Tag: Technology

Negative emissions

Negative emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) are high on the wish list of many. In short it is about taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and getting rid of them, most often by burying them in the ground. The benefit would be the possibility to keep emitting climate hurting gases in …

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Biofuel

Ombeni Urio is a biofuel entrepreneur in Arusha, Tanzania. He runs a company which installs biogas systems. The systems consist of tanks into which animal or human waste is flushed, which then produces natural gas as it decomposes. The gas is then piped off and used for cooking fuel, and the residue waste becomes fertilizer for crops. Photo: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development (CC BY 2.0)

Biofuel is fuel made from organic material, normally plants in some form. Common biofuels are wood, ethanol and biogas. As the carbon in biofuels are part of the natural carbon cycle, the carbon dioxide emitted when biofuels are used doesn’t increase the greenhouse effect and global warming. Biofuels can however be problematic if farmland or …

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Fossil fuel

How can we move away from fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic climate change? Source: The Current Sea

Examples of fossil fuels are petrol, diesel, oil and coal. They are called fossil fuels as they were created over hundreds of thousands of year from old organic material. Dead parts of plants and small animals at the bottom of the sea and in the ground were slowly turned into the fuels that we are …

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Bagger

Bagger digging coal. Photo: Von Spyridon Natsikos, CC BY 2.0 de

A bagger is a gigantic machine used to dig up coal. Baggers are essentially diggers and they are used in open-pit mines, among other places in Germany’s lignite mines. Some types of baggers can move 14,000 cubic meters of coal and other materials per hour. Trivia A person named Dan DeEntremont has made an animation of …

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