Energy

"You already have a heat pump in your home . . . . It's called a refrigerator."

"Just about everyone who’s alive now will have to adapt to a warmer world. As sea levels and floodplains change, we’ll need to rethink where we put homes and businesses. We’ll need to shore up power grids, seaports, and bridges. We’ll need to plant more mangrove forests . . . and improve our early-warning systems for storms."

"It helps to set ambitious goals and commit to meeting them, the way countries around the world did with the 2015 Paris Agreement. It’s easy to mock international agreements, but they’re part of how progress happens: If you like having an ozone layer, you can thank an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol."

"As the climate gets warmer, droughts and floods will become more frequent, wiping out harvests more often."

"[W]orldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide . . . ."

"The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have."

"{W}ith transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest. In the first group are passenger cars and trucks, light and medium trucks, and buses. In the second group are long-distance trucks, trains, airplanes, and container ships."

"There’s so much animal poop that it’s actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation."

"[In discussing solely cement, steel and plastics in this chapter] I'm leaving out fertilizer, glass, paper, aluminum, and many others. . . . We manufacture enormous amounts of materials, resulting in copious amounts of greenhouse gases, nearly a third of the 51 billion tons per year."

"[T]he path to zero emissions in manufacturing looks like this: (1) Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation. (2) Get that electricity from a power grid that’s been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. (3) Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. (4) Use materials more efficiently. Same."

"The path to zero carbon for heating actually looks a lot like the path for passenger cars: (1) electrify what we can, getting rid of natural gas water heaters and furnaces, and (2) develop clean fuels to do everything else."

"With agriculture . . . each year’s emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are the equivalent of more than 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide."

"Deploying today’s renewables and improving transmission couldn’t be more important. . . . Unless we use large amounts of nuclear energy . . . every path to zero in the United States will require us to install as much wind and solar power as we can build and find room for. . . . [[w:Renewable energy in the United States#Potential resources|[M]ost countries aren’t as lucky as the United States when it comes to solar and wind resources]]. . . . That’s why, even as we deploy, deploy, deploy solar and wind, the world is going to need some new clean electricity inventions too."

"Offshore wind holds a lot of promise . . . ."

"[W]e don’t have a practical way to make [the cement in concrete] without producing carbon."

"[W]e’re going to need much more clean electricity in the coming years. . . . [B]y 2050 . . . the world will need much more than three times the electricity we generate now."

"In most locations, your overall costs will go down if you get rid of an electric air conditioner and gas (or oil) furnace and replace both with an electric heat pump."

"[C]ement . . . steel [and] plastics are cheap because fossil fuels are cheap."

"[Question] 5: How Much Is This Going to Cost? . . . Most . . . zero-carbon solutions are more expensive than their fossil-fuel counterparts. . . . These additional costs are what I call Green Premiums. . . . Green Premiums [can help us] decide which zero-carbon solutions we should deploy now [those with low or negative premiums] and where we should pursue breakthroughs because the clean alternatives aren't cheap enough."

"We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar. To do it, we need lots of breakthroughs in science and engineering. We need to build a consensus that doesn’t exist and create public policies to push a transition that would not happen otherwise. . . . But don’t despair. We can do this."

"[Question] 1. How Much of the 51 Billion Tons Are We Talking About? . . . Tip: Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world’s current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents)."

"[Question] 2. What’s Your Plan for Cement? . . . [This question] is just a shorthand reminder that if you're trying to come up with a comprehensive plan for climate change, you have to account for much more than electricity and cars."

"The reason we need to get to zero is simple. Greenhouse gases trap heat, causing the average surface temperature of the earth to go up. . . . Once greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, they stay there for a very long time . . . . There’s no scenario in which we keep adding carbon to the atmosphere and the world stops getting hotter, and the hotter it gets, the harder it will be for humans to survive, much less thrive."

"I [have become] convinced of three things: 1. To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero {net emissions by the year 2050}. 2. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. 3. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way."

"When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary."

"Pages 54 and 55"

"Some companies may go under in the coming years; that comes with the territory when you’re doing cutting-edge work . . . ."

"[Question] 3: How Much Power Are We Talking About? . . . [A] watt is a bit of energy per second [like] measuring the flow of water out of your kitchen faucet . . . . Watts are equivalent to "cups per second." A watt is pretty small. A small incandescent bulb might use 40 of them. A hair dryer uses 1,500. A power plant might generate hundreds of millions of watts. . . . Because these numbers get big fast, it's convenient to use some shorthand. A kilowatt is 1,000 watts, a megawatt is a million, and a gigawatt . . . is a billion."

"There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year. . . . Zero is what we need to aim for [by the year 2050 to] stop the warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change . . . ."

