such as American Airlines, Bank of America and General Motors.

'MAYBE' TECH

Climate crisis: do we need millions of machines sucking CO2 from the air?

From turning CO2 into rock to capturing the breath of office workers, a growing number of companies think the answer is yes

 So, right now, Dac is like trying to bail out the Titanic using an eyedropper.”

The Canadian firm Carbon Engineering’s pilot plant pellet reactor and associated equipment. Photograph: Carbon Engineering

Damian Carrington 

Environment editor
THE GUARDIAN
Fri 24 Sep 2021

Does the world need millions of machines sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the air to beat the climate crisis? There is a fast-growing number of companies that believe the answer is yes and that are deploying their first devices into the real world.

From turning CO2 into rock in Iceland, to capturing the breath of office workers, to “putting oil back underground”, their aim is to scale up rapidly and some have already sold their CO2 removal services to buyers including Bill Gates, Swiss Re, Shopify and Audi. Prices, however, are sky high – $600 (£440) per tonne and more. Given that humans emit about 36bn tonnes a year, that is problematic. .

Direct air capture (Dac), as the technology is known, is challenging in more ways than just financially. Despite its potent climate heating properties, CO2 makes up just 0.04% of air and so trapping a tonne of the gas means processing a volume of air equivalent to 800 Olympic swimming pools.

“It is not super intuitive,” says Jan Wurzbacher at Climeworks, which just opened the world’s biggest Dac plant in Iceland and recently hosted a conference for the Dac industry. “But that doesn’t mean it is hard. There is no physical reason it can’t be done for $100/tonne in the next 10-20 years.”

The Dac industry is still young and there is a proliferation of technologies and business models, though most use modular machines that should be easier to manufacture and stack.

Gauges, valves and pipes for water, heating and CO2 at the Gebr Meier greenhouse in Hinwil outside Zurich. The heating and the CO2 is sourced from the local waste incinerator, where the CO2 is collected by the Swiss company Climeworks. 

Photograph: Orjan Ellingvag/Alamy

Climeworks’ units use fans to pass air over a solid material that absorbs CO2. When the material is saturated, it is heated to 100C (212F) and releases a stream of pure CO2. Its Orca plant in Iceland uses renewable geothermal energy.

The CO2 is then taken by a partner company, Carbfix, and put underground with water, where it solidifies into rock in two years. About 4,000 tonnes a year will be captured and the company is also working on projects in Oman and Norway.

Canadian firm Carbon Engineering takes a similar approach to CO2 capture but is looking to bury the CO2 in depleted oil and gas reservoirs in the US and the North Sea off Scotland, effectively reversing the flow in existing pipes. “Rather than the transportation of gas in, it’s the transportation of CO2 out,” says Amy Ruddock, the company’s European head.

“Importantly, there is a huge overlap between the skill sets required to do Dac and traditional oil and gas, so it really supports the green transition,” she says. The company aims to bury 1m tonnes a year in the US in 2025, at about $300/tonne. The company also wants to use its technology to provide CO2 as a feedstock for producing low-CO2 jet fuel. “That’s the largest market we’re seeing at the moment,” Ruddock says.

Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial, has an even more striking pitch: “We put oil back underground.” The company takes agricultural and forestry waste that would otherwise rot – emitting CO2 – and heats it to create “bio-oil” that is then pumped back into empty oil reservoirs.

The first injection took place in Oklahoma in January and the equivalent of 1,400 tonnes of CO2 has been buried this year, at a cost of $600/tonne. “Obviously there is a long way to go – it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the problem,” Reinhardt says. But if 500,000 machines are deployed, he says, a billion tonnes could be buried at $50/tonne.

CarbonCapture Inc, a US firm, is using “molecular sieves” called zeolites to capture the CO2. Handily, zeolites are already produced in huge volumes for use in laundry detergents, oil refineries and sewage plants. In the Netherlands, Carbyon hopes using thin-film technology will make its machines faster at separating the CO2 from the air.

Rendering showing what will be the world’s largest Dac plant, currently being engineered by Carbon Engineering and 1PointFive. 

