Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Carbon Heavy Money: How Bitcoin Maybe Accelerating Global Warming


Bitcoin may just prove be an accelerating factor for the current global warming situation.


BY CORY PARKER
PUBLISHED 13 HOURS AGO


Bitcoin Is Viewed As Dirty Currenc
y.


The problem is cryptocurrency mining 'farms', which are usually large spaces housing computers dedicated to mining the coins; sometimes, these farms will have thousands of computers all working simultaneously to increase profitability. This process requires an enormous amount of computing power and thus tends to consume immense amounts of energy. The result of this is that bitcoin-mining operations are constantly chasing cheap electricity. Cheap electricity can be found in China, which now accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world. The problem with this is that coal and other fossil fuels are currently a major source of electricity worldwide, with two-thirds of all power plants globally burning fossil fuels for energy.




“Bitcoin alone consumes as much electricity as a medium-sized European country,” says Professor Brian Lucey at Trinity College Dublin. “This is a stunning amount of electricity. It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty currency.”

RELATED: Bill Gates Talks Synthetic Meat, COVID, & Climate Change In New Reddit AMA




It's More Than Just Energy Consumption

The high turnover of these specialized machines creates a lot of electronic waste, electronic products which have reached the end of their usefulness. ASICs serve no other purpose than to mine cryptocurrencies, so when they can no longer mine them profitably, they cease to serve a purpose. According to a new analysis by economists from the Dutch central bank and MIT, because of the high churn of these machines, a single bitcoin transaction creates the same amount of electronic waste as throwing away two iPhones. There were 253,000 transactions last month.


De Vries and Stoll write in the paper, “We estimate that the whole bitcoin network currently cycles through 30.7 metric kilotons of equipment per year. This number is comparable to the amount of small IT and telecommunication equipment waste produced by a country like the Netherlands.”



Countries Are Starting To Take Notice

In Malaysia, police seized and destroyed more than 1000 bitcoin mining rigs by crushing them with a steamroller after the miners had allegedly stolen almost $2 million worth of electricity to power their machines. The miners were charged with stealing energy.

A lot of Chinese mining operations that have been shuttered are relocating to neighboring Kazakhstan. The move might be short-lived, however, as a new law signed by the president will introduce extra taxes for crypto miners starting in 2022, making the country less attractive for miners.

 

Bitcoin mining producing tonnes of waste


BBC
Published
commen
IMAGE SOURCE,

Bitcoin mining produces electronic waste (e-waste) annually comparable to the small IT equipment waste of a place like the Netherlands, research shows.

Miners of the cryptocurrency each year produce 30,700 tonnes of e-waste, Alex de Vries and Christian Stoll estimate.

That averages 272g (9.5oz) per transaction, they say. By comparison, an iPhone 13 weighs 173g (6.1oz).

Miners earn money by creating new Bitcoins, but the computing used consumes large amounts of energy.

They audit Bitcoin transactions in exchange for an opportunity to acquire the digital currency.

Attention has been focused on the electricity this consumes - currently more than the Philippines - and the greenhouse gas pollution caused as a result.

But as the computers used for mining become obsolete, it also generates lots of e-waste.

The researchers estimate Bitcoin mining devices have an average lifespan of only 1.29 years.

As a result, the amount of e-waste produced is comparable to the "small IT and telecommunication equipment" waste of a country like the Netherlands researchers said - a category that includes mobile phones, personal computers, printers, and telephones.

The research is published in the journal Resources, Conservation & Recycling.

Efficiency drive

As electricity is a key cost for Bitcoin miners, they have sought out ever more efficient processors.

That has seen a move to highly specialised chips called Application-specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

But ASICs are so specialised that as they become obsolete, they cannot be "repurposed for another task or even another type of cryptocurrency mining algorithm", the researchers write.

But while the chips can't be reused, much of the weight of Bitcoin mining equipment is made up of components such as "metal casings and aluminium heat-sinks" which could be recycled.

Globally just over 17% of all e-waste is recycled. However, the number is probably less in some of the countries in which most miners are based, where in many cases regulations on e-waste are also poor.

Chip shortage

Many industries are struggling with a global chip shortage.

In addition to producing large amounts of e-waste the researchers argue that "rapidly cycling through millions of mining devices may disrupt the global supply chain of various other electronic devices".

They suggest that one solution to the problem of e-waste would be for Bitcoin to change the way transactions are verified, to a different less computing-intensive system.




Why Bitcoin uses more electricity than many countries



Cryptocurrencies have emerged as one of the most captivating, yet head-scratching, investments in the world. They soar in value. They crash. They’ll change the world, their fans claim, by displacing traditional currencies like the dollar, rupee or ruble. Some of them are named after dog memes.

And in the process of simply existing, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, one of the most popular, use astonishing amounts of electricity.

We’ll explain how that works in a minute. But first, consider this: The process of creating Bitcoin consumes around 96 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by the Philippines, a nation of about 110 million.

That usage, which is close to half-a-percent of all the electricity consumed in the world, has increased about tenfold in just the past five years.

The Bitcoin network uses about the same amount of electricity as Washington state does in a year.

And more than one-third of what residential cooling in the United States uses up.
More than seven times as much electricity as all of Google’s global operations.

So why is it so energy intensive?

For a long time, money has been thought of as something you can hold in your hand — say, a dollar bill.

Currencies like these seem like such a simple, brilliant idea. A government prints some paper and guarantees its value. Then we swap it among ourselves for cars, candy bars and tube socks. We can give it to whomever we want, or even destroy it.
On the internet, things can get more complicated.

Traditional kinds of money, such as those created by the US or other governments, aren’t entirely free to be used any way you wish. Banks, credit-card networks and other middlemen can exercise control over who can use their financial networks and what they can be used for — often for good reason, to prevent money laundering and other nefarious activities. But that could also mean that if you transfer a big amount of money to someone, your bank will report it to the government even if the transfer is completely on the up-and-up.

So a group of freethinkers — or anarchists, depending on whom you ask — started to wonder: What if there was a way to remove controls like these?

In 2008, an unknown person or persons using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a proposal to create a cashlike electronic payment system that would do exactly that: Cut out the middlemen. That’s the origin of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin users wouldn’t have to trust a third party — a bank, a government or whatever — Nakamoto said, because transactions would be managed by a decentralized network of Bitcoin users. In other words, no single person or entity could control it. All Bitcoin transactions would be openly accounted for in a public ledger that anyone could examine, and new bitcoins would be created as a reward to participants for helping to manage this vast, sprawling, computerized ledger. But the ultimate supply of bitcoins would be limited. The idea was that growing demand over time would give bitcoins their value.

This concept took a while to catch on.

But today, a single bitcoin is worth about $45,000 — although that could vary wildly by the time you read this — and no one can stop you from sending it to whomever you like. (Of course, if people were to be caught buying illegal drugs or orchestrating ransomware attacks, two of the many unsavory uses for which cryptocurrency has proved attractive, they would still be subject to the law of the land.)

However, as it happens, managing a digital currency of that value with no central authority takes a whole lot of computing power.

1. It starts with a transaction.

Let’s say you want to buy something and pay with Bitcoin. The first part is quick and easy: You would open an account with a Bitcoin exchange like Coinbase, which lets you purchase Bitcoin with dollars.

