By: Chandu Visweswariah The oil giant Saudi Aramco recently published an article on Carbon Capture which got my attention. Is Carbon Capture the holy grail to solve the climate crisis? The fossil fuel industry is pushing carbon capture as a panacea to our greenhouse gas emission problems. Fossil fuels are wonderful and essential to our way of life, they say….
By: Chandu Visweswariah [Mount Rushmore image acknowledgment: By Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90107110] Dear Mr. President, If this letter gets to you, I hope you read it because it describes the single most important thing you can do to boost your legacy. More on this a bit later in this letter. Earlier today, I received a renewal notice…
By: Subbu Upputuri, Dr. Chandu Visweswariah, Dr. Thomas N. Theis, Dr. Anjali Sauthoff Executive Summary The transition from fossil fuel vehicles to electric alternatives is a critical step towards reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and combating climate change. However, the localized impacts on air quality, specifically fine particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions, are more nuanced. In some electricity zones of the…
By: Chandu Visweswariah In India, a billion people went to the polls over a 6-week period ending on June 1, 2024. Meanwhile, a scorching heat wave raised temperatures in New Delhi, the capital city, to an unbearable 120oF (49oC). Despite this juxtaposition of intense political and climate activity, climate change was not a plank in the platform of any of…
By: Dr. Anjali Sauthoff, Dr. Chandu Visweswariah, Dr. Thomas N. Theis Authors’ note: The CURE100 Carbon Tracker tool, available here, now has full support in the latest version 288 for PM2.5 (Particulate Matter 2.5 microns or smaller) emissions and implements the models described in this article for light duty vehicles. The CURE100 BEST (Bus Electrification for Student Transportation) tool, available…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Dear human race, Congratulations on centuries of progress and triumph (albeit bumpy at times). Your intellectual, artistic, medical and scientific progress in the last few centuries has been impressive. You have also made incremental progress on injustice, bigotry, discrimination and exploitation of all kinds, be it slavery, racism, colonialism or elitism. Failure However, it pains me to…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Summary With each passing year of under-achievement in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, our planet’s carbon budget is dwindling. To avoid truly catastrophic and irreversible damage from climate change, this blog argues that the world now has to achieve net zero by 2034, if not sooner. What is a Carbon Budget? A carbon budget is an amount…
By: Chandu Visweswariah I’ve been asked by multiple friends and relatives what it’s like to drive an EV in frigid weather. I usually reply that the combination of a heavier car, low center of gravity, high torque at slow speeds, and four-wheel drive is an unbeatable combination in snowy and icy conditions. In fact, given that our driveway is steep,…
By: Akhila Golla†, Yuting Hu†, Vishnu Sai Teja Kondamudi†, Chandu Visweswariah‡, Sai Subhash Reddy Yarram†, Venkata Subrahmanyam Upputuri† and Jinjun Xiong††State University of New York, Buffalo‡CURE100.org According to the National Academy of Engineering, electrification and the electric grid constituted the top U.S. engineering achievement of the 20th century. But now it is already time to reinvent that same engineering marvel…
By: Chandu Visweswariah The two biggest sources of carbon emissions in our part of the country in the Northeast are transportation and building heating. Most homes and buildings are heated with a fossil fuel furnace, burning fuel oil, gas or propane to produce heat. To decarbonize rapidly, we urgently need all new construction to incorporate heat pumps, and all existing…
