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Bryanked

26 Jun 2025 - 05:34 pm

Climeworks, which launched in 2009, is among around 140 direct air capture companies globally, but is one of the most high-profile and best funded.
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In 2021, it opened its Orca plant in Iceland, followed in 2024 by a second called Mammoth. These facilities suck in air and extract carbon using chemicals in a process powered by clean, geothermal energy.

The carbon can then be reused or injected deep underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking it up permanently. Climeworks makes its money by selling credits to companies to offset their own climate pollution.

The appeal of direct air capture is clear; to keep global warming from rising to even more catastrophic levels means drastically cutting back on planet-heating fossil fuels. But many scientists say the world will also need to remove some of the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere. This can be done naturally, for example through tree planting, or with technology like direct air capture.
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The advantage of direct air capture is that carbon is removed from the air immediately and “can be measured directly and accurately,” said Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative.

But there are big challenges, he told CNN. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been shooting upward, but still only makes up about 0.04%. Herzog compares removing carbon directly from the air to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue.

This makes the process energy-intensive and expensive. The technology also takes time to scale.

Climeworks hasn’t come anywhere close to the full capacity of its plants. Orca can remove a maximum of 4,000 tons of carbon a year, but it has never captured more than 1,700 tons in a year since it opened in 2021. The company says single months have seen a capture rate much closer to the maximum.

The company’s Mammoth plant has a maximum capacity of 36,000 tons a year but since it opened last year it has removed a total of 805 tons, a figure which goes down to 121 tons when taking into account the carbon produced building and running the plants.

Phillipret

26 Jun 2025 - 04:17 pm

“We’re asking everyone to take it slow, avoid driving through standing water, and use alternate routes when possible,” Rosenlund urged.
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Rainfall in Grand Island began Wednesday afternoon but the intensity picked up quickly after dark, falling at more than an inch per hour at times.

A total of 6.41 inches of rain fell by midnight, which made it the rainiest June day and the second rainiest day of any month in the city’s 130-year history of weather records.

The National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency — the most severe form of flood warning — at 11:45 p.m. CDT Wednesday for Grand Island that continued for several hours into Thursday morning, continuously warning of “extensive flash flooding.”
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Multiple rounds of heavy storms tracked over the area late Wednesday into early Thursday morning and ultimately dumped record amounts of rainfall. A level 2-of-4 risk of flooding rainfall was in place for Grand Island at the time, according to the Weather Prediction Center.

More than a month’s worth of rain – nearly 4.5 inches – fell in only three hours between 10 p.m. CDT Wednesday and 1 a.m. CDT Thursday. Rainfall of this intensity would only be expected around once in 100 years, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

Climate change is making heavy rainfall events heavier. As the world warms due to fossil fuel pollution, a warmer atmosphere is able to soak up more moisture like a sponge, only to wring it out in heavier bursts of rain.

Hourly rainfall rates have intensified in nearly 90% of large US cities since 1970, a recent study found.

Harveyadoke

26 Jun 2025 - 04:04 pm

“Generally, if people were more informed about the average
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(environmental) cost of generating a response, people would maybe start thinking, ‘Is it really necessary to turn myself into an action figure just because I’m bored?’ Or ‘do I have to tell ChatGPT jokes because I have nothing to do?’” Dauner said.

Additionally, as more companies push to add generative AI tools to their systems, people may not have much choice how or when they use the technology, Luccioni said.

“We don’t need generative AI in web search. Nobody asked for AI chatbots in (messaging apps) or on social media,” Luccioni said. “This race to stuff them into every single existing technology is truly infuriating, since it comes with real consequences to our planet.”
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With less available information about AI’s resource usage, consumers have less choice, Ren said, adding that regulatory pressures for more transparency are unlikely to the United States anytime soon. Instead, the best hope for more energy-efficient AI may lie in the cost efficacy of using less energy.

“Overall, I’m still positive about (the future). There are many software engineers working hard to improve resource efficiency,” Ren said. “Other industries consume a lot of energy too, but it’s not a reason to suggest AI’s environmental impact is not a problem. We should definitely pay attention.”

