Big Gap Between Plans and Reality for Carbon Dioxide Removal, New Report Says

The 2024 report on "The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal" just appeared and it’s even more depressing than I expected. Not only are we critically behind plans, but there is also no sign that the gap between plans and reality is closing. We are emitting about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. At the moment, we are removing about 2 billion tons per year, but almost all of it is through traditional methods like trees and smart agriculture. Only a million or so tons are removed by novel methods. The trouble is that the traditional methods cannot be scaled up much more, as they rely on land use, and new methods are still way too expensive to make any commercial sense. The only numbers that have dramatically increased is the amount of funding into research grants for carbon dioxide removal…You find the full report here and a good summary here.

Check out this video on Bitcoin! I was under the impression that Bitcoin mining was bad for the environment. It turns out that the situation is much more controversial and interesting than I originally thought. So what is it, is bitcoin good? Or is it bad? Let’s have a look. You can now leave comments on our quizzes!

OpenAI Looks into Nuclear Fusion to Power Data Centers

Design plan for Helion’s aneutronic nuclear fusion machine. Image: Helion

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company led by Sam Altman, is exploring the possibility of powering its energy-intensive data centers with nuclear fusion technology from the company Helion, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal. The U.S. company Helion is most famous for its bold proclamations. Not only do they want to produce net power by 2028, they want to do it with aneutronic fusion, which is notoriously difficult because the energy threshold is higher. More info here.

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Permafrost Thawing Probably Not a Climate Tipping Point

Permafrost in North-West Canada, Aerial View. Image: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / Guido

It’s not exactly good news, but at least it isn’t bad news: A new study says that thawing permafrost probably won’t cause a runaway process. Permafrost is permanently frozen ground that covers about a quarter of the landmass in the Northern Hemisphere. It stores large amounts of methane and carbon dioxide that will be released when it thaws. If that release were to cause enough further warming to accelerate its own release, the process would inevitably “run away” until everything is released. The new study now says that the pace of release depends strongly on the ground conditions and in general wouldn’t be fast enough to actually speed itself up. Press release here, paper here.

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