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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
It’s modernity, stupid
“I thought it might be a good time to revisit an exchange about ‘the green transition’ that clarified for me much of what I find troubling about it as a path forward. It started with Bill McKibben’s review of a book documenting the role carbon dioxide has played in shaping the history of the planet.
“McKibben does what he always does. He concludes his review with a breathless recitation of ‘the possibility of a quick and remarkable solar revolution’. He notes the declining costs of solar panels, the success with which China is installing them at home and selling them abroad, and the potential for grassroots activism to overcome the opposition.
“A letter from Mark Roller in the NYRB took issue with McKibben’s sunny rendering of the green transition. Solar and wind only appear cheap, Roller argues, if you ignore the way they are integrated into the existing fossil-fuel grid. They are intermittent energy sources that must be backstopped, and even if one could end dependency on that grid, the number of batteries required would be staggering — and costly to produce.
“He reminds us that electricity accounts for roughly a fifth of total energy usage and that the 4/5 remaining is dependent upon the non-stop burning of fossil fuels. Improving that proportion, even if it were technically feasible, would require building whole new industries pretty much from the ground up.
“Finally, it is misleading, he argues, to call solar and wind ‘renewable’. The sun and the wind are eternal, but solar panels and wind turbines are machines with a shelf life. Making, transporting, and installing them, replacing them when they wear out — these are necessary phases of a highly industrialized process fully dependent upon fossil fuels. The ecological costs attending the development of a ‘green’ economy — e.g., mining, pollution, toxic wastes — may well exceed those of a fossil fuel economy.
“For Roller, rising CO2 levels are just ‘one symptom of a larger man-made crisis of ecological overshoot’. By focusing so narrowly on global warming, we miss the main point: the modern industrial way of life itself is to blame and it imperils ‘not just the atmosphere but the entire biosphere’.
“McKibben, in his reply, dismisses Roller’s argument as ‘just silly’. He offers a point-by-point refutation of Roller’s critique. I have read nearly every book McKibben has written. He is always thoughtful and well-informed and writes in a manner I find appealing. I have learned a great deal from him over the years.
“But I found his response to Roller to be unconvincing and, to be honest, a bit annoying. Roller is sounding an alarm about issues that should be of primary importance. There are many weak spots in ‘green transition’ advocacy that make objections to it worthy of serious consideration.” [click the link for the full article]
Rob Hopkins remembers Richard Heinberg
“Richard was a Fellow at Post Carbon Institute, and the author of many books. He was also one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I ever met, and such a vital inspiration for so much of my life and work.
“First thing I knew about Richard’s work was his book ‘The Party’s Over’, his seminal book on peak oil. I was teaching permaculture at that time at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland and my last year was deeply inspired by ‘The Party’s Over’.
“As the year came to a close we set about organising a conference called ‘Fuelling the Future’. We had heard that permaculture co-originator David Holmgren and Richard were both going to be in Ireland, so we built an event around them.
“It was at that event that we released ‘The Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan’, an intentional pathway away from dependence on oil and gas. Richard was thrilled by it, took lots of copies back to the US with him, and his enthusiasm was one of the vital seeds of what later became the Transition movement.
“In late 2006 he visited my home in Totnes — where we had just started the Transition Town Totnes initiative — to teach on the ‘Life After Oil’ course at Schumacher College. His ability to present complex information in a digestible and accessible way, and his generosity to sit and discuss ideas with people was beautiful to see.
“His book ‘Powerdown’ was a huge impact on the Transition movement, as was the next one ‘The End of Growth’. In 2013 he was back in Totnes to promote that, speaking again in the Civic Hall.
“In 2013, I visited the US for a speaking tour. One of my highlights was speaking at the Northern California Permaculture Gathering. Richard was there and we both gave talks. That was the last time I saw him in person.
“My deepest love and condolences to Janet and to all Richard’s colleagues at Post Carbon, especially Asher Miller.” [click the link for the full article]
Battery waste — EV’s Achilles heel
“After spending the past decade building the world’s largest electric vehicle market, China is confronting one consequence of its success: a growing wave of batteries nearing the end of their service life.
“Annual sales of battery-powered vehicles in China were more than 16 million in 2025. With EV batteries typically lasting about eight years, disposal or reprocessing poses a major waste-management and recycling challenge. China reported 400,000 metric tons of EV battery waste last year. Researchers have projected that the figure could grow to 1.69 million metric tons in 2030, and 22.39 million metric tons by 2040.
“EVs eliminate tailpipe emissions, but their full life-cycle effects — including discarded lithium-ion batteries — remain a concern. Governments largely are betting that recycling systems would eventually catch up.
“Because China leads the world in EV adoption, how Beijing manages both the risks and opportunities of battery retirement could help shape the industry’s global model. By 2023, certified [Chinese] companies had a combined annual processing capacity of 623,000 metric tons. Yet they handled only about 25% of those batteries.
“In a paper, ‘The Urgency to Regulate Informal EV Battery Recycling in China’, researchers described China’s effort to control the informal market as a ‘losing battle’.
