Source: Fast Company, Nichola Groom, Reuters
Photo: Pixabay

Environmental groups have been pushing for U.S. protection of the winged pollinators for a decade.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) proposed listing the monarch butterfly as a threatened species on Tuesday, citing a significant decline in the iconic black and orange insects that has pushed them toward extinction.

Why it’s important

Monarch butterflies, known for migrating thousands of miles (km) across North America, have experienced a decades-long U.S. population decline due to habitat loss caused by human activities such as farming and urban development, widespread use of pesticides and climate change.

Environmental groups have been pushing for U.S. protection of the winged pollinators for a decade.

Key quote

“The iconic monarch butterfly is cherished across North America, captivating children and adults throughout its fascinating lifecycle,” U.S. FWS Director Martha Williams said in a statement.

“Despite its fragility, it is remarkably resilient, like many things in nature when we just give them a chance. Science shows that the monarch needs that chance, and this proposed listing invites and builds on unprecedented public participation in shaping monarch conservation efforts,” she added

Context

Despite being recognized as needing federal protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) four years ago, the monarch butterfly waited behind dozens of other species facing more immediate threats.

The ESA, signed into law in 1973, is credited with helping to save the bald eagle, California condor and numerous other animals and plants from extinction. ESA protection makes it illegal to kill or harm species classified as threatened or endangered without a special permit.

By the numbers

The eastern migratory monarch population has declined by about 80% since the 1980s, while the western migratory population has dropped by more than 95%. The declines put the western populations at greater than 99% chance of extinction by 2080, according to the FWS.

The agency is proposing to designate 4,395 acres (1,780 hectares) in California as “critical habitat” for the butterflies. Federal agencies are prohibited from destroying or modifying areas with that designation.

What’s next

The public will have until March 12, 2025, to comment on the proposal to list the monarch butterfly. The service will then evaluate the comments and any additional information on the species to determine whether to list the monarch butterfly.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91247028/monarch-butterfly-threatened-species-status-us

Source: The Guardian, Isabel O’Brien
Photo: TikTok’s emissions are greater than that of the country that gave us democracy and gyros. (Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images)

Average user generates greenhouse gases equal to driving an extra 123 miles in gasoline-powered car a year, data shows

TikTok’s annual carbon footprint is probably larger than that of Greece, according to a new analysis of the social media platform’s environmental impact, with the average user generating greenhouse gases equivalent to driving an extra 123 miles in a gasoline-powered car each year.

Estimates from Greenly, a carbon accounting consultancy based in Paris, place TikTok’s 2023 emissions in the US, UK and France at about 7.6m metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) – higher than those associated with Twitter/X and Snapchat in the same region.

TikTok has 1 billion users worldwide and Greenly’s findings placed its carbon footprint just above Instagram’s – even though Instagram has nearly double TikTok’s user base.

The reason behind this lies in the unique addictiveness of TikTok’s platform. The average Instagram user spends 30.6 minutes on the app a day. Meanwhile, the average TikTok user spends 45.5 minutes scrolling.

“The whole algorithm is built around the massification of videos,” explained Alexis Normand, the chief executive of Greenly. “Addictiveness also has consequences in terms of incentivizing people to generate more and more [of a carbon] footprint on an individual basis.”

Given that the US, UK and France make up just under 15% of TikTok’s global user base, the platform’s overall carbon footprint is likely around 50m metric tonnes of CO2e. And since these data center calculations do not include other smaller sources of TikTok’s emissions, such as the emissions associated with office spaces and employee commuting, this is likely an underestimation.

For context, Greece’s annual carbon emissions for 2023 were 51.67m metric tonnes of CO2e.

TikTok’s users also have the second-highest emissions per minute of use on social media according to Greenly’s analysis, just after YouTube. One minute on TikTok will burn 2.921 grams of CO2e, on average, while one minute on YouTube will burn 2.923 grams. One minute on Instagram burns 2.912 grams.

The small differences add up. Due to the sheer amount of content on the platform, as well as longer average scroll times, TikTok users have the highest yearly emissions. The average TikTok user will burn 48.49kg of CO2e on the app in one year, according to Greenly’s analysis. In second place comes YouTube, with an average user burning 40.17kg of CO2e. Instagram users will burn just 32.52kg of CO2e.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, that’s the difference between driving a gas car driving 123 miles (TikTok), 102 miles (YouTube) and 82.8 miles (Instagram).

The study examined the carbon footprint associated with each user per minute by incorporating the emissions associated with data centers, which made up about 99% of the footprint, and the emissions associated with charging devices after using the platforms.

TikTok’s emissions are the most opaque of the social media platforms. Tech giants such as Meta and Google release detailed reports to the Carbon Disclosure Project every year, even posting their findings to their respective websites. TikTok has no publicly available emissions data.

Other social media companies, while also reporting sky-high emissions, have made commitments to power their data centers with clean energy. The quality of these commitments varies widely. An investigation by the Guardian showed that four of the five top tech companies were using offset-like renewable energy credits (Recs) to underreport their emissions data by approximately 662%.

TikTok has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by 2030. The company has a plan called “Project Clover”, implemented in 2023, that is tasked with meeting this goal while enhancing overall data security. However, only one renewable data center has been built to date: a €12bn facility in Norway that runs on 100% renewable energy.

It is unclear whether or not these reporting practices and commitments will persist under new ownership – a US appeals court has upheld a law that will require Chinese firm ByteDance to sell the platform to a non-Chinese entity by 19 January 2025, though the firm is trying to delay this until a recently friendlier Trump administration is inaugurated.

If the platform is bought by a US company, rules passed this year would require the firm to publicly disclose its emissions if they are “material” to investors, though Trump will probably reverse this.

TikTok did not respond to request for comment.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/12/tiktok-carbon-footprint

Source: The Guardian, Tess McClure
Photo: Gergana Daskalova carrying out her work in Bulgaria. (Ivo Danchev/The Guardian)

Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria

Abandonment, when it came, crept in from the outskirts. Homes at the edge of town were first to go, then the peripheral grocery stores. It moved inward, slow but inexorable. The petrol station closed, and creeper vines climbed the pumps, amassing on the roof until it buckled under the strain. It swallowed the outer bus shelters, the pharmacies, the cinema, the cafe. The school shut down.

Today, one of the last institutions sustaining human occupation in Tyurkmen, a village in central Bulgaria, is the post office. Dimitrinka Dimcheva, a 56-year-old post officer, still keeps it open two days a week, bringing in packages of goods that local shops no longer exist to sell. Once a thriving town of more than 1,200, Tyurkmen is now home to fewer than 200 people.

