{"id":39347,"date":"2015-01-02T11:56:37","date_gmt":"2015-01-02T17:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=39347"},"modified":"2015-01-02T11:56:37","modified_gmt":"2015-01-02T17:56:37","slug":"how-we-weigh-carbon-emissions-a-radio-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2015\/01\/02\/how-we-weigh-carbon-emissions-a-radio-drama\/","title":{"rendered":"How We Weigh Carbon Emissions: A Radio Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_39353\"  class=\"wp-caption module image right\" style=\"max-width: 266px;\"><a class=\"fancybox\" title=\"An image of Sir Walter Raleigh from '&quot;A Child's History of England.&quot;\" href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/sir_walter.jpg\" rel=\"\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-39353\" alt=\"An image of Sir Walter Raleigh from '&quot;A Child's History of England.&quot;\" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/sir_walter-266x300.jpg\" width=\"266\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/sir_walter-266x300.jpg 266w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/sir_walter-620x697.jpg 620w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/sir_walter.jpg 1422w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 266px) 100vw, 266px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">archive.org\/details\/ost-history-a_childs_history_of_england<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">An image of Sir Walter Raleigh from &#39;&quot;A Child&#39;s History of England.&quot;<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Every year humans pump tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide, or CO2, into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. That CO2 traps heat into the atmosphere, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.epa.gov\/climatechange\/\">causing climate change<\/a>.\u00a0Whenever governments talk about fighting climate change,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ucsusa.org\/global_warming\/science_and_impacts\/science\/CO2-and-global-warming-faq.html#.VKbECSvF9vA\">\u00a0limiting carbon emissions<\/a> what they are talking about.<\/p>\n<p>But how do we keep track of the CO2 we\u2019re releasing? And just how do we weigh something that floats in the first place?<\/p>\n<p>It turns out there is a venerable history to the science of weighing smoke.\u00a0In 16th\u00a0century England Queen Elizabeth made a bet over the weight of smoke with famed explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh is known for popularizing tobacco at the royal court. One day, so the story goes, he told the queen he could weigh the smoke that came from his pipe.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s how he did it.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/181192956&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" height=\"166\" width=\"100%\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Raleigh took a pinch of tobacco from his pouch. He weighed it, smoked it, and then carefully weighed the ashes.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe difference between the weight\u00a0of the tobacco and the weight of the ashes must be the weight of the smoke!&#8221; he proclaimed according to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mainlesson.com\/display.php?author=evans&amp;book=america&amp;story=raleigh\">one book of early American tales<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a fine story, even if Raleigh was not exactly correct.<\/p>\n<p>The first thing to remember when measuring the emissions from a pipe, or a smoke stack, is that most of those emissions are invisible. The &#8220;smoke&#8221; we can see (and associate with air pollution) is the particulate matter that results from combustion.<\/p>\n<p>That particulate matter is important, but it&#8217;s just a fraction of the gas that&#8217;s being emitted.\u00a0CO2 gas, a chief culprit in climate change, is invisible to our eyes.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_39364\"  class=\"wp-caption module image left\" style=\"max-width: 300px;\"><a class=\"fancybox\" title=\"Smoke stacks on the Houston Ship Channel.\" href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/smokestacks_in_Houston_Ship_Channel.jpg\" rel=\"\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-39364\" alt=\"Smoke stacks on the Houston Ship Channel.\" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/smokestacks_in_Houston_Ship_Channel-300x195.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"195\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/smokestacks_in_Houston_Ship_Channel-300x195.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/smokestacks_in_Houston_Ship_Channel-620x403.jpg 620w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2015\/01\/smokestacks_in_Houston_Ship_Channel.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Courtesy of Louis Vest, flickr.com\/photos\/oneeighteen<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Smoke stacks on the Houston Ship Channel.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>\u201cIf we could see it it would be\u2026<a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/2014\/12\/22\/7421381\/co2-emissions-global\"> super red<\/a>,&#8221; says\u00a0Susan Hovorka, a research scientists who works with CO2 at the University of Texas, Bureau of Economic Geology. &#8220;It\u2019s infrared. It\u2019s some incredibly more than red color. And you could drive around and see it coming out of every combustion source.