Breadcrumbs from food waste could replace fossil fuels as a source of hydrogen in one of the most common chemical reactions used in chemical manufacturing, new research suggests.

The new process, reported Feb. 23 in the journal Nature Chemistry, combines natural fermentation processes in bacteria with metal catalysis to generate an array of valuable chemical products from simple food waste. Calculations showed that this hybrid procedure was carbon negative overall, and the authors think it could be the first step in reimagining chemical manufacturing as a more sustainable industry.

Hydrogenation is a chemical process that inserts a molecule of hydrogen across a double bond and is a staple reaction in food production, plastics manufacturing and the synthesis of drug compounds.

However, the bulk of the hydrogen gas used in this reaction is derived from fossil fuels through a dirty and energy-intensive process called steam reforming, which produces 15 to 20 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kilogram of hydrogen generated . Consequently, hydrogenation is a huge sustainability challenge for the chemical industry, and scientists are urgently searching for greener alternatives.

Turning to nature, Stephen Wallace, a professor of chemical biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh, decided to investigate whether it was possible to harness the power of biology to tackle this chemistry problem. Many bacteria naturally produce hydrogen when they are forced to respire anaerobically (without oxygen), and they release a constant stream of this gas into their surroundings. If this could be linked to a compatible chemical system, it would be theoretically possible to use bio-hydrogen in a hydrogenation reaction, thereby eliminating the need for fossil fuels in this process, Wallace reasoned.

"The main challenge was finding a catalyst that can operate in a living system ‪—‬ in water, at mild temperatures, and without harming the cells," he told Live Science in an email. "We had to balance both sides: a catalyst that stays active in a complex biological environment, and microbes that continue functioning in the presence of the catalyst."

Culture shift

The team cultured E. coli bacteria in a glucose-containing medium, adding a commercial palladium catalyst and a test substrate before sparging the mixture to remove oxygen. The oxygen-free reaction was incubated at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) for a day, and subsequent analysis revealed that the top-performing strain had produced the expected hydrogenation product in 94% yield.

"The metal catalyst comes in and is essentially bound to the cell membrane," Simone Morra, a biotechnologist at the University of Nottingham who wasn't involved in the work, told Live Science. "The cell itself will produce the hydrogen, and then as soon as the hydrogen starts to diffuse out of the cell, it will hit this metal catalyst, which will do the second part of the reaction and produce a hydrogenation product."

With a biocompatible system established, Wallace next sought to replace the expensive glucose feedstock with a cheaper and more sustainable alternative. Focusing on bread waste, the team used microbial enzymes to break the complex carbohydrate molecules within breadcrumbs into simple glucose units. This waste-derived fuel was then fed directly to the E. coli cultures, effectively converting breadcrumbs into hydrogen.

But the researchers had one final trick up their sleeves: Instead of feeding a precursor molecule to the bacterial culture, they genetically engineered certain strains to produce the required substrates within the cells themselves. "It’s brilliant and very inspiring," Morra said. "They show that they can capitalize on the synthetic abilities of E. coli. Essentially they can make use of the carbon pathways of the cell to make any substrate they want."

The use of bio-generated hydrogen resulted in a three-fold decrease in greenhouse gas emissions compared to using fossil fuels. The breadcrumb-powered hydrogenation process, in particular, reduced the global warming potential by more than 135%, corresponding to a carbon-negative footprint.

The team is now working to increase the number of possible substrates and developing the process to accept more types of biowaste. Ultimately, they hope the method could be incorporated into industrial chemical synthesis.

"Right now, the system works best with simpler alkenes," or molecules containing a carbon-carbon double bond, Wallace said. "It's not yet as efficient as industrial processes, but it demonstrates a fundamentally new way of doing hydrogenation. To make it viable, we need to improve efficiency, scale the biology, and develop catalysts that remain stable and cost-effective at industrial scale."

President Donald Trump's war on Iran is the perfect embodiment of all that is wrong with our ongoing fossil fuel dependence. And it puts an exclamation mark on the case for a clean energy transition. Renewable energy promises a more secure, domestically sustainable and inexhaustible energy source — via wind, solar, geothermal and energy storage technology.

It doesn't lead to the further warming of our planet and the destabilization of our climate. And it doesn't lead to us fighting dangerous, often misguided, wars in far-flung lands.

This isn't the first time a global event has placed a huge, shining light on the benefits of moving away from fossil fuels. Five years ago I opined that there might be just the slightest sliver of a silver lining in the tragic COVID pandemic. Despite the devastating loss of life, perhaps it provided us with an occasion to rethink our unsustainable ways, an opportunity to choose a better path — a "green reset."

The pandemic, and lockdowns that ensued, saw oil prices dropping for the first time ever. We didn't need fossil fuels to get around because no one could go anywhere. Renewables, however, are largely unaffected by demand and proved resistant to the global economic shock.

As governments sought to jump start the economy, it seemed an opportune time to retire our dirty fossil fuel energy infrastructure and rebuild in its place a clean, green global economy, tackling the greatest challenge we face today — the climate crisis.

But it was not to be. As my co-author Dr. Peter Hotez and I detail in our recent book "Science Under Siege" (PublicAffairs, 2025), petrostates, plutocrats and bad actors who benefit from the fossil fuel status quo simply doubled down in their efforts to spread propaganda and disinformation, turning the idea of a "great reset" into a boogie man of the right-wing conspiracy theory fever swamps.

Another reason for this failed opportunity was that the connection between the immediate crisis and the underlying environmental factors was subtle. Habitat destruction and climate change both favor the conditions that allow for the type of zoonotic transmission (e.g. from bats or pangolins to humans) involved in the spread of novel coronaviruses. But look at how long that last sentence was.

In the case of Trump's war on Iran (and his previous attack on Venezuela for that matter), the connection is comparatively simple: It's about the fossil fuels, stupid!

The warming of the planet poses an unprecedented threat in the form of more dangerous storms, rising sea levels, coastal inundation and deadly, damaging extreme weather events. It is a direct consequence of the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels. And Trump's war on Iran is fundamentally about fossil fuels.

The war against Iran advances the interests of petrostates like Saudi Arabia and Russia and supports the fossil fuel industry by attempting to seize from Iran control of the flow of oil and liquified natural gas through the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. itself is a petrostate under Trump and GOP rule — with the administration actively opposing green energy projects that could help make the country's energy supply self-sufficient. And our continued fossil fuel dependence poses a great threat to our nation. It's a double whammy. It makes us dependent on buying oil and gas from dangerous foreign nations, as epitomized by this unpopular war, expending tremendous amounts of blood and treasure in the effort to maintain access to fossil fuel reserves around the world. And it damages the climate, pushing us toward a dangerous, unstable planetary future.

We now understand the market instability associated with our continued reliance on fossil fuels, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz causes gasoline prices in the U.S. spike to levels not seen in years, driving a broader increase in the cost of goods and services that is propagating through the economy and negatively impacting consumers.

Renewable energy is actually cheaper than fossil fuel energy now on a levelized basis (and that’s not even accounting for the tremendous cost of climate damages). They can be produced on a domestic level and provide something fossil fuels cannot — predictability and security.

That's why the fossil fuel-driven Trump administration has put its thumb on the scales to block, or at least slow down, the inevitable transition to clean energy. The absurdity of these efforts has reached new levels with the recent report that the Trump administration paid a major energy company $1 billion to stop a project to build wind farms off the U.S. East Coast and invest the money in a Texas natural gas facility instead.

Trump's assault on renewable energy, meanwhile, is raising energy prices, along with his tariffs. His war of choice against Iran is adding to the affordability crisis that, ironically, now threatens his presidency.

Fortunately, we are seeing progress at the state and regional level. Virginia, for example, with its Democratic, climate-forward governor Abigail Spanberger, is forging ahead with a new offshore wind farm that has just begun producing electric power, having prevailed against the Trump administration and its effort to block the project.

Elections have consequences, and the midterm election — less than a year from now — will be an opportunity to put a check on a misguided administration that is taking us down an ever-more-treacherous road of fossil fuel dependence, war and economic devastation.

We need, in the meantime, to envision a better future — a clean energy future with a livable climate, in which we don't start dangerous foreign wars in a desperate effort to extract every last bit of fossil fuel.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

The first two weeks of the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran created immense present and future greenhouse gas emissions, draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined, a new analysis finds.

Between Feb. 28 and March 14, 2026, the warring parties released almost 5.6 million tons (5.1 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases by firing carbon-intensive weapons, powering fighter jets and ships, and bombing infrastructure such as oil storage facilities and civilian buildings, researchers found.

For comparison, if these emissions continued at the same rate for one year, they would be roughly equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of the 84 lowest emitting countries in the world combined. And the emissions from the first two weeks of the conflict are higher than Iceland's annual carbon emissions, which in 2024 totaled 4.7 million tons (4.3 million metric tons) of CO₂ via all sources, the team said.

"Every missile strike is another downpayment on a hotter, more unstable planet, and none of it makes anyone safer," Patrick Bigger, a co-author of the analysis and a research director at the Climate and Community Institute, a climate and economy think tank, told The Guardian.

The analysis and an accompanying opinion article written by the researchers were published March 21 by the Climate and Community Institute.

The biggest source of CO₂ from the conflict in Iran during its first two weeks was the destruction of homes, schools and other buildings, as the rubble will need to be cleared and the infrastructure must be rebuilt after the war ends, according to the analysis. Bigger and his colleagues calculated that these indirect emissions amount to about 2.7 million tons (2.4 million metric tons) of CO₂, which is equivalent to the Maldives' yearly emissions. Based on data from Red Crescent Society of Iran, a humanitarian organization, the infrastructure that has been razed includes 16,191 residential buildings, 3,384 commercial units, 77 medical centers and 69 schools, the researchers noted in the study.

The second largest chunk of CO₂ emissions from the first 14 days of the war came from the U.S., Israel and Iran's bombarding of oil storage facilities, oil refineries and oil tankers across the Gulf region. The researchers found that 2.5 million to 5.9 million barrels of oil were blown up during their analysis period, unleashing 2.1 million tons (1.9 million metric tons) of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — roughly equivalent to Malta's annual emissions.

Fuel used during combat and support operations in the first two weeks of the war was the third-biggest source of CO₂, totaling about 583,000 tons (529,000 metric tons) of the greenhouse gas, which is comparable to Greenland's yearly emissions. The U.S. and Israel struck more than 6,000 targets in Iran using fighter jets and bombers between Feb. 28 and March 14, according to the analysis. This is equivalent to about 2,500 flights lasting three hours each, which, together with the transport of troops and other support activities, likely consumed 150 million to 270 million liters (40 million to 71 million gallons) of fuel, the researchers estimated.

In the first two weeks of the war, the U.S. lost three F-15 fighter jets and one KC-135 refueling aircraft. In the same period, Iran is reported to have lost 28 planes, 21 ships and about 300 missile launchers. This equipment will likely be replaced through manufacturing, and this makes up the fourth-largest source of CO₂ in the analysis, totaling 190,000 tons (172,000 metric tons) of the greenhouse gas. That's about the same as Tonga's annual emissions.

Finally, the researchers estimated that the U.S. and Israel launched 9,000 missiles in the first 14 days of the war. Iran, meanwhile, is thought to have launched 1,000 missiles and about 2,000 drones in the same period. Similar to planes, ships and missile launchers, the warring parties will likely replenish this arsenal, which also includes interceptor missiles. According to the analysis, the embodied CO₂ emissions amount to roughly 61,000 tons (55,000 metric tons), which is equivalent to a small cement plant's yearly emissions.

The war is in its fourth week, meaning that far more CO₂ has now been emitted directly and indirectly as a result of the conflict than the analysis suggests.

"We expect emissions to increase rapidly as the conflict proceeds, mainly due to the speed [at] which oil facilities are being targeted at an alarming rate," Fred Otu-Larbi, a co-author of the analysis and a researcher at Lancaster University in the U.K. and the University of Energy and Natural Resources in Ghana, told The Guardian. "Just what are the costs, no one really knows, that is why studies like this are so vital."

If more countries join the war, they could significantly boost emissions, the researchers wrote in the analysis. But already, "burning up the annual emissions of Iceland in two weeks is something we really cannot afford," Otu-Larbi said.

The aftershocks of the war are expected to have an even bigger climate impact than the fighting itself, as countries seek to buffer against fuel and fertilizer shocks caused by Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Specifically, there could be an increase in drilling for fossil fuels as countries seek to become as energy secure as possible, the researchers said.

"Historically, every U.S.-driven energy shock has been followed by a surge in new drilling, new LNG [liquified natural gas] terminals and new fossil-fuel infrastructure," Bigger said. "This war risks hard-wiring another generation of carbon dependence."

Between the 17th and 20th centuries, humans killed millions of whales for oil. They stripped their blubber, spinning the iconic creatures in the water and pulling off the fat in a huge spiral like the peel of an apple. The blubber was boiled into oil, then strained into barrels to be used in everything from oil lamps to industrial lubricants.

This was the bloody process that brought light to society.

"It is horrible," Charles Nordhoff wrote of his experience on a whaling vessel in 1895. "Yet old whalemen delight in it. The fetid smoke is incense to their nostrils. The filthy oil seems to them a glorious representative of prospective dollars and delights."

For over 100 years, the voracious hunger for whale blubber drove blue, humpback and North Atlantic right whales to the brink of extinction.

Now, commercial whaling is all but banned, whale blubber is used in just a handful of products, and whale populations have rebounded somewhat.

A similar sea change is coming for petroleum, though when and how it will play out is still incredibly hazy.

The best superforecasters, combined with machine learning, are only accurate at predicting geopolitical events up to a year in advance, Luke Kemp, research affiliate with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. At best, "we have general pictures we can paint."

But the general trends are clear. We've already transitioned much of our home energy use away from oil. And as climate change pushes us to accelerate that transition, we're developing new technologies that will help the world outgrow its oil dependence ever faster, experts say. In a few industries, like shipping and plastic, the decayed bones of long-dead animals will be the primary energy source for a long time to come.

But a post-oil world is coming.

"The whaling industry is a very good analogy," David MacDonald, a professor of petroleum geology at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K., told Live Science. At its peak, "The whaling industry was huge." But over the decades, "it was an inexorable decline," he said.

Origins of oil

Humans have been using oil for millennia. In fact, around 40,000 years ago, people in what is now Syria used bitumen — a byproduct of crude oil — to stick handles onto their tools. Fast-forward 35,000 years, and the Mesopotamians used the same sticky substance to waterproof their boats. The Babylonians used it to build the Hanging Gardens, and the Egyptians used it to embalm mummies.

In China, people burned crude oil and gas for heat and light as early as 500 B.C. By the fourth century A.D., they were drilling for these natural resources and transporting it via bamboo pipes.

But it wasn't until 1859, when Edwin "Colonel" Drake struck it big in Pennsylvania, that oil was sought at scale. With the same, albeit modernized drilling technique used in China more than 1,500 years earlier, Drake hit a reservoir 69.5 feet (21 meters) down, and the U.S. oil industry was born.

Crude oil, which is composed of simple strings of carbon and hydrogen, forms from the remains of animals and plants that sank to the bottom of swamps, lakes and oceans. Over millions of years, layers of sand and rock covered them, and intense heat and pressure turned these remains into oil and natural gas. They were then locked away in reservoirs — some close to the surface, others thousands of feet below — with gas sitting atop a lake of oil.

For the past 165 years, crude oil has transformed virtually every aspect of society.

If oil vanished tomorrow, global trade would break down as the shipping and aviation industries ground to a halt. Food security would be precarious, with no petroleum to fuel large-scale agriculture or packaging to keep food fresh. Medical care would be set back generations without the sterile equipment needed in hospitals. Renewable energy projects would be frozen without the components required to make solar panels or wind turbines.

Planes, trains, boats and automobiles

Our transition away from oil will be far gentler than that, of course. We've largely stopped using oil for electricity. In October last year, a report by the International Energy Authority found demand for oil will peak this decade.

The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) will usher in the next big drop in oil use.

Currently, road vehicles make up almost 50% of global crude oil use, according to a 2018 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). But this percentage will plummet in the coming decades. It's estimated that EV sales will account for over two-thirds of the global market by 2030. If we are particularly aggressive in slashing fossil fuel emissions by three-quarters by 2050, the EV industry could be responsible "for more than half of the reduction in total oil demand," according to the BP Energy Outlook 2023, which forecasts future fuel use.

In 50 years, most of this car-driven oil usage could be eliminated.

Aviation also largely relies on oil for fuel. Planes last decades and cost tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to build. But technology is moving fast in this sector. New aircraft are far more fuel efficient than aircraft were 40 years ago, and the industry is engaged in reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

Sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) will be key to ditching oil. These biofuels are derived from the raw materials used for industrial processes, including waste, biomass, cooking oil and animal fat waste. SAFs have the added benefit of being compatible with current aircraft engines, and they can be blended up to 50% with traditional jet fuel. Boeing plans to make all of its commercial aircraft capable of flying on SAFs by 2030. By 2050, if we aggressively cut carbon emissions, SAFs will account for between 30% and 45% of aviation fuels, BP estimates.

Shipping is a more stubborn problem. Ships run on oil. Like planes, they are wildly expensive to build, last decades and will be hard to phase out. Around 90% of world trade is carried out by the international shipping industry, with over 105,000 merchant ships currently sailing the oceans and accounting for around 5% of oil consumption today.

Without ships transporting goods all over Earth, "half the world would starve and the other half would freeze," according to the International Chamber of Shipping. The problem for this industry is, you can't just change the fuel.

Fredric Bauer, an associate senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, researches low-carbon innovation in energy and industrial systems. He's not convinced the shipping industry will be able to transition away from oil anytime soon. The International Maritime Organization published its first climate strategy in 2018 and has generally been "incredibly conservative" in shifting away from fossil fuels, Bauer said.

Hydrogen is a potential alternative fuel. Ships could be retrofitted with hydrogen fuel cells, but that strategy comes with problems. For example, to remain liquid, the fuel must be stored at extremely low temperatures. Its energy density is low, increasing the amount of storage required on each ship. Hydrogen is also extremely explosive.

Hydrogen-powered ships are still in their very early stages. The first ferries and small ships using this technology are being tested, but large, hydrogen-fueled oceanic cargo ships are still in the design phase.

Jay Apt, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, told Live Science that shipping will likely be a voracious oil user for decades.

"If I was to look into the cloudy crystal ball, I would say that long-haul shipping would be one of the large-scale uses of petroleum that we would see 100 years from now," Apt said.

Plastic fantastic 

Single-use plastics are littering Earth in ever-increasing quantities. They take hundreds of years to degrade and then become microplastics, which are choking the ocean, littering the tops of mountains and congregating inside our bodies.

"The use of plastic is in many ways the more dangerous part of the oil industry, rather than the burning of hydrocarbons," MacDonald said. "If humanity disappeared from Earth tonight, in 1,000 years the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will be back to normal — whatever normal is — but there would be plastic in the oceans and soils for millions of years."

Synthetic plastic is made from oil, and it is extremely cheap to produce.

Around 12% of the oil extracted today goes toward the petrochemical industry, which makes plastic and fertilizers, along with clothing, medical equipment, detergents and tires. And this number is set to grow: The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that under current policies, the global use of plastics could triple by 2060.

Plastic is extremely useful because its density can be varied. We can try to move away from plastic in products like food packaging, but phasing out medical plastic is more challenging. Plastic is everywhere in hospitals, including in disposable syringes, IV bags, catheters, gloves and bed linens. It's not just that plastic is cheap, durable and malleable. It's also sterile, so helps curb the spread of infections.

"I couldn't even imagine health care without plastics, and I don't even think we should go there," Dr. Jodi Sherman, founding director of the Yale Program on Healthcare Environmental Sustainability, told Live Science. "I would argue that plastic has allowed very important innovation of medical devices and supplies, and is here to stay."

Right now, primary plastics are "ridiculously and unsustainably cheap," so oil-free alternatives can't compete on cost, Bauer said.

Bioplastics, made from crops, could provide a way forward, MacDonald said. But the story of biofuels serves as a cautionary tale. Soybean fields have taken over large swaths of U.S. farmland — in part because of its use as a biofuel.

"We have a finite amount of agricultural land," MacDonald said. "If we turn a lot of it over to growing fuels, what do we do about feeding people? It's not an easy equation. Everything is related and interlinked."

The beginning of the end of oil

"The oil industry isn't going to collapse because we run out of oil, there's plenty of oil left," MacDonald said.

But at some point, clean energy technologies will become so cheap that it won't pay off to drill and extract oil.

The first method to be phased out will be wildcat drilling, in which an area with unproven reserves is explored, MacDonald said. This is risky and extremely costly if you don't find anything. Even drilling new wells in areas with known oil reserves is eye-wateringly expensive: Companies spend tens to hundreds of millions to get wells and rigs staffed up and running, and then it's years before they turn a profit.

"You're spending money like a drunken sailor in the hope you're going to get some money back," MacDonald said. "It ain't a quick process. That's why oil companies are big — they have to be as they're carrying a huge amount of risk."

Still, oil wells will continue to pump in the vast sand fields of Saudi Arabia for decades. In the U.S., production will continue at high levels through 2050.

Femke Nijsse, a complexity scientist at the University of Exeter in the U.K. whose research focuses on modeling climate, energy systems and the economy, told Live Science she's hopeful that global oil use will be cut by 95% by 2065, with aviation and shipping as the remaining strongholds.

MacDonald predicts a "less spectacular" decline, falling a quarter by 2050. "At some point you'll get to a cliff where it will go down quite rapidly," he added.

Some experts can't imagine a post-oil future at all. Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView, a research firm that looks at energy trends, told Live Science that artificial intelligence and geoengineering will change oil extraction and refining, but that oil won't disappear until a technology that doesn't exist yet, like fusion energy, makes it obsolete.

But the push for decarbonization means oil will eventually become a flash in the pan in our history. Like industrial whaling, our taste for it will dissipate until just a few small strongholds remain.

Fifty to 100 years from now, oil derricks and drilling fields in the U.S. may start to look like the abandoned mine museums and gold-rush ghost towns that litter the American West — tourist attractions that paint a picture of a lost way of life, an economy firmly in the past.

The burning of fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — propelled humanity into the industrial revolution, remaking civilization in its wake. Gasoline powers many of the cars we drive; coal and natural gas are central to global energy. But if aliens were building their own society, would they have to go down the same path as humanity, relying on fossil fuels to build their advanced civilization? Or could they find an alternative?

To build a modern civilization, aliens would likely need to use a source of energy that's just as abundant as fossil fuels, said Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and author of "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch" (Penguin Press, 2014). It would be hard for them to simply bypass the production of fossil fuels, he noted.

Dartnell drew a parallel with humans: In the 18th century, the world entered the industrial revolution by tapping into what appeared to be a limitless source of energy. Coal burned longer and produced more power than wood and charcoal.

"Prior to that, energy was the fundamental limitation on how much you could do," he said. "It would limit how much you could mine and move things around, what you could build, and what you could make."

The question of whether humans could have bypassed fossil fuels to reach alternative energy sources is "somewhat of a chicken-and-egg dilemma," Dartnell told Live Science. For instance, producing solar panels requires silicon, and extracting and refining this element demands a significant amount of energy.

Related: How do we turn oil into plastic?

The easiest way for intelligent aliens to create fuel would be to start by burning stuff, like humans did, until they can move to other sources of energy. They could perhaps harness the light of a star or of the kinetic energy of the wind. But wind energy on its own would not create the high temperatures needed for the smelting, forging and casting of metals, which would be needed for industrialization, Dartnell said.

Meanwhile, hydropower would only work if the planet had significant amounts of accessible liquid, which most planets we've found don't possess, added Seth Shostak, an astronomer and director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute.

Could other planets have fossil fuels?

Scientists still haven't found a planet with abundant oxygen in its atmosphere, though trace amounts have been found on Mars, Venus and Jupiter's moon Europa. Oxygen is the key ingredient in burning fossil fuels because it enables combustion, which is what releases the energy stored in coal, oil and gas.

Fossil fuels are created from life — they're the transformed remains of plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Dartnell suggested that plate tectonics are a crucial part of the puzzle of how these life forms came to exist. "There's good reason to suspect that in order to have intelligent life on an Earth-like planet, you need to have plate tectonics to regulate the climate for long periods of time," he said.

A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Sydney reported how Earth's tectonic plates move carbon between the deep Earth and the surface, forming what they call a "carbon conveyor belt." This process is key to maintaining Earth's "Goldilocks" climate, making the planet habitable, according to the study. What's more, plate tectonics also results in continental drift and the creation of conditions that produce large amounts of coal, a fossil fuel, he added.

Put another way, plate tectonics can help pave the way for life and create conditions to help it become fossil fuels; it can also create ideal conditions for life that may become intelligent enough to harness those fuels.

"In a sense, you get a two-for-one," Dartnell said. "If you have a planet with active plate tectonics, that regulates the climate, which allows for the evolution of intelligent complex life."

Scientists have yet to find another planet with active plate tectonics. Nor have they found fossil fuels in space. What they have discovered, however, is evidence of fossil fuels' chemical building blocks: hydrogen and carbon. Approximately 75% of the universe's mass is composed of hydrogen, said Shostak. Additionally, scientists have found a field of liquid hydrocarbons on Saturn's moon Titan. Intelligent aliens could, hypothetically, attempt to burn these elements to produce energy.

A human point of view

Of course, aliens aren't necessarily bound by the same constraints as humans, and our imagination often limits us to thinking in terms of a human timeline. "It's hard for us to predict what the aliens might do," Shostak told Live Science. It's like asking Julius Caesar what he thought the Romans would be doing with oil in 2025, when they were only using small amounts of oil for lamps. "Julius would probably have some ideas, all based on Roman knowledge," he said. "He would completely miss the [mark]. You have to keep that in mind."

