Plus: No $25,000 Tesla; Steve Ballmer’s climate philanthropy |
If scientists at the University of California at Berkeley are right, there’s much-needed good news in the fight to slow and reverse the buildup of climate-warping carbon dioxide. Researchers there just published a report on a “covalent organic framework,” or COF, they created that absorbs large amounts of CO2 directly from the ambient air. This powder-like material made from common hydrocarbons could soon make its way into filtering devices that capture the climate-warming gas at industrial facilities, power plants or direct air capture systems being deployed. The crystal-like COF material absorbs and holds many times its weight in CO2, which is then removed by heating and pumping it out. Importantly, the material can repeat the cycle over and over, making it highly attractive for commercial applications, said Dr. Omar Yaghi, a UC Berkeley professor and senior author of the study.
“COFs to the naked eye look like baby powder or granulated sugar, but you would blend them to make coatings or you could make them as pellets. Either is easy to do,” Yaghi told Forbes. They would then be integrated into facilities where piped “flue gas” comes from an industrial process. “This flue gas would pass through the material and because it just plucks out CO2, it cleans CO2 from that flue before it reaches the atmosphere. This material will work for that application beautifully, but it even works in the most difficult application, which is taking it out of the air directly, where it's very dilute.”
Just 200 grams of the COF material, weighing a bit less than half a pound, can absorb as much CO2 in a year as a tree: 20 kilograms, according to UC Berkeley graduate researcher Zihui Zhou, the paper’s first author. To tackle the thousands of gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere that’s impacting global weather patterns, it will be necessary to quickly scale up production of the new material as quickly as possible.
“Essentially 100,000 tons of COF would take up half a gigaton [500 million tons] of CO2 per year,” Yaghi said. The university hopes to soon license its patent for the new material to manufacturers such as BASF that are highly experienced in producing specialized coatings and engineered materials. “We make materials every day on that scale and even larger scale. We make some materials in the millions of tons,” Yaghi said. “Now that we have a material that works well, we need to start thinking [about] how we make this more of a policy. We need a shift in our thinking and we need leadership to say, ‘We need to go in this direction of CO2 capture.’” |
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| | | Elon Musk Confirms There’s No $25,000 Tesla EV On The Way |
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the electric vehicle maker is not planning to release a $25,000 model, appearing to reverse comments he made six months ago when he denied a new report saying exactly that.
The billionaire entrepreneur and top donor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign commented on the status of the so-called Model 2 EV on Wednesday during an investor call after the Austin-based company reported stronger-than-expected third-quarter profit. He was asked specifically about the status of the low-cost, non-robotaxi car while taking questions from Tesla retail investors during an earnings call.
“We’re not making a non-robotaxi model,” he said. “I think we’ve made very clear that the future is autonomous.” |
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Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO and philanthropist, on contributing over $1 billion to climate initiatives globally since 2022
I’d like to know a bit of your thinking in terms of the climate philanthropy that you’re doing, what you’ve put the money behind, and how you see that changing, if at all, going forward.
My son [Sam] initiated this, I think three years ago. He went with [my wife] Connie to a thing called the Audacious conference that is sponsored by the folks at TED. They bring grantees who they think are worthy together, and then people evaluate and give money. And Sam went to one of these and really got interested in electrification of the auto business, essentially got really thinking in this area.
And there’s an amazing not-for-profit called Climate Lead. Climate Lead is an organization funded by philanthropists to provide advice to new philanthropists who want to give money in the climate area. So Sam’s basically had a free consultant for about three years. If you say, Hey I’m interested in deforestation, they’ll explain best strategies in deforestation, or I’m interested in agriculture, where are the leverage points and who would you give to? They’ve really provided steering if you will. They’re very, very good.
We have recently hired somebody who will come in and kind of partner with Sam [with the recently launched Rainier Climate Group], who knows the climate area, who’s worked in the climate area, named Tom Steinbach, who’s joining us from Tempest Advisors.
We’re actually quite broad right now in our giving because we don’t insist on being experts. If we know some other philanthropy who we trust is an expert in something, guess what? We’ll support it based on the examination of others. That’s also true in economic mobility. For example, we’ve given money to the Pritzker Fund because the Pritzkers are also interested in early childhood.
So how much have you given?
We committed last year $500 million plus in climate.
Would you expect to increase that amount going forward, in 2025 or 2026?
I would expect so.
Our accounting system has more to do with commitments made than money paid out. If we make a grant that says we’re giving $25 million a year to somebody over five years we think of that as $125 million of commitment.
The unit of work is the commitment as opposed to the payout. |
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