Breakthrough Technology Converts Captured CO2 Into Sustainable Aviation Fuel

6 Jan 2022, ·

 

by Otilia Drăgan 

Until electric aircraft and hydrogen fuel cell systems can become the norm, aviation needs a quick, affordable solution that can lower as much as possible the negative environmental impact. The U.S. government is actively supporting initiatives for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) development. One of the most innovative ones claims to turn CO2 and green hydrogen into SAF.

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Johnson Matthey is not an aviation specialist, but a company that focuses on sustainable technology across multiple industry sectors. Its latest launch is a technology meant to capture carbon dioxide and convert into drop-in fuel for aircraft, with the help of green hydrogen. Under the simple name of Hycogen lies a complex process, based on “Reverse Water Gas Shift technology.”

Basically, green hydrogen and CO2 are converted it into carbon monoxide (CO), through a catalyzed process. The carbon monoxide is then mixed with more hydrogen, becoming synthesis gas (syngas), a basic component for fuel production. Together with an additional technology (developed in partnership with bp), Hycogen can transform up to 95% of CO2 into synthetic crude oil, which can then be further processed into SAF or other types of sustainable fuel.

By combining these two technologies, Johnson Matthey claims to have developed a scalable, cost-effective solution for SAF production. It can be deployed as a small-scale project, using hydrogen from a single electrolyser, or a large-scale version using multiple, bigger electrolysis modules.

In 2021, Hycogen’s developer was part of one of the pioneering projects, led by Boeing and United Airlines. Back in December, a commercial aircraft with more than 100 passengers onboard conducted a pioneering flight using SAF. The Boeing 737 MAX 8 flew from Chicago to Washington D.C., with 500 gallons (1,892 liters) of 100% SAF in one of its engines, and an equal quantity of conventional fuel in the other engine. That’s because current regulations only allow a maximum of 50% SAF for regular flights.

In fact, ramping up SAF production, and making it readily available, is one of the most important factors in achieving 100% SAF-powered flights in the near future. Hycogen promises to make that happen faster. 

INSIGHT-Harmful soot unchecked as Big Oil battles EPA over testing



By Tim McLaughlin


Jan 6 (Reuters) - A deadly form of soot pollution from U.S. refineries has gone unregulated for decades because of a dispute between the U.S. oil industry and federal environmental officials over how to measure it, according to documents from the Environmental Protection Agency reviewed by Reuters.

The delay in addressing so-called condensable fine particulate matter emissions means this pollutant is being released by scores of facilities across the country unchecked, adding to a slew of other contaminants from oil refineries that researchers say take a disproportionately large toll on the health of poor and minority communities living nearby.

The absence of a federal standard has led at least one regional air quality regulator in California to attempt a crack-down on these emissions, an effort that has sparked litigation from oil refiners located there.

Condensable fine particulate matter is a form of soot that leaves the smokestack as a gas before solidifying into particles when it cools. The EPA first proposed a method to measure it in 1991 amid evidence that it was at least as damaging to human lungs as normal soot, which is solid when emitted.

The agency says even short-term exposure to fine soot particles can lead to heart attacks, lung cancer, asthma attacks and premature death. Scientific research cited by the EPA estimates that, combined, condensable and solid soot cause more than 50,000 premature deaths a year in the United States, findings that are disputed by the industry.

But the EPA has declined to impose limits on the condensable form of the pollutant. The oil industry and its main lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), claim the agency has failed to come up with an accurate test to quantify it, according to EPA disclosures and interviews with independent testing firms, API officials and the trade group’s members.

The industry says testing employed currently can overstate the amount of condensable soot emitted by refineries under certain conditions, a flaw the EPA has acknowledged.

“Costly retrofits or new control devices should not be required based on results from a faulty method," major U.S. oil company Chevron Corp told Reuters in a statement.

Setting a national limit on pollutant emissions without consensus on how to measure those emissions is unfeasible because it would invite legal challenges from the industry, according to regulators and stack-testing analysts.

The EPA said in a statement that it is still conducting research into how to reliably measure condensable soot, but did not comment on a timeline for finishing the effort.

The delays are dangerous, said Greg Karras, an environmental scientist who has worked for nonprofit groups seeking reduced emissions from the refining industry.

"It is inappropriate to wait more than 30 years to protect people from this form of pollution while you are trying to perfect a test,” Karras said.

