Hello, we’re back with edition #3 of Forge the Future. It’s a bit of a longer one this week - lots of interesting findings, particularly in science and technology.
As always, a note about formats - I’m still figuring out what works best week to week, as stories and content changes, so things may shift from one edition to the next. If there's a section you particularly like (or dislike!), let me know via email or Twitter.
State of the Climate
The latest recorded level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 414.38ppm. This is fairly similar to last week, but we’re past the annual peak in CO2 levels, and we should see a decline in levels towards September-October.
The CO2 graph I’ve selected this week is the CO2 level for the last 10000 years. This really does show the recent trends in a new light - for around 9700 of those years CO2 has been well under 300ppm, and it’s only in the very recent past that CO2 levels have rocketed, and to levels not seen in that entire duration.
Visualisation of the Week
This week’s visualisation is by Antti Lipponen, a research scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. It shows average monthly temperature anomalies versus the 1951-1980 base period, for every country, from 1901 to 2016.
News
Let's take a quick look at what's been going on around the world this week.
Political Affairs
USA
🇺🇸 MIT Technology review did a good review of how the main Democratic presidential candidates’ climate plans stack up. All have a major focus on the environment, a big step up from 2016, but it remains to be seen how much is just keeping up with the others and how much will become policy if they gain office.
One of those candidates, Jay Inslee, is running with climate change as his primary issue. This week he was told by the DNC that not only would there be no official DNC climate change debate, but that if he took part in a 3rd party one, he would be barred from official DNC debates. The DNC say this is because they don’t run single-issue debates, but as many candidates have pointed out, climate change is so massive and universal that it will affect all aspects of the country. It’s disappointing to see them take this stance - it remains to be seen whether Governor Inslee will abide by the DNC’s ruling or not.
Finland
💚 Finland’s new coalition government has pledged to make the country carbon-neutral by 2035, the most aggressive climate pledge thus far in Europe. This involves moving the country away from peat and fossil fuels for energy, and scaling back the forestry industry massively. It’s a great step forward, but it will be interesting to see if the pledge is upheld by subsequent governments - there’s always the risk of a u-turn by another party if elected.
Spain
🚗 Less than a year after the establishment of a major low-emissions zone in the centre of Madrid, it looks like the region’s likely incoming President will scrap the scheme, as they view traffic jams as ‘part of the life in Madrid’. The scheme has cut NOx levels in the centre of the city by 50%, and CO2 emissions dropped by 14% within a month of launching.
Serious Business
💸 CDP, a charity running a global environmental impact disclosure system, published a report last week showing that the world’s biggest companies face $1 trillion in climate change risks. However, the report also showed that climate business opportunities are calculated to be $2.1 trillion, and the potential value of sustainable business opportunities is nearly 7x the cost of realising them. This is huge, as if there is economic value in pursuing climate-friendly business opportunities, we can use our existing powerful market mechanisms to drive adaptation. This feels like one of the only ways we will achieve the scale of change that we need in a sufficiently short timeframe.
☀️ LevelTen Energy, a renewable energy marketplace startup, has raised $20.5 million in funding to expand its offering. LevelTen are trying to make it easier for renewable energy providers to sell their energy, as well as buyers to access clean energy at reasonable prices. More services that make it easier to install and purchase renewable energy can only be a good thing!
R&D
☀️ Scientists believe they may have identified a key flaw in photovoltaic panels that caused them to be around 2% less efficient during the first few hours of use. Whilst this sounds small, given the volume of solar installed globally, this finding could mean significant decreases in lost solar generation capacity.
Concentrated Solar Power, the less well known sibling of photovoltaic technology, has dropped in price by nearly 50% in the last 8 years. This shows the power of scaling - renewables were long discounted as far too expensive, but as the volume of installations has increased, prices have really plummeted recently, to the point where they are now able to compete with fossil fuels.
🚜 The NYT published a long-form piece on the seed industry, and how 60% of the world’s seed sales are controlled by just 4 companies. This has knock-on effects on farming, as current seeds are infertile (farmers have to re-purchase every year), and monocultures, making them less resistant to disease and climate change. The companies involved (including the much-hated Monsanto) also produce pesticides, meaning they have little incentive to change the status quo.
🌳 Brazilian deforestation is at the highest level since the current recording mechanism began. This is especially alarming as the new Brazilian president is anti-environmentalist and has criticised attempts to stop deforestation, leading to concerns that illegal mining, farming and logging are being given a free pass under the regime.
🔬 It may be possible to sequester carbon dioxide in old oil wells, new research has shown. Various tests have been performed in Europe, injecting CO2 under the North Sea, and using high-tech techniques to monitor the seabed for signs of leakage. Thus far, the results look highly promising, with minimal leakage detected. Carbon Sequestration is very much a mitigation rather than a solution to emissions, but we need all the tools we can get, so if this technique works it’s a massive win.
🌊 A new study has found huge amounts of micro-plastics deeper in the ocean. There is more plastic 1000ft down than in the Great Pacfiic Garbage Patch. Much of it comes from terrestrial sources - single-use plastics that have washed out to sea. This does mean that by changing consumer habits we can prevent this from getting worse. Another study released this week shows that we eat at least 50000 plastic particles each year. We still don’t know what the effect of this is, as such research is relatively new, but I can’t imagine it’s good for us.
💻 Machine Learning has been hailed as one of the greatest technologies of the past few years, but training large AI models can emit as much carbon as 5 cars through their entire lifetimes (including manufacture). The carbon impact of the compute resource used to train these models has been known for a while, but it is much larger than most researchers thought. This is one of the flip-sides of the easy access cloud computing gives us to such compute resource - it makes it easier for more people to use more computing power than ever before.
✈️ A mysterious aircraft spotted some time back has been revealed as a Celera 500l - an aircraft designed to run at 30-40 miles to the gallon, nearly 10 times more fuel efficient than competing aircraft. Whilst this is still running on fossil fuels, for now there are no alternatives to fossil fuels for aircraft, and making a 10x improvement in efficiency would go a long way to mitigating the heavy impact that air travel has on our environment.
Interesting things
Here’s a collection of quick links, projects that could use more attention, and interesting stories from the week:
Offset Earth - a project by fellow maker Alex Price from the Tech Impact Makers community, it offers a chance to support carbon offset projects for a monthly fee.
MIT Solve has opened up their $1.5m 2019 Global Challenge. They’re looking for solutions to one of four key areas, to be submitted by July 1st.
Amazon have released footage of their new delivery drone. Very cool technology, but will it help lessen the environmental impact of millions of Prime Now customers ordering parcels?
Grist has a great piece on approaches for those wanting to use their career to tackle climate change.
Forge the Future
The Forge the Future site has gone through an extensive redesign since last week. I’ve tried to split the entries into useful resources and inspiring eco-tech companies, and hopefully made it easier to find your way around and discover what you might be looking for. Please do check it out, and if you have any feedback, let me know!
Endgame
Thanks for reading through. If you've been sent this by a friend and would like to subscribe, please click the big purple button below (if you’re browsing the archive, you’ll find it in the top bar). And if you liked this, please share it with others - the more people we can reach, the better! I’m going to sound like a YouTube sign-off, but if you click the ❤️ at the top of the article, more people will see the list on Substack, which will broaden our audience. Thanks!
Finally, if you come across interesting articles or resources, fire them over to me via email or Twitter - I’m always on the lookout for new information and sources!
Until next week,
Oli
Notes from the community
If there's anything going on that you'd like to tell the community about, let me know. This could be a new project, a blog post, an event - anything goes!