Author: Organikos

Crossings, By Ben Goldfarb

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This journalist and author of the book to the left, surprisingly, has not appeared in our pages before. Here is what he says about himself:

Hi, I’m Ben, an independent conservation journalist. I’m the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

And about the book he shares what others have said:

An eye-opening and witty account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from the award-winning author of Eager.

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they’re practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. Continue reading →

Beavers’ Resilience On Display In Canada

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Beavers are not always welcome, but where they belong, they are a wonder to behold. Ian Frazier offers this dispatch from the great North:

Deep in the Wilderness, the World’s Largest Beaver Dam Endures

The largest beaver dam on Earth was discovered via satellite imagery in 2007, and since then only one person has trekked into the Canadian wild to see it. It’s a half-mile long and has created a 17-acre lake in the northern forest — a testament to the beaver’s resilience.

Wood Buffalo National Park, the largest national park in Canada, covers an area the size of Switzerland and stretches from Northern Alberta into the Northwest Territories. Continue reading →

Copping To The Resolution

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United States’ Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry(L) and China’s special envoy for climate change Xie Zhenhua (R) attend a press conference during the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on December 13th, 2023. Martin Divisek/ZUMA

It started on a flawed premise, that a petrostate bigwig could honestly lead the forum to a legitimate outcome. We knew it was not going to end dirtier than it should have, but still we must parse what just happened. Thanks to Mother Jones for republishing Damien Carrington’s explanation from the Guardian:

Good Cop, Bad Cop: Breaking Down the UN’s New Climate Resolution

Some call the COP28 agreement “historic,” others call it weak. Here’s why.

Language on coal power was no stronger than that of Cop26 in 2021. Photograph: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA

The decision text from Cop28 has been greeted as “historic,”  for being the first ever call by nations for a “transition away” from fossil fuels, and as “weak and ineffectual” and containing a “litany of loopholes” for the fossil fuel industry. An examination of the text helps to explain this contradiction.

Reducing Fossil Fuel Use

The text states the huge challenge with crystal clarity: Continue reading →

Cactus Conundrum

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Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

Cactus is an infrequent topic in these pages, sometimes with attention to their beauty–and that leads to an environmental problem we had not been aware of:

Inside the Illegal Cactus Trade

As the craze for succulents continues, sometimes the smuggler and the conservationist are the same person.

The succulent Dudleya pachyphytum is known as the Cedros Island live-forever. It has also been called the panda bear of plants, on account of being so cute. It has sweet, chubby leaves, is pale, and is powdered as if with confectioner’s sugar, and its shape is most often that of a rose. D. pachyphytum grows slowly, as succulents generally do, and many specimens would fit in your coat pocket. Continue reading →

Carbon Capture Question

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Photo Illustration by The New York Times

We have Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich to thank for the answer to this question:

Can Carbon Capture Live Up to the Hype?

The technology to capture and bury carbon dioxide has struggled to ramp up and has real limits. But experts say it could play a valuable role.

World leaders at the annual United Nations climate talks have battled for years over whether they should “phase out” fossil fuels like coal or just phase them “down.” Continue reading →

Greenwash Vibing@Cop28

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In an illustration, a sunflower sprouts from the top of a sparkling oil barrel that sits atop a grassy hill. A rainbow is in the background.

Sam Whitney/The New York Times

Vibing is a slang word that works well as a stand-in for greenwashing. Alex Simon, a co-founder of Synaps, an economic and environmental research center, shares additional perspective on the corruption built into Cop28:

In Dubai, a ‘Good Vibes Only’ Approach to Climate Change

On a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates, I felt as if I’d entered a fever dream of green exuberance. It was more than two months before COP28, the annual global climate meeting now in progress in Dubai, but the country was already awash in environmental hype. On the highway, banners for an event hosted by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the fossil fuel behemoth known as Adnoc, read: “Decarbonizing. Faster. Together.” A placard in my hotel bathroom asked me to conserve water by using the two-tiered flush, although the flush had only one tier. A friend’s utility bill was labeled “green bill” — although U.A.E. households have some of the biggest carbon footprints in the world. Continue reading →

Winning The Popularity Contest, Fungi In Our Pages

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courtesy of Laura Murray/Smallhold

The topic came to our attention a dozen years ago and is now mainstream enough that it is a regularly featured topic in our feed:

A mushrooming trend: how fungi became an It food

The mushroom moment of the past few years shows no sign of ending. What’s feeding its enduring popularity?

