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CO2 Outline

More concerning CO2 Emissions items that could be fixed only with the stroke of a pen:
Brazil’s new president plans to plunder the Amazon
U.S. Law
A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames : California’s forests emitted more carbon than they soaked up between 2001 and 2010

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Abo...

Really, a very nice memorial.

Bill Gates was in India recently and actually posted about this very topic.

tldr, they are putting in a lot of effort:

So far, the progress is impressive. In 2014, when Clean India began, just 42 percent of Indians had access to proper sanitation. Today 63 percent do. And the government has a detailed plan to finish the job by October 2, 2019, the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhiâ(TM)s birth. Officials know which states are on track and which are lagging behind, thanks to a robust reporting system that includes photographing and geotagging each newly installed toilet.

Cool. Let us know when they get it down to under a half-billion people shitting in public.

The goal is to end open defecation by 2019. The percentage of Indians with access to proper sanitation has increased
from 42% to 63% in a little over two years:

Bill Gates Blog

I like his recent one with Bill Gates.

http://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/XKCD-Marks-the-Spot

It lightly makes fun of us how 'the internet' is always trying to fix things. When execution is sometimes MUCH better than speculation.

They have already been doing work on that, just have a look at Bill's blog.

http://www.gatesnotes.com/Deve...

Why would anyone want to turn waste into drinking water and electricity?

Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren't properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically.

If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.

Western toilets aren't the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn't feasible in many poor countries.

One idea is to reinvent the toilet, which I've written about before.

Another idea is to reinvent the sewage treatment plant.

Today, in many places without modern sewage systems, truckers take the waste from latrines and dump it into the nearest river or the ocean --- or at a treatment facility that doesn't actually treat the sewage. Either way, it often ends up in the water supply. If they took it to the Omniprocessor instead, it would be burned safely. The machine runs at such a high temperature (1000 degrees Celsius) that there's no nasty smell; in fact it meets all the emissions standards set by the U.S. government.

Before we even started the tour, I had a question: Don't modern sewage plants already incinerate waste? I learned that some just turn the waste into solids that are stored in the desert. Others burn it using diesel or some other fuel that they buy. That means they use a lot of energy, which makes them impractical in most poor countries.

The Omniprocessor solves that problem. Through the ingenious use of a steam engine, it produces more than enough energy to burn the next batch of waste. In other words, it powers itself, with electricity to spare. The next-generation processor, more advanced than the one I saw, will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity.

From Poop To Potable: This Ingenious Machine Turns Feces Into Drinking Water

The article is full of shit.

It claims that Gates's blog post here here supports LENR, but it does no such thing (although some people in the comments section do mention it).

I can thoroughly recommend The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don't Fall through the Floor by J.E. Gordon, which even has a positive review by Bill Gates.

Finding something that is:

• Hard
• Tough
• Light
• Cheap
• Transparent

is challenging. Sapphire gets a pass for Hard and a (mostly) Transparent.