If condensable soot were eventually regulated, it would force nearly all of the country’s 135 oil refineries to invest in new pollution-control equipment, based on estimates of current emissions using the EPA’s contested testing method.

SAN FRANCISCO CRACKS DOWN

Soot is comprised of particles many times smaller than a grain of sand that can penetrate the lungs and bloodstream if inhaled. The EPA regulates solid forms of soot, which are easy to measure by filtering smokestack emissions. But because condensable soot is gaseous in the smokestack, it is harder to quantify.

The EPA’s current test for condensable soot, called Method 202, uses probes and glass tubes placed inside refinery smokestacks to collect samples from the gas stream. It shows individual U.S. refineries can emit up to hundreds of tons of the pollutant per year, sometimes accounting for nearly half of a refinery’s total soot emissions, according to a Reuters review of regulatory documents filed by oil companies.

The material examined by the news agency dates from 2017 to 2021 and includes results of Method 202 tests that some refineries had commissioned to meet local requirements or as part of litigation.

The API, however, says the test can produce erroneously high readings of condensable soot if the samples react with other chemicals that commonly are present at a refinery.

The EPA has acknowledged that pollution levels could be overestimated using Method 202, agency disclosures show. The EPA revised Method 202 in 2010 in an attempt to eliminate this bias. But the revision did not fully address industry concerns about potentially skewed results due to the presence of other compounds in refinery smokestacks, particularly ammonia, according to a 2014 EPA memorandum viewed by Reuters.

The EPA’s National Risk Management Research Laboratory in Ohio, which is charged with finding scientific and engineering solutions to environmental problems, is now working with the API on resolving issues with Method 202 while exploring an alternative methodology, the EPA told Reuters.

The long-running issue surfaced last year when regulators in San Francisco’s Bay Area, which includes nine counties around the city of San Francisco, passed the strictest soot regulations in the country in a bid to ease pollution in the neighborhoods around its cluster of oil refineries.

U.S. states and regions are often given the power to impose their own pollution limits provided those rules are as strong, or stronger, than federal regulations.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s (BAAQMD) new limits include condensable soot and require the industry – despite its objections - to use Method 202 to quantify those soot emissions. The agency contends the test is accurate and that condensable soot measurements are not impacted by the presence of ammonia in a smokestack if a refinery is operating properly. The tougher soot standard goes into effect in 2026 to give oil companies time to adapt.

Refining companies Chevron and PBF Energy Inc are fighting the BAAQMD’s new regulations in Contra Costa County Superior Court, according to a civil complaint filed in September. The companies say the rules would force them to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on pollution-control equipment for their Bay Area refineries.

“API and our members support policies at the federal level that follow the science to drive emissions reductions, but the Bay Area Air Quality Management District is using the wrong approach,” Ron Chittim, API’s vice president of downstream policy, said in a statement to Reuters.

Chevron estimates it would cost $1.48 billion to install a so-called wet gas scrubber at its refinery in Richmond, California, a pollution-control approach the BAAQMD wants the company to use.

BAAQMD estimates its restrictions would cut the area’s annual death toll from soot by as much as half. Soot-related deaths currently average up to 12 a year from Chevron's Richmond refinery and up to six deaths a year from PBF Energy’s refinery in Martinez, California, the regulator estimates.

Refiners disputed those figures in comments submitted to BAAQMD staff. The industry says the numbers don't take into account lifestyle choices of the deceased, such as smoking, and it contends the health benefits from cuts in soot production are exaggerated.

A BAAQMD spokesperson declined further comment, citing ongoing litigation.

NEW STANDARD?

It remains to be seen whether other California air quality districts, regulators in other states or the federal government will follow the Bay Area’s lead.

The EPA under Democratic President Joe Biden has said it is weighing whether to lower its existing limits for soot pollution after former Republican President Donald Trump’s administration declined to do so. But the agency would not specify whether it planned to crack down on condensable soot.

In Texas, which has the largest number of refineries in the country, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said it does not have plans to tighten restrictions on particulate matter, a spokesman said.

Elsewhere, recent test results at two refineries viewed by Reuters showed that condensable soot accounted for a significant portion of overall soot generated by those operations.

In Delaware, at the Delaware City Refinery owned by PBF, 48% of the soot measured was condensable soot, according to results from a May stack test performed by an outside consulting firm as part of the facility's routine compliance with federal air quality regulations.

PBF declined to comment.

