James Cameron's "organic vegetable farm" in New Zealand now had dairy cows on it →

From Radio New Zealand:

“James Cameron's plans to convert his Wairarapa properties into organic veggie farms appear to have fallen short - with hundreds of cows now understood to be grazing in his paddocks.

“The Avatar film director owns more than 1500 hectares of land in South Wairarapa, and has been outspoken about the need for New Zealand to move away from agriculture to curb carbon emissions.

“Locals say he's not walking the talk - with plans for crop farming giving way to more lucrative dairy grazing.

“However, they did note the farm had moved to get away from agriculture, that there was no intensive stock grazing taking place, and that staff did an excellent job with the property.”

Can you smell a whiff of non-disclosure agreement in the air?

“Checkpoint contacted many South Wairarapa residents for this story. Most did not want to speak, citing non-disclosure agreements they had signed due to connections with the Cameron Family Farms.”

In earlier times:

"You can't really talk about reducing emissions in New Zealand without talking about the future of ag[riculture] and food," Cameron said.

"The elephant in the room - or the cow in the room - here is obviously animal agriculture."

“It was a cause the Camerons obviously cared a lot about. They shut down two dairy farms when they bought land near Featherston and established a large vegetable-growing operation.

“Their website proudly states that 'Cameron Family Farms are dedicatedly leading the next generations of eco-warriors and farmers towards large scale animal-free organic eco-agriculture'.

“Wairarapa locals say those words are starting to sound like a bunch of hot air.”

Perhaps the facts-on-the-ground have won out:

“MacKenzie said there was plenty of interest when the Cameron's first came to town and announced their plans.

"For anybody coming in and specifically wanting to grow new sorts of crops and vegetables - which was their emphasis - we thought 'well, this is going to be interesting to watch', just to see how successful it's going to be."

“She said while the farm originally did have a lot of organically grown vegetables and crops, those activities appeared to have ground to a halt over the past year.

"I think they were unrealistic given the sort of climate and conditions, particularly in this area, that you would ever run a farm without animals."

Lots of speculation here but it does sound like dairy cows are grazing on the Camerons’ land, even if they’re being milked somewhere else.

We’ll see if Cameron has something to say about all this before Avatar 19 comes out.

[Cover photo: Environmental activist Suzy Amis Cameron with her husband, hollywood director James Cameron, at the Just Transition event. Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin]

The New York Times Changes its 52 Places to Visit to 52 Places to Love →

Each year the New York Times creates travel urges across a whole swathe of the planet’s richest humans.

Planes are—of course—usually involved.

For 2021, however, they write:

“But in this pandemic year, creating our usual list was out of the question. For one thing, there were the logistics: We usually deploy a small army of photographers in search of those perfect images. That was clearly impossible. Beyond that, our list is built on a journalistic imperative: What’s new? What makes a place so exciting and different — hotel openings, new museums, an expanding food or cultural scene — that it jumps to the top of the list of places to see now? But the pandemic has put a hold on most of those newsworthy developments.”

For their 2020 list, it was clear they’d had at least a sniff of the oncoming environmental shitshow, using phrases like, ‘An island chain devastated by hurricanes rebounds with an environmental bent’, and, ‘The small town of Rurrenabaque is the gateway to a lush and thrillingly beautiful part of northwestern Bolivia that offers a twofer for tourists passionate about supporting efforts toward sustainability and protecting endangered species.’

Passionate enough about sustainability to go overland from New York to Bolivia?

Cripes, even going overland from Bolivia to Bolivia is pretty intense.

The 2021 blurb continues:

“Instead, in 2021, we face a year of uncertainty. With vaccines newly available, perhaps the travel industry — which supplies millions of jobs and is a crucial part of the global economy — will start to revive. But it’s hard to know when and where that rebirth will begin. And a list that seems to encourage people to rush back onto planes when so many are suffering felt unconscionable.”

I think they got the reason for not encouraging people back onto planes wrong.

Here’s what they ended up doing:

“Instead of turning to our contributors and correspondents, we turned to another group of passionate travelers, our readers, and asked them to tell us about their most beloved places, and why they deserved a place on our list, as well as to share their photographs.”

So, basically, create wanderlust involving flights at a later date, rather than flights right now.

Perfect!

Here’s the list they came up with.

Americans could get to 11 of the 52 without flying, in theory. More, of course, if they have a sailboat.

In the end, a lost opportunity for the New York Times to present 52 places you can train and bus to from North America. Though I guess their international readership was a factor in this decision.

Why not do both?

[Cover photo: Carrie Dovzak, whose story is on of the 52 ‘Places to Love’ for 2021]

China and Eating Animals. →

As a follow-up to yesterday’s piece, China is important when it comes to how the planet deals with too many rich people wanting to eat heaps of meat, since there are 1.4 billion Chinese and they are getting richer by the second.

From the Guardian:

“The window of a KFC in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou hosts the image of a familiar mound of golden nuggets. But this overflowing bucket sporting Colonel Sanders’ smiling face is slightly different. The bucket is green and the nuggets within it are completely meat free.

