Carbon capture and sequestration

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a historic climate policy proposal on Thursday. Through a new rule, the Biden Administration intends to set limits on coal- and gas-fueled power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions.California’s Snowpack Gets a Much Needed Boost | Extreme EarthGenerally, the EPA regulates polluting emissions like carbon monoxide and ozone. But the agency has exercised limited authority over planet-warming carbon dioxide in the past. Currently, the sole Clean Air Act provision on the books…

Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty Images)This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.Block-Lite is a small concrete manufacturer in an industrial corridor of Flagstaff, Arizona. The third-generation family business makes bricks and other masonry materials for retaining walls, driveways, and landscaping projects. The company was already a local leader in sustainability — in 2020, it became the first manufacturer in Flagstaff to power its operations with on-site solar panels. But…

A CO2 collector on display at a museum in Germany. Photo: Daniel Karmann/picture-alliance/dpa (AP)Scientists agree that we’re going to need to build machines to suck carbon from the sky to stave off the worst impacts of climate change—but there are a lot of challenges for this new industry in the coming decades, including figuring out how to make the technology more effective. A discovery from a team of researchers at Lehigh University, published in Science Advances on Wednesday, could make this process three times more…

Forest cleared for palm oil planting in Aceh province, Indonesia.Photo: Ulet Ifansasti (Getty Images)If you’ve ever been offered the opportunity to donate money to plant a tree to offset a purchase, you’ve probably guessedthat trees naturally store carbon. Forests are an invaluable source of carbon storage around the world; one would assume that forests that have been cut down but are regrowing trees are also regaining their capacity to store carbon.But that assumption may be incredibly incorrect. Forests that are…

A coal plant in Germany.Photo: Lukas Schulze (Getty Images)Big Oil has a fancy new piece of climate technology to sink money into. As Bloomberg reported on Monday, both Shell and Norwegian oil giant Equinor have helped a new Israeli direct air capture startup, called RepAir, raise a cool $10 million in funding—despite the company only having a shoebox-size prototype for a technology it says could one day suck tons of carbon from the sky.Direct air capture, or the process of removing carbon dioxide directly from the…

A general view of Drax Group Plc’s Coal fired power station on October 09, 2021 in Drax, England. Photo: Dan Kitwood (Getty Images)UK-based “clean” energy company Drax Group is looking to sell offset credits tied to U.S.-based power plants that the company hasn’t even built yet, Bloomberg reports. While the company is being vague about specifics, Drax says its first biomass plant with carbon capture technology is expected to be up and running 2030. The future U.S. power plants that Drax plans to build rely on a type of…