At Exxon Mobil Corp's refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 17% of soot measured was condensable, according to an August stack test on file with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

Exxon declined to comment on the battle over Method 202. The company said it was "continuously optimizing our processes to minimize emissions and enhance energy efficiency.”

(Reporting by Tim McLaughlin in Boston; editing by Richard Valdmanis and Marla Dickerson)

Bolsonaro throws 15-year lifeline to thermal coal in Brazil

Bloomberg News | January 6, 2022 | 

Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro. Credit: Flickr Commons

One of the biggest villains of climate change, coal, has won a reprieve from the Brazilian government.

On Wednesday, President Jair Bolsonaro sanctioned a bill to extend the life of a thermal power complex in the country’s south for 15 years, until 2040. His administration refers to the measure as the “fair energy transition program” for the coal region of Santa Catarina state.

Brazil is a minor consumer of coal, burning in a year what China does in three days. Still, the bill’s approval is the latest example of a country out of step with other major economies when it comes to climate change. Bolsonaro’s cabinet has sought to draw foreign capital to oil exploration and develop more of the Amazonian rain forest region.

In a statement, the presidency said it aims “to preserve the carbon neutrality goals of the Brazilian economy until 2050, dealing responsibly with the economic, social and environmental impacts of the phase-out of mining activity, in line with the concept of Climate Justice widely debated at COP26.”

But the complex’s thermoelectric plants result in annual emissions of around 4.43 million tons a year, and will bring extra costs to consumers, according to the Association of Large Industrial Consumers of Energy and Free Consumers.

 Climate fiction needs to challenge and inspire, say these Canadian authors

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Also: Netflix enviro satire Don't Look Up is polarizing - and

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CBC News · Posted: Jan 07, 2022 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: January 7

(Sködt McNalty/CBC)

Hello, Earthlings! This is our weekly newsletter on all things environmental, where we highlight trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world. (Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.)

This week:

• Climate fiction needs to challenge and inspire, say these Canadian authors
• Netflix's enviro satire Don't Look Up is polarizing — and very popular
• How scientists know the New Year's Day boom over Pittsburgh was an exploding meteor

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Climate fiction needs to challenge and inspire, say these Canadian authors

(Arden Wray/ ECW Press/Mike Kalimin)

What On Earth27:01Cozy up with climate fiction

"Cli-fi" is a growing literary genre that, at its best, can inspire hope and spur action. Hear from Catherine Bush, Premee Mohamed and David Huebert about their new works of fiction. 27:01

Floods, record-breaking heat waves and forest fires brought climate change close to home for many Canadians in 2021 — and that includes authors, some of whom have begun weaving climate themes into their fiction. 

What On Earth host Laura Lynch spoke with three Canadian authors about how fiction can inspire action, and the climate-themed books that have influenced their own work. 

Catherine Bush, Blaze Island (2020)

Guelph, Ont., author Catherine Bush begins her latest novel, Blaze Island, with a climate change-induced storm battering an idyllic island off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Inspired by Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Bush recasts the character of Prospero the magician as a contemporary climate scientist desperate to protect his daughter, Miranda, from the dangers of a changing climate. 

"I believe that storytelling is actually key to our survival as a species," Bush said. "All fiction at its root wants to seduce through story, but also transform through story." 

To that end, Bush aims to inspire positive emotions in her readers.

"I think we need more wonder and awe, not just despair and fear," she said. "Wonder and awe and care are what are going to transform us."

Bush said her approach was inspired by Sarah Ray's book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. "[Ray] talks about replacing the idea of hope with desire. Hope is a more passive state, whereas desire leads to purpose and action," she said.

Bush's other climate-themed reading recommendations include Darryl Whetter's novel Our Sands and Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow.

Premee Mohamed, The Annual Migration of Clouds (2021)

Edmonton author Premee Mohamed's latest novella takes place long after climate disasters have wreaked havoc around the globe. The Annual Migration of Clouds is set on the abandoned University of Alberta campus, where a community of survivors cobbles together an existence as they cope with an incurable disease. 

Mohamed said she sees hope for the future in the collective mindset of her characters. As she watched the flooding disasters unfold in British Columbia last November, the power of community became even more apparent to her. 

"If I'd been in that situation, I actually wouldn't have been able to evacuate. I don't have a vehicle and, for medical reasons, I'm not supposed to drive," she said. "I would have had to rely on my community to hopefully look after me and get me out of there."

