Climeworks, which launched in 2009, is among around 140 direct air capture companies globally, but is one of the most high-profile and best funded. <a href=https://tripscan.biz>tripscan войти</a> In 2021, it opened its Orca plant in Iceland, followed in 2024 by a second called Mammoth. These facilities suck in air and extract carbon using chemicals in a process powered by clean, geothermal energy. The carbon can then be reused or injected deep underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking it up permanently. Climeworks makes its money by selling credits to companies to offset their own climate pollution. The appeal of direct air capture is clear; to keep global warming from rising to even more catastrophic levels means drastically cutting back on planet-heating fossil fuels. But many scientists say the world will also need to remove some of the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere. This can be done naturally, for example through tree planting, or with technology like direct air capture. https://tripscan.biz tripscan войти The advantage of direct air capture is that carbon is removed from the air immediately and “can be measured directly and accurately,” said Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative. But there are big challenges, he told CNN. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been shooting upward, but still only makes up about 0.04%. Herzog compares removing carbon directly from the air to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue. This makes the process energy-intensive and expensive. The technology also takes time to scale. Climeworks hasn’t come anywhere close to the full capacity of its plants. Orca can remove a maximum of 4,000 tons of carbon a year, but it has never captured more than 1,700 tons in a year since it opened in 2021. The company says single months have seen a capture rate much closer to the maximum. The company’s Mammoth plant has a maximum capacity of 36,000 tons a year but since it opened last year it has removed a total of 805 tons, a figure which goes down to 121 tons when taking into account the carbon produced building and running the plants.

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These preppers have ‘go bags,’ guns and a fear of global disaster. They’re also left-wing <a href=https://tripscan.biz>tripscan</a> This fear is where Marlon Smith’s interest in preparedness began. Growing up in Trinidad, he lived through an attempted coup in 1990 that sparked his concern the government would not be there in times of disaster. This only deepened after he moved to New York City and watched the aftermath of 9/11 and then Hurricane Katrina. “You see the inability of the government to truly help their citizens,” he said. Smith, who now lives in New Jersey, runs a fashion company by day and spends his weekends teaching survival skills — including how to survive nuclear fallout. “People find it funny that I work in women’s evening wear and yet I do this hardcore prepping and survivalism in the woods,” he said. https://tripscan.biz трипскан вход It’s hard to pin down the exact number of preppers in the US. Mills says 5 million is a reasonable estimate; others would say much higher. Chris Ellis, a military officer and academic who researches disaster preparedness, puts the figure at around 20 to 23 million using data from FEMA household surveys. Figuring out the proportion of preppers on the left is perhaps even trickier. Mills, who has surveyed 2,500 preppers over the past decade, has consistently found about 80% identify as conservatives, libertarians or another right-wing ideology. He doesn’t see any dramatic upswing in left-wing preppers. necdotal evidence, however, points to increased interest from this side of the political spectrum. Several left-wing preppers told CNN about the burgeoning popularity of their newsletters, social media channels and prepping courses. Shonkwiler says subscriber numbers to his newsletter When/If increase exponentially whenever right-wing views make headlines, especially elections. He saw a huge uptick when Trump was reelected. Smith has noticed more liberals among his growing client roster for prepping courses. He has an upcoming session teaching a group in the Hamptons — “all Democrats,” he said. Smith is at pains to keep politics out of prepping, however, and makes his clients sign a waiver agreeing not to talk about it. “You leave your politics and your religion at the door. … You come here to learn; I’ll teach you,” he said.

“It’s true that both plants are not yet operating at the capacity we originally targeted,” said the Climeworks spokesperson. <a href=https://tripscan.biz>трипскан</a> “Like all transformative innovations, progress is iterative, and some steps may take longer than anticipated,” they said. The company’s prospective third plant in Louisiana aims to remove 1 million tons of carbon a year by 2030, but it’s uncertain whether construction will proceed under the Trump administration. A Department of Energy spokesperson said a department-wide review was underway “to ensure all activities follow the law, comply with applicable court orders and align with the Trump administration’s priorities.” The government has a mandate “to unleash ‘American Energy Dominance’,” they added. Direct air capture’s success will also depend on companies’ willingness to buy carbon credits. https://tripscan.biz трипскан вход Currently companies are pretty free to “use the atmosphere as a waste dump,” said Holly Buck, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. “This lack of regulation means there is not yet a strong business case for cleaning this waste up,” she told CNN. Another criticism leveled at Climeworks is its failure to offset its own climate pollution. The carbon produced by its corporate activities, such as office space and travel, outweighs the carbon removed by its plants. The company says its plants already remove more carbon than they produce and corporate emissions “will become irrelevant as the size of our plants scales up.” Some, however, believe the challenges Climeworks face tell a broader story about direct air capture. This should be a “wake-up call,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law. Climeworks’ problems are not “outliers,” she told CNN, “but reflect persistent technical and economic hurdles faced by the direct air capture industry worldwide.” “The climate crisis demands real action, not speculative tech that overpromises and underdelivers.” she added. Some of the Climeworks’ problems are “related to normal first-of-a-kind scaling challenges with emerging complex engineering projects,” Buck said. But the technology has a steep path to becoming cheaper and more efficient, especially with US slashing funding for climate policies, she added. “This kind of policy instability and backtracking on contracts will be terrible for a range of technologies and innovations, not just direct air capture.” Direct air capture is definitely feasible but its hard, said MIT’s Buck. Whether it succeeds will depend on a slew of factors including technological improvements and creating markets for carbon removals, he said. “At this point in time, no one really knows how large a role direct air capture will play in the future.”

“AI expends a lot of energy being polite, especially if the user is polite, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’” <a href=https://tripscan.biz>tripscan</a> Dauner explained. “But this just makes their responses even longer, expending more energy to generate each word.” For this reason, Dauner suggests users be more straightforward when communicating with AI models. Specify the length of the answer you want and limit it to one or two sentences, or say you don’t need an explanation at all. Most important, Dauner’s study highlights that not all AI models are created equally, said Sasha Luccioni, the climate lead at AI company Hugging Face, in an email. Users looking to reduce their carbon footprint can be more intentional about which model they chose for which task. “Task-specific models are often much smaller and more efficient, and just as good at any context-specific task,” Luccioni explained. https://tripscan.biz трипскан вход If you are a software engineer who solves complex coding problems every day, an AI model suited for coding may be necessary. But for the average high school student who wants help with homework, relying on powerful AI tools is like using a nuclear-powered digital calculator. Even within the same AI company, different model offerings can vary in their reasoning power, so research what capabilities best suit your needs, Dauner said. When possible, Luccioni recommends going back to basic sources — online encyclopedias and phone calculators — to accomplish simple tasks. Why it’s hard to measure AI’s environmental impact Putting a number on the environmental impact of AI has proved challenging. The study noted that energy consumption can vary based on the user’s proximity to local energy grids and the hardware used to run AI models. That’s partly why the researchers chose to represent carbon emissions within a range, Dauner said. Furthermore, many AI companies don’t share information about their energy consumption — or details like server size or optimization techniques that could help researchers estimate energy consumption, said Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside who studies AI’s water consumption. “You can’t really say AI consumes this much energy or water on average — that’s just not meaningful. We need to look at each individual model and then (examine what it uses) for each task,” Ren said. One way AI companies could be more transparent is by disclosing the amount of carbon emissions associated with each prompt, Dauner suggested.