An intelligent alien civilization could be nothing like what we expect, Shostak added. While aliens would likely need an abundant energy source to advance their civilization, who's to say what form that energy would take? The answer could lie beyond human understanding.

Extraterrestrials quiz: Are you an alien expert, or has your brain been abducted?

Earth's oceans are getting warmer at an accelerating rate, researchers find — indicating that climate change is speeding up too.

The scientists found that ocean warming has more than quadrupled over the past 40 years and is likely to accelerate even faster in the future. The researchers published their findings in a new study published Tuesday (Jan. 28) in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The rate of sea surface temperature warming has risen from 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.06 degrees Celsius) per decade in the 1980s to 0.5 F (0.27 C) per decade today. The team's modeling suggests that this amount of accelerated warming will occur again in the next two decades and accelerate by an even greater margin if we don't address the causes of climate change and move away from fossil fuels, according to the study.

Study lead author Christopher Merchant, a professor in ocean and Earth observation at the University of Reading, U.K., said the oceans generally dictate the pace for global warming as a whole because they are Earth's main heat sink and absorb heat from the atmosphere. This means if ocean warming is accelerating, then it's a sign that climate change is accelerating too.

"Nature might do something different next, but on current trends, the world is warming faster than we have been used to," Merchant told Live Science in an email. "That means all the impacts are coming at us faster."

Global warming drives rising sea levels that threaten coastal communities, fuels more extreme weather and dries out land, compromising our ability to grow food. Scientists have warned that unchecked climate change will bring untold suffering to billions of people while driving a third of Earth's species to extinction.

Related: 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the 1st to breach the 1.5 C global warming limit, data reveals

Merchant and his colleagues used satellite data to model changes in average global sea surface temperatures over multiple decades. The team found an upward trend of warming alongside natural variations driven by events such as El Niño.

The team linked the accelerated ocean warming to climate change and Earth taking in more energy than it's emitting — a phenomenon called Earth's energy imbalance. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) trap heat in the atmosphere, which warm up the planet, and subsequently the oceans. This process, along with other human activities and natural variations, is a significant driver of Earth's energy imbalance, which has doubled within the last two decades.

Merchant noted that the warming ocean trend has picked up in the last 15 years because Earth is absorbing more sunlight as well as heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Researchers believe this increased sunlight absorption is linked to reduced cloud cover, meaning more sunlight penetrates Earth. Global warming also reduces snow and ice cover that would otherwise reflect sunlight back into space.

The study authors noted that the rate of surface ocean warming, and therefore global warming, over the last four decades isn't a guide for what's to come, and that much greater warming is expected if climate change isn't successfully mitigated.

"If we want to stabilize the climate, we should multiply our efforts to power our lifestyles without fossil fuels," Merchant said. "The good news is that significant transformation is already underway worldwide."

Los Angeles is burning, but it isn't alone. In recent years, fires have blasted through cities in Colorado, the southern Appalachians and the island of Maui, along with Canada, Australia, Portugal and Greece. What wasn't burned was smoked in.

Is this another case of a future not only dire but strange, without a narrative to join past to present or an analog for what is to come?

I'm a historian of fire, and my reply is that we have both a narrative and an analog. The narrative is the unbroken saga of humanity and fire, a companionship that extends through all our existence as a species. The analog is that humanity's fire practices have become so vast, especially in recent centuries, that we are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age.

Related: LA wildfires: How can wildfire smoke affect your health?

Fire as organizing principle

Humanity and fire have been reforging the Earth since the end of the last glaciation, about 11,500 years ago. Generally, these changes have made landscapes more fire-receptive.

The scale is significant. Recent studies speculate that massive depopulation, especially in the Americas, which removed the torch and allowed forests to reclaim land and so sequester atmospheric carbon, may have even helped nudge the planet into the Little Ice Age from the mid-16th to mid-19th centuries.

Still, there were limits. Fire and life had coevolved across 420 million years, and ecological checks and balances limited how far humans could push and pull fire within the constraints of terrestrial landscapes.

The process unquestionably quickened and changed character with the wholesale burning of fossil fuels, or what we might term lithic landscapes. This combustion lies outside the old boundaries: It can burn anytime, anywhere, and its effluent isn't easily absorbed into the old ecology. By warming the atmosphere, it is a leading cause of climate change, which in turn is generally enhancing conditions for wildfires.

Equally important, the transition to a fossil-fuel civilization has affected how people live on the land, how they design cities and peri-urban communities, how they shape living landscapes with agriculture and nature preserves, how they generate and transmit energy, and what kind of fire practices they adopt.

Petrochemicals from fossil biomass replace, or try to substitute for, fire's ecological effects. Energy from fossil fuels displaces the heat, light and power of flame. Instead of challenging wildfire with tamed fire, modern societies fight landscape fire with the counterforce of industrial fire in the form of pumps, engines, bulldozers and aircraft.

This "pyric transition" in types of combustion forces the two different kinds of burning — fires in living landscapes and fires that burn lithic landscapes — to interact in ways that sometimes compete and sometimes collude. Like the power lines that have sparked so many disastrous wildfires, the two realms of fire are crossing, often with lethal consequences.

The prospect for worsening fires because of changing land use and fire practices was apparent before climate change became a serious consideration in the 1990s. U.S. land agencies recognized the ill consequences of removing fire and reformed policies to reinstate good fire over 50 years ago. Unfortunately, bad fire continues to outpace good fire.

As the world burns

No single factor drives fire: It synthesizes its surroundings. It's like a driverless car that barrels down the road, integrating whatever is around it.

Sometimes it confronts a sharp curve called climate change. Sometimes it's a tricky intersection where townscape and countryside meet. Sometimes it's road hazards left from past accidents, such as logging slash, invasive grasses or postburn environments.

Climate change acts as a performance enhancer, and understandably, it claims most of the attention because it's global and its reach extends beyond flames. But the argument over whether climate or land use is more critical is misguided: They both derive, independently, from the conversion to a fossil-fuel society. Megafires, it seems, feed on modernity as hurricanes feed on warm oceans.

In the U.S., the pyric transition sparked a wave of monster fires that rode the rails of settlement — fires an order of magnitude larger and more lethal than those of recent decades. Land clearing and logging slash fed serial conflagrations, which blew up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — the waning decades of the Little Ice Age.

This havoc inspired the federal government to intervene to end the environmental wreckage, spare watersheds and shield communities, all under the aegis of conservation, which became a global project. Fire control was regarded as foundational; suppressing fires became an index of success. Led by foresters, the belief spread that fire on landscapes could be replaced, as was happening in cities, or caged, as it was in furnaces and dynamos.

With natural fire and traditional burning removed from the landscape, the population of fires fell to the point where flames could no longer do the ecological work required. Instead of reducing risk, landscapes became prone to more explosive burning as fuels accumulated on them over decades.

Now, too much fossil biomass is burned to be absorbed within ancient ecological bounds. Fuels in the living landscape pile up and rearrange themselves. The climate is unhinged. When flame returns, as it must, it too often comes as wildfire.

Welcome to the Pyrocene

Widen the aperture a bit, and we can envision Earth entering a fire age comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lakes, periglacial outwash plains, mass extinctions and sea-level changes. It's an epoch in which fire is both prime mover and principal expression.

Humanity's firepower underpins the Anthropocene, which is the outcome not just of anthropogenic meddling but of a particular kind of meddling, made possible by humans' species monopoly over fire. Even climate history has become a subset of fire history.

Fires in living landscapes, fires burning lithic landscapes — the interaction of these two realms of fire has not been much studied. It's been enough of a stretch to fully include human fire practices within traditional ecology. Yet humans — the keystone species for fire on Earth — are merging the two arenas of earthly burning with a give and take that is reshaping the planet in what resembles a slow-motion Ragnarok.

Add up all the effects, direct and indirect: the ice driven off by fire, the areas burning, the biogeographical migrations as biotas move to accommodate changed conditions, the collateral impacts with damaged watersheds and airsheds, the unraveling of ecosystems, the pervasive power of climate change, rising sea levels, a mass extinction, the disruption of human life and habitats. The result is a pyrogeography that looks eerily like an ice age for fire. You have a maturing Pyrocene.

If you doubt it, just ask California.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The goal of the 2021 Global Methane Pledge is bold: cut methane emissions by 30% by the end of the decade. This is to buy us vital time to work on cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Over 150 nations have now signed up to the pledge — representing more than half of the world's emissions of an extremely potent but short-lived greenhouse gas.

To put the pledge into action, many leaders announced policies to cut methane. However, the latest research shows global methane emissions are still rising rapidly. Atmospheric concentrations are now growing faster than at any other time since global record-keeping began about 40 years ago.

These findings are published today in our fourth global methane budget, in a paper and pre-print research undertaken through the Global Carbon Project, with contributions from 66 research institutions around the world.

Natural sources of methane include decaying organic matter in wetlands. But humans have supercharged methane emissions. We tracked changes in all major sources and sinks of this potent greenhouse gas and found humans are now responsible for two-thirds or more of all global emissions.

This is a problem, but we can improve upon it. Cutting methane emissions is one of the best and only short-term levers we can pull to slow the rate of climate change.

Related: The 165-year reign of oil is coming to an end. But will we ever be able to live without it?

Why is methane so important?

After carbon dioxide, methane is the second most important greenhouse gas contributing to human-driven global warming.

Although human activities emit much less methane than carbon dioxide in real terms, methane has a hidden punch — it's 80 times as effective as CO₂ in trapping heat in the first two decades after it reaches the atmosphere.

Since the pre-industrial era, the world has heated up by 1.2°C (taken as an average of the past 10 years). Methane is responsible for about 0.5°C of warming, according to the latest reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the atmosphere, methane rapidly mixes with oxygen and converts into carbon dioxide and water. By contrast, carbon dioxide is a much more stable molecule and will stay in the atmosphere, trapping heat, for thousands of years until absorbed by ocean and plants.

The combination of short lifespan and extreme potency make methane an excellent candidate for efforts to rapidly tackle climate change.

Methane is not slowing

In the early-to-mid-2000s, methane emissions growth rates actually fell. Analyses suggest it was driven by a combination of reduced fossil fuels emissions and chemical changes in the atmosphere's capacity to destroy methane.

Since then, however, methane has surged. Methane emissions from human activities increased by 50-60 million tonnes per year over the two decades to 2018-2020 — a 15-20% increase.

This doesn't mean atmospheric methane goes up by the same amount, as methane is constantly being broken down.

During the 2000s, an extra 6.1 million tonnes of methane entered the atmosphere each year. By the 2010s, the rate of growth was 20.9 million tonnes. In 2020, growth hit 42 million tonnes. Since then, methane has been added even more rapidly. Growth rates are now higher than any previously observed year.

Where does the methane come from?

Human activities such as farming livestock, coal mining, extracting and handling natural gas, growing rice in paddies, and putting organic waste in landfills contribute about 65% of all methane emissions. Of this, agriculture (livestock and rice paddies) contributes 40%, fossil fuels 36%, and landfills and wastewater 17%.

Methane emissions from fossil fuels are now comparable to livestock emissions. The fastest growing contributors are from landfill and fossil fuels (think natural gas escaping during extraction and processing).

Our impact is even higher when we account for indirect emissions such as the leaching of organic matter into waterways and wetlands, the construction of reservoirs, and the impacts of human-driven climate change on wetlands.

In 2020, human activities led to emissions of between 370 and 384 million tonnes of methane.

The remaining emissions come from natural sources, primarily the decomposition of plant matter in wetlands, rivers, lakes, and water-saturated soils. Tropical wetlands are particularly large emitters. The world's large areas of permafrost (permanently frozen ground) also produce methane, but at relatively low rates. As permafrost melts due to higher temperatures, this is changing.

Regional contributions and trends

Who emits most? By volume, the top five nations in 2020 were China (16%), India (9%), the United States (7%), Brazil (6%) and Russia (5%). The fastest-growing areas are China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

European nations have begun to lower their emissions over the last two decades, due to efforts to cut emissions from landfill and waste, followed by smaller cuts in fossil fuels and farming. Australia may also be lowering emissions mainly from farming and waste.

What does this mean for net zero?

Unchecked methane emissions are bad news. Recent observed atmospheric concentrations of methane are consistent with climate scenarios with up to 3°C of warming by 2100.

To keep global temperatures well-below 2°C — the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement — means cutting methane emissions as rapidly as possible. Methane has to be cut almost in half (45%) by 2050 to achieve that goal.

It's not an impossible problem. We now have have methods of rapidly cutting methane for every sector.

The oil and gas sector could cut their emissions 40% at no net cost, according to the International Energy Agency.

In agriculture, we can achieve rapid reductions by feed additives to reduce methane belched from cows, sheep, goats and buffalo, and by mid-season drainage in rice paddies.

Capturing landfill methane and using it for energy production or heat is now well established.

Three years ago, the world committed to slash methane emissions. Our findings show that we need to rapidly accelerate solutions across the globe to address and reduce methane emissions.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Many countries have seen extremely hot weather lately, but in most of the inhabited world, it's never going to get "too hot for people to live here," especially in relatively dry climates.

When it's hot outside in dry places, most of the time our bodies can cool off by evaporating water and heat from our skin as sweat.

However, there are places where it occasionally gets dangerously hot and humid, especially where hot deserts are right next to the warm ocean. When the air is humid, sweat doesn't evaporate as quickly, so sweating doesn't cool us the way it does in drier environments.

In parts of the Middle East, Pakistan and India, summer heat waves can combine with humid air that blows in off the sea, and this combination can be truly deadly. Hundreds of millions of people live in those regions, most without access to indoor air conditioning.

Scientists like me use a "wet bulb thermometer" to get a better sense of this risk. A wet bulb thermometer allows water to evaporate by blowing ambient air over a damp cloth. If the wet bulb temperature is over 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius), and even at lower levels, the human body won't be able to let enough heat out. Prolonged exposure to such combined heat and humidity can be fatal.

During a severe heat wave in 2023, wet bulb temperatures were very high over the lower Mississippi Valley, though they didn't reach fatal levels. In Delhi, India, where air temperatures were over 120 degree F (49 C) for several days in May 2024, the wet bulb temperatures came close, and several people died from suspected heatstroke in the hot and humid weather. In conditions like that, everyone has to take precautions.

Is it climate change?

When people burn carbon — whether it's coal in a power plant or gasoline in a vehicle — it creates carbon dioxide (CO2). This invisible gas builds up in the atmosphere and traps the sun's warmth near the Earth's surface.

The result is what we mean by "climate change."

Every bit of coal, oil or gas that ever gets burned adds a little bit more to the temperature. As temperatures rise, dangerously hot and humid weather has begun to spread to more places.

Areas of the U.S. Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas are increasingly at risk of dangerous hot and humid conditions in summer, as are heavily irrigated areas of the desert Southwest where water sprayed over farm fields adds moisture to the atmosphere.

Climate change causes a lot more problems than just hot, sweaty weather.

Hot air evaporates a lot more water, so crops, forests and landscapes in some areas dry out, which makes them more susceptible to wildfire. Each Celsius degree of warming can cause a sixfold increase in wildfire over parts of the western U.S.

Warming also makes ocean water expand, which can flood coastal regions. Rising sea levels threaten to displace as many as 2 billion people by 2100.

All of these impacts mean that climate change threatens the global economy. Continuing to burn coal, oil and gas could cut global incomes by about 25% by the end of the century, according to one estimate.

Good news and bad news

There's both bad news and good news about climate change in the future.

The bad news is that as long as we keep burning carbon, it will continue to get hotter and hotter.

The good news is that we can substitute clean energy, like solar and wind power, for burning carbon to power the products and services of modern life.

There's been tremendous progress in the past 15 years in making clean energy reliable and affordable, and almost every country on Earth has now agreed to stop climate change before too much damage is done.

Just as our ancestors built better lives by switching from outhouses to indoor plumbing, we will avoid making our world unlivable by switching from coal, oil and gas to clean energy.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A dramatic spike in atmospheric methane over the past 16 years may be a sign that Earth's climate could flip within decades, scientists have warned.

Large amounts of methane wafting from tropical wetlands into Earth's atmosphere could trigger warming similar to the "termination" events that ended ice ages — replacing frosty expanses of tundra with tropical savanna, a new study finds. Researchers first detected a strange peak in methane emissions in 2006, but until now, it was unclear where the gas was leaking from and if it constituted a novel trend.

"A termination is a major reorganization of the Earth's climate system," study lead author Euan Nisbet, a professor emeritus of Earth sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, told Live Science. "These repeated changes have taken the world from ice ages into the sort of interglacial we have now."

Ice age terminations typically occur in three phases, which are recorded in ice cores going back 800,000 years. The initial phase is characterized by a gradual rise in methane and CO2, leading to global warming over a few thousand years. This is followed by a sharp increase in temperatures fueled by a burst of methane, leveling off in a third phase lasting several thousand years.

Related: New map of methane 'super-emitters' shows some of the largest methane clouds ever seen

"Within the termination, which takes thousands of years, there's this abrupt phase, which only takes a few decades," Nisbet said. "During that abrupt phase, the methane soars up and it's probably driven by tropical wetlands."

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas released both by human activities — including fossil-fuel burning, landfills and agriculture — and natural processes, such as decomposition in wetlands. Human emissions soared in the 1980s with the expansion of the natural gas industry and stabilized in the 1990s, Nisbet said.

But in late 2006, something "very, very odd" happened, he said. Methane started rising again, but there was no dramatic shift in human activity to blame — and researchers were left scratching their heads. Then, in 2013, Nisbet and his colleagues realized this rise was accelerating. By 2020, methane was increasing at the fastest rate on record, he said.

"It looks as if there's a big, new methane source turning on," Nisbet said.

A flurry of studies since 2019 has linked the strange spike to soaring emissions from tropical wetlands, predominantly in Africa. A "significant change" in tropical weather ascribed to human-caused climate change has led wetlands to get bigger and more plants to grow there, thus leading to more decomposition — a process that produces methane, Nisbet said.

In the new study, published July 14 in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Nisbet and colleagues compared current trends in atmospheric methane to the abrupt phase of warming during ice age terminations.

"The closest analogy we have to what we think is happening today is these terminations," Nisbet said. 

While the evidence remains inconclusive, the scale of such a shift in climate is worth pondering, he added. In the past, terminations have flipped vast expanses of icy tundra in the Northern Hemisphere into tropical grasslands roamed by hippos, Nisbet said. There is no way to know what a termination could signify today, given that we are not in an ice age. "We're not saying we've got proof this is happening, but we're raising the question."

Regardless of whether termination-scale climate shifts are on the horizon, tackling methane emissions should be high on our list of priorities, Nisbet said. "We can do a great deal to bring down methane," he said, and this includes plugging gas leaks, and tackling emissions from manure, landfill and crop waste.

Earth is being choked by a thick, curling fog of carbon dioxide that coats the planet as the months go by, a series of NASA videos shows. The newly released animations visualize the astonishing scale of human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over a year by coloring the invisible greenhouse gas.

The animations were produced by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio and show CO2 emissions, which are cooking the planet, during the year 2021, with contributions from various human and natural sources highlighted in different colors.

In the animations, emissions from fossil fuel combustion are shown in orange, and those from burning biomass — living or dead vegetation burned to clear land for agriculture or set on fire by lightning, for example — appear in red. Carbon dioxide produced by land ecosystems through plant respiration is depicted in green, and emissions escaping from the oceans are in blue.

The model also shows where CO2 is absorbed by marine and land ecosystems, such as rainforests, via photosynthesis (in the oceans, this is done by algae). Collectively, these natural ecosystems soak up half of human emissions every year and play a vital role in mitigating climate change by periodically acting as carbon "sinks."

Related: New map of methane 'super-emitters' shows some of the largest methane clouds ever seen

"Though the land and oceans are each carbon sinks in a global sense, individual locations can be sources at different times," scientists noted in a NASA statement.

The three videos present the ebb and flow of CO2 across different regions of the world and highlight where the gas is emitted and absorbed over the course of a year.

In an animation featuring North and South America, a yellowish-brown cloud representing emissions from fossil fuels and burning biomass gradually builds in the Northern Hemisphere. Even on such a large scale, emissions can be attributed to specific regions.

"Some interesting features include fossil fuel emissions from the northeastern urban corridor that extends from Washington D.C. to Boston in the United States," scientists wrote in the statement.

Small green streaks that show emissions from land ecosystems curl in and out of this cloud during the winter months. That's because plants that absorb CO2 through photosynthesis during the growing season release much of this carbon in the wintertime, according to the statement.

The dotted green surface pulsing across South America depicts the absorption of CO2 by trees, which occurs only during the day. "The fast oscillation over the Amazon rainforest shows the impact of plants absorbing carbon while the sun is shining and then releasing it during nighttime hours," the scientists wrote in the statement.

A second animation covers parts of Asia and Australia. "The most notable feature is fossil fuel emissions from China," the statement said. Australia acts mainly as a carbon sink — as illustrated by flashing, green dots across most of the country — because the relatively sparse population emits less CO2 than its neighbors. Toward the end of the animation, the cloud of fossil fuel emissions from the Northern Hemisphere drifts southward and envelopes Australia too.

What the NASA video doesn't show is that Australia has the world's highest CO2 emissions from coal per person. 

The third video highlights Africa, Europe and the Middle East, with the vast majority of fossil fuel emissions produced in Europe and Saudi Arabia. Wispy red clouds hovering over central Africa depict emissions from fires that people light to clear leftover crops, according to the statement.

While CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change, fires contribute to global warming by reducing the amount of carbon that land ecosystems will soak up in the future, according to the statement. That's because charred soils lock up less carbon, and because fires diminish the density and size of trees. 

Steel manufacturing is a critical industry, creating the building blocks for so much of the world. But the steel industry also comes with considerable impacts, producing as much as seven percent of global CO2 emissions, thereby contributing significantly to global climate change. SSAB has found a cleaner way to produce steel without fossil fuels and massive carbon emissions. The byproduct of its process: water.

SSAB is highlighting the cleanliness of its steelmaking process by bottling some of the water , calling it Pure Waste (normally it is recycled to produce new hydrogen). SSAB Chief Technology Officer Martin Pei even took a bottle with him to COP27 to take a drink and demonstrate the paradigm shift SSAB’s technology presents. 

To create its fossil-free steel, SSAB’s HYBRIT technology uses hydrogen to reduce iron ore into sponge iron with significantly improved properties and quality. Hydrogen replaces the carbon and coke that would normally have been used in this process, so instead of seeing CO2 as a byproduct, SSAB just sees water as a byproduct. That water isn’t even a waste product, as it will be used to generate more hydrogen.

This carbon-free direct reduced iron is highly metallized and has excellent mechanical and aging properties, and it’s also ready for carbon-free processing into steel in an electrical arc furnace power with fossil-free electricity, continuing the manufacturing process in a fossil fuel-free manner.

While SSAB plans to produce steel using its HYBRIT technology, it alone can’t reduce the steel industry's significant carbon emissions. SSAB CTO Pei explains:

”The world is at a precipice of climate change. We have proven that there is a functioning technology to make fossil-free steel. But we cannot change the entire industry ourselves. Others need to act quickly also to keep the Paris Agreement goals alive. I hope that our colleagues in the industry will seize this chance to transform our sector from a climate villain to a climate hero,”

To cut down on the steel industry’s carbon emissions, SSAB needs steel buyers to demand fossil-free steel, and it needs other manufacturers in the industry to reduce their own emissions. 

To this end, SSAB has filed for a portfolio of patents for HYBRIT, making the technology available to the world. SSAB has also created a knowledge sharing platform around HYBRIT in the aims of inspiring and encouraging others in the industry to adopt virtually emissions-free processes. 

To learn more about SSAB’s process, you can check out its seminar at the Hydrogen, Iron & Steelmaking forum or head over to the Pure Waste campaign page.

With the energy crisis roiling the world, sending fuel prices and other costs soaring, you may wonder where your energy comes from. Crude oil, in particular, is a pretty useful substance. Around the world, just over 95 million barrels of the stuff are used every single day, according to Statista, and by 2026, that figure could rise to 104 million barrels.

But what exactly is this "black gold"?

Crude oil is one of the three main fossil fuels, along with coal and natural gas, Ann Muggeridge, a professor in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, told Live Science in an email.

Related: How do we turn oil into plastic? 

Fossil fuels are "the chemicals that are produced after the dead remains of plants and animals are compressed and heated under the Earth for a long period," said Paul Glover, a professor and chair of petrophysics at the University of Leeds in the U.K.

High temperatures and pressures, when applied to organic matter over an extended period of time, "induce chemical changes such as dehydrations, which result in the loss of almost all the oxygen originally present in the biomass," added Michael North, a professor of green organic chemistry at the University of York in the U.K. 

The resulting material can be a solid (coal), liquid (crude oil) or gas (natural gas).

So, where can crude oil be found, and what can it be used for? 

"Crude oil is more plentiful in the parts of the world that were oceans tens of millions of years ago and where ancient organic deposits were buried deeply enough that the material was 'cooked' to high enough temperatures to convert it into oil," Muggeridge told Live Science. 

These areas would largely have been tropical, as such climates "facilitate plant growth," North said. However, as a result of continental drift, regions that had tropical climates tens of thousands of years ago "are not necessarily the ones that do now," North noted. 

