In Between Times 3-9-2023
What Big Oil thinks about the new climate law, Supply chain challenges, Discovery in carbon capture, The power of beer
Take Action!
It is steps like this by companies like Carlsburg that will help regenerative agriculture continue to grow as a practice. Regenerative farming is much less carbon intensive and helps to encourage soil biome health. Let's say thanks and encourage other beer makers to follow in Carlsburg's footsteps by signing this petition.
Click here to sign the petition!
Carlsberg Group plans expanded regenerative barley usage across brands in the UK, Finland and France
In Between Times is committed to covering environmental and transpartisan news from an open and honest position.
We respect your intelligence.
Please consider supporting our work with a PAID subscription. Your financial support makes a big difference!
Thank You.
CERAWeek: What Big Oil thinks of the climate law
This week many of energy’s biggest bigwigs gathered at CERAWeek in Houston. The recently passed Inflation Reduction Action was front and center in discussions.
Permitting reform, hydrogen power, carbon capture, and even “renewable natural gas” (bio-methane), were also of particular interest this year.
(From Energy Wire)
The enactment of sweeping U.S. climate change legislation may be pivotal for early-stage technologies like low-carbon hydrogen, but an arduous permitting process and other challenges could stunt their progress, oil and gas executives said Tuesday.
The Inflation Reduction Act — signed into law by President Joe Biden last year — includes approximately $369 billion in climate and energy spending. Much of that comes in the form of tax credits targeting everything from wind and solar to batteries to “clean” hydrogen made from renewable or low-emissions electricity.
But while oil and gas leaders gathered at CERAWeek by S&P Global said the law will incentivize investments in carbon capture technologies and carbon-free hydrogen, they also called for changes to the permitting process to make it easier to build projects involving those technologies.
Click here for the article.
Moving the needle on supply chain sustainability
The problem for many consumers is that “sustainable” products tend to be more expensive. In a time when inflation is running somewhere between 6-9% annually and higher for many foodstuffs, it’s getting harder and harder to afford sustainable products. This is a reality.
The iron law of logistics holds that if resources run out, nothing can be done. This is as true for an army as it is for a family trying to put food on the table or get to work. If tomatoes that are grown sustainably cost twice as much as regular tomatoes people who are operating close to the margin (which is most families) are almost forced to chose the lower cost but less sustainable tomatoes. If there is no disposable income people will choose the product that will fill their stomach at a lower cost. (Even if long term - health costs for instance - are higher.)
We are accustomed to sustainable products being more expensive. There is a good reason for this. Sustainable products tend to be more expensive to create. But this is not ALWAYS the case and doesn’t have to remain the case for sustainable products that are currently prohibitively expensive (for many).
Supply chain reform (broadly speaking) is a key to solving part of this equation. Many sustainable products can be made at competitive prices when produced at scale. (And with emerging technologies.)
(From The Hill)
For example, the State of Supply Chain Sustainability report published annually by the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL) and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) is a study that gauges companies’ efforts to make their supply chains more sustainable. The report, based on more than 3,000 global survey responses and in-depth executive interviews, documents companies’ sense that the pressure to improve supply chain sustainability — from investors, top executives, and customers — has increased over the three years the annual report has been published.
However, the degree to which this pressure translates into supply chain changes on the ground is less clear. In fact, while such pressure enjoys more support as a corporate goal, it does not necessarily translate into investment dollars. So, how can corporate leaders actually “move the needle” on sustainability?
Click here for the article.
How to make carbon capture way more efficient
As we have said many times in this space, carbon capture is part of solving the climate equation. In the wake of the funding which will come from the Inflation Reduction Act this is even more true.
There are those who fear this tech. They fear that carbon capture might be a way for carbon emitters to avoid reducing initial carbon emissions. Such a theoretical reality is currently very far off. Carbon capture is just now coming online and it is far from scale. But even if carbon capture did let some carbon emitters “off the hook”, so what? If overall carbon emissions are reduced isn’t that the point?
The more efficient we can get carbon capture the bigger the boon for the planet.
It looks like an important discovery has been made in carbon capture recently that may help the tech get to where it needs to be.