"Pages 56 and 57"

"Sakharov looked wryly at the composition of an average cubic metre of Universe. ...a billion quanta of radiation, one proton and no antiprotons. Tracking... to just after the Big Bang... [we] should have had... a billion antiprotons, and a billion and one protons. ...Why the odd proton? ...[A]ntimatter had slipped off the map of the Universe ...Sakharov put forward a three-point explanation."

"[1] Big Bang... particle-antiparticle creation briefly got out of hand, more pairs being created than were reabsorbed back into radiation. ...[T]he present Universe is much larger than a sphere of light rays which started out from the Big Bang... Sometime in the past, the Universe... expanded faster than light... Most of the Universe we have not yet seen, despite traveling at [c]... not yet having had time to reach us. ...In the first fraction of a second... the Universe must have 'inflated' faster than the speed of light and particle-antiparticle pairs were produced faster than they could be reabsorbed."

"For the subnuclear world, the ordinary mirror has to be replaced by an extended mirror that carries out three reflections simultaneously—switching particle to antiparticle and vice-versa, changing left to right and vice-versa, and reversing the . ...[R]espectively C (for charge), P (for parity) and T (for time). The CPT mirror changes Alice into a mirror-image Anti-Alice going backward in time."

"In the early 1950s... attention was focused on two new unstable, electrically neutral particles... tau and theta. ...[T]he tau and theta were 'strange'—they carried Gell-Mann's additional charge. They decayed in different ways, and had different parities... [T]he tau and theta had the same mass. ...Chen Ning ('Frank') Yang and , thought it was bizarre for two apparently different particles to have the same mass, and suspected... two faces of the same particle, despite... different parities. ...[They] had to throw overboard ...apparently solid ...assumptions about quantum behaviour: ...[1] it would not be basically altered by left-right mirror reflection... [2] behaviour would not be altered by a mirror that reflected particles as antiparticles and vice-versa... [They] re-examined the evidence for both mirror symmetries, which everyone had assumed ...watertight ...showing that for particle decays this had never been proved conclusively."

"Lee and Yang... suggested that the particle-antiparticle mirror could be flawed. ...[T]wo experiments—by , Leon Lederman and Marcel Weinrich... and by Jerome Friedman and Val Telegdi...—looked at multiple particle transformations in which a pion decays into a , which in turn decays into an electron. ...[These] found that ...[f]or a positively charged pion, the muon's spin points backwards, against its direction of motion. [When t]he antiparticle... a negatively charged pion... decays, the muon emerges with its spin pointing in the direction of its motion. Looking in a mirror that changes particles into antiparticles, the antismoke comes down the chimney."

"[2] ...some mechanism had to tilt the balance in favor of matter. With Cronin and Fitch's... implications for the , Sakharov thought he had... the answer. But was the tiny subnuclear effect... enough..? Probably not... But... [h]eavier quarks, more exotic than strangeness, could show larger effects. Making B particles containing the 'beauty' (...'bottom') quark and manufacturing enough of them to probe the has become a major focus of... research."

"In his theory of beta reactivity Fermi introduced a new type of interactions among elementary particles, which today we call "weak interactions". Many new manifestations of weak interactions, which could be interpreted using Fermi's 1933 theory, were found in the following decades. The study of weak interactions has led to surprising discoveries, among which the violation of specular symmetry (known as parity symmetry or P symmetry), and the violation of time reversal symmetry (T symmetry) and of the symmetry between matter and antimatter (CP symmetry)."

"joined me... and I assigned him to the task of continuing the curvature measurements... As more data accumulated... practically all of the low-velocity cases of positive charge were particles... whose mass seemed to be too small to permit their interpretation as s. The alternative explanations... were that these particles were either ordinary electrons (of negative charge) moving upward, or some unknown lightweight particles of positive charge moving downward. In the spirit of scentific conservatism I tended... toward the former... [[Robert Andrews Millikan|[T]he chief]]... repeatedly pointed out that cosmic ray particles travel downward, and not upward, except in extremely rare circumstances, and that these... must be downward-moving protons. This point of view was difficult for me to accept... since in nearly all cases the density of the... tracks... was too low for particles of proton mass. To resolve this apparent paradox, a plate was inserted across the center of the ... [A] fine example was obtained in which a low-energy lightweight particle of positive charge was observed to traverse the plate... This particle came in from the bottom of the chamber, passed through the lead plate and went out near the top of the chamber. ...[I]ts track... was more curved above the plate... this meant it was going slower... therefore, it must have passed through the plate traveling upward."

"I knew it could not have been a proton. Since a proton is 1800 times as heavy as an electron it would have produced a much thicker line [trail]... [I]t could not have been a neutron since neutrons have no electric charge and, therefore, are incapable of producing any kind of line... [T]he line was exactly what would have been produced by an ordinary electron except that electrons had always been found to have a negative electric charge and, therefore, should have turned to the right. This one turned to the left... an electron with a positive charge ...a positive electron!"

