Technology

#CargoUnderSail #RethinkShipping

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Illustration by Owen D. Pomery

Pagan Kennedy offers another, more detailed look at an idea that seemed a mere novelty when we first linked to it:

The Climate Crisis Gives Sailing Ships a Second Wind

Cargo vessels are some of the dirtiest vehicles in existence. Can a centuries-old technology help to clean them up?

In February, 1912, Londoners packed a dock on the River Thames to gawk at the Selandia, a ship that could race through the water without any sails or smokestacks. Winston Churchill, then the minister in charge of the British Royal Navy, declared it “the most perfect maritime masterpiece of the twentieth century.” But, as the Selandia continued its journey around the world, some onlookers were so spooked that they called it the Devil Ship…

The history is a fun read, so continue to the whole story here. But then, take a closer look at the company featured in the article:

Our Story

Over the course of 20 years working in the maritime industry Cornelius Bockermann witnessed first hand how humans adversely affect our environment. He knew something had to change. In 2013, he moved with his family to Cairns and shipped all their possessions from Germany to their new home in Australia. Through the process of shipping his own goods he experienced the disconnect between commerce and environmental preservation. Upon learning of plans to expand fossil fuel based shipping along the Queensland coast and amongst the Great Barrier Reef he knew he had to act. The question became how do you offer businesses and consumers a sustainable option in shipping?

Cargo Under Sail is the answer and the Dutch schooner named the AVONTUUR is the vessel to start it.

We are a passionate collective of individuals working to create a supply chain that merges the relationship between commerce and preservation. We are restless and can no longer wait for others to make a change.

Our Mission Zero

To eliminate pollution caused by shipping cargo.

We have a five-stage approach:

1. Raise Awareness about the environmental destruction caused by the shipping industry

2. Model a clean shipping future with our AVONTUUR

3. Sell premium AVONTUUR products to support the ongoing operation of the project.

4.  Establish a demand for products shipped by sail

5. Build a modern sail cargo fleet

Thaw Gas Measurement

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Covered in netting to deflect stray balls, these instruments gather methane data on the seventh hole of Midnight Sun Golf Course. Permafrost is rapidly thawing across the far north, deforming fairways here and releasing the highly potent greenhouse gas, which leads to more warming. PHOTOGRAPH: FRANKIE CARINO

Thaw problems are coming. Permafrost is losing its permanence. Measuring the speed and impact of the thaw is a new form of sleuthing:

The Arctic’s Permafrost-Obsessed Methane Detectives

The Far North is thawing, unleashing clouds of planet-heating gas. Scientists rely on an arsenal of tech to sniff out just how nasty the problem is.

AT THE MIDNIGHT Sun Golf Course in Fairbanks, Alaska, they say you never get the same shot twice. Continue reading →

Developing Clean Energy At Ambitious Scale

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It is not every day that your country is given good odds on an important project of such an ambitious scale.

The Economist’s WOODBINE column has this to say about it:

America’s chance to become a clean-energy superpower

Getting the most ambitious energy and climate laws in American history through Congress was not easy. Now comes the hard part

The future catches you in unexpected places. Drive down Interstate 95, the highway running along America’s Atlantic coast, into south-eastern Georgia and you will find signs and rest stops named after pecans and peaches. Continue reading →

Kenya’s Libraries Get The Attention They Deserve

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The archives of the McMillan Memorial Library are being digitized. Kenyans are also being invited to bring items such as photographs or letters to create an archive anchored in collective memory. Patrick Meinhardt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Palace is a fine way to think about libraries, and Kenya has a movement to make this metaphor work:

Turning Nairobi’s Public Libraries Into ‘Palaces for the People’

A Kenyan nonprofit is restoring iconic public libraries, leaving behind a segregated past and turning them into inclusive spaces.

A project to preserve libraries such as this one is not a sprint or even a marathon, but a relay, said Lola Shoneyin, a Nigerian novelist. Patrick Meinhardt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In 1931, the first library in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, opened its doors — to white patrons only. Continue reading →

Our Increasingly Cluttered Skies

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A digital illustration of a network of satellites around the Earth. Visual: Andriy Onufriyenko/Moment via Getty Images

Our thanks to Undark for this:

Earth’s Orbit Is About to Get More Crowded

The military is launching a fleet of small, interconnected satellites to collect data, track missiles, and aim weapons.

