ReportWire

Tag: carbon dioxide

  • How does Maine’s forest carbon credit market work?

    [ad_1]

    Forest carbon credits are gaining traction in Maine. Yet as the voluntary carbon market picks up, some in the industry are worried about access for small family forest landowners with fewer resources than corporations who manage bigger plots of land.

    In order to participate in the market where carbon credits are bought and sold, a forest landowner first needs to understand exactly how much carbon their trees are capable of storing. The science behind the forest carbon market is based on the fundamental lesson taught in school: like us, trees “breathe.”

    Unlike us, however, trees take in carbon dioxide and hang on to it over long periods of time in a process called carbon sequestration. When certain climate-friendly management practices are followed, the carbon stored by forests can be counted and sold as credits to companies looking to offset their emissions in a larger marketplace.

    The market hinges on precise carbon sequestration calculations, which are done right down to the individual tree. That value, calculated by determining the amount of carbon a parcel of forestland will absorb and store over a period of time, often five or ten years in Maine, is then used to determine how many carbon credits a landowner can be issued by a carbon registry. Each credit is equivalent to one metric ton of carbon.

    For small-scale forest landowners, who might have a 25- or 50-acre parcel of woodland, this first step can be a barrier. The ground-based surveys traditionally required for calculating carbon storage potential are expensive.

    Though such surveys are typically conducted and paid for by a third-party entity called a forest carbon developer, surveying plots in the thousand-acre range versus dozen-acre range often makes for a more savvy investment. That can leave small landowners without access to the market.

    “When you have tens of thousands of acres to work with, then you have sort of an economy of scale to develop your own project. When you have 150 acres, the cost of developing a project would exceed the revenue you could gain from selling to carbon,” said Andrew Whitman, a climate and carbon specialist with the Maine Forest Service.

    In Maine, there are a handful of forest carbon developers who work with private family woodland owners, defined as those who manage 1,000 acres of forestland or less. One of those firms, a Maine-based startup called Renoster, is using remote sensing technology in an effort to make the surveying process cheaper.

    By using data collected from laser instruments on flyovers done by the state of Maine and the U.S. Geological Survey, Renoster’s team of scientists can create a detailed rendering of individual forest parcels. That rendering is called a LiDAR point cloud, named for the kind of three-dimensional laser scanner imagery created by the Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology.

    “By filtering the point cloud with good statistical practices, you can actually see the shape of individual trees,” said Mary Ignatiadis, a forest economist with Renoster. “People have been doing a lot of work to make sure that calculations are really accurate, and that’s the innovation that’s going to allow small Maine landowners to participate.”

    The state is preparing to launch a series of incentives later this year to encourage forest landowners to participate in the carbon market, according to Whitman. Maine received federal funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to invest in forest carbon and resilience.

    There will be two incentive programs available to forest landowners with parcels under 1,000 acres and under 10,000 acres, respectively. Though Whitman said federal funding is not in a “business as usual situation,” he anticipates that the incentives will move forward.

    Incentives are not the only part of Maine’s forest carbon market counting on federal funding. Forest carbon developers in the state rely on data from the U.S. Forest Service’s ongoing Forest Inventory and Analysis, or FIA. The Forest Service has seen significant budget and personnel cuts under the Trump administration. Remote sensing technology, including instruments on NASA’s satellite programs, could also be impacted by budget cuts.

    “From a carbon standpoint, if the capacity of the programs to keep up with the ongoing inventory work in FIA … if that’s diminished, then we’ll have less capacity to have high quality data,” said Ivan Fernandez, a member of the Maine Climate Council and the Forest Carbon Task Force Gov. Janet Mills convened in 2021. “I say that not as a criticism of what might occur by the scientists doing the work, but if you have less resources to do it, then you have less data, and you have bigger error bars.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • GHGSat Unveils Carbon Dioxide Plume Images From Vanguard, the World’s First Commercial Satellite That Pinpoints CO2 to Individual Facilities

    [ad_1]

    The carbon dioxide plume, the first shared by GHGSat, was detected from a power-generating station, with an estimated rate of 12Mt of CO2 per year.