"The first results from the magnet in 1931 and 1932 were dramatic and completely unexpected. An approximately equal number of particles of positive and negative charge were observed, whereas, according to the theories known at the time, one would expect to see only ordinary electrons (all of negative charge). The presence of such an abundance of particles of positive charge was perplexing—something new and mysterious must be ocurring."

"[3] The proton... has to be slightly unstable... Sitting still, the -filled proton would have to disintegrate into electrons and other light particles. ...But ...the level of ...instability needed was so small as to be almost undetectable. ...[E]xperiments are trying to capture this effect..."

"Dear Millikan, I have just received a letter from Rutherford which contains some of Blackett's work which may interest you and Anderson. It is that they have capitulated on the question of positive electrons and agree with Anderson that there are present in large numbers among the tertiary or quartinary (or whatever they are) ionizing particles seen in a Wilson photograph of the effects particles of positive charge and electronic mass. ...I take it that Blackett has collected so many photographs of such tracks as those earlier ones of Anderson that he can no longer resist this devastatingly interesting conclusion. Blackett's photos will come out in P.R.S. (Proceedings of the Royal Society) in March. I have a lecture to deliver."

"In 1932 Millikan and Anderson were investigating cosmic rays, and they had built a large '... When subatomic particles passed through... they left ghostly vapor trails in the supersaturated air... They placed powerful magnets around it to blanket the interior... with a magnetic field. ...[[Cosmic ray|[C]osmic rays]] ...were bent by the field ...[T]he direction and thickness of the paths... revealed the mass of the particles—and their charge. Anderson... noticed that some of the trails were... like... electrons, but were curved by the magnetic field in the opposite direction. At this point Anderson was not aware of Dirac's prediction ...After nearly a year of effort ...he ...identified ...pair production of electrons and antielectrons from the impact of cosmic rays."

"Ionization and curvature measurements clearly showed this particle to have a mass much smaller than... a proton... a mass entirely consistent with an electron. ...[D]espite the strong admonitions of the Chief that upward-moving cosmic ray particles were very rare, this... was an example..."

"The interpretation of these tracks as due to protons, or other heavier nuclei, is ruled out on the basis of range and curvature. Protons or heavier nuclei of the observed curvatures could not have ranges as great as those observed. The specific-ionization is close to that for an electron of the same curvature, hence indicating a positively-charged particle comparable in mass and magnitude of charge with an electron."

"Mirror matter is, first and foremost, matter. ...[A]ll mirror matter is still matter."

"Schrödinger's theory was not relativistic. It only applied to systems of particles like electrons... moving at low velocities... not close to the speed of light. It... did not take into account the electron's spin. ...Paul Dirac set out to remedy these shortcomings. ...to combine the Schrödinger equations for quantum mechanics, the Einstein equations for special relativity, the Maxwell equations for electromagnetism, and his own non-relativistic equations for the behavior of the electron into a single set of equations. This... described the relativistic quantum behavior of the spinning electron. ...Dirac's solution ...was a startling paper ...In the classical physics of Newton, the energy of a particle always has a positive value. ...Dirac's new equations ...had two possible solutions: an electron with positive energy, or an electron with . ...Dirac discovered that an electron with negative energy passing through a magnetic field would act exactly like an electron with positive energy—if the electron had positive instead of negative charge. To Dirac, this implied that for every particle that existed there was a corresponding mirror-image particle."

"The word "antimatter"... Strictly speaking, it's not... accurate... Antimatter is not "negative matter." It does not have negative mass, or negative spin, or negative (anti-) gravity (...scientists are... running experiments to see if antiprotons have the same kind of gravity as protons). ...One researcher has suggested replacing the... "anti-" with "co-,"... co-matter, co-protons,... Another... suggested... "exo-"... "Exo" in Greek means "outside." Other suggestions... "ob-" (obmatter, obproton) and "contra-" (contramatter and contraproton). None... ever caught on... Hannes Alfven in... Worlds-Antiworlds... said... let's coin a new word for "ordinary" matter... the word koinomatter... after the Greek word koinos, meaning common or well-known. ..."Matter will remain "matter" and "antimatter"... "antimatter"... However... "mirror matter" is the most accurate and unbiased term."

"A few hundred heavy nuclei of antideuterium, antitritium, and antihelium-3 have been observed... Sadly, they have been unable to keep these antimatter fragments under control long enough to add positrons and make neutral antiatoms..."

"When a matter particle and its mirror antimatter twin are brought into contact, the two annihilate each other. The mass of both is totally converted into energy. The amount of energy... Einstein's E=mc^2... The annihilation of a gram of matter and antimatter would produce the energy of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb, the size... dropped on Japan."