According to World Population Review, an organization that uses data and analytics to highlight global trends and statistics, the country with the most oil reserves is Venezuela, which has an estimated 300.9 billion barrels. Second on the list is Saudi Arabia, with approximately 266.5 billion barrels, and third place is occupied by Canada, with around 169.70 billion barrels. In this context, a 'barrel' is equal to 42 U.S. gallons, or around 159 liters, according to the University of Calgary. Each barrel, when full, weighs in the region of 300 pounds (136 kilograms).

But extracting crude oil is not a simple task, and it can be challenging to locate its various hiding spots deep underground.

"Before oil can be produced from a reservoir, we first have to find the reservoir," Muggeridge said. "This is not simple. Although most reservoirs are quite large — several kilometers across, and perhaps 50 meters [164 feet] thick — they are generally located between 1 km and 12 km [0.6 and 7.5 miles] underground."

Related: How do we tell the difference between geologic ages?

Geophysicists can only "see" these potential reserves by sending seismic waves through the Earth, Muggeridge said. As these waves reflect off the different layers of rock underground, they create a map of the underlying rock (or reservoir) composition. However, even when using very powerful computers, it is difficult to be "absolutely sure" there is oil underground until a well is drilled and experts can "identify oil in the drill cuttings," she added.

Drill cuttings are pieces of material removed from a hole that has been bored deep into the ground. By analyzing these shards, experts can note what is being drilled through — a process known as mud logging — and ultimately determine whether oil is present.

Drilling a well can take many months. In some cases, drilling projects can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and, once an oil field has been discovered, it may then be "several more years" before it is fully productive, Muggeridge said.

In places like Saudi Arabia and Texas, much of the oil is found on land, not far beneath Earth's surface. "The closer to the surface the oil is, the easier it will be to drill down to it. Drilling on land is much less work than drilling through water," North said.

Crude oil is an incredibly valuable resource, both financially, and also in terms of its many uses. Once refined it can be separated into "usable petroleum products" such as gasoline, jet fuel, asphalt and diesel fuel, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

While crude oil is immensely useful, its extraction is harming the planet. According to a study published in 2018 in the journal Science, "the extraction, transport and refining of crude oil" could account for as much as 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions that come from transport fuels, and 5% of total global emissions. 

What's more, extracting crude oil often harms the local wildlife and environment. 

Because most oil is less dense than water, spills often float on the surface, and so can negatively impact birds, fish and plants "through physical contact, ingestion, inhalation and absorption," according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

However, products derived from crude oil, if developed for purposes other than fuel, could conceivably be used without being quite so devastating to the climate. "While hydrocarbons as a raw material does cause some environmental damage, it also provides most aspects of our modern convenient lives," Glover told Live Science.

For instance, crude oil is a core component in many everyday products, including perfumes, shoe polish, vitamin capsules and paint. These items aren’t burned as fuel. Put another way, once these products are made, they don’t produce carbon dioxide, meaning that they aren't contributing to climate change. However, North added, "these mostly do not biodegrade and so accumulate in the environment," which can cause various problems, such as build-ups of detrimental marine waste and microplastics. 

According to research carried out by Kyushu University in Japan, there are at least 24 trillion pieces of microplastics in our oceans, though other sources suggest there could be as many as 51 trillion. These microplastics are so pervasive, they've even been found in human poop, Live Science previously reported.

Crude oil, along with other fossil fuels, "have allowed human civilization to develop from pre-industrial times to where we are today," North said. But he believes that change is needed. "We cannot continue exploiting [fossil fuels] the way we have for the last 100 years," North said. "They should be seen as a stepping stone from a non-industrialised society to one based on sustainable resources. The time has come to phase them out completely."

Originally published on Live Science.

After months of volatility and concern, it was revealed that energy costs for the average household in the UK will increase by £693 this year. A steep rise, it came as wholesale gas prices jumped to about 300% higher than at the beginning of 2021. These are historically high levels, never reached before in the UK.

And like so many issues facing society at the beginning of 2022, the influence of COVID is never far away. For although household energy bills include taxes and green levies, a major reason for the recent upward trajectory of gas prices is to do with changes in supply and demand.

Put simply, lockdowns and social restrictions over the last two years, when so many industries and events were forced to grind to a halt, led to a decrease in demand for energy. And as demand fell, so did supply.

Then, as restrictions began to ease, demand jumped. In particular, the hospitality and travel sectors enjoyed a recovery which contributed to rapidly increasing demand for energy.

Reaching for renewables

But it is difficult to suddenly increase supply to meet a rise in demand, so prices went up.

The supply side of the gas market has become increasingly complex in recent years. This is partly due to international political factors, but also the drive to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and switch to more sustainable energy sources to meet climate change commitments.

This deliberate change, away from hydrocarbons in favour of sustainable sources like wind, biofuels and solar power, makes it harder for gas suppliers to predict market needs. In the third quarter of 2021 for example, the UK generated about 38% of its electricity from renewable sources, which was less than in 2020 due to substantially less wind.

Despite all of this, the majority of the UK’s electricity production still comes from fossil fuels. And for at least the next ten years, gas will continue to be an essential part of the UK’s energy policy. Now more than ever, that comes at a hefty price.

Reaching for renewables

Until fairly recently, much of the UK’s supply came from domestic sources in the North Sea, but that has been in decline since the turn of the century. Part of the reason for the decline is that the remaining UK gas and oil fields tend to be relatively small and dispersed around the North Sea.

So every time one source is exhausted, the producer needs to assess the case for starting up extraction from another source. But these sources are becoming less accessible, more expensive to extract from, and therefore less competitive.

As part of the response to climate change, there is now less enthusiasm for offering the licenses to open new fields. But the problem is that the UK won’t become self-sufficient in renewable energy for many decades.

It now is heavily reliant on foreign sources, especially Norway, which has substantial gas reserves and is relatively near, which reduces transport costs.

But it is in the interests of gas exporters around the world to keep prices high, to maximize profits, so they have arguably been slow to increase production. (In the same way, Opec (the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) has limited the supply of oil to maintain price levels.)

A further supply problem involves the cap on gas prices imposed by the UK government in 2019. This led to a number of providers collapsing when the wholesale gas price rose above the original cap, reducing competition in the industry. And although the capped price level has been renegotiated this year to a higher level, it may still mean that prices charged by the suppliers are below the market rate.

All of this means it is unlikely that UK households will see a significant drop in energy prices any time soon, as demand continues to increase. Although it is dependent on international supply and demand, the current problems could continue for the foreseeable future.

Longer term though, there is a glimmer of hope from the government’s pledge to decarbonize electricity generation by 2035, with a rapid increase in renewable energy production. Current high prices for fossil fuels could and should act as a motivation to increase investment in renewable sources, which would reduce the problems of supply at the same time as ensuring energy security and a gradual reduction in prices.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. 

The United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) begins Sunday (Oct. 31) in Glasgow, and the outcome may determine whether the world moves closer to a net-zero carbon economy by 2050. 

The climate conference will bring together delegates from around the world to discuss their plans for reducing emissions and limiting climate change. The key question is whether nations will expand their commitment to the Paris Agreement, an international plan set in 2015 that aims to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, and preferably below 1.5 C (2.7 F) by 2100. 

Though 197 parties to the 2015 conference agreed to the Paris Agreement, commitments by nations to reduce emissions are not sufficient to stabilize the climate below 1.5 C. Climate scientists say that to reach this goal, the globe would need to rapidly shelve fossil fuels as an energy source, achieving a 45% reduction over 2010 levels by 2030 and hitting net zero in 2050. Politicians within member nations have not always been as committed as the original signers of the agreement: In 2019, the United States exited the Paris Agreement under President Donald Trump, Live Science reported. President Joe Biden re-committed to the agreement upon taking office in 2021. 

Related: 10 Signs Earth’s climate is off the rails

The goals of COP26, according to the organizers, are to get countries to agree to plans for ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030; to work together to support adaptation to climate change that has already occurred; to mobilize developed countries to provide $100 billion in climate finance per year for investment in global net zero, meaning the amount of emissions we produce is no more than the amount removed by the atmosphere. The final goal would be  to finalize the Paris Rulebook, the step-by-step guide on reaching the Paris Agreement. 

The COP meeting happens every year (this year's is the 26th ever). But eyes are on this year's conference: As part of the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to provide an update every five years on their highest ambitions for reducing emissions. That should have occurred in 2020, but that year's COP meeting was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. Thus, those updates will occur in Glasgow this year. 

All countries are also asked to provide an "Adaptation Communication," which will outline the challenges that each faces in adapting to a changing climate, and what they plan to do to overcome those hurdles. 

Nations, especially developed nations, will also be asked to put their money where their mouth is. The Paris Agreement committed developed countries to raising $100 billion each year to help developing countries finance their climate goals. According to the intergovernmental Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), developed nations provided a joint total of $78.9 billion in financing in 2018. 

The delegates to COP26 will also attempt to finalize the Paris Rulebook, much of which was formally adopted in 2018 at the UN COP24 conference in Poland. But there are still a few outstanding guidelines at play. One of the most crucial outstanding issues is that countries still need to agree upon how to ensure that emissions reductions aren't double-counted. Part of the structure underpinning the Paris Agreement is carbon markets: Countries or companies that have a hard time reducing emissions, like airlines, can buy emissions credits from companies that are more capable of reducing emissions. This should create a balance that keeps overall emissions low. 

But it's very easy for double-dipping to occur: Imagine if a U.S.-based company like Amazon converted its delivery vans to electric-only. Both Amazon and the U.S. might try to claim carbon credits for the resulting reduction in emissions. Without clear rules preventing this, the carbon markets could end up enabling more emissions, not fewer, according to climate policy experts.

There are signs that COP26 faces strong headwinds in meeting these goals. Leaked documents acquired by the BBC reveal that some developed nations are lobbying against the financial goals and hoping to downplay the need to move away from fossil fuels.

Originally published on Live Science.

Nearly 60% of the world's oil and methane gas reserves and 90% of its coal reserves must remain in the ground by 2050 in order to meet the climate goals set by the Paris Agreement, a new study finds.

Leaving these fossil fuel reserves untouched would give the world a 50% chance of limiting the increase in global average temperatures to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels, according to the study, published Wednesday (Sept. 8) in the journal Nature. 

"If we want a higher chance of staying below 1.5 C, then we have to, of course, keep more carbon in the ground, more fossil fuels in the ground," study co-author James Price, a research associate at the University College London (UCL) Energy Institute, told reporters at a news conference Tuesday (Sept. 7).  

Related: The reality of climate change: 10 myths busted 

"I think this is a very important study" in that the work lays out, in concrete terms, what it really would take to meet goals set by the Paris Agreement, said Maisa Rojas, a co-author of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report and a climate scientist at the University of Chile, who was not involved in the new study. 

"This is what it means — that there is a lot of fossil fuel that we cannot extract," Rojas said.

In 2015, parties to the Paris Agreement pledged to limit the increase in global average temperatures to well below 3.6 F (2 C) above preindustrial levels. Ideally, they aim to limit the increase to less than 2.7 F; limiting warming to this degree would slow, or even stop, some of the impacts of climate change that we're already seeing unfold, Live Science previously reported.

But to meet these goals, models suggest that the world should ideally reach net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050. That means major changes need to be made right away, according to a report the IPCC released last month. In the first installment of its Sixth Assessment Report, the IPCC concluded that if average global temperatures continue to rise at current rates, we'll soon surpass an 2.7 F increase and hit 3.6 F of warming above preindustrial levels by 2050. 

"Achieving global net zero CO2 emissions is a requirement for stabilizing CO2-induced global surface temperature increase," the IPCC report authors wrote. How do we reach net zero? The new Nature study highlights a critical step: We must cut the amount of fossil fuels we pull from the ground.

"We believe our new paper adds further weight to recent research that indicates the global oil and fossil methane gas production needs to peak now," first author Dan Welsby, an energy and environment researcher at UCL, said during the news conference. Specifically, the authors found that global oil and gas production needs to decline at an average annual rate of around 3% through 2050.

"For oil, this is a significant increase [from what] was found by a previous UCL study," published in 2015 in the journal Nature, Welsby noted. That study found that, to prevent global average temperatures from rising by more than 3.6 F, about a third of oil reserves, 50% of gas reserves and more than 80% of coal reserves would need to remain in the ground. 

The new study also suggests that, "for coal, all regions need to have already reached peak production," Welsby said. On a somewhat promising note, studies suggest that global coal production already peaked in 2013, the authors noted. To meet the targets set forth in their paper, current coal production rates would need to fall by around 6% per year through 2050, Welsby said.

Related: 10 signs that Earth's climate is off the rails

These estimates come with a degree of uncertainty, Price noted at the news conference. For example, as temperatures rise, carbon released from melting permafrost could cause ripple effects in the carbon cycle, the process by which carbon atoms move between reservoirs on Earth. These kinds of shifts can make plants less efficient at pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis, meaning efforts to limit fossil fuel production may need to ramp up in order to compensate, Rojas said. 

In addition, the authors' climate model assumes that, each year, a certain amount of carbon will be sucked out of the atmosphere by carbon dioxide removal technologies. "However, there is substantial uncertainty as to whether these largely unproven technologies can be deployed as quickly, and at the scale required," Price said. The world's largest CO2-sucking plant opened in Iceland just this week, but in general, experts agree that these pricey technologies are not a viable replacement for cutting CO2 emissions on the front end, Gizmodo reported.

Given these uncertainties in the model, "the bleak picture painted by our scenarios for the global fossil fuel industry is very probably an underestimate of what is required," the authors wrote in the Nature study. "As a result, production would need to be curtailed even faster" than predicted. 

But given the IPCC's latest report, can fossil fuel production and demand be curtailed dramatically enough that we avoid a global temperature increase of 2.7 F by 2050? 

In reality, "it may well be the case that we'll surpass 1.5 degrees globally, around midcentury," Price said. But in anticipation of the third installment of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, which will address strategies to mitigate warming, "much of the modeling that goes on there will assume some overshoot above 1.5 degrees, and then we'll return to 1.5 degrees at some stage in the second half of the century," he said. In other words, even if the warming were to exceed 2.7 F at some point, efforts to rein in fossil fuel extraction now would still pay off in the long run.     

"Really, what the future will look like will depend … on our decisions today,"  Rojas told Live Science. "This will all really depend on policies." These policies should include initiatives that both restrict fossil fuel production and reduce demand on the consumer side, study co-author Steve Pye, an associate professor of energy systems at the UCL Energy Institute, said at the news conference. For instance, moratoriums on production and bans on new exploration could curb fossil fuel extraction, while steep carbon pricing could target the consumer side, the authors wrote.

In this vein, Denmark and Costa Rica recently entered an agreement to phase out their domestic oil and gas production, and international agreements like theirs could be key to success on a global scale, Pye said. Of course, countries whose economies rely heavily on fossil fuel production will face the greatest challenges in decarbonizing, and ideally, international partners would help to support them through the transition, he said.

Originally published on Live Science. 

A massive fire has broken out at one of Indonesia's largest oil refineries, creating a towing inferno and dark plumes of smoke and toxic fumes. Some experts say lightning could have sparked the fire and explosion.

At least 20 people have been injured, five of whom are in intensive care after suffering severe burns, and around 950 local residents have also been evacuated from their homes, according to the BBC. Three people are still missing and another is reported to have died from a heart attack during the traumatic event, according to the Guardian.

The fire began at 12:45 a.m. local time on Monday, March 29 (1:45 p.m. ET Sunday March 28) at the Balongan refinery on the island of West Java; the refinery is capable of processing 125,000 barrels of crude oil per day, most of which is sent to the capital Jakarta 140 miles (225 kilometers) to the west, according to Reuters.

Related: 7 surprising uses of oil

Firefighters managed to contain the blaze to just four of the 72 gasoline storage units at the site and stop the inferno from spreading across the entire facility, according to Reuters. But the fire still continues to burn and produce dense clouds of black smoke. 

"The cause of the fire is not known with certainty, but at the time of the incident, it was raining heavily accompanied by lightning," Pertamina — the state-owned oil company that runs the refinery — said in a statement.

However, the local police suspect that oil may have leaked out of one of the tanks and was then ignited by the lightning.

"Initial information we received is that there was a leak at the plant," Ahmad Dofiri, chief of police for West Java, told Reuters. "While the leak was being handled, the lightning struck."

Reports from evacuated residents also support the theory that leaked oil may have been ignited by lightning.

"We smelled a strong fuel scent first, so strong that my nose hurt," a local woman known only as Susi told local news channel Metro TV, according to Reuters. "We heard lightning strikes, suddenly the sky was orange."

As soon as the flames have been completely extinguished, local authorities will begin a full investigation to figure out how the fire started, according to Pertamina. The company also said that the refinery will be up and running soon and assured the public that there will be no shortage of oil in the country.

"The main equipment at the refinery is not affected," Nicke Widyawati, CEO and director of Pertamina, told Reuters. "We hope the plant can be operational again soon after we put out the fire so there are no disruptions to supply."

Originally published on Live Science.

Renewable energy comes from sources that are replenished naturally, such as the sun and wind. Traditional energy sources, like coal and oil, are finite and when burned, release carbon in the form of carbon dioxide and methane — two greenhouse gases that significantly contribute to the acceleration of global climate change. Renewable energy, on the other hand, either does not emit carbon or is carbon neutral, meaning it absorbs as much carbon as it emits.

Related: US could reach 'net zero' carbon by 2050. Here's how.

Why is renewable energy important?

Tapping into sources of renewable energy is a relatively new development in the history of human energy production. Early human ancestors used wood to generate heat energy, then switched to coal, a fuel with higher energy density, as summarized in the textbook "The Cambridge World History" (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Petroleum oil now fuels the majority of the world's transportation industry, including cars, airplanes, boats and trains, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Coal, oil and natural gas are called "fossil fuels" because the products are formed over the course of millennia as heat and pressure transformed the fossilized remains of dead plants and animals trapped underground, according to the Geological Survey Ireland. 

Burning fossil fuels, such as in power plants or cars, releases the carbon that had been trapped underground into the atmosphere. Humanity's dependence on fossil fuels is a leading cause of climate change because of the large amounts of carbon that fossil fuels dump into the atmosphere as they burn.

Related: The human fossil-fuel addiction: Greenhouse emissions soar to record levels

Not only are fossil fuels accelerating global climate change, but the supply is limited, so they're not a sustainable source of energy. Industries, countries and individuals around the world are now turning to renewable energy sources, which either do not produce carbon to generate energy or are carbon neutral, to minimize humanity's contribution to climate change and help make sure our planet has energy for the future.

Types of renewable energy

Here are some of the most common sources of renewable energy, and some concerns about them:

Solar

Solar energy involves converting the sun's radiation into trapped heat, then using that heat to create or sustain a chemical reaction, or generate electricity, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. This can be achieved with photovoltaic solar panels or by concentrating solar-thermal power, which enables solar-generated heat to be stored until energy is needed.  

Although solar energy is free, it's not always available — the sun doesn't shine at night, which often coincides with peak energy demand, according to the University of Calgary. For this reason, the fate of renewable energies such as solar and wind relies on the development of efficient battery storage.

Related: Solar power stations in space could be the answer to our energy needs

There are also environmental concerns about solar energy because some of the chemicals used to manufacture solar panels are toxic to the environment, according to the EIA. The agency's website states that "some solar thermal systems use potentially hazardous fluids to transfer heat. Leaks of these materials could be harmful to the environment."

Wind

Wind turbines are giant windmills with huge blades that get pushed around by the wind. As the blades rotate they spin a generator, which creates electricity. However, environmental groups and scientists are concerned about the impact of wind turbines on local bird and bat populations. 

According to a 2015 review published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, wind turbines kill bats and birds when they fly into the turbine's enormous blades. A 2013 review published in the journal Renewable Energy estimated that wind turbines killed an estimated 20,000 birds in the United States in 2009, while fossil-fuel power stations killed about 14 million birds that year.

Related: How do wind turbines kill birds? 

Electricity production from wind is also not 100% reliable because it depends on whether or not the wind is blowing, and even in the windiest areas there can be wind lulls.

Hydropower

There are a number of ways in which water can be used to create energy. For example, energy can be generated via the free-flow of water in a river or stream, or from water released out of a dam with a higher elevation, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. As the water flows, it turns turbines that generate electricity. Pumped storage is another method of hydropower that involves pumping water into a dam at a higher altitude during off-peak periods and then releasing it to transfer energy to the electricity grid when there is high demand. 

Large dams and reservoirs, however, come with environmental concerns of their own, as these large-scale pieces of infrastructure drastically change water flow and affect local ecosystems, according to American Rivers, a nonprofit organization promoting river conservation. For example, the Itaipu Dam, a hydroelectric dam across the Paraná River between Paraguay and Brazil, was constructed in the 1970s and 1980s and has resulted in a 70% loss of biodiversity in the surrounding river habitat, Michigan State University professor Emilio Moran told the German news agency Deutsche Welle in June 2020. 

But what about the largest body of water on our planet? Although the ocean contains an abundance of wave power, locating and building an efficient power station in the unforgiving saltwater environment presents huge logistical and financial challenges. Nonetheless, researchers and engineers are developing and testing new energy-capture systems with the goal of finding an efficient way to harness the energy of ocean waves, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. 

Geothermal

There are two main methods of tapping into the energy below the Earth's surface. 

One method, known as a geothermal heat pump, is used to heat or cool homes and other buildings. This system works by taking advantage of temperatures just a few feet underground where it's a relatively stable 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 16 degrees Celsius), according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Water-filled pipes are buried between 30 to 100 feet (9 to 30 meters) below ground and are connected to a surface-level pump that circulates the water through the pipes. In cold weather climates, as water is pumped through the warmer pipes in the ground to the cooler pipes in the house, it releases energy in the form of heat, which dissipates into the building, warming it up. Nine out of 10 houses in Iceland heat their houses using this method, according to Iceland's National Energy Authority. Geothermal heat pumps can also be used to help cool buildings down in warmer climates where the below-ground temperature is cooler than the air temperature. 

Related: Magma power: Scientists drill into volcano to harness its energy

Further below Earth's surface are reservoirs of scalding water under extreme pressure from the tons of rock above. Another method of geothermal energy generation uses deep wells to access this water. As the hot water rises to the surface (driven by the pressure decrease) it turns to steam that creates enough force to turn the turbines of a powerstation, similar to the mechanism of a coal-fired powerstation. These deep geothermal vents produce substantially less toxic gas and 99% less carbon emissions than coal-fired power stations, according to the EIA.

Biofuel

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a nonprofit organization promoting sustainable energy, defines biomass as "living or recently dead organisms and any byproducts of those organisms, plant or animal. The term is generally understood to exclude coal, oil and other fossilized remnants of organisms, as well as soils." These biomass products absorb energy and carbon during their lifetime and are then burned for fuel, similar to fossil fuels, or converted into liquid fuel.

Related: Are biofuels worse than gasoline for the climate? 

Biofuel, or energy created from burning biomass, is one of the more controversial renewable energy options because of its dependence on farms, forests and other ecosystems as sources of biomass. The largest agricultural biofuel industries, for example, turn crops such as sugar cane and soybeans into energy rather than selling the crops as food. But agriculture is a carbon-intense industry, which means those biofuels aren't exactly environmentally friendly. Using food crops for biofuel also threatens food security as biofuel crops affect the price and availability of food crops, according to a 2010 NATO report.  

Is renewable energy cheaper or more expensive than traditional forms of energy?

In the first quarter of 2020, renewables accounted for 28% of global electricity generation, according to the International Energy Agency, an autonomous intergovernmental organization. Coal and gas, however, remain the global mainstays, representing 60% of global electricity supply.

A major impediment to the uptake of renewable energy has been its price tag, but as these technologies mature, their costs have decreased significantly. Between 2010 and 2019, the cost of solar panel technology dropped 82%, followed by concentrating solar power at 47%, onshore wind at 40% and offshore wind at 29%, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental organization.

More than half of the renewable capacity added in 2019 achieved lower electricity costs than new coal generation, and new solar and wind projects are undercutting the cheapest of existing coal-fired plants, according to IRENA's 2019 report.

Can renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels?

Considering how heavily humanity still depends on fossil fuels, will sources of renewable energy ever replace them? 

"The simple answer is 'yes,'" said Tomas Kåberger, a technology management and economics expert and affiliated professor at Chalmers University in Sweden. The major reason is that industrial technology development has pushed down the price of renewables, particularly wind and solar, allowing them to compete with fossil fuels, Kåberger said. Commercial advances in efficient battery technology, driven by cellphones, laptops and automotive manufacturers, has also led to cost decreases.

Related: This new cellphone uses such little power it doesn't need a battery

We may see a big shift in the next 10 years from fossil fuels to renewable energy, particularly in the electricity generation and transportation industries, said Ken Gillingham, an associate professor of energy economics at Yale University. But in order to accelerate the process, he said, the world needs policy interventions, such as carbon taxes or shifting government subsidies towards energy storage rather than generation.

Without government intervention, "we would get continual uptake of renewable energy over the next decade," Gillingham said, "but it won't, on its own, take us to the level we need to fully decarbonise electricity."

Additional resources: 

• Learn how to conserve energy in your home with tips from the U.S. Department of Energy. 
• Watch a video explainer about hydropower from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.  
• Learn more about geothermal energy from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. 

The Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius is on the brink of an environmental catastrophe after a bulk carrier struck a coral reef off its coast in late July, an accident that has led to a large oil spill visible from space. The accident could lead to an even greater environmental disaster if the ship — whose cargo includes fuel oil, diesel and lubricant oil — breaks apart further, according to news sources.