You now have a “digital wallet” with some Bitcoin in it. To spend it, you simply send Bitcoin into the digital wallet of the person you’re buying something from. Easy as that.
But that transaction, or really any exchange of Bitcoin, must first be validated by the Bitcoin network. In the simplest terms, this is the process by which the seller can be assured that the bitcoins he or she is receiving are real.

This gets to the very heart of the whole Bitcoin bookkeeping system: the maintenance of the vast Bitcoin public ledger. And this is where much of the electrical energy gets consumed.






2. A global guessing game begins.

All around the world, companies and individuals known as Bitcoin miners are competing to be the ones to validate transactions and enter them into the public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions. They basically play a guessing game, using powerful, and power-hungry, computers to try to beat out others. Because if they are successful, they’re rewarded with newly created Bitcoin, which of course is worth a lot of money.
This competition for newly created Bitcoin is called “mining.”

You can think of it like a lottery, or a game of dice. An article published by Braiins, a bitcoin mining company, provides a good analogy: Imagine you’re at a casino and everyone playing has a die with 500 sides. (More accurately, it would have billions of billions of sides, but that’s hard to draw.) The winner is the first person to roll a number under 10.

The more computer power you have, the more guesses you can make quickly. So, unlike at the casino, where you have just one die to roll at human speed, you can have many computers making many, many guesses every second.

The Bitcoin network is designed to make the guessing game more and more difficult as more miners participate, further putting a premium on speedy, power-hungry computers. Specifically, it’s designed so that it always takes an average of 10 minutes for someone to win a round. In the dice game analogy, if more people join the game and start winning faster, the game is recalibrated to make it harder. For example: You now have to roll a number under 4, or you have to roll exactly a 1.

That’s why Bitcoin miners now have warehouses packed with powerful computers, racing at top speed to guess big numbers and using tremendous quantities of energy in the process.

3. The winner reaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in new Bitcoin.
The winner of the guessing game validates a standard “block” of Bitcoin transactions, and is rewarded for doing so with 6.25 newly minted bitcoins, each worth about $45,000. So you can see why people might flock into mining.

Why such a complicated and expensive guessing game? That’s because simply recording the transactions in the ledger would be trivially easy. So the challenge is to ensure that only “trustworthy” computers do so.

A bad actor could wreak havoc on the system, stopping legitimate transfers or scamming people with fake Bitcoin transactions. But the way Bitcoin is designed means that a bad actor would need to win the majority of the guessing games to have majority power over the network, which would require a lot of money and a lot of electricity.
In Nakamoto’s system, it would make more economic sense for a hacker to spend the resources on mining Bitcoin and collecting the rewards, rather than on attacking the system itself.

This is how Bitcoin mining turns electricity into security. It’s also why the system wastes energy by design.

Bitcoin’s growing energy appetite

In the early days of Bitcoin, when it was less popular and worth little, anyone with a computer could easily mine at home. Not so much anymore.

Today you need highly specialized machines, a lot of money, a big space and enough cooling power to keep the constantly running hardware from overheating. That’s why mining now happens in giant data centers owned by companies or groups of people.
In fact, operations have consolidated so much that now, only seven mining groups own nearly 80% of all computing power on the network. (The aim behind “pooling” computing power like this is to distribute income more evenly so participants get $10 per day rather than several bitcoins every 10 years, for example.)

Mining happens all over the world, often wherever there’s an abundance of cheap energy. For years, much of the Bitcoin mining has been in China, although recently, the country has started cracking down. Researchers at the University of Cambridge who have been tracking Bitcoin mining said recently that China’s share of global Bitcoin mining had fallen to 46% in April from 75% in late 2019. During the same period, the United States’ share of mining grew to 16% from 4%.

Bitcoin mining means more than just emissions. Hardware piles up, too. Everyone wants the newest, fastest machinery, which causes high turnover and a new e-waste problem. Alex de Vries, a Paris-based economist, estimates that every year and a half or so, the computational power of mining hardware doubles, making older machines obsolete.

 According to his calculations, at the start of 2021, Bitcoin alone was generating more e-waste than many midsize countries.

“Bitcoin miners are completely ignoring this issue, because they don’t have a solution,” said de Vries, who runs Digiconomist, a site that tracks the sustainability of cryptocurrencies. “These machines are just dumped.”

Could it be greener?

What if Bitcoin could be mined using more sources of renewable energy, like wind, solar or hydropower?

It’s tricky to figure out exactly how much of Bitcoin mining is powered by renewables because of the very nature of Bitcoin: a decentralized currency whose miners are largely anonymous.

Globally, estimates of Bitcoin’s use of renewables range from about 40% to almost 75%. But in general, experts say, using renewable energy to power Bitcoin mining means it won’t be available to power a home, a factory or an electric car.

A handful of miners are starting to experiment with harnessing excess natural gas from oil and gas drilling sites, but examples like that are still sparse and difficult to quantify. Also, that practice could eventually spur more drilling. Miners have also claimed to tap the surplus hydropower generated during the rainy season in places like southwest China. But if those miners operate through the dry season, they would primarily be drawing on fossil fuels.

“As far as we can tell, it’s mostly baseload fossil fuels that are still being used, but that varies seasonally, as well as country to country,” said Benjamin A. Jones, an assistant professor in economics at the University of New Mexico, whose research involves the environmental effect of cryptomining. “That’s why you get these wildly different estimates,” he said.

Could the way Bitcoin works be rewritten to use less energy? Some other minor cryptocurrencies have promoted an alternate bookkeeping system, where processing transactions is won not through computational labor but by proving ownership of enough coins. This would be more efficient. But it hasn’t been proved at scale, and isn’t likely to take hold with Bitcoin because, among other reasons, Bitcoin stakeholders have a powerful financial incentive not to change, since they have already invested so much in mining.

Some governments are as wary of Bitcoin as environmentalists are. If they were to limit mining, that could theoretically reduce the energy strain. But remember, this is a network designed to exist without middlemen. Places like China are already creating restrictions around mining, but miners are reportedly moving to coal-rich Kazakhstan and the cheap-but-troubled Texas electric grid.

For the foreseeable future, Bitcoin’s energy consumption is likely to remain volatile for as long as its price does.

Although Bitcoin mining might not involve pickaxes and hard hats, it’s not a purely digital abstraction, either: It is connected to the physical world of fossil fuels, power grids and emissions, and to the climate crisis we’re in today. What was imagined as a forward-thinking digital currency has already had real-world ramifications, and those continue to mount.


BORN IN CANADA

At 50, Greenpeace is an environmental success story — with a daunting future

Global giant will need new strategies to connect with young

 activists: former director

Greenpeace activists carry the installation Earth on IV Drip, in front of the Croatian parliament during the Green Recovery protest in June 2020, to draw attention to ecology in the Adriatic country. (Antonio Bronic/Reuters)

Fifty years ago, an ad-hoc group of environmentalists gathered around living rooms and kitchen tables in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood with a shared goal of stopping the United States from testing nuclear weapons off the western coast of Alaska.

They decided to sail a leaky, 24-metre-long halibut fishing boat directly toward the blast zone as a form of protest.

The ship was ultimately forced back, but the move drew international attention. Nuclear testing in the area ended months later.

Today, the group with small beginnings in Vancouver has grown into one of the most recognizable environmental organizations in the world. Greenpeace has a presence in more than 55 countries, with nearly three million members globally.