Sign up for CNN’s Life, But Greener newsletter. Our limited newsletter series guides you on how to minimize your personal role in the climate crisis — and reduce your eco-anxiety.

Clintonzence

26 Jun 2025 - 04:01 pm

‘Like wildfires underwater’: Worst summer on record for Great Barrier Reef as coral die-off sweeps planet
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Great Barrier Reef, Australia
CNN
—
As the early-morning sun rises over the Great Barrier Reef, its light pierces the turquoise waters of a shallow lagoon, bringing more than a dozen turtles to life.

These waters that surround Lady Elliot Island, off the eastern coast of Australia, provide some of the most spectacular snorkeling in the world — but they are also on the front line of the climate crisis, as one of the first places to suffer a mass coral bleaching event that has now spread across the world.
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The Great Barrier Reef just experienced its worst summer on record, and the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced last month that the world is undergoing a rare global mass coral bleaching event — the fourth since the late 1990s — impacting at least 53 countries.

The corals are casualties of surging global temperatures which have smashed historical records in the past year — caused mainly by fossil fuels driving up carbon emissions and accelerated by the El Nino weather pattern, which heats ocean temperatures in this part of the world.

CNN witnessed bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in mid-February, on five different reefs spanning the northern and southern parts of the 2,300-kilometer (1,400-mile) ecosystem.

“What is happening now in our oceans is like wildfires underwater,” said Kate Quigley, principal research scientist at Australia’s Minderoo Foundation. “We’re going to have so much warming that we’re going to get to a tipping point, and we won’t be able to come back from that.”

Coral bleached white from high water temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. CNN
Bleaching occurs when marine heatwaves put corals under stress, causing them to expel algae from their tissue, draining their color. Corals can recover from bleaching if the temperatures return to normal, but they will perish if the water stays warmer than usual.

“It’s a die-off,” said Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a climate scientist at the University of Queensland in Australia and chief scientist at The Great Barrier Reef Foundation. “The temperatures got so warm, they’re off the charts … they never occurred before at this sort of level.”

The destruction of marine ecosystems would deliver an effective death sentence for around a quarter of all species that depend on reefs for survival — and threaten an estimated billion people who rely on reef fish for their food and livelihoods. Reefs also provide vital protection for coastlines, reducing the impact of floods, cyclones and sea level rise.

“Humanity is being threatened at a rate by which I’m not sure we really understand,” Hoegh-Guldberg said.

Antioneimmot

26 Jun 2025 - 03:49 pm

“It’s true that both plants are not yet operating at the capacity we originally targeted,” said the Climeworks spokesperson.
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“Like all transformative innovations, progress is iterative, and some steps may take longer than anticipated,” they said.

The company’s prospective third plant in Louisiana aims to remove 1 million tons of carbon a year by 2030, but it’s uncertain whether construction will proceed under the Trump administration.

A Department of Energy spokesperson said a department-wide review was underway “to ensure all activities follow the law, comply with applicable court orders and align with the Trump administration’s priorities.” The government has a mandate “to unleash ‘American Energy Dominance’,” they added.

Direct air capture’s success will also depend on companies’ willingness to buy carbon credits.
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Currently companies are pretty free to “use the atmosphere as a waste dump,” said Holly Buck, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. “This lack of regulation means there is not yet a strong business case for cleaning this waste up,” she told CNN.

Another criticism leveled at Climeworks is its failure to offset its own climate pollution. The carbon produced by its corporate activities, such as office space and travel, outweighs the carbon removed by its plants.

The company says its plants already remove more carbon than they produce and corporate emissions “will become irrelevant as the size of our plants scales up.”

Some, however, believe the challenges Climeworks face tell a broader story about direct air capture.

This should be a “wake-up call,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law. Climeworks’ problems are not “outliers,” she told CNN, “but reflect persistent technical and economic hurdles faced by the direct air capture industry worldwide.”

“The climate crisis demands real action, not speculative tech that overpromises and underdelivers.” she added.