The ship, the Japanese-owned MV Wakashio, hit a coral reef off Mauritius' southeast coast, near Pointe d'Esny, on July 25. In the weeks since, a crack has appeared on its hull, meaning that the ship's cargo is in jeopardy, a shipment that includes 4,290 tons (3,894 metric tons) of low-sulfur fuel oil, 228 tons (207 metric tons) of diesel and 99 tons (90 metric tons) of lubricant oil, which the ship was carrying from China to Brazil, according to The Swaddle, an Indian news site.

"This is the first time that we are faced with a catastrophe of this kind, and we are insufficiently equipped to handle this problem," Sudheer Maudhoo, the fishing minister of Mauritius told The New York Times. 

Related: In photos: Exxon Valdez oil spill 

The spill didn't happen immediately. The MV Wakashio became stuck when it collided with the coral reef about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) off the Mauritius coast. After the ship ran aground, its crew was safely evacuated. Since then, efforts to stabilize the ship and pump out the oil have failed, all while the Indian Ocean's rough waves have battered the vessel, Maudhoo and environment minister Kavy Ramano told The Guardian.

It wasn't until this past week that oil — spilling from a new crack in the ship's hull — began gushing into Mauritius' blue lagoons — waters that attract international tourists and support the nation's fishing industry, according to The New York Times. 

Images of the oil spill were captured by satellites operated by Maxar Technologies. These images, taken the morning of Aug. 7, show plumes of black oil saturating the lagoon and drifting northwest toward the shore. 

Nagashiki Shipping, the company that owns the MV Wakashio, said that salvage efforts were on hold due to poor sea conditions, but that it was monitoring the situation, The Guardian reported. "Nagashiki Shipping takes its environmental responsibilities extremely seriously and with partner agencies and contractors will make every effort to protect the marine environment and prevent further pollution," the company said in a statement, as reported by The Guardian. Even though the ship is owned by Nagashiki Shipping, the 984-foot-long (300 meters) vessel, built in 2007, flies the Panama flag.

The location of the spill, Pointe d'Esny, is an environmentally sensitive area that is protected under an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands, known as the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance. The area is also close to the Blue Bay Marine Park, a tourist destination, according to The Swaddle.

Several groups are trying to stop the flow of the liquid cargo from the sinking ship. These include the Mauritius National Coast Guard, the environment services company Polyeco and the French island of Reunion.

This oil spill "is likely one of the most terrible ecological crises ever seen on the small island country," Greenpeace Africa said in a statement Friday (Aug. 7), according to Bloomberg Green.

This is not the only oil spill to happen in 2020. At least eight other big spills have happened so far this year, according to a catalogue on Wikipedia. This list includes the May 29 disaster, when Russia declared an emergency after 22,000 tons (20,000 metric tons) of oil spilled into the Arctic Circle, making it one of the largest oil spills in modern Russia.

Originally published on Live Science.

Two European satellites have spotted a catastrophic oil spill in the Arctic Circle.

About 20,000 tons of diesel oil has leaked into a river in the Arctic Circle after a fuel tank at a power plant near the Siberian city of Norilsk collapsed last Friday (May 29). The Russian Investigative Committee has launched an investigation into the incident, as the plant reportedly waited for two days before informing Moscow authorities about the spill, according to the BBC.

As you can see in the animation above, the oil (depicted in red) traveled down the Ambarnaya River on May 31 and June 1. The river flows into Lake Pyasino, which feeds into the Pysaina River. Watching from space, the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission has observed the spill, for which Russia has declared a state of emergency. 

Related: Oil spill hinders space shuttle fuel tank delivery

The spill has contaminated a swath of land that covers roughly 135 square miles (350 square kilometers), according to the BBC. It is believed that ground subsidence, or the sinking or settling of the ground, beneath storage tanks holding fuel at the plant is behind this spill. This incident comes during a time when unusually high temperatures are causing the  Arctic permafrost to melt. 

Copernicus Sentinel-2 is an ESA mission made up of two satellites circling Earth in a sun-synchronous orbit. The satellites monitor and take high-resolution images of Earth's surface. They contribute important data to the European Union's Copernicus program, which focuses on issues including climate change, land monitoring and emergency management. 

• SpaceX's Starlink constellation could swell by 30,000 more satellites
• SpaceX's Starlink broadband service will begin in 2020: report
• 'Whoa, it worked': Elon Musk tweets via SpaceX's Starlink satellites

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Twenty-two thousand tons (20,000 metric tons) of oil products leaked from a Russian industrial power plant into a river in the Arctic Circle on May 29.

Russian president Vladimir Putin declared a state of emergency in the region around the Ambarnaya River, in eastern Russia, due north of Mongolia. According to Reuters, two days passed before local authorities learned of the spill from the Nadezhdinski (also spelled Nadezhdinsky) Metallurgical Plant. Even then, local officials only learned of the spill from social media. Per Reuters, Russian environmental agencies have said 16,500 tons (15,000 metric tons) of oil entered the river system, while an additional 6,500 tons (6,000 metric tons) leaked into the soil.

(These numbers do not perfectly add up to 22,000 tons. Live Science has reached out to Russian state authorities for more precise information.)

Related: The history and science of oil spills

The metallurgical plant is located near Norilsk, a city of 180,000 that sits 190 miles (300 kilometers) north of the Arctic Circle, according to Reuters.

According to Reuters, the spill included both diesel fuel and lubricants.

Putin put blame on Alexander Uss, the region's governor, for the spill, according to CNBC, saying publicly, "What are we to learn about emergency situations from social networks? Are you alright health-wise over there?"

In a statement reported by CNBC, Norilsk Nickel — the company that owns the plant — said that beams supporting a storage tank suddenly sank, triggering the spill. Norilsk Nickel is also the world's largest palladium producer and a major producer of nickel, platinum and copper

"In total, Norilsk Nickel has mobilized 250 personnel and 72 equipment items to work on the liquidation. As of June 3, a total of 262 [metric] tons of diesel fuel has been collected near HHP-3 [the power plant], a total of 800 cubic meters [28,000 cubic feet] of contaminated soil has been removed and approximately 80 [metric] tons of fuel has been collected from the spill to Ambarnaya river," the company said in a statement.

Russian government sources translated by Reuters said the river will need "decades" to recover from the damage. 

In comparison, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound spilled 11 million gallons, or about 346,000 tons (314,000 metric tons) of oil in 1989, while the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico spilled 200 million gallons, or about 6.3 million tons (5.7 million metric tons) of oil in 2010.

• Top ten worst oil spills
• Who owns the arctic?
• Images of melt: See Earth's vanishing ice

Originally published on Live Science.

On Friday (Sept. 20), students around the world will walk out of their classrooms and gather in coordinated protests to highlight the global crisis created by climate change. The goal? To get elected officials and industry leaders to actually act to stop the looming catastrophe. 

Climate change poses a dire threat to humanity, and politicians aren't doing enough to find solutions, protest organizers wrote on the Global Climate Strike website. Greenhouse gas emissions are a primary driver of global warming, but leaders have balked at abandoning fossil fuels, even as global temperatures continue to climb. 

Strikes and protests by students in more than 2,500 locations aim to show that the younger generations won't stand idly by while their future — and their planet — hang in the balance, according to Global Climate Strike.

Related: The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted

The strike follows a summer of extreme weather linked to climate change: unprecedented global heat waves, wildfires and ice loss from glaciers. In July, three studies found that the global climate is changing more quickly than it has in the past 2,000 years, Live Science previously reported.

Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who is currently visiting New York City, is one of the strike's key organizers. Thunberg will speak at a Friday demonstration at Foley Square there at 12 p.m. local time, after which protesters will march to Battery Park, Vox reported.

Thunberg will also address the United Nations (U.N.) Climate Action Summit on Sept. 23. The emergency meeting is being convened so that world leaders can present "concrete, realistic plans" for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of reaching zero emissions by 2050, according to a U.N. statement.

Thousands of protests are planned for Friday — just three days prior to the summit — and collectively, they will be the biggest climate action in history, according to The Guardian.

• 6 Unexpected Effects of Climate Change
• 5 Ways Climate Change Will Affect Your Health
• Photographic Proof of Climate Change: Time-Lapse Images of Retreating Glaciers

Originally published on Live Science.

How can humans limit catastrophic climate change? We can phase out fossil-fuel emitters — such as coal-burning power plants, jet-fuel-slurping planes and gas-thirsty automobiles — once they reach their retirement age, a new study finds.

And we need to start doing that now, the researchers said.

If society actually did that, we'd have a 64 percent chance of limiting the average global temperature rise to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels, said study lead researcher Christopher Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science at the University of Leeds, in England. [6 Unexpected Effects of Climate Change]

"We could ramp down all of the fossil-fuel-emitting infrastructure that we have, all of the way until it reaches the end of its life," Smith told Live Science. "And then we'd replace it with something [that emits] zero carbon."

However, this plan — while scientifically sound — is likely a pie-in-the-sky idea that won't happen anytime soon, said Donald Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who wasn't involved with the research.

"It's just not going to happen," Wuebbles told Live Science. "It's so much cheaper to rehabilitate existing facilities than it is to totally close everything off."

On the upside, weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels will likely happen at some point, just not tomorrow, Wuebbles said. Generally, it takes about 40 to 50 years for society to change its major power sources, for instance from coal to nuclear power plants. "I think this one [from fossil fuels to renewable energy] is going to occur occur somewhat more rapidly, but it's still going to be hard," Wuebbles said.

Climate change calculation

Smith's team chose the 2.7 degree F (1.5 degree C) benchmark because that's a temperature increase that could unleash extreme flooding on small island states, he said. "The difference in the sea level rise of the rate of warming between 1.5 and 2 degrees [celsius] would literally be life or death for them," Smith said.

And because climate change doesn't follow a linear trajectory (instead, it becomes much worse at high levels of warming), an increase of 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) could be catastrophic, Smith noted. That said, "it is probably better to aim for [1.5 degrees C] and miss it slightly than it is for us to say 2 degrees is fine," Smith said. "Because 1.6 [degrees C] is still a lot better than 2. I would definitely say we should have ambition and every fraction of a degree warming we can avoid is a good thing."

So, he and his colleagues got to work to see whether humans could stick to the 2.7 degree F (1.5 degrees C) benchmark if societies the world over phased out sources of fossil fuels and then replaced them with zero-carbon alternatives. It was possible, they found; if the plan was followed, carbon-dioxide emissions would become near zero after just 40 years. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

"If we don't build any new fossil fuel infrastructure, there is a good chance we'll avoid the worst impacts of climate change," Smith said. There is hope on the horizon, too, he added. Even if some federal governments aren't taking action, some state governments and companies are. For instance, in December 2018, the shipping giant Maersk pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050.

But humans have to act quickly, Smith noted. If governments and private industries wait until 2030 to start phasing out fossil-fuel emitters, there will only be a 50 percent chance that the world will be able to keep the average temperature increase to 2.7 degrees F, even if the rate of fossil-fuel retirement is accelerated, the researchers found.

Meanwhile, the transition will likely happen, but a lot more slowly than the study plan calls for, Wuebbles said. "The bottom line is, I agree with the concept of the paper, it's an interesting piece of work, he said. "I just don't see the political systems responding, unfortunately."

The study also has two major caveats. First, it does not "assess the practical feasibility of this transition," but rather focuses on the numbers, the researchers wrote in the study. That's a tall order, as phasing out fossil-fuel emitters will be an expensive and time-consuming mission, especially in industries that don't have good green energy alternatives yet, such as aviation.

In addition, the study doesn't consider hard-to-predict climate-change contributors, such as permafrost melt or forest dieback, which were not included in their model, Smith said. But even if these events occur, limiting human-made greenhouse gases is still worthwhile, Smith said.

The study was published online today (Jan. 15) in the journal Nature Communications.

• 8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World
• Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth
• Photos of Melt: Glaciers Before and After

Originally published on Live Science.

After a few promising years of minimal carbon-emission growth, the world is on pace to burn a bunch more fossil fuels. According to a new estimate, global carbon emissions will hit a record-breaking 37.1 billion metric tons in 2018.

That's a 2.7 percent increase over 2017's global emissions output of 36.2 billion metric tons, researchers with the Global Carbon Project reported Dec. 5. And 2017's numbers represented a 1.6 percent increase over the year before.

"For three years, we saw flat greenhouse gas emissions at the same time [that] the world economy grew. That was good news," said Robert Jackson, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University. "We hoped that represented peak emissions. It didn't." [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

To turn off the emissions spigot, countries will have to focus on renewable energy, and quickly, Jackson said.

Rising emissions

Climate change is already underway. A 2010 NASA study found that Earth's average surface temperature rose 1.44 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) over the 20th century. The Arctic, in particular, is responding rapidly to this change, exhibiting record levels of melt. Surface meltwater from Greenland alone now contributes nearly a millimeter of global sea-level rise to the oceans each year.

In October, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world will have to slash carbon emissions to 45 percent below 2010 levels by the year 2030 and then halt all emissions by 2050 in order to keep global average temperatures from rising more than 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C).

Currently, emissions are headed in the wrong direction, Jackson and his team found. Between 2017 and 2018, China is estimated to have increased its carbon output by 4.7 percent. The U.S. output has risen about 2.5 percent in the same period. India saw the sharpest increase in carbon output between 2017 and 2018, at an estimated 6.3 percent. The European Union has increased its outputs as well, by 0.7 percent.

The drivers of these trends are both meteorological and economic, the researchers reported. An especially cold winter in the eastern United States and a hot summer across the country increased fossil fuel emissions from the heating and cooling of homes and other structures. A decline in the price of oil led to the purchase of larger cars and trucks in the United States. Meanwhile, a sluggish economy in China has leaders there incentivizing heavy industry and instituting coal-power projects that had been on hold, Jackson said. Economic development in India has that nation scrambling to build any energy project it can.

"They're building coal, nuclear and renewables at breakneck pace," Jackson said. "Every coal plant they build is likely to be polluting 40 years from now."

Turning it around

Despite the sobering trends, there are glimmers of hope. The United States and Canada have seen a decrease in coal consumption of about 40 percent since 2005, Jackson said. And despite the vocally pro-coal administration of president Donald Trump, some 15 gigawatts of coal plants are slated to close this year in the U.S., a potential record, Jackson added.

"The pricing for wind and solar is now competitive with [that of] fossil fuels in many cases," Jackson added.

The transportation sector is a bigger challenge, Jackson said, as low oil prices lead consumers to drive more frequently and buy larger vehicles. Incentivizing electric vehicles — which can be charged with power generated by clean energy — would make a big impact in emissions, Jackson said.

Globally, the picture is complex. India, for example, is striving to bring any electric power at all to millions of people who have none.

"They need financial incentives to reduce reliance on new coal plants" and to build renewable-energy infrastructure instead, Jackson said.

Though it's discouraging to see emissions rising so quickly, Jackson said, he's an optimist at heart. "I believe green energy will eventually win," he said. The only question is how much warming will have to occur first and how hard it will be to rein in today's excesses.

"The higher we go in emission today," Jackson said, "the faster or the deeper the cuts need to be in a decade or two decades or beyond."

Jackson and his colleagues on the Global Carbon Project published their estimates on Dec. 5 in the journals Environmental Research Letters and Earth System Science Data.

• 8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World
• Photographic Proof of Climate Change: Time-Lapse Images of Retreating Glaciers
• Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice

Originally published on Live Science.

A recently issued environmental report suggests that leaders in the Trump administration have already shrugged off the possibility of putting the brakes on climate change, a stance that embraces a catastrophic future for the planet.

Scientists have warned that if current levels of fossil fuel consumption continue unchecked, Earth could warm by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) by 2100.

And according to this report, that prediction is already accepted by the government as inevitable — and nothing will be done to prevent it, The Washington Post reported today (Sept. 28). [6 Unexpected Effects of Climate Change]

Drafted in July, the environmental report was issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and its goal was to justify President Trump's proposal to freeze gas-mileage standards for light trucks and cars produced after 2020, according to The Washington Post.

Pushing to make vehicles more fuel efficient would reduce harmful emissions that contribute to global warming, while Trump's plan increases greenhouse gas emissions. But in a scenario where dire warming by 2100 was a foregone conclusion, Trump's policy wouldn't make that much of a difference, The Washington Post reported.

Since the age of industrialization began in 1880 — ushering in the widespread use of fossil fuels — global average temperatures rose 0.9 degrees F (0.5 degrees C) in just over a century. And if fossil- fuel burning continues unabated, temperatures would continue to rise along a similar trajectory, topping 7 degrees F (4 degrees C) by the end of the century.

According to the report, turning the tide of runaway climate change would require "substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption," and attempting such sweeping and dramatic change — even with the stakes as high as they are — is "not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible."

For more information, read the full story at The Washington Post.

Originally publishedon Live Science.

A note published in a New Zealand paper 106 years ago today (Aug. 14) predicted the Earth's temperature would rise because of 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide produced by coal consumption.

"The effect may be considerable in a few centuries," the article stated.

The clip was one of several one-paragraph stories in the "Science Notes and News" section of The Rodney and Otamatea Times, published Wednesday, Aug. 14, 1912.  

The paragraph seems to have been originally printed in the March 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics as the caption for an image of a large coal factory. The image goes with a story titled "Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future," by Francis Molena. [Photographic Proof of Climate Change: Time-Lapse Images of Retreating Glaciers]

In the article, Molena described how carbon dioxide in the air is associated with warmer temperatures, and "since burning coal produces carbon dioxide, it may be inquired whether the enormous use of that fuel in modern times may be an important factor in filling the atmosphere with this substance, and consequently indirectly raising the temperature of the Earth."

When Molena's story was published, scientists had already been predicting the effects of coal combustion on climate for the past few decades. Researchers were studying the topic at least as early as 1882, as evidenced by H.A. Phillips' paper titled "Pollution of the Atmosphere," published that year in the journal Nature.

Jeff Nichols, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Quartz that he's found many examples of newspaper articles published between 1883 and 1912 that make predictions about how rising carbon dioxide levels alter the climate. The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Kansas City Star all published articles about rising carbon dioxide levels affecting the climate more than a hundred years ago, Quartz reported.

Carbon dioxide continues to make up 65 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, having increased by 90 percent between 1900 and 2010, according to estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As of 2014, the top carbon dioxide-producing regions were China, the United States, the European Union, India, the Russian Federation and Japan, according to the EPA.

Original article on Live Science.

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly called fracking, is a drilling technique used for extracting oil or natural gas from deep underground.

Fracking is a hotly debated environmental and political issue. Advocates insist it is a safe and economical source of clean energy; critics, however, claim fracking can destroy drinking water supplies, pollute the air, contribute to the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and trigger earthquakes.

How fracking works

Most fracking wells in use today rely on two technologies: hydraulic fracturing, which has been in use since the 1940s, and horizontal drilling, a technique that first became widespread in the 1990s, according to Columbia University's Earth Institute.

In simplified terms, the fracking process starts with a well that is drilled vertically or at an angle from the surface to a depth of 1 to 2 miles (1.6 to 3.2 kilometers) or more, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The vertical well is then encased in steel and/or cement to ensure the well doesn't run the risk of leaking into any groundwater.

Once the vertical well reaches the deep layer of rock where natural gas or oil exists, the well curves about 90 degrees and begins drilling horizontally along that rock layer. Horizontal drilling can extend more than 1 mile (1.6 km) from the vertical well bore, according to Texas A&M University's publication "Hydraulic Fracturing and your Private Water Well."

After the fracking well is fully drilled and encased, fracking fluid is pumped down into the well at extremely high pressure, in some cases exceeding 9,000 pounds per square inch (62,050 kilopascals), according to a primer from Cornell University's environmental quality engineering course. The pressure is powerful enough to fracture the surrounding rock, creating fissures and cracks through which oil and gas can flow.

The fluid that is pumped into the well to fracture the rock is called slickwater. It is mostly water, though it also can contain a wide range of additives and chemicals that serve an engineering purpose. Additives can include detergents, salts, acids, alcohols, lubricants and disinfectants. These chemical additives usually make up 0.5 to 2 percent of the slickwater, with the remaining 98 to 99.5 percent consisting of plain water, according to a report called "Modern Shale Gas Development in the United States" by the U.S. Department of Energy.

In addition to the water and chemical additives, "proppants" such as sand and ceramic particles are also pumped into the fracking well. These proppants are added to prop open the fractures that form under pressure, thereby ensuring that gas and oil can continue to flow freely out of rock fractures even after pumping pressure is released, according to the EPA.

Once the underground rock is shattered and proppants are pumped into place, trapped reservoirs of gas and oil are released and pumped back to the surface, along with millions of gallons of "flowback" liquid, according to the EPA.

The flowback liquid contains water and a number of contaminants, including radioactive material, heavy metals, hydrocarbons and other toxins. This wastewater is stored on the fracking site in pits, injected into deep underground wells or disposed of off-site at a wastewater treatment facility.  

"Formation water" is the briny water that was in the pore spaces of the rocks. "The formation water is usually very salty and can have high levels of radon, a radioactive gas that comes from the decay of uranium in the subsurface," Marcia Bjornerud, a structural geologist at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, told Live Science. "Flowback water can be treated, but there are large volumes of it and so dealing with it is expensive, and beyond what many small-town water treatment plants can handle."

The fracking boom

Though fracking is used worldwide to extract gas and oil, a fracking boom has occurred recently in the United States, partly driven by concerns over the costs associated with imported oil and other fossil fuels as well as energy security — that is, having uninterrupted access to energy at affordable prices in ways that are preferably impervious to international disruptions, according to the Brookings Institution.

In 2000, there were about 276,000 natural gas wells in the United States. But by 2010, that number had almost doubled to 510,000, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). And every year, about 13,000 new wells are drilled. According to a 2014 study, at least 15.3 million Americans have lived within a mile of a fracking well that has been drilled since 2000.

The areas where fracking is most profitable include the Great Plains from Canada south into Texas, the Great Lakes region and an area known as the Marcellus Shale, which reaches from central New York into Ohio and south to Virginia, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The Marcellus Shale region is particularly attractive to gas drillers because it's a rich supply of natural gas — some call it "the Saudi Arabia of natural gas" or "Frackistan" — and because many of the region's rural communities are economically depressed and eager to attract an energy industry that enjoys handsome profits.

How safe is fracking?

Proponents of fracking claim that the drilling technique is a safe and clean method of securing essential sources of power that will meet U.S. energy needs for decades.

"Fracking has unlocked massive new supplies of oil and clean-burning natural gas from dense deposits of shale — supplies that increase our country's energy security and improve our ability to generate electricity, heat homes and power vehicles for generations to come," according to EnergyFromShale.org, an alliance of oil and gas industry groups.

But opponents say the industry is whitewashing fracking's real effects, a long list that includes air pollution, groundwater contamination, health problems and surface water pollution.

Recent history supports some of their claims: A fracking well in Bradford County, Pa., operated by Chesapeake Energy Corp., malfunctioned in April 2011, spewing thousands of gallons of contaminated fracking water for more than 12 hours.

And in 2012, Chesapeake was again cited for contaminating the drinking water of three families in Pennsylvania, resulting in a settlement of $1.6 million, according to NPR.org. "Many companies keep their specific 'recipes' for fracking fluids secret, arguing that this is intellectual property," Bjornerud said. "This lack of disclosure makes it difficult to tie any contamination of drinking water to a particular company or well."

Researchers from Duke University tested drinking water at 60 sites throughout Pennsylvania and New York; their research was published in 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that drinking water near fracking wells had levels of methane that "fell squarely within a range that the U.S. Department of Interior says is dangerous and requires urgent 'hazard mitigation' action," ProPublica reports.

There may be more cases of water that has been contaminated by fracking, but legal settlements and nondisclosure agreements usually prevent access to any documentation of these incidents, The New York Times reports.

A federal study, released in July 2014 by the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory, did find no evidence that chemicals from the fracking process had contaminated groundwater at one Pennsylvania drilling site.

In addition to water quality issues, fracking wells release compounds into the air, such as benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene and n-hexane; long-term exposure to these has been linked to birth defects, neurological problems, blood disorders and cancer. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has found that workers may be exposed to dust with high levels of respirable silica during hydraulic fracturing. These findings were shared after NIOSH studied 116 full shift air samples at 11 hydraulic fracturing sites in five states.

Benzene, for example, is a known carcinogen, according to the American Cancer Society. In 2012, researchers from the Colorado School of Public Health released a study showing that air pollution caused by fracking could contribute to immediate and long-term health problems for people living near fracking sites. Research by over 150 studies suggests that chemicals released during natural gas extraction may harm human reproduction and development. A 2016 study also found that living near a fracking site might increase a person's risk of developing mild, moderate or severe asthma.

Additionally, many areas of the United States not considered earthquake-prone, such as Ohio and Oklahoma, are now experiencing relatively strong seismic activity; a 2016 study found that the chances of a damaging earthquake occurring in parts of Oklahoma and some neighboring states are just as likely as they are in quake-prone California. Fracking is believed to be the cause of Oklahoma's strongest recorded quake in 2011 and more than 180 tremors in Texas between 2008 and 2009. To start off 2015, an area of North Texas had nine confirmed earthquakes in a 24-hour period. Fracking is being investigated as the cause. Two 2015 studies suggested that hidden faults beneath the surface may explain earthquakes in fracking zones; a 2016 study suggested that one way to calm the shaking was to limit the amount of wastewater pumped into wells deep underground.

According to a 2000 study of the Orito Field in Colombia, only around 15 percent of proppants can be removed after the fracking is done. Does leaving these foreign substances in a place where they weren't originally harmful? "No, there are no long- or short-term problems with leaving frack proppants in the fractures (fissures)," Rick Chamberlain, managing director the Berkeley Research Group, told Live Science. 

