The push to recycle electric vehicle batteries just gained some momentum. Redwood Materials has unveiled plans to build an EV battery recycling plant on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina. The roughly 600-acre facility (previewed in a render above) will break "end-of-life" batteries down to their raw metals and rebuild them as the anodes and cathodes that are crucial to EVs. The parts should support up to 1 million EVs per year. That could not only reduce waste, but reduce the costs and risks associated with importing those components from overseas.
The plant will reportedly amount to a $3.5 billion investment that includes 1,500 jobs. Like Redwood's Nevada campus, the Charleston hub will rely solely on clean energy and all-electric operations. The company claims its approach lowers CO2 emissions for producing the battery components by about 80 percent compared to the output from the usual Asian supply chain.
Construction should start for the South Carolina plant in the first quarter of 2023. The first recycling process should be ready by the end of that year, Redwood says. The company plans to scale afterward.
The locale choice is strategic. Redwood says South Carolina is part of a growing "Battery Belt" where EV cell manufacturing will ramp up to "hundreds" of gigawatt-hours of production capacity by 2030. Its seaside port helps, too. The state further hosts factories for car manufacturers that include BMW and Redwood partner Volvo, so a brand could quickly repurpose spent batteries for vehicles rolling off the line.
More importantly, Redwood appears to have broader support from the auto industry. On top of Volvo, it has partners like Ford, Toyota and battery makers that include Panasonic and Envision AESC. Large-scale battery recycling facilities are still relatively rare in the US — Li-Cycle's new Alabama plant can process batteries for about 20,000 EVs per year. This expansion could make recycling far more commonplace, and make a better case for electric cars as the environmentally conscious options.
Scientists have just crossed one of the most important thresholds in the quest for fusion energy. A team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has created the first known fusion reaction with a net energy gain — that is, it produced more energy than it consumed and ignited. The researchers achieved the feat on December 5th, when they used 192 lasers at the National Ignition Facility to blast a cylinder containing frozen hydrogen surrounded by diamond.
The reaction, which generated a flurry of X-rays, struck a fuel pellet of deuterium and tritium with 2.05 megajoules of energy. That, in turn, led to a wave of neutron particles and 3.15 megajoules of output. That gain was 'only' equivalent to about 1.5lbs of TNT, but that was enough to meet the criteria for fusion ignition.
The development has been a long time coming. The National Ignition Facility started work in 2009, but it wasn't until 2014 that the installation's laser-based fusion technology produced a meaningful volume of energy. Progress accelerated in the past year, however. Lawrence Livermore generated a much larger amount of energy last August, equivalent to 70 percent of that from the lasers. An attempt in September generated 1.2 megajoules using the 2.05-megajoule blast.
The lab and the Energy Department are quick to caution that "many" advancements are still necessary before fusion reactors are practical enough to power homes. During a presentation, scientists said they needed to improve the number of reactions per minute, simplify the process and otherwise make it easily repeatable. And of course, they need to improve scaling — a reactor would have to power enough households to justify its existence.
The Energy Department is in the midst of rebooting a coordinated fusion power effort, however. During the event, officials also noted that a functional plant wasn't as far off as you might think. While they didn't commit to a timeframe, they said it was less than the 50 or 60 years they might have predicted in the past. You might see the first commercial fusion reactor in your lifetime, to put it another way.
The technology could be vital to limiting global warming and otherwise fighting climate change. While renewable energy sources like solar and wind power are more eco-friendly than coal, they don't always meet demand and can require large amounts of land. Solar also isn't as effective in regions where sunlight can be limited. Sufficiently powerful fusion reactors could achieve the dream of clean powerplants that have enough capacity to serve large populations without the radioactive waste of nuclear facilities.
The rise of electric vehicles in China is causing devastating environmental impacts in nearby Indonesia, including rising ocean temperatures as a byproduct of coal plants. Upper respiratory infections are also one of the main health issues for people who live near nickel-processing factories and the main water sources for some areas are increasingly polluted and prone to flooding.
Some of the priciest condos in NYC are housed in buildings with futuristic parking systems. Robotic technology is deployed to park and retrieve vehicles. The catch? The apartments cost millions and reserving a self-parking spot will cost you at least $300,000 more.
