Heatwaves, Degrowth and Mass Timber
Forge the Future #2
Hello, and welcome to the second edition of Forge the Future. I’m still playing around with formats, so some things may move around and I may try out a few new ideas over the coming weeks - please bear with me! On that note, 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 for CO2 in the atmosphere is 413.91ppm. That’s slightly down on last week, but as you can see in the graph below (showing the last two years of readings), CO2 follows a yearly cycle, peaking in May, so we should see a gradual decline until around October.
Having said that, the long term graph I shared last week (take a look here if you haven’t seen it) shows the continual increase year on year. Azeem Azhar shared a graph of the year-on-year increase in his Exponential View mail from last week (if you’re into the future of tech/AI and its effects on society, I highly recommend you check out EV - it was one of the main inspirations for Forge the Future).
Weather
🔥 A massive heatwave in India has sent temperatures in the north of the country over 50°C, with lakes and rivers starting to dry up, and heatstroke deaths likely to rise rapidly. This is likely just a sign of things to come, this sort of event is likely to become more and more common as time goes on.
Visualisation of the Week
This week’s visualisation is actually an interactive article developed by National Geographic to explain carbon emissions. As you scroll through, it shows what we’ve emitted and what we have left, and how big a role carbon negative technologies will have to play to reach the Paris Agreement targets. You can see above how rapidly we have to scale down global emissions (which are still rising rapidly!) in the coming decades.
News
Let's take a quick look at what's been going on around the world this week.
Political Affairs
USA
🤝 The House of Representatives passed a bill this week to force the US to stay in the Paris climate Agreement - President Trump famously withdrew from the agreement within months of being inaugurated. Whilst this bill likely won’t pass the Republican-controlled Senate, it sends a message that climate change matters, and should help push it up the agenda for presidential candidates in the 2020 elections.
NZ
🤗 New Zealand’s goverment have set the priority of their latest budget as the ‘well-being’ of citizens, rather than economic growth or productivity. Whilst it remains to be seen whether this results in meaningful changes, it’s a potential route to a post-growth world - it feels unlikely that the world will continue to be able to grow year-on-year and meet climate goals with a finite set of resources.
UK
⚡ The UK has run without coal power for 2 weeks - its longest ever run. However, before we all celebrate, most of this coal power has been replaced with gas, which has driven much of the UK’s emissions reductions in the power sector. Gas is cleaner, but still a fossil fuel, so a long way from being green. Unfortunately, serious policy shifts to incentivise renewables are nowhere to be seen for now.
Serious Business
🛒 UK supermarket chain Waitrose are trialing a packaging-free way to buy a number of common groceries, including alcohol, rice and pasta, and cleaning materials. The prices are lower than packaged goods, with a refundable deposit for containers. This is a bold move by a major supermarket chain, and demonstrates how businesses can have a real multiplier effect by changing our everyday consumption habits.
📉 Vice published a feature on de-growth, a growing movement to try and push economic growth negative to save the climate. It’s an interesting idea, but as the article concludes, it’s probably too big an ask even if it were going to work. Even to meet climate change targets, we’ll need to reduce the Fossil Fuel industry, arguably one of the most powerful on the planet, basically to nothing, which is a huge task on its own.
🐄 College-educated millenials in Africa are giving up high-flying careers to become farmers, trying to bring modern innovations to what is a dying career - the average African farmer is 60 years old, even as 60% of the population is under 24. This is very much needed to improve food yields in a rapidly developing part of the world - it will be interesting to see if the new wave of farmers bring eco-farming techniques such as silvopasture or regenerative agriculture to the table.
🌴 The BBC ran a profile this week on the Brando resort, a luxury eco-resort near Tahiti, started by the movie star Marlon Brando. With closed loop heat exchangers, solar power and waste water recycling, it’s showing that eco =/= austerity.
Climate policy and technology
☢️ There’ve been a few articles floating around about the impact of nuclear power, particularly since the release of the Chernobyl series recently. However, one aspect that’s less often considered is the impact of falling nuclear power usage on climate targets. Whilst there’s a lot of worry over nuclear proliferation and nuclear waste, nuclear is still a carbon-free power source, and countries reducing their usage is only going to make climate targets harder to reach. Until we solve grid scale storage and scale up solar and wind significantly, there needs to be a baseline power production level, something nuclear excels at.
There are many advanced designs of nuclear reactor far beyond what’s implemented today, that were shelved years ago and never revisited. Take the molten salt reactor - an inherently safe reactor design, with low proliferation risk, that can even be fueled from existing nuclear waste! The US built a research design in the 60s, before shelving the technology. Now the Chinese are restarting R&D into the design, a mere 60 years after it was first developed!
🌳 ProPublica produced an excellent deep dive into the complicated world of forestry-based carbon credits. It’s a muddy system, with unproven benefits, but offers a chance to save forests and precious ecosystems when little else will. However, enforcing the rules whilst ensuring that local people aren’t cut off from their means of income is a tricky balance to strike.
🌲 More tree-based info, this time in the shape of an analysis of Mass Timber - the new push to build exclusively from wood, in an effort to make construction more eco-friendly. Once again, quantifying the impact on emissions from forestry is immensely complex, and it’s hard to work out which claims are valid. Mass Timber certainly seems promising, but it depends a lot on where the wood comes from, and whether existing woodland is destroyed to create it (not dissimilar to biofuels in that regard).
🛸 On a slightly lighter note, here’s an interesting read on how China’s sci-fi market has taken off, apparently after the government realised that it can inspire technologists and entrepreneurs to think in bigger and bolder ways!
Projects of the Week
Interesting projects that deserve more attention.
Google Sunroof - a Google Earth powered solar savings estimator (US only, sadly).
D-Rev - A not-for-profit creating low-cost medical devices for unserved populations around the world, including devices for detecting jaundice, breathing devices for newborns, and artificial joints for amputees.
Climate Work - a tech job board for those looking for climate-focused work.
UK Power Dashboard - a dashboard showing where UK power comes from at the current time, with a UI reminiscent of a car dashboard!
Forge the Future
You may or may not be aware, but there's also a site for Forge the Future. It’s designed to provide resources and inspiration for budding climate entrepreneurs, activists and more. I’m in the process of redesigning it to make it easier to find resources for particular usecases, but if you get the time, I’d love if you could check it out, and if you have 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!
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!