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Climate Change is Just So… An-Noya-ing.

Climate Change is Just So… An-Noya-ing.

Noya is a startup capturing carbon using existing industrial infrastructure. Sounds too good to be true? Read on so I can prove you wrong.

Shayna Berglas
September 28, 2022

This week, we're serving up a conversation on emissions in a few different ways. I'm talking sequestration, transportation, and market fluctuation. Care to become emissions enlightened? Read on.

— Written by Shayna Berglas

Noya

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have emitted somewhere between one and two trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s an unfathomable number.

The catastrophic effects of climate change have made clear the necessity to prioritize both proactive (stopping emissions from entering the air in the first place) and retroactive (taking out what CO2 we can with modern technology) measures. But it’s tricky. Carbon dioxide makes up about 0.04% of the atmosphere’s composition, meaning huge amounts of air and water must pass through chemicals that bind directly to the CO2 molecules.

Globally, millions of cooling towers worldwide already operate to move large amounts of air and water every day. What if they were built for carbon removal?

Now, they can be. Noya uses existing cooling towers for distributed carbon dioxide removal. By the company's estimates, the some two million towers in America could together capture 7 billion to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.

Have we Piqued your interest? Check back next week for the full film!

Public Transit Sucks… But What if it Didn’t?

Approximately 85% of greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector are related to the surface transportation system. Public transportation is one of the most effective ways we as individuals can conserve energy and emissions. Except for the fact that it… kind of sucks.

Don’t get me wrong - there are cities like Amsterdam, London, and even the dirty but ever-efficient NYC that have excellent transportation systems defined by their dependability and wide geographic access. But the vast majority of the world lacks this infrastructure. If someone can be late to work because the next bus doesn’t come for half an hour - or they can’t even get the bus because they live outside the limited radius of boarding spots - there’s a problem.

There are tons of ways we can encourage transit ridership. Increased service routes, frequency, operating hours, and improved coordination among modes like buses, trains, and ferries are two great places to start. And it isn’t just to save you the pretty penny on your car payments and rising gas prices - it’s for the planet, too.

Just one person who switches their solo 20-mile commute by car to existing public transportation can reduce their annual CO2 emissions by 20 pounds per day, or more than 48,000 pounds in a year. That equals a 10% reduction in all greenhouse gases produced by a typical two-adult, two-car household.

Even though it has leaps and bounds to improve, public transport in the U.S. currently saves 37 million metric tons of CO2 every year. Can you try to imagine just how much that is? It's about the use of 4.9 million households. In other words, America’s mediocre modes of public travel save the emissions equivalent of every household in Washington DC, New York City, Atlanta, Denver, and Los Angeles combined.

What if we could make public transit more accessible, more affordable, and more consistent? The effects would be significant. By increasing ridership, more fuel is conserved, air pollution decreases, and the region’s carbon footprint is reduced. And the resulting clean air benefits the entire region, not just those who use public transit

In an ideal world, all travel would be sustainable. Until then, sign the relevant petitions, vote for the right policymakers, and find a mode of travel that works best for you (but maybe hang up the car keys and hit a walk if you can, eh?).

Watch our video on public transit here.

Good Climate News!

Switching to Renewable Energy Could Save Trillions - Study

It’s okay to admit when you’re wrong.

That’s what a recent Oxford University report did after claiming that moving quickly towards cleaner energy sources would prove to be costly. The amendment acknowledged that switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy could save the world as much as $12 trillion by 2050.

The study’s analysis looks at the historic prices of both renewables and fossil fuels, and their expected cost fluctuations in the future. Using fossil fuel data that goes back more than a century, researchers accounted for inflation and market volatility and discovered that prices have remained relatively stable. And while renewables can only offer data on their use in the past few decades, steady improvements in technology have shown the cost of sources like wind and solar are falling rapidly, closing in on 10% a year.

The transition to renewable energy isn’t exactly cheap - but it’s cheaper than many people think. A report by McKinsey released in March of 2022 pegged the global net-zero transition bill to cost a whopping $9.2 trillion per year. But if you dive deeper into the report, you quickly discover that the headline is misleading. According to the math, it actually costs a fraction of that amount - more like $1 trillion per year in additional spending. More on the numbers here.

Reports like the one offered by McKinsey appear hyper-focused on the loss of revenue for countries that are heavily reliant on fossil fuels for economic growth. It’s a fair point. The nations most entwined with big oil will likely feel the cost of that relationship in their GDPs (acronym for "how much $$$ did my country generate this year") in the near future.

But the benefits from the renewable energy transition will come in the long term. We will see them in the net increase of jobs, stability in the energy markets, quicker and cheaper energy access for rural regions, decreased health risks and deaths associated with polluted air and water, and a more stable climate with a lower risk for environmental disaster. We have more to gain - and to lose - than the next decade’s energy return on investment. But even if that’s all that you care about… turns out you’re in luck. Clean energy isn’t just green for the planet, it’s green for our wallets, too.

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