The Carbon Dioxide Revolution
The Carbon Dioxide Revolution

Author: Michele Aresta

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-01-04

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 3030590615

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This book focuses on carbon dioxide and its global role in our everyday life. Starting with society's dependency on energy, it demonstrates the various sources of carbon dioxide and discusses the putative effects of its accumulation in the atmosphere and its impact on the climate. It then provides an overview of how we can reduce carbon dioxide production and reviews innovative technologies and alternative energy resources. The book closes with a perspective on how carbon dioxide can be utilized reasonably and how mimicking nature can provide us with a solution. Using simple language, this book discusses one of today's biggest challenges for the future of our planet in a way that is understandable for the general public. The authors also provide deep insights into specific issues, making the book a useful resource for researchers and students.

A Climate Policy Revolution
A Climate Policy Revolution

Author: Roland Kupers

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0674972120

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Humanity’s best hope for confronting the looming climate crisis rests with the new science of complexity. The sheer complexity of climate change stops most solutions in their tracks. How do we give up fossil fuels when energy is connected to everything, from great-power contests to the value of your pension? Global economic growth depends on consumption, but that also produces the garbage now choking the oceans. To give up cars, coal, or meat would upend industries and entire ways of life. Faced with seemingly impossible tradeoffs, politicians dither and economists offer solutions at the margins, all while we flirt with the sixth extinction. That’s why humanity’s last best hope is the young science of complex systems. Quitting coal, making autonomous cars ubiquitous, ending the middle-class addiction to consumption: all necessary to head off climate catastrophe, all deemed fantasies by pundits and policymakers, and all plausible in a complex systems view. Roland Kupers shows how we have already broken the interwoven path dependencies that make fundamental change so daunting. Consider the mid-2000s, when, against all predictions, the United States rapidly switched from a reliance on coal primarily to natural gas. The change required targeted regulations, a few lone investors, independent researchers, and generous technology subsidies. But in a stunningly short period of time, shale oil nudged out coal, and carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 10 percent. Kupers shows how to replicate such patterns in order to improve transit, reduce plastics consumption, and temper the environmental impact of middle-class diets. Whether dissecting China’s Ecological Civilization or the United States’ Green New Deal, Kupers describes what’s folly, what’s possible, and which solutions just might work.

Climate Change
Climate Change

Author: The Royal Society

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2014-02-26

Total Pages: 74

ISBN-13: 0309302021

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Climate Change: Evidence and Causes is a jointly produced publication of The US National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Society. Written by a UK-US team of leading climate scientists and reviewed by climate scientists and others, the publication is intended as a brief, readable reference document for decision makers, policy makers, educators, and other individuals seeking authoritative information on the some of the questions that continue to be asked. Climate Change makes clear what is well-established and where understanding is still developing. It echoes and builds upon the long history of climate-related work from both national academies, as well as on the newest climate-change assessment from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It touches on current areas of active debate and ongoing research, such as the link between ocean heat content and the rate of warming.

Revolutions that Made the Earth
Revolutions that Made the Earth

Author: Tim Lenton

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-04-11

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 0191501778

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The Earth that sustains us today was born out of a few remarkable, near-catastrophic revolutions, started by biological innovations and marked by global environmental consequences. The revolutions have certain features in common, such as an increase in complexity, energy utilization, and information processing by life. This book describes these revolutions, showing the fundamental interdependence of the evolution of life and its non-living environment. We would not exist unless these upheavals had led eventually to 'successful' outcomes - meaning that after each one, at length, a new stable world emerged. The current planet-reshaping activities of our species may be the start of another great Earth system revolution, but there is no guarantee that this one will be successful. The book explains what a successful transition through it might look like, if we are wise enough to steer such a course. This book places humanity in context as part of the Earth system, using a new scientific synthesis to illustrate our debt to the deep past and our potential for the future.

The Green Building Revolution
The Green Building Revolution

Author: Jerry Yudelson

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2010-04-16

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1597267635

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The “green building revolution’’ is happening right now. This book is its chronicle and its manifesto. Written by industry insider Jerry Yudelson, The Green Building Revolution introduces readers to the basics of green building and to the projects and people that are advancing this movement. With interviews and case studies, it does more than simply report on the revolution; it shows readers why and how to start thinking about designing, building, and operating high performance, environmentally aware (LEED-certified) buildings on conventional budgets. Evolving quietly for more than a decade, the green building movement has found its voice. Its principles of human-centered, environmentally sensitive development have reached a critical mass of architects, engineers, builders, developers, professionals in government, and consumers. Green buildings are showing us how we can have healthier indoor environments that use far less energy and water than conventional buildings do. The federal government, eighteen states, and nearly fifty U.S. cities already require new public buildings to meet “green” standards. According to Yudelson, this is just the beginning. The Green Building Revolution describes the many “revolutions” that are taking place today: in commercial buildings, schools, universities, public buildings, health care institutions, housing, property management, and neighborhood design. In a clear, highly readable style, Yudelson outlines the broader “journey to sustainability” influenced by the green building revolution and provides a solid business case for accelerating this trend. Illustrated with more than 50 photos, tables, and charts, and filled with timely information, The Green Building Revolution is the definitive description of a major movement that’s poised to transform our world.