“Over the last couple of years, after many years of rising meat consumption by China’s expanding middle classes for whom eating pork every day was a luxurious sign of new financial comforts, the green shoots of a vegan meat revolution have begun to sprout. Although China still consumes 28% of the world’s meat, including half of all pork, and boasts a meat market valued at $86bn (£62bn), plant-based meat substitutes are slowing carving out a place for themselves among a new generation of consumers increasingly alarmed by food crises such as coronavirus and African swine fever.”

How Chinese pork is “farmed” I’ll leave to your imagination (though it’s similar to the way most of the bacon eaten in New Zealand is farmed: imported from Spanish factory farms), so before criticising the Chinese it might be best to have a good look at the fine print next time you buy some; if it’s farmed in New Zealand, there’s a better chance the pigs weren’t tortured like they were in Spain.

“China’s most cosmopolitan cities are now home to social media groups, websites and communities dedicated to meat-free lifestyles. VegeRadar, for example, has compiled comprehensive maps of vegetarian and vegan restaurants all across China. According to a report by the Good Food Institute, China’s plant-based meat market was estimated at 6.1bn yuan (£675m) in 2018 and projected to grow between 20 and 25% annually.

“Yun Fanwei, a 25-year-old student from Shanghai, is one of a new breed of vegetarians hungry for more options. “I buy some of these fake meat products and a lot of them are pretty good. They don’t necessarily taste like meat, but it makes a nice change from tofu,” she said.”

A nice change from tofu is a pretty low bar lol.

Here’s the basic proof of how eating meats trends with wealth:

“Eating meat has been closely connected with the growing affluence of China. In the 1960s, the average Chinese person consumed 5kg of meat a year. This had shot up to 20kg by the time of former leader Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” of the late 1970s, and to 48kg by 2015.”

Two things here: meat eating per capita rose by a factor of ten, and the population doubled too. So consumption increased by a factor of twenty.

To create this much meat, you also create all of the pandemics (including the current one—probably) we’ve seen come out of Asia in the last twenty years.

“But in 2016, as part of its pledge to bring down carbon emissions, the Chinese government outlined a plan to cut the country’s meat intake by 50%. It was a radical move, and so far very few other governments around the world have included meat consumption in their carbon-reduction plans.

“The new guidelines, which called on citizens to consume just 40-75g of meat a day, were promoted with a series of public information adverts featuring the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and director James Cameron. Since then there have been few other concrete steps taken, other than the president, Xi Jinping, last August launching a “clean plate campaign” aimed at reducing the “shocking and distressing” 40% of food that goes straight from Chinese dinner tables into the bin.”

Arnie and James Cameron!

“Yao admits the industry is still very small in China but he thinks meat-free substitutes will become mainstream very soon. “Chinese consumers are actively looking for more sustainable products. While the link between meat and the environment is still weak among the majority of the population, the interest is there and China learns fast.”

Yes, it does.

[Cover photo: An advertisement for plant-based products at a KFC store in Hangzhou. International and domestic chains are expanding their range of meat alternatives. VCG/Getty Images]

Burgers for a better planet →

My opinion is at the bottom. Here’s Margaret Renki in the New York Times:

“My 91-year-old father-in-law happily eats plant-based hamburgers. That gives me a little more hope for the environment.

“Here is how my father-in-law now begins every meal at our house: He asks the blessing, unfolds his napkin and prepares to tuck in. Then he pauses, his fork still in the air, and asks, “Is this real meat?”

“No air of suspicion accompanies the question. He’s simply curious. Is what he’s about to put into his mouth the kind of food he’s been eating for nearly all of his 91 years? Or does it merely look (and smell and feel and taste) like something he’s been eating for nearly all of his 91 years?

“That similarity to real meat — its appeal to the senses, the way it mimics the experience of eating familiar foods — is exactly what the fake-meat industry has invested immense resources into achieving. In recent weeks I’ve served my family plant-based spaghetti and meatballs, plant-based tacos, plant-based breakfast sausage, plant-based bratwurst and two brands of plant-based hamburgers, almost always without telling anyone what they were eating until the meal was over.

“It all started when I read “Meat Hooked,” a chapter in “The Fate of Food,” Amanda Little’s wide-ranging examination of how we’ll eat in “a bigger, hotter, smarter world,” as the book’s subtitle puts it. According to Ms. Little, “Livestock production accounts for about 15 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally, more than all forms of transportation combined.” And that’s not even taking into account the water resources monopolized by livestock production or the deforestation caused when land is cleared for grazing.

“Worse, the demand for meat keeps growing. Worldwide, it has nearly doubled in the past 30 years and is expected to double again by 2050. Already, the single greatest cause of deforestation in the Amazon is cattle ranching, accounting for 80 percent of newly lost forest. “Razing forests to graze cattle,” writes Tad Friend in a brilliant piece for The New Yorker, “turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.”

Obviously, this is not a good thing, no matter your taste preferences, no matter how inconsequential you consider your personal meat-eating impact to be.