It's no doubt a success story for an organization with such small beginnings, but experts and early members agree that the operation will need to keep reinventing itself if it hopes to have an impact on a climate crisis more urgent than ever.

WATCH | From the Archives: Excerpt from CBC documentary profiles 12-member crew that sailed out of Vancouver in 1971:

Excerpt from a CBC documentary about the birth of Greenpeace and the 12 member crew, including Terry Simmons, that sailed out of Vancouver in 1971. 1:47

"There's both a sense of pride at Greenpeace and also definitely a sense that everything we've done is not enough," said Rex Weyler, who was the organization's director from 1973 to 1982.

Greenpeace has shifted priorities over the decades — from anti-nuclear issues, commercial whaling and overfishing to deforestation and the escalating climate crisis.

It's survived its fair share of criticismcontroversylegal action and infighting, even though any one of those issues has brought down similar organizations time and time again.

Experts attribute Greenpeace's endurance in part to its commitment to the original set of philosophies and principles.

Its core mission is still the preservation of the planet, and the organization still does not accept donations from corporations and governments to avoid the risk of corruption.

'No single generation is going to fix the world'

Its strategy of using highly visible, peaceful protest to get the public's attention has been another key.

"That's really where Greenpeace has excelled over time," said Lisa Sundstrom, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who studies non-governmental organizations.

"They got their start by having vessels in the oceans that were stopping environmental or nuclear damage of various kinds, heading off warships ... and it is these really dramatic moments that have been caught on film, and everybody around the world gets to know them for doing this," she said.

"They've kept that up to a certain degree but [while] simultaneously managing to become quite professionalized and disciplined."

LISTEN | From the Archives: The birth of Greenpeace:

A group of Vancouver hippies sails off to Alaska's waters to stop U.S. nuclear testing. 4:04

Greenpeace's next challenge will be connecting with younger, grassroots activists at the community level despite being an international giant. It will also have to come up with new strategies to hold the public's attention.

Speaking from his home on Cortes Island in B.C., Weyler said the organization's explosive growth has been beyond what the earliest members could have expected.

"We wanted the movement to be international, but no, we didn't quite imagine that Greenpeace would be as huge and successful as an organization as it has been," he said.

An activist for half a century, Weyler says he knows the road to change is long, and he understands, acutely, how easy it can be for the younger generation to feel powerless about making change.

On that, he shared his advice.

"You have to be willing to understand that no single generation is going to fix the world. It's going to take generations to approach solving this," Weyler said.

"You just have to keep going. You have to have courage — but every moment of your life cannot be about changing the world. It's overwhelming. You have to take care of yourself. You have to take care of your family," he said.

"All you can do is make a contribution as best you can."

Satellites spot methane plumes floating above Lahore

Lahore, the country’s second-largest city, is a global hot spot for emissions of the super-potent greenhouse gas

Bloomberg |
PUBLISHED ON SEP 20, 2021 


Satellites spotted a large plume of methane leaking from one of Pakistan’s largest cities last month.

The cloud was seen over Lahore on Aug. 6 and had an emissions rate of about 126 metric tons of methane an hour, according to an estimate from geoanalytics firm Kayrros SAS. That amount of the greenhouse gas would have roughly the same short-term climate warming impact as the annual emissions of 6,200 cars in the UK. A second, smaller plume was seen above the city on Aug. 31, emitting about 39 tons of methane an hour. Methane plume over Lakhodair landfill in Lahore, Pakistan, spotted on July 1, 2021.(GHGSat/Bloomberg)

Methane is a super-potent greenhouse gas, with more than 80 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide over two decades. That’s one reason scientists have been calling for rapid cuts to methane emissions in a bid to slow down climate change.

While many large methane leaks come from a relatively easily identified source, such as oil and gas infrastructure, it’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of the ones in Lahore. Other sources of methane include cattle farming, rice production and waste management.

“These kinds of events around cities are very difficult to find the origin of,” said a spokesperson for Kayrros. “Most of the time, it’s different sources that accumulate into methane clouds.”

Lahore has a history of these kinds of leaks. Since the beginning of 2019, Kayrros has analyzed dozens of methane clouds spotted around the city. Kayrros uses data collected by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite.

One potential source could be the Lakhodair landfill in the northeast part of the city, said Bram Maasakkers, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research who also uses Sentinel 5-P’s data to hone in on global methane hot spots.

Landfills can produce methane when the waste deposited in them decomposes without the presence of oxygen. The methane can build up for a time until it escapes to the surface and up into the atmosphere.

Following Maasakkers’ work, geoanalytics firm GHGsat, which offers higher resolution detection, captured a large methane plume on July 1 from Lakhodair landfill. The rate of release was about 4 tons per hour, which GHGSat captured using its own commercial satellites. The landfill operators didn’t reply to a request for comment.


Still, a cloud as large as the one detected in Lahore in August likely comes from multiple sources. Leaky cities will have to better understand and account for these emissions in order to limit their impact on the climate.

Scientists consider reduction of methane leaks one of the lowest-hanging climate solutions. Satellites are helping spot these leaks, including from landfills in Bangladesh and Argentina, and highlighting the regions of the world where more action is needed.

Last week, major economies, including the US and European Union, agreed to reducing methane emissions by at least 30% relative to 2020 levels before the end of this decade. The countries are now calling on others to join the voluntary pact in a bid to help the world reach climate goals.

 
Nuclear power: Why molten salt reactors are problematic and Canada investing in them is a waste

A Canadian stamp from 1980 representing the peaceful applications of nuclear energy. (Shutterstock)


September 14, 2021 

One of the beneficiaries of the run-up to a potential federal election has been the nuclear energy industry, specifically companies that are touting new nuclear reactor designs called small modular reactors. The largest two financial handouts have been to two companies, both developing a specific class of these reactors, called molten salt reactors (MSRs).

First, in October 2020, Canada’s minister of innovation, science and industry announced a $20-million grant to Ontario-based Terrestrial Energy and its integral molten salt reactor (IMSR) design. In March 2021, New Brunswick-based Moltex received $50.5 million from the Strategic Innovation Fund and Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.

As a physicist who has analyzed different nuclear reactor designs, including small modular reactors, I believe that molten salt reactors are unlikely to be successfully deployed anytime soon. MSRs face difficult technical problems, and cannot be counted on to produce electricity consistently.
How they work

Molten salt reactors use melted chemicals like lithium fluoride or magnesium chloride to remove the heat produced within the reactor. In many MSRs, the fuel is also dissolved in a molten salt.

These designs are very different from traditional reactor designs — currently, the Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) design dominates Canada’s nuclear energy landscape. CANDU uses heavy water (water with deuterium, the heavier isotope of hydrogen) to transport heat, slow down or “moderate” neutrons produced during fission, and natural uranium fabricated into solid pellets as fuel. Slower neutrons are more effective in triggering fission reactions as compared to highly energetic, or fast, neutrons.

Terrestrial’s IMSR is fuelled by uranium which contains higher concentrations of uranium-235, a lighter isotope as compared to uranium found in nature (natural uranium), which is used in CANDU reactors. The enriched uranium is dissolved in a fluoride salt in the IMSR. The IMSR also uses graphite, instead of heavy water used in CANDU reactors, to moderate neutrons.