Some of the Climeworks’ problems are “related to normal first-of-a-kind scaling challenges with emerging complex engineering projects,” Buck said.

But the technology has a steep path to becoming cheaper and more efficient, especially with US slashing funding for climate policies, she added. “This kind of policy instability and backtracking on contracts will be terrible for a range of technologies and innovations, not just direct air capture.”

Direct air capture is definitely feasible but its hard, said MIT’s Buck. Whether it succeeds will depend on a slew of factors including technological improvements and creating markets for carbon removals, he said.

“At this point in time, no one really knows how large a role direct air capture will play in the future.”

Williamgralk

26 Jun 2025 - 03:38 pm

Many left-wing preppers also have guns.
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Killjoy is open about the fact she owns firearms but calls it one of the least important aspects of her prepping. She lives in rural Appalachia and, as a transgender woman, says the way she’s treated has changed dramatically since Trump’s first election. For those on the left, guns are “for community and self-defense,” she said.

Left-wing preppers consistently say the biggest difference between them and their right-wing peers is the rejection of “bunker mentality” — the idea of filling a bunker with beans, rice, guns and ammo and expecting to be able to survive the apocalypse alone.

Shonkwiler gives an example of a right-wing guy with a rifle on his back, who falls down the stairs and breaks a leg. If he doesn’t have medical training and a community to help, “he’s going to die before he gets to enjoy all his freeze-dried food.”

“People are our greatest asset,” Killjoy said. When Hurricane Helene carved a path of destruction through Asheville, North Carolina in 2024, Killjoy, who used to live in the city, loaded her truck with food and generators and drove there to help.
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Inshirah Overton also subscribes to the idea of community. The attorney, who came to prepping after enduring Hurricane Irene in 2011, owns a half-acre plot of land in New Jersey where she grows food and has beehives.

She stores fruit, vegetables and honey but also gives them to friends and neighbors. “My plan is to create a community of people who have a vested interest in this garden,” she said.

At one point, Overton toyed with the idea of buying a “bug-out” property in Vermont, somewhere to escape to, but desire for community for her and her two daughters stopped her. In Vermont, “no one knows me and I’m just a random Black lady, and they’ll be like: ‘Oh, OK, right, sure. You live here? Sure. Here’s the barrel of my shotgun. Turn around.’”
This focus on community may stem in part from left-wing preppers’ growing fears around the climate crisis, predicted to usher in far-reaching ecological, social and economic breakdown. It cannot be escaped by retreating to a bunker for a few weeks.

As Trump guts weather agencies, pledges to unwind the Federal Emergency Management Administration and slashes climate funding — all while promising to unleash the fossil fuel industry — climate concerns are only coming into sharper focus.

They’re top of mind for Brekke Wagoner, the creator and host of the Sustainable Prepping YouTube channel, who lives in North Carolina with her four children. She fears increasingly deadly summer heat and the “once-in-a-lifetime” storms that keep coming. Climate change “is just undeniable,” she said.

Her prepping journey started during Trump’s first term. She was living in California and filled with fear that in the event of a big natural disaster, the federal government would simply not be there.

Her house now contains a week’s worth of water, long-term food supplies, flashlights, backup batteries and a solar generator. “My goal is for our family to have all of our needs cared for,” she said, so in an emergency, whatever help is available can go to others.

“You can have a preparedness plan that doesn’t involve a bunker and giving up on civilization,” she said.

Jamesked

26 Jun 2025 - 03:36 pm

These preppers have ‘go bags,’ guns and a fear of global disaster. They’re also left-wing
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The day after President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Eric Shonkwiler looked at his hiking bag to figure out what supplies he had. “I began to look at that as a resource for escape, should that need to happen,” he said.

