Turning CO2 into plastic?

In the fast emerging banana republic that is the US of A, apparently, and this was news to me, the vice president’s son-in-law wields a lot of power! I am laughing very hard at the cronyism while I remain concerned about the effects. But, remember Americans, democracy begins at home! While you’re busy lecturing, and invading other countries to “spread democracy”, your vice president’s family acts as if their “descended from god” line to the throne gives them divine right to rule by fiat.

Dick Cheney’s Dangerous Son-In-Law – Art Levine

To understand the workings of Philip Perry is to get a sense of the true lines of power in the executive branch. “Perry is an éminence grise,” says one congressional staffer. “He’s been pretty good at getting his fingerprints off of anything, but everyone in this field knows he’s the one directing it. He is very good at the stealth move.” And, as it turns out, Perry’s stealth moves have often benefited opponents of chemical regulation. One of his final pieces of handiwork included coming up with what critics have called an “industry wish list” on chemical security that ultimately became law last fall. “Every time the industry has gotten in trouble,” says the staffer, “they’ve gone running to Phil Perry.” The result has been that our chemical sites remain, even five years after 9/11, stubbornly vulnerable to attack. Philip Perry has hardly been alone in tolerating this. Others in the White House and Congress have been equally solicitous toward the chemical industry. But as part of a network of Cheney loyalists in the executive branch, Perry has been a key player in the struggle to prevent the federal government from assuming any serious regulatory role in business, no matter what the cost. And a successful attack on a chemical facility could make such a cost high indeed. A flippant critic might say the father-in-law has been prosecuting a war that creates more terrorists abroad, while the son-in-law has been working to ensure they’ll have easy targets at home. But it’s more precise to say that White House officials really, really don’t want to alienate the chemical industry, and Perry has been really, really willing to help them not do it.

Nice work. The alternative that the EPA wants to pursue is called inherently safer technologies, or IST. Read the whole article to follow all the behind the scene machinations. Next time a pesticide plant blows up in N.J releasing tons of chlorine, you can bet that none of the people involved in these maneuvers will be anywhere near the fallout!

More climate change positive feedback news (Positive feedback for children, Good, for climate, bad!). BTW, does this kind of news not make you leery of CO₂ Sequestration?

Study says methane a new climate threat – Yahoo! News

Scientists worry about a global warming vicious cycle that was not part of their already gloomy climate forecast: Warming already under way thaws permafrost, soil that has been continuously frozen for thousands of years. Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost and so on. “The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle,” said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was not part of the study. “That’s the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tend to shut it off.”

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Asias brown clouds warm planet

Clouds of pollution over the Indian Ocean appear to cause as much warming as greenhouse gases released by human activity, a study has suggested. US researchers used unmanned aircraft to measure the effects of the “brown clouds” on the surrounding area. Writing in Nature, they said the tiny particles increased the solar heating of the lower atmosphere by about 50%.

The warming could be enough to explain the retreat of glaciers in the Himalayas, the scientists proposed. The clouds contain a mixture of light absorbing aerosols and light scattering aerosols, which cause the atmosphere to warm and the surface of the Earth to cool.

Wow, I’ll have to read the paper later today to confirm, but when I was doing aerosol work in India back in the mid ’90s, the Indian Ocean cloud was unknown. 1995 through 1998, there was an experiment called INDOEX (my thesis advisor in Bombay participated in the later phases) which first observed this brown cloud. At that time, it was assumed that the light scattering (hence “cooling”) effects of this aerosol would dominate the absorbing (or “heating”) effects, and initial model estimates seemed to agree.

Turns out that it has a significant warming effect because the soot particles (dark, therefore heat absorbing) predominate. And, you had to measure it.

For their study, the team of researchers used three unmanned aircraft, fitted with miniaturised instruments that were able to measure aerosol concentrations, soot amounts and the flow of energy from the Sun.

The crafts flew over the polluted region of the Indian Ocean at varying heights between 500m (1,640ft) and 3,000m (9,840ft).

“During 18 flight missions, the three unmanned aerial vehicles were flown with a separation of tens of metres or less and less than 10 seconds (apart), which made it possible to measure the atmospheric solar heating rates directly,” they wrote.

If true, we can reduce the size of this “cloud” by reducing biomass combustion, installing particle controls on power plants, cleaning up other combustion sources, etc, and reduce global warming effects without worrying that this cloud was somehow mitigating temperature rise as previously thought. So, a win-win!

The utilization of solar energy on a large scale requires its storage. In natural photosynthesis, energy from sunlight is used to rearrange the bonds of water to O2 and H2-equivalents. The realization of artificial systems that perform similar “water splitting” requires catalysts that produce O2 from water without the need for excessive driving potentials. Here, we report such a catalyst that forms upon the oxidative polarization of an inert indium tin oxide electrode in phosphate-buffered water containing Co2+. A variety of analytical techniques indicates the presence of phosphate in an approximate 1:2 ratio with cobalt in this material. The pH dependence of the catalytic activity also implicates HPO42– as the proton acceptor in the O2-producing reaction. This catalyst not only forms in situ from earth-abundant materials but also operates in neutral water under ambient conditions.

In Situ Formation of an Oxygen-Evolving Catalyst in Neutral Water Containing Phosphate and Co2+ — Kanan and Nocera, 10.1126/science.1162018 — Science

Don’t you just love the title of the paper? I would have titled the paper “Splitting Water for Cheap”. The author is interviewed here. This catalyst can split water into H2 and O2 using the energy from a solar cell. Then, when you need electricity, you recombine them in a fuel cell to make water and electricity. So, a closed loop with the only external input being the solar energy. Solar energy can now be stored almost painlessly.

It is so simple. I am listening to the interview and the author says this can be replicated in a chemistry lab as it only needs a phosphate buffer, cobalt electrode and a conducting glass.

Wonderful. Now, please stop building coal plants.

Tags: Environment, Solar energy