    BAKU, Azerbaijan, November 14, 2024 (Newswire.com)
    –
    GHGSat, the global leader in satellite emissions monitoring, shared high-resolution images from Vanguard, the world’s first commercial satellite designed to trace carbon dioxide to individual industrial facilities, for the first time at COP29.

    The carbon dioxide plume was detected from a power-generating station, with an estimated rate of 12 Mt of CO2 per year.

    Released just as the international climate community convenes in Baku for the annual UN climate conference, the data marks a transformation in the way carbon dioxide emissions are monitored, reported, mitigated, and traded. 

    Recent research has shown that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are now 8% higher than 2015 levels, when the Paris Agreement that set landmark reductions targets for 2030 was first negotiated. Data like the observations from Vanguard, which zooms in to identify where exactly leaks originate, will be instrumental in pinpointing the sources and rates of those emissions, so that they can be effectively quantified and addressed. 

    “This detection is a critical first step toward a new era in monitoring emissions from space,” said Stephane Germain, Founder and CEO of GHGSat. “Ultimately, the insights generated by Vanguard will empower industry operators and government regulators with precise data required to address carbon dioxide emissions, guiding the way to the ambitious emissions reductions needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.” 

    GHGSat C-10, known as Vanguard, was launched in 2023, joining GHGSat’s constellation of 11 methane-sensing satellites as the first of a new carbon-detecting fleet that GHGSat will put into orbit over the coming years. Data from the satellite will enable the standardized measurement of greenhouse gas emissions at sites from carbon-intensive industries, such as steel mills, cement plants, and oil & gas facilities, anywhere in the world. High-resolution CO2 data will also improve the accuracy of country-level emissions inventories and the Global Stocktake, and build confidence in the global carbon trading market, estimated to be approximately $1 trillion as it continues to develop.

    GHGSat pioneered industrial greenhouse gas emissions monitoring from space in 2016, building a fleet of high-resolution satellites capable of tracing greenhouse gas emissions down to 25m—the area of an Olympic-sized swimming pool—and capturing methane emissions as small as 100 kg/hour at unmatched near-daily frequency. 

    Today, GHGSat serves as a trusted partner to the United Nations, NASA, the European Space Agency, and the governments of the United States, Canada and Great Britain, as well as multinational companies in carbon-intensive industries. In 2023 alone, GHGSat’s constellation made over 3 million measurements across 85 countries. Since the beginning of GHGSat’s journey, data from its satellite constellation has enabled mitigation of methane emissions equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 3.5 million gasoline-powered cars on U.S. roads.

    Source: GHGSat

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • U.S. Invests $1.2 Billion For Carbon Removal

    U.S. Invests $1.2 Billion For Carbon Removal

    [ad_1]

    The Energy Department announced an initiative to help build the nascent market for removing carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, awarding up to $1.2 billion for two consortiums to build commercial-scale direct air capture hubs. What do you think?

    “Refreshing to see the government and corporate America unite in greenwashing.”

    Cyrus Hammoudi, Web Architect

    Report: Your Friends Do Impressions Of You Behind Your Back

    “Let’s just hope they don’t accidentally turn the oxygen-removal button on.”

    Sheri Lopez, Massotherapist

    “I don’t know why this is such a big deal when I planted a tree last year.”

    Tim Sprecher, Unemployed

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Your Next Mosquito Repellent Might Already Be in Your Shower

    Your Next Mosquito Repellent Might Already Be in Your Shower

    [ad_1]

    For as long as I can remember, I have been that friend—the one who, from May to November, gets invited to every outdoor soiree. It’s not because I make the best desserts, even though I do. It’s because, with me around, the shoes can come off and the DEET can stay sheathed: No one else need fear for their blood when the mosquitoes are all busy biting me.

    Explanations abound for why people like me just can’t stop getting nipped—blood type, diet, the particular funk of the acids that emanate from our skin. Mosquitoes are nothing if not expert sniffers, evolving over millennia to detect the body’s many emissions, including the carbon dioxide we exhale and the heat we radiate.