"The amount of reputational and social wealth that stands to be lost if Twitter collapses is astounding," Fairbanks explains. "Twitter currently functions as perhaps the world's biggest status bank, and the investments stored in it are terrifyingly unsecured."
Honda's big electrification push will include US-oriented hydrogen fuel cell cars. The automaker has revealed that it will begin US production of fuel cell vehicles in 2024. The first model will be a plug-in hybrid based on the current-generation CR-V (pictured here). You'll theoretically have pure electric driving for your daily commute, but still get zero-emissions driving for longer city-to-city jaunts.
More details of the hydrogen-powered CR-V will be revealed sometime closer to its 2024 launch, Honda says. It's only willing to offer a peek at the power plant (below). The existing CR-V is available as a conventional hybrid with a gas engine and no plug-in feature.
Honda
The new model is part of a larger Honda strategy to completely drop combustion engine vehicles by 2040 using a mix of pure EVs and fuel cell cars. On top of the hydrogen CR-V, Americans can also expect the fully electric Prologue SUV in 2024. The brand already sells the electric Honda E subcompact, but not in the US. Honda aims to be carbon neutral by 2050.
Whether or not there's a market for the fuel cell SUV is uncertain. Hydrogen cars haven't gained much traction in the US compared to their all-electric counterparts, due partly to high prices and a lack of filling stations. Honda axed the fuel cell-based Clarity sedan in 2021, reportedly in response to weak demand for the $71,200 machine. There's no guarantee customers will be more welcoming in 2024, particularly as EVs become more affordable and offer improved range.
Whether you live in the rapidly drying American West or are aboard the International Space Station for a six-month stint, having enough water to live on is a constant concern. As climate change continues to play havoc on the West’s aquifers, and as humanity pushes further into the solar system, the potable supply challenges we face today will only grow. In their efforts to ensure humanity has enough to drink, some of NASA’s cutting-edge in-orbit water recycling research is coming back down to Earth.
On Earth
In California, for example, the four billion gallons of wastewater generated daily from the state’s homes and businesses, storm drain and roof-connected runoff, makes its way through more than 100,000 miles of sewer lines where it — barring obstructionist fatbergs — eventually ends up at one of the state’s 900 wastewater treatment plants. How that water is processed depends on whether it’s destined for human consumption or non-potable uses like agricultural irrigation, wetland enhancement and groundwater replenishment.
The city of Los Angeles takes a multi-step approach to reclaiming its potable wastewater. Large solids are first strained from incoming fluids using mechanical screens at the treatment plant’s headworks. From there, the wastewater flows into a settling tank where most of the remaining solids are removed — sludged off to anaerobic digesters after sinking to the bottom of the pool. The water is then sent to secondary processing where it is aerated with nitrogen-fixing bacteria before being pushed into another settling, or clarifying, tank. Finally it’s filtered through a tertiary cleaning stage of cationic polymer filters where any remaining solids are removed. By 2035, LA plans to recycle all of its wastewater for potable reuse while Aurora, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia, have both already begun augmenting their drinking water supplies with potable reuse.
“There are additional benefits beyond a secure water supply. If you're not relying on importing water, that means there's more water for ecosystems in northern California or Colorado,” Stanford professor William Mitch, said in a recent Stanford Engineering post. “You're cleaning up the wastewater, and therefore you're not discharging wastewater and potential contaminants to California's beaches.”
Wastewater treatment plants in California face a number of challenges, the Water Education Foundation notes, including aging infrastructure; contamination from improperly disposed pharmaceuticals and pesticide runoff; population demands combined with reduced flows due to climate change-induced drought. However their ability to deliver pristine water actually outperforms nature.
“We expected that potable reuse waters would be cleaner, in some cases, than conventional drinking water due to the fact that much more extensive treatment is conducted for them,” Mitch argued in an October study in Nature Sustainability. “But we were surprised that in some cases the quality of the reuse water, particularly the reverse-osmosis-treated waters, was comparable to groundwater, which is traditionally considered the highest quality water.”
The solids pulled from wastewater are also heavily treated during recycling. The junk from the first stage is sent to local landfills, while the biological solids strained from the second and third stages are sent to anaerobic chambers where their decomposition generates biogas that can be burned for electrical production and converted to nitrogen-rich fertilizer for agricultural use.