On a warm spring afternoon, Dimcheva stood in the town square. “The weddings took place here, all of the folk dances, the volleyball. There were lots of young people. A pool,” she said. She gazed around, pointing to ruins or now-empty spaces where buildings once stood, remembering. There, the building that housed a small cinema. Behind it, the space for a school that burned down, was rebuilt, then closed. “Life was bubbling.” Now, she said, “life in the villages is dying”.

Thousands of similar villages are scattered across Bulgaria. After the fall of communism, people flocked to the cities in search of work, and over the next 30 years many villages emptied to the point of obliteration. As of the 2021 census, almost 300 villages were completely abandoned, and more than 1,000 had populations below 30 – most of them very elderly. With its low birthrates and high rates of emigration, Bulgaria has been emptying out for decades. Its population has dropped from close to 9 million in 1989, to fewer than 6.5 million – one of the worst peacetime population declines in modern history.

Bulgaria lies at the extreme end of this kind of demographic change, but the forces reshaping it are acting everywhere. Over the past half century, the global portion of people living in rural areas has decreased by almost a third. Farming is becoming increasingly industrial and concentrated. More than half of all people now live in and around cities, and that figure is expected to rise to 70% by 2050. In many countries, birthrates are dropping steadily, and while the global population is projected to keep growing until 2080, around half of that growth is being driven by fewer than 10 countries.

As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.

Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world. A team of scientists recently calculated that roughly 30m hectares of farmland had been abandoned across the mainland US since the 1980s. As the climate crisis renders more places unliveable – too threatened by flooding, water shortages and wildfires to build houses, soil too degraded and drought-stripped to farm – we can expect further displacements.

This world-altering shift has drawn remarkably little attention. “It has been there all the time – but we did not really describe it,” says Prof He Yin of Kent State University, one of the scientists now using remote sensing to create global maps of abandoned land. “We talk about expansion,” he said, referring to development of land. “Yes, absolutely that’s important. But there’s this other side – abandonment – that people don’t really talk about.”

Alongside this story of depopulation is another story – of what happens to the land left behind. To preserve a livable planet, it is crucial to preserve and expand forests, grasslands, healthy ecosystems and wild places. Huge expanses of abandoned land represent an opportunity but also a question, an ongoing experiment without clearly predictable outcomes. For thousands of years, humans have dramatically shaped the places where they live, transforming the Earth’s face. So what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

It was this puzzle that drew ecologist Gergana Daskalova to Tyurkmen. On a hot, quiet morning in May she walked down the main street. It was empty of people, but lined by papers that fluttered in the early summer heat, tugging at their staples on the fences, gates and power poles. When a member of the household dies in Bulgaria, it is traditional to mark their passing with a notice. The A4 printouts featured a name, photograph, date of death and a brief tribute. Each noted how long ago the loved one had died: six months, a year, a decade, 22 years. In villages across the country, these posters often also mark the end of human habitation. “If you walk around, you’ll see it’s like this clock that’s ticking, measuring the time since those people have left us,” Daskalova said. “On a human level, that’s very sad. But that clock, it’s also measuring the end of human impact, and the onset of environmental change afterwards.”

Daskalova specialises in global change ecology: how large-scale human activity is reshaping the natural world. She is in the middle of an ambitious research project, studying 30 villages across the Bulgarian countryside in different stages of abandonment. Along with collaborators and students, she is gathering a huge range of data: using aerial drones to map the return of forests, block-by-block botany surveys to see what plants are growing, audio recorders on trees to capture shifts in the density and volume of birdsong. Over time, she hopes to compare the ecology of derelict villages with those where some people remain, providing a comprehensive picture of how nature responds when humans leave.

Daskalova, is in her early 30s, with a chatty warmth and patient knack for breaking down scientific theory, possibly honed by a year of explaining to curious shepherds why she’s out strapping microphones to trees in remote fields. She recently gave birth to her son, and on some days he watched from her hip, swaying and serious-eyed, as she strode around research plots.

Tyurkmen was not a randomly selected research site – it is the place she grew up. Like many of her generation, as a young child Daskalova was largely raised by grandparents while her parents went to work in the nearest city. Eventually, she left for university. “For a decade, I was one of the people who left the village and only returned occasionally, and every time I came back, there were less and less people living on my street,” she said. When she was younger, Daskalova would track the creep of abandonment in the wintertime, watching to see whether smoke emerged from a chimney down the street, or light shone from one of the windows. “Instead, one by one, the lights get turned off,” she said.

For the first few years of her career, Daskalova worked in far-flung places, including the arctic tundra. But she remembered the great depopulation she had lived through, and recognised that it was part of something wider, with scope to reshape the future of thousands of species.

Today, she lives and works in the home in Tyurkmen that once belonged to her grandparents. All around her, homes stand empty. Across the street, one house has crumpled inward, like a cardboard box left in the rain. Inside, that morning, nesting barn swallows orbited a bedroom. The front door had been knocked off its hinges, still carrying an enamel plaque: an award dispensed by communist-era local authorities, reading “exemplary home”.

Abandoned places are not the most alluring research sites: “They’re not the rainforests, not the gorillas,” said Daskalova. Individually, each research site is just a village, like thousands of others. “But in a way that’s what makes it special,” she continued, “because depopulation is happening at a really big scale.” And what comes after abandonment is often not what we expect.

News that great swathes of our planet are being abandoned can excite visions of a rewilded Eden in the ruins of humanity. In the absence of humans, nature will come roaring back. Deer will roam the streets of crumbling cities, vines will crack the concrete, football fields will give way to forests. The skies will clear and species will flourish. In 2020, lockdowns gave many people a taste of what semi-abandonment might look like. As humans were forced indoors, wild creatures returned to some urban streets and suburban gardens. “Humans are the virus,” observers declared, in a mixture of earnest commentary and internet punchlines. In their absence, “nature is healing”.

Visions of humans as a pox upon the natural world – and of paradise sprouting in our absence – are intertwined with some of ecology’s oldest ideas. In the late 19th century, botanist Frederick Clements helped popularise succession theory, the idea that left to its own devices, any disturbed landscape will follow a step-by-step progression. A ploughed field, for instance, will be overtaken first by fast-growing grasses and weeds, then shrubs, which finally thicken into trees and forest. Clements argued that any place would move through succession to a “climax” state of stable equilibrium. The final result could differ according to climate and geography, an alpine forest being different from a swamp or desert. But the essential trajectory was always the same: a “universal law”, Clements wrote, of ecosystems climbing toward climax like an animal progressing through infancy toward adulthood.

The idea gained traction through the early 20th century, coinciding with a period of explosive growth in human cities, populations and industry. It had a kind of simple, elegant beauty. As people watched human activity transform the earth around them, it also offered a certain comfort. No matter how dramatic the disturbance – whether the retreat of a glacier or the razing of a forest for farmland – nature’s capacity to return remained. That ideal climax state would rest like a substrate beneath the soil, lying dormant even as the land above was tilled or excavated or burned or paved. To return, all it needed was time and benign neglect.

