Daily Archives: November 25, 2024

Kennedys adopts science-backed plan for net zero by 2040

Kate Hursthouse

Global law firm Kennedys has set out a science-backed plan to achieve net zero by 2040. The firm — which has 48 offices, including in Dublin and Belfast — is committed to reducing its global Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 90 per cent from the 2040 fiscal year, using the 2020 fiscal year as a baseline. The remaining 10 per cent of emissions, also known as residual emissions, will be offset through carbon removal projects. This net zero target has now been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). SBTi previously validated the firm’s near-term emissions reduction commitment, under which it is committed to reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 70 per cent and Scope 3 emissions by 28 per cent by the 2030 fiscal year. Between the 2020 and 2024 fiscal years, the firm has achieved a 26 per cent reduction in combined Scope 1 and 2 emissions, driven by over a third of offices globally procuring renewable energy.   Kennedys intends to procure electricity by renewable means across all its global offices by 2030; revise its business travel policy to align with sustainability goals; engage with suppliers to understand their environmental ambitions, and encourage them to set their own emission reduction targets; and educate employees through initiatives including an annual Climate Action campaign, online e-learning and a workshop for senior leaders. The firm will provide updates on its progress in its annual responsible business report, the 2023-2024 edition of which has just been published. Kate Hursthouse, head of responsible business at Kennedys, said: “Choosing a net zero target year of FY2040 was ambitious, but we knew it was achievable. This is a significant milestone for the firm and has been more than two years in the making. “As a firm, we wholeheartedly recognise that we have a responsibility to play our part in limiting climate change, and we are committed to taking meaningful action. The launch of our responsible business report further reinforces our focus on integrating sustainable and responsible practices into the heart of how we do business.”

Mad about Science: Carbon neutral fuel

By Brenden BobbyReader Columnist
Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. So what happens when you pour $100 worth of fuel into your car’s tank, only for it to be empty in a week and a half? Where did it go?
Using up fuel in your car isn’t just deleting it from existence. The process of an internal combustion engine utilizes energy generated from applying heat to a volatile chemical (gasoline or diesel) to trigger a reaction that will split the fuel into its baser components, creating energy for the moving parts of your engine in the process. That energy transfer is then directed throughout the vehicle to make it move.
The baser chemicals are generally light enough to go from liquid to gaseous form and become a part of the atmosphere. There are an estimated 1.5 billion vehicles in the world, leading to a lot of waste products in the atmosphere.
Atmospheric carbon has a powerful insulating effect called the greenhouse effect. Essentially, carbon lets light in, but it doesn’t like to let heat back out after the light has impacted a surface and produced heat energy. The closest approximation is the acrylic panels of a greenhouse, which allow light in and trap heat inside, hence the term “greenhouse effect.”
It’s undeniable that we need energy sources to power our daily lives — especially in rural North Idaho — so the idea of saying, “Forget fossil fuels,” is kind of absurd, to say the least. These are things we need to thrive in our modern world, but there are steps that we can take to mitigate the damage we do to our environment.
Synthetic fuels can and have been created to help mitigate climate change, though these fuel sources aren’t a panacea for all climate and energy woes. One of these applications actually requires the environment to have been already altered in order to create the fuel.
The Navy is currently working to deploy processes to create synthetic jet fuel from carbonic acid pulled from the ocean. This requires an energy source that fossil fuels would typically fill. Nimitz class aircraft carriers are equipped with nuclear reactors to keep them powered, and would allow for them to harvest carbon from carbonic acid in seawater. Carbonic acid mostly comes from carbon in the atmosphere as a byproduct of internal combustion engines. The ocean absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere, and the CO2 merges with water to create carbonic acid.
A surplus of carbonic acid has a detrimental effect on the ocean at large by harming fragile organisms such as shellfish and coral, which creates a cascading effect throughout the oceanic ecosystem. Being able to “scrub” seawater and pull fuel from it without adding more waste products to the atmosphere helps mitigate some of the damage done by motorized vehicles, especially in times of peace.
Due to the highly controlled nature of nuclear energy, this solution can’t be widely applied to most ships. However, every little bit helps, and if this turns out to be a profitable endeavor, it could well be applied to specialized ships in the private sector, similar to how plastic collectors have been deployed over the past couple of years.
Microalgae is another form of potentially carbon-neutral fuel. Unlike things like fossil fuels, microalgae lends itself to a huge variety of organic purposes including pharmaceuticals and livestock feed. Crude oil pumped from the ground is the fossilized remains of ancient algal mats, so it’s only logical to explore the utilization of algae as a form of modern fuel.
The premise of how algae can become fuel is relatively simple, even when the extraction process is dense. Essentially, algae is a very basic form of plant life that draws in carbon dioxide and, through photosynthesis, cleaves the molecule into O2 and carbon, spitting out the oxygen as a waste product and keeping the carbon as building blocks to create more algae. We are then able to harvest the carbon as an energy source, applying heat and forcing it to bind with O2 and creating energy in the process.
Algae is extremely efficient at storing carbon compared to most other plant life. It’s also resilient and capable of thriving in a huge variety of environments so long as it has adequate moving water. Under the proper conditions, it can even be stored for hundreds of millions of years either as a carbon sink or a future fuel source, as is the case with oil.
Algae have been responsible for massive climate shifts in the Earth’s distant past. Over 2 billion years ago, a massive surge of cyanobacteria caused the greatest mass extinction the Earth has ever seen. Blue-green algae spread in huge quantities all over the world, absorbing an immense amount of carbon dioxide and spitting out O2 as waste. This completely altered Earth’s atmosphere, changed the planet’s average temperature and laid the foundation for life as we know it to exist on planet Earth. Oxygen was poisonous to most organisms alive at this time, and the rapid growth of O2 in the atmosphere killed most life on the planet with the exception of the cyanobacteria.
Plants are metal, man.
Unfortunately, using algae as fuel will never be a carbon-negative solution as it will always return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Stay curious, 7B.

