Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think
- If we do nothing, global temperatures could rise as high as 10 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
- Fortunately, humanity is hard at work at keeping temperature increases below the 2 degrees Celsius mark.
- These 7 projects are just a snapshot of what humanity is collectively doing to fight back and beat climate change.
It’s easy to feel hopeless when it comes to the climate. The news is full of stories on how the next century will see unbearable heat waves, impossibly strong hurricanes, flooded cities, an ice-free Arctic, and global temperatures reaching up to an average of 10 degrees Celsius hotter than they already are. But despite how terrible this feels, it’s important to remember that the appropriate response is to leap into action, not to be paralyzed by despair. To supply some optimism and show that humanity isn’t totally screwed, here are 7 climate change projects that are changing the game.
1. Carbon Engineering Ltd’s negative-emissions plant
Carbon Engineering
One of the biggest challenges to combatting climate change is the lack of incentive (aside from the destruction of the planet, that is). When looking at the astronomical profits of the oil and gas industries, it’s clear that reducing humanity’s reliance on oil and gas will take some serious incentivization.
That’s where Carbon Engineering comes in. The Canadian company intends to build a commercial-scale negative-emissions facility using funding from a variety of investors, including Bill Gates. These people didn’t invest entirely out of the goodness of their hearts; they did so to make a profit.
The facility will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere to either store it underground, where it can’t affect the atmosphere anymore, or to convert it into carbon-neutral fuel. What’s more, this will happen at a rate of $100 per ton of CO2, the benchmark at which negative-emissions technology is considered to be cost effective.
2. Disney’s new solar facility
As one of the largest entertainment corporations in the world, Disney has set itself an impressive goal: It intends to half its emissions by 2020. When you’re talking about the emissions produced by a corporation worth $171.7 billion, that’s pretty significant.
As an initial step towards this goal, Disney recently opened a 270-acre, 50-megawatt solar facility in Florida. Disney expects that this plant will produce enough energy to operate two of its four theme parks in central Florida and cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 57,000 tons per year. As an industry leader, their solar plant is likely a harbinger of more facilities across the United States — and world, for that matter.
3. Harvard’s SCoPEx project: Dimming the sun
Short for the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, SCoPEx’s controversial goal is to spray calcium carbonate — the same stuff in your antacid tablets — into the sky to observe its effects in the stratosphere, with the ultimate goal of observing whether it can reflect sunlight back into space.
This might seem familiar for those of you who have watched the movie Snowpiercer. In that film, the fictional chemical CW-7 is sprayed into the atmosphere to reverse climate change, ultimately cooling the planet too much and sending it into an apocalyptic Ice Age.
Fortunately, the Harvard researchers don’t plan on coating the…
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