Over time, Clements’ more sweeping theories were picked apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis. Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is seen as widely debunked. But Clements’ vision endured in the popular imagination – sometimes to the frustration of ecologists. “Many popular ideas about the environment are premised on the conviction that nature is … capable of preserving its natural balance more or less indefinitely if only humans can avoid disturbing it,” ecological historian William Cronon wrote in 1995. “These stories are ours, not nature’s. The natural world does not organise itself into parables.”

In practice, scientists have found that humanity’s relationship to the natural world is far more complex than we often assume. This is one of Daskalova’s more counterintuitive findings: rather than always being antithetical to nature, human presence can help make life possible for a vast array of species. Even more surprisingly, total abandonment can sometimes have worse consequences for biodiversity than landscapes where some people remain.

To show how this could be possible, Daskalova drove me to a village buried in vines. Kreslyuvtsi lies in semi-mountainous regions of central Bulgaria. For years now, most of the village has been completely abandoned. In the spectrum of villages that Daskalova is studying, it offers a case study of what something approaching absolute human absence brings.

Standing at the edge of a hillside, Daskalova gingerly took a step off the path and out into space. When her foot landed, she bounced ever so slightly, held up by the latticing of thousands of bramble vines, woven tightly enough to create their own buoyant elasticity. Somewhere beneath was a steeply sloped bank of land, and out a few metres in front was one of the long-abandoned homes of Kreslyuvtsi village. Its form was slowly collapsing as the stone walls crumbled. Brambles had surged up over the house until only an upper corner of the tiled roof was fully visible, jutting above the vines like the prow of a boat in its final stages of sinking. “They will swallow this place whole,” Daskalova said.

The brambles illustrate the first force that abandoned land faces: when humans leave en masse, new dominant species can make a clean sweep. The worst offenders are not brambles, but imported, invasive species. In Poland, where about 12% of farmland was abandoned after the fall of communism, the fields have turned thick mustard yellow, blanketed by the bright pollen cascades of Canadian goldenrod. This species has colonised about 75% of the country’s abandoned fields, and where goldenrod grows, little else thrives. Scientists studying this abandoned land found that wild pollinators decreased by 60%-70%, and the number of birds halved. In Bulgaria, an emerging threat is the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), a hardy, fast-growing, disease-resistant tree from northern China, with bitter-smelling sap that repels other plant, animal and microbial life.

These monocultures can create “biological deserts”, where just one species grows. The need to diversify them is not only an aesthetic, human preference. Monocultures are associated with soil degradation and nutrient depletion, extinctions of other species, difficulty purifying water, catastrophic wildfires, vulnerability to drought and the rapid spread of disease.

In some cases, a monoculture’s dominance is temporary. Even virulent invasive species can sometimes act as “nursery” environments for a variety of plants and creatures that might eventually outgrow them. Other times, an ecosystem may stall, failing to recover or diversify. “It is widely believed that once destroyed, forests can recover naturally from grassland or shrubland within a few decades in a process known as forest succession, and that tree planting can help,” scientists discussing the process on Hong Kong plantations wrote in 2023. “Our study shows that forests do not recover as much, or as rapidly, as people think they do.”

Humans are often responsible for creating monocultures. But there is also a surprising, unacknowledged role that people can play in holding them back.

Out among the brambles in Kreslyuvtsi, Daskalova turned, carefully dragging her gumboots back toward the path winding up the hillside. Reaching the path, she crouched in the grass and began to name species around her feet: grasses, ivy, but also buttercups, purple flowering vines, a tiny yellow orchid. “I can’t imagine many people walk up this road, but every once in a while some do,” she says. In the process, they have held back the rising tide of brambles, and opened up space for this small flurry of species, a scatter of colour against the flat green opacity of vines.

From where Daskalova stood, the path led up to an opening in the trees, where long grass and wildflowers grew in a clearcut meadow. Here, again, a small island of fragile blooms revealed the history of this land. Buttercups and agricultural weeds signalled that humans were here in the not-too-distant past, as did the clearing itself. Daskalova pointed to the thick-woven darkness of trees around the space, arranged like an audience in an amphitheatre, their network of branches already forking into the precious light of the clearing. “They’re right at the edge, ready to move in when that opportunity arises,” she said. “If there’s no grazing or mowing, it could only be something like five years until it’s all in the shadows of a denser canopy.”

When people imagine ecosystems recovering, this return to forest is often what springs to mind. But forests only represent a small sliver of possible habitats. For other species, the currency of life is light, and a dense, closed canopy of forest is impossible to survive. A swallow is perfectly adapted to vast, open fields: the curve of its wings and distinctive forking tail designed for fast pursuit of insects hovering above meadows. A starling murmuration, moving across the sky like spilled pepper over a tablecloth, is an adaptation to open fields: repelling predators, protecting the roost. Vast numbers of species adapted and co-evolved with these open places – plants, mammals, insects, grazers, species like wildflowers, that relish disturbance and light. The rich biodiversity of open grasslands can be even greater than that of temperate forests.

Once, many of these kinds of environments were created by megafauna. Mammoths, giant water buffalo, bison and cave bears were large enough to reshape forests, toppling trees to create steppes and prairie. Scientists have estimated that megafauna were responsible for keeping about 30% of South America’s forests at bay. Almost all of them are now extinct, the timing of their demise usually linked to the arrival of humans. In many places, humans are the only remaining creatures that can consistently reshape landscapes in these radical ways, pushing back the shade of the trees for other creatures to take root.

For millennia, all across the planet, humans have been using fire and tools to open up land for agriculture, gardens, grazing and hunting. In the process, we created ecological “mosaics”, or “patchworks”: landscapes that hold a mixture of habitats, like meadows, gardens and forests. These places were not designed as nature reserves, but they often catered to hugely diverse animal life. In her book Nature’s Ghosts, Sophie Yeo details research indicating that European hay meadows cultivated for animal feed were actually more successful at preserving a vast array of species than meadows explicitly cultivated for biodiversity. Looking back over the early Holocene – beginning 11,700 years ago – researchers have found that human presence was about as likely to increase biodiversity as reduce it.

Not all human-created landscapes have the same value. A paved subdivision with astroturfed lawns is very different to a village with diverse vegetable and flower gardens. A traditional hay meadow is radically different from a pesticide-drenched plantation of soya beans. But scientists continue to find evidence that the old idea of humans as antithetical to nature is also wrong-headed, and that rosy visions of thriving, human-free environments are more imaginary than real. “People are still imagining [nature as] this kind of pristine place that’s going to be saved from people,” says US environmental scientist Erle Ellis. “That is definitely a misunderstanding.”

