A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Let’s cancel lawns. Nick Martin makes an excellent case in his latest piece: They’re water hogs, biodiversity killers, and in order to look good they need pesticides and wildly inefficient mowers that put car emissions to shame (and mowers don’t drive you to the beach). The state of Nevada, which already has a number of lawn replacement incentives, is now considering straight-up outlawing new decorative grass outside businesses and housing developments, in median strips, etc.—the kind of stuff that isn’t used for sports or recreation or anything at all. The Southern Nevada Water Authority thinks the state could save about 12 million gallons of water each year with the measure—a huge mark in its favor as the region faces a water crisis that will only get worse as the planet warms. I’m sold. Let’s ban yachts, too, as Kate Aronoff proposed last summer after yachts managed to be involved in both a Steve Bannon scandal and a Jerry Falwell Jr. scandal in one week. The policy measure she outlined was reasonable, taxing private vessels over 79 feet at a rate of 100 percent. The superrich can get drunk and make bad decisions elsewhere: They don’t need to do it on a floating fuel fiend that doubles as a tax dodge. I don’t mind if we cancel Valentine’s Day, “anti-pollution” skin care, and rose quartz while we’re at it, but let’s stay focused for now: Front lawns and yachts go first. Only the dumbest and most wasteful American class markers make the top cut. Gleefully canceling other people’s pleasures falls into an unfortunate stereotype the right has of the left: liberals coming to take away your hamburgers and all that. It’s an image of somber moralizing that goes back decades: Socialists can’t take a joke, and feminists aren’t fun. |
In fact, joy discourse flourishes on the left, including among those who might also be inclined to question hamburgers. Take Gabriel Rosenberg’s writings on democratic hedonism, the picture Kate paints of investing in care work and ethical leisure, or the classic argument that socialism leads to better sex. No one’s out to reduce joy, just to reexamine the joys the state currently subsidizes (meat, fuel-guzzlers, lawns that stay alive only through public water infrastructure) and ask whether these, with their troubling side effects, are really the best ways to spark joy on a societal scale. Everyone’s hungry for climate “solutions”—magic dust that stops the sun from heating the earth, for example, or wave-harnessing generators. The thing is, sometimes really easy “solutions” are staring us in the face: win-win fixes that are way simpler and more cost-effective than, say, carbon scrubbers. Getting rid of lawns is a classic example of something that should absolutely count as a climate “solution,” even if it’s not going to halt global warming on its own. And who says banning lawns can’t be fun? In place of laboring to meet suburban greenery standards, grow a cactus garden—prickly pear fruit tastes like Skittles, by the way. Free up Sundays for picnics and parties instead of mowing away in the hot sun. Buy a bunch of yard flamingos and arrange them to spell out aerial-view insults to your neighbor with the drone obsession. Spark joy. Ban lawns. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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While lawn grass is bad, sea grass is very good, absorbing twice as much carbon as forests and protecting sea life from the acidification that comes from higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air. Unfortunately, we’re now losing it at an alarming pace. |
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That’s the amount of the pollution from oil refineries shouldered by minority communities, despite minorities making up only 39 percent of the population, according to new analysis from Greenpeace, the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, and the Movement for Black Lives. Geoff Dembicki has a good write-up here. |
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| Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
TNR has published multiple pieces about the dangers of being overly bullish on carbon capture, which is often a lot more complicated than it seems and really needs oversight to guarantee results. Bloomberg Green has a great dive into a particular case, reviewing remarkable shenanigans at the company Global Thermostat: |
| Last year, Chichilnisky said Global Thermostat had a 10-year contract to supply Coke with 20,000 tons of captured carbon annually. Global Thermostat declined to provide details about where or when this work would be happening. Then, in an interview this February, Chichilnisky acknowledged that no facility to do it had been built. The deal, she now says, was to capture carbon for Femsa, the Mexican company that is the world’s largest Coke bottler. Femsa says they never had a contract and that the parties weren’t able to agree on the technology’s potential usefulness or cost. A former Global Thermostat employee familiar with the talks says they centered on a small direct-air capture device that was to be set up at a Femsa bottling plant about 30 miles outside of Mexico City, in a hilly region where it’s expensive to import CO₂ by truck. The negotiations foundered, this employee says, after Chichilnisky upped her asking price. She also insisted that the bottler haul in the demonstration plant from Huntsville. “Femsa wanted a brand-new piece of equipment,” says the employee, “but Graciela wanted to save money.” |
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