Welcome back to some more good news!

This week, we have good news relating to clean energy breakthroughs. Read on!

Science

Proving Reliability of Sustainable Energy

• California has debunked the myth of renewable energy being unreliable

• For the last 98 of 116 days, California provided up to 10 hours of electricity with just renewables

• Compared to 2023, California had a 31% increase in solar output and an 8% increase in wind energy

• Doubled battery capacity from last year, meaning that they are now able to meet electricity demands during darker hours

• California burned 40% less fossil fuel than 2023

Business

Monetizing Dirty Water

• BlueGreen Water Technologies is a company that is removing algal blooms from water to make it safer to drink

• The idea: when you pour a certain mixture to remove algal blooms, the algae sinks to the bottom of the lake

• But what if you could sell the captured carbon?

• April 2024: BlueGreen announced they’d removed the equivalent CO2 of 3,000 cars on the road for a year

  Read more at Smithsonian Magazine

Politics

The Continued Climate Fight

• Despite Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the UN still to push to meet those goals

• One country’s idiocy will not bring them all down

Activism

Turns Out the Ocean Cools the Climate👀

• Researchers discovered methanethiol, a sulfur gas from marine plankton, significantly boosts known marine sulfur emissions by 25%, enhancing the cooling effect on the climate.

• Methanethiol is more efficient than dimethyl sulfide at forming aerosols, which reflect solar radiation and amplify cloud formation, offsetting greenhouse gas warming

• Highlights that polar oceans, particularly the Southern Ocean, are major hotspots for sulfur emissions, previously underestimated in climate models

• Findings address longstanding gaps in climate models, improving accuracy in predicting warming scenarios and solar radiation over the Southern Ocean

• Research provides crucial insights for climate policy, enabling better representation of oceanic cooling effects in global climate predictions

Thank you so much for reading!

If you like the content you’ve been reading, I would encourage you to introduce us to your friends who are also into climate news! We all need some positive news these days.

~ Dhanvi