In 2021, Ellis published new research that looked back 12,000 years. He and his colleagues found that nearly three-quarters of Earth’s land was occupied and shaped by human societies. Other researchers have pushed even further back. Examining human-biodiversity interactions in the Late Pleistocene – back as far as 120,000 years – scientists concluded that across most of the planet, “‘Pristine’ landscapes simply do not exist and, in most cases, have not existed for millennia”.

Many of the landscapes people now tend to think of as untouched, from the savanna lands of equatorial Africa to the deep Amazon rainforest, have already been deeply transformed by human presence. “The essential role that people play in ecology is the critical thing, and it’s been ignored,” Ellis says. “The most biodiverse places left on Earth – this is almost universally true – have Indigenous people in them. Why? Well, they conserve a lot of that biodiversity and actually produce it. They maintain that heterogeneous landscape.”

There is no question that recent human activity – particularly the massive clearing of ecosystems and industrial consumption of fossil fuels – has been an ecological catastrophe. But for nature to be restored to a past version of itself, the question might be less one of human absence, than what form human presence can take.

In the small communities riding out abandonment in Bulgaria, you sometimes see patches of gentle human presence that might offer paths for the future, as well as glimpses of the past. Off Tyurkmen’s main street, a dirt road leads to a stretch of scrubby meadowland. On the day I visited, Slavcho Petkov Stoyanov, who is 56 years old, stood watching as his sheep grazed among the shrubs. “Years ago, nobody would have let me graze here,” he said. “All this was used for growing vegetables.” His is the last flock in the village and he usually employs shepherds to watch them – but recently those young men left town and he was back out in the fields himself, sitting in a patch of shade to dodge the midday sun.

Stoyanov is one of the few remaining people here who help to maintain a diverse, “mosaic” landscape: in some empty blocks, the canopy of trees is expanding, but others are cleared by grazing and littered with wildflowers. He offers an example of how some forms of human occupation can be a protection against environmental damage rather than a source. As rural places like Tyurkmen depopulate, they become vulnerable to new forms of exploitation: land prices drop, and there are fewer people around to oppose projects like mines and quarries. “What you can get is depopulation as a stepping stone to industrialisation,” Daskalova told me.

Stoyanov pointed to the reservoir below the fields. His grandparents helped dig it themselves. Then, a few years ago, a company was granted cheap contracts by the municipality to take fish from it. The process followed a brutal, short-term logic: they installed pumps, drained the reservoir, and scooped the fish out. Almost everything else died. “They got about 20 tonnes of fish,” Stoyanov said. The remaining villagers were furious, and mounted a successful campaign to have the contract ended. The reservoir has slowly refilled, with water, fish, birds. Over time, he hopes parts of the village will refill, too. They have new opponents now, including a limestone quarry proposed at the village boundary.

To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by the great abandonment will require changing our conception of humanity’s relationship to nature, and understanding how our species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them. It will also require human intention: neglect alone is not enough. Around Slavcho’s herds, the backdrop of Tyurkmen was transforming. Patches of forest thrust outward, vines demolished villas, chemical-smelling invasive thickets occupied meadows. The march of nature seemed inexorable, but its future was still uncertain, contingent on the remaining people: what would they allow to grow? What would they keep at bay?

This point about uncertainty recurs again and again in conversations with scientists studying abandoned land. For biodiversity to thrive it needs time. The same forces that drive people from a place – pandemics, wars, shifting economic tides – can send them flowing back. He Yin, working with a group of scholars, found that millions of hectares of abandoned land were recultivated within a few decades. Their neglect was “too ephemeral” to translate into true gains for nature.

At one of Daskalova’s longest-abandoned monitoring sites, she had seen the trees grow thick and steady, undisturbed since the last occupants left. “Nobody had stepped on that plot in nearly half a century,” she said. Then, this year, a new set of owners appeared. They had plans for a guesthouse, transforming the isolated plot into a sanctuary for holidaymakers. “The first thing they did was to clear every single bit of vegetation – they just bulldozed the whole thing,” she said. The forest was shorn back and ploughed into dirt, the plot left dotted with a few invasive weeds.

After clearing the land, the buyers realised their new project would not be profitable. “They gave up on the guesthouse idea,” Daskalova said. “Now it’s abandoned again.”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/nov/28/great-abandonment-what-happens-natural-world-people-disappear-bulgaria

Source: The Hustle, Sara Friedman
Photo: The Hustle

In your favorite Netflix original show or movie, the protagonist likely spends most of their time on screen bathed in the perfect lighting.

That movie magic adds a lot of drama and, unfortunately, a hefty dose of greenhouse gas emissions — the entertainment industry produces ~700k tons of CO2 equivalent a year.

But Netflix is working on changing that by implementing new practices to curb emissions on its sets, per Bloomberg:

“Virgin River” uses two 18k-watt, battery-powered lights on set instead of traditional diesel generators and shuttles talent to and from filming locations in Teslas.

“Bridgerton” experimented with hydrogen-powered trailers and trucks, and “Stranger Things” is testing solar-powered trailers.

In Netflix’s Albuquerque studio, it’s invested in EV fast chargers, battery and solar storage systems, and geothermal water loops.

All those changes are part of Netflix’s goal to cut emissions in half by 2030.

But progress has been slow — the company’s 2021 and 2022 emissions increased compared to 2019, with the company growing faster than its carbon-cutting can keep up.

Green Screen

Netflix, Walt Disney Co. and nonprofit RMI formed the Clean Mobile Power Initiative — which launched with 10 startups — to supply clean energy businesses with $100k convertible notes, investor intros, and access to sets to test their tech.

Plus, most of Hollywood is jumping on board, per The Hollywood Reporter:

Warner Bros. Discovery’s Leavesden, England, facility switched to LED lighting and is testing out solar-powered carts and vehicles.

NBCUniversal’s GreenerLight program brings sustainability to all stages of production. The company aims to be carbon neutral by 2035.

While change is happening, there are challenges.

Vancouver, BC, has as many as 50 productions filming at a given time, but only seven production-ready batteries, per Bloomberg. And building a solar-powered trailer costs 50%+ more than an equivalent diesel trailer.

Plus, actors need to fly and drive to get to filming locations, adding to emissions.

Unless, of course, the locations come to them, like with Amazon MGM Studios’ virtual Stage 15.

https://thehustle.co/news/lights-camera-climate-change-hollywood-cleans-up-its-act

Source: Fast Company, Adele Peters
Photo: Ronan Gladu/TOWT

A French startup is bringing sails back to the shipping industry.

When a new cargo ship set sail from France to New York last month, loaded with hundreds of pallets of champagne, wine, and cognac, it was the first time in nearly a century that a large cargo ship crossed the Atlantic powered almost entirely by the wind.