“Clearly, any food that can disrupt this planet-threatening trend is a welcome development, but are the new meat substitutes truly feasible replacements for meat? At my house, reports have been varied. The Beyond Burger and the Pure Farmland breakfast sausage were a hit all the way around: All three generations at the table pronounced them delicious. (“This is a good piece of meat,” my father-in-law remarked, unprovoked, before learning his burger’s true provenance.) Beyond’s bratwurst and Pure Farmland’s meatballs earned family scores that ranged from zero to 10. Pure’s “plant-based protein starters” crumbled nicely during browning but remained a disconcerting shade of red. Even so, the casserole I made with it tasted no different from the same casserole made with regular breakfast sausage. Beyond’s “beefy crumbles,” by contrast, were truly enjoyed by no one in my house, although the college junior ate the leftover casserole for lunch at least twice, apparently preferring even unappealing leftovers to cooking something for himself.

“The Impossible Burger cannot be distinguished from a real hamburger by half the people who eat it in a taste test, according to Mr. Friend, but they are not yet sold in grocery stores here, so I took the college junior and a 12-year-old family friend to Burger King for a true taste test. The 12-year-old ordered her burgers the same way she eats all burgers: just bread and “meat.” The college student ordered his with the works. After blindfolding them, I gave each one a bite of both a regular Whopper and an Impossible Whopper. Neither one was fooled. After only one bite, they both correctly identified which burger was which. Then they both ate both burgers. The Impossible Whopper might not taste exactly like a traditional Whopper, it turns out, but it tasted perfectly good to them.”

I’ve tried a couple of these burger patty replacements. One of them wasn’t even trying to really taste meaty. And neither of them did.

I’m guessing they’ll get there in the end with the meatiness. But personally I’m not really bothered. There’s plenty of good, decent, tasty meat-free food out there that doesn’t try to trick you with looking and tasting like meat.

Everyone has their own path to take.

[Cover photo: Con Poulos for The New York Times]

New Jersey is going all-in on freakin' massive offshore wind turbines →

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“New Jersey is betting big on offshore wind — not just to reduce carbon emissions, but with high hopes of transforming into a dominant player in renewable energy along the East Coast and wresting away manufacturing dominated by Europe.

“The state’s powerful Democrats, unions, and business leaders say their ambition means jobs, lots of them, over the next two decades or longer.

“We’re talking about a whole new workforce of construction and maintenance jobs, work for architects and engineers of all types, mapping and surveying, computer and telecommunications, transportation and maintenance jobs,” said Jane Asselta, vice president of the Southern New Jersey Economic Development Council, a nonprofit.

“Painting and skilled metal manufacturing jobs, legal, accounting, banking, and financial services. The list of services and materials needed goes on and on,” Asselta said. “Not since the casino industry came to South Jersey have we seen a workforce of this size being created.”

How big is New Jersey aiming?

This big:

SOURCE: European Wind Energy Association; Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. DOMINIQUE DeMOE / Staff Artist.

The numbers for one turbine (again from the Philadelphia Enquirer):

  • A five-inch-thick, 400-foot-long, 2,500-ton steel monopile gets driven into the ocean floor as the foundation.

  • A tower, a rotating nacelle that contains a drive train, and three 305-foot-long blades are attached atop each monopile.

  • When complete, the GE Haliade-X turbine will rise 853 feet above the Atlantic Ocean — roughly as tall as the Two Liberty Place skyscraper in Philadelphia.

Perhaps the most amazing number of all: with one rotation, one of these wind turbines basically powers one house for one day!

Mindblowing.

The first project to get underway will have up to 99 of these babies. Each time they all rotate: 99 houses sorted for the day. 99 for the next rotation. 99 for the next rotation…

I believe you get the picture.

“When complete in 2024 the wind farm, located in federal waters, will generate 1,100 megawatts, enough to annually power 500,000 homes as one of the largest facilities of its kind in the United States.

“But that’s just the start of the state’s plan under Gov. Phil Murphy. New Jersey expects five more projects, or “solicitations,” meaning many more turbines will be needed to achieve the goal of 7,500 megawatts through 2035, enough to power 3.2 million homes. The next solicitation to be awarded this year could be twice the size of Ocean Wind.”

As for the environmental impact of actually building wind turbines, with these massive ones it takes a matter of months for the Co2 emitted to build them (using non-renewable energy sources) to be paid back into the system as renewable energy.

However, this renewable energy cannot be used to make the concrete needed to build future turbines, since concrete requires crazy high temperatures that currently must come from burning fossil fuels, not electricity. I need to look a little more into how it all balances out (or doesn’t) in the end. Does making all that concrete for so many wind turbines stuff up global emissions targets anyway?

It’s a good question.

It's been a week without train news!

YouTube has started to work out that I’m a closet trainspotter.

Woe is me!

My brother sent me this cool video of a dude taking the “newer” Amtrak sleeping car wagon from New York to Miami (and from snow to flip-flops!).

Looks pretty rad. Just have to avoid those Spring Breakers sharing their slobbery Covid-19 saliva all over the show.