SOMETIME THIS COMING March, a network of 10 small satellites winged with solar panels is scheduled to launch into Earth’s low orbit. Continue reading →

An Intelligible Conversation About Artificial Intelligence

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Yejin Choi leading a research seminar in September at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

We have shared dozens of links to stories about advances in technology–especially those with application to conservation–none has touched on artificial intelligence. During my daily scanning for articles to share in 2022 I have noticed this topic more and more as a source of fear, to the point where I stopped reading them; but today’s is different:

An A.I. Pioneer on What We Should Really Fear

Artificial intelligence stirs our highest ambitions and deepest fears like few other technologies. It’s as if every gleaming and Promethean promise of machines able to perform tasks at speeds and with skills of which we can only dream carries with it a countervailing nightmare of human displacement and obsolescence. But despite recent A.I. breakthroughs in previously human-dominated realms of language and visual art — the prose compositions of the GPT-3 language model and visual creations of the DALL-E 2 system have drawn intense interest — our gravest concerns should probably be tempered. At least that’s according to the computer scientist Yejin Choi, a 2022 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “genius” grant who has been doing groundbreaking research on developing common sense and ethical reasoning in A.I. Continue reading →

Fusion Hoopla

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A reason that the breakthrough is causing such hoopla is that it implicitly promises that we could use fusion to run the world in almost its current form. Photograph courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Without the expertise to fully appreciate the science, the hoopla can be overlooked too easily. McKibben’s comment helps clarify:

The Fusion Breakthrough Suggests That Maybe Someday We’ll Have a Second Sun

In the meantime, we need to use the sun we’ve already got.

On Tuesday, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in fusion energy: according to early reports, scientists at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, have succeeded for the first time in making their complex and expensive machinery produce more power than it uses, if only for an instant. Continue reading →

Imposing On Pastoral Beauty To Capture Wind’s Power

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Pinnacle turbines dot the skyline in Keyser, West Virginia, where, according to Andrew Cosner, a twenty-one-year-old technician, some residents remain hostile to the new wind farm: “They say it ruins the landscape and it’s ugly.”

It is to each of us whether we find the view attractive or not, and there was a time when I found large man-made structures an imposition on pastoral beauty.

Smith stands in the nacelle of one of the turbines just before daybreak.

As time passes I find myself drawn more to such a view as that in the photo above as a signal of progress.  It is not because the view is in a place far away from me– on the mountain ridge above where I live there is a row of such turbines and I am constantly gazing at that horizon. Published in the print edition of the November 28, 2022, issue of the New Yorker, with the headline “Blade Runners,” D.T. Max provides some context, but the photos do the heavy lifting:

THE BLADE RUNNERS POWERING A WIND FARM

In West Virginia, a crew of five watches over twenty-three giant turbines.

Photography by Philip Montgomery

The Pinnacle wind-power plant extends for roughly four miles in the northeastern corner of West Virginia. Continue reading →

Tagging Technology Gives Godwit Game

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A juvenile bar-tailed godwit has flown from Alaska in the US to Tasmania in Australia, covering a record 13,560kms without stopping. Photograph: Johnny Madsen/Alamy

Who’s got game in the bird world is not, strictly speaking, a phrase associated with ornithologists or what they do for a living. But sometimes, their news features what looks like competitive sport to the lay public. We have shared news of long-journey bird species on several occasions, and one that has the right stuff now stands out from the rest by virtue of tagging technology:

Bar-tailed godwit sets world record with 13,560km continuous flight from Alaska to southern Australia

Satellite tag data suggests five-month-old migratory bird did not stop during voyage which took 11 days and one hour to reach Tasmania

A juvenile bar-tailed godwit – known only by its satellite tag number 234684 – has flown 13,560 kilometres from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania without stopping, appearing to set a new world record for marathon bird flights. Continue reading →

Sunscreen For Roads

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(Photo credit: Jonathan Cutrer / CC BY-NC 2.0)

Our thanks to Sarah Kennedy/ChavoBart Digital Media and Molly Matthews Multedo via Yale Climate Connections for keeping us ahead of the curve:

Titanium dioxide coating could keep roads and bike paths cooler

Like mineral sunscreen, it works by reflecting UVA and UVB rays from the sun.

