Bienvenidos a una nueva semana. This week: Oil and Gas subsidies (Yes, they’re HUGE), the sexy area of cyanobacteria and their use to produce green plastics and sustainable fuels. It was about time for the Nobel Academy! And finally SO2 in our atmosphere. Have a good week everyone.
CHART OF THE WEEK - What is the size of subsidies in the O&G world?
The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF found the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020, with not a single country pricing all its fuels sufficiently to reflect their full supply and environmental costs. Experts said the subsidies were “adding fuel to the fire” of the climate crisis, at a time when rapid reductions in carbon emissions were urgently needed.
Explicit subsidies that cut fuel prices accounted for 8% of the total and tax breaks another 6%. The biggest factors were failing to make polluters pay for the deaths and poor health caused by air pollution (42%) and for the heatwaves and other impacts of global heating (29%).
Cyanobacteria may represent a breakthrough in green plastics and fuels production:
Scientists have created a photo-electrosynthetic system that allows cyanobacteria to use both light and electricity to convert carbon dioxide into acetate or ethylene.1 The system is more energy efficient than natural photosynthesis and opens new avenues for coupling renewable electricity to photosynthetic microorganisms to sustainably produce fuels.
To overcome these limitations, a team of scientists lead by Jeffrey Blackburn and Wei Xiong at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the US, designed a system that allows cyanobacteria to use an external supply of electrons and light to drive carbon dioxide fixation. They genetically removed photosystem II from cyanobacteria and attached the modified cells to a cathode within an electrochemical circuit.
2021’s Physics Nobel Prize awarded to 3 scientists, 2 of them working on climate modeling
Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it.
One complex system of vital importance to humankind is Earth’s climate. Syukuro Manabe demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the Earth’s climate and was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for the development of current climate models.
About ten years later, Klaus Hasselmann created a model that links together weather and climate, thus answering the question of why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic. He also developed methods for identifying specific signals, fingerprints, that both natural phenomena and human activities imprint in the climate. His methods have been used to prove that the increased temperature in the atmosphere is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide.
Just took 60 years to award the Nobel prize to some of the important work done in climate modelling!
MAP OF THE WEEK - Sulfur dioxide cloud from the volcano Cumbre Vieja reaches Latin America
SO2 is a toxic pollutant that poses several health issues, it is naturally emitted by volcanoes but it is also emitted from burning fossil fuels.
High levels of sulfur dioxide also directly harm the environment by damaging foliage and decreasing growth in trees and plants. When combined with water and air, sulfur dioxide forms sulfuric acid: the main component of acid rain. Acid rain is incredibly destructive and can lead to deforestation, the acidification of waterways, harming aquatic life, and the corrosion of building materials.
While sulfur dioxide isn’t a direct greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide or methane, it is considered an indirect greenhouse gas. Sulfur dioxide is regarded as an indirect greenhouse gas because, when coupled with elemental carbon, it forms aerosols. Surprisingly, aerosols contribute to both the cooling and warming of the planet. They scatter the sun’s radiation, sending it back to space and cooling the planet, but they also increase the lifetime and thickness of clouds leading to increased radiation and warming.
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