Bjornerud agrees, "Even with the sand propping open the cracks, the weight of the overlying rock will, over months and years, cause the cracks to close and the rock's permeability return to about what it was before the fracking." According to Bjornerud, this is a problem for oil and gas production since the process has to be done quickly, soon after the fracking fluids have opened up micro-cracks, or the amount of oil and gas that can be extracted rapidly decreases as the cracks progressively shut.

Fracking and the law

Across the United States, fracking is regulated by a patchwork of state and local legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislators.

At the federal level, fracking is exempt from some of the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act, particularly the requirement to disclose the chemicals used in well injections.

Wyoming, Michigan and Texas, however, have regulations requiring full disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking. Dozens of other proposed regulations that control some portion of the fracking industry are now moving through the legislatures of states where fracking is a large and growing industry. Some cities are taking the matter into their own hands by banning fracking mines.

But by most accounts, America's fracking boom — especially in areas of shale gas — isn't going to stop anytime soon: The Annual Energy Outlook 2012 predicted that the country's ample supply of shale gas will account for nearly half of the natural gas produced in the U.S. by 2035. More current analysis shows a much more modest outlook for fracking due to dropping gas prices and overproduction. 

Additional reporting by Charles Q. Choi and Alina Bradford, Live Science contributors

Additional resources

• Geology.com: Hydraulic Fracturing Fluids - Composition and Additives
• NIOSH Field Effort to Assess Chemical Exposure Risks to Gas and Oil Workers
• EPA: Natural Gas Extraction

At a recent rally in Phoenix, President Donald Trump spoke about opening a new coal mine in Pennsylvania, and referenced "clean coal." But what does it really mean when politicians throw out this term?  

"We've ended the war on beautiful, clean coal," he said on Aug. 22. "It's just been announced that a second, brand-new coal mine, where they're going to take out clean coal — meaning, they're taking out coal, [and] they're going to clean it — is opening in the state of Pennsylvania, the second one."

Trump was referring to a mine from Corsa Coal Corp. that is projected to open in 2018. The reference to "clean coal" was somewhat unclear in this context, because clean coal refers to attempts to recapture carbon released when coal is burnt or to otherwise reduce coal pollution during the combustion process. It's not something that happens during the mining stage. [6 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong]

In response to a reporter from Time magazine, the CEO of Corsa Coal, George Dethlefsen, wrote on Twitter that Trump was referring to the coal preparation process, which involves washing coal free of rock and soil. That cleaning process is separate from the usual usage of "clean coal" in the sense of carbon removal and pollution reduction.

Carbon capture

Trump's confusing use of "clean coal" is par for the course; the term itself is fairly vague and has no set definition, said Shiela Medina, the associate director of development and community management at the University of Kentucky's Center for Applied Energy Research.

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"As many people as you would ask to define it for you, they would say something different," Medina told Live Science.

But, generally speaking, "clean coal" refers to a suite of technologies geared toward preventing climate change. These technologies are expensive, so they're typically funded through public-private partnerships with, and loans from, the U.S. Department of Energy.

One major arm of clean coal technology deals with carbon capture and storage. The goal is to grab carbon dioxide from industrial waste streams and then use it for something else — sometimes making other, more valuable chemicals or sometimes injecting it into oil-bearing rock deep underground to increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from a particular well.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) lowers the viscosity of oil and helps it move through the pores of the rock reservoir, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In other cases, the goal is simply to stick the CO2 into deep rock reservoirs. One active project funded by the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) is attempting to take carbon dioxide produced during ethanol refining and inject it into sandstone reservoirs in Illinois.

Scrubbing carbon dioxide out of an emission stream isn't particularly difficult, chemically speaking. Chemicals called amines can bind to carbon dioxide and to hydrogen sulfide, another pollutant in coal combustion. The problem is that the process takes a huge amount of energy and space, Medina said. The entire emissions stream from a coal-burning power plant, known as flue gas, must be run through a bubbling solvent to get the chemical reaction that pulls out the carbon dioxide. This solvent-and-CO2-mixture must then be heated to remove the greenhouse gas for compression, transport and storage. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

"The equipment is enormous," she said. "It might be the size of the whole power plant. It's acres."

And it's expensive. All that heat is costly, Medina said. A power plant might have to use one-third of its entire output just to clean its emissions of carbon. That's why adding carbon capture to a plant would as much as double the cost of electricity, she said.

There are problems on the storage end, too, Medina added. The utility that runs the carbon capture plant would be responsible for carbon stored in a rock reservoir "in perpetuity," she said, meaning that if that CO2 ever got released somehow, the utility would be liable. That's a big deterrent.

And even reusing the CO2 in oil fields comes with challenges, she said.

"In general, coal plants are not located next to oil wells," Medina said. Getting the greenhouse gas to the right place requires pipelines — and more expense. Additionally, carbon dioxide [that's] used to improve oil recovery only partially remedies the problem, as not all of the injected carbon dioxide stays in the ground, according to a 2014 study published in the journal Frontiers in Energy Research.

Some scientists and climate change researchers argue that carbon capture and storage will be necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change. On the basic research side, scientists are looking for new heat sources — like the heat of a power plant's waste stream itself — and for new solvents that will require less heat to pick up and release carbon dioxide, Medina said.

Coal gasification

The second major arm of "clean coal" is coal gasification. This process involves converting coal into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called "syngas." This removes nasty pollutants like sulfur and nitrogen oxides so that the syngas burns "cleaner" than coal, according to the Department of Energy.

However, it's hard for coal gasification to compete with natural gas, which naturally emits less carbon dioxide when burned than coal does. The ability to drill horizontal oil and gas wells and to "frack" shale by injecting pressurized sand and chemicals into the rock has enabled a huge boom in natural-gas production over the past decade.

In 2005, U.S. producers put 18.9 trillion cubic feet (535 billion cubic meters) of natural gas on the market, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By 2016, that number was at about 28.3 trillion cubic feet (800 billion cubic m). The boom in supply has caused a corresponding price decrease, so there is little incentive for the more costly, complex process of manufacturing syngas, Medina said.  

The NETL has also funded programs in the past geared toward increasing the efficiency of power plants and reducing other pollutants from these plants' waste streams, but there are no current active projects in those programs today. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

Clean coal policy

Though Trump has made clean coal a centerpiece of his speeches, his administration's policies have not always backed up his rhetoric. The president's 2018 budget proposal suggested 55 percent cuts to the Department of Energy's Fossil Energy Research and Development Program, which funds clean coal research and implementation, the news site Axios reported in May.

Clean coal projects depend on Department of Energy funding because banks aren't enthusiastic about making loans to back such expensive, unproven technology, Bloomberg reported in July. Thus, Trump's budget might threaten projects like a $3.8 billion plant in Lake Charles, Louisiana, meant to turn oil-refinery waste into valuable chemical projects and to capture carbon for oil recovery; that project relies on a $2 billion Department of Energy loan.

These cuts are unlikely to come to fruition, however, as the U.S. House of Representatives appropriations committees released a budget proposal in July that would keep Department of Energy funding flat rather than slashing it. Under this proposal, according to Science Magazine, the agency's fossil fuel programs would lose only $33 million annually, a 5 percent cut.   

Original article on Live Science. 

A new way of refining biodiesel so that it works in standard diesel car engines could help broaden the use of renewable fuels, according to scientists.

Biodiesel made from plant material could present a more eco-friendly alternative to the fossil-fuel-derived diesel, or petrodiesel, that is currently used. In the European Union (EU), commercial diesel already has to contain at least 7 percent biodiesel.

But the molecular makeup of these fuels means they boil at different temperatures from petrodiesel, which means only specially designed engines can run on pure biodiesel or blends that contain considerable amounts of the fuel. [Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies]

Now, scientists in Germany have found a way to transform chemicals derived from plants into a biodiesel that meets the boiling characteristics required by the EN 590 standard, set by the European Committee for Standardization, for commercial diesel sold in the EU.

Lukas Gooßen, a professor of organic chemistry at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum who led the research, said his motivation came during a trip to a biodiesel plant in Rwanda a few years ago. The problem, he said, was that only a single bus had been converted to run on the fuel because of a lack of funds.

"If you're going to use biofuel, you need existing infrastructure you can tap into," he told Live Science. "Anything else will be unaffordable to most countries and societies. This has to be the starting point."

The reason conventional biodiesel doesn't work in standard diesel engines is that about 95 percent of its constituent molecules are the same length and, therefore, boil at roughly the same temperature.

In contrast, petrodiesel is made up of a mixture of hydrocarbons of different lengths and structures that boil at different temperatures, giving petrodiesel a much broader boiling range. Importantly, these are the boiling characteristics for which modern cars have been designed.

"All engines were specifically made to fit this fuel," Gooßen said. "Diesel fuel and diesel engines evolved together."

There are existing processes that can convert plant oils into biofuel suitable for use in standard diesel engines, but a significant proportion of the fuel is burned to carry out the refining. Gooßen and his colleagues decided to find a way to take advantage of catalysts — substances that accelerate chemical reactions — to do the same thing at low temperatures, using very little energy.

In a paper published online today (June 16) in the journal Science Advances, they report that using a combination of three catalysts, they were able to blend rapeseed oil methyl ester (RME) — a common raw material for making biofuels — and ethylene into a fuel with the same boiling profile as petrodiesel. Ethylene is an abundant hydrocarbon that can be generated from plant-derived ethanol or shale gas.

To demonstrate its potential as a motor fuel, the researchers built a model diesel car and used the biodiesel to propel it. The fuel is still a long way from commercialization, though; the first batch cost more than $1,125 per quart to produce. [Hyperloop, Jetpacks & More: 9 Futuristic Transit Ideas]

The main issue with the current process is that it uses expensive, short-lived catalysts aimed at making small amounts of high-value chemical products, Gooßen said. Finding cheaper, more robust alternatives suitable for commercial production will be a huge challenge, he added, as will designing effective high-throughput industrial processes.

But Gooßen said one of the biggest barriers to wider use of biodiesel is its incompatibility with standard engines. But his new study shows that this challenge can be overcome.

"This boiling point seemed to be a completely insurmountable hurdle," he said. "Now, we are saying, 'How can we make a catalyst that just does this cheaper?' which is a completely different question to, 'How can we even come from biodiesel to something we can put in a car?'"

There is a pressing need to find sustainable fuels that are "drop-in replacements" for current fossil fuels, said Duncan Wass, a professor of catalysis at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

Using a cheap and abundant addition such as ethylene to transform biofuels makes good sense, he said, but he agreed with the study authors that the current catalysts are not fit for that purpose and that finding appropriate replacements will be hard.

"[I]t will be difficult to find a simple, cheap, long-lived, heterogeneous catalyst that can achieve the same results as these very sophisticated systems," Wass told Live Science.

It is also too early to label the technology as "sustainable," he added, until a full life-cycle analysis of the process and products is undertaken.

Original article on Live Science.

The first attempt at building a "clean coal" power plant that captures its carbon dioxide before being burned is struggling to get up and running in Mississippi, as the Trump administration plans to sharply cut back funding for the technology.

Mississippi Power's Kemper power plant is designed to allow the continued use of cheap but dirty fuels like coal in an era when the world — most of it, anyway — is trying to reduce its emissions of planet-warming CO2 and other gases. But the project has been plagued with technical problems that have pushed it back three years and more than doubled its budget, now estimated at about $7.5 billion.   The plant started limited operations last fall, but the company announced this week that it would be pushing back the date it expects to be fully online until the end of June.   And in the proposed budget it released last month, the Trump administration called for slashing research on capturing carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion and producing cleaner coal technologies. If approved by Congress, the proposal would cut the Department of Energy's fossil fuel research and development by 56 percent and "clean coal" research by nearly 70 percent.   Coming from an administration that came to power promising to bring back coal jobs, the budget was "shocking," said David Schlissel, who directs resource planning analysis at the Cleveland-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Finding ways to reduce the black rock's carbon output "is the only way of giving coal any kind of chance of being a long-term fuel source," he said.

"Given that," he added, "I don't see much chance of carbon capture really being an economically viable alternative on any kind of scale in the US."

RELATED: The Twilight of American Coal and the Rise of Renewables

Despite slumping demand and the fracking-driven boom in cheap natural gas, coal still produces about a third of US electric power — and about two-thirds of that industry's carbon emissions. American taxpayers have spent about $7 billion on carbon capture and storage technology since 2008, including more than $3 billion from the Obama administration's economic stimulus bill. The Trump administration says it will shift its spending toward improving early-stage technology that the private sector could then adopt.

But Schlissel said Kemper's technical and financial challenges are likely to scare off private industry — especially while gas remains cheap.

"Private industry doesn't want to bear the risk of the projects if they fail, or like Kemper, they cost a whole lot more than they originally thought," said Schlissel, a critic of the Mississippi project.

Ratepayers are on the hook for about $2.9 billion and have already seen a 15 percent hike in their power bills.

The 582-megawatt Kemper plant is designed to extract a cleaner-burning synthetic gas from lignite, a cheap, locally mined coal. The fuel is heated to temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) under high pressure to release gas. Solvents and limestone are added to capture carbon dioxide, sulfur compounds, and mercury, while coal ash gets filtered out. The gas then gets burned to produce steam, which spins a turbine that drives the electrical generator.   The process is designed to capture up to two-thirds of the carbon dioxide emissions of a normal coal-fired power plant. The captured CO2 is shipped to oil fields and pumped underground to help bring up hard-to-reach petroleum deposits. Mississippi Power tentatively started running generators on the process last fall, but started running into trouble because of a buildup of coal ash.   In a filing with stock regulators this week, corporate parent Southern Company told investors it will need to redesign and replace a key piece of gear at Kemper in part because of those coal ash issues. That process is likely to take up to two years and cost another $164 million, though the company says it will get the plant up and running while the engineering work proceeds. Ratepayers are on the hook for about $2.9 billion of the cost and have already seen a 15 percent hike in their power bills.

Schlissel said the company launched the project using technology that hadn't been tested at industrial scale and ignored the risks.

"The history has been that those technologies have more problems than you expect, cost a lot more than you expect, to build take a lot longer to build and then have startup problems. That's been the history of just about any technology," he said.   RELATED: The Myth of Clean Coal vs. the Reality   Mississippi Power representatives didn't respond to requests for comment. In a statement announcing the latest delay, it said the plant "has primarily been using natural gas as fuel, but has also been using syngas from the project's gasifiers during testing and operation at periods throughout the year."   Since Southern also is struggling to complete a nuclear power project in Georgia that's years late and billions over budget, some stock analysts have suggested the Atlanta-based utility conglomerate would be better off to just keep burning natural gas at Kemper.

Two other power plants in North America — one in Saskatchewan and one in Texas — are recapturing CO2 emissions through a different process, from smokestack emissions, said Jeff Erikson, Americas general manager for the Global CCS Institute. With the United States moving away from building coal-fired power plants, the prospect of new carbon capture projects in that field is dim, Erikson said.

RELATED: Trump Eyes Rebooting Yucca Mountain, as Nuclear Waste Piles Up

There's more hope for the technology in the industry overseas and in other industries, he said. A steel plant in the United Arab Emirates has begun capturing about 800,000 tons of CO2 a year from its stacks. And while Kemper has struggled, China and India are still planning new coal-fueled power plants that could incorporate CCS more easily in construction than tacking the process onto an existing plant.

"What that does is create an opportunity for American companies, as they get experience with both the capture and storage processes, to export that overseas," said Erikson, whose organization promotes carbon capture R&D. And cutting federal support for those projects would be unwise and isn't likely to make it through Congress.

"We think that continued investment in both basic research and in commercialization of existing early-stage technologies are both critical," he said. "If you sacrifice one for the other, you're either extending out that next generation of applications or your sacrificing that third- or fourth-generation breakthrough opportunity down the road."

Original article on Seeker. 

The Swiss have spoken, and nuclear power has been voted out in favor of renewable energy.

On the ballot yesterday (May 21) was the Swiss government's Energy Strategy 2050, a referendum that called for the ban of new nuclear power plants and investment in renewable energy. Under this energy plan, the country's five existing nuclear power plants will remain operational for as long as safety standards are met, The Local, an English-language news network in Europe, explains. Energy production would instead focus on hydropower, according to The Local, along with other renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

Though the votes have not been finalized, the New York Times reported that initial figures show Swiss voters passed the energy plan with 58.2 percent support. The country's direct democracy system gives voters the power to pass major policy issues.

"[The public] wants a new energy policy and does not want any new nuclear plants," Doris Leuthard, the Swiss energy minister, said at a news conference, according to The Times. "The law leads our country into a modern energy future."

Leuthard said the Energy Strategy 2050 will reduce the use of fossil fuels and foreign energy — Switzerland was a net power importer in 2016 — while supporting and expanding domestic production of renewable energy, the Times reported. Though some aspects of the plan will take effect in 2018, a fourfold increase in solar and wind power is targeted for 2035.

Less than 5 percent of Switzerland's current energy production is solar and wind, according to the Times, while hydropower accounts for 60 percent of energy output and nuclear for 35 percent. The nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, following the major earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, is partly responsible for the lack of support for such energy in Switzerland and the rest of Europe, according to the Times.

In 1978, legislation prohibited nuclear power plants on Austrian territory. After the Fukushima disaster, Germany decided to accelerate its plan to phase out nuclear power, the news site Deutsche Welle reported.

Polls suggest Europe is not alone in this nuclear cold-shoulder: A Gallup poll conducted in 2016 found that the majority of Americans (54 percent) oppose the use of nuclear energy. For comparison, in 2011 just days before the Fukushima disaster, 57 percent of Americans said they were in favor of nuclear energy, Gallup reported.

Original article on Live Science.

Has it been a while since you moved your car? Do you have leftover fuel in your garage for the lawn mower? If so, you may wonder, does gasoline go bad?

Unfortunately, "there's no hard and fast rule," said James Speight, an energy consultant and author of the "Handbook of Petroleum Refining" (Taylor & Francis, 2016) and other publications. "It's just …very difficult to generalize."

While gasoline can likely keep for months to years, environmental factors such as heat, oxygen and humidity influence the fuel's condition, Speight said.

Related: Why does hydrogen peroxide fizz on cuts?

But if crude oil lasts hundreds of millions of years underground, why is gasoline even at risk of spoiling? Simply put, by the time gasoline reaches consumers, it is a very different substance from the original crude oil.

Gasoline is mostly a mixture of carbon and hydrogen atoms bonded together, forming a variety of energy-rich compounds called hydrocarbons. During the petroleum refining process, engineers remove impurities such as sulfur, which can form sulfur dioxide and cause acid rain. Then, substances are added to improve the gasoline's performance and achieve the desired octane number, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Octane numbers represent how much compression the gasoline can handle. The higher number, the less likely it is to ignite from the pressure.

With the final, carefully calibrated product, the gasoline is composed of hundreds of different compounds — too many to even identify and characterize, Speight said.

However, this care in balancing the gasoline goes to waste if the gasoline is stored for too long, said Richard Stanley, a former chemical engineer for Fluor Corporation, an engineering firm headquartered in Irving, Texas, and Ascent Engineering, based in Houston.

"If you leave gasoline by itself, over time ... it just doesn't perform the way you think it's going to perform,” Stanley said.

This is because, over time, "[t]he lighter hydrocarbons start evaporating out of gasoline," Stanley told Live Science. And your car engine may not be designed to handle the resultant gasoline, if left too long.

Additionally, the careful blends that are used to produce gasoline don't look the same throughout the year, according to experts. In the winter, companies produce a gasoline containing lighter hydrocarbons, making the liquid more volatile and therefore easier to ignite.

During the colder months, this blend makes it easier to start your car, Speight said. But in the summertime, the blend loses enough of the lighter hydrocarbons, leaving you with a different gas rating, according to Stanley. Summer gasoline contains heavier hydrocarbons to prevent excessive evaporation from the heat. This makes summer-blend gasoline difficult to ignite in the winter, Stanley said.

Aside from evaporation, "[gasoline] is like wine — once you take it out of the bottle, it starts going bad. It starts oxidizing away," Stanley said.

As some of the hydrocarbons in the gasoline evaporate, other hydrocarbons react with the oxygen in the air, Speight said. The gasoline then begins to form solids called gum. 

Related: The 10 most polluted places on Earth

"[O]nce [the bad gasoline] gets into the pipeline, that gum may separate out ... and maybe [it will] not block the gas line fully, but maybe [it will] start to block it," Speight said.

"You can almost say that gumming of the gas lines is like atherosclerosis," he added, which is a disease in which cholesterol plaques build up in arteries.

In short, you want to store your gasoline in cool, low-oxygen environments, Speight said.

Additionally, one of the other main ingredients in gasoline in the United States is ethanol. In fact, most of the gasoline sold in the United States is made up of 10 percent ethanol, or a blend called E10, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In the Midwest, the heartland of ethanol production, the blend can go as high as E85, or 85 percent ethanol.

However, unlike hydrocarbons, ethanol is hydrophilic, meaning it bonds to water.

"If there’s ethanol in your gasoline, it could start sucking in water vapor from the air and putting it into your gasoline," Stanley said. "You don't want water in your engine, because it starts corroding the system."

All in all, while the experts agree there are too many variables to determine exactly when gasoline goes bad, they all urge caution with handling and storing gasoline.

"Remember, gasoline is very, very volatile," Speight said. "It's not worth trying to store large amounts. It can just result in trouble.

"Anything that makes the gasoline a little more volatile than it normally is affects the gasoline," he added. This includes temperature, humidity or, as Speight joked, "on a hot day ... looking at the stuff the wrong way."

Originally published on Live Science.

The largest coal-fired power plant in the West — one of the biggest climate polluters in the nation — could close later this year, a major symbolic blow to the future of coal as the backbone of America's electric power grid.

The owners of Arizona's Navajo Generating Station northeast of the Grand Canyon announced in early January that low natural gas prices and the rising costs of generating electricity using coal make it too expensive to operate the plant. A decision on the plant's fate is expected this spring.Coal-fired power plants, once the workhorse of the nation's electricity grid, are the biggest individual climate polluters in the country, and they're falling victim to coal's biggest competitor — plentiful, cheap natural gas flooding the country because of fracking.

It's a trend all across the nation, even as President Trump tries to begin to make good on his campaign promise to revitalize America's declining coal fields while dismissing the threat they pose to the climate.

The Navajo plant may soon be the West's largest victim of the move toward natural gas. It is America's seventh-largest single source of the carbon dioxide emissions driving climate change. Its closure would relieve Arizona of a source of pollution long targeted by federal regulators for contributing to regional haze and poor air quality over the Grand Canyon.

RELATED

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The six other largest carbon polluters are coal-fired power plants scattered around the country, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"The owners' decision to consider its future is based on the changing economics of energy — primarily the low cost of natural gas and other resources," said Scott Harelson, spokesman for the Salt River Project, Arizona's primary electric power company and one of the plant's owners. "Coal plants across the West face a variety of issues that their respective owners must face with respect to their ongoing operations that could lead to additional closings."

Compared to coal, natural gas pollutes the atmosphere with about half as much carbon dioxide when it is used to generate electricity. Beginning in the middle of the last decade, the fracking boom flooded the U.S. with cheap natural gas, driving prices down to 18-year lows in 2016.

Federal mercury pollution regulations are also a factor in coal plant closures because energy companies were required to install special "scrubbers" on their coal-fired power plants costing hundreds of millions of dollars each.

"Nobody in this country is building new coal plants because they're too expensive," said Jeremy Richardson, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "As you look into the future, it's cheaper to either shift to an existing natural gas plant where the capacity is available or even in some cases switch to renewable energy."

These changing energy economics have felled a flurry of coal-fired power plants across the U.S. since the fracking boom took hold more than a decade ago. Major electric utilities across the country operated 353 coal-fired power plants of various sizes in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Over the next decade, 97 of those shut down.

At the same time, electricity generated using coal declined by 32 percent nationwide, while power generation from natural gas skyrocketed 159 percent. Coal and natural gas each generate about 33 percent of America's electric power, with wind and solar trailing far behind at about 7 percent. In 2016, natural gas surpassed coal as the primary source of electricity for the first time in U.S. history.

Renewables, such as wind and solar, have been exploding in growth over the past decade, too, but they're still just a tiny player. In 2015, less than 2 percent of electricity in the U.S. came from wind and solar.

The changing economics of electricity and the rise of natural gas are occurring regardless of any climate policy, such as the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, which was meant cut down on the carbon pollution from most coal-fired power plants. Trump, who has promoted both fracking and coal, has scoffed at the idea of greenhouse gas controls because he and many of his cabinet nominees deny the existence of climate change and have vowed to kill the plan.

The nation's largest electric power companies are responding differently to these changing economics.

We Energy, an electric power company in Wisconsin, announced in January that it will be shutting down one of its largest coal-fired power plants for six months each year during the spring and fall when demand for electricity and natural gas prices are both low.

"Low natural gas prices allow natural gas plants to generate power at lower costs than most coal plants during those months," said We Energy spokesman Brian Manthey. "Lower natural gas prices and environmental regulations have led to the addition of more natural gas-fueled power generation throughout the country. In fact, we recently converted our downtown Milwaukee Valley Power Plant from coal to natural gas."

The Tennessee Valley Authority, which is one of the largest electric power providers in the South, has closed three coal-fired power plants since 2011 mainly because of Environmental Protection Agency air pollution regulations, not cheap natural gas. Two more and part of another are expected to shut down through 2018, leaving TVA with six.

"Few of these closures are related to coal and gas prices," TVA spokesman Scott Brooks said. "It all relates back to an agreement we reached with EPA in 2011 to evaluate all our coal units that weren't fitted with environmental controls. Gas prices are attractive, but our strategy is toward a diverse portfolio so that we don't rely on one generation source too heavily."