Photograph: Carbon Engineering Ltd

Energy use is a big concern if Dac is to be deployed at massive scale and Mission Zero Technologies uses electrochemical processes to release the captured CO2, which it says means 3-5 times less power is needed than for heat-based processes.

Another firm, Heirloom, does away with fans and allows heat-treated rocks to passively absorb CO2 over a couple of weeks, before more heating liberates the gas. “We are trying to turn this Dac problem from a chemical engineering problem into an industrial automation problem,” says Shashank Samala. “Imagine white powder on cookie trays in cafeteria tray racks – it’s pretty simple.”

There are also other business models. Soletair Power’s approach is to turn buildings into CO2-capturing machines. The CO2 in exhaled breath makes offices stuffy and can reduce worker productivity, says CEO Petri Laakso. “Basically people are more stupid indoors and that means thousands of dollars of loss for companies in offices,” he says. “We have a different business logic: we sell fresh indoor air as a service.” The company’s current office unit can capture a kilogram of CO2 every 8 hours.

A lack of commercial CO2 supply recently hit the UK, and AirCapture, based in California, is developing onsite machines that suck CO2 from the air to produce streams for businesses such as drinks companies. Most CO2 today is produced from fossil fuels and has to be trucked to sites.

But can these systems really play a significant part in beating the climate crisis?

Pipework inside a pod, operated by Carbfix, containing technology for storing carbon dioxide underground, in Hellisheidi, Iceland. 

Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

The biggest and most urgent task in beating the climate emergency is to slash the burning of fossil fuels to as close to zero as possible. The problem is that some sectors are very hard to decarbonise, such as farming, aviation and certain industrial processes, and these emissions have to be mopped up to stop global heating.

It is also likely, given that CO2 emissions are actually still rising, that the world will overshoot the carbon budget for the internationally agreed 1.5C target. This also means CO2 is going to have to be pulled from the air. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2018 that billions of tonnes of CO2 a year may need to be captured and buried after 2050.

“Unless affordable and environmentally and socially acceptable CO2 removal becomes feasible and available at scale well before 2050, 1.5C-consistent pathways will be difficult to realise, especially in overshoot scenarios,” the IPCC said. “Roughly, we need to take care of 10 billion tonnes of CO2 each year in mid-century,” says Wurzbacher.

Dac, however, is not the only option. Growing crops, burning them to produce power, and burying the emissions also removes CO2, but scientists worry about the huge land and water requirements. Growing trees – the original CO2 removal machines – is also an option, but also requires a lot of land, takes time and the forests then have to be protected for decades or the CO2 goes up in smoke.

Prof Thomas Crowther, an ecologist at ETH Zurich and prominent backer of reforestation, says: “We cannot simply plant a blanket of trees across the planet and hope to save the world – nature isn’t going to do this alone. We are undoubtedly going to need thousands of solutions.” He says technology for drawing down CO2 has immense potential.

Christoph Gebald at Climeworks is bullish about his company’s technology: “We are very confident we can achieve million-tonne [per year] capacity in the second half of this decade, and billion-tonne capacity by 2050.”

Businesses are increasingly buying offsets to claim carbon neutrality, often via schemes that claim to protect forests, plant trees or install renewable energy. But many offset schemes are criticised as smoke and mirrors. Gebald argues that, by contrast, Dac with underground burial offers immediate, permanent and easily measurable CO2 disposal.
Right now, direct air capture is like trying to bail out the Titanic using an eyedropperRobert Rohde, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth

Will the financials add up? For all these companies, scaling up to crush the cost of their technologies is critical. Hans De Neve, founder of Carbyon, says solar panels were originally extremely expensive but have plummeted in price, falling by 80% in the last decade alone: “I see no fundamental reason why this can’t happen for the Dac industry.”

Gebald says Dac will need a subsidy phase. “Solar PV in the 2000s was receiving subsidies well north of $500 per tonne of CO2, and with the support of billions of dollars annually over 10 years, this really helped the industry to scale and drive down costs.” Ruddock highlights the cost of unchecked global heating: “The benchmark I would throw out there is what is the cost of going above 1.5C or 2C?”