Moltex’s Stable Salt Reactor (SSR), on the other hand, uses a mixture of uranium and plutonium and other elements, dissolved in a chloride salt and placed inside a solid assembly, as fuel. It does not use any material to slow down neutrons.

Because of the different kinds of fuel used, these MSR designs need special facilities — not present in Canada currently — to fabricate their fuel. The enriched uranium for the IMSR must be produced using centrifuges, while the Moltex design proposes to use a special chemical process called pyroprocessing to produce the plutonium required to fuel it. Pyroprocessing is extremely costly and unreliable.

Both processes are intimately linked to the potential to make fissile materials used in nuclear weapons. Earlier this year, nine non-proliferation experts from the United States wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressing serious concerns “about the technology Moltex proposes to use.”

Difficult questions

Experience with MSRs has not been very encouraging either. All current designs draw upon the only two MSRs ever built: the 1954 Aircraft Reactor Experiment that ran for just 100 hours and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment that operated intermittently from 1965 to 1969. Over those four years, the latter reactor’s operations were interrupted 225 times; of these, only 58 were planned. The remaining were due to various unanticipated technical problems. In other words, the reactor had to be shut down at least once every four out of five weeks — that is not what one would expect of a reliable power plant.

Even the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that had funded the U.S. MSR program for nearly two decades raised difficult questions about the technology in a devastating 1972 report. Many of the problems identified continue to be technical challenges confronting MSR designs.

Another basic problem with MSRs is that the materials used to manufacture the various reactor components will be exposed to hot salts that are chemically corrosive, while being bombarded by radioactive particles. So far, there is no material that can perform satisfactorily in such an environment. A 2018 review from the Idaho National Laboratory could only recommended that “a systematic development program be initiated” to develop new alloys that might work better. There is, of course, no guarantee that the program will be successful.

These problems and others have been identified by various research laboratories, ranging from France’s Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN) to the Nuclear Innovation and Research Office in the United Kingdom. Their conclusion: molten salt reactors are still far from proven.

As the IRSN put it in 2015: “numerous technological challenges remain to be overcome before the construction of an MSR can be considered,” going as far as saying that it does not envision construction of such reactors “during the first half of this century.”


The Point Lepreau nuclear generating station in New Brunswick, where Moltex proposes to build a molten salt reactor. (Shutterstock)
Problematic solutions

Should an MSR be built, it will also saddle society with the challenge of dealing with the radioactive waste it will produce. This is especially difficult for MSRs because the waste is in chemical forms that are “not known to occur in nature” and it is unclear “which, if any, disposal environment could accommodate this high-level waste.” The Union of Concerned Scientists has also detailed the safety and security risks associated with MSR designs.

The Liberal government’s argument for investing in molten salt reactors is that nuclear power is necessary to mitigate climate change. There are good reasons to doubt this claim. But even if one were to ignore those reasons, the problems with MSRs laid out here show that they cannot be deployed for decades.

The climate crisis is far more urgent. Investing in technologies that are proven to be problematic is no way to deal with this emergency.



Author
MV Ramana

Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia
Disclosure statement

MV Ramana receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Partners


Olymel to close former F. Menard bacon plant

Pork further-processing plant at Henryville to shut in November


Meat packer Olymel plans to shut a pork further-processing plant it operates in Quebec’s Monteregie by mid-November and pick up the work at its other sites.

Olymel, the meats arm of Sollio Co-operative, said Wednesday it will permanently close the bacon plant at Henryville, about 60 km southeast of Montreal, effective Nov. 12.

The closure will affect 29 jobs, Olymel said, and all affected employees will be offered relocation to nearby Olymel facilities in the Monteregie. Employees were notified Wednesday morning at a meeting and by “personalized letter.”


ADVERTISEMENTThe former Agromex site, a 70,000-square foot facility in operation since 2011, came to Olymel early last year when it bought the pork business of processor F. Menard.

The employees are mostly represented by TUAC (UFCW) Local 501, working under an eight-year collective agreement that was put in place with F. Menard and was to run into 2026.

The Henryville site and buildings “are currently being evaluated, and Olymel will soon make a decision on the future of these facilities,” the company said.

“Closing a facility is always a difficult decision,” Olymel CEO Rejean Nadeau said in the company’s release. “However, after careful evaluation of our capacities and needs in this production sector, we have concluded that the company already has the necessary facilities elsewhere to meet our customers’ demand.”

The costs of continuing to operate the plant “would not have allowed this facility to achieve profitability,” he said.

The company, he said, hopes all 29 affected employees “affected by the closure “will be able to remain with the company in its other facilities in the region, and we’ll do everything to make this happen.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network
CAPITALI$M IS CRISIS

The Guardian

UK food industry warns of ‘10 days to fix CO2 crisis’ or face shortages – business live

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Introduction: Food industry warns government has 10 days before consumer see shortages

U.K. meat industry warns of threat to supplies from CO2 crisis

CO2 shortage is caused by closure of fertilizer plants

By James Davey
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Published: September 20, 2021

An information label is seen on packaging for a CO2 cylinder for a fizzy drinks machine in Manchester, Britain on Sept. 20, 2021. (Photo: Reuters)/Phil Noble)


London | Reuters — Some of Britain’s meat processors will run out of carbon dioxide (CO2) within five days, forcing them to halt production and impacting supplies to food retailers, the head of the industry’s lobby group warned on Monday.

A jump in gas prices has forced several domestic energy suppliers out of business and has shut fertilizer plants that also make CO2 as a byproduct of their production process.

The CO2 gas is used to stun animals before slaughter, in the vacuum packing of food products to extend their shelf life, and to put the fizz into beer, cider and soft drinks. CO2’s solid form is dry ice, which is used in food deliveries.

The CO2 crisis has compounded an acute shortage of truck drivers in the U.K., which has been blamed on the impact of COVID-19 and Brexit.

“My members are saying anything between five, 10 and 15 days supply (remain),” Nick Allen of the British Meat Processors Association told Sky News.

With no CO2 a meat processor cannot operate, he said.

“The animals have to stay on farm. They’ll cause farmers on the farm huge animal welfare problems and British pork and British poultry will disappear off the shelves,” Allen said.

“We’re two weeks away from seeing some real impacts on the shelves,” he said, adding that poultry could start disappearing even sooner.
Retailers hit

Allen said the government was working hard to try and resolve the issue and might be able to persuade a U.K. fertilizer producer to restart its plant.

The crisis is also having a more immediate impact.

Online supermarket group Ocado said it had temporarily reduced the number of lines it is able to deliver from its frozen range. Dry ice is used to keep items frozen during delivery.

Shares in processor Cranswick, whose products include fresh pork and chicken and gourmet sausages, were down 2.7 per cent after CEO Adam Couch said production could be halted.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC), which represents retailers including the major supermarket groups, said the CO2 shortage had compounded existing pressures on production and distribution.

“… it is vital that government takes immediate action to prioritize suppliers and avoid significant disruption to food supplies,” said Andrew Opie, the BRC’s director of food and sustainability.

Britain’s National Farmers Union said it was concerned about the shortages of fertilizer and CO2.

“We’re aware of the added strain this puts on a food supply chain already under significant pressure due to lack of labour,” said NFU vice-president Tom Bradshaw.

Foreign office minister James Cleverly said the government was looking to address short-term shortages.