Her publisher, ECW, describes the speculative fiction novella as "hopepunk," a subgenre with optimism at its core. 

"Hopepunk is not about unbearable naiveté or optimism that ignores the facts of the world," said Mohamed. Rather, it recognizes the dangers facing humanity and suggests that people can fight back in positive, communal ways. 

"I would like to see more characters and more books acknowledging that these terrible problems and the villains and the antagonists and the systemic issues can be solved together, in ways that don't devolve into a bloodbath," she said.

Mohamed suggested Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh as another work of climate-themed fiction.

David Huebert, Chemical Valley (2021)

Halifax author David Huebert named his latest collection of short stories after Chemical Valley, a region in Sarnia, Ont., with a large number of plants and refineries. 

Many of Huebert's characters make their living from the petrochemical industry, but also see the impacts of climate change. 

"There is a necessity to move beyond the fossil fuel industry," he said. "But I also wanted to think in more complicated ways about the ways that all of our lives are entangled in oil."

Huebert's stories have humour woven through them, something he believes is a helpful way to counter climate dread and anxiety. 

"It can also be a way of processing, and a way of turning these feelings on their heads and examining them. And it's certainly one of the ways that we can be together as people." 

One of Huebert's influences is the book Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, in which author Nicole Seymour asks readers to rethink the environmental movement's doom-and-gloom attitude. "I think there's room for more levity in climate change discourse," Huebert said. 

His other recommendations for climate literature include Underland by Robert Macfarlane and Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell.

– Rachel Sanders

Shell US solar platform raises €686m

Silicon Ranch will use the equity finance to support construction and accelerate growth

7 January 2022 Solar[Image: Shell]

Shell's US solar platform Silicon Ranch Corporation has raised $775m (€686m) in new equity capital to support construction of its contracted pipeline and the acceleration of its customer-led growth strategy.

The strategy is aiming to develop new projects, enter new markets and pursue strategic acquisition opportunities.

Manulife Investment Management, on behalf of Manulife Infrastructure Fund II and John Hancock, led the round with about a $400m commitment, its first investment in the company.

Manulife Investment Management is joined in the round by existing Silicon Ranch shareholders, including Shell, TD Greystone Infrastructure Fund, and Mountain Group Partners.

Subject to regulatory approvals, the transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of this year.

Silicon Ranch founder and chief executive Reagan Farr said: “As a society we are still in the early stages of the global energy transition and find ourselves at an inflection point defined by both critical need and enormous opportunity.

“This significant capital raise positions Silicon Ranch to play an important role in this transition and enables us to deliver customer solutions and make meaningful capital investments in the rural communities we serve.

“Silicon Ranch is honoured to welcome Manulife Investment Management as our newest business partner, and we thank them and our existing shareholders for the trust and confidence they have placed in our team.”

Manulife Investment Management head of infrastructure investments Recep Kendircioglu said: “We are pleased to make this investment on behalf of our clients and thrilled to become long-term equity partners with Silicon Ranch.

“We view Silicon Ranch as an innovative leader in the US energy sector and look forward to working closely with its talented management team to grow and scale the business in the years to come.”

New California wildlife preserve gives animals room to roam
January 3, 2022


1 of 3

A rare cold storm covers the pine trees atop Bear Mountain in a coat of white in the Tehachapi Mountain in Calif., on April 27, 2021. The Randall Preserve covers more than 112 square miles (290 square km), connecting a patchwork of ranchland across the southern Sierra Nevada and the Tehachapi Mountains, the Nature Conservancy announced late December 2021. The preserve is the largest ever assembled in California by the environmental nonprofit. Its topography stretches from hilly grasslands to pine forest with elevation ranges from 800 to nearly 8,000 feet. (Tyler Schiffman/Nature Conservancy via AP)


TEHACHAPI, Calif. (AP) — Mountain lions, eagles, salamanders and other protected animals will have room to roam without threat of encroaching development thanks to a vast new nature preserve that creates a wildlife corridor connecting Northern and Southern California.

The Randall Preserve covers more than 112 square miles (290 square km), linking a patchwork of ranchland across the southern Sierra Nevada and the Tehachapi Mountains that will serve as a “biodiversity hotspot,” the Nature Conservancy announced last week.

The preserve is the largest ever assembled in California by the environmental nonprofit. Its topography stretches from desert to hilly grasslands to pine forest.

