A guide to climate change and how to prevent it
👉 = highly recommended
How are we causing climate change?
- 👉 Climate Change: a pragmatic guide - an excellent high-level overview of climate change
- Climate change and the 75% problem - Bill Gates breaks down major sources of climate change
How will climate change impact us?
- 👉 NY Times' summary of the United Nations IPCC report on the consequences of 1.5C and 2C increases in warming (4 min read)
- Information is Beautiful infographic on impact at different global warming thresholds
How can individuals help prevent climate change?
Political activism:
- Citizens' Climate Lobby - a nationwide group dedicated to lobbying for bipartisan climate change solutions.
- A carbon tax would accelerate the adoption of every climate solution - a reddit user's breakdown of why a carbon tax is important, and how to lobby for it.
Everyday actions:
- Buy carbon offsets and contribute to projects that reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions (United Nations Carbon offset program)
- Ten simple ways to act on climate change (BBC) (6 min read)
- Fix systemic issue by being consumer advocates for systemic improvements and renewable energy (e.g. divesting funds out of polluting activities like fossil fuel stocks)
- Go car-free
- Change your diet to have less meat. Cows produce lots of methane, a greenhouse gas. They eat a lot of food, which is an inefficient process. And they require lots of water, fertilizers, and land (which can come from cleared forests).
- Fly less. A transatlantic flight can release ~1.6 tons of CO2.
- Chart of impact of different individual actions
What are ways to reduce greenhouse gases from the atmosphere?
Overviews
👉 Y Combinator's Request for Startups around carbon removal
A fascinating guide illustrating experimental approaches to carbon removal.
👉 Bret Victor's "What can a technologist do about climate change?"
- Improve costs or scalability of wind and solar
- Use computation to improve power generation, e.g. by using probabalistic modeling to better estimate wind capacity at a location
- Improve the ability to distribute energy from the grid and to store it: all energy produced in power plants must be consumed somewhere. Relying on solar and wind means that we'll need ways to store energy when there's no sun or wind out. Grid-scale energy storage is critical and current batteries don't cut it.
Project Drawdown - a research organization analyzing the most viable climate change solutions. They have a book and a ranked list of solutions.
Clean electricity
A critical step to reduce climate change - Bill Gates talks about the three key solutions for clean electricity: improved energy storage, carbon capture storage and nuclear, and high-voltage long-distance transmission lines.
- TerraPower - a Bill Gates backed company building a safe nuclear reactor that uses depleted U-238 uranium, which is currently considered nuclear waste.
Agriculture & forestry
We should discuss soil as much as coal - Bill Gates talks about how agriculture and forestry, which contributes to 24% of greenhouse gas emissions, may be overlooked. Goes over a variety of ideas for food production with less emissions.
Companies:
- C16 Biosciences - uses fermentation and microbes to produce a palm oil alternative. Palm oil is a $61 billion industry that has caused massive deforestation.
- Salk - genetically modifying plants to grow bigger root systems that absorb larger amounts of carbon and burying it in the ground in the form of suberin (cork).
- Nori - creating a marketplace to make it easy for companies to pay farmers for storing carbon in soil
Carbon capture and direct-air capture
Sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than scientists thought - Carbon Engineering, a direct-air capture company, published a study putting the cost of removing a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere to be from $94 to $232.
Companies:
- Carbon Engineering - captures CO2 from the air and turns it into gasoline/diesel/jet fuel. Based in Vancouver.
- ClimeWorks - captures CO2 from the air, heats it to 100C, and then collected as concentrated gas to be sold
- Mosaic Materials - trying to make direct air capture more efficient by developing porous nanomaterials (metal-organic frameworks)
- Prometheus - remove CO2 from air and turn it into gasoline. YC '19 startup.
- Carbon Clean Solutions Limited - captures CO2 from industrial flue gases
Cleaner production of raw materials
Here’s a question you should ask about every climate change plan - Bill Gates talks about the problem of unavoidable greenhouse gas production through the production of materials like steel and concrete. Potential solutions include carbon capture, electrification, fuel switching, and recycling.
Companies:
- Solidia - uses a curing process to produce concrete using CO2 instead of water. Concrete production accounts for 5-7% of CO2 emissions
- Boston Metal - steel production without CO2 emissions.
- Charm Industrial - producing hydrogen from crops instead of steam methane reformation (responsible for 2% of CO2) emissions. Based in SF.
Reusing CO2
- Novonutrients - turn industrial CO2 emissions into protein, useful for feeding fish and other animals
- Saratoga Energy - turning CO2 into carbon nanotubes, which are an essential material in lithium-ion batteries. YC startup.
- Mango Materials - turn methane into biodegradable plastic, which turns back into methane in a landfill. Based in SF.
Geoengineering
Companies:
- Project Vesta - olivine weathering to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere
- Smart Stones - olivine weathering to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere
Organizations to support
Organizations:
- Breakthrough Energy Ventures - Bill Gates' energy venture fund, focusing on technologies that could reduce at least half a gigaton of greenhouse gases every year
- Carbon180 - an NGO that wants to drive carbon removal by finding economic uses for CO2.
- Impossible Labs - a consultancy that explores business opportunities in climate change
Lists of organizations:
- Climate.careers - a job board specifically for climate-oriented companies.
- Airminers - an index of companies and projects that are trying to remove carbon from the air
- Geoengineering monitor - a map of organizations worldwide working on greenhouse gas removal, solar radiation management, and weather modification. A nice way to discover common groups of focus areas such as carbon capture, direct air capture, ocean fertilization, and so on.
Contests:
- Climate CoLab - an MIT project which creates contests to find the best proposals for combating climate change.
Forums
- Collective.Energy - a community of people discussing solutions to climate change.
- /r/ClimateActionPlan - action-oriented news about methods for combating climate change.
Carbon science and glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Biochar | A charcoal-like solid substance that can be used to keep carbon in soil for thousands of years, and help improve soil quality. |
| Carbon capture | Capturing greenhouse gases right where they're created |
| Carbon sequestration | The process of capturing and long-term storage of atmospheric CO2 to mitigate global warming. |
| Direct-air capture | Pulling carbon from the atmosphere after it's been dispersed, unlike carbon capture |
| Feedstock | TODO |
| Gasification | Process of converting organic or fossil fuels into carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. Reacts the material at >700C with oxygen and/or steam. |
| kWh (kilowatt hour) | Unit of energy, 1000 watts of power over an hour. Example: running a 100w TV for 10 hours. |
| Industrial flue gas | Gas that's emitted into the atmosphere from a pipe |
| RCP | TODO |
| SSP | TODO |
| Syngas | TODO |