New York, for example, produces 22,746 tons of wastewater sludge per day from its 1,200-plus statewide wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). However, less than a tenth of plants (116 specifically) actually use that sludge to produce biogas, per a 2021 report from the Rockefeller Institute for Government, and is “mainly utilized to fuel the facilities and for the combined heat and power generation of the WWTPs.”
“Increasing pressures on water resources have led to greater water scarcity and a growing demand for alternative water sources,” the Environmental Protection Agency points out. “Onsite non-potable water reuse is one solution that can help communities reclaim, recycle, and then reuse water for non-drinking water purposes.”
In Orbit
Aboard the ISS, astronauts have even less leeway in their water use on account of the station being a closed-loop system isolated in space. Also because SpaceX charges $2,500 per pound of cargo (after the first 440 pounds, for which it charges $1.1 million) to send into orbit on one of its rockets — and liquid water is heavy.
ESA
While the ISS does get the occasional shipment of water in the form of 90-pound duffle bag-shaped Contingency Water Containers to replace what’s invariably lost to space, its inhabitants rely on the complicated web of levers and tubes you see above and below to reclaim every dram of moisture possible and process it into potability. The station’s Water Processing Assembly can produce up to 36 gallons of drinkable water every day from the crew’s sweat, breath and urine. When it was installed in 2008, the station’s water delivery needs dropped by around 1,600 gallons, weighing 15,960 pounds. It works in conjunction with the Urine Processor Assembly (UPA), Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA), Sabatier reactor (which recombines free oxygen and hydrogen split by the OGA back into water) and Regenerative Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) systems to maintain the station’s “water balance” and supply American astronauts with a minimum of 2.5 liters of water each day. Cosmonauts in the Russian segment of the ISS rely on a separate filtration system that only collects shower runoff and condensation and therefore require more regular water deliveries to keep their tanks topped off.
ESA
In 2017, NASA upgraded the WPA with a new reverse-osmosis filter in order to, “reduce the resupply mass of the WPA Multi-filtration Bed and improved catalyst for the WPA Catalytic Reactor to reduce the operational temperature and pressure,” the agency announced that year. “Though the WRS [water recovery system] has performed well since operations began in November 2008, several modifications have been identified to improve the overall system performance. These modifications aim to reduce resupply and improve overall system reliability, which is beneficial for the ongoing ISS mission as well as for future NASA manned missions.”
One such improvement is the upgraded Brine Processor Assembly (BPA) delivered in 2021, a filter that sieves more salt out of astronaut urine to produce more reclaimed water than its predecessor. But there is still a long way to go before we can securely transport crews through interplanetary space. NASA notes that the WPA that got delivered in 2008 was originally rated to recover 85 percent of the water in crew urine though its performance has since improved to 87 percent.
NASA
“To leave low-Earth orbit and enable long-duration exploration far from Earth, we need to close the water loop,” Caitlin Meyer, deputy project manager for Advanced Exploration Systems Life Support Systems at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, added. “Current urine water recovery systems utilize distillation, which produces a brine. The [BPA] will accept that water-containing effluent and extract the remaining water.”
When the post-processed urine is then mixed with reclaimed condensation and runs through the WPA again, “our overall water recovery is about 93.5 percent,” Layne Carter, International Space Station Water Subsystem Manager at Marshall, said in 2021. To safely get to Mars, NASA figures it needs a reclamation rate of 98 percent or better.
But even if the ISS’s current state-of-the-art recycling technology isn’t quite enough to get us to Mars, it’s already making an impact planetside. For example, in the early 2000’s the Argonide company developed a “NanoCeram” nanofiber water filtration system with NASA small business funding support. The filter uses positively charged microscopic alumina fibers to remove virtually all contaminants without overly restricting flow rate, eventually spawning the Oas shower from Orbital Systems.
“The shower starts with less than a gallon of water and circulates it at a rate of three to four gallons per minute, more flow than most conventional showers provide,” NASA noted last July. “The system checks water quality 20 times per second, and the most highly polluted water, such as shampoo rinse, is jettisoned and replaced. The rest goes through the NanoCeram filter and then is bombarded with ultraviolet light before being recirculated.” According to the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control, the resulting water is cleaner than tap.
