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But the global effort to fight climate change is also causing problems. Europe’s wind farms haven’t seen a good breeze in months, and droughts in China and South America have dried up power generation from hydro dams. Meanwhile, surging prices for carbon pollution credits in Europe have made fossil alternatives even more expensive, and Chinese grid operators have come under mounting political pressure to help the country meet its carbon emissions targets by burning less coal.

The energy crisis could imperil political support for climate policies, just as the COP26 climate summit approaches in Glasgow in November. But there are steps governments can take to prevent energy market turmoil leading to sky-high electric bills and breakdowns in the global supply chain.

“What we’re seeing is an unfortunate set of circumstances during a period of transition where we haven’t fully moved from one system to another,” says James Henderson, director of the Energy Transition Research Initiative at Oxford University. “During that period, market risks are enhanced. It’s impossible to envision a world where there won’t be more volatility.”

“DeepGreen is offering a false or dystopian choice,” Deep Sea Conservation Coalition cofounder Matthew Gianni told The Guardian.

Dangling the possibility of widespread electric vehicle adoption by securing the resources necessary to manufacture more and better batteries is certainly tantalizing. But scientists told The Guardian that getting those metals from the seafloor — especially with machines that would cause a poorly-understood environmental impact in an area that’s nearly impossible to monitor and regulate — would come at too great a cost.

“There are some very significant questions being raised by scientists about the impacts of ocean mining,” University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Douglas McCauley told The Guardian. “How much extinction could be generated? How long will it take these extremely low-resilience systems to recover? What impact will it have on the ocean’s capacity to capture carbon?”

China’s new rules on auto data require car companies to store important data locally.

Cars today offer high-tech features and gather troves of data to train algorithms. As China steps up controls over new technologies, WSJ looks at the risks for Tesla and other global brands that are now required to keep data within the country. Screenshot: Tesla China.

Continue reading “What China’s New Data Rules Mean for Tesla and Other Auto Makers | WSJ” »

Air pollution is likely to have been responsible for up to 6 million premature births and 3 million underweight babies worldwide every year, research shows.

Global analysis of indoor and outdoor pollution also finds link to low birth weight.

Feeding the world uses enormous amounts of land, water, fertilizer, pesticide, and fuel. In a step towards a more sustainable solution, researchers have designed a method to make starches from carbon dioxide more efficiently than plants do (Science 2,021 DOI: 10.1126/science.abh4049).

The new technique, which relies on chemical catalysts and a curated combination of natural and engineered enzymes, converts CO₂ to starch 8.5 times as efficiently as corn plants can.

The advance hints at sustainable, efficient factory production of food and industrial chemicals by.

Continue reading “New method makes starch from CO₂ faster than plants can” »

Last year, computer engineers from Northwestern University and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) introduced the world’s first battery-free Game Boy, which harvests both solar energy and the user’s kinetic energy from button mashing to power an unlimited lifetime of game play.

The same team now introduces a new platform that enables makers, hobbyists and novice programmers to build their own battery-free electronic devices that run with intermittent, harvested energy.

Continue reading “Now everyone can build battery-free electronic devices” »

Our cooling systems are heating the Earth as they consume fossil-fueled energy and release greenhouse gases. Air Conditioning use is expected to increase from about 3.6 billion units to 15 billion by 2050. So, how do we exit this cold room trap? What if I told you we could tap into space for electricity free air conditioning and other refrigeration tech?

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Continue reading “Space Powered Cooling May Be the Future of Energy” »

Innovator, philanthropist, humanitarian — khaliya — discussing radical solutions for the global mental health crisis.

Khaliya (https://www.khaliya.net/) is a Columbia University-trained public health specialist and Harvard University-trained specialist in Global Mental Health and Refugee Trauma. She is also a Venture Partner for Gender Equity Diversity Investments (www.gedi.vc), a new female-led VC firm targeting high growth investments that deliver top-quartile returns and measurable impact towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals with a preliminary focus on health.

Continue reading “Khaliya — Innovator, Philanthropist, Humanitarian — Solutions For The Global Mental Health Crisis” »

Ford, in a partnership with SK Innovation, has announced an $11.4 billion plan for electric vehicle (EV) production, its largest ever investment in the United States, with a major new factory in Tennessee and twin battery parks in Kentucky creating nearly 11,000 jobs.