Environment
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Number Crunch
Unusual cold weather gave the state’s power grid a stress test. It wasn’t prepared.
10,000%: That’s how much the spot price of electricity in Texas spiked on Monday relative to pre-storm prices, according to Reuters.
As extreme cold temperatures hit the state last weekend and Texans turned on their electric heaters to stay warm, the state’s power grid — unprepared for the sudden cold — suffered a “black swan” supply catastrophe. Pumping equipment, fuel lines, wells, wind turbines, and everything in between froze up at the same time that the need for electricity spiked, leading to widespread blackouts in the state. That sharp and abrupt imbalance in supply and demand is what sent wholesale…
Electric car charging is operating on a version of the freemium model — cheap only until you are hooked
Over the last few months, three big U.S. electric vehicle charging companies have announced multibillion-dollar reverse mergers to take themselves public. In the latest, Volta Industries said Monday that it will go public at a value exceeding $2 billion and walk away with $600 million in cash to build out its charging network. It is part of a massive expansion of EV charging that is underway — one that, according to McKinsey, will grow to as many as nine million U.S. charging points by 2025.
The public consensus about our EV charging future — from industry experts, analysts, and investors…
Number Crunch
But will it last?
10.3%: That’s how much global greenhouse gas emissions fell in 2020 as a result of global shutdowns to combat the spread of Covid-19, according to an analysis by independent research company Rhodium Group, per Future Human.
That’s the single biggest drop in greenhouse gas emissions in the post-World War II period, bringing emissions below 1990 levels for the first time. That sounds like good news, but it’s bound to be fleeting as vaccines roll out and economic activity revs up again.
It’s unfortunate that it’s taken a global pandemic to pump the brakes on our march toward climate disaster. There…
NUMBER OF THE DAY
Turning our beaches into a receptacle for Big Plastic
4.7 million: That’s how many food wrappers the Ocean Conservancy collected during its global beach cleanups in 2019, according to a report in Fast Company. This marks the first time since the Ocean Conservancy began its cleanups in 1986 that cigarette butts have been knocked off their perch as the most common form of beach litter. In 2019, cigarette butts came in second, at 4.2 million.
The reversal is not simply a reflection of the continued decline of cigarette smoking (though the pandemic has given that habit a bit of a boost): While the number of cigarette butts they found…
Number of the Day
Keeping cool on a hot planet is only warming it faster
6 billion: That’s how many air conditioners we can expect to see in use globally by 2050, if current trends persist, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. That would be three times the current number, with two-thirds of the world’s households owning an air-conditioner. According to MIT Technology Review, all of this cool air would require 6,200 terawatt-hours of energy, or nearly a quarter of the world’s total electricity consumption today.
Unlike computers, electric vehicles, or meatless burgers, air conditioning has seen only marginal technological improvements since it was introduced nearly a century ago. As the world…
NUMBER OF THE DAY
The tiny plastic pellets have become a big environmental problem
25 tons: That’s how many tiny plastic pellets called “nurdles” spilled into the Mississippi River near New Orleans earlier this month. (By Marker’s calculation, that works out to about 1.1 trillion nurdles.)
The spill was attributed to a container ship operated by a French shipping firm that was allowed to continue on its way. “No fines have been issued,” an editorial in Louisiana paper The Advocate recently complained. “No penalties have been levied. No one has been asked, or told, to clean up the mess.” The shipping company has reportedly hired a waste-management firm to conduct some cleanup work, but…
Fashion designers, environmentalists, and car companies are desperate for someone to invent animal-free leather. This Peoria, Illinois upstart thinks it can.
In September, Luke Haverhals, a 41-year-old former chemistry professor from Peoria, Illinois, found himself at London Fashion Week, strolling through the exhibition halls while dressed in his go-to power outfit: a white dress shirt, blue pants, a brown belt, and a two-year-old sports jacket selected by his wife, Noelle. Very presentable, he thought. …
We’re getting more efficient about resource use because of, not in spite of, the world’s dominant economic system
Capitalism and technological progress are driving dematerialization.
This statement will come as a surprise to many, and for good reason. After all, it’s exactly this combination that caused us to massively increase our resource consumption throughout the Industrial Era. Through most of history, capitalism and tech progress have always lead to more from more: more economic growth, but also more resource consumption.
So what has changed? How are capitalism and tech progress now getting us more from less? To get answers to these important questions, let’s start by looking at a few recent examples of dematerialization.
Fertile farms
America has long been…
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