Positive environmental news stories

Brian G Turner

Brian G Turner

Fantasist & Futurist
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With all the news about human-induced climate disasters, it would be easy to get swamped by negativity about the environment. I figure we therefore need a thread to show some of the more positive stories about how the world is actually achieving important net neutral goals, with the aim not simply of slowing global warming, but even eventually reversing it.

Here's a couple for starters:

1. The UK was the first country to industrialize coal power - but now has stopped producing energy from coal:
www.bbc.co.uk

UK to close last coal power station after 142 years

The UK's last coal power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, is due to end operations on Monday.
www.bbc.co.uk

2. China may be the biggest CO2 polluter - but it is also the biggest driver of green energy, building almost twice as much solar and wind capacity than every other country combined:
phys.org

China passes energy law to 'promote carbon neutrality'

China on Friday passed a new energy law to promote carbon neutrality, state media reported, as Beijing moves ahead with its pledge to decarbonize its economy by 2060.
phys.org phys.org

I don't know if we have an existing thread on this - if so, I'll moved this thread into that one. :)
 
Brian G Turner said:
With all the news about human-induced climate disasters, it would be easy to get swamped by negativity about the environment. I figure we therefore need a thread to show some of the more positive stories about how the world is actually achieving important net neutral goals, with the aim not simply of slowing global warming, but even eventually reversing it.

Here's a couple for starters:

1. The UK was the first country to industrialize coal power - but now has stopped producing energy from coal:
www.bbc.co.uk

UK to close last coal power station after 142 years

The UK's last coal power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, is due to end operations on Monday.
www.bbc.co.uk

2. China may be the biggest CO2 polluter - but it is also the biggest driver of green energy, building almost twice as much solar and wind capacity than every other country combined:
phys.org

China passes energy law to 'promote carbon neutrality'

China on Friday passed a new energy law to promote carbon neutrality, state media reported, as Beijing moves ahead with its pledge to decarbonize its economy by 2060.
phys.org phys.org

I don't know if we have an existing thread on this - if so, I'll moved this thread into that one. :)
Click to expand...


It might be worth noting that China's heavily investing in fusion power as well.
 
It's difficult, because what has been agreed falls well short of what is required, but this will help because the production of Steel in the traditional way contributes significantly to overall carbon emissions, estimated at between 7% and 11% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

www.azocleantech.com

Forging a Sustainable Future: The Rise of Green Steel Plants

Green steel represents a pivotal change in steel production, focusing on eco-friendly practices and technological advancements to combat climate change.
www.azocleantech.com www.azocleantech.com
 
I loved this BBC news story I heard recently. Basically they decided to try and reboot a river (in Somerset). As I understand it they simply filled the river in completely and let it do its own thing, find it's own course, create ponds etc. (though it looks like they added quite a few tree trunks). Apparently hugely successful with huge diversity of flora and fauna.
 
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I'm actually not sure on how "green" solar/wind actually is. It's the same as windfarms - I'm not sure there have been any proper studies on carbon impact of the mining, assembling, transportation and ongoing maintenance of these types of technologies.
 
SilentRoamer said:
I'm actually not sure on how "green" solar/wind actually is. It's the same as windfarms - I'm not sure there have been any proper studies on carbon impact of the mining, assembling, transportation and ongoing maintenance of these types of technologies.
Click to expand...
The big thing is capacity and demand.
Wind and Solar are good, but both are variable power sources that don't coincide with demand. Both will vary a lot with the time of year and the weather - winter time and you will draw far less power from solar than in the summer; esp if you are further from the equator. Wind can randomly be super great one moment and then totally dead another.

My impression is that nuclear is the best all round. The waste product is a problem, but otherwise its cleaner than most other power sources for the volume of power it can output and for the fact that its constant. It doesn't rise and fall with the weather.
Fusion power is the absolute dream power - a few years back they managed a stable reaction with more power out than in in the USA so that's a huge leap. If that could be built into a sustained reactor system then I think that's the fuel for the future at least so far as electrical energy is concerned.
 
Overread said:
My impression is that nuclear is the best all round. The waste product is a problem, but otherwise its cleaner than most other power sources for the volume of power it can output and for the fact that its constant. It doesn't rise and fall with the weather.
Fusion power is the absolute dream power - a few years back they managed a stable reaction with more power out than in in the USA so that's a huge leap. If that could be built into a sustained reactor system then I think that's the fuel for the future at least so far as electrical energy is concerned.
Click to expand...
Agreed. Sadly I suspect it's still at least a decade or two, probably more, before we'll have anything actually on line. I remember years ago someone, possibly Brian Cox, saying solar/wind/wave etc. would never realistically provide all our future power needs and that fusion was essential for our future. I tend to agree. And we still need a truly sustainable battery technology.
 
Education (as always) is key. This won't persuade the conspiracy theorists and is only for the UK, but given poor the level of general knowledge, and especially among journalists, it should already be happening. Please sign.
petition.parliament.uk

Petition: Run a public information campaign on the climate crisis

Communicate clearly: 1) the science behind the climate crisis - how & why for the first time in the last year we've averaged 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels 2) the implications of going beyond this and what needs to be done to address it globally, nationally, locally and individually.
petition.parliament.uk petition.parliament.uk
 
More happy stuff. From Fauna and Flora, who've been around about 120 years and work on restoration and protection with local people, they are reporting a lot of success with Caribbean Island re-wilding.
www.fauna-flora.org

Thirty islands restored in 30 years

Fauna & Flora and partners have now restored 30 Caribbean islands, saving over a dozen species from extinction in the process.
www.fauna-flora.org www.fauna-flora.org
 
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I think Brian created this thread because privately I was (still am) very pessimistic about the future of the Earth (particularly as I feel the COP process is a total failure) so I don't have any more positive climate related news to provide. We have to support the institutions working towards the COP process because without them there is nothing else. I do hope that a Carbon Capture engineering solution works, because my alma mater Imperial College and the present UK government have put great stock into those. However, Environmentalists are very vocal that they don't think it will work and that it is untested at the scaled up levels necessary. Personally, I have to be hopeful, but I can't see how it can work unless it is a part of a much broader range of things that people seem to just not want to do - ending fossil fuel use, eating less meat, less travel and more public transport. Otherwise, it just becomes an excuse to continue the way that we presently are. 2024 will beat 2023 to see a record output of CO2, so hardly a phasing out! And we are now beginning to see how the future climate will be shaped.

Anyhow, I did go to an event at Imperial last night on 'Cities of the Future' which I thought you might be interested in. There were no science fiction ideas broached (which I had expected - like living underground or nocturnally) and it was quite pedestrian really, just extrapolating from present trends. However, what was uplifting was three new start up companies presenting afterwards run by young people. I think that there is certainly hope when you have these people in the world. Their inventions were wonderful and I wanted to share them.

Startbook

startbook.app startbook.app
Untap health have developed an automated way to test sewage for pathogens. If you put one on a Cruise Ship you can see in real time when a disease appears and then bring in measures to prevent it spreading BEFORE everyone falls sick. If you put the devices in care homes, hospitals and sewage works all over a city then you can prevent real public health problems by containing the illnesses of today and preventing the pandemics of tomorrow. This came from measuring COVID, as there was then no automated way to do so.

Startbook

startbook.app startbook.app
Treeva have a device that provides reliable renewable energy for critical transport infrastructure in places where there are energy supply risks. It works by using the air of passing trains, trucks and aircraft to drive small turbines. It honestly sounds like something out of Mad Max or the Dark Tower or some other apocalyptical SFF story, but it is an actual real thing.

guerrillaco.notion.site

Guerrilla.Co | Notion

What is Guerrilla?
guerrillaco.notion.site guerrillaco.notion.site
Guerrilla have developed a device to fit to road drains that will capture pollution from road runoff. This is an environmental concern that is reported to mobilise 30% of ocean pollution and is probably the biggest river pollution problem in big cities like London. As a citizen scientist working on London rivers I can tell you that road runoff (micro-particles from tyres and heavy metals attached to them) is a huge problem that is currently unsolvable. Sewer overflows and misconnected outfalls can be cured, but road runoff is mostly rainwater. You cannot use a membrane or something that could get blocked because of the risk of the drain flooding. This device works because the tubes (which look straight) are actually curved at a very specific angle take makes the particles fall out of suspension. The silt is then removed from the drain in the usual way by the council gully cleaning teams. It's an ingenious concept.