And that video fed me on like a raging train-maniac to a video about a little-known night train that goes right across Poland from the top north-west border with Germany to the bottom south-east border with the Ukraine. Here’s an idea of that trip:

The actual connection Google finds is not the night train, which is direct and leaves Świnoujście at 4:28 pm, getting to Przemyśl at 9:18 am. I’m particularly interested in this direction because I immediately wondered: Can you get from Paris in the morning to catch this train onwards to the border to Ukraine in one day-night extravaganza?

Well, you can’t at the moment: you miss the connection by a few hours. You can get from Paris to Szczecin (just below Świnoujście) at 6:54 pm but the night trains leaves there at… 6:40 pm! Gahhhhh! So you miss the connection by less than half an hour! Ah well…

Here’s the video of that night train by the way:

I checked. You can get your own personal bed compartment (a single!) for you alone for around 85 €, right across Poland.

That’s a good deal!

Once night trains start again out of Paris heading east towards Central Europe, more efficient options for connecting up with the eastern edges of Europe will start to pop up like my new game: whack-a-train.

Can’t wait!

Welcome to Spring! →

Sorry…

If you’re in nearly every country in the world, Spring is cancelled this year.

It’s also cancelled for these Australian songbirds:

“Everyone else seems to know the song, except you.

“Humans who sing karaoke know the feeling. So do birds, apparently, and it’s a big problem for one avian species in Australia.

“As the population of the critically endangered regent honeyeater plummeted over the years, some young birds could no longer find older ones to teach them to sing, a new study reports. As a result, the birds have failed to learn the songs they need for courtship and other evolutionary business.

“They try to compensate by mimicking songs from other types of birds. But because female regent honeyeaters aren’t easily moved by unfamiliar melodies, the courtship ritual is doomed to fail.

“A failed tryst or two wouldn’t be a reproductive problem for a healthy population. But for a species with an estimated 200 to 400 members spread across an area of southeastern Australia that is larger than the United Kingdom, the loss of singing culture may be what the researchers called a “precursor to extinction.”

Or as another scientist puts is:

“It’s an exquisite piece of work that tells a terrible story,” David Watson, a professor of ecology at Charles Sturt University in Australia who was not involved in the research, said of the new study.

“It is carefully conducted science, reasonable and evidence-based inferences that, in a few short pages, describe what the extinction of a species sounds like,” Professor Watson said in an email. “It doesn’t happen with a bang but with a slow drawn-out whimper.”

New app idea: TinderBird.

Is Sergey Brin trying to secretly make flying low-carbon? →

This piqued my interest:

“Although back in 2017 the word on the street was that Brin intended the aircraft to serve at least in part as a luxurious “air yacht” for his family and friends, the LTA website states only humanitarian goals: “LTA airships will have the ability to complement — and even speed up — humanitarian disaster response and relief efforts, especially in remote areas that cannot be easily accessed by plane and boat due to limited or destroyed infrastructure.”

“Unlike jet planes, airships have the ability to land or deliver goods almost anywhere.

“In addition, the LTA site says that their airships are intended to serve as a zero emissions alternative to airplanes, used for both shipping goods and moving people. Climate change has made airships sound more appealing to scientists in recent years — while slower than airplanes, airships are faster than cargo ships and have fewer emissions than both boats and planes. In fact, airships produce 80% to 90% fewer emissions than conventional aircraft.”

I wonder whether the humanitarian stuff is just a smokescreen and he’s actually aiming to transform flying as we know it.

He appears to be to use a hydrogen cell for propulsion and helium for lift. The other option would have been a battery, but that would have been too heavy, as far as I can tell.

A question floating in the air is how do you obtain the hydrogen? What emissions are involved in that? The current trend seems to be building renewables (wind, solar), then using them to produce hydrogen. So it ends up being a complicated calculation between the payoff of building renewables today (using a mix of fossil fuel and renewable energy) and how fast we tend towards a fully-renewable future.

Another practical question when it comes to passenger transport is: 'How fast do these babies fly?’ A quick online look suggests they glide at around 1/5 the speed of today’s planes.

What would that mean for example for flights between New Zealand and Australia? It’s currently around three hours from coast to coast. The airship would therefore take around fifteen hours. Set up with beds for everyone, it could be a simple overnight flight.

One last thing: hopefully they’ve also discovered how to stop hydrogen-fueled airships blowing up!

[Cover photo: Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images. Above photo: The Hindenburg exploding]

Mexico starts thinking about trains again

Even in 1978, Paul Theroux struggled to join up trains from Boston all the way down to Patagonia for his book, The Old Patagonian Express. He had more luck in Mexico than in other countries though.

Since then, as The Man in Seat 61 puts it:

“Mexico used to have a good train service linking all major cities, using restaurant cars, sleeping-cars and observation cars, many inherited from the USA. Sadly, the Mexican government pulled the plug on almost all long-distance passenger train service some years ago, and buses and planes are now the only way to get around Mexico. A couple of very minor service exist in certain areas, including the famous scenic 'Copper Canyon' service.”

Which is why today’s news story from National Geographic gave me caliente fuzzies:

“The sun has yet to rise as Algeria Aguilar Peña boards the bus for the 42-mile journey from her home in Toluca to Mexico City, where she operates a street food stand. “Right now, while the buses aren’t yet running completely, sometimes it takes me three [hours],” she says of the commute she has traveled daily for the last 40 years.

