“Annual emissions of SO₂ in China … rose steeply during the 1980s and 1990s. But they peaked in the mid-2000s, and over the last 15 years, they have fallen by more than two-thirds.

Putting emissions limits on coal plants and introducing desulphurization technologies that remove SO₂ from smokestacks were critical drivers of this decline.”

From Our World in Data.

“Captura is one of a cadre of startups eyeing Earth’s oceans as a carbon sink ready to be harnessed. The bioengineering strategies it’s deploying aim to accelerate what the oceans already do: absorb carbon emissions on a massive scale. This natural process has helped keep atmospheric CO2 levels in check for millions of years, but it can’t keep up with present-day industrial emissions. Dozens of field trials and pilot projects have begun, and in 2025, Captura and several other companies will begin scaling up their facilities.

Their approaches are as diverse as they are bold. Some groups are growing kelp forests or microalgae in the sea. Others propose pumping seawater between shallow and deep layers to move carbon around. Two strategies caught IEEE Spectrum’s gaze—Captura’s ocean carbon dioxide removal approach, which sucks carbon out of the sea, and ocean alkalinity enhancement, which stores carbon in the sea. Both have inspired the engineering of novel, highly efficient electrochemical systems to treat copious amounts of seawater.

Big funding entities support these ideas. The finalists for both the US $100 million XPrize for Carbon Removal and the $35 million Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize from the U.S. Department of Energy include marine-based strategies, alongside atmospheric ones.”

From IEEE Spectrum.

“Globally, total CO2 emissions are still slowly increasing. The Global Carbon Project just released its preliminary estimates for 2024, which suggest another 0.8% increase.

However, while total emissions have not yet peaked, emissions per person have. Globally, per capita CO2 emissions from fossil fuels peaked in 2012. When land use emissions — which are more uncertain and noisier — are included, they peaked in the 1970s.”

From Our World in Data.

“The carbon–fluorine (C–F) bond is one of the strongest in organic chemistry, requiring huge amounts of energy to break down, at huge expense. But now two papers in Nature describe two low-energy ways to overcome the C–F bond.

Both methods combine a catalyst with some relatively simple chemistry driven by the energy of visible light. In each case, the catalyst absorbs light that then triggers a reaction.

Chemist Garret Miyake at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and his colleagues use this absorbed energy to reduce the C–F bond to carbon–hydrogen — albeit not in Teflon. Yan-Biao Kang, a chemist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, and his colleagues uses this energy to break the bond and the overall molecule down to smaller constituent parts, in temperatures as low as 40 °C. Both papers, without doubt, mark a major step forward.

Important next steps include using these ideas in real-world settings, for example to develop catalysts that work in waste water or that can be used to clean up PFAS in contaminated soils. If a method can be adapted so that it is powered by sunlight, that would be of huge benefit.”

From Nature.