Following two weeks of negotiations that felt doomed to go nowhere, the COP27 climate conference delivered a breakthrough deal to help developing nations cope with the often catastrophic effects of climate change. The Washington Post reports dignitaries agreed to create a “loss and damage fund” in the early hours of Sunday morning after two extra days of negotiations. The Alliance of Small Island States, an organization that includes countries whose very existence is threatened by climate change, called the agreement “historic.” However, as with the Glasgow Climate Pact that came out of last year’s COP26 conference, the consensus is that COP27 failed to deliver the action that is desperately needed to meet the demands of the current moment.
For one, the conference failed to see nations agree to new and stronger commitments to reduce their carbon emissions. According to The Post, China and Saudi Arabia were strongly against language calling for a phaseout of all fossil fuels, as were many African nations. Alok Sharma, the chair of COP26, said (via Phys.org) a clause on energy was "weakened, in the final minutes.”
The conference also left many of the most important details related to the loss and damage fund to be sorted out by a committee that will need to answer some difficult questions in the coming months. Among the issues that need to be decided on is how much the United States, historically the greatest emitter of greenhouse emissions globally, should pay out to vulnerable countries. The conference also ended without a clear commitment from China to pay into the fund.
The committee now has a year to draft recommendations for next year’s climate meeting in Dubai. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said governments took “an important step towards justice,” but fell short in pushing for the commitments that would ultimately protect the world’s most vulnerable people from the worst effects of climate change. "Our planet is still in the emergency room," Guterres said. "We need to drastically reduce emissions now and this is an issue this COP did not address."
As American cannabis has grown from cottage industry to $25 billion-a-year commercial enterprise that employs 428,059 folks nationwide, the product that weed has become now often bears little resemblance from the product that used to be sold raw. Flower, once delivered in sandwich bags, now arrives wrapped in child-safety-locked, plastic-lined mylar pouches; every gram of hash seemingly needs its own glass jar, plastic lid, and cardboard box; and half-gram vape pens must often be dug from three times their own weight in display and security packaging before use. And while most of the outer packaging can be easily recycled, vaporizer cartridges themselves can be far more problematic to dispose of.
Cannabis is more popular than ever in the US — 44 percent of adults have access to it, either medically or recreationally, more than 90 percent of adults support its full legalization, and a 2021 Weedmaps survey suggests that usage has increased by 50 percent since the start of the pandemic. What’s more, edibles and concentrates continue to rise in popularity among all age groups, from boomers to doomers. This increased demand for vape cartridges — both near-ubiquitous 510-threads like those from Rove or more specialized carts like the Pax Era Pods — has led to their increased production and, in turn, their inevitable arrival in American landfills. In California, the nation’s largest legal cannabis market, 510 cartridges are quite popular but, due to the state’s strict hazardous waste disposal regulations, difficult to dispose of in a responsible manner.
On the production side, virtually every ingredient, component, growth medium, nutrient, castoff, trimming, and scrap is carefully destroyed, typically either dismantled on-site or rendered unusable before being shipped to a certified waste facility. At the cultivation level, Taylor Vozniak, Sales and Marketing Manager for California cannabis waste management company Gaiaca, told Engadget, “it would be plants after they've been trimmed, grow medium — that's either going to be soil or rock wool or cocoa husk — any sort of water nutrients or pesticides.”
At the manufacturing stage, the company handles post-production green waste (think, mashed up stems and leaves) as well as hazardous waste like concentrate solvents and failed edible product batches like misshapen canna-gummies or burned weed brownies — the latter must be destroyed on-site to stay within bounds of the California Cannabis Track and Trace (CCTT) system operated by the state’s Department of Cannabis Control. The CCTT extends to the point of sale, meaning that local dispensaries are responsible for seeing returned product and defective merchandise properly destroyed.
“Single-use batteries have been a big sticking point for a while now,” Vozniak said. “We're proud that we can recycle those vape batteries either with or without cannabis.” As it turns out, much of the underlying impetus for the creation of the CCTT system, Vozniak notes, is to prevent this waste from being illicitly harvested and resold. “The overarching way these regulations were written the way they were is to prevent any sort of product going into the black market,” he noted, which is why cannabis by-products, which is what all the stuff above is considered, has to be rendered into inert “waste” before it gets put in the ground. It’s also why your local dispensary doesn’t have a drop-off bin for used cartridges.
