Month: June 2023

NASA’s latest experimental X-plane has received a name. 

The United States Air Force has designated the plane, designed in conjunction with Boeing through NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project as the X-66A.

The X-66A is also the first X-plane designed specifically to help the U.S. achieve the net-zero goal for aviation greenhouse gas emissions, set out in the White House’s U.S. Aviation Climate Action Plan, released in 2021.

NASA said in a press release that the X-66A could inform a new generation of sustainable single-aisle aircraft, planes that currently operated as the backbone of passenger-bassed air travel. As a result of their heavy usage, single-aisle aircraft account for around half of aviation greenhouse gas emissions across the globe. This means a sustainable version of such a craft could have a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions. 

“At NASA, our eyes are not just focused on stars but also fixated on the sky. The Sustainable Flight Demonstrator builds on NASA‘s world-leading efforts in aeronautics as well climate,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the statement. “The X-66A will help shape the future of aviation, a new era where aircraft are greener, cleaner, and quieter and create
new possibilities for the flying public and American industry alike.”

Related: This wild DARPA CRANE X-plane could be a giant leap in aircraft design

NASA has a Funded Space Act Agreement with Boeing for the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, which will see the space agency make an investment of $425 million over seven years. While NASA also provides the facilities and technical expertise for the project, Boeing and its partners will contribute an estimated $725 million to its funding. 

Together with Boeing, this will see NASA build and fly a full-sized demonstration of the X-66A with extra long thin wings stabilized by diagonal struts, a design called a “Transonic Truss-Braced Wing.”

What is an X-plane? 

X-plane status is granted by the Air Force to development programs such as that of the X-66A, which aim to create revolutionary experimental aircraft configurations. Usually reserved for research aircraft, the X-planes should test novel designs and new technologies that can be integrated into other aircraft rather than planes designed to be prototypes for full production.

“We’re incredibly proud of this designation because it means that the X-66A will be the next in a long line of experimental aircraft used to validate breakthrough designs that have transformed aviation,” Boeing chief technology officer Todd Citron said. “With the learnings gained from design, construction, and flight testing, we’ll have an opportunity to shape the future of flight and contribute to the decarbonization of aerospace.”

In the case of the X-66A, the X-plane status recognizes the design’s Transonic Truss-Braced Wing configuration that, in combination with advancements in propulsion systems, and materials, could lead to a reduction of 30% in fuel consumption and fewer emissions in comparison to current “best-in-class” aircraft. 

The aircraft is the latest in a long line of X-planes created by NASA, dating back to the 1940s, and the space agency’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which founded an experimental aircraft program with the Air Force and the U.S. Navy. With its emphasis on emission reduction, the X-66A may just be one of the most important X-planes yet. 

“To reach our goal of net zero aviation emissions by 2050, we need transformative aircraft concepts like the ones we’re flying on the X-66A,” associate administrator for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Bob Pearce said. “With this experimental aircraft, we’re aiming high to demonstrate the kinds of energy-saving, emissions-reducing technologies the aviation industry needs.”

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• Three Tesla Models come with “bioweapon defense mode.”
• Using HEPA air filters and positive pressure, Tesla says you could ride out a military attack in one. 
• Tesla owners posted videos of the mode in use amid thick wildfire smoke this week. 

Tesla added intense air filtration to three of its models years ago and drivers are once again finding them useful for unhealthy air sweeping across North America.

“Never thought I’d have to use this feature,” one Reddit user posted with a photo. In the comments, Californians chimed in that they’d found it useful during the state’s fires in recent years. 

Tesla’s bioweapon mode acts as an air pressure buffer on top of the usual HEPA filtration, similar to the positive ventilation used in surgical facilities to keep any pollutants out. 

Tesla made a demonstration video on how it works: 

 

“You can literally survive a military grade bio attack by sitting in your car,” Tesla said, posting a chart of its data to prove it. 

Tesla’s not the only automaker to include air-purifying HEPA filters, but they’re not common. Mercedes-Benz‘ “Air Balance” system also uses them.

 

 

I have never much liked mowing the lawn. I remember struggling with an antiquated hand-push lawn mower as a kid. Nowadays, I dread my weekly battle with the big, heavy, indestructible gas mower I inherited from my grandfather. The idea of a robot mower filling in for me as I lounge with a cold drink has always appealed, so I was excited to test the EcoFlow Blade.