    But to focus only on a mosquito’s hankering for flesh is to leave a whole chapter of the pests’ scent-seeking saga “largely overlooked,” Clément Vinauger, a chemical ecologist at Virginia Tech, told me. Mosquitoes are omnivores, tuned to sniff out blood and plants. And nowadays, most humans, especially those in the Western world, tend to smell a bit like both, thanks to all the floral, citrusy lotions and potions that so many of us slather atop our musky flesh.

    That medley of scents, Vinauger and his colleagues have discovered, may be an underappreciated part of what makes people like me smell so darn good to pests. The findings are from a small study with just five volunteers, four brands of soap, and one mosquito species, and still need to be confirmed outside the lab. But they’re a reminder that, as good or as bad as some of us might inherently smell to a mosquito, the insects experience us as dietarily diverse smorgasbords—not just as our animal selves.

    Read: You have no idea how good mosquitoes are at smelling us

    Researchers have also long known that “everything we use on our skin will affect mosquitoes’ behavior or attraction toward us,” says Ali Afify, a mosquito researcher at Drexel University. That includes extracts from plants—among them, chemicals such as citronella and limonene, which have both been found to repel the bloodsucking insects in at least some contexts. Something about encountering floral and faunal cues together seems to bamboozle mosquitoes, as if they’re “seeing an organism that doesn’t exist,” says Baldwyn Torto, a chemical ecologist and mosquito expert at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology. After all, female mosquitoes, the only ones that bite, spend their lives toggling between seeking nectar and hunting for blood, but never both at the same time. That’s part of why Vinauger initially figured that soap might deter mosquitoes from flying in for a sip.

    The story ended up being a bit more complicated. The researchers, led by Morgen VanderGiessen and Anaïs Tallon, collected chemicals from their volunteers’ arms—one scrubbed with soap, the other left aromatically bare—and offered them to the mosquitoes. One body wash, a coconut-and-vanilla-scented number made by Native, seemed to make a subset of people less appetizing, probably in part, Vinauger told me, because mosquitoes and other insects are not into coconut. (Duly noted.) But two other cleansers, made by Dove and Simple Truth, bumped up the attractiveness of several of their volunteers—even though all of the soaps in the study contained plenty of limonene. (None of the manufacturers of the body washes used in the study responded to a request for comment.)

    No single product was a universal attractant or repellent, which probably says more about us than it does about body wash. A bevy of lifestyle choices and environmental influences can tweak an individual’s unique odor profile; even identical twins, Torto told me, won’t smell the same to a mosquito on the prowl. Soaped up or no, some people will remain stubbornly magnetic to mosquitoes; others will continue to disgust them. This makes it “hard to say, ‘Hey, this soap will make you really attractive’ or ‘That soap will keep mosquitoes completely away from you,’” says Seyed Mahmood Nikbakht Zadeh, a chemical ecologist and medical entomologist at CSU San Bernardino, who wasn’t involved in the study. Plus, soap is hardly the only scented product that people use: Whatever enticing ingredients your body wash might contain, Tallon told me, could easily be counteracted by the contents of your lotion or deodorant.

    Read: A pivotal mosquito experiment could not have gone better

    The point of the study isn’t to demonize or extol any particular products—especially considering how few soaps were tested and how many factors dictate each individual’s odor profile. The five volunteers in the study can’t possibly capture the entire range of human-soap interactions, though the researchers hope to expand their findings with a lot of follow-up. “I wouldn’t want the public to be alarmed about what type of soap they’re using,” Torto told me.

    But just knowing that personal-care products can alter a person’s appeal could kick-start more research. Scientists could design better baits to lure skeeters away from us, or develop a new generation of repellents using gentle, plant-based ingredients that are already found in our soaps. “DEET is really efficient, but it’s a chemical that melts plastic,” Vinauger told me. “Could we do better?”

    The researchers behind the study are already trying. After analyzing the specific chemicals in each of the soaps they tested, they blended some of the most alluring and aversive substances into two new concoctions—a flowery, fruity attractant and a nuttier repellent—and offered them to the insects. The repellent was “as strong as applying DEET on your skin,” Vinauger told me, “but it’s all coming from those soap chemicals.”