He didn’t have the terminology for it at the time, but this backpack was his “bug-out bag” — essential supplies for short-term survival. It marked the start of his journey into prepping. In his Ohio home, which he shares with his wife and a Pomeranian dog, Rosemary, he now has a six-month supply of food and water, a couple of firearms and a brood of chickens. “Resources to bridge the gap across a disaster,” he said.
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Margaret Killjoy’s entry point was a bleak warning in 2016 from a scientist friend, who told her climate change was pushing the global food system closer than ever to collapse. Killjoy started collecting food, water and generators. She bought a gun and learned how to use it. She started a prepping podcast, Live Like the World is Dying, and grew a community.

Prepping has long been dominated by those on the political right. The classic stereotype, albeit not always accurate, is of the lone wolf with a basement full of Spam, a wall full of guns, and a mind full of conspiracy theories.

Shonkwiler and Killjoy belong to a much smaller part of the subculture: They are left-wing preppers. This group is also preparing for a doom-filled future, and many also have guns, but they say their prepping emphasizes community and mutual aid over bunkers and isolationism.

In an era of barreling crises — from wars to climate change — some say prepping is becoming increasingly appealing to those on the left.
The roots of modern-day prepping in the United States go back to the 1950s, when fears of nuclear war reached a fever pitch.

The 1970s saw the emergence of the survivalist movement, which dwindled in the 1990s as it became increasingly associated with an extreme-right subculture steeped in racist ideology.

A third wave followed in the early 2000s, when the term “prepper” began to be adopted more widely, said Michael Mills, a social scientist at Anglia Ruskin University, who specializes in survivalism and doomsday prepping cultures. Numbers swelled following big disasters such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2008 financial crisis.

A watershed moment for right-wing preppers was the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Mills said. For those on the left, it was Trump’s 2016 election.

Preppers of all political stripes are usually motivated by a “foggy cloud of fear” rather than a belief in one specific doomsday scenario playing out, Mills said. Broad anxieties tend to swirl around the possibility of economic crises, pandemics, natural disasters, war and terrorism.

“We’ve hit every one of those” since the start of this century, said Anna Maria Bounds, a sociology professor at Queens College, who has written a book about New York’s prepper subculture. These events have solidified many preppers’ fears that, in times of crisis, the government would be “overwhelmed, under-prepared and unwilling to help,” she said.

Nelsonnax

26 Jun 2025 - 03:34 pm

Despite prepping’s reputation as a form of doomerism, many left-wing preppers say they are not devoid of hope.
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Shonkwiler believes there will be an opportunity to create something new in the aftermath of a crisis. “It begins with preparedness and it ends with a better world,” he said.

Some also say there’s less tension between left- and right-wing preppers than people might expect. Bounds, the sociology professor, said very conservative preppers she met during her research contacted her during the Covid-19 pandemic to offer help.
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There is a natural human solidarity that emerges amid disaster, Killjoy said. She recalls a cashier giving her a deep discount on supplies she was buying to take to Asheville post-Helene. “I have every reason to believe that that man is right-wing, and I do think that there is a transcending of political differences that happens in times of crisis,” she said.

As terrifying events pile up, from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to deadly extreme weather, it’s hard to escape the sense we live in a time of rolling existential crises — often a hair’s breadth from global disaster.

People are increasingly beginning to wonder whether their views on preppers have been misconceived, Mills said. “There is a bigger question floating in the air, which is: Are preppers crazy, or is everyone else?”
Killjoy has seen a huge change over the last five years in people’s openness to prepping. Those who used to make fun of her for her “go bag” are now asking for advice.

It’s not necessarily the start of a prepping boom, she said. “I think it is about more and more people adopting preparedness and prepper things into a normal life.”

Evidence already points this way. Americans stockpiled goods in advance of Trump’s tariffs and online sales of contraceptives skyrocketed in the wake of his election, amid concerns he would reduce access. Shows like “The Walking Dead,” meanwhile, have thrust the idea of prepping into popular culture and big box stores now sell prepping equipment and meal kits.

People are hungry to learn about preparedness, said Shonkwiler. “They have the understanding that the world as we knew it, and counted on it, is beginning to cease to be. … What we need to be doing now is figuring out how we can survive in the world that we’ve created.”