Not only does this thing have a cool name, it looks like it rolled straight out of Robot Wars, with big chunky wheels, an angular frame, and a central chassis that can go up and down to your preferred cutting length. Since it uses GPS for navigation, there’s no need to faff with boundary wire, and a front-facing camera combines with lidar to ensure it avoids obstacles. But the EcoFlow Blade does not come cheap, and has some disappointing quirks.

Get Your Mower Running

Photograph: Simon Hill

Setup was surprisingly quick and easy. I unpacked the mower and followed the instructions to set up the charging station and plant the 4-foot-tall GNSS antenna. The mower relies on satellite navigation. Picking a spot was tricky, as the antenna and base require a location with a strong GPS signal and nothing too tall close by. Trees and buildings can block the signal. The EcoFlow Blade employs real-time kinematic positioning (RTK), triangulating GPS modules in the mower and the charging base with the GNSS antenna to get an accurate position.

Once the EcoFlow app was satisfied with the signal, I drove the mower around my lawn like a gigantic remote control car to set a mowing area. You can set no-go zones and define multiple mowing areas. Within an hour of unboxing, the EcoFlow Blade was busily cutting my lawn. You can set your preferred grass length between 0.8 and 3.1 inches in the app, schedule the Blade to mow, and tell it to make multiple passes around the edge.

By default, the EcoFlow Blade connects to your phone via Bluetooth, which takes a few seconds and has limited range. But you can also connect via Wi-Fi or use an eSIM. It can track its own position, so if anyone pinches your EcoFlow Blade, it will stop working. Then you can use the app to locate it.

Thankfully, you don’t need the app to use your mower. There’s a big red stop button on top for safety and a trio of buttons to turn the power on or off, start mowing, and return to base. It takes just over two hours to charge and works for up to four hours.

Lawn Patrol

Photograph: Simon Hill

EcoFlow says the Blade can cover over 30,000 square feet of lawn and handle slopes up to 27 degrees. Most robot mowers are designed for much smaller areas and struggle with inclines. The EcoFlow Blade’s front two wheels are angled in, which enables it to turn sharply, and the back wheels have teeth for better traction. It certainly had no trouble with the gentle slope in my modest lawn and cut the grass in neat rows.

Vaishali Kanal’s wages don’t depend on how much she works. They depend on whether there is internet in her village or not. Kanal, 25, usually leaves her toddler at home in Palatpada, a remote village in western India, early in the morning, and goes to work on a nearby building site. But when we met on a scorching May afternoon, she was cradling her daughter in her arms. “If she is awake or crying, I take her with me,” she says. “It is tough to do backbreaking labor and take care of the toddler at the same time.”

Often she puts in a whole day of grueling labor but doesn’t get paid for it, due to a glitch in a government system that was supposed to help some of the country’s most marginalized people—like Kanal, a tribal farmer from Maharashtra’s Palghar district. Kanal is a worker under the Indian government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, or MGNREGA, which gives rural workers a guaranteed income for working on public infrastructure project, such as roads, wells and dams. The aim of the scheme was to give people in rural areas employment opportunities close to home, so they wouldn’t have to move to cities to find work. With 266.3 million registered workers and 144.3 million active ones, it is probably the largest employment scheme in the world.

Until last year, workers’ attendance at their jobs was often marked on a physical muster roll by a village employment guarantee assistant or worksite supervisor. However, in January this year, the national government made it mandatory to log the attendance of workers on an app, the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS). The official on site now has to upload pictures of workers to the system to prove their attendance. But the app doesn’t work in remote areas with weak or infrequent internet connections. Critics of the policy say the lack of connectivity was an easily foreseeable problem, and that workers from marginalized groups are—not for the first time—being left behind in the government’s obsession with rolling out glossy, but poorly thought-through technologies.

“The government’s focus is not on workers, but on technology, regardless of whether it helps workers,” says Brian Lobo, an activist working in Palghar.

The Ministry of Rural Development, which oversees the MGNREGA scheme, did not respond to a request for comment.

Workers using the NMMS have to have their photos taken twice—once when they start work, and once when the day is over. “If the internet is sluggish, the photos don’t get uploaded,” said Jagadish Bhujade, a guarantee assistant in the block of Vikramgad where Kanal’s village is located. “In our block, it is always a problem.”

