We are recording this episode about a week in advance of our normal recording date. This is because our producer Ally Pelphrey and I will be at the Balticon science fiction and fantasy convention over Memorial Day weekend and I’m then flying to Orlando where I’ll be meeting with a colleague, spending a day at Disney, and helping move.
This kind of travel is a bit selfish – I get to hug old friends, take a selfie with a the Gay street sign in Baltimore, and do things that can only be done face to face, like lifting heavy boxes to load a van. I’m doing this because I want to.
But in general, academia requires me to travel if I want to maintain my career. The 3 years of the pandemic demonstrated without the shadow of a doubt real-world conferences and events are necessary for healthy collaboration and for inspiring new directions of research. They can’t be replaced with virtual events – the networking just isn’t the same and the doors opened are fewer if there at all…. And who among us has succeeded at virtually attending a meeting in Japan while living at home a dozen time zones away?
When researchers who care about our climate see this kind of a problem they start doing research.
In a new paper in the Journal of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, researchers lead by Marie-Elodie Perga review the carbon footprint of researchers attending conferences between 2004 and 2023. Based on the distribution on conference venues and information on where attendees are based, they determined that a typical conference attendee produced 1.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide while traveling to and attending each conference. As a point of comparison, the Paris Agreement as a stated goal of 2.3 tonnes of carbon emission per year per person by 2030 and 1.4 tonnes by 2040. This means that attending just one conference a year will create more than half a years worth of emissions.
When a major theme of so many conferences has become climate and its impacts on everything from weather to oceans to farming to manufacturing, it becomes clear that our current ways of communicating to one another and advancing our careers needs to become our old ways.
Many conferences suggest going vegan or using electric vehicles as possible ways to make conferences more green, and before you all at me about that possibility, their research finds that what we eat and how we drive are only minor factors when compared to the associated damage done by air travel.
And with so many conferences held in places like Hawaii, and so many converses requiring jumping from one continent to another, rail travel isn’t exactly a reasonable alternative.
But there could be another way.
The pandemic taught us that humans are terrible at mingling in virtual spaces and even more terrible at fully engaging in virtual events. We know from the research that conferences that require a 1000 people from around the world to converge on what spot are terrible for the environment.
But what if instead, there were simultaneous satellites events, such that people in different regions gathered for the same event at the same time, with the understanding that keynotes would be beamed between locations, and parallel sessions would have real world speakers scattered from place to place. The logistics is suddenly super complex, but that’s something we know how to do. Now… we have shortened travel distances for everyone, real-world interactions for everyone, and the chance to have a shared semi-virtual semi IRL meeting of a globe spanning population researchers.
I attended one conference like this in the days before the pandemic. It was hosted by the American Humanist Society and was split across many university campuses to allow more people to participate with a lowered carbon foot print. This isn’t a new idea. It is just one that requires our professional societies to rethink their business models… and if it comes down to climate or the economy… I know which side I’m on.
Copper mining delays the green economy
Like many, I love to travel, and I keep hoping that changes to industry and power production advance so quickly that my occasional desire to visit Micky and watch a rocket launch will become guilt free escapes.
But change sometimes gets slowed by unexpected factors. When it comes to switching to switching power generation to renewable energy sources and expanding the use of electric cars, the slow down comes from the availability of copper.
A new study by the International Energy Forum points out that current mining rates and recycling rates cant produce copper in the needed amounts. And this isn’t a tiny problem. According to the report, “as many as six new large copper mines must be brought online annually over the next several decades. About 40% of the production from new mines will be required for electric vehicle-related grid upgrades.”
Starting up new mines isn’t straightforward. There is typically a 20 year lag between discovery of a copper deposit and get a permit to build a mine. And, presumably, all the easy to find deposits have already been found. Even without the added needs of a new green economy, our access to copper will limit the global economy as more of the world becomes developed. According to a summary of this work from the University of Michigan, “The researchers found that between 2018 and 2050, the world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all of human history up until 2018 just to meet ‘business as usual.’”
Can we remove atmospheric carbon dioxide?
If a green economy isn’t in our future, it become necessary to ask, can we just pull the carbon dioxide we emit back out of the atmosphere somehow. A new study conducted in Germany considered a variety of methods, including direct air carbon capture and storage and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage as well as measures to increase carbon uptake by ecosystems. The study considered how hard it would be to implement different mechanisms and what could be accomplished. They found that in Germany, it would be possible to offset only 5-15% of current emissions. According to researcher Daniela Thran, “With technological Carbon Dioxide Removal measures, the economic and institutional hurdles in particular are still quite high.”
Put another way, to make big Carbon Dioxide removals, you have to spend a lot of money and disrupt the normal ways of doing things.
The study suggests that meaningful change may need to come through myriad small, local efforts designed to meet the needs and fit within the infrastructure of the regions where they are built. In nations where there is a unified view that climate measures need to be taken, this may be possible, but I do worry about places like the US, where many communities will opt to ignore climate change rather than help save our planet.
Making things hot with the sun (on purpose)
It may seem that everything is doom and gloom when it comes to meeting the requirements of the Paris Climate Agreement and slowly the pace of climate change.
I can’t say it isn’t bleak. What I can say is some amazingly creative things are getting tried as folks strive to find a new path forward.
One of the latest new technologies are thermal traps made of quartz that leverage Sunlight to heat materials to over 1000 degrees Celsius. Developed by ETH Zurich, the new technology could allow some industries to become carbon neutral by eliminating the need to combust fossil fuels to achieve needed manufacturing conditions. This work is led by Emiliano Casati who has gotten it to work at laboratory scales – with units measuring 7.5 by 30 cm, and the new unit has significantly less heat loss than existing industrial solar plants built on different technologies. The next step is going to be seeing if this lap unit can be scaled up to even a factory R&D unit… but every idea has to start somewhere and this technique shows promise.
And it isn’t alone.
Concrete from coal ash goes green
Half a world away at Australia’s RMIT researchers have been looking for ways to utilize the billion tons of coal ash produced in coal fired power plants in a year. It is estimated that in australia, coal ash accounts for a fifth of all waste. At the same time, they’ve been trying to figure out how to combat the 8% of all global carbon emissions that comes from cement production.
And, somehow, it looks like both the overabundance of coal ash, and the carbon emissions from cement can be fixed, to a degree at least, by make concrete out of coal ask. They found that the coal ash concrete required half the cement as other mixes, and was just as strong. This means that coal ash can go into making concrete that releases half the emissions.
It’s a small thing, but if we can some how half the amount of cement emissions globally, 4% of current emissions will go away…
We are a long way from seeing any of these technologies going into production, but seeing them get tested and paid attention to at government levels gives me some small hope that we can maybe slow climate change just enough to allow all of us to have the occasional airplane to somewhere that brings us joy.