Have Scientists Solved Decades-Long Mystery Involving A Submarine And A Creepy Quacking Sound?

Ancient Greek sailors returned home with stories of mermaids and sirens. In the 1960s, a group of submariners returned home from the Southern Ocean with a much odder tale. They had heard the ocean quack.Strange as it might sound, it was not a one-off event and it has even earned itself a quacking name, “bio duck”.AdvertisementTwo decades after submarine personnel first detected the sound, a team of researchers recorded the mysterious phenomenon – four bursts of quack-like noises – while creating a soundscape of the South Fiji Basin. Four years later, in 1986, Ross Chapman from the University of Victoria joined the project. “We discovered that the data contained a gold mine of new information about many kinds of sound in the ocean, including sounds from marine mammals,” he said in a statement. Referring to the strange quacking noise, he explained: “The sound was so repeatable, we couldn’t believe at first that it was biological.” However, after speaking to colleagues based in Australia, they found similar noises had been detected in other spots close to New Zealand and Australia. AdvertisementChapman now believes what the researchers overheard in 1982 was a conversation between sea animals: “Maybe they were talking about dinner, maybe it was parents talking to children, or maybe they were simply commenting on that crazy ship that kept going back and forth towing that long string behind it.”The “crazy ship” he refers to was a vessel decked in an acoustic antenna and hydrophones, equipment that enabled the researchers to work out where exactly the unusual sounds were being made. The results show that there were several “speakers” at any one time, though there were no visual sightings that could confirm the identity of the animal doing the “speaking”. “The most amazing thing was that when one speaker was talking, the others were quiet, as though they were listening,” said Chapman. “Then the first speaker would stop talking and listen to responses from others.”A study published in 2014 suggests the animal responsible for the sound is the Antarctic minke whale. Researchers came to this conclusion after comparing recordings of the “bio-duck” with vocalizations made by this species of baleen whale, finding convincing similarities between the frequency and number of pulses. AdvertisementAs for these new revelations, Chapman presented his findings as part of the virtual 187th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which took place recently. 

Have Scientists Solved Decades-Long Mystery Involving A Submarine And A Creepy Quacking Sound?

Ancient Greek sailors returned home with stories of mermaids and sirens. In the 1960s, a group of submariners returned home from the Southern Ocean with a much odder tale. They had heard the ocean quack.Strange as it might sound, it was not a one-off event and it has even earned itself a quacking name, “bio duck”.AdvertisementTwo decades after submarine personnel first detected the sound, a team of researchers recorded the mysterious phenomenon – four bursts of quack-like noises – while creating a soundscape of the South Fiji Basin. Four years later, in 1986, Ross Chapman from the University of Victoria joined the project. “We discovered that the data contained a gold mine of new information about many kinds of sound in the ocean, including sounds from marine mammals,” he said in a statement. Referring to the strange quacking noise, he explained: “The sound was so repeatable, we couldn’t believe at first that it was biological.” However, after speaking to colleagues based in Australia, they found similar noises had been detected in other spots close to New Zealand and Australia. AdvertisementChapman now believes what the researchers overheard in 1982 was a conversation between sea animals: “Maybe they were talking about dinner, maybe it was parents talking to children, or maybe they were simply commenting on that crazy ship that kept going back and forth towing that long string behind it.”The “crazy ship” he refers to was a vessel decked in an acoustic antenna and hydrophones, equipment that enabled the researchers to work out where exactly the unusual sounds were being made. The results show that there were several “speakers” at any one time, though there were no visual sightings that could confirm the identity of the animal doing the “speaking”. “The most amazing thing was that when one speaker was talking, the others were quiet, as though they were listening,” said Chapman. “Then the first speaker would stop talking and listen to responses from others.”A study published in 2014 suggests the animal responsible for the sound is the Antarctic minke whale. Researchers came to this conclusion after comparing recordings of the “bio-duck” with vocalizations made by this species of baleen whale, finding convincing similarities between the frequency and number of pulses. AdvertisementAs for these new revelations, Chapman presented his findings as part of the virtual 187th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which took place recently.