The other critical factor for large-scale Dac is the creation of a market for CO2 disposal. Jet fuel and clean office air might raise some funds in the near term, but not enough to get to removing billions of tonnes of CO2 a year.

“If there’s no price on CO2, it’s going to be extremely difficult to establish these technologies,” says Prof Reto Knutti, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich. “So I think that governments have to say, yes, there is a price for CO2, and then the private sector can come up with fancy innovative solutions.” Negotiations over rules for an international CO2 market will be one of the main issues at the Cop26 summit in November, and the backers of Dac will be hoping for success.

Early adopters of Dac, like Microsoft, are already pushing funding into the sector, and both Elon Musk and the UK government have launched technology competitions worth $100m and £100m respectively. There are also some early offset customers, such as insurance giant Swiss Re, which has signed a 10-year deal with Climeworks, and Shopify, both attracted by the certainty of removal.

Jens Burchardt of Boston Consulting Group, another customer, says: “We think it’s something that the world undoubtedly needs to get to net zero and we are one of not-so-many companies in the world who can afford to give this a push at a time when its economics are not yet where they need to be.”

Climate campaigners, such as Greenpeace, have argued that Dac could be a dangerous distraction. “We simply can’t wait until tech like Dac is finally affordable or widely available if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change,” says Charlie Kronick, senior climate adviser at Greenpeace UK. “If overhyping Dac encourages delay and dithering on the necessary action to cut emissions then it will make the situation worse, not better.”

Prof Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University and author of The New Climate War, says: “Of all of the geoengineering schemes, Dac seems the safest and most efficacious. It could, along with natural reforestation, be an important component of broader efforts to draw down carbon from the atmosphere, a strategy that arguably belongs in any comprehensive climate abatement program. But since we’re only talking about capturing 10%, at most, of current carbon emissions, this obviously cannot be a primary strategy for cutting emissions.”

“Dac would be an amazing weapon in the fight against climate change,” says Robert Rohde, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. “However, it remains very small-scale and high cost. Current global capacity for Dac is about 12,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Each year, human activities release 40bn tonnes. So, right now, Dac is like trying to bail out the Titanic using an eyedropper.”

“The industry needs to find a way to rapidly grow many thousands of times larger, and cut costs by about 80%, if they are going to have a real hope of making a tangible impact in the fight against global warming,” says Rohde. “It will be great if they can make it work, but I am not optimistic, and most of the world’s attention should be focused on reducing emissions because we don’t have time to wait.”

Scaling up rapidly will require huge investment, but Adrian Corless, CEO at CarbonCapture, points out that many trillions of dollars have been invested in oil and gas infrastructure, which is the source of much of the climate crisis. “I don’t think it should scare or surprise anyone that to solve the climate problem it will need an industry on the scale of the oil and gas industry,” he says.

'MAYBE' TECH

How soon could carbon capture technology solve industry CO₂ shortages?

September 24, 2021 

The recent spike in natural gas prices has closed many plants that make fertiliser in the UK – sending a shockwave through lots of other industries.

This is because ammonia fertilisers are made from nitrogen and hydrogen, and the latter comes from breaking down natural gas – a process which gives off carbon dioxide as a byproduct. It is this CO₂ that is then taken up and used in different industries, from carbonating soft drinks to euthanising livestock. In its solid form, known as cardice, CO₂ can even be used to transport and store temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals – including the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

The scarcity of CO₂ has caused havoc in UK supply chains, threatening shortages of meat, alcohol and fizzy drinks. While the government has paid to reopen a fertiliser plant, firms buying CO₂ will have to pay five times more than usual.

It may seem surprising to read that CO₂ – the greenhouse gas heating our world – also keeps certain essential industries functioning. How can there be a shortage of something we’re desperately trying to emit less of? Couldn’t we just pull it down from the atmosphere and pump it into factories where it could be put to use?