Biking or walking on a hot day can make you feel like you’re in an oven because dark pavement absorbs and retains heat. But applying a special coating to streets and bike paths could help cool them off. Continue reading →

Previously Unheralded Climate Policy Good News

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(David McNew / Getty)

Robinson Meyer‘s newsletter this week is the most positive in its history, so if only for that read it and click the banner above to sign up:

America’s Climate Bill Looks Even Better Than Before

Late last month, analysts at the investment bank Credit Suisse published a research note about America’s new climate law that went nearly unnoticed. The Inflation Reduction Act, the bank argued, is even more important than has been recognized so far: The IRA will “will have a profound effect across industries in the next decade and beyond” and could ultimately shape the direction of the American economy, the bank said. Continue reading →

Pushing Decarbonizing Technology Via Industrial Policy

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The NLMK mill in Portage, Indiana, which uses a furnace powered by electricity and produces steel from recycled scrap. SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES

Thanks to Yale e360:

Beyond Biden’s Climate Plan, a New Industrial Revolution Is Needed

The new U.S. climate plan is historic and will pump billions of dollars into advancing the transition away from fossil fuels. But a more far-reaching, innovative approach is needed to push forward the radically new technologies that will be required to decarbonize the economy.

BY CHARLES F. SABEL AND DAVID G. VICTOR

Workers guide a hydrogen-powered truck, part of Anglo American Plc’s NuGen carbon-neutral project, during a moving demonstration at the Anglo American Platinum Ltd. Mogalakwena platinum mine in Mogalakwena, South Africa, on Friday, May 6, 2022. Anglo American unveiled the worlds biggest green-hydrogen powered truck at a platinum mine in northeast South Africa where it aims to replace a fleet of 40 diesel-fueled vehicles that each use about a million liters of the fossil fuel every year. Photographer: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg

For all the great news in the Biden administration’s massive new climate spending plan, the hardest work of transforming the economy to stop global warming lies ahead. That’s because nearly all the money in the $369 billion plan will be spent on technologies that American companies already know how to deploy, such as solar farms, making buildings more efficient, and developing networks of electric vehicle charging systems.

Doing a lot more of the same will undoubtedly bring down emissions faster. But deep decarbonization requires a transformation of the American economy that will demand a much more active effort to push the technological frontier and build new industries so emissions can be driven to zero. Continue reading →

The 150 Most Consequential Years

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Amanda Northrop/Vox; Getty Images

Our thanks to Vox for this conversation with one of the great economic historians of our time:

Humanity was stagnant for millennia — then something big changed 150 years ago

Why the years from 1870 to 2010 were humanity’s most important.

“The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.”

So argues Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, the new magnum opus from UC Berkeley professor Brad DeLong. It’s a bold claim. Homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years; the “long twentieth century” represents 0.05 percent of that history.

But to DeLong, who beyond his academic work is known for his widely read blog on economics, something incredible happened in that sliver of time that eluded our species for the other 99.95 percent of our history. Continue reading →

Smart Cities, Japan Edition

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A delivery robot makes its rounds at Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town in Japan.Credit: Yoshio Tsunoda/AFLO/Alamy

Frustrated but determined leadership on environmental challenges facing urban constituencies is worthy of our attention and even admiration, even if “smart cities” can be problematic terminology. Nature magazine offers this snapshot from Japan:

Houses equipped with solar panels in Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town.Credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty

Why Japan is building smart cities from scratch

Purpose-built sustainable communities can boost energy efficiency and support an ageing population.

By 2050, nearly 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities, up from just over half in 2020. Urbanization is nothing new, but an effort is under way across many high-income countries to make their cities smarter, using data, instrumentation and more efficient resource management. Continue reading →

Ever-Improving Solar Technologies & Techniques

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Sheep graze alongside a solar array in Dubbo, Australia. JANIE BARRETT / THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD VIA GETTY IMAGES

Solar power, one of the renewables with the greatest promise, continues to improve:

A solar array in Madera County, California, with panels placed side-by-side on the ground. ERTHOS

More Energy on Less Land: The Drive to Shrink Solar’s Footprint

With the push for renewables leading to land-use conflicts, building highly efficient utility-scale solar farms on ever-smaller tracts of land has become a top priority. New approaches range from installing PV arrays that take up less space to growing crops between rows of panels.

Farmers grow hay between solar fences in Donaueschingen, Germany. NEXT2SUN

From the ground, the new solar farm shimmers like a mirage oasis on a hot summer day. Instead of row after slanting row of shiny panels stretching taller than corn, this array, mounted directly on the earth, lies flat as water. Continue reading →

Action Is The Thing

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ILLUSTRATION: WIRED; GETTY IMAGES

Climate inaction is a theme bookending the first decade of our chronicling news stories and analytical essays. Why, we have stopped bothering to wonder, is inaction so persistent? Whether activism or other forms of action, there is not enough of it relative to the scale of the crisis. We thank Eleanor Cummins, a freelance science journalist and adjunct professor at New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program for these ideas as published in Wired:

‘Thinkwashing’ Keeps People From Taking Action in Times of Crisis

When it comes to issues like climate change, too many let the perfect become the enemy of the good, while the world burns.