“Aguilar Peña is one of the thousands of vendors, hairdressers, and other professionals who make their way into Mexico City from the surrounding state. They spend an average of 2.5 hours each day in traffic, or about 45 days out of the year (pre-pandemic), according to a 2017 report by Mexico’s Universal newspaper. 

“But a handful of passenger train projects are poised to bring big changes to the lives of locals and travelers alike. Four are under way, with about a dozen more planned. The biggest—and most controversial—is President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Tren Maya, which would connect the five southern states of the Yucatán Peninsula.”

Here’s the upside:

“All told, López Obrador promises to add 1,200 miles of track to the country’s 16,600 by the end of his term in 2024. If completed, these new trains would mean life-changing shorter commutes and faster transportation for the millions of post-pandemic tourists who are expected to travel throughout the country each year. The environment, too, could benefit from the thousands of polluting cars and buses that trains would pull off the roads for decades to come.”

There are however real downsides to some of the more extreme plans. For instance, the proposed Tren Maya would go through forested areas like the one shown below on the Yucatan Peninsula:

I get it. One idea perhaps would be to put the train line next to the road most of the way. At least then there wouldn’t be much cutting through remote forest. I understand the opposition to it though.

At a minimum, maybe they should simply renovate and bring back all the lines that existed before. That would be a great start!

[Photo: AGENCIA EL UNIVERSAL, AP IMAGES]

Trains, planes and automobiles →

Some glass half-full half-empty (depending on what side of the bed you got out of) trains and planes news out of Germany:

“German Rail (DB) and German airline Lufthansa have announced plans to connect a further five cities to the Lufthansa Express Rail network in the second half of this year using extra-fast Sprinter trains. 

“The service will expand to Frankfurt Airport from Hamburg and Munich from July, with additional connections to the airport from Berlin, Bremen and Münster from December. This will coincide with the launch of new sprinter services that will reduce the Munich – Cologne journey time to under four hours. Two daily return services without intermediate stops will be introduced from Munich and Nuremberg to Frankfurt Airport, further reducing the journey time by half an hour. 

“DB and Lufthansa already offer 134 daily services from 17 cities to Frankfurt Airport, following a previous expansion of the scheme in July 2020 to include services to and from Hannover, Leipzig and Basle.”

Here’s a map of the train network feeding into Frankfurt’s airport:

franfurtplanetrain.png

You can probably guess what the glass half-full feeling is: More Trains!

You can probably guess what the glass half-empty feeling is: To Help People Catch Planes!

This is obviously a pre-emptive strike against a near future in which domestic flights in Germany will be banned if there is a train that can do the same route as the flight takes in under a few hours. It’s already started in France.

If the following issue isn’t properly dealt with however, it’s a very “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” move: What will Lufthansa do with the airport slots it frees up from reducing domestic flights? If it uses them to increase international flight capacity down the line, emissions will actually increase overall!

I’m not entirely sure what benefit Lufthansa gets out of this otherwise.

[Photos c/o DB]

Where pandemics come from →

There is an uncomfortable truth hanging in the air as the Covid-19 pandemic screeches on. From Friedman in the New York Times:

“…if you talk to wildlife veterinarians and other conservationists, they will tell you that the breakout of SARS-CoV-2 from an animal living in the wilderness to humans was not only NOT surprising, but that a similar outbreak could happen again soon. So, don’t throw away your leftover masks.

“I really like how one of the organizers, Cornell University’s Steve Osofsky, a wildlife veterinarian, summarized how the health of wildlife, the health of ecosystems and our own health are inextricably linked.

“To say that a majority of emerging viruses come from wildlife is not to blame wild creatures, explained Osofsky. It is to make the point that through our own behaviors we “invite these viruses into humanity’s living room: We eat the body parts of wild animals; we capture and mix wild species together in markets for sale; and we destroy what’s left of wild nature at a dizzying pace — think deforestation — all greatly enhancing our encounter rates with new pathogens.”

“What these three behaviors have in common, added Osofsky, is one “surprisingly simple underlying cause: our broken relationship with wild nature, often based on a hubris that we are somehow separate from the rest of life on earth.”

Did you know humans are also animals. Surprising, yet true!

And there are a lot of us and we tend to be right utter bastards when it comes to the rest of the planet, whether it be destroying or killing or both.

If it moves, stick it in ya pie-hole quick fast!

As Friedman notes, first you have to spot that the problem is a problem.

“First, recognizing that many of the zoonotic viruses that can cause pandemics can jump to humans via so-called wet markets, which sell a mix of domestic and wild creatures from the land and sea — all crowded together, along with the pathogens they carry.”

Osofsky does not mince words either:

“While we missed our chance to stop SARS-CoV-1 and now SARS-CoV-2 from emerging, how many more times must humanity allow this cycle to repeat?” asked Osofsky. “It’s time for markets selling wildlife (especially mammals and birds) in places where people have other sources of nutrition to be deemed totally unacceptable to humanity.”