The French startup that designed the ship, called TOWT (TransOceanic Wind Transport), argues that sailing cargo ships can viably compete with container ships running on fossil fuels.

“We know the wind is abundant, and we’ve known it for centuries,” says Guillaume Le Grand, the startup’s cofounder and president. Now, he says, “the meterological models, the satellite communications, and the routing intelligence that we can put behind it make wind a reliable source of propulsion.”

This isn’t a traditional sailing ship

The company’s first vessel, called Anemos, is very different from a traditional sailing ship. It takes some inspiration from sailboats used in racing. First, the masts are made from carbon fiber. That makes them so lightweight that they can be much taller than the traditional version made from wood. The extra height means that they can hold up sails that are around twice as large, and catch more wind.

The sails are deployed with a mechanized system rather than sailors working by hand. “You could actually handle the whole rigging—the seven sails on board, and 3,000 square meters of sail—with just one remote control,” says Le Grand. At around 265 feet long, the vessel is a little bigger than the Cutty Sark, the famous British clipper ship. But while the Cutty Sark had 48 sailors, Anemos has just seven.

Custom routing software helps the ship use as much wind as possible. As a backup, the ship also has diesel electric engines. When there’s not much wind, those engines can be used in a hybrid mode at very low power. Around 95% of the time, Le Grand says, the ship can rely entirely on sails.

On the first journey, delays meant that the ship missed the best weather window, and it needed to use fuel when it first left France. But the last 10 days of the trip were powered by the sails. Because the company uses its own system to unload cargo—and most container ships sit for days at port before they can be unloaded—the total time for delivery is faster than the typical alternative. (The capacity of the ship, however, is much smaller than the largest modern container ships, which can hold more than 20,000 shipping containers; Anemos can carry around 1,000 tons of cargo on pallets.)

When the wind is strong enough and the ship is moving quickly, the propellers in the engines can spin backwards, generating power from the wake in the water. That energy can be used to run electronics on board, from the kitchen to ventilation.

Brands are using the service to help their own climate goals

The shipping cost is slightly higher than customers would pay on a standard container ship, Le Grand says. But TOWT also offers long-term contracts with a predictable price, without the wild swings that come from using diesel or fuel oil. And the first customers are willing to pay a little extra because it can help them reach their own climate goals—and because saying that your product was delivered on a sailing ship is good marketing. Brands can add a QR code to their labels that links to data about the CO2 savings on each journey.

While others are betting on alternative fuels to decarbonize shipping, Le Grand argues that wind power is a better option because it’s available now. “The shipping industry, even though they seem to be willing to decarbonize, is sort of kicking the can down the road,” he says. “Everyone’s hoping or pretending that cheap, reliable, really efficient decarbonized fuels are going to arrive tomorrow morning, like Santa.” Some so-called solutions may really be greenwashing; liquified natural gas, for example, can cause significant pollution through methane leaks.

TOWT now has two ships, and will begin making monthly transatlantic crossings. After they deliver wine and spirits from France to the U.S., the ships will travel to South America to pick up coffee to take back to Europe. Six more vessels are on order, and will be in use beginning in 2026. Ultimately, Le Grand hopes to have hundreds of vessels. The company is also beginning to talk to industry associations about how to train a new generation of sailors. “We want to formalize and create a proper training for a modern sailing cargo captain, which doesn’t exist,” he says.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91185144/the-worlds-largest-wind-powered-cargo-ship-just-made-its-first-delivery-across-the-atlantic

Fast Company, Jesus Diaz
Photo: Aerflo

The Aer1 system makes carbonated water anywhere, anytime, with the push of a button.

I love carbonated water, but I hate the waste of packaged carbonated water. And while a Sodastream might have been a solution a decade ago, it doesn’t allow you to refill your bottle when the water is gone and you are 12 subway stations and two transfers away from your kitchen. Which is why I’m excited about the Aer1, a portable bottle that sparkles the hell out of your favorite liquid—anywhere, anytime, at the the push of a button. It may very well become the game-changer for the millions of people who love their bubbles but hate the environmental toll of single-use cans and bottles.

Made by a Brooklyn startup called Aerflo, the Aer1 system is a simple concept: it combines a reusable bottle with a carbonating device. The system comes with 13 reusable CO2 capsules, each capable of carbonating the equivalent of four 16 oz bottles of water. These finger-sized capsules lock right inside a sleek carbonation device built into its cap. When a capsule runs out, you simply replace it with a new one from the included pack.

But what really sets Aer1 apart is the sustainability of its design. The used capsules aren’t tossed in the trash. They’re sent back to Aerflo’s facility in New Jersey inside a neat packaging with a preprinted post label (think old Netflix years, without the subscription).

In that custom-designed, custom-built, fully-automated facility, they’re inspected using optical and mechanical sensors, thoroughly sterilized, and finally refilled for another round of use. The company doesn’t send you back your capsules because the moment you ship your used capsule pack back, a package of newly filled capsules ships immediately.

The company says nothing gets trashed and you can keep four extra capsules on hand, so you never run out of bubbles while your new capsules are en route.

When I saw the Aer1 bottle in action over a video conference with the Aeroflo founders—Buzz Wiggins and John Thorp—it all seemed deceptively simple. One of those “oh yes!” moments followed by the usual, stupid “why hasn’t anyone done this before?” thought.

It turns out that making the Aer1 was a major design challenge. Aerflo’s founders say in total, the product took four years full of mechanical challenges and regulatory nightmares to come to life. It started with designing a cap that injects the bubbles into your favorite liquid, and ended with creating a shipping package and label design that had to go through three years of revisions and approvals before the United States Postal Service and the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) approved the refillable CO2 capsules for shipping.

A nightmare design trip

Wiggins and Thorp, long-time friends, had talked about starting a company for years before they landed on the concept for Aerflo. Thorp, who has a background in venture capital and hardware businesses, recalls the moment they realized they were onto something. “We saw our entire peer group carrying around reusable bottles, and we started to think about those as a platform. We asked ourselves, ‘How could you bring beverage customization to the bottle that someone is carrying around with them every single day?’”

The answer they found was carbonation, which they identified as the fastest-growing beverage category in North America. However, portable carbonation solutions were almost non-existent, aside from single-use options, which didn’t fit with their vision of sustainability. So, they set out to develop a system that could carbonate water in a portable bottle while being environmentally friendly.

The first prototype was little more than a bike pump rigged to inject CO2 into a bottle. “I can’t believe this worked,” Wiggins says with a laugh, showing me their ACME contraption. But while that initial device proved the concept was possible, it was far from market-ready. They started to miniaturize the design until they reached a key point. “When we were able to get five bottles of sparkling water out of one capsule, that’s when we knew we had something,” Wiggins points out.

