Over the past few months, I’ve had a set of conversations with entrepreneurs, academics, and engineers engaged in new technical solutions for cleaning up the tailing ponds that follow on from oil sands petroleum extraction and hard mineral mining. There are some key insights I’ve gained from this that will shape cleanup of the mess […]
The Coronavirus is upending many things in the world. Tourism is dead for now. Planes are traveling empty. Everyone who can is working from home. St. Patrick’s Day was canceled. Even the Coronavirus Conference was cancelled. We’re all being asked to practice ‘social distancing’, and the introverts among us are gloating about having trained for […]
Cleantech is usually focused on electric cars, batteries, clean electrical generation, and the like. But clean also has a more direct connotation for humans of being free from disease. Danish company UVD Robotics makes germ-, virus-, and mold-killing ultraviolet robots for hospitals. The product has been in existence for a while, but with the outbreak of the […]
Climate action continues to be a political football in Canada. The election in late 2019 hinged on climate change as much as anything else. Big portions of our passenger and freight rail systems are shut down because of protests allied with a First Nations group that wants to re-route — not block, just re-route — […]
Recently, reasonable groups have been raising moderate concerns about the growing stacks of wind turbine blades in landfills. Other reasonable people have been working to find ways to reuse them and reduce the minor impact. (Note: I consulted to an entrepreneur considering starting a business based on a Washington State process for this.) By Michael […]
(This article originally appeared on the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation website. It’s being reprinted here as CleanTechnica releases the case study on Carbon Engineering’s air-to-fuel and enhanced oil recovery technology). Promoted by numerous attention-grabbing headlines of late, the technology called air-carbon capture (ACC) is having a moment in the sun. But all the hype is encountering dark clouds of […]
Canada is in a federal election cycle, one mostly ignored internationally in favor of the US Democratic primaries with their 20 candidates. However, it’s an important election for climate change. The Liberals, elected in 2015, brought in a national carbon tax along with a raft of climate positive measures (and some questionable but pragmatic actions). […]
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are the bad idea that refuses to die, zombies revenant from their ~2005 grave, lurching forward into transportation discussions over and over. They are the B-movie monster that rises from the bathtub they were drowned in, only to be killed again in a different way. It’s time again to put a […]
As a reminder of what the series has found, the Carbon Engineering solution would use a 2-kilometer long, 20-meter high wall of noisy fans to capture 4 orders of magnitude too little CO2 to make a difference while burning natural gas sufficient for 70,000 households and producing half a ton of CO2 from the gas […]
As a reminder of what the series has found, the Carbon Engineering solution would use a 2-kilometer long, 20-meter high wall of noisy fans to capture 4 orders of magnitude too little CO2 to make a difference while burning natural gas sufficient for 70,000 households and producing half a ton of CO2 from the gas […]
For a year or two, I’ve been asserting that the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster would cost closer to a $1 trillion when all costs were accounted for. Recently, I was challenged on this point and decided to document and argue my thesis. By Michael Barnard Let’s start with principle accountability. Yes, if the tsunami had […]
Carbon Engineering recently garnered $68 million in investment in its air-carbon capture technology from three fossil fuel majors. This is part 3 of the 5 article series assessing the technology and the value of the investment. By Michael Barnard Cleantechnica The first piece summarized the technology and the challenges, and did a bottoms-up assessment to give […]
Smart cities continue to receive global attention. Alphabet (nee Google) is engaged in Toronto through its Sidewalk Labs company in creating a smart neighborhood on the formerly industrial waterfront. Microsoft is engaged through its CityNext initiative in bringing AI and IoT to urban issues. MIT continues to pay attention to the area, as do numerous Internet of Things (IoT) […]
Pro-nuclear advocates have a few go-to cliches in their rhetorical kitbag. A big one is that the public has an irrational fear of nuclear energy and it’s led to nuclear shutdowns and excessive regulation. Let’s examine the historical record of nuclear generation to see if it’s possible to identify the footprints of public fear and […]
Close to five years ago I published an assessment of nuclear scaling vs wind and solar scaling using China as the proving ground in the CleanTechnica article “Wind Energy Beats Nuclear & Carbon Capture For Global Warming Mitigation.” Today, the China example is more clear proof that wind and solar are the better choice for global warming […]