Energy

Photographer Garth Lenz uses his images of beauty and devastation to take us inside the most damaging fossil fuel extraction operation on Earth: mining in the Alberta Tar Sands. The tar sands represent a net loss of energy. With high oil prices though, it’s profitable to burn more oil than you produce, pollute the land and water, and call it job creation.

Despite the uptick in renewable energy usage, global emissions have steadily increased.

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Investors are finally paying attention to climate change — though not in the way you might hope.

Global energy consumption is rocketing upward every year: The Energy Information Administration expects it to climb another 28 percent within a generation. Hydropower, wind and solar contribute about 22 percent of the total, and their share grows yearly. But the net amount of energy generated by hydrocarbons is growing yearly, too.

Unlike almost every other future event, climate change is 100 percent certain to happen. What we don’t know is everything else: where, or how, or when, or what the changes mean for Facebook or Pfizer or notes of Chinese-government debt. Navigating these thickets of complexity is theoretically what Wall Street excels at; the industry prides itself on its ability to price risk for the whole economy, to determine companies’ values based on their likelihood of generating earnings. But traders are compensated on their quarterly or yearly performance, not on their distant foresight.

What is odd about many of these climate plays, which rely on such complex assumptions about the future, is how myopic they seem. They assume that the world will change around a stable, fixed point. American weather will curdle to such a degree that Tennessee will become an incubator for malaria, yet Wall Street banks and patent lawyers will saunter along as usual. Rising oceans will submerge coastal financial centers beneath several feet of saltwater, yet commodities markets will pay top dollar for Greenlandic uranium. Taken individually, these assumptions sound dubious. But as a whole, they mirror what’s happening on Wall Street. Each successive year incinerates the temperature figures of the previous one, yet the stock market continues to break records.

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Increasing glacial melt is creating unstable, increasingly problematic glacial lakes, especially in the Andes and Himalaya Mountains. In Peru, Guardians are charged with watching these lakes to try to prevent a catastrophic flood.

Using similar methods that eventually were successful in bring lawsuits against Big Tobacco, vulnerable populations are trying to sue the large corporations that have overwhelming contributed to climate change. Surprisingly, just 90 companies are responsible for two-thirds of all the greenhouse gases emitted between 1751 and 2016. More than half those emissions have occurred since 1988. Still, it is an incredibly complex question to figure out the harm and recompense involved in large-scale, complex systems like earth’s climate.

Since 2017, eight United States cities, including New York and San Francisco, six counties, one state and the West Coast’s largest association of fishermen have brought suit against a host of corporations — Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, Peabody Energy, among others — for selling products that caused the world to warm while misleading the public about the damage they knew would result.

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Can two scientists from a Swiss firm called Climeworks perfect a novel process of “direct air capture” to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, bottle it, and store or sell it? Although Climeworks’s existing rooftop plant currently requires significant energy inputs to function, the two entrepreneurs (Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher) are finding ways to bring costs down and scale the size up. Right now they sell their expensive bottled CO2 to agriculture or beverage companies which seem willing to pay a premium for a vital ingredient they can use to help market their products as eco-friendly.

However, in the next seven years, Climeworks believes that it can bring expenses down to a level that would enable it to sell CO2 into more lucrative markets, like combining captured CO2 with hydrogen and fashioning many types of fossil-fuels. There is another company, Carbon Engineering, based in British Columbia, and backed by investors like Bill Gates, which is similarly seeking to produce synthetic fuel at large industrial plants from air-captured CO2. But eventually what Climeworks seeks to do once they lower costs and perfect the process is to pull vast amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere and bury  it, forever, deep underground, and sell that service as a carbon offset.

This fits Climework’s plan in a series of possible negative-emissions technologies (NETs), like planing new groves of trees, a process known as afforestation, which we can then burn for power generation, with the intention of capturing the power-plant emissions and pumping them underground, a process known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. Other negative emissions technologies including manipulating farmland soil or coastal wetlands so they will trap more atmospheric carbon and grinding up mineral formations so they will absorb CO2 more readily, a process known as “enhanced weathering.” As it happens, the Climeworks machines on the rooftop do the work each year of about 36,000 trees.

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