“This area is also one of the most significant in North America because by connecting Northern and Southern California it helps complete an intact network of open space lands from Canada to Mexico,” the Nature Conservancy said in a statement.

The project cost $65 million, with all but $15 million donated by philanthropists Frank and Joan Randall.

It will allow movement of rare, threatened, and endangered animals that have been at risk from habitat loss, fragmentation and extreme climate events.

“The protection of this immense area ensures that 28 sensitive species across California, including slender salamanders, condors, legless lizards, golden eagles, primrose sphinx moths, mountain lions, badgers, and several endangered plants and blue oak trees, have the best chance of survival,” the statement said.

As part of the preserve, the Nature Conservancy said it will work with state transportation officials to create a system of wildlife crossings over and under some mountain roads to further facilitate safe movement of animals through the region.

In addition to the Randalls’ money, the preserve was funded by public and private donors, including the Wildlife Conservation Board, The Department of The Navy, CalTrans, Resources Legacy Fund, Sierra Nevada Conservancy, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

State climatologist: Texas had hottest December since 1889

January 4, 2022

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) — Last month was the hottest December in Texas since at least 1889, state Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said.

Gammon found that temperatures from Dallas through Abilene to Del Rio averaged 5 to 9 degrees above normal, according to a Texas A&M University news release issued Monday. Nielsen-Gammon is the school’s regents professor of atmospheric sciences.

Nielsen-Gammon also said last month would likely prove to have been the warmest Texas winter month on record. February 2017 currently holds that distinction.

“It’s like the entire state moved south for the winter,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “Amarillo got Dallas’s normal temperatures, Dallas got Corpus Christi’s normal temperatures, and Austin got Brownsville’s normal temperatures.

The official state record for the warmest December is held by December 1933, at 53.3 degrees. The 20th-century average for December is 46.9 degrees, he said.

Texas seasonal temperatures have been 2 degrees warmer on average than in the 20th century because of climate change, the climatologist said.

“Global warming didn’t cause this December to be record-setting, but it did contribute to the margin of victory,” he said.

The unseasonably warm temperatures have also been worsening drought conditions throughout the state. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than two-thirds of the state is in a drought, and 10 percent is in an extreme drought.

“In much of West Texas, it hasn’t rained for over two months,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “The high temperatures increase the rate of evaporation, drying out everything and leading to increased wildfire risk.”

Experts puzzled by continuing South Carolina earthquakes

By MEG KINNARD

January 5, 2022

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Yet more earthquakes have struck near South Carolina’s capital city, the ninth and tenth in a series of rumblings that have caused geologists to wonder how long the convulsions might last, or if they could possibly portend future, more serious seismic activity.

Early Wednesday, a 2.6-magnitude earthquake struck near Elgin, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Columbia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was measured at a depth of 0.5 kilometers, officials said. About 7 hours later, another earthquake hit the area, this one with a magnitude of 1.5, according to officials.

That area, a community of fewer than 2,000 residents near the border of Richland and Kershaw counties, has become the epicenter of a spate of recent seismic activity, starting with a 3.3-magnitude earthquake on Dec. 27. That quake clattered glass windows and doors in their frames, sounding like a heavy piece of construction equipment or concrete truck rumbling down the road.

Since then, a total of nine more earthquakes have been recorded nearby, ranging from 1.5 to Wednesday morning’s 2.6 quake. No injuries or damage have been reported.

According to the South Carolina Emergency Management Division, the state typically averages up to 20 quakes each year. Clusters often happen, like six small earthquakes in just more than a week last year near Jenkinsville, about 38 miles (61 kilometers) west of the most recent group of tremors.

Earthquakes are nothing new to South Carolina, although most tend to happen closer to the coast. According to emergency management officials, about 70% of South Carolina earthquakes are located in the Middleton Place-Summerville Seismic Zone, about 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) northwest of Charleston.

In 1886, that historic coastal city was home to the largest recorded earthquake in the history of the southeastern United States, according to seismic officials. The quake, thought to have had a magnitude of at least 7, left dozens of people dead and destroyed hundreds of buildings.

That event was preceded by a series of smaller tremors over several days, although it was not known that the foreshocks were necessarily leading up to something more catastrophic until after the major quake.

Frustratingly, there’s no way to know if smaller quakes are foreshadowing something more dire, according to Steven Jaume, a College of Charleston geology professor who characterized the foreshocks ahead of Charleston’s 1886 disaster as “rare.”