One of the most significant hurdles was creating a pressure relief valve small enough to fit into the bottle’s cap, yet robust enough to manage the carbonation process safely. Wiggins recalls how everyone told them it was impossible to do. “I designed this valve 50 times before we found one that was market viable,” he says.

The duo’s relentless pursuit of perfection led them to take on tasks that most would consider far outside their wheelhouse. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global supply chains, finding manufacturers willing to produce their custom pressure relief valve became nearly impossible.

Faced with a six-week wait and a $3,000 price tag from the only company that didn’t laugh at their proposal, Wiggins decided to do it himself. “I told John, for $1,000 in two weeks, I can purchase a lathe, go learn how to use it on YouTube, and do this,” he says. And that’s exactly what he did. This hands-on approach not only kept their project on track but also built a deep understanding of every aspect of their product.

Seven rings of regulatory hell

Traditional CO2 cartridges used in carbonation devices are single-use and made of steel—heavy, expensive to ship, and environmentally damaging, particularly when they’re filled overseas and shipped to the U.S. “We looked at that entire model, and for us, it was just a huge breakdown,” Wiggins explains. “The core of our company and the nexus of what we worked on for so long is this thing here,” he says, holding up one of their deep blue reusable capsules. “This is made out of aluminum, and what that does for us is it makes it so that we are allowed to refill it.”

Refining this idea took years of negotiation and innovation. The refillable CO2 capsules had to meet stringent safety standards, and getting them approved by the U.S. Department of Transportation was no small feat.

Wiggins recalls their initial conversations with regulators: “I’ll never forget on that call, the person we were talking to said, ‘I told you somebody was going to come up with this idea.’”

Three years later, Aerflo had an approved capsule design and packaging that the USPS can safely ship. Today, Aerflo operates out of a 5,000 square foot, custom-built facility in New Jersey, where used capsules are accumulated and then refilled.

A cheaper sparkling water

With traditional sparkling water costing between $2.55 and $6.33 per liter, the Aer1 system can produce sparkling water for around $1 per liter—up to 70% less than buying single-use bottles or cans. It took a lot of effort, but the result could change the market of carbonated beverages without screwing up the planet.

Aerflo is launching the Aer1 system on August 27, with the first 1,000 units available for preorder on its website. These early units come with custom engraving options and a 50% discount on the first refill pack. Full availability will follow in late September, with the system priced at $99 and replacement packs of 12 capsules available for $25.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91176982/this-simple-carbonated-water-gadget-could-upend-the-beverage-industry

Source: Time, Joshua Graff Zivin, Benjamin Krebs and Matthew J. Neidell
Photo: The view of downtown Los Angeles skyline is obscured by smoke, ash and smog as seen from the Griffith Observatory Monday, Sept. 14, 2020 in Los Angeles. (Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag—2020 Los Angeles Times)

Air pollution is the world’s second-largest cause of death globally, leading to 8.1 million premature deaths annually from lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema, among other diseases. Regular forest fires are a reminder for many in the U.S. that our air quality can be precarious, but in much of the world’s cities, foul air has been a fact of life for decades.

Tracking air quality is a critical step toward preventing air pollution related illnesses, yet monitoring is nowhere near granular enough. Levels of pollution can vary dramatically within just a few miles. In the U.S, there is only one monitor in the Environmental Protection Agency’s network for every 750 square miles. In India, it’s one monitor per 3,000 square miles.

Inaccurate air quality information can lead to wasted time and money if people stay home from school or work because they think clean air is actually dirty, or worse, result in poorer health for people who venture out into dirty air thinking it’s clean.

What the world needs is the equivalent of Waze or Google Maps for air quality instead of traffic, a network of millions of personal devices collecting pollution data in real time and shared with everyone who wants it.

Unfortunately, your phone doesn’t yet have the capability to monitor air quality, but there are many devices on the market that do. These monitors are easy to use, and once installed, upload air quality data to online networks accessible to anyone with an internet browser (users can opt out of sharing data but most don’t). For monitor owners, and those in the know about the network, they provide real time data about local air pollution. While they’re not as precise as monitors used by the EPA, for most practical questions—is the air clean enough to go for a run today? can I send my kid to soccer practice?—they’re just fine.

An air monitor in every school

While these monitors are widespread, they’re not in every neighborhood that needs them. That’s why we propose installing one at each of the 64,311 elementary schools in the U.S., ensuring every community has access to immediate information about local air quality.

We conducted research into the adoption of these monitors, focusing on one that has the widest network across the U.S. PurpleAir, a Utah-based company, sells reliable air monitors for between $229 and $299. Tens of thousands of U.S. households have installed their monitors, and they’re in every state and most countries. (We have no financial interest in PurpleAir and they have not participated in our research.)

While these PurpleAir monitors cover the nation, they don’t do so evenly. As our research into monitor distribution in California demonstrates, they are clustered in affluent and predominantly white neighborhoods. In the Bay Area, for example, the concentration of devices is far denser in affluent Palo Alto, with six outdoor monitors in a neighborhood of roughly 4,000 people, compared to no monitors at all in a comparably sized neighborhood in poorer Oakland.

The uneven distribution of the monitors shouldn’t be surprising. These monitors are a new technology, and more likely to be adopted by the tech savvy with disposable incomes. But the uneven distribution makes the network less reliable, and creates pockets where less information about air quality is generated and uploaded, predominantly in Black and Latino neighborhoods most vulnerable to illnesses created by air pollution.

That’s why we propose installing them in every American elementary school.

While not perfectly distributed around the country, there is an elementary school in virtually every neighborhood in the U.S. And significantly, where there are elementary schools there are children, the cohort most affected by air pollution.

A monitor at every elementary school would mean everyone can access accurate air quality information regardless of where they live, or how tech savvy their neighbors happen to be.

With a minimal amount of messaging, monitors located at schools will also create awareness within the school community about air quality more generally, and help encourage parents, teachers, and staff to log on. School-based monitors can also serve a teaching purpose, engaging students in practical lessons about the environment and their community.

The lesson of AEDs

While the monitors aren’t without cost, it’s pretty minimal in the context of a school budget.

But monitors could also be provided by the EPA, and both the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act contain funding for air quality monitoring. These devices will likely pay for themselves by facilitating behavioral changes that reduce healthcare expenditure, improve student performance, and increase labor productivity.

There is a template for schools adopting monitors. Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are electronic devices that can stimulate the heart during cardiac events. A vigorous public awareness campaign has advocated for the installation of AEDs in every school, and now about half of all U.S. states have laws requiring their presence in schools.