Good luck stopping humans munching animal bodies though. Is Covid-19 the scourge, or is it actually us?

[Cover photo: Data from United Nations "World Population Prospects 2019"]

Cheaper carbon capture is in the pipeline →

From phys.org:

“As part of a marathon research effort to lower the cost of carbon capture, chemists have now demonstrated a method to seize carbon dioxide (CO2) that reduces costs by 19 percent compared to current commercial technology. The new technology requires 17 percent less energy to accomplish the same task as its commercial counterparts, surpassing barriers that have kept other forms of carbon capture from widespread industrial use. And it can be easily applied in existing capture systems.

“At a cost of $400-$500 million per unit, commercial technology can capture carbon at roughly $58.30 per metric ton of CO2, according to a DOE analysis. EEMPA, according to Jiang's study, can absorb CO2 from power plant flue gas and later release it as pure CO2 for as little as $47.10 per metric ton, offering an additional technology option for power plant operators to capture their CO2.”

Interesting side note:

“One of the first known patents for solvent-based carbon capture technology cropped up in 1930, filed by Robert Bottoms.

"I kid you not," said green chemist David Heldebrant, coauthor of the new study. "Ninety-one years ago, Bottoms used almost the same process design and chemistry to address what we now know as a 21st century problem."

So what’s next?

“They will continue testing at increasing scales and further refine the solvent's chemistry, with the aim to reach the U.S. Department of Energy's goal of deploying commercially available technology that can capture CO2 at a cost of $30 per metric ton by 2035.”

The current consensus is that we’re going to have to get Co2 out of the air with carbon capture processes like these.

Small wins like this are still wins.

[Photo: Michael Perkins | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory]

A bolt from the blue! →

Some truths are hard to swallow.

One of those truths is that to get worldwide emissions down, less planes will be able to fly. We can yell and scream at this “truth”, but reality always wins in the end. There is simply not the technology in the pipeline to bring current or near-future planes’ emissions down fast enough.

So, less planes will be flying. How does this happen in a capitalist world?

Either by law changes decreeing it so, or by price increases, or both.

Perhaps the most coherent way to do it here will be to make it increasingly expensive to fly, using a carbon tax for instance. It would have to scale up pretty fast though—say in the next 5-10 years—to really start to bite.

And…..

Into this context of self-evident truth flies Air New Zealand. In some sense, this airline has the most to lose when it comes to cracking down on airline emissions, simply because New Zealand is so goddam far away from the rest of the planet.

And Air New Zealand knows it.

It already has a fully-fledged sustainability mechanism in place, which can be examined in detail on its website.

The reality though is that there are only so many trees you can plant to offset emissions, and more importantly: it doesn’t matter if you decrease the average emissions per passenger kilometre if you are intending to expand your network (and thus increase total emissions), as is normal in a capitalist setting.

And Air New Zealand knows it.

I almost fell off my chair the other day when the Guardian fed me this article:

“Air New Zealand’s chief environmental adviser has said he is in favour of increasing the price of flights to New Zealand and “putting off some people coming” as the country considers a new approach to tourism post-Covid.

“In an interview with Newsroom published on Tuesday, the airline’s chief environmental adviser, Sir Jonathon Porritt, said he supported hiking the price of international flights to pay for the greenhouse gas emissions they generated.

“His comments followed a recommendation by the parliamentary commissioner for the environment, Simon Upton, that people departing New Zealand (including citizens) should be required to pay a departure tax to offset the environmental cost of flying .

“As proposed by Upton, the tax could add as much as $155 (£80) to an economy fare to the United Kingdom and would be used to fund climate initiatives in the Pacific.”

Putting aside the fact that the tax should be much higher, this is pretty revolutionary stuff. An international airline’s advisor is suggesting that ticket prices need to go up.

He didn’t shut right up there either. He kept going!

“But he said that the aviation industry urgently needed to be forced to reduce its emissions and that there was “no going back” to tourism as it was pre-Covid. Porritt said air travel was a privilege, not a right.

“Controversial though it may be, I’m in favour of putting off some people coming to New Zealand. I just don’t believe in the idea that the number of international visitors to New Zealand can grow and grow and grow without limits. I just don’t believe that is credible [or] right. So, if a higher price for the privilege of flying to New Zealand puts some people off, good.”

Amazeballs.

Sometimes I feel like I’m flogging away at a dead horse here, but this is definitely not one of those times.

I have an up-and-coming project that deals with exactly this issue when it comes to over-tourism in New Zealand. I’ll let you know more about it when the time comes!

Until then, try to hold on to your chair!

[Photo: imageBROKER/Alamy]

Pandemic aviation and what comes next in 2021

From the New York Times:

“The pandemic upended commercial aviation. One way to visualize the effect of lockdowns on air travel is to consider the number of passengers screened on a daily basis at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints.

“Traveler screenings plunged in March before hitting a low point on April 14, when 87,534 passengers were screened — a 96 percent decline as compared with the same date in 2019.

“Numbers have risen relatively steadily since then, though today the screening figures still sit at less than half of what they were a year earlier.