You can’t walk more than a few aisles in the grocery store these days without running into some kind of new mushroom product. Fresh white button mushrooms are increasingly joined by specialty varieties like lion’s mane, maitake or oyster mushrooms. There’s sparkling cordyceps tea and chaga coffee boasting a range of health benefits, mushroom chips and even chocolate bars infused with reishi. Continue reading →

Good Money After Bad

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The energy transition will lead to wide-ranging transformations across economies. | MONTAGE ILLUSTRATION BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE; PHOTOGRAPHS BY UNSPLASH

We applaud the Fund, especially for this work, even if the source of their money is problematic:

Easing the Energy Transition

How the Bezos Earth Fund hopes to seed economic transformation

WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST economic obstacles to the needed rapid transition in energy supplies and the challenges of deforestation driven by climate change? Continue reading →

Power Rangers With A Different Approach

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Women rangers hugged a tree while collecting data during a forest patrol near the village of Damaran Baru, in Aceh Province, Indonesia. Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times

We thank Muktita Suhartono for the story and  Ulet Ifansasti for the photographs:

Female Rangers ‘Don’t Go All Alpha Like the Men’ to Protect a Forest

Rather than take a confrontational approach with trespassers looking to farm or log in a tropical rainforest in Indonesia, teams of women rangers try dialogue first.

Asmia, one of 15 rangers whose job is to protect nearby forests from squatters who want to clear trees for timber or to farm the fertile soil.

Riding her motorbike while balancing a backpack, a wok and a sharp cleaver, Asmia expertly maneuvered her way up a dangerous cliffside: a three-mile trip along a precipitous dirt path, barely 40 inches wide, to reach the mouth of the forest.

Asmia is one of the 15 members of a team of rangers — 10 of whom are women — whose job is to protect their village forest in Aceh Province in Indonesia from the squatters who want to clear the trees for timber or to farm the fertile soil.

Two teams of rangers, each consisting of five women and two men, take turns each month on five-day forest patrols.

“Here, we once fought with a squatter, asking him to stop the encroachment,” Asmia said, pointing as she walked beneath the thick canopy of trees that shadow her rounds. “He insisted on clearing the land, as he wanted to grow coffee. He was persistent. But we talked him out of it.” Continue reading →

Corrupted Cop & Better News

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Cylindrical battery cells undergoing tests in the UK. Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

Thanks to Bill McKibben, in his newsletter–“A Corrupted COP New revelations show just how bad the oil countries really are“–for more details on this bad news but also for pointing us to better news that has implications for so much of the decarbonization opportunity set:

Battery Prices Are Falling Again as Raw Material Costs Drop

BloombergNEF breaks down the biggest annual drop in its lithium-ion battery price survey since 2018.

As the auto industry grapples with how to make affordable EVs, the task may get easier by one key metric. Battery prices are resuming a long-term trend of decline, following an unprecedented increase last year.

According to BloombergNEF’s annual lithium-ion battery price survey, average pack prices fell to $139 per kilowatt hour this year, a 14% drop from $161/kWh in 2022.1

New York Wind Power

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The giant parts for wind turbines await pickup at a pier in New London, Conn. Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Wind has always been there for the taking in so many places, the challenges of nimbyism notwithstanding. Now the turbines are arriving to harness it for the New York metropolitan area. Our thanks to Patrick McGeehan and the New York Times for sharing the story:

Huge Turbines Will Soon Bring First Offshore Wind Power to New Yorkers

Parts of what will eventually be the towers of wind turbines out in the ocean. Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times

New York’s best bet for entering the era of offshore wind power is stacked up at the water’s edge in Connecticut.

The pier on the Connecticut coast is filled with so many massive oddities that it could be mistaken for the set of a sci-fi movie. Sword-shaped blades as long as a football field lie stacked along one edge, while towering yellow and green cranes hoist giant steel cylinders to stand like rockets on a launchpad.

It is a launching point, not for spacecraft, but for the first wind turbines being built to turn ocean wind into electricity for New Yorkers. Crews of union workers in New London, Conn., are preparing parts of 12 of the gargantuan fans before shipping them out for final assembly 15 miles offshore. Continue reading →

The Warped Side Of Our Universe, Demystified

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Harvard staff writer Anne J. Manning writes about an event with the author and illustrator of this new book, discussing their remarkable collaboration:

CalTech’s Kip Thorne and Chapman University’s Lia Halloran visit Harvard to discuss their collaboration. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Nobel-winning physicist, artist illustrate universe’s ‘warped side’

New book seeks to demystify complex science from black holes to time travel

Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne has spent his career describing, through mathematics, some of the deepest mysteries of the universe. His latest project takes on similar material, but through poetry and paintings.

© 2023 by Lia Halloran

A nearly two-decade collaboration with artist Lia Halloran has extracted from Thorne’s brain the pictures that accompany those highly technical descriptions and brought them to life in their new book, “The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves.” The weighty tome blends complex science with whimsical art and features more than 300 ink-on-film paintings by Halloran alongside poetry by Thorne.

Paintings that accompany the poems “A Black Hole is Made from Tendices/of Stretching and Squeezing Space and/ a Chaotic Singularity” and “When Orbiting Black Holes Collide:/Spiraling Vortices/ Morph into Gravity Waves.” © 2023 by Lia Halloran

Thorne, the 2017 Nobel laureate in physics and emeritus theoretical physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, and Halloran, associate professor at Chapman University, shared the story behind their partnership at a Harvard Science Book Talk last week, moderated by MIT physicist and humanities Professor Alan Lightman (one of Thorne’s former students at CalTech).

