Debunking Electric Vehicle Battery Myths – How is Climate Change Impacting Jet Stream

by | Jul 28, 2021 | Climate Notes, Uncategorized

Researchers Identify Battery Alternative to Slow Climate Change. WSKG.org has an interesting story – here’s an excerpt: “…The salt in most traditional batteries are lithium-ions. Takeuchi said the trouble starts with cost. Building enough lithium-ion batteries for renewable energy storage can be expensive. “There’s like one or two places on Earth where you can actually mine these elements. And one of the elements, cobalt, that’s used in lithium-ion, the biggest mines are all located in Congo, in Africa,” she said. The salt Takeuchi uses is made of manganese and zinc, instead of lithium. “If these batteries are really big, can we use elements, can we use materials that are not very dangerous, that are Earth abundant, that are readily available?”
New Study Debunks One of the Biggest Criticisms of the Electric Vehicle. As the electric vehicle continues to rise up the ranks, a new report addresses some of the criticism. Here’s the intro to an explainer at Fast Company: “In the past, some studies claimed that electric vehicles (EVs) weren’t actually better for the environment: The energy used to make the battery plus the emissions from making electricity could make the total footprint worse than a gas-powered car. Or so the argument went. A detailed new report shows that isn’t true. No matter where an electric vehicle is used, even if it charges on an electric grid that uses coal power, it has a smaller carbon footprint than a fossil fuel-powered car. One factor is that it’s less polluting to make batteries than previously thought…”

Researchers Identify Battery Alternative to Slow Climate Change. WSKG.org has an interesting story – here’s an excerpt: “…The salt in most traditional batteries are lithium-ions. Takeuchi said the trouble starts with cost. Building enough lithium-ion batteries for renewable energy storage can be expensive. ‘There’s like one or two places on Earth where you can actually mine these elements. And one of the elements, cobalt, that’s used in lithium-ion, the biggest mines are all located in Congo, in Africa,’ she said. The salt Takeuchi uses is made of manganese and zinc, instead of lithium. “If these batteries are really big, can we use elements, can we use materials that are not very dangerous, that are Earth abundant, that are readily available?” she said…”

Heat, Floods, Fires: Jet Stream is Key Link in Climate Change Disasters. Bloomberg Green delves into rapid warming in far northern latitudes and the possible impact on jet stream wind speeds and configurations and the tendency for upper air blocking patterns: “…But the link between these far-flung extremes goes beyond warming global temperatures. All of these events are touched by jet streams, strong and narrow bands of westerly winds blowing above the Earth’s surface. The currents are generated when cold air from the poles clashes against hot air from the tropics, creating storms and other phenomena such as rain and drought. “Jet streams are the weather—they create it and they steer it,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “Sometimes the jet stream takes on a very convoluted pattern. When we see it taking big swings north and big dips southward we know we’re going to see some unusual weather conditions…”

Climate Change to Bring More Intense Storms Across Europe. ScienceDaily reports: “Climate change is driving a large increase in intense, slow-moving storms, a new study by Newcastle University and the Met Office has found. Investigating how climate affects intense rainstorms across Europe, climate experts have shown there will be a significant future increase in the occurrence of slow-moving intense rainstorms. The scientists estimate that these slow-moving storms may be 14 times more frequent across land by the end of the century. It is these slow-moving storms that have the potential for very high precipitation accumulations, with devastating impacts, as we saw in Germany and Belgium...”

How to Win Big for the Climate: Rein in the “Super Polluters”. Here’s an excerpt of a post and summary at Nature.com: “A crackdown on a limited number of ‘hyper-emitting’ power plants could yield outsize cuts in the carbon emissions resulting from global electricity generation. Don Grant and his colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder, combed an inventory of more than 29,000 fossil-fuel power plants across 221 countries to identify the world’s largest polluters as of 2018. They then calculated the potential emissions reductions that could be attained if the worst offenders boosted their efficiency, switched to lower-carbon fuels or implemented carbon-capture technologies. The team found that extreme emitters — power plants that ranked in the top 5% in terms of climate pollution — were responsible for 73% of global emissions from electricity generation…”

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