“According to the International Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, global passenger traffic in 2020 fell by 65.9 percent as compared to 2019, the largest year-on-year decline in aviation history.”

As for the Co2 emissions:

“According to figures from Carbon Monitor, an international initiative that provides estimates of daily CO2 emissions, worldwide emissions from aviation fell by nearly 50 percent last year — to around 500 million metric tons of CO2, down from around 1 billion metric tons in 2019.”

Notice the difference between a 69.5% drop and a 50% drop. That’s because the planes that were flying had less people in them—on average—in 2020.

There has not been any large-scale reckoning on what to do with the insane-emissions aviation industry post-Covid. There has been a deafening silence from the top of all of the tops. Too much of the world’s money flow depends on people boarding flying cucumbers for politicians to even get close to taking a stand on this one: tourism, the aviation and aeronautics industries, and all the jobs that go with them.

Hot potato!

As Greta would no doubt say though, this is a choice we are making as a species. And choices have consequences.

And this planet that keeps us alive is increasingly walloping us back when we slap it on the backside.

For Planet Earth, No Tourism is a Curse and a Blessing →

From the New York Times:

“With flights canceled, cruise ships mothballed and vacations largely scrapped, carbon emissions plummeted. Wildlife that usually kept a low profile amid a crush of tourists in vacation hot spots suddenly emerged. And a lack of cruise ships in places like Alaska meant that humpback whales could hear each other’s calls without the din of engines.

“That’s the good news. On the flip side, the disappearance of travellers wreaked its own strange havoc, not only on those who make their living in the tourism industry, but on wildlife itself, especially in developing countries. Many governments pay for conservation and enforcement through fees associated with tourism. As that revenue dried up, budgets were cut, resulting in increased poaching and illegal fishing in some areas. Illicit logging rose too, presenting a double-whammy for the environment. Because trees absorb and store carbon, cutting them down not only hurt wildlife habitats, but contributed to climate change.”

As for air quality:

“The pandemic helped push American emissions below 1990 levels for the first time. Globally, carbon dioxide emissions fell 7 percent, or 2.6 billion metric tons, according to new data from international climate researchers. In terms of output, that is about double the annual emissions of Japan.

“It’s a lot and it’s a little,” said Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Historically, it’s a lot. It’s the largest single reduction percent-wise over the last 100 years. But when you think about the 7 percent in the context of what we need to do to mitigate climate change, it’s a little.”

“In late 2019, the United Nations Environment Program cautioned that global greenhouse gases would need to drop 7.6 percent every year between 2020 and 2030. That would keep the world on its trajectory of meeting the temperature goals set under the Paris Agreement, the 2016 accord signed by nearly 200 nations.

“The 7 percent drop last year is on par with what we would need to do year after year,” Dr. Smerdon said. “Of course we wouldn’t want to do it the same way. A global pandemic and locking ourselves in our apartments is not the way to go about this.”

Sobering.

From an extremely simplistic point of view, there are two converging problems: (1) The richest 10% of the planet is pumping out more than half of the (way way way too high) emissions; and (2) Some of the poorest parts of the planet have increasing populations that require more and more resources just to survive, and ironically these are (sometimes) places with plentiful “resources” left, including forests and land (after burning the forests) which can be “tapped” when other sources of income (e.g., tourism) drop off the cliff.

We’re currently fucked due to both.

Emissions have recovered to pre-pandemic levels and the pandemic isn't even over →

From CNN:

“Global emissions of heat-trapping gases fell dramatically last year as the pandemic forced much of the world to a halt. But new data has shown they are bouncing back -- fast.

“Lockdown measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus caused a 7% drop in CO2 emissions over the course of 2020 -- the biggest drop ever recorded -- a study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change estimates.

That was then.

“New data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) published on Tuesday showed global energy-related emissions were actually 2% higher in December 2020 than they were in the same month a year earlier -- and that was despite parts of the world still experiencing lockdowns.

“Fatih Birol, the IEA's executive director, said the rebound in carbon emissions was "a stark warning that not enough is being done to accelerate clean energy transitions worldwide."

"If governments don't move quickly with the right energy policies, this could put at risk the world's historic opportunity to make 2019 the definitive peak in global emissions," he said in a statement.”

There is no way 2019 will be the definitive peak. Hopefully 2019 is at least a false summit, and the true peak isn’t too far off.

In order to keep warming below 2°C, we basically need the 7% drop from 2020 to be repeated in 2021, and then repeated again in 2022, and so on.

In other breaking news: pigs truly can fly. You heard it here first, folks.

Wish us luck, alien life-forms on Mars.

[Cover photo: JPL/Cornell/NASA]

All the blog posts I never got around to writing

A year or two before I started blogging on climate stuff, I’d begun to notice a gradual increase—day by day, month by month—in articles appearing on the climate crisis.

By the time I started blogging in mid-2019, the chance of not finding some sweet new daily hell to worry about was already tending quickly to zero.

Today, in 2021, there’s a slight glimmer in the ratio of positive stories to negative ones, like a tiny signal in the noise, trying to break out and be seen. Maybe 1-2% of stories are now positive or hopeful.