AEDs save lives, and so can accurate information about air pollution. It’s time we asked our schools to install monitors.

https://time.com/7013463/air-pollution-monitors-health

Source: Fast Company, Chris Morris
Photo: Nyobolt

Nyobolt’s new EV battery charges in roughly twice the time it takes to fill up a gas-fueled vehicle.

One of the most common complaints from electric vehicle owners is the time it takes to recharge their cars. In some instances, such as “level 1” EV battery chargers in residential homes, that can take as long as 40 hours. Using a Tesla Supercharger, it averages out to about 20 minutes.

A Cambridge-based EV manufacturer, though, says it has developed a battery that charges in less than five minutes, roughly twice as long as it takes to fill up a gas-fueled vehicle.

Nyobolt says it has developed a 35kWh lithium-ion battery that charges from 10% to 80% in just over four and a half minutes. Additionally, it says, the battery does not show the degradation of lithium-ion batteries.

The battery, the company says, citing independent OEM testing (though the company did not name who ran that testing), can achieve over 4,000 fast charge cycles, which spans roughly 600,000 miles, maintaining over 80% battery capacity retention.

“Our extensive research here in the U.K. and U.S. has unlocked a novel battery technology that is ready and scalable right now,” said Nyobolt’s cofounder and CEO, Dr Sai Shivareddy in a statement. “We are enabling the electrification of new products and services currently considered inviable or impossible.”

The new batteries were tested, the company says, in the Nyobolt EV prototype, an EV sports car weighing just 2,755 pounds (vs. more than 5,000 lbs. for a Tesla Model X). That not only can improve handling, but lighter vehicles and smaller batteries will be cheaper to build and have a smaller carbon footprint, Nyobolt argued. The car will reportedly travel roughly 155 miles on a single charge (and can add 120 miles of range in just four minutes).

Nyobolt says it is in talks with eight electric car manufacturers about sales of its battery. It’s unlikely to make it over to the U.S. in the short term, as a 35 kWh battery is notably smaller than the 85 kWh one used in most American EVs. The breakthrough, though, could be a building block for larger batteries in the future.

The company claims to already be prepared for manufacturing, saying it could be in production at low volumes within a year.

Widespread distribution is far from imminent, though. Nyobolt’s battery depends on the chemical niobium, which is not heavily mined at present compared to the production levels of the materials used in the production of lithium-ion batteries.

Nyobolt is just one of many companies working to improve EV batteries. A company called 24M, last month, showcased a battery that is designed to have a range of up to 1,000 miles on a single charge. That battery uses lithium metal rather than lithium ion, which 24M, an MIT spinout, says gives it more energy density. It could be five years, however, before that technology is on the road.

And researchers at Cornell University, earlier this year, said they had created a stable, lithium battery that can charge in less than five minutes. And last year, a company called Gravity said its chargers could power an EV for a 200 mile trip in just five minutes. The problem there was that some EVs aren’t designed to handle the chargers’ power.

It’s promising tech, but the days of super-fast charging EV batteries are still a good way down the road for owners and buyers.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91150627/u-k-company-nyobolt-new-electric-car-ev-battery-charges-in-5-minutes

Source: Dezeen, Starr Charles
Photo: Paris 2024 Olympics

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games have been billed as the most sustainable ever. As part of our Olympic Impact series, we look at how the organisers have sought to limit emissions.

While media depictions of Paris 2024 as the greenest ever Olympics are arguably overblown and some have accused the organisers of greenwashing, there can be little doubt that these games are pursuing an ambitious sustainability agenda.

A target has been set to emit no more than 1.58 million tonnes of carbon dioxide – around half the footprint of London 2012 or Rio 2016.

Meanwhile, Paris has sought to use the Olympics as a vehicle to accelerate longer-term environmental policies for the city.

In order to achieve these goals, a set of measures were put in place with a particular focus on construction, transport, energy and consumption.

Here are eight sustainability initiatives at Paris 2024:

Focusing on renovation and reuse

The most significant sustainability move by Paris 2024’s organisers has been to limit new construction to a minimum. As a result, 95 per cent of the venues are existing buildings or temporary facilities.

For example, the Stade de France will act as the main athletics stadium, while scaffolding-based structures have been erected at the Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde and the Palace of Versailles.

The strategy has also involved the renewal of existing landmarks, including the Grand Palais (pictured), which has been revamped by French studio Chatillon Architectes in time to host fencing and taekwondo at the games.

Cleaning the Seine

Arguably the most ambitious of Paris’ environmental initiatives has been the €1.4 billion (£1.2 billion) cleanup of the River Seine, where the 10-kilometre swimming marathon and Paralympic swimming event are set to take place.

Swimming in the city’s river has been banned since 1923 due to severe pollution levels, with wastewater from domestic and industrial sources being the predominant pollutant.

Newly updated infrastructure has contributed to a 90 per cent decrease in wastewater into the river over the last two decades. Significantly, a large underground basin came online in May that stores excess rainwater in a bit to prevent wastewater from flowing into the river when sewers are overwhelmed.

But there is still uncertainty regarding the river’s cleanliness, and organisers have warned that heavy rain could raise E-coli levels in the water to unsafe levels and force the swimming competitions to be held at a backup venue.

Using low-carbon buildings materials

Where permanent construction has been deemed necessary, the Paris 2024 organisers have taken steps to ensure that associated emissions are limited.

For example, the Aquatics Centre (pictured), designed by VenhoevenCS and Ateliers 2/3/4, features a wooden structure and large solar array on its roof, while spectator seating is made from recycled plastic waste. Across all venues including temporary stands, around 11,000 seats will be made from recycled materials.

The nearby Olympic Village, which will accommodate 14,250 athletes during the Olympic Games and a further 8,000 during the Paralympic Games, has also been developed according to an environmental strategy.

The use of bio-sourced materials is expected to result in a 50 per cent carbon footprint reduction over the buildings’ lifecycle compared to conventional construction.

Among the new structures are a trio of hybrid timber and concrete apartment blocks completed by Brenac & Gonzalez & Associés, which feature facades lined with loggias and finished with terracotta tiles, and a mass-timber office building by local architecture studio Dream.

Smaller details include bed bases made from recycled cardboard and street lamps made from salvaged building materials.

A geothermal water system was intended to negate the need for air conditioning, though some Olympic federations are bringing their own.

Building cycle lanes

Targets were also set out to optimise mobility across Paris during the games in order to reduce transport emissions, partly by using many venues in the city centre.

Improving bike routes has been key to this transport strategy, with cycling targeted to be one of the main legacies of Paris 2024. A network of more than 400-kilometres of cycle lanes now links all the competition venues, including 55 kilometres of newly added routes.

In addition, 3,000 self-service bikes and 10,000 extra bike rack spaces have been made available across the venues.

Extending the Métro

Another aspect of Paris 2024’s mobility strategy has been ensuring that all venues are accessible by public transport.

