Good News
There's been so much good news on the clean energy front we're not even sure where to start. Let's kick off with "oil and gas are now junk investments" according to some head-in-the-clouds, granola loving climate activist, oh wait it's *checks notes* the head of the International Energy Agency, Faith Birol. Sky News
The IEA's new Net Zero by 2050 report says that, after 250 years, humanity should now stop exploring for oil, gas, and coal. It's arguably as big a moment as the Paris Agreement, because in one stroke, it completely wipes out the fossil fuel industry's last remaining justifications for new capacity. People throw around the word 'turning point' a lot but this really is one. New Yorker
The hits keep on coming. The IEA says last year's record surge in renewables is the 'new normal', and that 90% of all new energy built in 2021 and 2022 will be clean. Keep in mind, this is from an organization that was founded explicitly to promote coal, oil and gas. Welcome to an energy revolution driven not by altruism, or politics, but by the cold-blooded logic of the marketplace. Independent
Another crunchy hippy, Ben van Beurden, the CEO of Shell, has just announced that half of the oil giant's energy mix will be clean somewhere in the next decade. HALF. “If we do not make that type of process by the middle of this decade, we have a problem not just as a company but as a society." Bloomberg
The Sines coal plant in Portugal has been shut down nine years ahead of schedule, reducing the country’s carbon emissions by 12%. A second and final plant is due to close in November which will make Portugal the fourth European country to eliminate coal, following in the footsteps of Belgium (2016), Austria (2020) and Sweden (2020). Beyond Coal
Ford has unveiled its new electric pickup, the F-150 Lightning. Its petrol-powered counterpart is the biggest selling truck in the United States, and the electric version is aimed squarely at the same customers. 360 km of range, 3.5 tons towing capacity, 11 charging ports for your power tools, three days of backup electricity you can run straight into your house. Price? $40,000. Verge
Japan will be smoke-free within the next decade following the announcement by tobacco giant Phillip Morris that it will phase-out conventional cigarettes. Big news for a country that has until very recently been considered a ‘smoker’s paradise’ and an outlier among OECD nations for cigarette use. Channel News Asia
Another step forward for human rights in America with Utah's Supreme Court overturning a district judge’s decision to deny two transgender people the right to change their birth certificates. The ruling comes after a three year deliberation and creates an important precedent not just for the state, but the country as a whole. LGTBQ Nation
Earlier this year, Colombia granted millions of Venezuelan refugees legal status, allowing them to work and access healthcare and education. Three months later, the government has spent $187 million on providing migrant healthcare, and about half a million migrant children are attending public schools. "We gave Venezuelan migrants a license to dream." BBC
Stunting is when a child is too short for their age, and is one of the most important indicators of chronic or recurrent malnutrition. According to the WHO, between 2010 and 2020, the prevalence of stunting in children under 5 fell from 27.7% to 22%. That means there are now around 30 million fewer children affected compared to a decade ago. Remember - progress is slow, and it almost never makes headlines.
Animal rights activists in the UK have won a major victory with a landmark reform that legally recognizes animals as sentient beings. A range of new government measures will ban most live animal exports, the importation of hunting trophies like ivory and shark fins, and target puppy theft. The government has also pledged to uphold animal welfare in future trade deals. Guardian
A crackdown on rhino poaching in South Africa, Namibia, Kenya and Zimbabwe has paid off with the number of rhinos poached dropping by 1,319 between 2015-2020. The sharp decline is thanks to tougher legislation, enforcement, and more sophisticated investigations. Conservationists have also switched tactics, empowering communities to become rhino custodians. Geographical
The population of Vietnam’s critically endangered monkey, the Delacour’s Langur, has quadrupled in the past 20 years thanks to the combined efforts of a German primatologist and local communities. Their collaboration resulted in the Van Long Nature Reserve established in 2001 to prevent habitat loss and poaching. Mongabay
Since 2010, almost 21 million km2 has been added to the world’s network of national parks and conservation areas, an area greater than the land mass of Russia. That means about 17% of land and inland water ecosystems and 8% of marine areas are now within formal protected areas, with the total coverage increasing by 42% in the last decade. Protected Planet
Indistinguishable from magic
A few years ago Kevin Kelly wrote a seminal piece for Wired called Mirrorworld, describing how "our physical reality will merge with the digital universe." Apparently the geeks were paying attention. Earlier this week, Google unveiled a device that allows you to beam a life sized, three dimensional version of yourself into somebody else's living room. Just like the movies promised. Road to VR
Vestas, the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer, says all its blades can now be fully recycled. This is welcome news; turbine blades are notoriously difficult to recycle, because they're made of a mix of glass and carbon fibres and sticky resin. This new technology will "be a significant milestone in enabling a future where landfill is no longer required in blade decommissioning." Reuters
One of the most awful things about the industrial food system (from a long list of awful things) is the shredding of four billion male chicks every year. A startup in Israel says it can prevent that cruelty from happening, using CRISPR to insert a biomarker on the male chromosome that shows up on a scanner, allowing the eggs to be separated out before incubation. Fast Co
Genetically modified mosquitoes have been released in Florida, with the goal of suppressing their wild, disease-carrying counterparts. The modified mosquitoes, all male, are carrying a lethal gene that prevents female offspring from building an essential protein, causing them to die before maturity. The science behind this is rock solid, but whew, it still feels like a pretty big Pandora's Box. Live Science
Here's a fun story for the neuroplasticity geeks out there. Researchers at UCL gave people a 'third thumb' and within days, they were able to perform complex tasks like building towers from blocks, or stirring coffee while holding it. Neural scans showed their brains changed: the sensorimotor representation of individual fingers became less distinct, even when the thumb was taken off.
Information superhighway
One of the most influential academic papers of all time is 1968's The Tragedy of the Commons which made a compelling argument for why humans can't have nice things. Its grim outlook gets a good debunking here from Michelle Nijhuis who, inspired by the work of Nobel Prize winning economist, Elinor Ostrom, shows how communities in real life actually work to share and protect resources. Aeon
Is grit all it’s cracked up to be? Ever since Angela Duckworth’s 2013 TED talk, parents and 'thought leaders' alike have jumped on the gritty bandwagon, believing it to be the silver bullet to success. Jesse Singal has another look at the research, and concludes that success is more likely to come down to good old-fashioned study skills, habits, and attendance rates instead. Nautilus
We've gotten used to describing our brains as computers, but Daniel Graham says it’s time to upgrade that metaphor to 'the internet': a system that provides flexible, efficient, reliable communication, and divides messages into chunks of fixed size. A nice spin on a familiar topic, and one that makes a good case for why we need brain metaphors in the first place. Berfrois
An underappreciated advantage of ageing is that allows people to gain greater control of their emotional realm. For 20 years, psychologist Susan Turk Charles has paid close attention to how people handle and experience emotions as they age and found that, on average, older people have “fewer but more satisfying social contacts and report higher emotional well-being.” Smithsonian
The news we didn’t know we were waiting for. Most of our problems aren't because we’re inefficient but because we’re not inefficient enough. This essay reframes the idea of ‘slack’ as increasing capacity for responsiveness and flexibility and will make you rethink your to-do list. “The irony is that we achieve far more in the long run when we have slack. We are more productive when we don’t try to be productive all the time.” FS
Give a damn
In September last year we sent some money to Skateistan to help them set up a makerspace in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan's third largest city. We've just heard from Talia Kaufman, their Programs Director, with some news on how things are going.
Dear Future Crunch readers, we wanted to give you an update about our Makerspace setup process. The digital equipment you paid for has just arrived in Kabul by road from Mannheim Germany. It went via Pakistan and has taken about 10 weeks to arrive. Next we will ship the making equipment to Mazar and start some training with the educators on how to use the Arduinos for digital making projects.
Meanwhile the team is also using the funds you provided on getting some customized furniture for the space. Sewing classes have already begun where students are using sewing machines and embroidery to make reusable bags in order to reduce our waste at the skate schools. Below are some photos of the sewing space and one of the bags that a student made.
Please accept our apologies that we've been out of touch for so long, it's quite a process to find a shipping solution to Afghanistan these days and we were holding our breath that everything would arrive intact (it has!). We look forward to being able to send you some more photos and a longer update when the rest of the space is all set up.
Talia
Humankind
Meet Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer in the West African nation of Burkina Faso known as ‘the man who stopped the desert’ after he reintroduced an indigenous farming practice called Zaï and transformed barren land across Africa into forest and crops.
Born sometime around 1946, Yacouba was working as a salesman at a local market when severe drought and famine changed the direction of his life in the early 1980s. While many people left rural areas to find work in the cities, Yacouba returned home to his village with a vision to cultivate the desolate land and make it fertile again.
He began experimenting with Zaï, a traditional farming technique that involves digging pits into the earth to trap precious rainfall. Yacouba innovated by digging deeper holes and filling them with manure and other biodegradable waste to enrich the damaged soil and enhance water retention. The results were striking: trees began sprouting in the arid ground and the crops he planted thrived.
Despite his success, locals called him a 'madman' and even set his forest on fire. Yacouba was undeterred. He persisted, and by 1984, was hosting 'zaï markets' on his land to teach other farmers how to regenerate the soil. Today he receives visitors from all around the world and continues to train young farmers in his adaption of Zaï.
In forty years, Yacouba has created a 40-hectare forest on his land with more than 60 species of bushes and trees. His innovation has helped villages across Burkina Faso and Niger become food secure and produce crops even in years of drought.
Yacouba is now facing another challenge as the expansion of a nearby city is threatening the land he’s regenerated. Without formal ownership of the land, houses are been constructed on the edge of his forest but Yacouba will not give up easily. “It’s not possible to avoid hardship or being challenged by other people for your goals. You have to be ready to challenge them back and defend your position. The world is counting on it.”
Whew. We know this one was slightly longer than usual, thanks for reading.
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Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the FC team.
