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Politics and plastic

December 19, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The world currently produces nearly half a billion tons of plastic each year. This is more than twice the amount it produced 20 years ago. Half of all plastics ever manufactured have been made in the past 20 years. Plastic waste is everywhere. About eight million tons of plastic waste escapes into the ocean each year.

Environmental groups have urged nations to adopt a legally binding treaty to address the ever-growing problem of plastic pollution. The United Nations climate conference in South Korea last month took up the issue of reaching agreement on such a treaty. At what was supposed to be the final round of talks on the topic, delegates could not bridge wide differences on what such a treaty should contain.

The main bone of contention was whether the treaty should include limits on plastic production itself. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kuwait, and other oil-producing countries opposed any curbs on plastic production. They also opposed the phase-out of harmful chemicals used in the production of plastic.

The Saudi delegation claimed that if the issue of plastic pollution is addressed, there should be no problem with producing plastics. They said the problem is pollution itself, not plastics. They proposed a focus on improving recycling and waste management.

Of course, preventing plastic pollution from occurring is an extremely challenging thing to do. Delegates from countries pushing for a wide-ranging treaty – led by Rwanda – were unwilling to accept a toothless theory lacking real constraints on the plastics industry.

As the conference ended, delegates said that they would reconvene in future months to try again to produce a treaty. No date or place has been announced.

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Nations Fail to Reach an Agreement on Plastic Pollution

Photo, posted February 4, 2023, courtesy of Ingrid Taylar via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Potential for floating solar

July 16, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

As installations of utility-scale solar power continue to expand around the world, there is the issue of where to put them. They do take up considerable amounts of space and, in many places, available land is at a premium.

An alternative to taking up available land with solar panels is to deploy them on the surfaces of lakes and reservoirs. A study by researchers at Bangor and Lancaster Universities in the UK calculated the potential electrical output for floating photovoltaic installation on nearly 68,000 lakes and reservoirs around the world. The lakes and reservoirs selected were no more than 6 miles from a population center, were not in a protected area, and didn’t dry up and didn’t freeze for more than six months each year. The calculations were based on covering just 10% of the surface area of the bodies of water.

The calculations were evaluated country-by-country. Five countries could meet their entire electricity needs by floating installations including Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. Many countries, mostly in Africa, South America, and Central Asia, could get between 40% and 70% of their electricity this way. Most European countries could only meet a few percent of their electricity needs from floating solar, but even that could be significant.

There are other benefits to floating solar apart from freeing up land. The panels stay cooler, making them more efficient, and reservoirs lose less water through evaporation and the growth of algal blooms is reduced because there is less light reaching the water.

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Some countries could meet their total electricity needs from floating solar panels, research shows

Photo, posted November 25, 2015, courtesy of Smabs Sputzer via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A month of extra-hot days

June 19, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The past 12 months have been the hottest ever measured across the globe. This may not be everyone’s experience in every location, but the average person on Earth experienced 26 more days of abnormally high temperatures than they would have in the absence of climate change.

Researchers considered a given day’s temperature to be abnormally high in a particular location if it exceeded 90% of the daily temperatures recorded there between 1991 and 2020. Nearly 80% of the world’s population experienced at least 31 days of abnormal warmth since May of 2023. Theoretically, the number of unusually warm days would have been far fewer in the absence of global warming.

In some countries, the extra-warm days added up to two or three weeks. In others, such as Colombia, Indonesia, and Rwanda, there were up to 4 months of them. The average American experienced 39 days of extra-warm temperatures since last May.

Scientists also added up how many extreme heat waves the planet experienced since last May. These are defined as episodes of unseasonable warmth across a large area, lasting three or more days, and causing significant loss of life or disruption to infrastructure or industry. In total, the researchers identified 76 such episodes, affecting 90 countries, on every continent except Antarctica.

The world’s climate is now shifting toward the La Niña phase of the cyclical pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. This usually leads to cooler temperatures on average, but the recent heat could have lingering effects on weather and storms for months to come, including what is expected to be an extraordinarily active Atlantic hurricane season.

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Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year

Photo, posted December 21, 2011, courtesy of Maggie Lin Photography via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A Climate-Friendlier Coolant

November 18, 2016 By WAMC WEB

Recently, negotiators from more than 170 countries reached a legally binding accord in Kigali, Rwanda to cut the use of hydroflurocarbons, or HFCs, which are chemical coolants used in air conditioners and refrigerators. HFCs are just a small percentage of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but they are supercharged greenhouse gases that have 1,000 times the heat-trapping potency of carbon dioxide.