Let’s not kid ourselves though that there’s not a bounteous shitshow still heading straight for our noggins.

From a personal point of view, ask yourself: Have you changed your behaviour in some way in the last two years in response to the climate crisis? Even in some small way, like more recycling? A little less meat? Turning the lights off when you leave a room?

We’ve all been taking fewer flights (thanks Covid!) but are you thinking of dialling down the flights even after the pandemic has slowed to a simmer?

Think about it.

Right this second I’m in a train and we are gliding past wind turbines as the sun rises over little French villages south of Paris. Lovely.

As I will never get around to writing about all of this, here’s a little peep at of all the climate articles that could have appeared on the blog—but never made it—over the last two years.

Peace out.

One of those humans are dicks stories →

Usually I refuse to even click on stories with “Outraged” in the title.

But there are exceptions:

“Butter doesn't get soft in my house at room temperature, but I always figured that's because the thermostat stays at 65˚F (18˚C). It turns out, though, that butter's persistent firmness has less to do with my preference for a cool home and more with what Canadian dairy farmers are feeding their cows.

“Reports have emerged in recent weeks of cows being fed supplements derived from palm oil to increase the butterfat content of their milk. The practice is partly a response to surging demand for butter during the pandemic, when everyone was baking more than ever, but the number of cows producing milk had not increased accordingly. The fastest way for the industry to respond was to boost butterfat in that milk using supplements.”

Where to begin on this one? Take a highly-polluting dairy industry not to mention all its methane emissions (burps and the occasional fart) and then start feeding its cows palm oil extracts from the tropical regions of planet that used to have virgin forest on them.

Win-win!

This is the kind of stuff that should end in prison sentences.

“Most disturbing for me, however, is the environmental piece of this puzzle. Palm oil has a notorious reputation for driving tropical deforestation, particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia, which produce 85% of the world's palm oil supply. This rapid expansion has destroyed habitats for the Sumatran rhino, orangutans, and pygmy elephants. Fires set to clear jungle growth and carbon-rich peat soils pollute the air, and some smolder for years, impossible to put out. Even national parks and protected regions are at risk, with WWF reporting that nearly half of Sumatra's Tesso Nilo National Park is now overrun with illegal palm plantations.”

Bet that’s a fun national park to visit? Have you passed a palm plantation before? It’s up there with looking at a bare concrete wall in terms of visual interest.

There are several shitty issues at play here. First, we in the rich “modern” world accept palm oil in many of the products we buy. Worse, we often don’t even know that it’s in there because you don’t have to write “palm oil” on the ingredients. If it says “vegetable oils” on the label, there’s a good chance it’s palm oil. How this kind of semantic bollocks is still legal is beyond me. Even worse, palm oil provides a certain texture in human mouths which people find pleasant, especially if you don’t tell them that the (life-changing) texture correlates with the death of an orangutan or two.

The deeper issue is therefore that there is not enough individual and institutional pushback against the idea that a 10% improvement in how a food feels in your mouth is worth the destruction of virgin forest and all the life in it. The reality is that it’s not just palm oil, it’s all oils added to food that are the problem. If you keep adding the oils and switch out palm oil with another oil, it’s worse. Palm oil is unbeatable in the oil family for quantity recovered per plantation area.

So the battle is to accept a compromise in how the Nutella feels in your mouth (with less palm oil or no oil in it one day) vs violating the planet and its non-human life, in very obvious ways. You can’t pretend this isn’t happening and just wish it all away. This stuff is bad. I find that each time I dream of eating Nutella, watching that video of the orangutan crying in the shattered remains of its Indonesian forest as the humans move in does the trick for a month or two.

At least we could start with the low-hanging fruit of products we know are full of palm oil and move up the pyramid of lies from there?

Which brings us back to the heart of the matter, all of this comes down to how special you think you personally are as a life form on Earth versus the rest of life on Earth, its ecosystems (some of which actually keep you alive, indirectly), its remaining majesty?

Though as even Greta knows, personal decisions and feelings have fuck all effect overall if not followed up by lobbying and law changes. I’m guessing we’re a bit screwed on this one, modulo a miracle or six.

But at least you can feel a little bit better about yourself if you choose to avoid the most obvious criminals like Ferrero, who makes Nutella, and Nestlé (if you’re clever enough to know that the product you’re buying is from Nestlé). With those motherfuckers, it’s not obvious though, they have their fingers in half of the planets pies (and pie holes): Aero bars, Kitkat, San Pellegrino, Maggi Soup, and even Häagen-Dasz (sorry people).

(Just to be clear, the latter does not have palm oil in it, and clearly San Pellegrino doesn’t either. These are just well-known brands of Nestlé. Kitkats do contain palm oil. So does Maggi soup. Why packet soup needs palm oil in it is beyond me.)

A couple of “resources” before we go:

Here’s a great write-up by Greenpeace on the shitshow that is global palm oil production and distribution.

And if you would like a world-class lesson in greenwashing, I suggest going to any Nestlé website and hunt around for pictures of trees and forests. I’m not going to link to their mythmaking though.