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s not to say you haven\u2019t seen CO2 in other forms.\u00a0 Dry ice is frozen CO2, and you may have liquid CO2 in your kitchen. It\u2019s in those cartridges used for making sparkling water. Both of these things are\u00a0&#8220;byproducts of various refining industries,&#8221; says Hovorka.<\/p>\n<p>It may be strange to think of the bubbles in your soda as a food-grade petrochemical byproduct, but they are.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s how CO2 emissions are formed. Most things we burn contain carbon, whether it\u2019s coal for power or tobacco in a pipe. \u00a0Burning that stuff takes every molecule of carbon and adds oxygen. \u00a0Add the C from the carbon and the O2 from the oxygen \u2013 with some covalent bonding \u2013 and you get CO2.<\/p>\n<p><div class=\"related-content alignright\"><h4 class=\"related-header\">Related<\/h4><div class=\"links\"><h5>Posts<\/h5><ul><li class=\"link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2014\/11\/18\/texas-grid-operator-says-clean-energy-plan-could-raise-bills-and-lead-to-blackouts\/\">Texas Grid Operator Says Clean Energy Plan Could Raise Bills and Lead to Blackouts<\/a><\/li><li class=\"link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2014\/11\/12\/climate-deal-puts-spotlight-on-carbon-capture-technology\/\">Climate Deal Puts Spotlight on Carbon Capture Technology<\/a><\/li><li class=\"link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2014\/10\/13\/global-warming-and-the-texas-surge-of-new-chemical-plants\/\">Global Warming And The Texas Surge Of New Chemical Plants<\/a><\/li><li class=\"link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2014\/09\/29\/state-lawmakers-consider-the-impacts-of-epa-regulations\/\">State Lawmakers Consider the Impacts of EPA Regulations<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/div><div class=\"topics\"><h5>Topics<\/h5><p class=\"topic\"><img class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2011\/12\/12211223_H21945193.jpg\" height=\"60\" width=\"60\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/topic\/epa\/\">Everything You Need to Know About the EPA<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/div>These days it&#8217;s easy to find the carbon content of the fuel we burn for energy. \u00a0You can even check out\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.eia.gov\/environment\/emissions\/co2_vol_mass.cfm\">this list\u00a0<\/a>from the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.eia.gov\/\">Environmental Information Agency<\/a>\u00a0that provides the carbon content of different types of coal and other material.<\/p>\n<p>So, if you know the amount of fuel you&#8217;re burning and its carbon content, you can add the weight of the oxygen, and you have a sense of how much CO2 you\u2019ve created.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Gas is just molecules that are far apart,\u201d says Gary Rochelle, a professor of Chemical Engineering at UT-Austin. &#8220;Although you can\u2019t really weigh\u00a0a molecule you know it has a mass of 44 atomic units.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If you gather enough of those together you have what scientists call a mole of carbon dioxide. That weighs about\u00a044 grams.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And when you get enough moles together then you\u2019ve got a ton,&#8221; says Rochelle. &#8220;A typical coal power plant might have 4 million tons per year.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s where Sir Walter Raleigh&#8217;s method runs into some trouble. It turns out the weight of the CO2 emissions created by burning that coal is actually heavier than the weight of the coal itself. \u00a0That&#8217;s because, by burning the carbon, you\u2019ve added the oxygen.\u00a0 So even though the CO2 you&#8217;ve created is less dense, and it floats, it\u2019s actually heavier.<\/p>\n<p>One ton of some types of coal creates\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.eia.gov\/coal\/production\/quarterly\/co2_article\/co2.html\">around three tons of CO2<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s bad news for Sir Walter Raleigh. It turns out the smoke from his pipe was heavier than he believed.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s even worse news for us: Humans are estimated to have pumped around 40 billion tons\u00a0of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every year humans pump tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide, or CO2, into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. That CO2 traps heat into the atmosphere, causing climate change.\u00a0Whenever governments talk about fighting climate change,\u00a0limiting carbon emissions what they are talking about. But how do we keep track of the CO2 we\u2019re releasing? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39347"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39347"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39374,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39347\/revisions\/39374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}