There is a lot of innovation in the carbon sequestration space, and I was quite surprised to see that there are teams working on tweaking how trees behave with carbon. Am unsure how this will play out. The research that has been done is only short term view and there are studies ongoing to check effectiveness in the long run.
This seems like a nice idea - we have all seen how crazy pollutive the road construction phase is. There is a lot of energy consumption plus pollution from the asphalt being laid. There is also less standardization even in this day and age, and all of which adds to the low quality of roads being built. Which means roads are rebuilt/repaired often and cause more damage. Can plastic roads really solve this, only time will tell I guess.
"What distinguished the neoliberal era of the last four decades is that governments gave over much of their decision-making to the market, thinking it was the best decision-making apparatus. But the market is inadequate to meet the realities of economic and ecological crisis. It is no longer a place where people meet to trade things — that’s an anachronistic use of the word. Now, “the market” is a name for a simplistic algorithm to create profit. The last 40 years demonstrate that the consequences of using it as the exclusive method for making decisions include gross inequality among humans and the wrecking of the health of the biosphere.
The global energy market is $6T. It produces ~75% of entire GHG emissions.
Fusion holds the key to the most abundant source of energy- matter itself. When it’s made commercially viable, it can replace the entire energy generation in a matter of decades.
Helion Energy is really close to solving this. Fingers crossed!
Installing floating solar panels on hydro-power reservoirs seems like a really good solution to the problems plaquing solar panels. They keep the panels cool and increase their efficiency, keep water bodies intact, have minimal bio-diversity loss and even decrease global warming.
They’ll also be easier to connect to the grid as they can just be connected to the hydro-electric plant transmission lines.
@trsraman would be grateful if you can share your views on this, especially if something like this is being/has been attempted in the Indian context and potential impact on native species, soil and biodiversity. #tia
I am skeptical about these claims and their utility in addressing the climate and broader environmental crisis. This article sounds to me like a genetic technofix version of ‘these fast-growing trees are best for carbon’. The articles do not indicate how the trees are propagated… perhaps they are all clones. We know now that most monoculture plantations do not sequester carbon as well as some natural forests (esp. tropical evergreen and deciduous) and plantations are also not as resilient as forests in the face of year-to-year variation in rainfall and climate. If monocultures are bad enough, clonal monocultures would be worse. Also maximising carbon to the detriment of other values such as biodiversity and hydrology needs to be factored in, along with other risks such as that of such plantations burning up in wildfire. Using a combination of fast growing and hardwood trees native to an ecosystem to bring back multi-species forests (in areas that were originally similar forests)–through active restoration or natural regeneration–may be a slightly slower, possibly more expensive, but far surer approach in the long run on multiple counts: carbon, water, biodiversity. @Pai@Mari
Am unsure how this will play out. The research that has been done is only short term view and there are studies ongoing to check effectiveness in the long run.
But another sector that was propped up by 0 interest rate regime? 
