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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Transition Towns — regeneration from the grassroots
“Here are snapshots of some of the most successful systems-changing strategies, stories not often reported in the mainstream media.
“Regional food hub networks for the aggregation and distribution of local and regional produce were commonplace only a century ago, but many were dismantled during the process of economic globalization. One group that’s been trying to bring theirs back is the Belgian Transition Initiative, a powerful network of 15 local food cooperatives, including several farms and grocery stores.
“Community-owned renewable energy companies typically raise funds by offering shares to local investors, and then use those funds to purchase, install, and maintain solar photovoltaic arrays and wind turbines.
“Because local currencies can only be spent at local businesses, they keep wealth circulating locally instead of being sent back to corporate headquarters. For example, the Bristol Pound combined printed notes, an Open Source Pay-by-Text system, integration with the local credit union, and withdraws from ATMs.
“The first community land trust in the US, New Communities Inc., was founded in 1969 by Black farmers and civil rights activists in Southwest Georgia as a way to acquire land and hold it in common in perpetuity. The 501(c)(3) organization raises the funds and owns the land, and typically offers 99-year ‘ground leases’ to residents who own their own homes.
“In Totnes, England, where the Transition Movement started, they’ve taken on bigger and bigger community-based redevelopment. The Totnes Community Development Society (TCDS) signed an agreement in 2014 to redevelop a derelict 8.6-acre industrial site. The resulting design included 62 affordable housing units, 37 retirement homes, a 58-bed ‘eco-hotel’, an arts and music venue, a health and wellness center, 76,000 square feet of workspace, and a local foods cafe, all owned by the community and powered by 100% renewable energy.”
When every one does better, everyone does better
“France’s network of Agricultural Machinery Cooperatives (CUMA) pools equipment, provides each other extra help and experience. CUMA is a space for farmers of all stripes to come together in a neighbourly spirit of mutual aid and solidarity.
“Almost 50 farms are members of this CUMA branch, and 80% of those farms are organic. Strategically, pooling the purchase of equipment is a win-win for members. It frees them up to invest elsewhere on the farm. Meanwhile, they save some 30% in maintenance and operating costs associated with the equipment.
“Members can also avail of the services of three farm workers and an apprentice who are employed by the CUMA. This pooling of labour is another economically viable solution — particularly for small-scale farms that cannot afford to employ someone full-time.
“New members take out shares in the cooperative in order to gain access to the various services. There are different categories of membership, for partial or full access. To cater to everyone’s needs, members decide together on investments in machinery.
“Members can use the repair workshop independently — or with the help of staff. Here they have access to equipment for welding, hydraulics and even tyre repairs. It’s a valuable resource for farmers, especially as such services are rare or virtually non-existent in rural areas.”
Milking Trump’s stupidity, smart people are turning to EVs
“The AAA says gasoline prices are up nationally more than a third since the start of the Iran conflict. Owner Dink Davis of iDrive1 Motors in Carrollton, Texas, specializing in used electric vehicles, says ‘We can barely keep up with the stuff that’s coming in’. On Tuesday, he says, a customer traded in a diesel-eating Jeep, which costs more than $100 to fill up, for a used EV.
“Data from Cox Automotive shows that US sales of used EVs popped 12% in the first quarter of the year compared to the same time in 2025, with 93,500 vehicles sold in 2026 so far.
“The bump in used EV interest comes at both a weird and convenient time. In column weird: Automakers that sell electrics in the US are continuing to back away. Honda last month nixed three EVs. Ford discontinued the F-150 Lightning and canceled its next-generation electric truck. Stellantis canceled its own all-electric Dodge Ram.
“In column convenient: Used EVs are a pretty good deal right now. Though new battery-powered cars are still plenty more expensive than gas-powered ones, Cox noted that used electric average is $34,800, a lot, but just $1,300 more than the average gas-powered one.
“In the months ahead, the price might get even better. Some 200,000 used EVs are set to come off lease this year after US consumers start turning them in, triple 2024’s levels.”
Local and national — data center secret plans and non-disclosure agreements
“Across America, data center projects — often advanced in secret by an alliance of local powerbrokers, politicians, and bureaucrats working in league with the developers — are blindsiding unsuspecting communities.
“One of the first steps, it seems, is to quietly infiltrate a community, usually through city/county commissioners, kingpins, or a Chamber of Commerce Economic Development Committee. The same local officials facilitating data center projects often sign NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements), guaranteeing their secrecy.
“At a 2025 Douglas County [Kansas] Board of County Commissioners work session, Commissioner Patrick Kelly asked [County Attorney] about signing NDAs: ‘. . when an economic development project may come up and we may be asked to sign a non-disclosure for protecting their intellectual property rights or whatever they’re sharing with us, do you [County Attorney] have any advice on that?’ (Kelly is on the Lawrence/Douglas County Economic Development Committee Board of Directors.)
“The county attorney, Steve Bullock, replied that there would likely be some kind of work-around: ‘The KORA statute has 55 exceptions, so I imagine there’s one that would allow us to enter into an agreement like that’.
“In July 2024, the Douglas County Commissioners tasked an obscure member of the zoning staff with drafting data center regulations. When I put in a KORA request for whatever they’d worked on in the intervening 14 months, I got one blank email, four duplicate PDFs of questions from a Lawrence Journal-World reporter, and nine blacked out pages, citing [various] KSA exemptions.”
