Drought Smacked Lake Mead Could Become “Dead Pool”
September 24, 2021
Which is a bummer because Dead Pool 2 was a much better movie.
Below, the same NBC reporter, Jacob Soboroff, has a look at California’s largest reservoir, and the impacts on renewable energy production.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
September 25, 2021 at 11:19 am
Saw this yesterday, gives a decent enough timeline (Lake Powell would/will happen before Lake Mead):
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/23/lake-powell-hydropower-at-risk-as-water-levels-plunge-says-blm.html
September 25, 2021 at 11:39 am
To cheer everyone up (I’m all about that), I saw this today:
The world’s biggest carbon-removal plant just opened. In a year, it’ll negate just 3 seconds’ worth of global emissions.
https://news.yahoo.com/worlds-biggest-carbon-removal-plant-110600071.html
September 25, 2021 at 8:25 pm
It’s very easy to be sceptical about the Climeworks project and emphasize how ridiculously small the one ORCA unit is in the picture of CO2 removal requirements. ORCA never claimed to be the total, final solution.
Climeworks state “the plant is a steppingstone for Climeworks’ expansion on route to megaton removal capacity by the second part of this decade, based on our leading and most scalable direct air capture technology.” At least they are developing and advancing helper technology.
It really highlights how industrial nations must cease emitting large quantities of CO2, rather than relying on technology and mankind’s ingenuity to dig us out.
Once we do that forests, peat bogs, kelp, seagrass etc and any and all removal technology will help to rebalance the atmospheric carbon over time maybe several centuries or more. The alternative is dabbling in solar geoengineeering and other drastic schemes, which may make matters even worse for some.
Jan Wurzbacher, co-CEO and co-founder of Climeworks
”Orca, as a milestone in the direct air capture industry, has provided a scalable, flexible and replicable blueprint for Climeworks’ future expansion. With this success, we are prepared to rapidly ramp up our capacity in the next years. Achieving global net-zero emissions is still a long way to go, but with Orca, we believe that Climeworks has taken one significant step closer to achieving that goal.’’
September 26, 2021 at 11:55 am
It is very easy, yes.
The main thing I don’t get with Climeworks is how is it supposed to be profitable? The estimates to remove one year of carbon emissions (at their current rate) is 50,000 scrubbing plants at a cost of $5 trillion a year, and that’s with an enormous drop in the costs to do it. Then, do that for for about a hundred years. Climeworks intends to eventually sell CO2 to companies that need it, but there’s no way that’s a $5 trillion market or anywhere close to that. So, that means governments have to prep a private company up to the tune of trillions a year. Nothing even remotely close to that has ever happened. I think it’s MORE unprobable in the future, when we’re going to have to pay trillions already to prop up failing agricultural systems and flooded cities.
I saw this article today about cultured meat:
The Counter: Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story..
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
The theory is there. The practicalities of doing it are another thing entirely.
September 26, 2021 at 10:49 pm
How much money has been spent and made by industry in using the atmosphere and oceans as a free CO2 disposal dump. Maybe every ICE vehicle, every power generation station (burning fossil fuel), every steel plant, every cement producer etc. should have paid a fee. As my Yorkshire born grandad used to say “You don’t get owt for nowt”.
The Orca is the first and just a protype, repeat not a final solution. “The Orca facility does the work of 200,000 trees in 1,000 times less space.” It can be placed in areas where trees can’t grow. How much are lost species and ecosystems worth ?
Work is also going on carbon dioxide removal from oceans that too will be pretty costly.
With forest fires increasing what alternatives do we have ? Solar geoengineering – filtering sunlight
The founders of Climeworks are well educated engineers with a mission, they may get rich, they may not be sincere, I don’t know, maybe governments, academia should be leading this work, whoever it is critical work.
Any many thanks for cheering me up this week-end.
September 26, 2021 at 11:12 pm
“many thanks”
Ha ha. Sure thing.
September 26, 2021 at 2:40 am
The Energy Gang podcast recently had a discussion about this CO2 extractor in Iceland. One issue is the low efficiency you get from extracting CO2 from the ~415ppm of the atmosphere as opposed to CO2 capture from a source with much higher levels—chemical or concrete plants, say—where concentrations are measured as 20/30/40% rather than 0.04%.
The Iceland advantage was supposed to be that you were doing it with lots of “free” geothermal energy, and it would “permanently” store the carbon in rock (as opposed to the much shorter-term storage of wood).
September 26, 2021 at 4:59 am
continued.. ), when the sources of carbon emitting industries are replaced, then there will be nature and atmospheric scrubbers left to slowly plod away until we get back to the 278 ppm mark. We can then switch off the artificial scrubbers and leave it to nature. The alternative is watch populations suffer mayhem and perish and/or dick about with solar shading. Of course we are talking in long term and we may yet have a mighty world war iii involving nuclear winters and yet more climate modifications.
September 26, 2021 at 4:52 am
Ideally we need to reduce atmospheric CO2 measurements to around the 278 ppm mark – where nature settled for post ice age, before the intensive industrial revolution. Hopefully we will eventually create steel and cement (Volvo has an initiative creating steel with hydrogen reduced iron – also companies like Hoffman-Green are creating low carbon cement
September 26, 2021 at 5:23 am
Sorry – I messed that up by pressing the wrong key at the wrong time, continuation above, better I type it up first using word next time.
September 26, 2021 at 10:36 am
“The world’s biggest carbon-removal plant just opened. In a year, it’ll negate just 3 seconds’ worth of global emissions”.
Whoopa !! Whoopa !! Progress s being made and someone is going to get rich from it—-what more could we ask for?
September 27, 2021 at 5:36 am
We could ask Stanford to put their money where their mouths are and get started on methane.
“Removing about three years-worth of human-caused emissions of the potent greenhouse gas would reduce global surface temperatures by approximately 0.21 degrees Celsius while reducing ozone levels enough to prevent roughly 50,000 premature deaths annually. ”
https://news.stanford.edu/press/view/41196