Carbon capture technology

The problem is that the CO₂ used in industry comes from sources that are a well-established part of a complex supply chain. This CO₂ generated in the process of making fertiliser is relatively cheap and easy to separate. If that system fails, there is no ready alternative. Meanwhile, CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere are about 420 ppm – 0.0042% of all the gases. Separating CO₂ from the air is difficult, and far more expensive.

Something called “point-source carbon capture technology” is currently the best alternative option, and involves scrubbing CO₂ from exhaust gases in the chimneys of factories and power plants. Here, CO₂ is emitted in the highest volumes and concentrations are thousands of times higher that those found in the atmosphere.

Technologies which can capture carbon from power station chimneys or even directly from the air are being developed, but they aren’t available at the scale needed. Two UK-based competitions to drive innovation in carbon capture and storage technology have been launched and closed by successive governments since 2005, the last one ending in 2015 without much success.

Some initiatives have got off the ground though, including The Acorn Project in St Fergus, Scotland, which separates CO₂ from natural gas – which is used to make hydrogen – and injects it under the North Sea. The Drax C-Capture project, meanwhile, extracts CO₂ from emissions at a biomass energy plant in North Yorkshire, England. This project, it’s claimed, aims to be carbon-neutral in time by transporting the CO₂ via pipeline to an offshore storage site.

Ten years of research and engineering are usually needed before any new carbon capture technology can be deployed at the necessary scale. Industries which use CO₂ must plan for new carbon capture technology being available many years in the future, rather than expect immediate solutions.

And carbon capture units currently operating at selected locations globally, such as at the Boundary Dam coal-fired power station in Canada, are unlikely to offer the solution to CO₂ supply industries need. That’s because they use liquids to absorb and purify the greenhouse gas at high temperatures, which produces over 99% pure CO₂, but requires a lot of energy and so is expensive. Liquid adsorbents decompose at high temperatures too, leaving toxic byproducts.

Solid adsorbents combined with high pressures could be the next generation of carbon capture.

  Yuriy Bartenev/Shutterstock

Solid adsorbents, like those made from silica or cellulose powders, are much more stable. Some new systems use solid absorbents and high pressures rather than high temperatures to adsorb the CO₂. These are likely to be the cheapest to run and the least environmentally damaging, making them a good choice for industries to source sustainable CO₂. There are plans to install a pressure-based capture facility at Tata Steel plant in South Wales that will capture waste CO₂ and convert it into transport fuels.
Preventing future shortages

In the next 30 years, industries will also need to consider direct air capture – technology capable of pulling the greenhouse gas out of the air – as a source of CO₂, but this will come at a cost to the consumer. Products that are made in processes requiring CO₂, such as carbonated drinks and fresh and packaged food, will have to pass on these cost increases.

These direct air capture fans, run by the Swiss company Climeworks, extract CO₂ from the air. EPA/Walter Bieri

Captured CO₂ should be stored in industrial reserves – steel tanks on the same site as the power plant the CO₂ came from or the factory where it might be used, and not underground. Industrial reserves need to be readily accessible as a backup supply.

Given that all these technologies are some way off being rolled out widely, society runs the risk of regular shortages without monitoring committees, similar to the COVID-19 task force, that can provide workable scenarios as soon as a problem occurs, rather than days or weeks into potential supply crises.

Author

Peter Styring
Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, University of Sheffield
Disclosure statement
Peter Styring receives funding from UKRI, European Union, Global CO₂ Initiative and Unilever. He is affiliated with the Liberal Democrats.
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NOT NUKES, NATURAL GAS INSTEAD

Comment: Facing the inconvenient truth about 

wind and solar power

FILE — In this Aug. 15, 2016, file photo, a lift boat, right, that serves as a work platform, assembles a wind turbine off Block Island, R.I. A group from the island of Nantucket, Mass., called ACK Residents Against Turbines, filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2021, to block the construction of dozens of wind turbines off the coast of Nantucket and nearby Martha’s Vineyard. The group say Vineyard Wind’s proposed project poses a risk to the endangered Northern Atlantic right whale. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

Gwyn Morgan

A commentary by a retired business leader who has been a director of five global corporations. BIG OIL IN CALGARY

In a previous column I pointed out that, since switching coal-fuelled power plants to natural gas cuts CO2 emissions in half, exporting liquified natural gas to displace coal both benefits our economy and reduces global emissions.