“We will ensure that we are able to put food on the table, obviously that is a real priority,” he told Sky News.

Britain’s big four supermarket groups — market leader Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons — had no immediate comment.

— James Davey reports for Reuters from London, England.
'MAYBE' TECH
Climate change/Carbon sequestration

Companies hoping to grow carbon-sucking kelp may be rushing ahead of the science

Sinking seaweed could sequester a lot of carbon, but researchers are still grappling with basic questions about reliability, scalability and risks.

by James Temple
MIT
GETTY

In late January, Elon Musk tweeted that he planned to give $100 million to promising carbon removal technologies, stirring the hopes of researchers and entrepreneurs.

A few weeks later, Arin Crumley, a filmmaker who went on to develop electric skateboards, announced that a team was forming on Clubhouse, the audio app popular in Silicon Valley, to compete for a share of the Musk-funded XPrize.

A group of artists, designers, and engineers assembled there and discussed a variety of possible natural and technical means of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. As the conversations continued and a core team coalesced, they formed a company, Pull To Refresh, and eventually settled on growing giant bladder kelp in the ocean.

So far, the venture’s main efforts include growing the seaweed in a tank and testing their control systems on a small fishing boat on a Northern California lake. But it’s already encouraging companies to “get in touch” if they’re interested in purchasing tons of sequestered CO2, as a way to balance out their greenhouse-gas emissions.

Crumley says that huge fleets of semi-autonomous vessels growing kelp could suck up around a trillion tons of carbon dioxide and store it away in the depths of the sea, effectively reversing climate change. “With a small amount of open ocean,” he says, “we can get back to preindustrial levels” of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
'No one knows'

Numerous studies show the world may need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere by midcentury to prevent dangerous levels of warming or bring the planet back from them. In addition, more and more corporations are scouring the market for carbon credits that allow them to offset their emissions and claim progress toward the goal of carbon neutrality.

All of that has spurred a growing number of companies, investors, and research groups to explore carbon removal approaches that range from planting trees to grinding up minerals to building giant C02-sucking factories.

Kelp has become an especially active area of inquiry and investment because there’s already an industry that cultivates it on a large scale—and the theoretical carbon removal potential is significant. An expert panel assembled by the Energy Futures Initiative estimated that kelp has the capacity to pull down about 1 billion to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.

But scientists are still grappling with fundamental questions about this approach. How much kelp can we grow? What will it take to ensure that most of the seaweed sinks to the bottom of the ocean? And how much of the carbon will stay there long enough to really help the climate?

In addition, no one knows what the ecological impact of depositing billions of tons of dead biomass on sea floor would be.


“We just have zero experience with perturbing the bottom of the ocean with that amount of carbon,” says Steven Davis, an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is analyzing the economics of various uses of kelp. “I don’t think anybody has a great idea what it will mean to actively intervene in the system at that scale.”

The scientific unknowns, however, haven’t prevented some ventures from rushing ahead, making bold promises and aiming to sell carbon credits. If the practice doesn’t sequester as much carbon as claimed it could slow or overstate progress on climate change, as the companies buying those credits carry on emitting on the false promise that the oceans are balancing out that pollution, ton for ton.

“For the field as a whole, I think, having this research done by universities in partnership with government scientists and national labs would go a long way toward establishing a basic level of trust before we’re commercializing some of this stuff,” says Holly Buck, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, who is studying the social implications of ocean-based carbon removal.
The lure of the ocean

Swaying columns of giant kelp line the rocky shores of California’s Monterey Bay, providing habitat and hunting grounds for rockfish, sea otters, and urchins. The brown macroalgae draws on sunlight, carbon dioxide, and nutrients in the cool coastal waters to grow up to two feet a day. The forests continually shed their blades and fronds, and the seaweed can be knocked loose entirely by waves and storms.

In the late 1980s, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium began a series of experiments to determine where all that seaweed ends up. They attached radio transmitters to large floating rafts of kelp and scanned the ocean depths with remote-operated submarines.

The scientists estimated that the forests released more than 130,000 tons of kelp each year. Most of the rafts of kelp washed up on shore within the bay in a matter of days. But in the underwater observations, they found bundles of seaweed lining the walls and floor of an adjacent underwater gully known as the Carmel Submarine Canyon, hundreds of meters below the surface.

Scientists have spotted similar remnants of kelp on the deep ocean floors in coastal pockets throughout the world. And it’s clear that some of that carbon in the biomass stays down for millennia, because kelp is a known source of oil deposits.

A 2016 paper published in Nature Geoscience estimated that seaweed may naturally sequester nearly 175 million tons of carbon around the world each year as it sinks into the deep sea or drifts into submarine canyons.

That translates to well below the levels of carbon dioxide that the world will likely need to remove annually by midcentury—let alone the amounts envisioned by Crumley and his team. Which is why Pull To Refresh and other companies are exploring ways to radically scale up the growth of kelp, on offshore vessels or elsewhere.
Reaching the deep seas

But how much of the carbon will remain trapped below the surface and for how long?

Certain species of seaweed, like giant bladder kelp, have tiny gas bladders on their blades, enabling the macroalgae to collect more of the sunlight necessary to drive photosynthesis. The bladders can also keep the remnants or rafts afloat for days or longer depending on the species, helping currents carry dislodged kelp to distant shores.

When the carbon in kelp decomposes on land, or turns into dissolved inorganic carbon dioxide in shallow seawater, it can return to the atmosphere, says David Koweek, science director at Ocean Visions, a research organization that partners with institutions like MIT, Stanford, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The carbon may also be released if marine creatures digest the kelp in the upper oceans.

But some kelp sinks into the deep ocean as well. Bladders degrade. Storms push the seaweed down so deep that they deflate. Certain species are naturally nonbuoyant. And some amount that breaks free below the surface stays there and may drift down into deeper waters through underwater canyons, like the one off the coast of Monterey.
GETTY

Ocean circulation models suggest much of the carbon in biomass that reaches great depths of the oceans could remain there for very long times, because the overturning patterns that bring deep waters toward the surface operate so slowly. Below 2,100 meters, for instance, the median sequestration time would exceed 750 years across major parts of the North Pacific, according to a recent paper in Environmental Research Letters.

All of which suggests that deliberately sinking seaweed could store away carbon long enough to ease some of the pressures of climate change. But it will matter a lot where it’s done, and what efforts are taken to ensure that most of the biomatter reaches the deep ocean.

For-profit plans


Pull To Refresh’s plan is to develop semi-autonomous vessels equipped with floats, solar panels, cameras, and satellite antennas, enabling the crafts to adjust their steering and speed to arrive at designated points in the open ocean.

Each of these so-called Canaries will also tow a sort of underwater trellis made of steel wire, known as the Tadpole, tethering together vases in which giant bladder kelp can grow. The vessel will feed the seaweed through tubes from an onboard tank of micronutrients.

Pull To Refresh has tested its control systems on a fishing boat on a lake in Northern California.

PULL TO REFRESH

Eventually, Crumley says, the kelp will die, fall off, and naturally make its way down to the bottom of the ocean. By putting the vessels far from the coast, the company believes, it can address the risk that the dead seaweed will wash up on shore.

Pull To Refresh has already begun discussions with companies about purchasing “kelp tonnes” from the seaweed it’ll eventually grow.