Anyway, I hope that is positive enough!

Edit: I should add that all these young people are looking for investors in their ideas!
 
If you like quirky inventions like those, then I also went to another event this week held at ZSL for citizen scientists in which there was a talk about another device. This was a much more Heath Robinson idea, but incredibly useful. Clean Up the River Brent (CURB) and Friends of the River Crane (FORCE) had wanted to monitor pollution in their rivers automatically in real time. These are the same groups that recently made the news after asking for a Environmental Information Request (EIR) from Thames Water to find the source of this outfall:
www.bbc.co.uk

Raw sewage from new homes being flushed into London rivers

Raw sewage is being dumped into London's rivers from at least 100 homes, a charity finds.
www.bbc.co.uk

They wanted to have monitors all along the rivers to pinpoint when events occur automatically. The easiest things to measure would be temperature, conductivity and pH, however the kind of Sonde probes that are used professionally (like the Untap thing I mentioned above) cost thousands of pounds. So, they have put together something using a Raspberry Pi chip, a very old mobile phone chip (intel 8080), some cheap waterproof thermal probe sensors, and put them all together inside a waterproof electrical junction box. They can have these manufactured for about £21 each. This means that it doesn't matter when they get washed away, vandalised, or shot at with air guns. And it uses very little power so the battery lasts a very long time.

They want to open source the software they have written and then allow other groups to use these everywhere. All good news.
 
Nice tech but the pedant in me demands I mention that the 8080 predates mobile phones and was actually the chip used in the first IBM PC (though also pre dates them by some way).
 
Then I have definitely got that wrong. It is some old chip with some 8's in it that is very cheap. But this is from memory, from two days ago. And my memory is poor on a good day. Plus I didn't expect an exam on it.
 
I enjoyed reading these posts. Very often headlines are out of context like about China. I am cautiously hopefully about carbon capture and storage but don't think there's much hope without it, at the rate industries need to decarbonise without pushing communities into a dystopian state of economic fallout.
Anyhow, here's my bit on some recent positive news. Anything on puppies next? Finally, some good news: Record use of recycled materials in the European Union
 
More recycling is good and is certainly necessary, but that 12% level is shameful. Also, recycling can only be part of the solution to our poor waste management, and it is another area where change has been too slow. After working, giving out recycling information for about 8 years, I now believe that we should stop using single use plastics entirely. Plastic is a great material, and is easily the best material in some of it's uses. Just not for single use bottles and packaging and that kind of use. We can build more public water fountains again as the Victorians once did if we want people to keep hydrated outdoors.

Plastics themselves are not evil. As an example, a reusable plastic pallet used aboard a ship rather than wood, saves a tree, and because it is light it saves £'s in fuel over it's lifetime. But using plastics just once, and then sending to landfill, burning or even recycling bottles is wrong-headed. Most ends up in the oceans via our rivers. Microplastics are in our water, in our soils, in the food chain, and inside our bodies. We don't even know what that means in regards to our long term health.

Instead, the goal should be to be working towards a more true circular economy by using more of all of the 12 R's of zero waste - Rethink. Redesign. Refuse. Reduce. Repair. Recover. Reuse. Recycle. Rehome. Regift. Replant. Rot. There is some progress in this.


There is this World conference sitting right now that hopes to get agreement on reducing plastics. But has anyone even heard about it from the main news sources? Given the poor record of COP I'm pessimistic again, but it does seem to be making headway and we did after all we did once get a World agreement on ozone depleting substances back in the 1990's, and we cured that ill. So, World agreements are possible.

It is good that you brought up recycling, because the Climate Crisis get's all the headlines, but there are many other environmental problems that we need to solve. There is also a crisis in Biodiversity too.
 
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