The book, said Thorne, is not meant to teach the particulars of astrophysical concepts, but rather to “convey the essence of the ideas, the feeling, the experience of the ideas, without going into the technical details — like I do in my other life.” Continue reading →

Corrupt Cop

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Illustration by Isabel Seliger

Ever wondered what the Cop in Cop1-28 means? The answer is not nearly as interesting as how it came to be that a country whose lifeblood is oil is hosting Cop28. Petrostates have been biding their time, gaining momentum, and now have corrupted the Cop system from within. Weekend reading, Thanksgiving edition, from Elizabeth Kolbert, explains the stakes:

The Road to Dubai

The latest round of international climate negotiations is being held in a petrostate. What could go wrong?

Cop1 was held in 1995 in Berlin’s International Congress Center, a massive, metal-clad complex that looks like the set for a dystopian movie. Around nine hundred government delegates attended the weeklong negotiating session, along with about a thousand observers from non-governmental organizations. Daimler-Benz brought some electric cars to show off, while young activists brought a steamroller, to convey their opposition to cars. Delegates were invited to take a trip along the River Spree in a solar-powered boat. Continue reading →

Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, Leading The Conversation, Again

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We are grateful to the GEF for sharing this, and to Carlos Manuel Rodriguez for leading the conversation, as he has always done:

Creating space for young people to affect climate policy

In a recent conversation at his home, GEF CEO and Chairperson Carlos Manuel Rodríguez heard from members of the Youth and Climate Change Network of Costa Rica about how the climate emergency is impacting young people. Continue reading →

Heat Pumps Catching On In Norway

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The Tromsø sorting office of the Norwegian postal service Posten Bring is heated by heat pumps. The city is located almost 140 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty

Previous stories we have linked to about heat pumps have raised our expectations and hopes, but also raised the question of whether they will catch on. Here is the start to an answer:

‘You can walk around in a T-shirt’: how Norway brought heat pumps in from the cold

Device installed in two-thirds of households of country whose experience suggests switching to greener heating can be done

When Glen Peters bought a heat pump for his home in Oslo he wasn’t thinking about the carbon it would avoid. Continue reading →

Green Mountain Power, Sunrun, FranklinWH & Innovative Electricity Options

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Photograph by Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist / Bloomberg / Getty

We need more energy, and here are some possibilities:

The Next Power Plant Is on the Roof and in the Basement

A Department of Energy report promotes a new system that could remake the energy grid.

On any given Monday in Vermont, Josh Castonguay, the vice-president of innovation at that state’s Green Mountain Power utility, told me, he studies the forecast for the days ahead, asking questions like “What’s it looking like from a temperature standpoint, a potential-of-load standpoint? Is there an extremely hot, humid stretch of a few days coming? A really cold February night?” If there is trouble ahead, Castonguay prepares, among other things, Vermont’s single largest power plant, which isn’t exactly a power plant at all—or, at least, not as we normally think of one. Continue reading →

The Great Carbon Divide

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While the wealthiest 1% tend to live climate-insulated lives, their emissions are responsible for immense suffering. Illustration: Guardian Design

Jonathan Watts, whose work we have been linking to for some years now, is the global environment editor for the Guardian, and this may be his most revealing story yet.

Even if you are not in the 1%, if you are not in the bottom 66% the implications for all of us on the wealthier side of the divide are challenging:

Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says

‘Polluter elite’ are plundering the planet to point of destruction, says Oxfam after comprehensive study of climate inequality

The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency, a report says. Continue reading →

Prioritizing Carbon Capture Versus Emissions Reduction

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A carbon capture plant near Reykjavik, Iceland.

A carbon capture plant near Reykjavik, Iceland. CLIMEWORKS

Since we first heard of it we have been enthusiastic about the upside potential of this technology, but until now had not considered the tradeoffs:

Climate Plans That Rely Too Much on Carbon Removal Could Breach International Law

Countries that rely too heavily on carbon removal in their climate plans could violate international law, warns a new paper. Continue reading →

Letters To The Secretary

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We have appreciated this newsletter since it started, and every issue since. This week it brings these handwritten letters to our attention:

…Oh, and who’s the other group of climate voters the president needs to worry about? That would be older people, like those of us at Third Act—we codgers have been organizing mass protests all year. And while we may not be TikTok savvy, we have another weapon: pen and stationery. In the last week Third Actors have unleashed thousands of letters on DOE headquarters—which may not sound quite as sexy as petitions from the Internet, but they have their own impact, since officials know that if you’re willing to do more than click you’re probably an effective and motivated adversary.

So consider [image above left]

Or [image to the right]

What I’m trying to say is, the Department of Energy has a real problem—an increasingly aware and activated posse of youngsters and oldsters. And a solution: announce CP2 is going nowhere, and that no other project will be approved, or even considered, until there’s been an exhaustive rewrite of the criteria taking into account the latest science and economics. It’s not hard. Continue reading →