This document from EASAC (European Academies' Science Advisory Council) is a pretty nice and well sourced overview of many (not all) different negative emission technologies/methods.
Direct reduction of iron ore with Hydrogen can eliminate most of the process emissions of smelting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_reduced_iron . Production of secondary steel (recycled steel) using electric arc furnaces also barely has process emissions.
I've never heard of this before, so correct me if I'm wrong, but that wikipedia article makes it look like 2Fe2O3 + 6H2 -> 2Fe + 6H2O. Commercially hydrogen is produced via CH4 + 2H2O -> CO2 + 4H2.
Combined you're just converting methane into CO2 and H2O as if you burnt it? Is it actually the case that this ends up needing less hydrocarbons than other routes for some reason?
I think[1] typical plants steam reform natural gas to CO and H2 and use that to reduce iron ore below the melting temperature of iron. Which makes it energy efficient.
In the US, no new blast furnaces have been built in decades; they’re all mini mills and/or direct reduction furnaces and yeah, the latter use natural gas. But again, you could use electrolytically producers hydrogen. There’s no reason to use steam reformed hydrogen except it’s currently cheaper.
Great work, a friend of mine is molecular biologist and she is furious about how in germany they don't use alternative methods for RNA Extraction like Phenol/Chloroform (labor intensive but no shortage of material) / SPRI (with magnetic beads) or skipping it altogether.
The statement from the hospital management boggles my mind: "In addition, there are different parts to a patient bill. One part is what the hospital charges the insurance company, one part is what the insurance company eventually pays [...]"
I can't think of any other business transaction where someone just puts a giant number on a bill and then is happy if someone pays ~25% of it. Such companies would be shunned by their customers and they'd go bankrupt. Is there any economic theory which explains how such odd of an system can emerge/survive?
Nothing about hospital billing would fly anywhere else. Bills just showing up after the fact with little ability to verify their accuracy, constant errors one can catch anyway (so how many are missed?), bills showing up months later from a half-dozen different sources when you only had one apparent "vendor", and so on.
I bet we received between 100 and 200 pieces of mail for each of our kids' births, including maternal care before the births. Probably averaged 40-60 hours dealing with billing and billing problems with each one, maybe more. And ours were all totally normal and about as easy as it gets, and we had insurance. I think we ended up missing some tiny bill we could easily have paid in each one (oh, yeah, they also like to give you very little time to pay) and had them go to collections.
I found a bill with a mistake on it, as one of my kids was charged twice for a single procedure. I called to get it fixed, but instead of dealing with it they just immediately sent it to collections.
My experience has been that no one at the insurers nor at medical providers’ billing departments give a shit until state regulators and/or legislators’ offices get involved. Which means yet more time on the phone.
The amount of time lost dealing with this system of ours is incredible. All else being equal it would be a win just to eliminate that, and there’s no reason to suppose that is the only improvement we could achieve.
A lot of businesses work like that. There is a retail price and then a discount is applied depending on who you are. That's kind of how all retail works, really.
Even working with Amazon or Walmart is kind of like that. You invoice them for one amount, but you get paid much less based on different deductions for things like discounts, co-ops, damage allowance, etc.
> Is there any economic theory which explains how such odd of an system can emerge/survive?
It has nothing to do with economics, but rather with law. My first reaction upon seeing figures like $300 for ibuprofen or $750 for iodine (both elsewhere in this thread) is imagining I'd tell the hospital to fuck right off (ie respond with written notice disputing the validity of such charges), but clearly there are other details that pressure people into actually paying the nonsensical bullshit.
Regardless of single payer, private insurance, subsidies, out of pocket, etc, I do think much of healthcare could be solved if providers had to charge/publish uniform prices and couldn't post-facto bill, you know, like every other business. Imagine going to the grocery store, paying at the register, and then two months later receiving a bill in the mail for the cashier's time!
China has a flu every year, their reaction to the current outbreak is vastly different from a flu. That suggests that they consider it a bigger threat than the flu.
iron seeding can increase amount of cyanobacteria which recently have been identified as potentially being methanogenic, thus this might not be a good idea. Unintended side effects of most geoengineering solutions are a big problem - some things like marine cloud brightening might be a bit less risky though. The other big issue is that most of those measures are just a bandaid which offsets a fixed amount of CO2, so it counter acts a few years of emissions but then you can't scale it up anymore. Adding Sulfur to the atmosphere for example can have a cooling effect but alongside other bad effects like acid rain, there are also studies showing that after a certain amount of sulfur, it does not provide a lot of negative forcing anymore.
That's vastly inaccurate. It is correct for household prices, but for energy intensive industry the difference is much smaller, something around 2 cents.
Syn-fuels are never carbon neutral, you always have CH4 Emissions when producing, transporting,storing or burning fuel (and N2O too if you burn the fuel using air and not pure oxygen). CH4 is not only a rather potent GHG, it also oxidizes to CO2. Obviously the emissions are a lot lower than using fossil fuels but they are still there.
