Скачать или смотреть How to Change the Rate of Global Warming in our Lifetimes | Desiree Plata | TEDxBoston

Methane will do as much global warming as CO2 in the next decade. It is a ""short lived"" climate pollutant, which means it does its warming now. If we take it out of the atmosphere or stop it from getting there in the first place, we could change the rate of global warming observed in our lifetimes. The Plata lab at MIT has developed a catalyst that can do just that. The catalyst works by converting methane to CO2-- which sounds like a bad thing but dramatically reduces radiative forcing (the heat absorbed near the Earth) and the amount of CO2 produced is minuscule. This can be used at places like dairy barns, coal mines, and potentially oil and gas fields and all the other sources of methane that seep into the atmosphere. The economic value is large. The environmental impact for warming reductions dramatic (0.5oC saved by 2100). The social benefits will ripple across the globe. And we are just one methane reduction technology. Other technologies are also emerging, providing profitable, sustainable routes to protecting the Earth System now.

Desirée Plata’s research seeks to maximize technology’s benefit to society while minimizing environmental impacts in industrially important practices through the use of geochemical tools and chemical mechanistic insights. Plata earned her doctoral degree in Chemical Oceanography and Environmental Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Joint Program in Oceanography (2009) and her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Union College in Schenectady, NY (2003). Plata is an NSF CAREER Awardee (2016), an Odebrecht-Braskem Sustainable Innovation Awardee (2015), a two-time National Academy of Engineers Frontiers of Engineering Fellow (2012, 2020), a two-time National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow (2011, 2013), a Caltech Resnick Sustainability Fellow (2017), and winner of MIT’s Junior Bose Teaching Award (2019), Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award (2021), and Perkins Graduate Mentor Award (2022). Having previously served as John J. Lee Assistant Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale University and Associate Director for Research at the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale, Plata is now Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Plata is co-founder of Nth Cycle, a sustainable metal processing and recycling firm. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx