Good News and Nothing But

One Day Only--Happy Earth Day

Writing a newsletter about the unfolding catastrophe that is climate change offers less of a chance than I would like for unbridled good news. I sometimes imagine readers looking at the screen through their fingers, like the audience at a slasher film. But today—well, 54 years ago on this day 20 million Americans took to the streets—ten percent of the then population—and really gave birth to the modern environmental movement. So in their honor, I’m offering up only encouraging news today.

Like the fact that California has now generated more than one hundred percent of its power needs from sun, wind, and hydro for big parts of almost every day this spring. Here’s the graph that Stanford professor Mark Jacobson put together to illustrate the remarkable run—that number in the top right corner means that the day before yesterday at its max the Golden State was producing 148.3 percent of its power needs from renewables

The Washington Post attempted to paint this as a problem earlier today, but for once I’m reluctant to agree with the wise Shannon Osaka, who writes

There is so much solar on the grid that, on sunny spring days when there’s not as much demand, electricity prices go negative. Gigawatts of solar are “curtailed” — essentially, thrown away.

On the list of problems we’d like to have, free clean electricity is fairly high on the list. Especially since the answer to this ‘problem’ is fairly obvious: if it’s raining pennies from heaven, then by all means collect them. In this case, use a battery.

Which is what is starting to happen, as batteries get cheaper and cheaper. Here’s Nick Hedley’s account of last night’s action:

Then, during the evening peak on April 21, another milestone was hit when big batteries discharged 6.5GW of instantaneous power into the grid. Batteries were the single-largest source of supply at the time, covering a fifth of the state’s electricity supply.

If you want a graph of that too, here you go

But just to repeat: as the sun went down last night, the biggest source of energy in the world’s fifth largest economy was…sunshine storied in batteries.

Speaking of batteries, here’s what strikes me as the single happiest story of the week. It’s from Bloomberg’s Tom Randall, and it describes the world’s biggest battery recycling plant, which is across the California border in western Nevada. At the center of the facility is what Randall describes as a giant slow cooker,

“baking the junk at several hundred degrees for about an hour... Traditional recycling through burning uses heat well over 1,000C (1,800F) to separate out precious metals, but Redwood’s goal at this stage is to preserve and prepare the materials for the next steps in the most efficient way.

Importantly, RC1 doesn’t use any oxygen — there’s no combustion and, thus, no emissions. It simply reduces the glues, plastics and unwanted fluids into charcoal. The high-grade black carbon left over can be sold for use in black paints and industrial lubrication.

The RC1 also uses surprisingly little electricity, which is key to lowering Redwood’s climate impact. Once the kiln heats up, the energy released from the batteries is self-sustaining. Think of it as a controlled, slow-motion version of a battery fire, running nonstop day and night, week after week. It safely releases the charge in any batteries that could pose a danger to workers, while breaking down the stuff that binds key minerals together.

Those key minerals—lithium, cobalt, nickel, aluminum—come out of the oven in a fine black powder that can be reused in the next batteries. They get the copper back to—a machine at the recycling plant produces a thin sheet of copper foil. By 2028, as it expands, the company will produce enough copper foil each year to wrap around the world six times. All in all, about 95 percent of the minerals in a battery can be profitably recovered. Which means:

“Once we've changed over the entire vehicle fleet to electric, and all those minerals are in consumption, we’ll only have to replace a couple percent each year that’s lost in the process,” said Colin Campbell, Redwood’s chief technology officer and the former head of powertrain engineering at Tesla. “It will become obvious to everyone that it doesn't make sense to dig it out of the ground anymore.”

Read that again if you want a smile for the day.

And someday not having to dig as many things out of the ground will be a great relief. Indeed, the federal government last week redid its regulations on its vast holdings of public lands, “putting conservation, recreation and renewable energy development on equal footing with resource extraction.” It went further than that in Alaska, putting large areas of the western Arctic off limits to oil drilling. This happy development actually came about because of a tragic one: the Biden administration stupidly permitted the Willow oil complex in Alaska, setting off a TikTok of criticism; now they’re making amends. As EarthJustice attorney Jeremy Lieb put it

“It’s no secret that the Reserve — a vast region of tundra and wetlands teeming with wildlife and globally recognized for its ecological value – has frequently landed in the crosshairs of the insatiable fossil fuel industry. Today the administration has taken an important step to defend a cherished landscape from further fossil fuel development that would threaten these irreplaceable lands and waters and our climate. We applaud this move and call for even bolder action to keep the fossil fuel industry out of the Arctic, for the sake of the climate and future generations.”

