First ‘negative emissions’ carbon-capture plant is running

SUCK IT UP

Arctic-Images / Getty Images

Emilia Urry reports in Grist:


On Wednesday, Iceland flipped the switch on the first project that will remove more CO2 than it produces. The plant is operated by Climeworks, which also opened the first commercial carbon-capture plant in Switzerland earlier this year.
Here’s how direct-air carbon capture works: Giant turbines pull in huge quantities of air, hoovering up molecules of carbon dioxide so we can store it somewhere that’s NOT the atmosphere.
The Icelandic pilot program can remove an estimated 50 metric tons of CO2 from the air in a year. It pumps the collected gas deep into the island’s volcanic bedrock, where it reacts with basalt and essentially turns into limestone. Voilà! No massive reservoirs to manage for millennia — just a lot of rock.
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If all this sounds too good to be true, there’s a reason. Ambitious “clean coal” plants have been engaged in a very public struggle with the economic reality of carbon capture in recent years, and direct-air capture is an even tougher sell.

But it’s getting more affordable. Today, companies estimate it would cost between $50 and $100 to capture a single metric ton of carbon. Iceland’s plant has already achieved $30 per metric ton. It will never work as a substitute for action to reduce emissions, but carbon capture could be a crucial part of keeping global temperatures in check this century.

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Is Facebook squashing bugs or quashing Russian data?

Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin report for Washington Post:


Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research last week showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well.
Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything — thousands of Facebook posts and the related data — that had made the work possible.
Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis he had done just days earlier.
Facebook does not dispute it removed the posts, but it offers a different explanation of what happened. The company says it has merely corrected a “bug” that allowed Albright, who is research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, to access information he never should have been able to find in the first place. That bug, Facebook says, has now been squashed on a social media analytics tool called CrowdTangle, which Facebook bought last year.
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Amazon’s HQ2 offers big benefits, but it won’t come cheap

Jeff Jeffrey writes in Philadelphia Business Journal:

The prospect of landing Amazon.com’s second North America headquarters has public officials and economic development experts salivating at the chance to land what is being billed as a $5 billion, 50,000-job investment to their hometown. But as the Oct. 19 bidding deadline fast approaches, cities also are grappling with a sobering reality: HQ2 is going to be an expensive proposition.

More than 50 cities throughout North America have announced plans to submit bids to Amazon for its new HQ2 facility. As such, Amazon is in a powerful position to potentially secure billions in taxpayer subsidies and related incentives. It’s a position the company is well acquainted with.

The Business Journals has identified at least $1.24 billion in taxpayer incentives and abatements awarded to Amazon over the past decade. More often than not, those subsidies have come in return for pledges by Amazon to locate facilities and bring jobs — sometimes thousands of jobs — to nearby communities. It’s a process that has frequently pitted cities and states against one another as they compete to lure Amazon their way.

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NJ appellate court blocks mining operation in Pinelands


Court finds Pinelands Commission’s rejection of project was justified because it did not conform to region’s Comprehensive Management Plan

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:
pinelands

A state appeals court yesterday upheld a decision by the Pinelands Commission to block approval of a mining operation in Jackson Township by a local planning board.
In a 12-page ruling, the court found the commission’s rejection of the project was justified because it failed to conform with the agency’s Comprehensive Management Plan, which does not permit mining operations in parts of the Pinelands designated as “forest areas.’’


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New Jersey looking to put food waste to beneficial uses

On Inside New Jersey with host Larry Mendte, Guy Watson, president of the Association of New Jersey Recyclers (ANJR), discusses sources of wasted food in the Garden State and legislation designed to capture more of it to feed the hungry
and for new recycled uses as fuel and compost.  

To start video, click on the white arrow in the center of
photo above or click here 


Disclosure: ANJR is a client of our related company,
Brill Public Affairs. 


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Researchers find key pesticide in bees almost everywhere


Seth Borenstein reports for the Associated Press:

Washington — When researchers collected honey samples from around the world, they found that three-quarters of them had a common type of pesticide suspected of playing a role in the decline of bees. Even honey from the island paradise of Tahiti had the chemical.

That demonstrates how pervasive a problem the much-debated pesticide is for honeybees, said authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. They said it is not a health problem for people because levels were far below governments’ thresholds on what’s safe to eat.

Bee colony
What this shows is the magnitude of the contamination,” said study lead author Edward Mitchell, a biology professor at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, adding that there are “relatively few places where we did not find any.”

Over the past few years, several studies — in the lab and the field — link insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics, to reduced and weakened honeybee hives, although pesticide makers dispute those studies. Neonics work by attacking an insect’s central nervous system;

Bees and other pollinators have been on the decline for more than a decade and experts blame a combination of factors: neonics, parasites, disease, climate change and lack of a diverse food supply. Honeybees don’t just make honey; about one-third of the human diet comes from plants that are pollinated by the insects. Bees pick up the pesticide when they feed on fields grown from treated seeds.

As part of a citizen science project, the Swiss researchers asked other experts, friends and relatives to ship them honey samples. More than 300 samples arrived and researchers tested 198 of them for five of the most common types of neonics.

Overall, 75 percent of the samples had at least one neonic, 45 percent had two or more and 10 percent had four or more.

Results varied by region. In North America, 86 percent of samples had the pesticide; Asia, 80 percent; Europe, where there’s a partial ban, 79 percent; Africa 73 percent; the Australian region, 71 percent and South America, 57 percent.



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