    What’s not yet clear, though, is how long those powers of repulsion last. Most people don’t manage more than a daily scrub; meanwhile, “the odors coming out of your pores are continuously coming out, so in the long run, those might win out,” says Maria Elena De Obaldia, a neurogeneticist who previously studied mosquito attraction at Rockefeller University. And it’s a lot less practical to ask someone to shower every few hours than to simply reapply bug spray.

    Read: A new way to keep mosquitoes from biting

    I’m certainly not ready to blame my mosquito magnetism on my body wash (which, for what it’s worth, contains a lot of “coconut-based cleanser”) or anything else in my hygiene repertoire. Part of the problem is undoubtedly just me—the tastiest of human meat sticks. But the next time I shop for anything scented, I’ll at least know that whatever wafts out of that product won’t just be for me. Some pest somewhere is always catching a stray whiff.

    [ad_2]

    Katherine J. Wu

    Source link

  • I Bought a CO2 Monitor and It Broke Me

    I Bought a CO2 Monitor and It Broke Me

    [ad_1]

    A few weeks ago, a three-inch square of plastic and metal began, slowly and steadily, to upend my life.

    The culprit was my new portable carbon-dioxide monitor, a device that had been sitting in my Amazon cart for months. I’d first eyed the product around the height of the coronavirus pandemic, figuring it could help me identify unventilated public spaces where exhaled breath was left to linger and the risk for virus transmission was high. But I didn’t shell out the $250 until January 2023, when a different set of worries, over the health risks of gas stoves and indoor air pollution, reached a boiling point. It was as good a time as any to get savvy to the air in my home.

    I knew from the get-go that the small, stuffy apartment in which I work remotely was bound to be an air-quality disaster. But with the help of my shiny Aranet4, the brand most indoor-air experts seem to swear by, I was sure to fix the place up. When carbon-dioxide levels increased, I’d crack a window; when I cooked on my gas stove, I’d run the range fan. What could be easier? It would basically be like living outside, with better Wi-Fi. This year, spring cleaning would be a literal breeze!

    The illusion was shattered minutes after I popped the batteries into my new device. At baseline, the levels in my apartment were already dancing around 1,200 parts per million (ppm)—a concentration that, as the device’s user manual informed me, was cutting my brain’s cognitive function by 15 percent. Aghast, I flung open a window, letting in a blast of frigid New England air. Two hours later, as I shivered in my 48-degree-Fahrenheit apartment in a coat, ski pants, and wool socks, typing numbly on my icy keyboard, the Aranet still hadn’t budged below 1,000 ppm, a common safety threshold for many experts. By the evening, I’d given up on trying to hypothermia my way to clean air. But as I tried to sleep in the suffocating trap of noxious gas that I had once called my home, next to the reeking sack of respiring flesh I had once called my spouse, the Aranet let loose an ominous beep: The ppm had climbed back up, this time to above 1,400. My cognitive capacity was now down 50 percent, per the user manual, on account of self-poisoning with stagnant air.

    By the next morning, I was in despair. This was not the reality I had imagined when I decided to invite the Aranet4 into my home. I had envisioned the device and myself as a team with a shared goal: clean, clean air for all! But it was becoming clear that I didn’t have the power to make the device happy. And that was making me miserable.

    Read: Kill your gas stove

    CO2 monitors are not designed to dictate behavior; the information they dole out is not a perfect read on air quality, indoors or out. And although carbon dioxide can pose some health risks at high levels, it’s just one of many pollutants in the air, and by no means the worst. Others, such as nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, and ozone, can cause more direct harm. Some CO2-tracking devices, including the Aranet4, don’t account for particulate matter—which means that they can’t tell when air’s been cleaned up by, say, a HEPA filter. “It gives you an indicator; it’s not the whole story,” says Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech.

    Still, because CO2 builds up alongside other pollutants, the levels are “a pretty good proxy for how fresh or stale your air is,” and how badly it needs to be turned over, says Paula Olsiewski, a biochemist and an indoor-air-quality expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The Aranet4 isn’t as accurate as, say, the $20,000 research-grade carbon-dioxide sensor in Marr’s lab, but it can get surprisingly close. When Jose-Luis Jimenez, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, first picked one up three years ago, he was shocked that it could hold its own against the machines he used professionally. And in his personal life, “it allows you to find the terrible places and avoid them,” he told me, or to mask up when you can’t.