Products are handled slightly differently depending on whether they’re THC or CBD-based. “CBD is federally legal,” Vozniak said — so that it can be transported across state lines for disposal, “while THC is state-by-state regulated. A lot of the time you'll see, especially in California, CBD destroyed on site, but I have a client in Dallas who I've been able to just take their product as-is off site to a disposal facility.”
The materials that can be directly recycled or composted, will be. The six-month composting process is sufficient to leach out and fully decay any leftover THC before the material is repackaged and sold as a gardening amendment. Less sustainable materials like used nitrile gloves, non-recyclable or food-contaminated packaging will instead be routed to local landfills and incinerators. But not vape cartridges. Those, along with the Li-ion batteries that power them, are considered e-waste in California so there’s a litany of additional regulatory hurdles to jump through before throwing one away.
“What ends up happening is you'll be able to take [used carts and batteries] to a recycling vendor for a while,” Vozniak said, until “they realize it's a difficult product to deal with, so we'll have to find new vendors.”
MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images via Getty Images
The difficulty with recycling cartridges lies in their complex construction and mix of materials — woven cloth wicks and aluminum atomizers sealed by plastic walls with rubber o-rings keeping the viscous liquid in place. You can’t very well clean, sort, and disassemble these items by hand; as e-waste, they’re sorted, cleaned and then repeatedly mechanically shredded and resorted into progressively smaller chunks until they’re reduced and separated into their constituent materials. Vape pen batteries, both rechargeable and single-use all-in-one varieties, go through a similar process, Vizniak explains. They’re first statically separated by density, then dipped into liquid nitrogen to instantly freeze and deactivate the lithium ion cells before they’re pulverized with mechanical hammers and further sorted for commodity sale.
If that seems like a whole lot of work for such tiny devices, you’re not wrong. Despite the legal cannabis industry in California existing for less than a decade, much of the verbiage of Prop 54 is already falling out of relevance. “When things were first written, there was a lack of understanding of how the cannabis industry would end up operating,” Vozniak said. He points to all-in-one (AIO) pen battery disposal as one such example.
“We still have to destroy these products on site — and I understand the concern there, they [state regulators] don't want anything going to the black market — but for these all-in-one-pens, there really is no way to destroy them without putting the operators at risk,” he continued. “A lot of times, operators are going to try to destroy these products themselves because Gaica can be on the more expensive side just because of the nature of what we do. It's very labor intensive.”
Vozniak has seen cannabis retailers encase old AIOs in blocks of resin to deactivate them — whole drums of resin-ensconced lithium batteries that no recycler would ever take — in order to comply with the state’s “destroy on-site” order. Vozniak argues that a basic exemption to that rule specifically for cannabis e-waste could, “really help the industry out because that's really what I'm seeing most — out of state as well.”
In addition to contacting their district and state representatives to advocate for regulatory amendments, vape pen users looking to reduce their consumption footprints have a number of options. Refillable 510 cartridges are a thing — they operate just as the single-use canisters from the dispensary do but have a screw-on lid for injecting fresh oil — such as the Flacko Jodye from KandyPens, the SPRK ceramic from PCKT, an all-in-one kit from Kiara Naturals, or the Puffco Plus. Maintaining and cleaning refillable tanks is straightforward and they can easily be topped off using a dab syringe from either your local dispensary or friendly neighborhood drug dealer if you prefer a more homebrewed product.
Hybrid cars aren't just valuable for their fuel efficiency, apparently. Consumer Reports has published annual reliability survey data indicating that hybrids are generally more reliable than their gas-only equivalents. Hybrid cars were the most reliable among vehicle types, with their SUV siblings ranking third. Certain models were stand-outs, including the Ford Maverick pickup, Lexus NX luxury SUV and Toyota Corolla sedan — they all had above-average reliability on top of major fuel savings.
That trustworthiness doesn't always extend to other electrified cars. The publication found that plug-in hybrids aren't as reliable. Toyota's Prius Prime and RAV4 Prime are less reliable than their conventional hybrid versions, and the Chrysler Pacifica hybrid was one of the most unreliable vehicles in the survey. EVs continue to struggle, too. While there are some exceptions, such as the "outstanding" reliability of the Kia EV6, the category is still plagued with glitches — and not just Tesla's build quality issues. Ford's Mustang-Mach-E dipped to below average due to its electronics flaws. Only four out of 11 models with enough survey data had average or better reliability.