LESS THAN A decade ago, “wait and see” arguments about climate change still circulated. “We often hear that there is a ‘scientific consensus’ about climate change,” physicist Steven E. Koonin wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2014. “But as far as the computer models go, there isn’t a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences.” The idea was that the world needed more data before it could respond to the threat posed by global warming—assuming such research indicated a response was even necessary. Continue reading →

Tertulia & Touch

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Customers in Bookmongers of Brixton, a book store in London. Apps have struggled to reproduce online the kind of real-world serendipity that puts a book in a reader’s hand. Tom Jamieson for The New York Times

Yesterday’s post notwithstanding, my favorite book review in ages was published five days ago. A couple weeks earlier I had read an essay that riffs off the book, written by the book author himself.  And I was all in–hook, line and sinker as they say–after reading the author’s punchy riff. The reviewer, one of my favorite cultural commentators, filleted the book such that I had to question my susceptibility to the book author’s riff essay.

One reason I read book reviews in a variety of publications is to get the next best thing to in-store browsing; comparative criticisms. But finding and holding a book is a whole other thing. Alexandra Alter’s article, about how technology may afford that in a new way, is of interest; Tertulia, if you can simulate that sensation of discovery, I will be all in:

A New Way to Choose Your Next Book

Most books are sold online, where it’s impossible to replicate the experience of browsing in a brick-and-mortar store. Book-discovery apps aim to change that.

By some measures, the book business is doing better than ever.

Last year, readers bought nearly 827 million print books, an increase of roughly 10 percent over 2020, and a record since NPD BookScan began tracking two decades ago.

But all is not as rosy as it seems. As book buyers have migrated online, it has gotten harder to sell books by new or lesser known authors. Continue reading →

Technology Put To Good Use

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A Wounaan forest technician inspects an illegal clearcut in Indigenous territory. CULLEN HEATER

Jim O’Donnell and Cullen Heater tell an essentially hopeful story from our neighbor to the south:

Panama’s Indigenous Groups Wage High-Tech Fight for Their Lands

With help from U.S. organizations, Panama’s Indigenous people are using satellite images and other technologies to identify illegal logging and incursions by ranchers on their territory. But spotting the violations is the easy part — getting the government to act is far harder.

On a blazing February morning, the Indigenous Wounaan territorial monitoring coordinator, two forest technicians, and a local farmer climbed into the mountains outside the fishing and farming community of Majé, near Panama’s Pacific coast. Continue reading →

Youth & Perspective

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It should not be this difficult to change viewpoints on an existential topic. But apparently it is. If it requires a new social media platform, and watching a few short, catchy videos, so be it:

A growing chorus of young people is focusing on climate solutions. “‘It’s too late’ means ‘I don’t have to do anything, and the responsibility is off me.’”

Alaina Wood is well aware that, planetarily speaking, things aren’t looking so great. She’s read the dire climate reports, tracked cataclysmic weather events and gone through more than a few dark nights of the soul. Continue reading →

Crypto, Pigs & Possibilities

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Wind turbines next to Argo Blockchain’s new facility in Dickens County, Texas. The site would be fueled mostly by wind and solar energy. Carter Johnston for The New York Times

First thought upon seeing the headline of the story below: when pigs fly. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. If you read to the end of the story, published in the New York Times (click through to read it in full there), you will understand that some at the cutting edge of crypto want to change the name of what they do to “validators” from the less environmentally-friendly sounding “miners.” So, second thought: lipstick on pigs. But, at least they are acknowledging the complaint. Plus, the author of this story has a remarkable track record of reporting on issues we care about. So let’s read their latest claims with an open mind:

Bitcoin Miners Want to Recast Themselves as Eco-Friendly

Facing intense criticism, the crypto mining industry is trying to change the view that its energy-guzzling computers are harmful to the climate.

Texas has become a hot spot for crypto mining, attracting more than two dozen companies, partly because of an unusual incentive structure with its power grid. Carter Johnston for The New York Times

Along a dirt-covered road deep in Texas farm country, the cryptocurrency company Argo Blockchain is building a power plant for the internet age: a crypto “mining” site stocked with computers that generate new Bitcoins. Continue reading →