Climate heating impact of data centers
“The vast data centers that power artificial intelligence are creating ‘heat islands’, warming the land around them by up to 16°F, and making life hotter for more than 340 million people. There are still big gaps in our understanding of the impacts of data centers, even as they boom in number.
“Andrea Marinoni, associate professor at the University of Cambridge, decided to look at temperature data over the last 20 years from ‘hyperscalers’, vast data centers that house thousands of servers and can stretch over a million square feet.
“They focused on more than 6,000 data centers located away from highly dense urban areas. They found surface temperatures increased by an average of 3.6°F after a data center started operations. In extreme cases, nearby temperatures increase by up to 16.4°F.
“These increases were consistent across the globe. Strikingly, the impacts weren’t limited to a data center’s immediate surroundings. Temperature increases affected areas up to 6.2 miles away.”
War’s always about oil — Trump’s just stupid enough to say it out loud
“Donald Trump said this past week he wants to ‘take the oil in Iran’ by seizing control of a key export hub. Said Patrick Bigger, co-director of the Transition Security Project, ‘Trump truly believes that the US is entitled to whatever resource it so desires. It’s a real might-makes-right logic that is both abhorrent and spectacularly miscalculated’.
“Iran has said it would need guarantees against future attacks to halt its counteroffensive. Iran attacked a fully loaded crude oil tanker anchored at Dubai port on Monday. Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz to most commercial traffic.
“The president said that if the strategically crucial strait of Hormuz were not ‘immediately’ reopened and a peace deal not reached ‘shortly’, the US planned on ‘blowing up and completely obliterating’ Iran’s energy infrastructure. That includes Kharg Island — the five-mile strip through which 90% of Iran’s oil is exported.
“Said Amir Handjani, an energy lawyer at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, ‘It undermines all of the other reasons Trump has given for waging this war, and makes it look like what everyone always suspects when the US engages in military confrontation, which is a play for natural resources.’”
Farming: energy in/energy out — role of fossil fuel is obscure
“Often I hear figures in the range of that it takes 10 units of external energy to produce 1 unit of food energy. But the proponents of biofuel make claims that they produce three times more energy than they use. The whole discussion is admittedly quite complex and I will try here to sort things out.
“The main energy supply to farming is sun light, but it is just a small share of that energy reaching the field that is converted by the photosynthesis into carbohydrates. If one calculates backwards, we find that the energy in harvested products represents only 0.4% of the solar energy that reaches the fields. Of this 0.4%, only 61% is actually used. Thus, in reality we use only around 0.25% of the solar energy reaching the ground.
“Human labour energy is another input that sometime is included, but would in many cases lead to a double counting, as the human energy is derived from the agriculture system. One can make a similar argument about animal draught power, to the extent the draught animals are fed from the agriculture system.
“Different kinds of agricultural production and different foods have different energy ratios. The energy efficiency of deep-sea fishing, meat production from feedlots, and vegetables grown in heated greenhouses is very low. It is much higher for grains, grazing animals and root crops. One third of all energy in the food system in the United States is used for snacks, convenience foods, and beverages. Food that requires cold chains and a lot of processing consumes a lot of energy post-harvest.
“Zeke Marshall and Paul E Brockway published A net energy analysis of the global agriculture, aquaculture, fishing and forestry system which includes human labour and also animal labour. According to their research the net Energy Return on Energy invested of the whole system increased from 2.9 in 1971 to 4.0 in 2017. A lot better than my calculation. Why? To begin with, their calculation doesn’t include the post-harvest processing, distribution and consumption stages.
“As you can see, one can use all kinds of figures to support various statement and argument. When comparing earlier periods with today, I believe it is highly misleading to only calculate farming operations’ energy use. The energy use for processing, transport, wholesale, retail, and consumption, which is a bigger part of total energy use, should be included in order to compare two systems in a meaningful way.”
Petroleum supposedly replaced whale oil to protect whales — no longer
“The Endangered Species Act is the bedrock law that protects threatened plants and animals in the United States. The law is difficult to circumvent, but it does contain a key loophole. The federal government can convene a committee known as the ‘God Squad’ to vote on whether to override the law.
“The ‘God Squad’ has only ever been invoked a few times. On 31 March, the Trump administration convened the ‘God Squad’ for the first time in more than three decades. In a morning meeting that lasted around 15 minutes, the committee voted unanimously to waive all Endangered Species Act regulations on oil and gas extraction in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The decision could cause the extinction of the Rice’s whale, a species that lives only in the northern Gulf of Mexico and which has only about 50 living members. Rice’s whales grow to leviathan proportions, their bodies spanning the length of a bus and weighing as much as as six elephants. The busy ship traffic in the northern Gulf of Mexico results in deadly vessel strikes upon the whales, which rest at the surface of the sea at night.
“Congress intended the Extinction Committee to be used only in rare circumstances, as a last resort. The Trump administration is weaponizing this power to pad the profits of the oil and gas industry. You can tell Congress: Save Whales From the Extinction Committee.”
Caught in the Devil’s bargain
“I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm
I’m going to join in a rock ‘n’ roll band
I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m going to try an’ get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who I am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden”
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