2022's 'Earthshot Prizes' Recognize Five Innovative Responses to Climate Change (bbc.com) 32
"Childhood friends in Oman who figured out how to turn carbon dioxide into rock are among five winners chosen for the Prince of Wales's prestigious Earthshot Prize," reports the BBC:
The annual awards were created by Prince William to fund projects that aim to save the planet. Each winner will receive £1m ($1.2m) to develop their innovation.... "I believe that the Earthshot solutions you have seen this evening prove we can overcome our planet's greatest challenges," Prince William said during the ceremony. "By supporting and scaling them we can change our future," he said.
1,500 projects were nominated, according to the event's web site. Here's the five winners:
1,500 projects were nominated, according to the event's web site. Here's the five winners:
- A Kenya-based company producing stoves powered by processed biomass (made from charcoal, wood and sugarcane) that "burns cleaner, creating 90% less pollution than an open fire," while cutting fuel costs in half.
- The Indian startup behind Greenhouse-in-a-box. "Plants in the greenhouse require 98% less water than those outdoors and yields are seven-times higher," explains the site, while the greenhouses themselves are 90% cheaper than a standard greenhouse, "more than doubling farmers' incomes [while] using less water and fewer pesticides."
- A Queensland-based program to expand the network of rangers using drones to monitor reefs and wildfires while sharing information and innovative ideas.
- London-based start-up Notpla, which created a plastic alternative made from seaweed and plants that's entirely biodegradable. (The seaweed used in its production also captures carbon twenty-times faster than trees.)
- The company 44.01 removes CO2 permanently by mineralising it in peridotite, accelerating the natural process by pumping carbonated water into peridotite underground. (Unlike carbon storage, "mineralizing" CO2 removes it forever, making the process safer, cost-effective, and scalable.)
Five prizes will be awarded each year until 2030.
They love them their award banquets (Score:2)
The Brits' answer to Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and whatever else were here in Massachusetts yucking it up with their fellow beautiful people yesterday.
Road closures, transparently paid-for breathless coverage in local media insisting for some reason that Americans crave a royal family of our own to fawn over, and obligatory photo ops with the local politicals ensued.
Back before people realized why they should have all been personae non grata, Russian oligarchs like Yuri Milner staged similar spectacles.
Half Earth (Score:1)
There is really only one solution to avoiding The Ecocide, and that is Half Earth [half-earthproject.org]:
Yes, we would be forced to make hard decisions about how many fast food joints, apartment blocks, and football stadia we can have, but only
Re: Half Earth (Score:4, Informative)
Probably better that conservatives don't reproduce either, because they are the biggest polluters and supporters of polluters.
Re: Half Earth (Score:1)
Don't worry dear. Your kind won't be around to fret about our kind if y'all do the honorable thing and take one for team earth.
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Wouldn't the honorable thing to be to stop the destruction of the biosphere by "any means necessary", and starting with the biggest abusers?
Re: Half Earth (Score:1)
Limousine liberals who fly to awards banquets in private jets while telling the rest of us to ride bikes?
Too easy.
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I would suggest that we go back to a first principles type point of view. Global warming is caused by humans. We have way too many humans and still growing. I'm not talking about a 'Moonraker' type solution, but rather drastically reducing future populations
We have seen that societies can make meaningful changes in population growth rates in relatively short periods of time (aka China). I would not say we model exactly like China, that was pretty heavy handed as one can expect form an authoritarian regi
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... We have way too many humans and still growing ...We have seen that societies can make meaningful changes in population growth rates in relatively short periods of time (aka China).
Ask the Chinese leadership how that worked out for them, now that they're in the throes of demographic collapse and soon won't have enough working-age people to support those who have aged out of the workforce.
I don't disagree that population reduction is good and perhaps necessary, but we can only rely on it as a secondary strategy in the fight against AGW. The time frames required to prevent putting the whole world in China's current situation are far too long to mitigate the catastrophe we're facing in t
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More accurately, global warming is almost entirely caused by humans in the first world. The only significant contribution by the impoverished societies with the highest reproduction rates is their effect on deforestation. Lower birth rates in such societies would reduce some of the pressure on forested areas, but tackling deforestation is largely a political challenge. Subsistence agriculture and harvesting forests for charcoal (both carried out by impoverished families)
Take time into account (Score:1)
The first world invented the technology and have been its most prolific users, so this is what we would expect. The problem is that the other seven billion people now also want that lifestyle.
To be fair, much of this comes from selling the wood to first-world countries that make it into prod
Moonraker (Score:1)
Talk about something from the vault! Good reference.
I can only agree here. AGW may be dwarfed by the threat of The Ecocide, or consumption of all resources and land on Earth by humans, leading to population crash in natural species, which then causes a lack of genetic diversity which leads to extinction rather rapidly. There is also the crisis of urbanization, since nearly 60% of humanity now lives in cities, which creates both an urban heat island effect and a
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"Greenhouse in a Box" Cool, I thought. Let's look at that.
It's a fucking tent. Wouldn't last two months in any season where I am. Probably not more than a year anywhere.
OMGWTFBBQ give them an award!!!1
Re: They love them their award banquets (Score:1)
A funny story. After the Epstein shit put MIT under a microscope, one of the things that came to light was that the Media Lab was "developing" a "personal food computer" which was just basically a grow light inside a temperature and humidity controlled box. Which technically could, as claimed, replicate any climate and let you grow whatever you wanted anywhere....at crazy expensive costs because it turns out running an air handler on electricity ain't free compared to just planting something in the ground a
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I saw a button to "donate" but not "buy". So no pricing information to evaluate ROI.
