références en Anglais

An MIT Energy Initiative study finds many climate-stabilization plans are based on questionable assumptions about the future cost and deployment of “direct air capture” and therefore may not bring about promised reductions.

Wind, water and solar energy is cheap, effective and green. We don’t need experimental or risky energy sources to save our planet

With more governments embracing industrial policies to transform their economies, picking the right technologies to subsidize will become a key challenge. To navigate the minefield of entrenched interests, techno-hype, and political pressures, policymakers must embrace a mix of openness and caution.

To this day, the demand for metals has kept increasing. The energy transition necessary to meet climate objectives will add to that demand during the upcoming decades, for low-carbon energy technologies require larger metal quantities than their fossil-fuel based counterparts. This frequently raises concerns over the actual capacity of geological stocks to meet demand at scale, which we investigate in the present analysis.

The Belgian Institute for Sustainable IT is a think and do tank founded in 2020, based on its French equivalent the INR. Our aim is to bring together Belgian companies, organizations and individuals, and help them succeed their digital transition while reducing the environmental and social footprint of their IT services and usages. Thanks to the support of our members and of public authorities, we promote digital technologies and services that are more sustainable, inclusive and ethical.

Oil companies love to tell the world about the super cool technologies that have that will allow us to keep burning fossil fuels without cooking the climate. But those technologies are largely bullshit.

Low greenhouse gas technologies require more metals than their fossil fuel-based counterparts. This column estimates supply elasticities and pins down the price impact of the energy transition on the metals markets. The results show that prices for copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium could reach historical peaks for an unprecedented, sustained period in a net zero emissions scenario. The total value of production could rise more than four-fold for the period 2021-2040, rivaling the total value of crude oil production.

Technologies for the removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere (direct air capture, or DAC for short) are already in use, but neither their actual benefits for climate protection nor their other environmental impact have yet to be investigated.

We also asked about organisations’ risk response and approaches to planning. Our survey results support a picture of UK organisations that are taking steps to prepare for similar extreme weather, with the top three actions of organisations affected being capacity training or some form of knowledge transfer, investment in new technologies, and making an insurance claim. While just 16% of organisations reported having an adaptation plan, a considerable proportion (37%) said their organisation was planning to develop one.

This article argues that resource and logistical constraints weighing on low-carbon energy and CO2 capture technologies are likely to pave the way for geo-engineering solutions such as Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), which demand negligible land, material, and energy inputs. This “climate transition without carbon transition”, though technically feasible, is far from being that simple, raising a whole new set of environmental risks as well as geopolitical, institutional, and ethical issues.

Even “sustainable” technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines face unbreachable physical limits and exact grave environmental costs

New research suggests social transformations that prompt “degrowth” could cut humanity’s climate footprint in time to meet the Paris climate agreement target.

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