    That rule of thumb starts to break down, though, when the terrible place turns out to be your home—or, at the very least, mine. To be fair, my apartment’s air quality has a lot working against it: two humans and two cats, all of us with an annoying penchant for breathing, crammed into 1,000 square feet; a gas stove with no outside-venting hood; a kitchen window that opens directly above a parking lot. Even so, I was flabbergasted by just how difficult it was to bring down the CO2 levels around me. Over several weeks, the best indoor reading I sustained, after keeping my window open for six hours, abstaining from cooking, and running my range fan nonstop, was in the 800s. I wondered, briefly, if my neighborhood just had terrible outdoor air quality—or if my device was broken. Within minutes of my bringing the meter outside, however, it displayed a chill 480.

    Read: The plan to stop every respiratory virus at once

    The meter’s cruel readings began to haunt me. Each upward tick raised my anxiety; I started to dread what I’d learn each morning when I woke up. After watching the Aranet4 flash figures in the high 2,000s when I briefly ignited my gas stove, I miserably deleted 10 wok-stir-fry recipes I’d bookmarked the month before. At least once, I told my husband to cool it with the whole “needing oxygen” thing, lest I upgrade to a more climate-friendly Plant Spouse. (I’m pretty sure I was joking, but I lacked the cognitive capacity to tell.) In more lucid moments, I understood the deeper meaning of the monitor: It was a symbol of my helplessness. I’d known I couldn’t personally clean the air at my favorite restaurant, or the post office, or my local Trader Joe’s. Now I realized that the issues in my home weren’t much more fixable. The device offered evidence of a problem, but not the means to solve it.

    Upon hearing my predicament, Sally Ng, an aerosol chemist at Georgia Tech, suggested that I share my concerns with building management. Marr recommended constructing a Corsi-Rosenthal box, a DIY contraption made up of a fan lashed to filters, to suck the schmutz out of my crummy air. But they and other experts acknowledged that the most sustainable, efficient solutions to my carbon conundrum were mostly out of reach. If you don’t own your home, or have the means to outfit it with more air-quality-friendly appliances, you can only do so much. “And I mean, yeah, that is a problem,” said Jimenez, who’s currently renovating his home to include a new energy-efficient ventilation device, a make-up-air system, and multiple heat pumps.

    Many Americans face much greater challenges than mine. I am not among the millions living in a city with dangerous levels of particulate matter in the air, spewed out by industrial plants, gas-powered vehicles, and wildfires, for whom an open window could risk additional peril; I don’t have to be in a crowded office or a school with poor ventilation. Since the first year of the pandemic—and even before—experts have been calling for policy changes and infrastructural overhauls that would slash indoor air pollution for large sectors of the population at once. But as concern over COVID has faded, “people have moved on,” Marr told me. Individuals are left on their own in the largely futile fight against stale air.

    Read: Put your face in airplane mode

    Though a CO2 monitor won’t score anyone victories on its own, it can still be informative: “It’s nice to have an objective measure, because all of this is stuff you can’t really see with the naked eye,” says Abraar Karan, an infectious-disease physician at Stanford, who’s planning to use the Aranet4 in an upcoming study on viral transmission. But he told me that he doesn’t let himself get too worked up over the readings from his monitor at home. Even Olsiewski puts hers away when she’s cooking on the gas range in her Manhattan apartment. She already knows that the levels will spike; she already knows what she needs to do to mitigate the harms. “I use the tools I have and don’t make myself crazy,” she told me. (Admittedly, she has a lot of tools, especially in her second home in Texas—among them, an induction stove and an HVAC with ultra-high-quality filters and a continuously running fan. When we spoke on the phone, her Aranet4 read 570 ppm; mine, 1,200.)

    I’m now aiming for my own middle ground. Earlier this week, I dreamed of trying and failing to open a stuck window, and woke up in a cold sweat. I spent that day working with my (real-life) kitchen window cracked, but I shut it when the apartment got too chilly. More important, I placed my Aranet4 in a drawer, and didn’t pull it out again until nightfall. When my spouse came home, he marveled that our apartment, once again, felt warm.

    [ad_2]

    Katherine J. Wu

    Source link