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The Climate Change Thread

Encouraging. And for that reason, Trump will attack this.



IN A NUTSHELL

  • Recent advancements by the EPFL could transform geothermal energy into a sustainable global power source.
  • Researchers demonstrated the ability to fracture ductile rocks at supercritical depths, allowing water circulation.
  • Companies like Quaise Energy are exploring innovative drilling technologies using particle accelerators.
  • The potential for large-scale geothermal exploitation may revolutionize the global energy landscape.
 
Encouraging. And for that reason, Trump will attack this.



IN A NUTSHELL

  • Recent advancements by the EPFL could transform geothermal energy into a sustainable global power source.
  • Researchers demonstrated the ability to fracture ductile rocks at supercritical depths, allowing water circulation.
  • Companies like Quaise Energy are exploring innovative drilling technologies using particle accelerators.
  • The potential for large-scale geothermal exploitation may revolutionize the global energy landscape.
Advanced geothermal is cool. I think it’s promising because it solves the issues around low carbon baseload.

The limitations are twofold: it is limited to locations with sufficient thermal gradient (the west), it only produces electricity.

From a technical standpoint, open questions remain. They still need to bring costs down (they will), they also need to solve well spacing, and how much fluid and proppant is required to to stimulate the wells. These are the same questions that plagued the oil industry while they incinerated capital figuring out how to make shale profitable. It’s not an easy question, took oil and gas 13 years.
 
“Online bots and trolls hugely amplify false narratives, the researchers say, playing a key role in promoting climate lies”. Where have I seen that happen? Lol….


Rampant climate misinformation is turning the crisis into a catastrophe, according to the authors of a new report.

It found climate action was being obstructed and delayed by false and misleading information stemming from fossil fuel companies, rightwing politicians and some nation states. The report, from the International Panel on the Information Environment (Ipie), systematically reviewed 300 studies.

The researchers found climate denialism has evolved into campaigns focused on discrediting solutions, such as the false claims that renewable energy caused the recent massive blackout in Spain.

Online bots and trolls hugely amplify false narratives, the researchers say, playing a key role in promoting climate lies. The experts also report that political leaders, civil servants and regulatory agencies are increasingly being targeted in order to delay climate action.

Climate misinformation – the term used by the report for both deliberate and inadvertent falsehoods – is of increasing concern. Last Thursday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, called for misinformation and greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry to be criminalised. On Saturday, Brazil, host of the upcoming Cop30 climate summit, will rally nations behind a separate UN initiative to crack down on climate misinformation.

“It is a major problem,” said Dr Klaus Jensen, of the University of Copenhagen, who co-led the Ipie review. “If we don’t have the right information available, how are we going to vote for the right causes and politicians, and how are politicians going to translate the clear evidence into the necessary action? Unfortunately, I think the [bad actors] are still very, very active, and probably have the upper hand now.”

Jensen added: “We have about five years to cut emissions in half and until 2050 to go carbon neutral. Without the right information, we’re not going to get there. So the climate crisis being translated into a climate catastrophe is possible, unless we handle the climate information integrity problem.”

Morgera said in her report last week that countries must “defossilise” information systems, after decades of misinformation from the powerful fossil fuel industry.

She said states should “criminalise misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry” and “criminalise media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies”. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, called in June 2024 for a ban on advertising by fossil fuel companies, calling the firms the “godfathers of climate chaos”

The report:

 
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