A straightforward hybrid isn't always the best choice, either. Consumer Reports warns that BMW, Mercedes, Ram and others offer "mild" hybrids that don't offer much in the way of fuel savings, and are sometimes focused more on adding power. These vehicles weren't included in the hybrid reliability rankings.
The greater reliability of hybrids isn't a total surprise. While they offer improved fuel economy, they're ultimately based on familiar model lines using well-established combustion engine technology. EVs are more likely to be brand new models based on young electric motor systems and don't have years of refinement.
Automakers will have to improve their safety tech if they want to stay in Consumer Reports' good graces, whatever powertrain they're using. As of November, the outlet will penalize models that don't include pedestrian-aware automatic emergency braking as a standard feature. CR will also stop handing out bonus points to vehicles that only have blind spot warnings (they'll need rear cross traffic warnings as well) and forward collision alerts. This will theoretically push car creators to strengthen their default safety packages and potentially save lives.
When it comes to charging your EV in the US, Canada and Mexico, the only two connector types available aren't cross-compatible. Tesla has its J1772 connector, which in the company's defense was developed when Tesla was still the only EV game in town. Everybody else uses the current North American standard, the Combined Charging System (CCS). Tesla apparently hopes to upend that dynamic, announcing Friday that it is "opening our EV connector design to the world."
Tesla is releasing its specs and production designs for the J1772 connector, which it is rebranding as the North American Charging Standard (NACS), in hopes that charging networks like Electrify America and Chargepoint will incorporate the company's hardware in their stations. The NACS contains "no moving parts, is half the size, and twice as powerful," as the alternative, Tesla argues.
The company presses that these networks should adopt its technology because, "NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla's Supercharging network has 60 percent more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined." I mean, sure, but that's kind of ignoring that those numbers are a direct result of the multi-year lead that Tesla held over its competition in coming to market, a capitalization lead that is rapidly shrinking as the industry's marquee brands like GM, Honda and Audi pivot to electrification and Chinese makers like BYD dominate the EV space in Asia's largest market.
Tesla claims that "network operators already have plans in motion to incorporate NACS at their chargers," without specifying which networks are doing so and at what scale. The company "looks forward to future electric vehicles incorporating the NACS design and charging at Tesla’s North American Supercharging and Destination Charging networks."
We can only speculate as to why Tesla has decided that right now — even as Elon Musk sinks faster than Artax into the quicksands of Twitter ownership — is the best tiime to open up their standard to the rest of the industry. Tesla, and now Twitter too, does not employ a public-facing PR team, so your guess is as good as any blue check's.
The United Nations is betting that satellites could help the world catch up on emissions reductions. The organization has unveiled a Methane Alert and Response System (MARS) that, as the name implies, will warn countries and companies of "major" methane emission releases. The technology will use satellite map data to identify sources, notify the relevant bodies and help track progress on lowering this output.
The initial MARS platform will focus on "very large" energy sector sources. It'll gradually expand to include less powerful sources, more frequent alerts and data from animals, coal, rice and waste. Partners in the program, such as the International Energy Agency and UN's Climate and Clean Air Coalition, will provide help and advice. The information also won't remain a secret, as the UN will make both data and analyses public between 45 to 75 days after it's detected.
The system will get its early funding from the US government, European Commission, Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub. Both Bezos' fund and GMH are backing related efforts, such as studies on spotting and counteracting agricultural methane emissions.
This is the first publicly available system of its kind, the UN claims. It will theoretically lead to faster, more targeted methane emissions reduction than you see today. That could be crucial in the years ahead. The UN warned at the COP27 conference that Earth was nowhere near limiting global warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius from the Paris Agreement. As human-released methane is both a major contributor to climate change (about 25 percent, the UN says) and quick to leave the atmosphere, an effective use of MARS could help get environmental strategy back on track.
As you might imagine, though, MARS will only work if governments and businesses cooperate. There's not much point to alerts if emissions contributors ignore them. An oil company might be reluctant to spend the money need to fix its flaring, for instance. The UN can point out a problem using this system, but it can't require action.