Duke Energy, the nation's largest electric utility, shut down 12 coal-fired power plants over the past five years, with another in Asheville, N.C., scheduled to close in 2020. Duke spent more than $9 billion to modernize 40 others across the South and Midwest to help them comply with environmental regulations, spokesman Jeff Brooks said.

State-level climate policies are having an effect, too, and are likely to be factors in any decision to shutter the Navajo plant, said Colleen Regan, head of North America power and environmental markets for Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

For example, California's cap-and-trade program prompted Los Angeles' city electric utility to sell its stake in the Navajo plant, Regan said. The program — the nation's first — caps the amount of climate pollution the state can release and issues pollution permits called allowances to utilities and companies. Allowances are auctioned and traded among polluters.

A Nevada electric company's plan to cut its carbon pollution also led it to cut ties to Navajo by 2019, Regan said.

"These climate-motivated deals have put an increasingly large onus on Salt River Project," she said, adding that these factors and cheap natural gas are helping to put coal-fired power plants such as Navajo out of business.

"This story is playing out across most of the country," Regan said.

Though the federal government and independent analysts are projecting a small boost in the use of coal for electricity over the next several years, the long-term outlook for coal is dim.

"In the near term, there is a chance coal may rebound as gas finds new markets, pushing gas prices up slightly," Regan said. "But even looking out to 2020, 2025, I don't see much of a comeback, irrespective of the Clean Power Plan."

That's true even if Trump administration policy heavily supports both fracking and coal because when it comes to generating electricity, natural gas and coal compete with each other.

"Anything that boosts domestic natural gas production will directly, negatively impact coal-fired power plants by reducing their margins as gas prices depress wholesale power prices," Regan said.

One of Trump's biggest campaign promises to voters in coal-producing Appalachian states such as West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky was that he'd "bring back coal" by killing off the Clean Power Plan and other regulations seen as detrimental to the coal industry. But those same states also depend heavily on natural gas production.  

"It's going to be difficult for Trump to be both pro-natural gas and pro-coal at the same time, unless he intends to directly subsidize coal plants or find other markets for U.S. coal," Regan said.

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Originally published on Climate Central.

During his confirmation hearing Tuesday, Interior secretary nominee Ryan Zinke emphasized the incoming Trump administration's vow to recommit America to fossil fuels development while disregarding renewables and the need to act on climate change.

Zinke said climate change is not the hoax Trump has said it is, but he falsely claimed the science around it is uncertain, and said that federal energy policy, which determines how the Interior Department manages energy and public land, should heavily favor coal.

If confirmed, Zinke, a second-term congressman from Montana and former Navy SEAL, would oversee all the nation's national parks and more than 500 million acres of federal public lands, mostly in the West. He would be responsible for all the coal mining, fracking and oil drilling on public lands and waters off of all U.S. coastlines, and for permitting all new offshore wind power development.

Trump vowed during his campaign to breathe new life into America's coal industry, which he said has been hit too hard by environmental and climate regulations. In reality, coal is in decline mainly because of cheap natural gas, which electric power companies are beginning to use more than coal to generate electricity.

Trump Reportedly Pivots to Zinke for Interior Post Protection of Public Lands Cast in Doubt Public Lands May Be America's Best Climate Defense

"The war on coal, I believe, is real," Zinke said. "All-of-the-above is the correct (energy) policy. Coal is a great part of that energy mix. I'm also a great believer that we should invest in research and development on coal — because we know we have the asset — to make it cleaner and better. We should lead the world in clean energy technology."

Coal is the world's largest single source of carbon pollution driving climate change. To make it "clean," all the carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants would have to be captured and stored permanently, preventing it from ever reaching the atmosphere. That technology is in its infancy, and it is unnecessary if other energy sources such as wind, solar and natural gas are used to generate electricity.

But given Zinke's statements Tuesday, renewables seem likely to be shunted aside for more fossil fuels. Zinke said he'd revisit the Obama administration policy closing most of the Arctic Ocean off the north coast of Alaska to oil drilling. He said he'd also reexamine an Obama moratorium on coal development on federal lands, which was put in place a year ago while the government studies the climate impacts of coal development.

Throughout the hearing, Zinke questioned the science showing that climate change is driven by burning fossil fuels, that it could bring about water scarcity, influence the spread of catastrophic wildfire, and melt glaciers in the national parks he would oversee.

"The climate is changing," Zinke said, adding that he believes that because he watched Glacier National Park’s Grinnell Glacier melt while he ate lunch there one day. "Man has had an influence. That is undisputable as well. Where there is debate is what that influence is and what we can do about it."

He said the U.S. Geological Survey, a scientific agency in the Interior Department, should do "objective" climate science to help clear up the debate.

"Actually, there is no debate," U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said. The overwhelming majority of the world's scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels for electricity and transportation are the main cause of climate change.

Zinke hesitated several times to mention renewables as part of his "all of the above" energy strategy for public lands — a term often used by politicians to signify that they favor coal, oil, gas and renewables development instead of focusing primarily on renewables to address climate change and other environmental challenges.

"I'm a strong supporter of research and development for different technologies for a complete spectrum of energy — to include traditional sources to make sure we're better at doing that," he said when asked what he means by "all of the above."

Federal public lands are a major source of energy in the U.S., with about 40 percent of America's coal mined from them and about 20 percent of the country's oil and gas drilled on them.

In the Obama administration, the Interior Department has played a major role in implementing the White House's plans to cut greenhouse gases and uphold America's part of the Paris Climate Agreement, which aims to keep global warming from exceeding 2°C (3.6°F) — a level of warming climate scientists consider dangerous for humanity.

Through the Interior Department, the Obama administration blocked oil development off of much the Atlantic and Arctic coastlines, placed a moratorium on new coal leasing, created vast new national monuments that protect land and prevent energy development within their borders, and he designated tracts of public land just for wind and solar energy development.

Zinke suggested his Interior Department would pivot toward allowing states to have more say over what happens on federal land while "restoring" the trust of some Westerners who are disenchanted with federal lands policies that protect the environment. As part of that, Zinke said he would focus on cutting forests for timber and developing land for oil, gas and coal.

Fixing crumbling roads, bridges, trails and other infrastructure in national parks would be another major priority, he said.

Zinke emphasized his love for public lands and the need to keep them open to public access.

But when Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., asked why Zinke voted for a U.S. House rules change that would make it easier for the federal government to sell off public lands, Zinke said he was responding to a sense of anger among some Westerners that the federal government isn't listening to them when it implements restrictive environmental policies.

"It was an indicator of how upset people are about our land policy at the moment," he said. "It's a shot across the bow that you have to do something."

Yet, he said he opposes a movement in some Western states and within the Republican party to reduce the amount of land the federal government manages by transferring it to states willing to take it.

"I want to be clear on this point: I am absolutely against the transfer or sale of public land," he said. "I cannot be more clear."

Originally published on Climate Central.

In these days of transition, President Barack Obama summed up his view of the progress the U.S. had made on clean energy as well as his vision for its future.

Obama laid out this argument in an article that was published online today (Jan. 9) in the journal Science, saying that clean energy is not only sustainable, but that progress toward adopting such environmental policies is also an "irreversible" trend that benefits economic growth, and it will continue long after he leaves office.

In the journal article, Obama talked about how U.S. dependence on fossil fuels has declined since 2008, and explained that the economic opportunities presented by clean energy left him confident that this progress would continue after his presidency ends this month. 

In fact, evidence from around the world suggests that decreasing the use of fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse gas emissions does not restrict economic growth, Obama added. Further evidence hints that ignoring the costs on the environment that are exacted by fossil fuels can only strain the global economy and restrict growth. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

Between 2008 and 2015, carbon emissions dropped by 9.5 percent, even as the economy grew by over 10 percent, supporting the conclusion that reducing emissions neither reduces living standards nor hobbles markets and the economy, according to the article.

Adopting clean energy allows businesses to operate more efficiently, lowering costs to their customers and creating capital that can be reinvested in the business — a direction that drives job creation, Obama said.

And the costs of reversing this trend and thereby accelerating the pace of global warming could be severe. Economic models predict that a temperature rise of 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) over average temperatures from preindustrial times could drive annual losses in U.S. revenue of approximately $340 billion to $690 billion, Obama said.

"It's good business and good economics to lead a technological revolution and define market trends," Obama said in the study. "The latest science and economics provide a helpful guide for what the future may bring."

Original article on Live Science.

SAN FRANCISCO — The world's leaders should institute a carbon tax to mitigate the worst effects of climate change and help shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said.

The current lack of a carbon tax amounts to a hidden subsidy that incentivizes "bad behavior," Musk said here Tuesday (Dec. 15) at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

"It's kind of like if we had high taxes on fruits and vegetables and low taxes on cigarettes and alcohol," said Musk, the founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX. "That wouldn't make sense, but that's sort of what we have now with respect to energy, with very powerful forces trying to keep it that way." [Earth in the Balance: 7 Crucial Tipping Points]

At heart, prices are just a form of information that "tell people what to do, and what things should be favored over another thing. And so when the prices are wrong, then the wrong thing happens in the economy," he added. "Any sort of carbon tax would reduce the effective error in the system of prices in the economy."

Musk is working to reduce humanity's dependence on gas, oil and coal, which release heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere when burned. Musk co-founded and helms the electric-car company Tesla Motors, and he also co-founded and serves as chairman of SolarCity, the United States' largest solar-power provider.

Not surprisingly, Musk is bullish on solar, viewing it as the chief energy source of the post-fossil-fuels future.

"You could take basically a corner of Utah and Nevada and power the whole United States with solar power," Musk said. "So I think that's mostly how it will get solved."

And that future dependency on renewable energy — with solar in the lead, but also featuring hydropower, nuclear energy and other "green" sources — cannot come soon enough, Musk said.

Humanity will need to shift to a sustainable-energy economy at some point, because the world's accessible fossil fuels won't last forever, he noted.

"The question is just when [the shift occurs], and how many billions of tons of CO2 are in the atmosphere versus in the ground," Musk said. "Given that we know where we'll end up, which is a sustainable-energy economy, it seems like we should terminate this experiment as soon as possible."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

President Obama announced Friday morning that he has denied TransCanada’s permit application to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline in the U.S.

“The State Department has decided that the Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States,” Obama said. “I agree with that decision.”

Obama said America is a global leader on taking action on climate change, and approving Keystone XL would have undercut that leadership. Some crude oil needs to be left in the ground to keep the climate from warming further, and rejecting Keystone XL will help meet that goal, he said.

Among the reasons for rejecting Keystone XL, Obama said the pipeline would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to the U.S. economy, nor would it increase U.S. energy security or help to lower gas prices, which have already declined dramatically over the last year.

TransCanada said in a statement that it “would review all of its options in light of a permit denial for Keystone XL,” including the possibility of filing a new permit application for a pipeline.

“TransCanada and its shippers remain absolutely committed to building this important energy infrastructure project,” TransCanada CEO Russ Girling said in a statement.

State Department officials said at a news conference Friday that TransCanada is free to apply for a new permit to build a cross-border pipeline and it is up to the company to do so.

Pipeline Crunch Could Keep Northeast’s Heating Bills High British Columbia Rejects Tar Sands Oil Pipeline Expansion Four Things to Know About Keystone XL

The $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline was slated to stretch 1,179 miles from east-central Alberta, Canada, to the Texas Gulf Coast. It would transport 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the Canadian tar sands to refineries near Houston. Proposed in 2008, the 875-mile section between the Canadian border and Steele City, Neb., needed State Department approval because it crossed an international border.

Other parts of TransCanada’s Keystone Project between central Nebraska and Texas have already been built and are carrying tar sands oil to refineries along the Gulf Coast today. Environmental advocates have rallied against the unbuilt portion and urged the Obama administration to reject it, saying emissions from the production and burning of tar sands oil it would carry could worsen climate change.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculated that the tar sands oil the pipeline would carry is highly damaging to the climate, emitting about 1.3 billion more tons of greenhouse emissions over the pipeline’s 50-year lifespan than if it were carrying conventional crude oil. The production of tar sands oil releases 17 percent more CO2 into the atmosphere than the average barrel of crude oil produced elsewhere, according to the State Department.

“Construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would be inconsistent with stabilizing global warming below dangerous levels,” Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann said. “I am pleased that the administration has made good on their promise to take seriously the task of acting on climate by rejecting the construction of the pipeline.”

State Department officials said that, internationally, approval or denial of Keystone XL would be seen as a test of U.S. resolve on global leadership on climate change, with approval of the pipeline likely seen as inconsistent with America’s pledges to reduce emissions.

However, the officials said that crude oil production from the Canadian tar sands would not likely be reduced by the rejection of the Keystone XL permit. Only global oil prices and tar sands producers themselves will determine the level of production in the tar sands, they said.

The Obama administration’s rejection of Keystone XL doesn’t mean Canadian tar sands won’t find their way to refineries. Energy companies mining the tar sands may have a range of options to get their crude to refineries on the Gulf Coast and elsewhere.

Stephen R. Kelly, visiting professor of public policy at Duke University specializing in U.S.-Canada border issues, said that the rejection of Keystone XL will have little effect on the amount of oil flowing between the two countries because energy companies have already compensated by adding new rail capacity for oil shipping.

“I think the company (TransCanada) and more importantly oil producers and refiners have either figured out that this isn’t going to happen, or isn’t going to happen anytime soon,” Kelly said, referring to Keystone XL. “The market has adjusted.”

Within Canada, TransCanada is planning an even bigger pipeline project than Keystone XL. Starting in Hardisty, Alberta, the Energy East Project would carry more than 1 million barrels of tar sands oil per day to refineries in New Brunswick, though the company announced this week that the project has been paired down slightly. Energy East is slated to begin operating in 2018.

Another proposed project is an expansion of an existing Enbridge Inc. pipeline in Wisconsin called the Line 61 Upgrade Project, which is being designed to carry 1.2 million barrels of crude oil per day from an oil terminal in northern Wisconsin to another terminal near Pontiac, Ill. Construction began in 2014, and the pipeline is expected to be operating at full capacity late this year.

Enbridge just upgraded another pipeline called the Flanagan South Project that stretches from Pontiac to oil terminals in Cushing, Okla. There, Flanagan links to yet another new Enbridge pipeline expansion, called the Seaway Twin, which started carrying crude last fall from Cushing to refineries in Freeport, Texas.

Energy companies are also using rail to transport crude from Alberta, and the Canadian government has approved other major Enbridge oil pipeline projects. Those include the Northern Gateway Project, which is slated to transport crude oil from Alberta to a port on Canada’s west coast, and the Line 9 expansion, which would pipe tar sands oil east to Montreal.

You May Also Like: How Safe Are America’s 2.5 Million Miles of Pipelines? Montana Oil Spill Illustrates Climate-Related Risks to Pipelines, Experts Say Tar Sands Mining Makes Leap from Canada to Utah

Originally on Climate Central.

Jeremy Deaton writes about the science, policy and politics of climate and energy for Nexus Media. You can follow him at @deaton_jeremy. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Climate activist and author Bill McKibben has likened 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming to the legal drinking limit, and the global carbon budget to a six-pack shared between friends. The total proven coal, oil and gas reserves? That's "the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour."

Sixty to 80 percent of the coal, oil and gas reserves of publicly listed companies need to stay in the ground if the planet is to have a decent shot of keeping global warming to less than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, the limit agreed to by world leaders. Extending McKibben's analogy, coal is the moonshine of fossil fuels — cheap, dirty and extremely dangerous. Oil is an off-brand whiskey. Natural gas is Grey Goose vodka — clean, refined and widely unobjectionable. It should appeal to free-market libertarians and left-leaning environmentalists alike. That's received wisdom, anyway. In actuality, natural gas simply poses a different range of threats. Gas may be just as hazardous as oil and coal.

Here's why:

1. Natural gas is mostly methane.

Natural gas produces about half as much carbon dioxide as coal, but it can wreak havoc if it escapes into the atmosphere unburned. That's because natural gas is comprised mostly of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. Over the course of a century, methane will trap 34 times as much heat as an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. 

Problematically, natural gas is prone to leaking from pipelines, wellheads, and the nooks and crannies of processing and storage facilities. "Accounting for methane leakage throughout the supply chain of natural gas, natural gas might actually be worse for the climate than coal," said Lena Moffitt, director of the Sierra Club's Stop Dirty Fuels Campaign, at a panel on energy hosted by Politico. 

As NOVA Next reported, it's conceivable that leaked methane from the U.S. oil and gas sector is warming the atmosphere as much as America's 557 coal-fired power plants. [Nearly 6,000 Natural Gas Leaks Found in Washington, D.C. ]

Thus, while the United States' embrace of natural gas has cut carbon dioxide emissions, the country might not have put a dent in total greenhouse gas emissions, which include methane. 

2. Gas pipelines blow up. 

Shoddy pipes don't just deliver climate-distorting methane into the atmosphere. They also endanger people who live nearby. In recent years, natural-gas pipeline explosions have killed five in Allentown, Pennsylvania; eight in San Bruno, California; and 10 in southeast New Mexico, to name a few. Now, thanks to the shale gas boom, thousands of miles of new gas pipelines are wending their way across the country.

Pipes, known as "gathering lines," carrying gas from wells to processing facilities are just as vulnerable to deterioration and natural disasters as are other kinds of pipelines. But a significant portion are exempt from federal safety or construction regulations because they traverse rural areas, and are therefore seen as posing a less significant threat. 

This regulatory wrinkle puts countless rural families at risk.

3. Fracking is bad for your health.

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking ," allows drillers to access reserves of natural gas trapped deep underground in shale rock. The expansion of hydraulic fracturing has driven down the price of natural gas, but not without a cost to local communities. From Texas to Pennsylvania, chemicals used in fracking are contaminating water supplies. Hydraulic fracturing has been linked to infertility, miscarriage, birth defects and low birth weight, according to a study published in the journal Reviews on Environmental Health. [Fracking: The Confusing Vocabulary of Hydraulic Fracturing (Op-Ed)]

Astoundingly, fracking is exempt from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, thanks to a loophole passed in 2005 at the urging of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, an editorial in the New York Times said. Prior to his time in the White House, Cheney served as CEO of Halliburton, a national leader in hydraulic fracturing. 

It's tempting to see natural gas as a bridge technology, a clean(er)-burning fossil fuel that will hold the world over until the price of solar energy drops to bargain levels. But as Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp argues, Americans should view natural gas as an "exit ramp," not a bridge. That's because every dollar spent on a new pipeline or a new gas well is a dollar not invested in wind or solar.

Natural gas is merely another way to feed the world's addiction to climate-altering hydrocarbons. Investing in gas will only slow the development of affordable clean energy. Given the risks associated with natural gas, both to the climate and to human health, this fuel deserves just as much scrutiny as do oil and coal.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

The Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) calculates a 75 percent chance of one or more spills of more than 1,000 barrels of oil over the next several decades if Arctic drilling proceeds as planned.

In 2014, the United States consumed 6.95 billion barrels of petroleum products, an average of 19.05 million barrels per day.

The National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska (NPRA) is about 24 million acres of land owned by the federal government. In 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that the NPRA area contains about 896 million barrels of undiscovered oil (only one-tenth of what had been estimated in 2002).

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) was established in 1960 to conserve its fish, wildlife and plants. ANWR has about the same area as the state of South Carolina. The area also includes the Inupiat native lands of Kaktovik, with a population of 5,000 to 7,000. The USGS estimates 10.4 billion barrels of oil lie beneath the ANWR.

Since 1977, the “1002 Area” has been controversial due to oil companies’ desire to drill for the estimated 7.7 billion barrels of oil in that area.

BOEM calculates that there’s a 75 percent chance of one or more spills of more than 1,000 barrels of oil over the next 77 years, given 500 wells and 4.3 billion barrels of oil produced. The Exxon Valdez spill in1989 spilled an estimated 260,000 to 900,000 barrels; the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 spilled about 4.9 million barrels. 

This story was updated on 9 July at 2:38 p.m. ET.

Spotting dark, gooey and flammable tar on the beach — remnants from an oil spill in Southern California in May — just got a lot easier, thanks to NASA.

The agency recently captured a light-sensitive image of tar-seeped sand and water in Santa Barbara to help officials study and respond to the spill.

"Mapping tar on beaches using high-resolution imaging spectroscopy techniques that can identify tar of this type has never been done before, and is a natural extension of oil-on-water remote sensing," Ira Leifer, principle investigator of the oil spill and an environmental consultant, said in a statement.

The oil spill, also known as the Refugio Incident, occurred on May 19 when a pipeline operated by Plains All American Pipeline burst. Roughly 21,000 gallons of oil leaked into the Pacific Ocean, in the north Santa Barbara Channel, located about 100 miles (161 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles. 101,000 gallons of crude oil also spilled onto Refugio State Beach, just north of Santa Barbara, according to NASA. [SOS! 10 Major Oil Disasters at Sea]

Plains All American Pipeline doesn’t have a stellar safety record, with 175 safety and maintenance infractions since 2006, reported the Los Angeles Times. Since 2004, mechanical failures on Plains' pipelines have released around 2 million gallons of hazardous liquid in Canada and the United States, according to the Times.

Leifer collected tar balls — lumps of solidified crude oil — on the affected beach in Santa Barbara and analyzed them in a laboratory. Leifer identified the unique way that the tar balls absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light, which NASA then used to spot other tar balls from the air.

NASA deployed a De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft with an advanced camera-type instrument that was developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The instrument, called an Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer, Next Generation (or AVIRIS-NG), measures light reflected from Earth's surface and decodes it into surface properties.

Once the AVIRIS-NG knew to look for a specific light-absorption and -reflection signature radiating off the tar balls, it identified and mapped their locations over a 220-foot (67 meters) span of the beach.

AVIRIS-NG has previously been used to map ecosystems, minerals, land use and trace gases, according to NASA. The first-generation AVIRIS was used to survey the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The Deepwater Horizon spill had far-reaching effects on marine biodiversity, affecting coral reefs and dolphins, among many other species. But accounting for all the missing oil can be problematic, so the extent of impacts can remain unknown for many years. 

NASA's images are part of the agency's Disasters Program, and will help local, state and federal officials assess the impact to the beach and guide its restoration. "NASA is keenly interested in fostering development of new operational remote-sensing technologies that improve disaster response for application by federal responders," said David Green, the NASA disasters program manager in Washington, D.C.

Editor's Note: The story was updated to reflect the corrected estimate of oil that was spilled on Refugio Beach. NASA now says 101,000 gallons of crude oil spilled, not 105,000 barrels.

Elizabeth Goldbaum is on Twitter. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science

Wesley Greene is garden historian for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. This article is adapted from one that originally appeared as "Snails, Flies and Caterpillars" in The Interpreter. Greene contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 

When humans first gathered food plants into a garden, they simultaneously created an ideal habitat for insects to feed, initiating a battle for sustenance that continues to this day. For the largest part of human history, the insects have had the upper hand. 

In the Colonial Garden at Colonial Williamsburg, we face the same challenge, but use centuries-old techniques to fight back. 

The first English garden book, "The Gardeners Labyrinth" (1577) written by Thomas Hill, records: 

"There is none so dul of eye-sight (as I believe) who not thorowly perceiveth and seeth, how that the Garden riches be diversly annoyed, and harmed by divers creeping worms and beasts, as wel above as under the earth, and that through the same occasion, often procured to feeble and wast, and unlesse speedy remedies shall be exercised, that these in the end do fall down and perish."  [Editor's note: original text spellings are used throughout this article.]

The remedy, of course, has been the problem. In his book, Hill recommends many of the same techniques that had been practiced for more than a thousand years at the time and that continued well into the 19th century. Plants were sprinkled with fig tree ashes, ox urine, olive oil and the soot of chimneys. Sulfur, lixivium of limewater (a solution of slaked lime) and assafætida (an evil-smelling latex from the roots of several species of Ferula plants) were sprayed on the leaves. Bundles of garlic, brimstone (sulfur), goat hooves and hart's horn were burned between the rows to ward off pests. 

Pests born from the morning dew

For people of the time, the very origin of the insects that attacked the plants was a mystery. For more than a thousand years, gardeners believed insect and disease organisms arose through spontaneous generation. According to Aristotle, plant lice (aphids) arose from the morning dew and field mice were created by dirty hay. 

One of the first scientific investigations into spontaneous generation was conducted by the Italian physician, Francesco Redi, in 1668. It was generally believed that maggots arose spontaneously in rotting meat, but Redi postulated that the organisms actually arose from the eggs laid by flies. To test his hypothesis, Redi set meat out in a number of flasks, some open to the air, some sealed completely and others covered with gauze. The maggots appeared only in the open flasks, proving that the flies had to be able to reach the meat to lay their eggs. 

The debate over spontaneous generation continued through the 18th century. In 1745, the English clergyman John Needham conducted what he claimed to be the experiment that definitively settled the debate. After the invention of the microscope, it was readily apparent that boiling killed microorganisms. So, in his experiment, Needham boiled chicken broth in a flask and then allowed the liquid to cool. Within a few days, microorganisms had formed a scum on the surface of the broth, proving the theory of spontaneous generation, Needham claimed. 

Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian priest, was not convinced. In 1768, he proposed that the microorganisms had been introduced from the air. In his experiment, he boiled meat broth in one flask that was allowed to stand open and in another that was sealed. The open flask grew microorganisms; the sealed flask did not. Doubters argued that this only proved that spontaneous generation could not occur without air. 