(From Gizmodo)
…new research could help change some of that productivity measure for existing and new plants, just by switching up what’s inside the machines. Most direct air capture processes currently use amine-based materials—made from ammonia—in their filtering processes. What the researchers did was add copper to an amine-based sorbent, a pairing that is pretty well-known in chemistry.
“Amine means they have nitrogen atoms,” said Arup Sengupta, a professor of engineering at Lehigh University and a co-author of the paper. “Nitrogen and copper, they love each other.” Adding copper into the mix meant that the new hybrid sorbent can filter out CO2 three times as well as existing sorbents on the market, a potentially game-changing performance improvement that could significantly lower costs and improve the efficiency of DAC plants.
“An ultra-low concentration [of CO2] is no longer an obstacle to this process,”
Click here for the article.
This new material absorbs three times more CO2 than current carbon capture tech
Chevron takes over East Texas carbon capture project as it triples in size
Transitioning coal plants to small modular nuclear energy?
What role can beer play in bridging our political divides?
Answer: A big one. We are not kidding.
Your editor has had many productive political discussions over beers in his lifetime.
One particular instance stands out.
I was attending CPAC (as a journalist), the conservative gathering in Washington DC that happens every year. Outside of the hotel were a bunch of Occupy people and various Democratic Party activists generally making noise. There was yelling. There was a little shoving (not much), but then Andrew Brietbart wandered into the crowd, engaged with the protestors, and some of them were invited inside for a “beer summit”. As I remember it was a worthwhile time for pretty much all involved. The Republicans bought the drinks and everyone seemed cool with that.
Thing is, people actually talked with one another. It was fun to watch.
We love the below story.
(From Allsides)
But that's not all: For the last several years Anheuser-Busch has hosted a Brew Across America Congressional Brewing Competition where pairs of lawmakers work with breweries across the country to produce a beer. The 2021 competition added an additional stipulation, the pairs had to be bipartisan. The Brew Across America Competition was initially launched in 2017 as part of Anheuser-Busch’s ‘Brew Democracy’ Initiative, which “highlights the nonpartisan nature of beer and its ability to strengthen our democracy by fostering dialogue and finding common ground.”
For his bipartisan brew, Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D) worked with Rep. Fred Upton (R), and was quick to note in an NPR interview the similarities between drafting legislation on Capitol Hill and brewing beer.
Click here for the article.
Helping bridge the gaps among young adults
Political bridge building is a worthwhile endeavor. Keeping lines of communication open is key for a civil society. It is when we close ourselves off from discussion, and more specifically avoid discussing subjects that might make us upset or uncomfortable that bad things happen. Heck, the USA and the USSR even came to understand this during the Cold War after the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which there was no White House to Kremlin hotline. Leaders realized that a red phone had to be installed.
This is an important lesson. Discussion, even when it seems pointless at the time, may be of real value down the line. It is certainly necessary for peace.
(From The Fulcrum)
Civic Synergy empowers young adults with the skills and opportunity to bridge political divides in service of solving the pressing challenges of our time. Politically diverse teams of 5-7 participants, from around the country, formulate and present policy proposals to members of Congress at the end of a 6 week program. During the first session, each team participates in a Living Room Conversation around the topic at hand. These are open-source, guided conversations proven to build understanding to bridge divides. The Living Room Conversations organization seemed to start with the same question I wondered about - how can we get people to talk to each other in the first place? For the past two programs we’ve run, our cohorts have gotten to hear from John Gable from AllSides and Joan Blades from Living Room Conversations and then have broken out into teams for their very own conversations.
The program starts with these conversations to help participants connect as humans and to begin to build trust, which is a key building block for teams’ collaboration.
Click here for the article.
Listen to last week’s A Moment of BS from Bill Shireman
Event
The EarthX Expo is the world’s largest green gathering held annually around Earth Day in Dallas, Texas. Our Congress of Conferences highlights a wide range of environmental & sustainability-related topics.
It has grown to become the largest event of its kind in the world, bringing together environmental organizations, businesses, academic institutions, government agencies, speakers, interactive programming, and subject matter experts.
EarthX Expo also features live music, art and food to help create a fun and engaging atmosphere for thought and experiential learning.