Meanwhile, the administration chose this day to summon Bernie to the White House to help with the announcement of the $7 billion Solar for All grants under the Inflation Reduction Act. This is as it should be: Senator Sanders skillfully used his near-win in the 2020 primaries to leverage Team Biden into supporting a legislative version of the Green New Deal—watered painfully down, it became the IRA, which contains this solar buildout provision aimed at saving low-income Americans $350 million a year in electric bills.

“Solar is the cheapest form of electricity—and one of the best ways to lower energy costs for American families,” said John Podesta, Senior Advisor to the President for International Climate Policy. “Today’s announcement of EPA’s Solar for All awards will mean that low-income communities, and not just well-off communities, will feel the cost-saving benefits of solar thanks to this investment.”

And it’s not just the U.S. As China hand Jacob Dreyer noted in a weekend oped about the world’s other champion carbon emitter, the pace is picking up there as well. The government, its leader Xi Jinping, is

making a decades-long bet that China can dominate the global transition to green energy, with his one-party state acting as the driving force in a way that free markets cannot or will not. His ultimate goal is not just to address one of humanity’s most urgent problems — climate change — but also to position China as the global savior in the process.

It has already begun. In recent years, the transition away from fossil fuels has become Mr. Xi’s mantra and the common thread in China’s industrial policies. It’s yielding results: China is now the world’s leading manufacturer of climate-friendly technologies, such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. Last year the energy transition was China’s single biggest driver of overall investment and economic growth, making it the first large economy to achieve that.

If you were thinking about dynasties and their effect on our climate future, you might think about China—or you might think about the Kennedys. So I guess it’s good news that the overwhelmingly responsible members of that clan are coming together to warn everyone off RFK Jr. And so are a bunch of other enviros who’ve known him forever.

“The Bobby I knew is gone,” said Dan Reicher, a senior energy researcher at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for Environment. Mr. Reicher worked with Mr. Kennedy at N.R.D.C. and said he had a decades-long personal friendship with Mr. Kennedy, including paddling rivers together in the United States and Chile.

Gina McCarthy was the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama and then became president of N.R.D.C. during the Trump administration, only to return to national service as Mr. Biden’s climate adviser until last year.

“If folks remember him as an environmentalist, he is no more,” she said about Mr. Kennedy. “He’s against science, he’s against vaccines, he talks jibber jabber on climate. I don’t know what he stands for.”

Saddest of all is the truly great John Adams (since we’re talking dynastic names!), who founded NRDC and is one of the great figures of the early Earth Day era.

”I mentored Bobby as a young environmentalist. I do not recognize the person he has become. His actions are a betrayal to our environment.”

From the ridiculous to the sublime: check out this account of the Sioux builders in Minnesota developing a world-leading business in hempcrete—using the remarkable plant for insulation and strength in home construction.

Roughly half of the tribal nation’s enrolled members – about 1,120 people – are currently in need of housing….so the community started experimenting with hemp as a housing construction material – also known as hempcrete – back in 2016, even before it was decriminalized in the US. This month, the tribal nation is set to open the first vertically integrated hempcrete facility in the nation, complete with its own growing operation.

When the Lower Sioux’s 20,000-sq-ft, $6.2m onsite facility opens in April, the tribal nation will become a leader in the growing green building movement.

But the decision to invest in hemp was first born out of the Lower Sioux’s commitment to sovereignty and self-determination. “The whole idea was just to be able to service our own needs, because we’re short at least 150 houses [on the reservation],” said Earl Pendleton.

And now, as a final reward for putting up with all the dire stuff we have to deal with regularly here, a couple of videos.

The first is a Rube Goldberg machine, assembled as a tribute to the thousand ad and design agencies that as of today have foresworn using their talents on behalf of fossil fuels. It is fun to watch.

And finally there’s this, from the remarkable team at Brief But Spectacular at PBS. I fear it’s of me, and that there’s a certain amount of the requisite gloom. But I promise there’s some hope too—and a shot of my high school yearbook photo. So much hair!