Climate Intervention
Climate Intervention

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2015-06-17

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0309305322

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The signals are everywhere that our planet is experiencing significant climate change. It is clear that we need to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from our atmosphere if we want to avoid greatly increased risk of damage from climate change. Aggressively pursuing a program of emissions abatement or mitigation will show results over a timescale of many decades. How do we actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make a bigger difference more quickly? As one of a two-book report, this volume of Climate Intervention discusses CDR, the carbon dioxide removal of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere and sequestration of it in perpetuity. Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration introduces possible CDR approaches and then discusses them in depth. Land management practices, such as low-till agriculture, reforestation and afforestation, ocean iron fertilization, and land-and-ocean-based accelerated weathering, could amplify the rates of processes that are already occurring as part of the natural carbon cycle. Other CDR approaches, such as bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration, direct air capture and sequestration, and traditional carbon capture and sequestration, seek to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and dispose of it by pumping it underground at high pressure. This book looks at the pros and cons of these options and estimates possible rates of removal and total amounts that might be removed via these methods. With whatever portfolio of technologies the transition is achieved, eliminating the carbon dioxide emissions from the global energy and transportation systems will pose an enormous technical, economic, and social challenge that will likely take decades of concerted effort to achieve. Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration will help to better understand the potential cost and performance of CDR strategies to inform debate and decision making as we work to stabilize and reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

An Economy Based on Carbon Dioxide and Water
An Economy Based on Carbon Dioxide and Water

Author: Michele Aresta

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-07-01

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 3030158683

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This book is devoted to CO2 capture and utilization (CCU) from a green, biotechnological and economic perspective, and presents the potential of, and the bottlenecks and breakthroughs in converting a stable molecule such as CO2 into specialty chemicals and materials or energy-rich compounds. The use of renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) and non-fossil hydrogen is a must for converting large volumes of CO2 into energy products, and as such, the authors explore and compare the availability of hydrogen from water using these sources with that using oil or methane. Divided into 13 chapters, the book offers an analysis of the conditions under which CO2 utilization is possible, and discusses CO2 capture from concentrated sources and the atmosphere. It also analyzes the technological (non-chemical) uses of CO2, carbonation of basic minerals and industrial sludge, and the microbial-catalytic-electrochemical-photoelectrochemical-plasma conversion of CO2 into chemicals and energy products. Further, the book provides examples of advanced bioelectrochemical syntheses and RuBisCO engineering, as well as a techno-energetic and economic analysis of CCU. Written by leading international experts, this book offers a unique perspective on the potential of the various technologies discussed, and a vision for a sustainable future. Intended for graduates with a good understanding of chemistry, catalysis, biotechnology, electrochemistry and photochemistry, it particularly appeals to researchers (in academia and industry) and university teachers.

Carbon Sequestration for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
Carbon Sequestration for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

Author: David A. N. Ussiri

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-03-28

Total Pages: 554

ISBN-13: 3319538454

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This book provides an understanding of the role of human activities in accelerating change in global carbon cycling summarizes current knowledge of the contemporary carbon budget. Starting from the geological history, this volume follows a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the role of human activities in perturbing carbon cycling by quantifying changes in different reservoirs and fluxes of carbon with emphasis on the anthropogenic activities, especially after the industrial revolution. It covers the role of different mitigation options – natural ecological, engineered, and geoengineered processes as well as the emerging field of climate engineering in avoiding dangerous abrupt climate change. Although the targeted audience is the educators, students, researchers and scientific community, the simplified analysis and synthesis of current and up to date scientific literature makes the volume easier to understand and a tool policy makers can use to make an informed policy decisions.

Earth
Earth

Author: Jonathan I. Lunine

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780521644235

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This is an outstanding overview of the history of the Earth from a unique planetary perspective for introductory courses in the earth sciences. The book approaches Earth history as an evolution, encompassing the origin of the cosmos through the inner working of living cells. Earth: Evolution of a Habitable Planet tells how the Earth has come to its present state, why it differs from its neighboring planets, what life's place is in Earth's history, and how humanity affects the processes that make our planet livable. Today's human influences are contemplated in the context of natural changes on Earth. This book brings a fresh perspective to the study of the Earth for students who wish to learn how our planet evolved to its present form.