Month: December 2022

It’s the year 2050, and humanity has made huge progress in decarbonizing. That’s thanks in large part to the negligible price of solar and wind power, which was cratering even back in 2022. Yet the fossil fuel industry hasn’t just doubled down on making plastics from oil and gas—instead, as the World Economic Forum warned would happen, it has tripled production from 2016 levels. In 2050, humans are churning out trillions of pounds of plastic a year, and in the process emitting the greenhouse gas equivalent of over 600 coal-fired power plants. Three decades from now, we’ve stopped using so much oil and gas as fuel, yet way more of them as plastic.

Back here in 2022, people are trying to head off that nightmare scenario with a much-hyped concept called “bio-based plastics.” The backbones of traditional plastics are chains of carbon derived from fossil fuels. Bioplastics instead use

SWOT could turn out to be a major improvement over measurements by previous satellites. “Instead of a ‘pencil beam’ moving along the Earth’s surface from a satellite, it’s a wide swath. It’ll provide a lot more information, a lot more spatial resolution, and hopefully better coverage up close to the coasts,” says Steve Nerem, a University of Colorado scientist who uses satellite data to study sea-level rise and is not involved with SWOT. And KaRIn’s swath-mapping technology is a brand-new technique, he says. “It’s never been tested from orbit before, so it’s kind of an experiment. We’re looking forward to the data.”

SWOT has other instruments in its toolkit too, including a radar altimeter to fill in the gaps between the swaths of data KaRIn collects, a microwave radiometer to measure the amount of water vapor between SWOT and the Earth’s surface, and an array of mirrors for laser-tracking measurements

That is, as we polluted less—heavy industry spun down, flights got canceled, people stopped commuting—we also produced less of the pollutant that normally breaks down methane. It’s a second unfortunate and surprising consequence of cutting pollution: Burning fossil fuels also produces aerosols that bounce some of the sun’s energy back into space, somewhat cooling the climate. While it’s imperative that we decarbonize as quickly as possible, cutting out the beneficial effects of NO_x and aerosols has some unintended—and twisted—side effects.

“Burning less fossil fuels will cause there to be less OH radicals in the atmosphere, which will cause methane concentrations to go up,” says Earth scientist George Allen of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, who penned an accompanying commentary on the paper but wasn’t involved in the research. “So that’s going to cut back on the effectiveness of measures to fight global warming.” 

This makes it all the

Last week, inside a gold-plated drum in a Northern California lab, a group of scientists briefly recreated the physics that power the sun. Their late-night experiment involved firing 192 lasers into the capsule, which contained a peppercorn-sized pellet filled with hydrogen atoms. Some of those atoms, which ordinarily repel, were smushed together and fused, a process that produces energy. By standards of Earth-bound fusion reactions, it was a lot of energy. For years, scientists have done this type of experiment only to see it fall short of the energy used to cook the fuel. This time, at long last, they exceeded it.

That feat, known as ignition, is a huge win for those who study fusion. Scientists have only had to gaze up at the stars to know that such a power source is possible—that combining two hydrogen atoms to produce one helium atom entails a loss of mass, and