"overcome our planet's greatest challenges" (Score:1)
The planet has endured far worse than the pestilence we call human beings.
Asteroids, mass extinctions, you name it.
It's the aforementioned humans that we are trying to save.
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Except we're causing a mass extinction event right now.
it's GreenWashing... (Score:2)
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I'm hoping for a killer asteroid soon so we can stop hearing about "climate change" all the time. Broken record. (A reference to vinyl for the young 'uns.)
Windows (Score:2)
A news podcast said yesterday that a quantum computer predicted a glass coating that reduced heat transfer by 30% and it worked.
It's silly to think humans won't invent themselves out of this box.
Unless "they" drive everybody into poverty first.
I like these ideas (Score:2)
The geoengineering one especially, but I don't know if they can operate at the sort of scale needed. I mean, to be effective, the combined result will have to halve the CO2 accumulation by 2030. That's not a whole lot of time, and CO2 production is only increasing right now.
To decrease, India and China are going to have to seriously make a major dent in fossil fuel use in industry and power generation, simply because I don't believe you can mineralise all of the CO2 they're producing.
India also has to total
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We can put some hard numbers on this. According to the website for the prize [earthshotprize.org], "44.01's goal is to have mineralised 1bn tonnes of CO2 by 2040." The world emitted over 40 billion tons of CO2 [ourworldindata.org] last year. So their goal is that by 2040, they'll have captured 2.5% of the CO2 we're emitting in a single year.
It's a nice idea, but it's a drop in the ocean. Maybe we'll find ways to scale it up 100x and then it can make a real difference. You have to start somewhere. But it's going to take a huge, global effort.
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Where will 1 bn tonnes be put? That's a non-trivial amount of stuff.
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From the website for the prize:
Named after the molecular weight of carbon dioxide, 44.01 removes CO2 permanently by mineralising it in peridotite, a rock found in abundance in Oman as well as in America, Europe, Asia and Australasia. Peridotite mineralisation is a natural process, but in nature it can take many years to mineralise even a small amount of CO2. 44.01 accelerates the process by pumping carbonated water into seams of peridotite deep underground.
Re: I like these ideas (Score:2)
A few thoughts... (Score:2)
A Kenya-based company producing stoves powered by processed biomass (made from charcoal, wood and sugarcane) that "burns cleaner, creating 90% less pollution than an open fire," while cutting fuel costs in half.
Presumably the "processed biomass" is a commercial product, that the Kenyans will have to buy, instead of scavenging fuel - where will the Kenyans get the money to buy their fuel?
The Indian startup behind Greenhouse-in-a-box. "Plants in the greenhouse require 98% less water than those outdoors and yields are seven-times higher," explains the site, while the greenhouses themselves are 90% cheaper than a standard greenhouse, "more than doubling farmers' incomes [while] using less water and fewer pesticides."
So these farmers will have to grow all their crops in an expensive building ("greenhouse")? While these greenhouses may be cheaper than previous models, that doesn't mean sustenance farmers can afford them, and you water usage (98% less) and yield (seven-times higher) increase seem, in a word, fantastical.
A Queensland-based program to expand the network of rangers using drones to monitor reefs and wildfires while sharing information and innovative ideas.
How are drones helping the
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I'll take a crack:
A Kenya-based company producing stoves powered by processed biomass (made from charcoal, wood and sugarcane) that "burns cleaner, creating 90% less pollution than an open fire," while cutting fuel costs in half.
Presumably the "processed biomass" is a commercial product, that the Kenyans will have to buy, instead of scavenging fuel - where will the Kenyans get the money to buy their fuel?
Their website talks about the hours saved for that scavenging. They can do something more productive with that time, which more than offsets the costs of purchasing the processed fuel. Given that this is a locally bootstrapped initiative, and not an effort by an international conglomerate to hook them via the gillette model, and given that it's successful for 200,000 people so far, I'd give it the benefit of the doubt.
The Indian startup behind Greenhouse-in-a-box. "Plants in the greenhouse require 98% less water than those outdoors and yields are seven-times higher," explains the site, while the greenhouses themselves are 90% cheaper than a standard greenhouse, "more than doubling farmers' incomes [while] using less water and fewer pesticides."
So these farmers will have to grow all their crops in an expensive building ("greenhouse")? While these greenhouses may be cheaper than previous models, that doesn't mean sustenance farmers can afford them, and you water usage (98% less) and yield (seven-times higher) increase seem, in a word, fantastical.
... or.. this pushes the commercial or domestic viability of small-sc
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Their website talks about the hours saved for that scavenging. They can do something more productive with that time, which more than offsets the costs of purchasing the processed fuel. Given that this is a locally bootstrapped initiative, and not an effort by an international conglomerate to hook them via the gillette model, and given that it's successful for 200,000 people so far, I'd give it the benefit of the doubt.
I see where you're coming from, but unless the Kenyans have the ability to turn that newly created free time (that they used to spend foraging for fuel) into actual money to pay for the "processed biomass" it solves one problem (foraging) and replaces it with another (money for "processed biomass").
I'm not imagining Kenya is like it was in the movie "Born Free", but it's not like there's a great infrastructure of "gig economy" jobs that lets them turn idle time into pocket money.
Also, as much as we may disl
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