Posts Tagged ‘conservation’
“Every act of energy conservation… is more than just common sense: I tell you it is an act of patriotism”*…
But how do we best honor that admonition? The estimable Saul Griffith has observed “We need a proportional quantitative understanding of energy use, for everyone.” Now, Hannah Ritchie (Deputy Editor of Our World in Data and Senior Researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford) rides to the rescue with an elegant tool that compares and quantifies (in both watt-hours and usage cost, in both the U.S, and the U.K.) the energy consumption of different products and activities.
Try it: “Does that use a lot of energy?” from @hannahritchie.bsky.social. Background in her newsletter.
* Jimmy Carter
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As we watch our wattage, we might send wild birthday greetings to Bernard Frank; he was born on this date in 1902. A conservationist, forester, and wilderness activist, he had a long, engaged career in conservation concerns, especially in the D.C. area, where he was a leader in organizing the Rock Creek Watershed Association which worked to restore and preserve the area around Rock Creek in Washington, D.C., and Maryland and in the effort that lead to the creation of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park. He was honored for his work in this region with the naming of Lake Bernard Frank in Derwood, Maryland. But Frank is probably best remembered as one of the eight founding members of The Wilderness Society.
“This is a cardboard universe”*…
As we rid ourselves of the detritus of the Holiday season, let us pause to consider its signature component: at the turn of the 21st century, corrugated cardboard accounted for just fifteen percent of the United States recycling stream; today, it’s nearly half. Shannon Mattern on the cardboard box…
… As historian Maria Rentetzi writes (“Cardboard Box: The Politics of Materiality,” in Boxes: A Field Guide), “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate. And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.”
Let’s unpack that, shall we? Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.” And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains.” The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them.
Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there. The Container Corporation of America was founded in 1926, and upon those claims it built an empire with surprising reach. The CCA made collapsible shipping boxes, and it transformed packaging into a science and an art. It advanced market research, shaped mid-century taste, and altered the chromatic universe through color standards. It employed some of the best graphic designers of the period, and as national borders shifted after the Second World War, it commissioned Herbert Bayer, author of the Universal typeface, to revise the World Geo-Graphic Atlas. Even then, the CCA was remaking that new world to meet its logistical needs, rehabbing mining towns and germinating forests, and orchestrating civic discourse about all of this.
How did a packaging company get into the publishing business — into the containment and distribution of information? How were geographic imaginations changed in the process? Soon we’ll dive into the Paepcke archive, to find answers to those questions. But first I want to show you how a cardboard box is made…
In turn, inspiring and horrifying– the social history of the cardboard carton: “World in a Box,” @shannonmattern.bsky.social in @placesjournal.bsky.social.
For an earlier (R)D focused on Mattern’s work: “To clarify, ADD data.”
* Philip K. Dick, The Dark-Haired Girl
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As we tape it tight, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that a federal official who might slowed the onset of the cardboard box was fired: Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forest Service, was fired by President William Howard Taft. Pinchot had opposed Taft’s newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, Richard Ballinger, who favored commercial exploitation of federal reserve lands.
During President Theodore Roosevelt’s term, Pinchot had help enable policies for the conservation of natural resources. Roosevelt had designated millions of acres to protect as National Forests. That legacy was threatened, so Pinchot pressured Taft to remove Ballinger from office. In November of 1909, Collier’s Magazine had created a scandal when it accused Ballinger of shady dealings in coal lands in Alaska. When Pinchot criticized both Ballinger and Taft, the president reacted by firing him.
“Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is”*…
Reality feels “stable” enough to talk about it– though all logic seems to point away from that possibility. Marco Giancotti unpacks what he suggests is the only line of reasoning that resolves that paradox…
What is the source of what we call order? Why do many things look too complex, too perfectly organized to arise unintentionally from chaos? How can something as special as a star or a flower even happen? And, for that matter, why do some natural phenomena seem designed for a purpose?
We live in a universe of forces eternally straining to crush things together or tear them apart. There is no physical law for “forming shapes”, no law for being separated from other things, no law for staying still.
Boundaries are in the eye of the beholder, not in the world out there. Out there is only tumult, clashing, and shuffling of everything with everything else.
And yet, our familiar world is filled with things stable and consistent enough for us to give them names—and to live our whole lives with.
In this essay we’ll tackle these questions at the very root. We need good questions to get good answers, so we’ll begin by clarifying the problem. It has to do with probabilities—we’ll see why those natural objects seem so utterly unlikely to happen by chance, and we’ll find the fundamental process that solves the dilemma.