“We need a business model that works now-ish or as soon as possible,” Crumley says. “The ones we’re talking to are forgiving; they understand that it’s in its infancy. So we will be up-front about anything we don’t know about. But we’ll keep deploying these Canaries until we’ve got enough tonnes to close out your order.”

Crumley said in an email that the company will have two years to get the carbon accounting for its process approved by a third-party accreditor, as part of any transition. He said the company is conducting internal environmental impact efforts, talking to at least one carbon removal registry and that it hopes to receive input from outside researchers working on these issues.

“We are never going to sell a tonne that isn’t third-party verified simply because we don’t want to be a part of anything that could even just sound shady,” he wrote.
‘Scale beyond any other’

Other ventures are taking added steps to ensure that the kelp sinks, and to coordinate with scientific experts in the field.

Running Tide, an aquaculture company based in Portland, Maine, is carrying out field tests in the North Atlantic to determine where and how various types of kelp grow best under a variety of conditions. The company is primarily focused on nonbuoyant species of macroalgae and has also been developing biodegradable floats.

The company isn’t testing sinking yet, but the basic concept is that the floats will break down as the seaweed grows in the ocean. After about six to nine months, the whole thing should readily sink to the bottom of the ocean and stay there.

Marty Odlin, chief executive of Running Tide, stresses that the company is working with scientists to ensure they’re evaluating the carbon removal potential of kelp in rigorous and appropriate ways.

Ocean Visions helped establish a scientific advisory team to guide the company’s field trials, made up of researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and other institutions. The company is also coordinating with the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge on efforts to more precisely determine how much carbon the oceans can take up through these sorts of approaches.

Running Tide plans to carry out tests for at least two and a half years to develop a “robust data set” on the effects of these practices.

“At that point, the conclusion might be we need more data or this doesn’t work or it’s ready to go,” Odlin says.

The company has high hopes for what it might achieve, stating on its website: “Growing kelp and sinking it in the deep ocean is a carbon sequestration solution that can scale beyond any other.”

Running Tide has raised millions of dollars from Venrock, Lowercarbon Capital, and other investors. The tech companies Shopify and Stripe have both provided funds as well, purchasing future carbon dioxide removal at high prices ($250 a ton in Stripe’s case) to help fund research and development efforts.

Several other companies and nonprofits are also exploring ways to sequester carbon dioxide from seaweed. That includes the Climate Foundation, which is selling a $125, blockchain-secured "kelp coin" to support its broader research efforts to increase kelp production for food and other purposes.
The risks

Some carbon removal experts fear that market forces could propel kelp-sinking efforts forward, whatever the research finds about its effectiveness or risks. The companies or nonprofits doing it will have financial incentives to sell credits. Investors will want to earn their money back. Corporate demand for sources of carbon credits is skyrocketing. And offset registries, which earn money by providing a stamp of approval for carbon credit programs, have a clear stake in adding a new category to the carbon marketplace.

One voluntary offset registry, Verra, is already developing a protocol for carbon removal through seagrass cultivation and is “actively watching” the kelp space, according to Yale Environment 360.

We’ve already seen these pressures play out with other approaches to offset credits, says Danny Cullenward, policy director at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that assesses the scientific integrity of carbon removal efforts.

CarbonPlan and other research groups have highlighted excessive crediting and other problems with programs designed to incentivize, measure, and verify emissions avoided or carbon removal achieved through forest and soil management practices. Yet the carbon credit markets continue to grow as nations and corporations look for ways to offset their ongoing emissions, on paper if not in the atmosphere.

Sinking seaweed to the bottom of the ocean creates especially tricky challenges in verifying that the carbon removal is really happening. After all, it’s far easier to measure trees than it will be to track the flow of carbon dissolved in the deep ocean. That means any carbon accounting system for kelp will rely heavily on models that determine how much carbon should stay under the surface for how long in certain parts of the ocean, under certain circumstances. Getting the assumptions right will be critical to the integrity of any eventual offset program—and any corporate carbon math that relies on them.

Some researchers also worry about the ecological impact of seaweed sinking.

Wil Burns, a visiting professor focused on carbon removal at Northwestern University and a member of Running Tide’s advisory board, notes that growing enough kelp to achieve a billion tons of carbon removal could require millions of buoys in the oceans.

Those floating forests could block the migration paths of marine mammals. Creatures could also hitch aboard the buoys or the vessels delivering them, potentially introducing invasive species into different areas. And the kelp forests themselves could create “gigantic new sushi bars,” Burns says, perhaps tipping food chains in ways that are hard to predict.
An underwater kelp forest off the coast of California.
GETTY

The addition of that much biomatter and carbon into the deep ocean could alter the biochemistry of the waters, too, and that could have cascading effects on marine life.

“If you’re talking about an approach that could massively alter ocean ecosystems, do you want that in the hands of the private sector?” Burns says.

Running Tide’s Odlin stresses that he has no interest in working on carbon removal methods that don’t work or that harm the oceans. He says the reason he started looking into kelp sinking was that he witnessed firsthand how climate change was affecting marine ecosystems and fish populations.

“I’m trying to fix that problem,” he says. “If this activity doesn’t fix that problem, I’ll go work on something else that will.”
Scaling up

Scaling up kelp-based carbon removal from the hundreds of millions of tons estimated to occur naturally to the billions of tons needed will also face some obvious logistical challenges, says John Beardall, an emeritus professor at Monash University in Australia, who has studied the potential and challenges of seaweed cultivation.

For one, only certain parts of the world offer suitable habitat for most kelp. Seaweed largely grows in relatively shallow, cool, nutrient-rich waters along rocky coastlines.

Expanding kelp cultivation near shore will be constrained by existing uses like shipping, fishing, marine protected areas, and indigenous territories, Ocean Visions notes in a “state of technology” assessment. Moving it offshore, with rafts or buoys, will create engineering challenges and add costs.

Moreover, companies may have to overcome legal complications if their primary purpose will be sinking kelp on large, commercial scales. There are complex and evolving sets of rules under treaties like the London Convention and the London Protocol that prevent dumping in the open oceans and regulate “marine geoengineering activities” designed to counteract climate change.

Commercial efforts to move ahead with sinking seaweed in certain areas could be subject to permitting requirements under a resolution of the London Convention, or run afoul of at least the spirit of the rule if they move ahead without environmental assessments, Burns says.

Climate change itself is already devastating kelp forests in certain parts of the world as well, Beardall noted in an email. Warming waters coupled with a population explosion of sea urchins that feed on seaweed have decimated the kelp forests along California’s coastline. The giant kelp forests along Tasmania have also shrunk by about 95% in recent years.

“This is not to say that we shouldn’t look to seaweed harvest and aquaculture as one approach to CO2 sequestration,” Beardall wrote. “But I simply want to make the point that is not going to be a major route.”
Other, better uses

Another question is simply whether sinking seaweed is the best use of it.

It’s a critical food and income source for farmers across significant parts of Asia, and one that’s already under growing strains as climate change accelerates. It’s used in pharmaceuticals, food additives, and animal feed. And it could be employed in other applications that tie up the carbon, like bioplastics or biochar that enriches soils.

“Sustainably farmed seaweed is a valuable product with a very wide range of uses … and a low environmental footprint,” said Dorte Krause-Jensen, a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark who has studied kelp carbon sequestration, in an email. “In my opinion it would be a terrible waste to dump the biomass into the deep sea.”