“You can’t see it coming,” Jaume told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “There isn’t anything obvious moving or changing that you can put your finger on that you can say, ‘This is leading to this.’”

Typically, Jaume said that the recent quakes near Elgin — which lies along a large fault system that extends from Georgia through the Carolinas and into Virginia — would be characterized as aftershocks of the Dec. 27 event, since the subsequent quakes have all been smaller than the first.

But the fact that the events keep popping up more than a week after the initial one, Jaume said, has caused consternation among the experts who study these events.

“They’re not dying away the way we would expect them to,” Jaume said. “What does that mean? I don’t know.”

___

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.

ENTERTAINMENT NOT SCIENCE

Japan tycoon Maezawa returns from space with business dreams
By YURI KAGEYAMA

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa waves during a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo Friday, Jan. 7, 2022. Maezawa has returned from space with hopes of new celestial investments. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

TOKYO (AP) — “Space now,” was what Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa wanted to tweet for years. He finally really did it, from the International Space Station.

“The space market holds so much potential,” he said Friday at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo, his first news conference in Japan after returning to earth before Christmas.

Maezawa, who heads a company called Start Today, is preparing to invest in various businesses which may develop from the ongoing research by NASA, the Japanese equivalent called JAXA and others. But he wants first to recover from his recent celestial adventure: returning to life with gravity has proved heavier than he’d expected, he said.

Maezawa, 46, blasted off in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft along with a Russian cosmonaut Dec. 8, becoming the first self-paying tourist to visit the station since 2009.

He returned to earth after spending 12 days at the orbiting outpost, where he took videos of himself clowning around in weightlessness, shaping water droplets into bubbles and punting a golf ball drifting toward a flag in the spacecraft.

The clips, taken by astronaut Yozo Hirano, who accompanied Maezawa, have been posted on YouTube, drawing millions of views.

He tweeted “uchyu nau,” or “space now,” in the style Japanese often use on the popular social media to relay what they’re up to, such as “partying now,” or “dinner now.”

“Here is what I really wanted say. My first tweet from space,” said the post following one with a photo of him wearing a T-shirt and shorts, floating cross-legged in a meditation pose.

He said he would like to tweet “moon now” next. He has booked an orbit around the moon aboard Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starship, scheduled in the next few years, possibly as early as next year.

“I don’t know when exactly I should tweet that,” he said, as he wouldn’t be landing on the moon. “Maybe when we get to the back side of the moon.”

Maezawa has more than 11 million Twitter followers and has emerged as a flamboyant celebrity known for a free-wheeling managerial style that’s rare in Japan’s conformist, staid business world.

He ran an import CD business and played in a rock band before starting an online fashion business in 1998. Famous for dating movie stars, Maezawa has been both admired and ridiculed for his lavish purchases, including a Stradivarius violin and artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol.

In 2019, Maezawa resigned as CEO of e-commerce company Zozo Inc. to devote his time to space travel, selling his business to Yahoo Japan. Forbes magazine estimates his wealth at $1.9 billion.

How much Maezawa paid for his voyage has been the topic of much speculation and skepticism. Reports put the price tag at more than $80 million. Maezawa declined again to disclose the cost.

But he said living in space has him appreciating the everyday more: the wind, the changing seasons, smells and sushi.

Maezawa hopes that one day the world’s leaders could make that same trip. Planet Earth is “100 times more beautiful” than any photo he had ever seen, he said, and so maybe they would also realize the importance of working together.

“That is my dream,” he said.

___

Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

REWILDING

Mama bear, 3 cubs climb tree, take nap in urban Virginia


Two of the four bears sleeping in a tree on Bruin Drive in Chesapeake, Va., on Monday, Dec. 27, 2021. (Stephen M. Katz/The Virginian-Pilot via AP)

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (AP) — A mama black bear and three cubs clambered up a tree and napped in the middle of a Virginia neighborhood before voluntarily ambling on hours later, wildlife officials said Tuesday.

The four black bears left their lofty perch on aptly named Bruin Drive in the city of Chesapeake around midnight Monday, Chesapeake Animal Services announced on Facebook.

Officials had asked residents near the tree to stay inside and blocked off the road from outside visitors in order to give the bears “space, quiet, and time.”

Police were first alerted to the bears about 2 a.m. Monday, The Virginian-Pilot reported.