In 1859, the French Academy of Sciences solicited experiments to prove or disprove spontaneous generation. A young French chemist named Louis Pasteur created the experiment that finally lay to rest the theory of spontaneous generation (decades before he developed the rabies vaccine). In his experiment, as others had in the earlier tests, Pasteur boiled meat broth in a flask. But he modified the container by heating the neck of the flask and bending it into an S shape so that air could enter but airborne spores could not. The broth in the flask remained clear. In a definitive demonstration, he then tipped the broth into the lowest part of the neck, where spores had settled through gravity, and the broth rapidly clouded over. This not only disproved spontaneous generation, but also demonstrated the ubiquity of microorganisms in the air. 

From whence the insects came

The confusion over the origins of insects is apparent in many 18th-century garden works. Leonard Meager, a gardener in Northamptonshire, records in "The Compleat English Gardner" (1704): 

"Caterpillars, of which there are several sorts, but those are the worst enemies to Trees and Fruit which are bred by the East Wind. To counter this evil: some affirm with much confidence, that the oft smoaking of them with old Hay, or Straw, using the advantage of the Wind in the Spring, to be a sure prevention." 

Philip Miller, superintendent of the Chelsea Physic Garden, writes in "The Gardeners Dictionary" (1768): 

"Some have supposed that blights are usually produced by an easterly wind, which brings vast quantities of insects' eggs along with it from some distant place; which, being lodged upon the surface of the leaves and flowers of fruit-trees, cause them to shrivel up and perish." 

Today, as then, caterpillars are particularly bothersome, one of several insect pests that afflict the cabbage family. The green caterpillar of the imported cabbage worm is familiar to anyone who has ever grown broccoli, cauliflower, collards or cabbage. Richard Bradley, a member of the Royal Society and first botany professor at Cambridge University, writing in "The Gentleman and Gardener's Kalendar" (1720), also recognized the vast potential these insects have to reproduce, saying: 

" . . . every Insect increases Yearly about 400, and some of them many more; for Example, those Caterpillars which feed upon the Cabbage, and change into the common White Butter flies, breed twice every Year, each of them laying near 400 Eggs at one time; so that from the second Brood of one single Caterpillar, we may reasonably expect 160,000."

In "The Farmer's Instructor or the Husband and Gardener's Useful and Necessary Companion" (1747), a work begun by gentleman Samuel Trowell and enlarged and finished by farmer William Ellis, the authors were great believers in the virtues of manure in controlling insect pests. In regard to the cabbage worm, they record: 

" . . . when the Plant is grown large, the white-wing'd Butterfly lays his Eggs, which brings a Caterpillar at the Bottom of the Leaf, and when they come to be large, devours the whole Plant … Now to prevent this Mischief, take some of the Lixivium made of the Manure, and water the plants with it, which will destroy all the Caterpillars, be thy ever so many, nor will they come there any more."

William Thompson, gardner to the Duke of Ancaster, in "The New Gardener's Calendar" (1779) suggests salt: 

"When your cabbages and coleworts are infested with caterpillars, take some salt water, and sprinkle it over them; this method has been frequently found to be effectual."

When is a fly a fly?

The origin of the white butterfly that produced the green caterpillar remained a mystery throughout the 18th century. John Hill, an apothecary, botanist and occasional actor, writes in "Eden, or a Compleat Body of Gardening" (1773) with this advice for the gardner in the month of November: 

"On the Tops of the Branches in his Hedges, and on many Trees that are about the place, he will see Bags like Cobwebs: these are the Nest of the Caterpillars that will the next Year eat his Cabbages and other valuable Products; let him cut them off, and burn them." 

The webworm that Hill writes of is not the source of cabbage worms. He further observes: 

"Chuse for this Purpose [planting cabbage], an open Piece of Ground, far from Trees or Hedges, for Caterpillars breed among the Leaves of these; and the Butterflies, that produce those Devourers, frequent such Places more than open Ground." 

Many authors recommend placing cabbages at a distance from trees or hedges, and while that would have no effect in controlling the cabbage caterpillar, this may actually be good advice for combatting another pest of cabbage: the cabbage flea beetle. The flea beetle shelters in vegetation on the edges of gardens or fields, so placing your plants away from hedges may have some benefit. The cabbage flea beetle is a pest on canola crops in the northern United States today, and research from Washington State University has shown that flea beetle damage on canola seldom occurs farther than 50 yards (46 meters) from the edge of a field.

The confusion for modern readers of 18th-century garden works — as well as 18th-century authors who read, and often plagiarized each other — is that just about any insect that hops, flutters or flies is called a "fly." This can make identification confusing for the reader, and for this reason, information about one "fly" is often attributed to a different insect in those books. 

In "The Practical Kitchen Gardiner" (1727), Stephen Switzer — a garden designer and one of the first proponents of a move away from the classic formal gardens of the 17th century — is speaking of the flea beetle when he writes concerning coleworts (similar to the modern collard greens) that it: 

"is often apt to be eat up in the seedleaf as other cabbage seeds are with the black fly. It is only in the seedling stage that cabbages are damaged by the flea beetle." 

To prevent damage from the beetle, he suggests, "as soon as the seed is sown and rak'd in, you should sow some slack'd lime, the virtue of which will last till some rain succeeds, after which the seed will soon sprout, and be out of danger." 

The use of lime very likely does provide some protection from the flea beetle, as lime is extremely caustic.

Philip Miller recommends using radishes as a trap crop with cauliflower. Trap crops are more attractive (to an insect) and lure them away from the crop a gardener wishes to protect.

"If there are not some Radishes amongst them, and the month of May should prove hot and dry, as it sometimes happens, the fly will seize your Cauliflowers, and eat their leaves full of holes, to their prejudice, and sometimes their destruction; whereas, if there are Radishes upon the spot, the flies will take to them, and never meddle with the Cauliflowers." 

This would likely have some limited effect, as the flea beetle seems to prefer radish over cauliflower.

This same insect and a number of its relatives also feed on turnips. Switzer writes: 

"There is a black fly that always fastens upon them, and eats the seed-leaves in their first coming up in the summer-time, which spoils that crop entirely, if not prevented." To prevent the fly he recommends: "some have sap or seminated soot out of the chimney, wood-ashes, and the like strewn over the young plants." 

Organic gardeners in England will often spread ashes amongst turnips to this day to ward off this troublesome fly.

In "Modern Eden" (1767), gardeners John Rutter and Daniel Carter suggest a more elaborate method to combat the turnip fly: 

"Steep the seed in the following liquor: Boil a good quantity of tobacco stalks in water till it is very strong of them; then stir into this some aloes, soot and flour of brimstone. Put in the seeds, and let them lie 18 hours; then draw off the liquor and sow them with the ingredients." 

Trowel, ever the proponent of manure, writes: 

"Manure must be of very great Service here, because it will prevent the Fly's Mischief, that is the chiefest Insect that spoils Turnips; for altho' the Rains may wash it, yet its Efficacy will hold strong enough to prevent its Hurt." 

Another vexing problem was the fly on the broad or horse bean (known to most Americans as the fava bean). Trowel writes in 1747: 

"Many Farmers' and Gardeners' Bean-Crops in the Spring-season of 1746, where the Seed was sown or set too early … their Horse-beans in particular suffered much by the destructive Dolphin Fly, bred by the frequent Showers of Rain, and the hot Glades or the Sunbeams that interposed their scorching Rays between their falling, and produced this horrid Insect, which no Manure, sowed over the Ground, can prevent: but I will here make known a Way to prevent this Collyer Fly's Damage … These black Dolphin Flies always begin their Settlement on the top part of the Bean-stalk, and there carry on their Increase till they get down almost to its bottom, and live on the Sap of it, by which they poison and destroy it … I am the first Author that discovered this Remedy, and this is, when a Crop of Horse-beans is perceived to be seized by this Dolphin Fly: Then let a Man make use of a Scythe, and go in among them, and mow their Tops off so far as the Fly has settled … when all the Tops are cut off, the Fly falls with them on the Ground, and can never rise again." 

In Trowel's case, the insect is actually an aphid, but English gardeners still top beans to combat what is now known as the black bean aphid. The aphids are often found on the newest growth, so this method would reduce the population and also hasten the ripening of the beans lower on the stem.

Stopping slugs and snails

All of the above insects are fairly host specific. Slugs and snails, on the other hand, are indiscriminate feeders. In "A Compleat System of Husbandry and Gardening" (1716), John Worlidge, a British gentleman and agriculturalist, writes: 

" . . . there cannot be a more pernicious Enemy than Snails, which you may in a Dewy Morning easily find where they most delight to feed; but the surest way is in the hard Winter to seek our their haunts, and make a clean riddance of them: They lie much in the holes of Walls, behind old Trees, under Thorn, and other old and close Hedges. In one Year, I caused near two Bushels to be gathered in a Nobleman's Garden, which had in precedent Years destroyed the most of their Wall-Fruit, and ever after they had great plenty of Fruit."

The most common method of gathering snails is explained by Tompson in 1779: 

"If you place bricks, tiles or boards hollow against your pales and walls, the snails will creep under them for shelter, and may then be taken."

This is a simple trap that can be effectively used today. Simply lay boards amongst your plants, and remove the snails and slugs that collect under them each morning.

The final solution is provided by John James, translating an original French work by J. Dezallier d'Argenville, in "The Theory and Practice of Gardening" (1712): 

"They are easily taken with your Hand, if you look for them Morning and Evening, especially after Rain, for then they come out in the greatest Abundance; they should be presently crush'd under Foot."

Aphids give ants a bad name

The aphid, or plant louse, is nearly ubiquitous in gardens worldwide. The insect's success is due to its extraordinary reproductive proficiency. All aphids are parthenogenic, meaning the females do not require males to produce offspring, and in some genera of aphids, males have never been found. 

In "A New System of Natural History" (1792), British scientists Peter Hill and Thomas Cadell describe the damage aphids inflict: 

"They are furnished with a small trunk, which pierces the leaves, and enables the animal to extract the juices proper for its nourishment. Many plants grow deformed by the number of punctures thus made upon their leaves."

(Hill and Cadell are also known for theorizing that America and Americans were inferior due to the lack of large mammals on the continent, a theory Thomas Jefferson tasked Lewis and Clark with dispelling.)

Worlidge writes, 

"By reason of great Drought, many sorts of Trees and Plants are subject to Lice: And seeing that they are caused by Heat and Drought, as is evident in the Sweetbryar and Gooseberry, that are only Lowsy in dry times, or in very hot and dry places; therefore frequent washing them, by dashing Water on them, may prove the best remedy."

Drought, of course, does not produce aphids, but the damage from aphid feeding is much more pronounced in drought conditions, which likely explains the phenomena that Worlidge observes. It is probably aphids that gave the ant a bad name among 18th-century gardeners. Ants are attracted to the honeydew emitted by aphids, and like an army of farmers, "milk" the aphids for the honeydew and protect their "herd" from predators. Ants do not damage plants themselves other than in aiding the aphids, but most 18th-century gardening works give ideas for killing these relatively harmless insects. 

In "Kalendarium Universale," (1748) the father and son gardeners Benjamin Whitmill the elder and Benjamin Whitmill the younger suggest the following: 

"Some Persons recommend the cutting of Dew-Worms in small Pieces, and strewing them for Ants in proper Places which they do frequent; to these, they will resort in great Numbers for Food, and may be easily destroy'd by the Help of a Watering-Pot of scalding Water."

Pests destroying pests

Hill and Cadell give a novel use of ants in an early example of natural pest control:

"In Switzerland, however, they are transported to trees for a different purpose: the destruction of caterpillars and other vermin. A bag filled with ants is fastened to a tree, with a small hole purposely left open for them to creep out; they spread along the tree, and are prevented from leaving it, by a quantity of pitch with which the stem is covered. Rather than die by famine, they go in pursuit of the caterpillars among the leaves and devour them."

The authors also recognize the role of beneficial insects in controlling plant pests. Concerning aphids, Hill and Cadell observe:

"The most effectual method of preventing the depredations of plant lice upon flowers and leaves to plants is suggested by those insects which live by preying upon them [the lice]. The plant louse-lion, or aphidivorous fly, either by instinct or foresight, deposits her eggs in the midst of these animals; and as soon as the larvæ are produced, they devour hundreds around them." 

The authors are likely referring to ladybugs.

Parasitic wasps are important predators of many insect pests. Hill and Cadell are also familiar with the most important family of these wasps. 

"Ichneumon — one striking peculiarity in the manners of some insects of this genus, who make their way into the body of the caterpillars of different kinds, and there deposite their eggs [is that]… The ova hatched within the caterpillar after being quickened into life, preys upon the intestines of that animal."

A control method for both insect and disease problems that is widely practiced to this day is a system of crop rotation. Meager writes in 1704: 

"Another thing I would have you take notice of, and that is that you do not sow one sort of Crop too often upon one and the same piece of ground, but sow it with changeable Crops, especially Parsnips and Carrots, the which being sown too often without change, will be apt to canker, rot or be very apt to be Worm-eaten, although the ground be maintained very rich." 

Gardeners recognize the importance of crop rotation today as an effective method of pest control.

[Everyday Citizens Can Help Solve the Riddle of the Disappearing Ladybugs]

Pest control, the Colonial Williamsburg way

How did the colonists in Virginia deal with insect pests in the vegetable garden? For the most part, they did not have to, because the majority of insects that plagued their crops in England had not yet arrived in America! 

The imported cabbage worm was introduced first to Quebec and did not find its way to Massachusetts until around 1869. The flea beetles that infested the English cabbage and turnips did not arrive in America until the 20th century. The species of slugs and snails plaguing Britain arrived in America sometime in the 19th century, and to this day, I have never seen a black bean aphid on my broad beans. New World pests such as the Colorado potato beetle and the Mexican bean beetle never made it within a thousand miles of Virginia in the 18th century. 

There were a few garden pests waiting for the colonists in North America, such as the cabbage looper and striped cabbage caterpillar that gardeners occasionally see today. The striped cucumber beetle is native to North America as is the squash vine borer. John Randolph, last Royal Attorney General of the colony of Virginia (a loyalist who returned to England in 1775), writing in "A Treatise on Gardening" (1793) from Williamsburg in the 18th century, gives this warning concerning raspberries: "They are pestered with lice, but limewater kills them, if sprinkled upon them." However, very few insect problems are recorded by our colonial predecessors in the vegetable garden. 

Robert Beverley Jr., a gentleman, historian and politician in colonial Virginia observed in "History and Present State of Virginia" (1705) that "A Kitchin-Garden don't thrive better or faster in any part of the Universe, than there. They have all the Culinary Plants that grow in England, and in far greater perfection" — a finding due, in part, to the fact that English vegetables did not arrive in America with their English pests. 

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Peak oil — the point in time when domestic or global oil production peaks and begins to forever decline — has been looming on the horizon for decades. Countless research reports, government studies and oil industry analyses have tried to pin down the exact year when peak oil will occur, to no avail.

The stakes are undeniably high: Much of human civilization is now inextricably linked to a readily available supply of inexpensive oil and petroleum products. From heating, electricity production and transportation to cosmetics, medicines and plastic bags, modern life runs on oil.

Peak oil theory: The early years

In October 1973, the world was roiled by the OPEC oil embargo. Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed to stop exporting oil to the United States, much of Western Europe, Japan and several other nations.

Though the oil embargo only lasted five months (until March 1974), it sent shock waves throughout the industrialized world and underscored our utter dependence on petroleum. Many government leaders and academic institutions realized, even after the embargo ended, that the global oil economy couldn't last forever.

Years earlier, in 1956, geologist M. King Hubbert at Shell Oil Company (and later at the U.S. Geological Survey) predicted that oil production in the lower 48 U.S. states would peak sometime around 1970.

Though his comments generated much controversy, he was later vindicated when institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences and the Energy Information Agency (EIA) confirmed that his now-famous bell curve predicting the 1970 peak was correct, despite much rosier predictions made by industry and government analysts.

'Hubbert got a lot of notoriety in his lifetime for correctly predicting U.S. oil would peak in 1970," said Alan Carroll, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of "Geofuels: Energy and Earth" (Cambridge University Press, 2015). "That same logic was extended to world oil production, and there have been many predictions that global production will reach a peak, none of which have happened yet," Carroll said.

When Hubbert turned his sights to global oil production in 1974, his report was equally disturbing, especially in light of the OPEC oil embargo: He predicted that the world's peak oil production would occur in 1995, assuming that current production and use trends continue.

In 1988, Hubbert said in an interview, "We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It's unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can't possibly happen again. You can only use oil once."

Does peak oil even exist?

Since Hubbert introduced the concept of peak oil, countless forecasters from every corner of the industrial, governmental and academic worlds have tried to substantiate or refute Hubbert's prediction.

Geoscientist Kenneth S. Deffeyes, author of "When Oil Peaked" (Hill and Wang, 2010), asserted that peak oil happened on Thanksgiving Day 2005. Meanwhile, petroleum geologist Colin Campbell, a founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), once estimated that peak oil had occurred around 2010, but his views have shifted somewhat as new data have become available.

The trouble is, determining when peak oil will occur, if it already has occurred, or if it will happen at all, are all dependent on an ever-changing set of assumptions and variables.

"The basic assumption of peak oil analysis is that you have prior knowledge of what the available reserves are, and in fact we do not," Carroll said. 

Reserves are the known amount of oil that can be extracted given present-day prices and present-day technology, Carroll explained. But peak oil also depends on oil prices and available technology. For example, hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, has opened up numerous oil fields in areas that were once considered played out or too costly to develop.

As a result of expanded fracking production, places like North Dakota — home of the Bakken formation of oil-bearing shale rock — are now experiencing an oil boom, and are likely to shift the global energy picture in dramatic ways over the next decade.

Thanks to fracking, instead of resembling a bell curve, U.S. oil production is back on the rise. Through the first half of 2014, the United States produced an average 8.3 million barrels a day. "We may have a second peak [of oil production] in the U.S.," Carroll said. "Maybe Hubbert wasn't right."

Oil supply and oil demand

Demand for fossil fuels is another critical factor in the debate over peak oil. Developing countries like China, India and Brazil have become big markets for oil (and other fossil fuels such as coal). As these enormous markets expand — and as the global population continues to increase beyond the 7 billion mark — the demand for oil increases.

And as the demand for fossil fuels like oil increases, the supply of these resources dwindles, or so some have argued. But the amount of available oil is not uniform. For instance, reserve estimates may be inaccurate. In California's San Joaquin Valley, production has well exceeded its initial 800 million barrel estimate, with 2.5 billion barrels already drilled and production continuing to grow through secondary recovery efforts, Carroll said.

Oil industry analysts often describe oil resources in terms of conventional and unconventional oil. Conventional oil describes oil that's available through more traditional, less expensive technologies like the oil wells that dot landscapes from West Texas to Saudi Arabia.

Unconventional oil, however, isn't readily or cheaply available. Sources like the tar oil sands of Canada, shale oils from the Bakken formation, coal oil (liquefied fuel from coal) and biofuels (ethanol, biodiesel and other liquid fuels from plants like switchgrass) are expected to form an increasingly important resource in the 21st century.

"We might hit a peak in terms of conventional oil, but coming in behind that are the oil sands, oil shales, the methane hydrates, and they will prevent consumption from simply dropping in a peak fashion," Carroll said. 

Costs and benefits of unconventional oil

EIA administrator Adam Sieminski points out a crucial issue in what makes oil available — its cost. When the price of oil reaches a certain point, it becomes profitable to drill in areas and in ways that would not be profitable if oil were too cheap.

"The question is not when you will run out of oil, but when you will run out of money to get the oil," Carroll said.

Deepwater drilling, for example, is an expensive and risky drilling procedure that usually takes place miles offshore in waters more than 500 feet (152 meters) deep. Roughly 80 percent of the oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico comes from deepwater wells, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The risks of deepwater drilling — and all unconventional oil development — were thrown into sharp relief in 2010, when BP's Deepwater Horizon well exploded, killing 11 people and spilling an estimated 205 million gallons (776 million liters) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest oil spill in U.S. history, eclipsing even the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

Despite the high costs and the risks, unconventional oil exploration and drilling makes sense when the price of oil is high — and according to energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, spending on deepwater drilling should grow from $43 billion in 2012 to $114 billion in 2022.

Thus, the amount of oil that's available for refining isn't fixed, even though the overall quantity of oil on Earth is finite.

A peak, or a plateau?

In a much-quoted (and much-criticized) report from 2006, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) presented an analysis that found 3.74 trillion barrels of oil available — far more than the 1.2 trillion barrels estimated by some earlier analyses.

Their research suggested that oil production won't simply reach a peak, followed by a precipitous decline. Instead, "global production will eventually follow an 'undulating plateau' for one or more decades before declining slowly."

From their research, CERA also determined that "the global production profile will not be a simple logistic or bell curve postulated by geologist M. King Hubbert, but it will be asymmetrical — with the slope of decline more gradual … it will be an undulating plateau that may well last for decades."

Their analysis calls into question the very idea of "peak oil" as a useful model for energy forecasting or governmental policy: "The 'peak oil' theory causes confusion and can lead to inappropriate actions and turn attention away from the real issues," CERA director Peter M. Jackson said. "Oil is too critical to the global economy to allow fear to replace careful analysis about the very real challenges with delivering liquid fuels to meet the needs of growing economies."

Whether oil production peaks or plateaus, one underlying fact drives the issue: "World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter," according to a 2005 in-depth analysis co-authored by Robert L. Hirsch and commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy (widely referred to as "the Hirsch report").

"Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity, and political influences," the report concludes. "Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain."

Other scientists, such as Carroll, question whether a true peak will ever be reached, given the remarkable quantities of carbon stored in the planet's crust. "There's potential for an enormous increase in quantity if one is willing to go for lower quality," he said.

Regardless of when or how oil production begins to decline, according to the Hirsch report, its effects will be global and will be accompanied by dramatic social, political, economic and environmental upheaval.

Mitigation of these effects — through conservation and development of alternative energy sources — will require advance planning and "an intense effort over decades," according to the report. "There will be no quick fixes. Even crash [mitigation] programs will require more than a decade to yield substantial relief."

The final word on peak oil may belong to Campbell, who was among the first to foresee its arrival: "The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stone, but because bronze and iron proved to be better substitutes," he wrote in 2001. "Firewood gave way to coal; and coal to oil and gas, not because they ran out or went into short supply but because the substitutes were cheaper and more efficient. But now, oil production does reach a peak without sight of a preferred substitute."

Additional resources

• U.S. Geological Survey National Oil and Gas Assessment – find out the current estimated oil and natural gas reserves of the United States.
• U.S. Energy Information Administration Energy Outlooks – find out the projections for U.S. energy use and profiles of energy use for countries around the world

Additional reporting by Becky Oskin, Senior Writer

Follow Marc Lallanilla on Twitter and Google+. Follow Becky Oskin @beckyoskin. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+.

This story was updated Feb. 6 at 9:45 a.m. EST.

Up to 10 million gallons (38 million liters) of crude oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill has settled at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where it is threatening wildlife and marine ecosystems, according to a new study.

The finding helps solve the mystery of where the "missing" oil from the spill landed. Its location had eluded both the U.S. government and BP cleanup crews after the April 2010 disaster that caused about 200 million gallons (757 million liters) of crude oil to leak into the Gulf.

"This is going to affect the Gulf for years to come," Jeff Chanton, the study's lead researcher and a professor of chemical oceanography at Florida State University, said in a statement. "Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It's a conduit for contamination into the food web." [Deepwater Horizon: Images of an Impact]

However, BP disputes the study's findings. The company's disagreement with the results, including a claim that there is no "missing oil," can be found on their website.

In the new study, the researchers took 62 sediment cores from an area encompassing 9,266 square miles (24,000 square kilometers) around the site of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Unlike other sediment on the ocean floor, oil does not contain any carbon-14, a radioactive isotope. Therefore, sediment samples without carbon-14 indicate that oil is present, Chanton said.

The scientists avoided areas with natural oil seeps, features in which oil slowly leaks onto the ocean floor through a series of cracks. In these areas, the sediment cores would have a lack of carbon-14 throughout the sample. In areas that don't normally have oil, "the oil is just in the surficial layer, like in that 0 to 1 centimeter [0 to 0.39 inches]" interval," Chanton told Live Science.

After studying the samples, the researchers made a map of the areas affected by the spill. About 3,243 square miles (8,400 square km) are covered with oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, they found.

It's unclear exactly how the oil got there after the spill. One idea is that the oil particles clumped together at the water's surface, or in plumes from the underwater leak, and became heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the Gulf. Cleanup crews also burned large patches of oil, and the resulting black carbon and ash could have sunk into the water, the researchers said. Or, zooplankton (tiny animals that drift near the water's surface) may have ingested the oil and discarded it in fecal pellets that sank to the Gulf floor, the researchers added.

Oil outlook

For now, the sunken oil may help keep the water above it clear and free of black oil particles, Chanton said, but it's turning into a long-term problem.

"There's less oxygen down there, and so that will slow the decomposition rate of the oil," Chanton said. "It might be there for a long period of time, a little reservoir of contamination." Moreover, the oil may cause tumors and lesions on underwater animals, research suggests.

The new study supports the findings of another independent study, which found that about 10 percent of the spill's oil made it to the Gulf floor. Using hopane, a hydrocarbon found in oil, the researchers of that study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2014, analyzed sediment samples to see how much oil had fallen to the bottom of the Gulf.

The new study calculates that 3 to 5 percent of the oil from the spill sank to the ocean floor, but the results of the two studies aren't that different, Chanton said.

"Our number is a little bit more conservative than theirs," he said, but "if the two approaches agree within a factor of two, that's pretty good for estimating all of the oil on the seafloor."

The findings were published Jan. 20 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

BP Responds

BP disputes the study's findings, saying that the researchers used a flawed method to calculate the amount of oil on the Gulf floor.