And that since converting gasoline and diesel-fuelled vehicles and ships to natural gas cuts emissions by 25 per cent, providing incentives to achieve that could substantially decrease domestic emissions, as well.

It’s not unusual for my columns to draw criticism, but presenting a practical and achievable way of substantially reducing global greenhouse gas emissions seemed to me the least likely to do so. I was wrong!

Criticisms of my columns typically fall into two categories. Those incapable of disputing the facts often resort to personal attacks. In this case, I was accused of writing a “propaganda piece for the fossil-fuel industry.”

I retired from the industry and disposed of all my investments in it 15 years ago. But if being an engineer with 30 years of experience in the energy industry is a sin, I plead guilty.

The second category of critics dispute the validity on my analysis.

In this case, criticism focused on so-called “fracked gas.” Much of our natural gas is locked in solid rock requiring the creation of cracks (fractures, hence “fracking”) to allow it to flow to the well.

Those fractures are created by injecting fluid, mostly water along with small amounts of vegetable oil, household cleansers and automotive antifreeze, under high pressure.

Anti-fossil-fuel zealots have coined the derogatory term “fracked gas,” falsely claiming it constitutes a health hazard to those who burn it. In fact, it’s made of the same methane molecule (CH4) as all other natural gas.

A more valid criticism is that leaks in production and transportation release methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But those emissions are minuscule compared with the environmental benefits of displacing higher emissions from coal and liquid fuels.

Raising issues about the environmental impact of gas production and transportation is certainly fair game. But what about the environmental impact of producing wind and solar energy?

A study by the Manhattan Institute, an independent New York-based think-tank, found that replacing the energy output of a single 100-megawatt natural gas-fuelled power plant requires 20 170-metre tall windmills occupying 10 square miles of land.

Building that wind farm requires 30,000 tons of iron ore, 50,000 tons of concrete and 900 tons of non-recyclable plastics (for the mammoth blades). Moreover, the wind farm can only replace the natural gas plant power when the wind is blowing sufficiently.

Making the wind power reliable would require the storage capacity of 10,000 tons of Tesla-class batteries. Mining the minerals to produce those batteries would consume huge amounts of fossil fuel to power the heavy equipment, not to mention the environmental and social impact of the mining.

Meanwhile, building that natural gas-fuelled power plant requires less than 10 per cent of those wind farm raw materials and occupies just a couple of acres of land. And it saves large numbers of eagles and other birds from being killed by windmill blades.

What about solar panels? The Manhattan Institute report includes U.S. Department of Energy data showing the material requirements to produce a given amount of solar energy are some 60 per cent higher than for wind turbines. And solar farms also need all those batteries to be reliable.

Clearly, building wind and solar farms that could replace the 84 per cent of global energy currently supplied by fossil fuels is technically impossible and would be very damaging to the environment. Moreover, the colossal costs of trying to do it would drive electricity prices to what for most people would be ruinous levels.

But there’s yet another compelling reason why wind and solar are not the answer to reducing global emissions.

Just 1.3 billion of the Earth’s 7.9 billion inhabitants live in advanced economies where those costly investments might even be possible. Most of the other 6.6 billion are striving to lift themselves out of “energy poverty” by increasing their access to fossil fuels.

That’s why almost all of the current increase in oil and coal demand is in non-OECD countries. For example, the International Energy Agency estimates that OECD demand will increase by just 1.5 million barrels per day over the next five years while non-OECD oil demand increases from 51.7 to 58.3 million barrels per day. Shifting that increasing energy consumption from coal and diesel to natural gas is the only way of arresting emissions growth in those countries.

In the end, what sparked the most strident criticism of my column is the inconvenient truth that a “net-zero” emissions utopia cannot be reached unless all fossil fuels are eliminated.

The day might come when breakthroughs such as nuclear fission make that possible. In the meantime, the world is blessed with natural gas — an energy source that’s safe, plentiful and effective at substantially reducing emissions, if only our political leaders would understand that.