Kanal says that there have been days she’s rushed to work, only to find that the internet is down and there’s no way to log in. “That means I have to walk back all the way to my home,” she says. “Some of the worksites are quite far, and I can’t afford to take the bus each time.”

CLIMATEWIRE | A major question has emerged as the world strives to reduce greenhouse gases: How much money should rich nations pay to poor ones for raising Earth’s temperature?

Scientists have found an answer.

High carbon countries owe at least $192 trillion to low-emitting nations in compensation for their greenhouse gas pollution.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper published Monday in the journal Nature Sustainability by researchers Andrew Fanning and Jason Hickel.

“It is a matter of climate justice that if we are asking nations to rapidly decarbonise their economies, even though they hold no responsibility for the excess emissions that are destabilizing the climate, then they should be compensated for this unfair burden,” said Fanning in a statement.

The concept of climate reparations is a topic of global discussion. Low-income and developing nations have long argued that wealthy, high-emitting countries should help them with the costs of decarbonizing. More recently, the international community has begun to acknowledge that high-emitting nations should help other countries grapple with the damages they’ve suffered as a result of climate change, including the impacts of extreme weather events, rising seas and other climate consequences.

World leaders agreed last year at the U.N. climate talks in Egypt to establish a fund that would pay vulnerable countries for “loss and damage” associated with climate change. But the details of how the fund will operate — including which states are eligible for compensation, what kinds of damage the fund will cover and how the money will be disbursed — are still undecided.

A special committee tasked with hashing out these details is expected to present a proposal at the climate talks in the United Arab Emirates starting in November.

Meanwhile, activists, scientists and policy experts around the world are considering ways that climate aid — sometimes called reparations — could potentially be structured. The new paper presents one potential framework for climate compensation.

Nations participating in the Paris climate agreement are currently striving to keep global temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius of their preindustrial levels, and below 1.5 C if at all possible. So the researchers began by examining the carbon budget for both climate goals — that’s the amount of carbon the world can release without overshooting the temperature target.

Then they divided the carbon budgets into fair shares for every country. Each nation gets a slice of the budget according to its size and population.

Next, they examined each country’s cumulative emissions since the year 1960. The world had been emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases for decades beforehand — but by 1960, they said, researchers clearly understood the science of global warming and were beginning to communicate it to the public, as well.

Based on these historical emissions, the researchers then determined which countries have already used up their fair shares of the carbon budget. They also looked at how much more carbon each country is likely to emit between now and 2050, even if the world begins reducing emissions fast enough to meet the 1.5 C target.

The researchers divided the world into two groups. They lumped 39 high-emitting countries together, including the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Israel, in a group they refer to as the Global North. All of the other countries in the study, including the rest of Asia, the Americas and Africa, fell into the second group, which the researchers referred to as the Global South.

They found that all the countries in the Global North group had already exceeded their fair shares of the carbon budgets. The group had collectively blown through its 1.5 C budget back in 1986, and its 2 C budget was gone by 1995.

Even if nations worldwide manage to collectively reduce their net emissions to zero by 2050 and meet the 1.5 C temperature target, Global North countries would still overshoot their share of the budget by three times — and they’d use up half the Global South group’s budget in the process.

Fifty-five countries around the world would have at least 75 percent of their carbon budget used up by high emitters in this net-zero scenario. And 10 countries — all in sub-Saharan Africa — would sacrifice at least 95 percent of their carbon budgets.

The researchers then calculated the amount of money the overshooters would owe in compensation. They based their estimates on carbon prices, or the costs associated with excess emissions, established by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They found that the overshooters would owe a total of $192 trillion to the rest of the world. The United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom alone would be responsible for about two-thirds of that total. And the United States would owe the single greatest debt of any country on the planet.

Meanwhile, India and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa would be owed around half the total compensation value.

The researchers noted that these figures only include compensation for “atmospheric appropriation.” They don’t include payments that rich countries may owe poorer countries for the costs associated with decarbonizing or adapting to climate change — those would be extra.

The researchers also noted that the study does not account for inequalities within high-emitting nations themselves, where the wealthiest people account for much greater shares of the carbon footprint.

“Responsibility for excess emissions is largely held by the wealthy classes who have very high consumption and who wield disproportionate power over production and national policy,” Hickel said in a statement. “They are the ones who must bear the costs of compensation.”

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2023. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.