“World’s Largest Air Purifier Completes Successful Trial Run in Xi’an, China” (arch daily) is about a 100-meter-high air cleaner that the Chinese have put together. It seems to work! Whenever people complain that, due to our Plague of Trumpness, the U.S. has “lost its leadership position on climate change,” I respond with “Why were we ever considered leaders considering that we cannot build solar cells or infrastructure cost-effectively and we are not good at most kinds of engineering? Wouldn’t we expect it to be the Chinese, Germans, and Japanese who come up with engineered/infrastructural ways to reduce atmospheric CO2?”
Readers: What do you think? Can we now rest easy and drive around in circles in our pavement-melting SUVs?
“Can we now rest easy and drive around in circles in our pavement-melting SUVs?”
No.
Don’t expect any solutions from Germany. Over here fighting climate change is a religion, and the only acceptable solution is to reduce energy usage, or use solar, wind and water energy.
Geo-engineering is as unacceptable as using nuclear power in any form (unless, maybe, the nuclear power plant is in France).
It’s not about finding a solution in Germany. Over 50% of the power is still generated using coal and natural gas. There is no way to change this, since in German winters solar and wind are pretty useless. We don’t have the geology to store enough energy in summer to make it through the winter (see http://www.hanswernersinn.de/dcs/2017%20Buffering%20Volatility%20EER%2099%202017.pdf ).
So does China’s city size air purifier also splice genes with CRISPR & cure all diseases with embryonic stem cells?
I’d like to know how many of kilos of crap this thing removes from the air per day and its composition. That would be interesting.
I see no mention of atmospheric CO2 being removed by this thing in any substantial quantity, in fact the measurement of its effectiveness seems to be based on subjective “observations”. I suspect that if any improvement is seen in the area due to this “scrubber”, it is mainly soot and particulate pollution from burning coal, which while a good thing, hardly seems to be a counter to Global Warming.
As far as not being “good at any type of engineering” in the US, I think the negative examples you site, solar panels and infrastructure, are more a function of business climate/regulations/taxation issues for solar and general government dysfunction in the case of infrastructure which self serves in rewarding itself with fat pensions and buying voters rather than solving problems. Engineering is not the issue, but I think the writer understands that.
This seems like a good idea to me. It helps cure the terrible air pollution in their cities and put them on a path to clean up the air. I bet we end up buying this technology as many of our cites could use this.
Paul: This particular widget is not designed to scrub CO2, which is why it likely underperforms in that respect. My point was that designing and building a CO2 scrubber is going to involve similar skills, which the Chinese apparently have and the U.S. apparently lacks (since, no matter how filthy our cities got, we never built anything like this).
The U.S. is great at building infrastructure except for our “business climate/regulations/taxation issues”? Now I am relieved! “Engineering is not the issue”? Engineering is something that happens within a business climate, in accordance with regulations, and in a way that must make economic sense. So if our “business climate/regulations/taxation issues” make it impossible to engineer stuff then we are not good at engineering. (Separately, drive a Honda Accord and a Chevy Malibu and then come back and tell us about American engineering genius! The Malibu is ranked dead last among mid-size cars by Consumer Reports. The Ford Fusion is somewhat better. The top-rated cars are from Toyota, Honda, Subaru, and Kia.)
Phil, coal burning is passé in the states now, so this type of scrubber probably will not be needed here as more and more coal plants are shut down for wind mills. And I really don’t give too much stock to China’s communist propaganda machine press releases, that said, I hope it’s as good as they say it is.
Re: cars, I drive a 2015 Grand Cherokee and my wife drives a 2013 Acura TL. Both have been very reliable. I’m a little biased, but I would give comfort, fit and tech application to the Jeep. But the Acura is a great car, in a more Spartan way. Long term reliability will probably go to the Acura due to more complex systems in the Jeep, but the Jeep will be gone long before it starts giving me any problems. My mom had a Toyota Camry, nice car, but it had its share of issues, AC, some electrical issues and rust through after about 10 years. Highly rated by CR though.
I don’t know Phil, I guess I misjudged what you understand. Infrastructure can’t be engineered until a project is initiated, seems more a public leader vision problem to me. I see lots of examples of American engineering genius, I see rockets launching into space then coming back and landing on a landing pad. I see Boeing jets flying overhead all the time. I’m flying American made and engineered airplanes, Cessna and Cirrus, I love them. Perfect? No, but I trust my life in them. You fly a Robinson helicopter, are you telling me those engineers are clowns? I’ll take an American engineer over three non-American engineers every time. Programmers, maybe not so much.
I call fibs on this. One reason that smokestacks are high is that it helps diffuse the smoke away from the area. There’s no way that this thing is filtering enough air that it’s measurable over a large area. If you look at the volume of air passing through this thing and the area they’re considering, it come out to 1 meter’s worth of air across the 10 square kilometers.
I think they were looking to build a small version of this thing, and since it can’t produce any real power at this scale, they’re saying it’s supposed to be an air filter.
https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/02/tech/innovation/solar-tower-arizona/index.html
Photovoltaic Solar Cell – Invented at Bell Labs in 1954
Lithium-Ion Battery – Invented by Exxon in 1970
Electric vehicle – Renewed by Tesla
Megawatt class Wind turbine – invented in Vermont in the 30s
Nuclear fission reactor – Invented as part of the Manhattan Project
All the technologies were invented in the US. The commodities are produced in China.
You might find the following link interesting:
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2130749/fast-rail-watch-1500-chinese-workers-build-train-station-track-9
Tony: Photovoltaics an all-American show? https://www.thoughtco.com/photovoltaics-timeline-1992481 suggests that everything fundamental was done over in Europe, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#Discovery_of_nuclear_fission says it was Germany for nuclear fission!
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/223/electric-car-timeline.html says Scotland for the first electric car.
A windmill that generates electricity? Isn’t that Faraday+17th century tech?