Alfredorawn

26 Jun 2025 - 03:13 pm

UK project trials carbon capture at sea to help tackle climate change
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The world is betting heavily on carbon capture — a term that refers to various techniques to stop carbon pollution from being released during industrial processes, or removing existing carbon from the atmosphere, to then lock it up permanently.

The practice is not free of controversy, with some arguing that carbon capture is expensive, unproven and can serve as a distraction from actually reducing carbon emissions. But it is a fast-growing reality: there are at least 628 carbon capture and storage projects in the pipeline around the world, with a 60% year-on-year increase, according to the latest report from the Global CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) Institute. The market size was just over $3.5 billion in 2024, but is projected to grow to $14.5 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.
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Perhaps the most ambitious — and the most expensive — type of carbon capture involves removing carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air, although there are just a few such facilities currently in operation worldwide. Some scientists believe that a better option would be to capture carbon from seawater rather than air, because the ocean is the planet’s largest carbon sink, absorbing 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

In the UK, where the government in 2023 announced up to ?20 billion ($26.7 billion) in funding to support carbon capture, one such project has taken shape near the English Channel. Called SeaCURE, it aims to find out if sea carbon capture actually works, and if it can be competitive with its air counterpart.

“The reason why sea water holds so much carbon is that when you put CO2 into the water, 99% of it becomes other forms of dissolved carbon that don’t exchange with the atmosphere,” says Paul Halloran, a professor of Ocean and Climate Science at the University of Exeter, who leads the SeaCURE team.

“But it also means it’s very straightforward to take that carbon out of the water.”

Pilot plant
SeaCURE started building a pilot plant about a year ago, at the Weymouth Sea Life Centre on the southern coast of England. Operational for the past few months, it is designed to process 3,000 liters of seawater per minute and remove an estimated 100 tons of CO2 per year.

“We wanted to test the technology in the real environment with real sea water, to identify what problems you hit,” says Halloran, adding that working at a large public aquarium helps because it already has infrastructure to extract seawater and then discharge it back into the ocean.

The carbon that is naturally dissolved in the seawater can be easily converted to CO2 by slightly increasing the acidity of the water. To make it come out, the water is trickled over a large surface area with air blowing over it. “In that process, we can constrict over 90% of the carbon out of that water,” Halloran says.

Jamesstabe

26 Jun 2025 - 03:10 pm

Study reveals how much energy AI uses to answer your questions
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Whether it’s answering work emails or drafting wedding vows, generative artificial intelligence tools have become a trusty copilot in many people’s lives. But a growing body of research shows that for every problem AI solves, hidden environmental costs are racking up.

Each word in an AI prompt is broken down into clusters of numbers called “token IDs” and sent to massive data centers — some larger than football fields — powered by coal or natural gas plants. There, stacks of large computers generate responses through dozens of rapid calculations.

The whole process can take up to 10 times more energy to complete than a regular Google search, according to a frequently cited estimation by the Electric Power Research Institute.
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So, for each prompt you give AI, what’s the damage? To find out, researchers in Germany tested 14 large language model (LLM) AI systems by asking them both free-response and multiple-choice questions. Complex questions produced up to six times more carbon dioxide emissions than questions with concise answers.

In addition, “smarter” LLMs with more reasoning abilities produced up to 50 times more carbon emissions than simpler systems to answer the same question, the study reported.

“This shows us the tradeoff between energy consumption and the accuracy of model performance,” said Maximilian Dauner, a doctoral student at Hochschule Munchen University of Applied Sciences and first author of the Frontiers in Communication study published Wednesday.

Typically, these smarter, more energy intensive LLMs have tens of billions more parameters — the biases used for processing token IDs — than smaller, more concise models.

“You can think of it like a neural network in the brain. The more neuron connections, the more thinking you can do to answer a question,” Dauner said.
What you can do to reduce your carbon footprint
Complex questions require more energy in part because of the lengthy explanations many AI models are trained to provide, Dauner said. If you ask an AI chatbot to solve an algebra question for you, it may take you through the steps it took to find the answer, he said.