This will take us most of the way, but we’ll have one final obstacle to overcome, a cognitive Last Boss: living things still feel a little magical in some way, imbued with a mysterious substance called “purpose” that feels qualitatively different from how inanimate things work. This kind of confusion runs very deep in our culture. To remove it, I’ll give a name to something that, as far as I know, hasn’t been named before: phenomena that I’ll be calling—enigmatically, for now—“Water Lilies.”…
Applying systems dynamics, complexity, and emergence to understanding reality itself: “Recursion, Tidy Stars, and Water Lilies,” from @marco_giancotti (the second in a trilogy of essays: part one here; subscribe to his newsletter for Part Three when it drops).
* Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir“
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As we explore existence, we might spare a thought for Francis Simpson; he died on this date in 2003. An English naturalist, conservationist, and chronicler of the countryside and wild flowers of his native Suffolk, he became a botanist at Ipswich Museum, where he worked until his retirement in 1977.
He published one of the most highly regarded county floras, simply entitled Simpson’s Flora of Suffolk, and in 1938 saved a small meadow, famous for its snakeshead fritillaries, from being drained and ploughed into farmland. Using donations amounting to £75, he was able to purchase the field, Mickfield Meadow, for the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves. Today, it is one of the oldest nature reserves in the country, protecting the meadow flowers now surrounded by farmland.
“It’s a rotten job, but somebody’s got to do it”*…
All of us know the pains (and at least occasional pleasures) of work; but as Kayla Zhu and Sabrina Lam explain, some also know its danger…
Some jobs inherently carry significant risks due to factors such as hazardous working conditions, exposure to harmful substances, and the physical demands of the tasks.
Unfortunately, work injuries can sometimes be fatal, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recording 5,486 fatal work injuries in 2022.
2022 saw a 5.7% increase from the 5,190 fatal work injuries in 2021, and meant that a worker died every 96 minutes from a work-related injury that year.
This graphic visualizes the six occupations in the U.S. with the highest rates of fatal work injuries per 100,000 full-time workers, and their number of fatal work injuries in 2022.
The figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and are updated as of December 2023…
… While logging workers saw the highest fatal work injury rate, over 1,000 truck drivers died due to work injuries in 2022—the most fatalities out of any occupation…
“Ranked: The Most Dangerous Jobs in the United States,” from @kylzhu in @VisualCap.
* Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery
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As we take care, we might send carefully-conserved birthday greetings to Gifford Pinchot; he was born on this date in 1865. An American forester, he became the first chief of the Forest Service in 1905. By 1910, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s backing, he built 60 forest reserves covering 56 million acres into 150 national forests covering 172 million acres. Roosevelt’s successor, President Taft– no environmentalist– fired Pinchot, who went on to champion environmental causes (in particular, arguing against the wide-scale commercial logging of federal forests that was undertaken after he was ousted) and to serve two terms as Governor of Pennsylvania. In all, Pinchot’s efforts earned him the honorific, “the father of conservation.”
“It always seems impossible until it is done”*…
Adam Tooze unpacks a recent report from the clean energy think tank Ember— one that heralded a profoundly important historical turning point…
Electrification is key to the new energy system that is being built around the world. Electricity generation is one process we do know how to decarbonize. With concerted action, net neutrality is within reach in electric power generation for OECD countries by the 2030s and for the whole world by 2045. Furthermore, as Ember points out, electrification will replace “fossil fuel burning that currently takes place in car and bus engines, boilers, furnaces and other applications.”
Green electrification is the key to the future. And in 2023, according to Ember’s report, almost the entirety of new power demand was covered by growth in renewables, above all solar. Though there was growth in demand for electricity around the world, fossil fuel generation barely increased. Growth in solar and wind alone were sufficient to cover 82 percent of new electricity demand.
This is not new in rich countries. In the OECD demand growth for electricity is not strong or is even negative and renewable investment has been ongoing for two decades. The sensation is that this is now happening at the global level where the growth in demand for electric power is relentless.
In 2024 Ember expects the trend to be even more pronounced. This year, for the first time there will be substantial growth in global demand for electricity, whilst fossil fuel generation will likely fall…
… There is an obfuscation involved in talking about “the global” when, in fact, there is one country that dominates the entire dynamic of the energy transition: China.