"Instead of using rigorous chemical analysis to identify oil in sediments, the authors used a tracer common to all sources of oil, including oil from the Gulf’s numerous natural seeps," BP spokesman Jason Ryan said in a statement.

But these statements don't lessen the impact of the study, Chanton said.

The researchers used the absence of carbon-14 as a tracer, which helped the researchers locate oil on 35 percent of the area they examined on the Gulf floor, Chanton said. The researchers did not include natural seepage in the results, Chanton said.

"A general tracer might be better because the oil can be transformed," once it enters water, for instance, by oxidation, Chanton said. But a general tracer will still be able to identify oil, even if it undergoes chemical changes, he said. The October 2014 study, which used a more specific oil tracer, got similar results to the new study.

Of the 62 sediment samples, at least 35 showed depletion of carbon-14, Chanton said.

Editor's note: This story was updated to include BP's response. 

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

With more stars in the sky than can easily be counted, Carl Sagan, in his book “Billions and Billions,” wrote about how hard it is to talk about the cosmos without using huge numbers.

The same is true for energy consumption and production in the U.S. Daily crude oil production in some states is measured in the millions of barrels. Household energy consumption is measured in millions of British thermal units (Btu). Total nationwide energy production is measured in quadrillions of Btus, or “quads” for short. 

Just as the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that the crude oil production in the U.S. is expected to continue booming even as oil prices decline, the federal government put out an interactive map showing just how production of energy of all kinds has increased over the past 20 years or so, and where those production hotspots are.

For example, in 2012, the U.S. produced a total of about 79,000 trillion Btu or about 79 quadrillion btu of energy, up from about 68 quadrillion Btu in 1993. By comparison, the average U.S. household burns about 89.6 million Btu of energy each year.

The biggest growth in energy production came from natural gas, which has grown by 6.9 quadrillion Btu since 1993. Biofuels production grew by 1.6 quadrillion Btus from almost nothing two decades ago. And growth in U.S. renewables production, such as wind, solar and hydropower, didn’t quite reach 1 quadrillion Btu between 1993 and 2012.

Low Oil Prices May Bode Ill For Climate  Derelict Oil Wells May Be Major Methane Emitters  Limiting Methane Leaks Critical to Gas, Climate Benefits 

A few other things stand out on the map.

Wyoming, a major coal producer, can be seen exploding onto the energy production scene as a major natural gas and wind power producer. The map shows how Pennsylvania’s natural gas boom made it a major energy producer over the past five years and North Dakota’s Bakken shale boom made that state a major oil producer at the same time.

Most of all, the map shows that, maybe like night sky and the cosmos beyond, “Quadrillions and Quadrillions” may be an apt title for the story of U.S. energy over the past two decades.

You May Also Like: Storm Pounds Calif., but to the Drought, Just a Spritz West Coast States Rule Electric Vehicle Adoption in U.S. Warm Ocean Waters Boosting Typhoons, Record Heat How Winters Are Changing Throughout the U.S. Low Oil Prices May Bode Ill For Climate CO2 Takes Just 10 Years to Reach Planet’s Peak Heat

Peter Lehner is executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). This op-ed will appear on the NRDC blog Switchboard. Lehner contributed this articleto Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

A group of Harvard students recently filed suit against the college's president, fellows and others for "mismanagement of charitable funds." The suit asks the court to compel the university — which boasts a $36 billion endowment, the largest of any university in the world — to divest from fossil fuels.

Harvard is just one of many colleges across the country where students, alumni and some faculty, motivated by the urgency of the climate crisis, have been pressuring administrations to move investments out of fossil fuels.

The divestment debate

Carbon pollution from fossil fuels is the primary driver of climate change. Scientists estimatethat rises in sea level, deadly floods, droughts, heat waves and other harmful impacts of climate change could become irreversible unless fossil fuel companies keep the majority of their known reserves in the ground.

Harvard, like many other universities, has rejected calls for divestment, using the same excuse as other schools: Their concern for the financial stability of the university, among other things, makes divestment impossible. But studiesfrom asset management firm Impax have demonstrated that fossil-fuel-free investments make money — just as much, if not more than conventional investment strategies. If fund performance isn't the issue, why the reluctance to divest? Are U.S. universities, just like the U.S. Congress, so hooked on fossil-fuel funding that they fear alienating certain deep-pocketed interests? If celebrated institutions of higher education can't shake free of fossil fuel influence, what hope is there for the country's somewhat less high-minded political system? [We Will Not Run Out of Fossil Fuels (Op-Ed )]

It's time for universities to consider what they stand for, as they did with apartheid in the 1980s and with tobacco in the 1990s, and divest from fossil fuels. That industry is standing in the way of clean-energy progress , and using its power and influence to ensure that its polluting products continue to dominate the global energy system and destabilize the climate. These actions pose serious risks to the environment, human health, the nation's economy and its national security — risks that are disproportionately borne by those who have contributed least to the problem.

"People of conscience," urged Desmond Tutu in a video released just before the UN Climate Summit in September, "need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of climate change."

Harvard, my alma mater, has $34.6 million invested in the top 200 fossil-fuel companies. This represents less than 0.1 percent of the university's endowment. Yet Harvard President Drew Faust, in an open letterto the community explaining her position on divestment, claimed that divestment would risk "significantly constraining investment returns."

At the City University of New York (CUNY), which is reportedly considering divestment, a political science professor also fell back on the same argument, telling The Wall Street Journal that divestment would come "at the expense of financial stability." CUNY has about $10 million of its $241 million endowment in fossil-fuel securities.

Fossil fuels are risky investments

Convention dictates that fossil-fuel companies should be part of an investment portfolio, just as convention dictates that U.S. taxpayers should subsidize the industry, at a rate that now adds up to about $8 billion every year. But financial experts have found that a strong investment portfolio doesn't need fossil fuels.

Impax, in two back-to-back reports, found that if fossil fuels had been removed from a global benchmark index fund for the past five and six years , performance would have improved. And if those holdings were replaced with renewable energy and energy efficiency stocks, the fund's performance would have been even better.

The global index provider FTSE Group, working with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the asset management firm BlackRock, developed the groundbreaking ex Fossil Fuel Index this year, which seeks to exclude companies that produce oil, coal and natural gas. When FTSE comparedthe historic performance of the new index to its benchmark index over the past eight years, the returns were very similar; the ex Fossil Fuel Index, however, showed less volatility than the benchmark.

Other analysts simply see fossil fuels as too risky. Oil and gas companies are pushing deeper into the ocean, operating in politically unstable areas, using environmentally harmful fracking methods in people's backyards and cutting corners on safety, just to keep their business model alive. John Streur, the president of Portfolio 21 Investments, which eschews fossil fuel companies in its investment strategy, wrote in his blog that he avoids these stocks "because our research tells us that these companies pose too much risk to the environment and society, and that they face too much risk based on their business operation profile."

In other words, investing in companies that base their profits on a risky, polluting, outdated energy system may not be financially prudent.

Rockefeller and others have committed to divestment

About 180 institutions have committed to divestment from fossil fuels in recent years, including colleges, philanthropies, pension funds and local governments. Hampshire College, the first college to divest during the anti-apartheid movement, also became the first to divest from fossil fuels. Just before the UN Climate Summit in September of this year, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced it would divest from fossil fuels. Stanford recently announced it would divest from coal; the University of Dayton, a Catholic university in Ohio, also committed to divestment, saying its "values of leadership and service to humanity call upon us to act."

As NRDC pursued our divestment strategy, our finance team — a hard-nosed bunch who don't like risky investments — wasn't about to put the organization's assets in jeopardy. One of the reasons NRDC worked with FTSE to help develop a new divestment tool was to satisfy those concerns.

With the advent of FTSE's fossil-free index (now a family of several indices), divestment is no longer an arcane process. Institutional investors, endowments, family offices and retail investors have an objective, transparent benchmark against which they can measure the performance, risk and return of their divestment strategies.

These recent developments demonstrate that divesting from fossil fuels is not only the morally correct action, but also one that need not compromise an institution's financial stability.

Other excuses for not divesting, in which university leaders echo arguments espoused by the oil and gas industry itself, have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere. The fact that only a handful of universities have committed to divestment shows just how strong the hold of the fossil fuel industry is not only on the global energy system, but also on the vaunted U.S. higher education system. Universities are the institutions the public trusts to light the way forward for the next generation — they should not be beholden to an industry that relies on the pollution of the past.

Divestment is about demonstrating there is another way forward. Universities should be the ones up front, holding the solar lantern.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

The crowded highways of Los Angeles just got a little greener, thanks to a new electric-vehicle program sponsored by the U.S. Air Force.

The fleet of 42 electrically powered sedans, trucks and vans was recently unveiled at Los Angeles Air Force Base in California. Based on technology known as V2G, or vehicle-to-grid, the vehicles are plugged in to charge when not in use, but they can also be used as generators — producing electricity that is directed back into the local power grid.

Collectively, the fleet is capable of providing more than 700 kilowatts of power to the grid, which is enough electricity to power 140 homes, Air Force officials said in a statement. [Hyperloop, Jetpacks & More: 9 Futuristic Transit Ideas]

Electric lexicon

The new vehicles will replace Los Angeles Air Force Base's general-purpose vehicle fleet — presumably, the cars and trucks that military personnel use to drive around the city. Many of the vehicles are plug-in electric vehicles, or PEVs.

Unlike hybrid electric vehicles — which rely on gasoline-powered engines to stay charged — plug-in electric vehicles are charged the same way cellphones and other electric devices are charged. You simply plug them into a wall socket to recharge their batteries. There are also plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that still have a gas engine but can also be plugged in to recharge the car's battery packs.

Only some of the military's new electric cars and trucks have gas engines. Others run only on battery power and differ from many other electric cars because of their ability to transfer electricity back to the grid, in a process known as bi-directional charging. In other words, when these cars are plugged into an electric socket, drivers can either charge the vehicle's batteries, or remove the energy stored in the car's batteries and pump it back into the grid.

Powerful stuff

The idea of integrating electric cars into America's power grid has been around since at least 1997, when Willet Kempton, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment at the University of Delaware, published his first paper on vehicle-to-grid technology in the peer-reviewed journal Transportation Research.

Kempton's more recent work has focused on how whole fleets of V2G-enabled electric vehicles could be used to support existing power systems, as well as future power systems that rely more on solar and wind energy.

Currently in the U.S., the power grid handles fluctuations in demand for electricity by storing power in large generators. These generators kick on during peak hours of energy usage (e.g., when everyone gets home from work) and they turn off again when demand for power goes down (e.g., in the middle of the night), Kempton told colleagues at a recent lecture at the University of Delaware.

"At times, there really isn't enough electricity on the system, and this is when operators would like to take electricity out of storage devices and put it back on the electric grid," Kempton said. "There is a lot of inherent storage available in electric vehicles, and batteries are the cheapest and most versatile way to store electricity." [The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments]

Cars are an especially good energy-storage optionbecause, most of the time, they're not in use, Kempton said.

"If a person buys an electric vehicle, they usually drive it about an hour each day. The vehicle is idle for the remaining 23 hours," Kempton said. "We are going to use this electric storage device for the other 23 hours."

Electric cars are also a cleaner storage option than generators, many of which still use coal, oil or natural gas to generate electricity. However, some of today's generators do use hydroelectric dams or nuclear reactors — not fossil fuels.

Test pilot

The Air Force's new fleet of V2G, plug-in electric vehiclesis one of the first full-scale tests of this technology in the United States. The project received support from the California Energy Commission, which invested $3 million. Federal, state and private energy organizations also contributed to the project, according to Air Force officials.

In the near future, the Air Force hopes to expand its V2G program to other bases around the country, including Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and Joint Base McGuire-Dix in New Jersey.

"The forward thinking of the Air Force promises to be an important signal to the market to move this technology into the mainstream," Kempton said. "By requesting V2G-capable trucks and cars from several vehicle manufacturers, placed in bases in several states, the Air Force has helped to stimulate demand from both automotive suppliers and the electric industry in these states."

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A remote, coal-rich patch of the Southwest produces the highest methane concentrations in the United States, a new study reports.

The methane hotspot is centered over New Mexico's San Juan Basin, where some 40,000 wells suck out natural gas trapped in coal seams. (Natural gas is almost entirely methane.) The tiny patch covers 2,500 square miles (6,500 square kilometers) near the Four Corners intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

Between 2003 and 2009, the hotspot spewed 0.59 million metric tons (0.65 million tons) of methane each year, scientists report today (Oct. 9) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. That's about 10 percent of all U.S. methane emissions each year.

The leaks likely come from natural gas drilling and production, the researchers said. The study predates the use of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, in San Juan Basin, lead study author Eric Kort, of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, said in a statement. "There's been so much attention on high-volume hydraulic fracturing, but we need to consider the industry as a whole," Kort said.

Methane is one of the four greenhouse gases primarily responsible for global warming. The gas is more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping infrared radiation (the greenhouse effect). However, methane breaks down more quickly, disappearing after about a decade, compared with carbon dioxide's life span of hundreds to thousands of years. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has come under fire this year from independent scientists and its own inspector general for failing to control methane leaks from natural gas production and distribution.

Recent studies have found that total methane emissions in the United States are nearly twice the amount estimated by the EPA and by the International Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR).

The Four Corners methane levels reported in the new study are 1.8 times higher than EPA's "bottom-up" estimates from surveying methane sources on the ground. The mismatch is even higher (3.5 times as much) for the widely used EDGAR database.

Kort and his co-authors measured methane levels in the atmosphere with the European Space Agency's Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Cartography (SCIAMACHY) instrument. The measurements were checked against a ground instrument in the Four Corners region that is part of a worldwide greenhouse gas monitoring network.

"Satellite data cannot be as accurate as ground-based estimates, but from space, there are no hiding places," said study co-author Christian Frankenberg, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The natural gas industry is one of the biggest methane emitters in the United States, according to a Feb. 13, 2014, study published in the journal Science. Leaks come from drilling, refining plants and transport and distribution, such as pipelines. While there are about 500,000 wells and some 2 million miles (3.2 million km) of pipeline in the United States, the authors of the earlier Science study said just a small number of "super-emitters" are responsible for most of the leaking methane.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

3D printers have been used to make everything from human stem cells to food to full-size cars, and now researchers are using the technology to build models of rocks to study how fluid seeps underground.

Geologists are reproducing the microscopic, intricate pore networks of rocks in scaled up 3D-printed models. Franek Hasiuk, a professor of geological and atmospheric sciences at Iowa State University in Ames, is printing replicas of the tiny holes at huge magnifications to get a better look at how fluids like oil flow through underground rock. Hasiuk thinks the research could have important implications for energy companies drilling miles underground to reach oil and gas reserves.

"What oil and gas companies want to know is 'If I put a well in this location, how is it going to drain? If I frack these rocks how is it going to drain?'" Hasiuk told Live Science. [Photos: The World's Weirdest Geological Formations]

Hasiuk, who has worked as a research specialist for ExxonMobil, said oil and gas companies want to get at underground reserves as efficiently and economically as possible. Currently, Hasiuk's research is focused on Fontainebleau Sandstone, because it is one of the coarsest types of rocks with a large, uniform grain size.

"Were doing a pretty good job at reproducing that," Hasiuk said. "Then the next goal is to start moving to smaller and smaller pore sizes."

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is a drilling technique used to collect underground oil and natural gas. Fracking involves drilling a well encased in steel or cement a couple miles underground. Then, water mixed with a few chemical additives is pumped down the well at an extremely high pressure to crack and fracture the surrounding rocks and allow oil and gas to seep through. Proponents have heralded fracking as a "bridge fuel" that could help the U.S. become less dependent on coal, but critics say it can destroy groundwater reserves, cause earthquakes and pollute the air with methane — a powerful greenhouse gas.

Figuring out the best way to drill down and break up underground rocks is not easy. The problem is that rock surfaces are not uniform — each tiny section of stone is different from the one next to it, Hasiuk said. Every rock is different, and that makes studying them and reproducing the same results extremely difficult.

"3D printing lets geology have lab rats," Hasiuk said. "You can create identical copies of rocks with the same pore network and perform the same experiment several times. That takes some of the variables out and gives you meaningful results.”

Hasiuk said that 3D scans and prints will allow geologists to map out networks of pores in underground rock and predict where fluids will flow.

"Eventually we hope to get to the point that we can make predictions on where the oil will flow," Hasiuk said. "If that means fewer wells need to be dug, then that's great."

Not only could 3D-printed rocks allow geologists to create maps of pore networks, they could also be used to test how several different types of rock will fracture under the huge pressure that fracking uses to break up underground rock. Before they start drilling, oil companies have teams of researchers that crush rocks to see how strong they are and which way they will fracture, Hasiuk said. 3D-printed rocks will make these tests much easier and make the results more meaningful.

"If you know how the rocks will break, it may turn out that you need to frack each one in a slightly different way to get the most efficient and environmentally friendly process," Hasiuk said.

Studying fluid movement through rock pores and fracture patterns with 3D modeling is a new frontier, and it's too soon to tell how the research could influence fracking, Hasiuk said.

"This [research] would add to the toolbox to better understand how rocks will behave in different scenarios," Hasiuk said. "If that has the collateral benefit of meaning we need to drill fewer wells or we can drill more efficiently, then positive impacts could occur."

Follow Kelly Dickerson on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Fetid, flammable, polluted drinking water in Pennsylvania homes near natural gas drilling sites was contaminated by methane escaping from flawed fracking wells, a new study shows.

Based on geochemical forensics work, the research makes a direct link between tainted drinking water and leaky gas wells in the Marcellus Shale. The rock layer is thousands of feet below the surface, but the leaks are shallow, where cement and steel are supposed to shield water supplies from natural gas inside wells. Scientists saw the same connection in Texas, above the Barnett Shale, they report today (Sept. 15) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This does provide pretty strong evidence that it's a well integrity problem and not a fracking problem," said lead study author Tom Darrah, a geochemist at The Ohio State University in Columbus.

The energy industry has contested claims that fracking can contaminate water supplies. Fracking is the process of shattering deeply buried rock to release trapped natural gas. Oil and gas companies have claimed that drinking water pollution may be caused by methane gas slowly bubbling up naturally through cracks in rock layers. Other groups have debated whether the methane came from fracking, horizontal drilling or leaking wells. [In Photos: The World's 9 Most Polluted Places]

In the study, researchers traced methane gas in more than 130 Pennsylvania and Texas water wells to poorly sealed, cracked or failing fracking wells. Several layers of cement and steel typically protect shallow underground water supplies from gas and fluids pulsing through fracking wells. The thickest layers are at the top, to create a buffer between the well and groundwater. The wells narrow with depth, similar in shape to a telescope.

Both the cement and steel casings can fail because of damage during installation, corrosion, design flaws or age — known as "well integrity problems." Methane gas will escape through any openings.

The discovery means there is hope for Pennsylvania's polluted drinking water, Darrah said. Fixing existing wells and keeping a sharp eye on new drilling sites could reduce contamination.

"There's actually a little bit of good news," Darrah told Live Science. "If we improve well integrity, we can eliminate a lot of the environmental problems that have surrounded fracking so far," he said.

Widespread effects

About 6 percent of Pennsylvania's fracking wells have documented well leaks, according to a June 30, 2014, study by engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Up to 100,000 new fracking wells could be drilled in Pennsylvania in the next few decades.

But methane isn't the only contaminant in drinking water wells near natural gas fracking sites. Dangerous levels of arsenic and barium have also been found. Salty natural brines from deep rock layers are also migrating upward toward the surface. An Environmental Protection Agency review of nationwide well safety and fracking's effects on water supplies is due this year.

The boom in fracking (or hydraulic fracturing) has boosted U.S. natural-gas production by 30 percent in the past decade. The drilling has also sparked an increase in moderate earthquakes in states such as Oklahoma, Arkansas and New Mexico, as well as fears of widespread environmental contamination. Leaking wells also emit methane into the atmosphere, where the greenhouse gas is about 34 times more efficient at trapping infrared radiation (the greenhouse effect) than carbon dioxide, though methane breaks down much more quickly than CO2.

Measuring methane

Darrah said multiple lines of evidence confirm the methane leaks come from the Marcellus and Barnett shales, or from shallower methane pockets in overlying rocks. Carbon isotopes revealed the methane was created by heat and pressure, not from microbes in groundwater. (Isotopes are versions of the same element with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei.)

Trace amounts of noble gases helped determine how fast the gas bubbled into drinking water supplies. Naturally rising methane should have about 10,000 times more helium than the gas polluting the drinking water wells, Darrah said. But the helium, neon and argon suggest the methane zipped to the surface via a fracking well, and then leaked out into groundwater.

"Somehow, these gases managed to get to the surface without going through any water or rock, and in some cases, we could actually document well integrity was the problem," Darrah said.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The recent surge of bushfire disasters has introduced fire-fighting tactics to everyday language.

Two important approaches that use fire to fight fire are “back burning” and “fuel-reduction burning”. Unfortunately these two fundamentally different approaches are often confused.

Fuel reduction

Fuel reduction (also known variously as prescribed, planned, controlled or hazard-reduction burning) is the targeted burning of bushland to control fire behaviour.

The idea is to reduce the intensity of subsequent fires at the same place by removing fine surface fuels such as leaf litter. Reducing these hazards increases the window of opportunity for fire fighters to control bushfires.

The technique can only be applied to open flammable vegetation. In dense eucalypt forests (such as wet sclerophyll forests) fuel-reduction burning is impractical because of the risk of uncontrollable fires sustained by heavy fuel loads that only become flammable in dry conditions. This limits the utility of this approach in heavily forested, wet regions.

Even in more open, dry sclerophyll forests, extreme fire weather makes reduction techniques much less effective than in milder conditions. For example, with extreme heat and winds, eucalypt crowns can catch on fire regardless of the amount of leaf litter and surface fuel.

Fuel reduction has to be applied frequently. Fuel loads build up quickly, often returning to a carrying capacity (when litter fall is balanced by decomposition) between 10 and 20 years.

This underpins fuel-reduction targets. In Victoria, for instance, the 5% fuel-reduction target means a given area of bush will be burnt every 20 years. But ecologists are concerned that such high frequencies can have damaging effects on plant and animal species that require longer fire-free intervals to complete their life cycles.

There is also much debate about the effectiveness of fuel-reduction burning, given that a huge area of landscape needs to be treated in order to increase the chance of significantly influencing wildfire behaviour.

There is growing evidence that the best benefits of fuel-reduction burning are close to the bushland suburbs (also known as the wildland-urban interface).

It must be acknowledged that such targeted burning is expensive to carry out safely given the need for engagement with numerous stakeholders (private land owners, councils, various branches of government). It is also dangerous work, which carries a risk of destroying houses and infrastructure if the fires escape control.

Finally, a serious side effect is smoke pollution, which can briefly fumigate nearby communities. Because of these constraints, attention is increasingly being focused on managing fuel without burning. This can involve using herbivores and thinning vegetation, including burning the debris in specially designed portable furnaces that have low smoke emissions.

Back burning

The difference between fuel-reduction burning and back burning is effectively the same as the difference between elective and emergency surgery.

Back burning is a last-resort measure to stop wildfire from burning out specific areas. It works by setting fires from containment lines, such as established fire breaks or hastily contrasted ones made with a bulldozer or cut by hand.

Back burns are often set at night or during weather conditions when the fire danger is low. A spectacular use of back burning, which stemmed the threat of two large uncontrolled bushfires, occurred at the height of the Blue Mountains bushfire disaster in Spring 2013. But back burning is dangerous and carries substantial risks of exacerbating a bushfire event.

The ecological impacts of back burning are rarely discussed but may be quite substantial. Wildlife, which can normally flee a fire front, can become trapped between the bushfire and the back burn. Exacerbating impacts on wildlife is the technique known as “blacking out”, involving setting fire to unburnt areas that escaped combustion by the back burn. Such unburnt patches can be critical refuges for wildlife and a sort of seed for recovery of adjacent burnt areas.

Another harmful effect of back burning is the unintentional destruction of fire-sensitive biological communities. These include fire-sensitive plants, habitat for endangered wildlife and areas recovering from a previous high-severity fire.

Regrettably, in some situations ecologically vulnerable areas have been sacrificed to protect lives and property. This can be avoided by having ecologists help design the footprint of a back burn, but extreme bushfire situations may not allow sufficient time for fine-tuning.

One unappreciated aspect of back burning is that it makes it impossible to study how a bushfire would naturally spread across the landscape, given the coupling of human-set fires with the wildfire. For this reason, the fires set by lightning and left to burn in the south-west Tasmania wilderness are of considerable interest.

Flammable landscape

We can’t totally suppress fire in a flammable landscape — nor should we. Long unburnt areas can accumulate very heavy fuel loads, resulting in ecologically destructive fires.

But it is also important to acknowledge that wildfires achieve fuel reduction too. This occurs particularly on the flanks or sides of a fire, which burn at a lower intensity than the front of the fire, and during cooler periods between fire “runs” that are driven by extreme fire conditions. For this reason bushfires are sometimes left to burn if they present no threat to any valued economic or ecological assets.

We are yet to achieve ecologically sustainable fire management of flammable landscapes. Managing bushfires will become more complicated given the increased extreme fire weather driven by climate change and the need to reduce smoke pollution to minimise greenhouse gas emissions and protect human health.

Fuel-reduction burning will remain a key tool that must be cleverly incorporated in landscape fire planning. This will need to involve targeted fuel treatments around areas vulnerable to bushfires, as well as the development of buffer zones that can be used to contain wildfires using techniques like back burning and direct attack using water and fire retardants.

David Bowman receives funding from ARC, NASA, TERN and NERP.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.