UC Irvine’s Davis has been conducting a comparative economic analysis of various ways of putting kelp to use, including sinking it, converting it to potentially carbon-neutral biofuels, or using it as animal feed. The preliminary results show that even if every cost was at the lowest end of the ranges, seaweed sinking could run around $200 a ton, which is more than double the long-term, low-end cost estimates for carbon-sucking factories.

Davis says those costs would likely drive kelp cultivators toward uses with higher economic value. “I’m more and more convinced that the biggest climate benefits of farmed kelp won’t involve sinking it,” he says.
‘Get it done’

Pull To Refresh’s Crumley says he and his team hope to begin testing a vessel in the ocean this year. If it works well, they plan to attach baby kelp to the Tadpole and “send it on its voyage,” he says.

He disputed the argument that companies should hold off on selling tons now on the promise of eventual carbon removal. He says that businesses need the resources to develop and scale up these technologies, and that government grants won’t get the field where it needs to be.

“We’ve just decided to get it done,” he says. “If, in the end, we’re wrong, we’ll take responsibility for any mistakes. But we think this is the right move.”

It’s not clear, however, how such a startup could take responsibility for mistakes if the activities harm marine ecosystems. And at least for now, there are no clear mechanisms that would hold companies accountable for overestimating carbon removal through kelp.

At this stage, it’s crucial to carry out controlled field tests to provide more information about the scale, durability, and environmental risks of kelp sinking, Ocean Vision’s Koweek says. Filling in these knowledge gaps will be essential to setting up reliable carbon accounting methods for any voluntary or government-regulated offset programs that eventually allow companies to buy and trade kelp carbon credits.

He does believe that companies can play a helpful role in that, working with scientists and engineers across academia and nonprofits to more quickly deliver the information needed to produce reliable standards and determine best practices. But without addressing any specific company, he also says the science is too premature to start marketing carbon credits from kelp.

“The entire field broadly—the entrepreneurs, startups, investors, philanthropies, scientists, and engineers—we would all benefit by putting time and resources into building out the evidence base together, before we jump the gun and start selling carbon credits,” he says.
What are you flushing away? These brands of toilet paper are dumping on the environment, ranking says

'The toilet paper you buy is a climate decision'

Author of the article: Colin McClelland
Publishing date: Sep 20, 2021 •
Cutting down trees to make toilet paper reduces the ability of forests to absorb carbon out of the air. 
PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES

A family of four’s annual toilet paper use generates about the same amount of carbon as cutting down 27 trees or flying on a jet from Toronto to Vancouver.

Those are the kind of statistics that might make you want to sit down, on the throne, perhaps, with a new appreciation of what we’re flushing away. The numbers come from the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental advocacy group.

The council’s annual ranking of toilet paper released Friday heaps scorn on those companies, such as consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble Corp., that shun recycled paper in their top-selling products, such as Charmin. The council gives mixed praise to competitor Kimberly-Clark Corp. for finally offering environmental tissue — Scott Essential Standard Roll — to the residential market, while retaining market share in offending tissues, such as Cottonelle.

“There are plenty of toilet paper and tissue products out there today that have a much smaller budget than companies like Procter & Gamble,” Shelley Vinyard, a campaign manager in the council’s Canada Project, said in a statement.

“For Procter & Gamble to say that they can’t fix this problem and they can’t take responsibility for the role that they’re playing in fuelling the climate crisis and forest destruction is an abdication of their own responsibility.”

P&G defends its wood fibre sourcing on its website: “Though we do not own or manage forests, we have a responsibility through our procurement practices to ensure the sustainability of the world’s forest resources. As such, we are committed to understanding our pulp fibre sources, transparency in sourcing, and ensuring that sustainable forest management practices are used.”

Cutting down trees to make toilet paper reduces the ability of forests to absorb carbon out of the air. Canada’s boreal forest stores nearly twice as much carbon as all the world’s oil reserves combined, according to the report. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas blamed in part for the climate change raising the planet’s temperature.

The quirky Who Gives a Crap brand originally out of Melbourne, and the Green Forest marque, founded in Wisconsin 30 years ago, sported top marks with A plusses on the NRDC list. They scored almost a perfect 600 points for being made entirely of recycled fibres that are more than 90 per cent post-consumer (pre-consumer recyclables are used primarily in manufacturing) and bleached with a less toxic process.

P&G, Kimberly-Clark, Georgia-Pacific LLC, Amazon.com, Costco Wholesale Corp. and Walmart Inc. all earned Fs for some of their brands. Those products are made of 100 per cent virgin fibres bleached with a process releasing cancer-causing dioxins. They scored zero.

Of perhaps greater impact than personal guilt while on the go is how Canadian securities regulators increasingly demand listed companies to report the environmental credentials of their products. The guidelines require public companies to disclose information that, if omitted or misstated, would likely influence a reasonable investor’s decision to buy, sell or hold a security.

Large producers such P&G, Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific are based in the United States, but there the Securities and Exchange Commission is now weighing whether to require companies to disclose climate-change related risks in their annual reports, a move that could open them to court challenges.

“There are plenty of brands out there that are made from recycled fibre and alternative fibres that have one-third the climate impact of toilet paper that comes from virgin forest fibre,” Jennifer Skene, lawyer for the council’s Canada Project, said in a statement.

“When companies decide to continue producing toilet paper made from forests, and when retailers decide to stock their shelves with toilet paper made from forests, they’re making a choice to sacrifice our climate and our world’s forest all for something that gets flushed away.”

The NRDC ranked 44 rolls in total, with 11 earning As or higher. In addition to Who Gives a Crap, Green Forest and Kimberly-Clark, the top achievers included American brands which may be difficult to find in Canada: Whole Foods, Natural Value, Seventh Generation, Trader Joe’s, Target and Publix.

It also reviewed tissues made with bamboo fibre for the first time. Bamboo can be a complicated choice. it grows rapidly and generally has a smaller ecological footprint, but some bamboo plantations were created after levelling primary forests. Those can be weeded out by certification from organizations such as the Forest Stewardship Council, which evaluates forest use according to human rights and ecological impacts.


The NRDC also ranked paper towels and facial tissues. Thrive Market, Target and Green Forest paper towels earned A plusses. P&G’s Bounty, Kimberly-Clark’s Viva, Costco, Amazon and Walmart got Fs.

Facial tissues ranked similarly. Kleenex got an F.

As North American forests are being clear-cut at a rate of one million acres a year, P&G and Kimberly-Clark increased their purchases of Canadian wood pulp in the past year in a “tree-to-toilet pipeline” that must be dismantled to save centuries-old trees and the climate, the council says.

“The toilet paper we buy is a climate decision,” Vinyard said.

“When you choose to buy a product that’s made from recycled content you are minimizing your own carbon footprint. You’re voting with your dollars and telling tissue manufacturers that what you’re looking for is something that doesn’t destroy forests and harm our climate.”
'MAYBE' TECH
Plug Power Will Make Hydrogen From Water in California Drought

David R. Baker
Mon, September 20, 2021



(Bloomberg) -- Plug Power Inc. plans to make green hydrogen from waste water in drought-stricken California, a potential model for producing the clean-burning fuel at a time when clean water is in short supply.

