Damn, gives a good perspective to the size of that Wedgie!

You can use gas and other fossil fuels to produce hydrogen, but you can obviously use renewables too, amongst other methods. https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2021/may/green-blue-brown-hydrogen-explained

There has been a decent greenwashing campaign to try to disguise that a lot of hydrogen in the hydrogen mix is produced using fossil fuels. This is to try and enable greater use of hydrogen technologies over other solutions, eg EVs vs hydrogen cars, and keep money flowing to the fossil fuel barons. Unfortunately, we do need to be careful when we hear the blanket phrase 'hydrogen', rather than 'green hydrogen' specifically.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2021/07/31/is-hydrogen-just-oil-and-gas-greenwashed/?sh=203dcf3fca04

This article is from 2021 but I imagine the percentage of grey hydrogen in the hydrogen production mix is still up towards what is stated in the below quote. The context for the quote is in the lead up to the Tokyo Olympics, Tokyo was using hydrogen buses.

Currently, around 95% of hydrogen production is what is called “grey”, including that being used at the Tokyo Olympics. It is made by reacting natural gas with high-temperature steam. This is the cheapest way to manufacture hydrogen but produces loads of CO2. In fact, it has been calculated that producing 1kg of hydrogen by this method will generate 9.3kg of CO2, which is actually more than the 9.1kg of CO2 produced by burning a gallon of gasoline, usually considered to have a similar energy value.

Might be a water dragon, I'm not certain though

Considering

Only 1% of Australian taxpayers own nearly a quarter of all property investments across the country, amid concerns over escalating rates of wealth concentration.

Data provided by the Australian Taxation Office has revealed the extent of that concentration, with more than 7% of property investors – or 215,321 people – accounting for 25% of all property investments.

That 7% also have three or more interests in investment properties across the country, with 1% of investors – or just 19,895 people – currently holding six or more investment interests.

And that is only the top 1% of tax payers (which is only 7% of investors), I can't imagine what percentage of property investment is owned by the top 10% of tax payers.

From: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/04/a-quarter-of-australias-property-investments-held-by-1-of-taxpayers-data-reveals

So I've been reading up on this topic a bit more and I came across this

Problem Australia’s interstate freight rail network comprises many long sections of single track. This restricts the number of train paths, reducing rail’s competitiveness with road, and hindering rail’s ability to meet growing freight movement demand. The interstate freight rail network needs to be enhanced to accommodate growth in the freight and passenger task, and improve efficiency and safety.

From here, https://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/map/advanced-train-management-system-implementation-interstate-rail-network

On the bright side it is a proposal to upgrade a lot of the rail corridors to support more freight than we have currently. Though it was added in 2016 and is still only in the 'potential investment options' phase

Unfortunately we don't have a rail freight network that either works well or reaches every township in Australia, and until we do encouraging the switch from ICE road haulage to EV road haulage is the best way to reduce transport industry emissions.

For a lot of the more rural towns (or a least for the ones I know of) that do have rail connections, they are only accessible using diesel locomotives as there is no electricity network set up to power electric trains. So if we don't want to introduce more emissions from rail freight we would have to electrify the whole rail network.

Realistically we should be building rail and allowing EV trucks to be more accessible, but Australia is a big place, building all that rail infrastructure will take time. A good stepping stone would be to build rail connections to regional urban centres and then have trucks distributing it to the surrounding towns, but even building that much rail will take time. And that's just the construction. The amount of time it would take to secure the land corridors for the rail would be considerable alone. AEMO have been having a difficult enough time securing land rights to build transmissions networks across properties

The abuse isn't the only issue either, it seems like some of the carbon credit organisations aren't fulfilling their claims either https://youtu.be/Vw3jw5IYL2c?si=R75QkDgFQV_S6o06

Thanks for the responses, its interesting stuff and seems like a sensible way of trying to reduce emissions and actually capture carbon from the atmosphere.

It makes me think of research that shows that it would make more sense to try and capture carbon from the ocean rather than the atmosphere, as the concentrations are much higher than in the ocean. If we can do this using the natural process of photosynthesis via kelp farms and bio char it could be a very sustainable process.

"THE ocean is the single biggest carbon storage device on Earth,” said Chengxiang ‘CX’ Xiang, CTO and co-founder of direct ocean capture (DOC) company Captura. About 30% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are absorbed by the ocean, where it is 150 times more concentrated volumetrically than in the air.

He said one of the challenges of removing CO2 directly from air is the “really, really, really low” concentration, prompting the need to build large machinery to filter a lot of air. “Leveraging the ocean to do CO2 drawdown for us as we remove CO2 from the ocean water is a unique process that is inherently scalable.”

This is the source I got that quote from: https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/features/co2-capture-putting-the-sea-into-ccs/

It goes on to talk about how they are working to create tech to capture the carbon, but utilising natural process to achieve the same outcome would be considerably better, though we may need to employ all reasonable methods to decarbonise as quickly as possible.

Sorry for the delayed response.

Could you give me a eli5 on biochar? I've noticed you refer to it in some other posts/comments, including the fire pits story. I'm guessing char stands for charcoal? If that is the case, how does biochar differ from other charcoals.

Also, how is the kelp related to the biochar?

I mean I guess I could google it, but you seem to have a bit of insight to the whole thing that could help one get an understanding.

It's sucks these results weren't what was hoped. I remember reading an article from the CSIRO years ago suggesting this to be a good method to reduce emissions from cattle. I can't remember what percentage reductions of emissions they claimed though.

At this point I'm thinking this idea could be similar to carbon capture storage, in the sense that the idea was taken up as a means of greenwashing for the beef industry, so they could continue to grow while 'reducing their emissions'.

I guess 28% is still better than nothing, presuming it isn't used as an excuse for further growth.

Yeah the laws should definitely be updated to say if you are found corrupt by icac or any other corruption body then you are no longer entitled to the pension.

Maybe some of them will reason that getting the pension is more valuable to them than accepting donations from corporate sponsors.

And a friendly fuck spez to you too!