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DOE
The 10 corridors range from 12 miles to 780 miles in length. The public will have 45 days to have their say on the proposals, and then the DOE will narrow the list further. “In order to reach our clean energy and climate goals, we’ve got to build out transmission as fast as possible to get clean power from where it's produced to where it’s needed,” said John Podesta, senior advisor to the president for international climate policy. “The Biden-Harris administration is committed to using every tool at our disposal to accelerate progress on transmission permitting and financing and build a clean energy future.”
In case you missed it: Climeworks opened its newest commercial direct air capture plant yesterday. The Iceland-based facility, named Mammoth, is not yet operating at full capacity, with only 12 of its planned 72 capturing and filtering units installed. When the plant is fully operational — which Climeworks says should be sometime next year — it will pull up to 36,000 metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere annually. For scale, that’s about 1/28,000th of a gigaton. To get to net zero emissions, we’ll have to remove multiple gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. “So in the context of where we need to go, Mammoth is almost nothing,” wrote Heatmap’s new climate tech reporter Katie Brigham. “But in the context of our current reality, it’s nine times the size of the next largest DAC facility: another Iceland-based Climeworks plant called Orca. And it’s a major stepping stone towards the company’s ultimate goal of capturing a million metric tons of CO2 yearly by 2030 and a billion by 2050.”
And speaking of carbon removal, the Elon Musk-backed Xprize yesterday unveiled a shortlist of 20 finalists in its $100 million global competition to discover and develop breakthroughs in the field. The list is broken up into categories: air, rocks, land, and ocean. U.S.-based finalists include:
What’s next? The companies will need to remove 1,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide over one year in order to move ahead in the competition. They’ll also have to prove scalability.
The death toll from flooding in Brazil climbed to 100, and the rain is expected to continue through the weekend. Before-and-after satellite images show the extent of the disaster. Here is a crude screenshot from Google Earth, showing Porto Alegre in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, prior to the floods, followed by an image of roughly the same region, captured by Copernicus, that speaks for itself:
Google Earth
European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery
Human activity is rapidly changing the natural environment, and this is fueling the rise of dangerous diseases, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. The research pulls together findings from nearly 1,000 previous studies on environmental damage to paint a more complete picture of how humanity’s disruption to nature is enabling the spread of pathogens – for humans, yes, but also for animals and plants. It concludes that biodiversity loss, toxic chemicals, the introduction of invasive species, and of course, human-caused climate change, are all associated with “increases in disease-related end points or harm.” Biodiversity loss was found to be particularly dangerous, because it likely drives pathogens to evolve to target new and more abundant hosts.
One biologist who wasn’t involved in the research called it “one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I think has been published that shows how important it is health systems start getting ready to exist in a world with climate change, with biodiversity loss.”
Florida is likely to make it illegal to release balloons into the air outdoors.
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