A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

I think a lot about something renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote about climate and aesthetics last September. It came up in an essay recounting opposition to a 500 kilowatt solar array near Manchester, Vermont. Though the installation was found not to endanger any historical artifacts, or public health, or even at-risk species, McKibben noted in his newsletter, neighbors still hated the idea of this project nearby, saying it was an eyesore and would change the feel of the place.

 

In reality, McKibben countered, the solar array represents a valiant effort to preserve the ways of life these people felt was being threatened:

Building clean energy is the project of our era on earth. And at some level it really is an aesthetic issue. When we look at a solar panel or a wind turbine, we need to be able to see—and our leaders need to help us see, because that’s what leadership involves—that there’s something beautiful reflected back out of that silicon: people finally taking responsibility for the impact our lives have on the world and the people around us. We are in an emergency, and an emergency calls for imagination, for literally seeing things in a new way.

This paragraph has stuck with me in part, I think, because it offers a useful way to think about the relationship between life-saving policy and beauty. On the one hand, it feels frivolous and misguided to demand that urgently needed change be pretty, as well. But at the same time, it’s wrong to reject aesthetic considerations entirely.

 

For one thing, a big part of “selling” people on climate policy involves showing them that a low-carbon future doesn’t have to be joyless and austere. That, in fact, is the whole strategic theory behind the Green New Deal—while the ideological theory is that global warming and inequality are inextricably linked, its strategic underpinning is that people will support climate policy if it gives them nice things. 

 

On the other hand, our notions of what beauty is are highly culturally defined. This is McKibben’s point. People should appreciate the solar panels as beautiful because of what they represent. Aren’t things that help save us and the people and things we love almost definitionally beautiful? Shouldn’t we start to treat them as such?

McKibben’s words were in my mind this week as I read an article published by Boston University public radio station WBUR about a new recycling startup in Massachusetts, Ascend Elements, which is recycling lithium-ion batteries. This is a big issue, which Merrill Goozner covered in The New Republic last fall. As he wrote, “Batteries are the linchpin of the coming shift to electric vehicle production, as well as renewable energy more broadly.” But the infrastructure for recycling them sucks—which is a huge problem given how expensive and environmentally damaging battery components are to mine.

 

Here’s the part of the WBUR piece that stood out to me:

Once the shredded material [from lithium-ion batteries] goes through a series of sieves, it emerges as a fine powder known as “black mass.”

 

“That’s essentially where all the value is,” says Roger Lin, Ascend’s vice president of global marketing and government relations.

 

The process, called “Hydro-to-Cathode,” takes about a week to extract the impurities from the powder, leaving behind vats filled with valuable EV metals, according to the company. It also recovers almost 100% of the metals and produces no toxic waste.

 

“This is alchemy,” says Lin. “We call it chemistry but it’s alchemy.”

 

The company’s secret sauce is in adjusting the metal mixture, atom-by-atom, to get the exact ratio of materials. The finished product, called a battery cathode, can be customized to an EV manufacturer’s specific needs.

 

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