As Ember’s data show: “China remained the main engine of global electricity demand growth. China’s rapid growth (+606 TWh, +6.9%) was just 21 TWh lower than the net global increase. India’s growth (+99 TWh, +5.4%) was the next largest contributor.”
Until the 2010s China fed its voracious demand for new power with coal-fired power stations. The energy transition in the advanced economies was never going to be sufficient to offset this. Of course, the renewable energy transition in the West was also painfully slow. But even if the USA and the EU had taken more drastic action, China’s growth was simply too large and too dirty. The fact that we are now reaching a turning point in the balance between fossil and clean power generation is due to a turning point in China: a huge surge in renewable energy investment.
In 2023 China alone accounted for more than half of the new global additions in wind and solar…
Measured in terms of power consumed China’s electrification of road transport is 3.5 times larger than that of the entire rest of the world. That is the EV revolution that the West is so worried about….
It is also the largest heat pump market in the world with more installations per year than any other country. Electrolysers, used mostly in demonstration plants by chemical and petrochemical companies, have also grown faster in China than the rest of the world. As a result, China accounted for 50% of global electrolyser capacity in 2023…
But as Ember notes, this process of applying electricity to new uses, is only at the beginning.
“Even in China, electrification is still in its infancy. Only a fifth of China’s electricity demand growth in 2023 (124 TWh of 606 TWh) was from the three electrification technologies, but this share will rise in time. These technologies added 1.4% to China’s electricity demand in 2023, up from 1.1% in 2022. Meanwhile in the rest of the world, electrification added 0.25% to electricity demand in 2022 and 0.28% in 2023. As China further accelerates the deployment of key electrification technologies and the world continues to catch up, the contribution of electrification will expand even further.“
At COP28 in 2023 many countries around the world committed to tripling global renewable electricity capacity by 2030. This has the potential to almost halve power sector emissions by 2030, as coal-fired power generation will be replaced first. Furthermore, it will provide enough new electricity to replace drive forward the electrification of transport, home and industrial heating with a 32 percent increase in electricity demand.
Having shattered all previous experience of renewable power rollout, China’s huge surge in solar now actually puts us within striking distance of achieving a net zero path, driven by green electric power…
What we are witnessing is the most rapid take-up of a significant energy technology in history.
The response of Western politicians? Protectionism. Of course there are complex motives. They need to build coalitions to sustain the energy transition. They are worried about the CCP regime in China. They want to escape extreme dependence on imported sources of energy (though of course in the renewable space it is capital equipment not energy they are importing). But the more basic question is simply this. Are Western government and societies willing to prioritize the energy transition if it is not their drama, not their success story? Or, if the PV panels and the electric vehicles are from China, do other interests take priority?
In the European case one can see a compromise based on a balance between domestic and Chinese-sourced energy transition solutions. As Martin Sandbu has remarked there is at least the possibility of a grand bargain. In the case of the United States it seems increasingly clear that the energy transition as such is a second order concern, and geopolitical confrontation and the struggle to form domestic coalitions take precedence. That is depressing. And it matters. But, as Ember’s data make clear, it is far from being a decisive obstacle. The global energy transition will go on anyway…
“The beginning of a new era: How the ‘global’ energy transition is happening in China,” from @adam_tooze and @EmberClimate. Eminently worth reading in full (both Tooze’s summary and the Ember report).
Apposite (and divergent, though not opposite, from Tooze): “The climate case for Biden’s new China tariffs,” from @timmcdonnell in @semafor.
And this: “We might be closer to changing course on climate change than we realized,” from @voxdotcom.
* Nelson Mandela
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As we find solace where we can, we might spare a thought for Joseph Wood Krutch; he died on this date in 1970. An author, critic, and naturalist, he began his career in New York City, where he was a professor at Columbia and theater critic for The Nation, and where he wrote The Modern Temper (challenging the then-fashionable notions of scientific progress and optimism), biographies of Samuel Johnson and Henry David Thoreau, and (inspired by Thoreau) The Twelve Seasons, Krutch’s first nature book.
In 1952, on doctor’s orders, Krutch left the East for Tucson and the Sonoran Desert, where he began writing about ecology, the southwestern desert environment, and the natural history of the Grand Canyon. He won renown as a naturalist, nature writer, and an early conservationist for works like The Voice of the Desert and The Desert Year, arguing that human beings must move beyond purely human centered conceptions of “conservation” and learn to value nature for its own sake.
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