Planned extensions to the Métro intended to help with transporting the 15 million expected visitors were scheduled to be finished in time for the games. However, as a result of major delays linked partly to the covid-19 pandemic, almost none of the proposed lines have yet reached completion.

Line 14, which has been extended to connect Orly Airport to the new Saint-Denis – Pleyel station designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates (pictured), is a key transport route that has been completed on time.

For the athletes and their teams, Paris 2024 will use non-fossil-fuel vehicles including 500 hydrogen-fuel cell cars and buses from Toyota, though some experts have criticised this decision, calling it “scientifically misaligned with net-zero” in an open letter.

The major transport-related sustainability challenge for the games remains people flying in from around the world. Carbon accounting firm Greenly has estimated that aviation emissions for Paris 2024 could hit 837,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – more than half the 1.58 million overall carbon budget.

Using renewable energy

The energy initiative set out by Paris 2024 has aimed to supply all Olympic venues through entirely renewable electricity and retractable electrical terminals – an approach that is expected to save around 13,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions through a reduction in use of diesel generators.

On-site solar or geothermal generation at locations such as the Olympic Village and the Aquatics Centre will also help to meet their energy requirements.

As part of the games’ legacy, each of these new grid connections will remain beyond the event and will contribute to reducing fossil-fuel-based energy consumption in Paris after the Olympics.

Furthermore, a floating solar power plant on the River Seine will also produce renewable energy during the games through its 400-metre-square array of photovoltaic panels.

Encouraging lower-carbon catering

France may be famous for its rich, meat-heavy cuisine, but Paris 2024 will take a different approach as it seeks to limit the carbon footprint of the 13 millions expected to be served during the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Under the Food Vision initiative, the amount of plant-based food on offer will be double that of London 2012 and Rio 2016, while 80 per cent of ingredients will be French-produced including all meat and dairy.

Combined with efforts to limit food waste, the organisers hope that each meal served will carry a carbon footprint of 1 kilogram of CO2, compared with the French average of 2.3 kilograms.

The impact of all this will be relatively small, with catering anticipated to account for only 1 per cent of the games’ overall carbon footprint – and spectators are still likely to throw away large amounts of food.

And while the games have pledged to half the amount of single-use plastic used in catering compared to London 2012, the event’s main drinks sponsor, Coca-Cola, has been accused of greenwashing amid claims that most drinks sold to spectators will still come from single-use plastic bottles.

Using carbon offsetting

Paris 2024 has committed to offsetting 100 per cent of unavoidable carbon emissions related to the games. According to market intelligence agency S&P Global, it will rely on offsetting to hit its 1.58 million tonnes target despite the measures outlined above.

A programme set up to fund projects aimed at reducing or capturing carbon emissions has already purchased nearly 1.5 million tonnes’ worth of carbon credits from overseas. The biggest of these include a forest-preservation project in Guatemala, a conservation initiative in Kenya’s Chyulu Hills and the installation of clean cooking stoves in Kenya and Nigeria.

In addition, Paris 2024 will fund four forestry projects within France.

However, carbon offsetting projects are controversial, with many climate activists claiming that they are ineffective at mitigating pollution and enable large organisations in wealthy countries to shunt the problem of reducing emissions to the Global South.

Olympic Impact

This article is part of Dezeen’s Olympic Impact series examining the sustainability measures taken by the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games and exploring whether major sporting events compatible with the climate challenge are possible.

https://www.dezeen.com/2024/07/26/paris-2024-sustainable-olympic-impact

Source: The Guardian, Oliver Milman
Photo: Kamala Harris represents the US at Cop28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in December. (Amr Alfiky/Reuters)

Vice-president’s record on climate crisis strikes stark contrast with Trump in potential 2024 election match-up

Kamala Harris has a strong record on the environment that will provide a vivid contrast with Donald Trump, who has vowed to rescind climate change policies should he return to the White House, according to green advocates who have welcomed the prospect of a Harris presidency.

“We are confident that she is ready to carry forward President Biden’s historic legacy and set a new high bar for climate ambition in America,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen, one of a raft of green groups, including Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters Action Fund and the NRDC Action Fund that have now endorsed the leading contender for the Democratic nomination.

Harris, as vice-president, cast the tie-breaking vote to pass Joe Biden’s landmark legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, which unleashes hundreds of billions of dollars into building clean energy and electric car capacity. Biden, in his Sunday letter confirming he will drop his bid to be re-elected president, called the bill “the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world”.

Extolling this record, faced by an opponent who dismisses a climate crisis that is of growing concern to American voters amid a scorchingly hot summer, will be a key task for Harris should she gain the Democratic nomination. “President Harris would kick ass against Trump,” said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s former chief climate adviser.

“She has spent her whole life committed to justice, fighting for the underdog, and making sure that no one is above the law. She will fight every day for all Americans to have access to clean air, clean water and a healthy environment.”

Harris’s work on environmental issues stretches back to the early stages of her career two decades ago, when she created one of the US’s first environmental justice units as San Francisco’s district attorney. Later, as attorney general of California, Harris secured multimillion-dollar settlements from Volkswagen for rigging vehicles with emissions-cheating software and from the oil firms Phillips 66 and ConocoPhillips for environmental violations.

She once claimed, incorrectly, that she also sued ExxonMobil, although she did investigate the company over its climate change disclosures. As a US senator, Harris further built her climate credentials by becoming a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, a resolution that called for the US to swiftly transition to 100% clean energy while providing well-paying jobs and healthcare assurances.

When Harris ran for the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she promoted a green agenda far more ambitious than Biden’s, calling for a carbon tax, a ban on fracking for oil and gas on public lands and a $10tn investment to help combat global heating.

While this turned into little more than a wishlist, Harris became a champion of Biden’s climate bill once she became vice-president. She represented the US in Biden’s stead at last year’s Cop28 UN climate summit in Dubai where she took a thinly veiled swipe at Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and promised to “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas if elected again.

“Continued progress will not be possible without a fight,” Harris told assembled world leaders at the Cop28 talks. “Our action collectively, or worse, our inaction will impact billions of people for decades to come.

“Around the world, there are those who seek to slow or stop our progress. Leaders who deny climate science, delay climate action and spread misinformation. Corporations that greenwash their climate inaction and lobby for billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies.”

Harris no longer mentions the Green New Deal – which has been roundly vilified by conservatives – but environmental groups see an instinctive ally in the vice-president, should she secure the nomination and beat Trump.

Climate groups who said just last week they questioned Biden’s ability to win in November are now starting to swing behind Harris. “We’re ready to go full steam ahead talking with young people about the stakes of this election and what a second Trump presidency would mean for our generation,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of Sunrise, the youth-led climate group.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/23/kamala-harris-climate-crisis