News from a Changing Planet -- #12
Hello there --
Building off my last edition, I wanted to share a piece that I wrote for The Washington Post. It's about a new kind of air conditioning, which could help alleviate both the impeding cooling crisis and the inequality of cooling that I wrote about in my last issue. It's a really simple and elegant solution, and given how much I think about the problems presented by air conditioning and its use, I'm really excited about the possibilities!
Here is the beginning of that story. For the full article, follow this link!
Cooling off without air-conditioning: A “Cold Tube” pavilion offers relief outdoors from heat and humidity
The novel coronavirus has made an enemy of one of humanity’s most reliable sources of comfort: the air conditioner.
Given the airborne nature of the virus, recirculating air — a defining feature of traditional air conditioning — has become a dangerous proposition, with at least one example from China showing possible contagion in an air-conditioned restaurant.
But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that it’s possible to keep cool without recirculating air, and to do so outside in Singapore, a hot and humid tropical environment.
The process, known as “radiant cooling,” has taken on new importance in a time when fresh air is practically a health requirement.
The study was originally intended to address another problem posed by air conditioning: energy consumption. With global temperatures rising, along with income in some developing nations, air conditioning is expected to grow by two-thirds over the next decade, according to the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization.
But the cost is high: More units mean greater demand for electricity, to say nothing of the refrigerant most air conditioners use — hydrofluorocarbons, greenhouse gases that can leak from the manufacturing or improper disposal of old units.
There are about 2 billion air conditioning units in the world, more than half of which are in China and the United States, according to the IEA. They consume about 9 percent of total global electricity production, and result in the emissions of 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
The study’s authors employed the principle of radiant cooling to see whether subjects could be kept cool on hot, humid, sunny days in Singapore — without a heavy reliance on electricity. They built a “Cold Tube” pavilion, made up of 10 panels, each eight feet tall, containing capillaries full of chilled water, insulated and enclosed in a polyethylene membrane that allows for infrared transfer, but not condensation.Radiant cooling is something we regularly experience when we stand in front of an open refrigerator, though we might not remember this term from physics class. Basically, in the words of Eric Teitelbaum of Princeton University, one of the study’s authors, “You are the sun; you are radiating the warmth, and it’s the surfaces around you that take the heat away.”
It is tempting to say that there is a lot of news from the world of climate and the environment that I should address, but I reject the idea that news about the state of our planet is different from the rest of the news. Regardless, what is happening in California and the Pacific Northwest is scary and upsetting, and I am thinking of my friends and everyone else out there and hoping that people are staying safe and as healthy as possible.
I have been trying to figure out what to say to help put these fires in context or provide some new information, and I find myself coming up empty, so if any of you have particular questions or ideas for me, I would love to hear them. Otherwise, I am puzzling about how to understand the crisis of climate change within the longer sweep of American history -- in particular, how it may or may not be the logical conclusion to the myth of the frontier in the United States -- so I hope to report back to all of you on that soon! (I also re-read Moby Dick recently and if I can't make some kind of climate change analogy out of that, then I don't know what I'm doing here.)
In the meantime, here is some of my other recent work that I hope you will find interesting.
Lots of companies are working on plastic alternatives. Read about a few of them!
I interviewed Dan Esty, a professor at the Yale School of Management, about the intersection of climate change and the coronavirus, and why the possible benefits have been overstated and to possibly negative effect.
I wrote about the problem of medical waste and the move towards using more and more single-use disposable items, and the overall environmental impact of health care, something readers of this newsletter got a preview of in #10! (My contribution is in the second half of this newsletter; the first part is a great piece by by former colleague Hiroko Tabuchi about closing the racial gap among scientists, featuring an entomologist I really admire, Dr. Esther Ngumbi, who has done very interesting work around food security, entomology, and climate change.)
Scientists are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help save the oceans -- saving endangered whales, cleaning up ocean plastic, and more! Here's more.
Here is a piece I wrote for Vanity Fair around Earth Day about the question I am often asked, which is, how to think about having children in the middle of a climate crisis?
I am also very pleased to report that my book won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists! It is an incredible honor to be recognized by my colleagues in this field, and in honor of Rachel Carson, without whose books (Silent Spring; The Sea Around Us) we might not have the environmental movement at all. Thank you to the SEJ and to all of you for your support and interest in my work! (Check out this incredible profile of Rachel Carson by Jill Lepore from The New Yorker a few years ago: "The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson")
More soon.
Tatiana