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Fuel From Greenhouse Gases

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Carbon dioxide and methane are the two greenhouse gases that are having the greatest impact on the global climate.  There are basically three ways to prevent them from getting into the atmosphere:  don’t emit them, trap them and store them away, or turn them into something useful.

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Energy From Evaporating Water

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Researchers at Columbia University have demonstrated a potential new energy harvesting technique based on the natural evaporation of water.   Every day, vast amounts of water evaporate from the surfaces of lakes and rivers, a process powered by the heat energy of the sun.   The amount of energy involved is enormous but generally speaking is not something we can tap into.

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An All-Electric Plane

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The British discount airline EasyJet recently announced a partnership with American company Wright Electric to develop an all-electric commercial airplane that they said could be flying within 10 years.  The goal of the partnership is to develop aircraft with a maximum range of 335 miles, which is long enough for many of the European routes that EasyJet flies from its hub in England.

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A Giant Solar Thermal Plant For Australia

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A project planned for sunny South Australia will be the world’s largest single solar thermal power plant when it comes on line in 2020.   The Aurora Solar Energy Project will have a capacity of 150 MW, which is enough to supply 90,000 people with electricity.

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Tidal Turbines Set An Energy Record

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Two turbines in the Pentland Firth in Scotland recently set a world record for monthly energy production from a tidal stream power station.  In August, the MeyGen installation off the Caithness coast of Scotland produced 700 MWh of electricity, enough to power 2,000 homes.

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New Places For Solar Cells

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Solar panels are on more than a million rooftops in the United States, so they are getting to be a pretty common sight.   We also see them along our highways powering lights and signs and emergency call boxes.  As it gets cheaper and more common, solar technology is starting to show up in more unusual ways.

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Air Travel And Global Warming

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Air travel is pretty carbon intensive.  For those of us who take plane trips, it represents a substantial part of our individual carbon footprints. It isn’t that plane travel is inefficient fuel-wise on a miles-per-gallon-per-passenger basis compared with driving, for example.  It is just that we go so much farther on planes.   Currently, aviation accounts for only a few percent of overall carbon emissions, but that is changing for two reasons.

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New Rules For Ocean Conservation

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In a recent report to a United Nations ocean conference, scientists are warning that new rules are desperately needed to protect marine life in the open seas.  That’s because more than 60% of the ocean has no conservation rules since it’s located outside national jurisdictions.  The open ocean is at risk from climate change, over-fishing, deep sea mining, farm pollution, and plastics pollution. 

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Ditching Gas And Diesel Cars

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Electric cars represent only a tiny fraction of the overall auto market.  The numbers are growing, most certainly, but they are still quite small in most places.   The recent start of production of the Tesla Model 3 has attracted quite a bit of attention to electric cars, but in many countries, there is much more to the story than just media buzz about a new car.

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Electric Cars For Real This Time?

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Electric cars have been around for a long, long time.  The first ones appeared in the mid-19th century.  Around the turn of the 20th century, they were popular for taxi cabs in places like New York City.  But within about 10 years, they mostly disappeared.  In the 1990s, electric cars had a brief revival with vehicles like the General Motors EV1.  But again electric cars mostly vanished.

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A Record Drop In Coal Consumption

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Global consumption of coal dropped by 1.7% last year.  This is a major change considering that it had increased by an average of 1.9% per year from 2005 to 2015.   China, which accounts for about half of the coal burned in the world, used 1.6% less in 2016, as compared to an increase of 3.7% per year over the previous 11 years.

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Offshore Wind Progress

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Last December, the first commercial offshore wind farm in the United States started operation off the coast of Rhode Island.   The Fisherman’s Energy Atlantic City Windfarm off the coast of New Jersey is under construction.  With the lengthy logjam finally broken, there is increasing activity in the emerging U.S. offshore wind sector.

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Fern-Inspired Energy Storage

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The amount of solar energy striking the surface of the earth in two hours is enough to supply all of humankind’s needs for an entire year.   For this reason, it is widely thought that solar energy should be our primary source of electricity.  If this is to happen, however, there must be cost-effective ways to obtain solar electricity regardless of the time of day, weather, or seasonal changes. Essentially, there must be ways to store the energy from the sun to use it when we need it.

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China And India Climate Progress

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China and India have 36% of the world’s population and produce about 35% of global CO2 emissions, ranking first and third respectively in that category.  The United States, with a little over 4% of the world’s population, produces about 16% of global CO2 emissions, good for second place. 

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WAMC Northeast Public Radio

WAMC/Northeast Public Radio is a regional public radio network serving parts of seven northeastern states (more...)