The facility in Fresno County, announced Monday, will take recycled water from a new wastewater treatment plant and strip hydrogen from it, while the remainder goes to a nearby community. The plant will produce 30 metric tons of hydrogen each day, using electrolyzers to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, with power from a 300-megawatt solar farm, Plug Power said.


Governments worldwide are exploring hydrogen as a tool to fight climate change, because the fuel can be burned in turbines or fed through fuel cells to generate electricity without producing greenhouse gases. But almost all hydrogen produced today is stripped from natural gas, in a process that releases carbon dioxide.

Green hydrogen, produced without carbon emissions, is better for the atmosphere but needs substantial amounts of clean water as its raw material at a time when water supplies worldwide are under increasing strain. Green hydrogen production consumes 10 liters of water to make a kilogram of hydrogen, while stripping hydrogen from natural gas requires between 4.5 and 7 liters of water per kilogram, according to BloombergNEF estimates.

Plug’s plan includes supplying treated water to the city of Mendota, which can use it to irrigate parks. The city lies in California’s agricultural Central Valley, where a deepening drought has led severe over-drafting of local aquifers. Plug aims to break ground on the project in 2023 and commission it in 2024.

“We’re recycling water that’s already used,” Chief Executive Officer Andy Marsh told Bloomberg Television Monday. “So, I feel very comfortable with our plant.”

The plant is the latest of Plug’s projects to produce hydrogen from Texas to Upstate New York.


Plug Power to Build Largest Green Hydrogen Production Facility on the West Coas
t

Plug Power, Inc.
Mon, September 20, 2021

The Fresno County plant will produce 30 metric tons of liquid green hydrogen per day

LATHAM, N.Y., Sept. 20, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Plug Power Inc. (NASDAQ: PLUG), a leading provider of turnkey hydrogen solutions for the global green hydrogen economy, is expanding its green hydrogen ecosystem to the west coast with the construction of a new state-of-the-art production facility in Fresno County, California. Green hydrogen is produced through the electrolysis of water with electricity generated from zero-carbon sources and only harmless oxygen is emitted during the process.


As the largest green hydrogen production facility on the west coast, the plant will produce 30 metric tons of liquid green hydrogen daily, serving customers from San Diego to Vancouver. The facility will use a new 300 megawatt zero-carbon solar farm to power 120 megawatts of Plug Power’s state-of-the-art PEM electrolyzers, which split water into hydrogen and oxygen through an electro-chemical process.


The California plant joins the company’s growing national network of plants in New York, Tennessee, and Georgia that will supply 500 tons per day of liquid green hydrogen by 2025, replacing 4.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and 1,000 tons per day globally by 2028.

When fully built, the network of plants in the U.S. will offer transportation fuel to customers that is price-competitive with diesel. Plug Power’s investment in green hydrogen production will contribute to decarbonizing light-duty vehicles, freight-transportation, and logistics operations, and supports California’s leading role in developing hydrogen as a zero-emission fuel.

The project includes construction of a new tertiary wastewater treatment plant in the city of Mendota that will provide recycled water for the people of Mendota and supply the full needs of the plant.

Pending environmental and construction permitting approvals, the plant will break ground in early 2023 and complete commissioning in early 2024.

“Plug Power is fully committed to a green hydrogen future and is investing heavily in building a green hydrogen ecosystem to support our customers’ efforts to achieve their sustainability goals,” said Andy Marsh, CEO for Plug Power. “California is leading the world in the adoption of green hydrogen and renewable energy. Plug Power is proud to be a part of that transition and to support the state’s continued leadership.”

“This project showcases what can happen when market pull, innovation and public policy intersect – privately financed, large scale, zero-carbon hydrogen transportation fuel that creates jobs in a key region: Fresno County,” said Dee Dee Myers, Senior Advisor to Governor Newsom and Director of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. “We commend Plug Power for investing in a clean, sustainable future in California and beyond.”

“Plug Power has a long-standing commitment to fuel cell technology. With this project, they are taking an innovative, sustainable and low-impact approach to provide instate renewable hydrogen,” said CARB Executive Officer Richard W. Corey. “This will help support the state’s target of carbon neutrality by 2045 or sooner, and continue to transition the transportation sector out of petroleum, including trucks that carry freight and cargo. That will benefit our most impacted communities including those located near ports, rail yards, and distribution centers.”

“The project is a huge win for the City of Mendota, and we are very happy to see this significant investment in clean energy in our community,” said Mendota Mayor, Rolando Castro. “This green-hydrogen plant will provide full time high-paying jobs for our people. The city will also get a new wastewater treatment plant to provide recycled water for the city and all the needs of the hydrogen plant.”

“The hydrogen plant will create higher wage job opportunities for residents and offer the City of Mendota recycled water that can be used in parks and other areas, relieving the city of additional groundwater pumping and worsening overdraft,” said Supervisor Brian Pacheco, District 1.

“Green hydrogen represents the energy of the future and with this major announcement, Fresno County will soon plant its flag as the strategic center for California’s hydrogen economy. This project is poetic justice for our region, which has struggled with persistent poor air quality, and will produce the zero-emission fuel needed to support the state’s renewable energy goals. We are proud to have worked alongside Plug Power representatives, GO-Biz, the County of Fresno, the City of Mendota and our Westside cities in supporting the catalytic investments Plug Power’s hydrogen production facility stands to create.” Lee Ann Eager, President/CEO, Fresno County Economic Development Corporation

About Plug Power

Plug Power is building the hydrogen economy as the leading provider of comprehensive hydrogen fuel cell turnkey solutions. The Company’s innovative technology powers electric motors with hydrogen fuel cells amid an ongoing paradigm shift in the power, energy, and transportation industries to address climate change and energy security, while meeting sustainability goals. Plug Power created the first commercially viable market for hydrogen fuel cell technology. As a result, the Company has deployed over 40,000 fuel cell systems for e-mobility, more than anyone else in the world, and has become the largest buyer of liquid hydrogen, having built and operated a hydrogen highway across North America. Plug Power delivers a significant value proposition to end-customers, including meaningful environmental benefits, efficiency gains, fast fueling, and lower operational costs. Plug Power’s vertically-integrated GenKey solution ties together all critical elements to power, fuel, and provide service to customers such as Amazon, BMW, The Southern Company, Carrefour, and Walmart. The Company is now leveraging its know-how, modular product architecture and foundational customers to rapidly expand into other key markets including zero-emission on-road vehicles, robotics, and data centers. Learn more at www.plugpower.com.

Safe Harbor Statement
This communication contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve significant risks and uncertainties about Plug Power Inc.(“PLUG”), including but not limited to statements about PLUG’s expectations regarding its multi-year investment and growth, PLUG’s clean hydrogen technology and fuel cell solutions playing a critical role in achieving climate and decarbonization goals, deepening of relationships with key stakeholders, and acceleration of demand and adoption of hydrogen technology. You are cautioned that such statements should not be read as a guarantee of future performance or results, and will not necessarily be accurate indications of the times that, or by which, such performance or results will have been achieved. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in these statements. For a further description of the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those expressed in these forward-looking statements, as well as risks relating to the business of PLUG in general, see PLUG’s public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the “Risk Factors” section of PLUG’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019 and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended March 31, 2020, June 30, 2020 and September 30, 2020. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof, and PLUG undertakes no obligation to update such statements as a result of new information.

SOURCE: PLUG POWER