“’There is poisoning, explosion, and fire caused by improper battery dismantling, waste water being dumped into rivers, contaminants being seeped into groundwater and polluting the soil’, said Laixiang Sun, a professor at the University of Maryland and co-author of the paper.” [click the link for the full article]
Broken US public transit has available solutions
“America once led the world in building transit and now leads the world in what transit costs, roughly three times the international average per mile.
The great benefit of cities lies in what social scientists call ‘agglomeration’. It’s a fancy way of saying that if you put a lot of people close together, they produce cultural and economic value. That is why urbanists are always going on and on about density.
“Cars work against agglomeration. Whether they are gas cars, electric cars, autonomous cars, flying cars, it doesn’t matter; you simply can’t get enough people living close enough together to produce the benefits of agglomeration if every one of those people is carried around by their own two-ton vehicle. Individual car ownership inherently reduces the value of cities.
“In the 19th and early 20th century, the US was a world leader in public transportation, building trains and urban streetcar systems quickly and cheaply in ways that turbocharged its economic growth. But in the modern era, this story has flipped on its head.
“But what can be done about it? At the think tank, Institute for Progress, they recently brought together a group of experts to propose ideas on that subject. Released last month, the Transit Abundance Playbook contains a series of essays and proposals on how to improve the various stages of the process of building transit.” [click the links for the full articles]
$750 million federal bicycle funding rescinded by the Donald
“Cities and states are scrambling, as the Trump administration seeks to shut off the federal funding spigot for biking and walking trails. In his efforts to eliminate what he perceives as diversity, equity and inclusion, Trump has targeted hundreds of millions in federal grants, and further cuts could be coming.
“Nate Sizemore from the USDOT said the ‘administration is simply getting back to basics by ‘building the essential infrastructure needed to safely move people and commerce. This decision reflects a significant shift away from costly social and climate initiatives that deprioritized the needs of American drivers’.
“Already reeling from the $750 million in cuts included in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cities and states that are counting on federal money for biking and pedestrian projects are worried about further cuts when Congress reauthorizes a broad transportation funding law that expires on September 30.” [click the link for the full article]
Mycorrhizal fungal networks critical to soil fertility and carbon storage
“Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks — webs of ultra-thin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun.
“These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.
“For decades, researchers have known arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi form intimate symbiotic relationships with roughly 80% of the globe’s plant species. But the extent of those networks and where they are densest, such as grasslands, and where they are being lost, like in agricultural areas, hasn’t been well understood until now.
“Those networks have never been mapped globally until now. ‘[The study] helps us come to grips with how important these below ground organisms can be to everything that we see above ground’, said James Bever, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas.
“Mycorrhizal fungal networks are made up of hyphae, each smaller than a strand of human hair. These living pipes transport the nutrients and carbon between the plants and fungi. Because they are so long and thin, they can reach deeper into soils than roots, getting nutrients deep underground that plants can’t reach, while simultaneously storing carbon.
“The study also found where these networks are most threatened. Fungal network densities across croplands are about half of what they are in wild ecosystems. Meanwhile, wild grassland ecosystems are among Earth’s least protected ecosystems, and they are converted into farmland at four times the rate of forests.” [click the link for the full article]
Another youth climate lawsuit overturned
“In affirming a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit called Lighthiser v. Trump, the appeals court said that the youth plaintiffs failed to bring a viable case against the federal government. The appeals court said that it was not the role of the judiciary to supervise government energy policy.
“A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Portland, Oregon expressed skepticism toward some of the plaintiffs’ arguments, such as the assertion that their requested relief was manageable and that the case was meaningfully distinct from a previous youth climate suit.
“The 22 youth plaintiffs wanted the court to declare three executive orders signed by Trump unconstitutional, since they are expected to unleash more dangerous carbon pollution and worsen the climate emergency.
“The Ninth Circuit panel said the Lighthiser plaintiffs’ ‘sweeping’ challenge to hundreds of agency actions, all taken under the executive orders, through one lawsuit is ‘unprecedented’.
“Youth plaintiffs and their attorneys sharply criticized the court’s decision. ‘The court never said we were wrong. They never said the harm isn’t real. They just said they wouldn’t stop the harm’, said lead plaintiff Eva Lighthiser.” [click the link for the full article]
Total oil company liable for customers’ climate emissions
“A recent decision by a French court requires a major European oil and gas company to report not only its own climate-warming emissions and those of its contractors but also those of its customers. The court ruling gives TotalEnergies six months to report on the emissions from airlines, auto drivers and other customers.
“Those emissions represent the vast majority of the company’s total emissions. The company must also assess the risks of those emissions to the environment, human rights and health, and report how it plans to reduce those risks.
“TotalEnergies acknowledged that its own activities result in emissions that pose risks to the environment, but it said emissions from its customers were outside the scope of the law. The court disagreed.
“In a partial win for the company, however, the court declined to directly order TotalEnergies to reduce its overall emissions – including those of its customers – which would have meant effectively telling the company to sell less petroleum.
“This ruling will have repercussions in the United States, because TotalEnergies’ U.S. operations are extensive, including oil and gas production, refining and sales. That could, over time, require U.S.-based companies that operate in Europe to collect and share similar data about their emissions and those of their customers.” [click the link for the full article]
Price of crude will end globalization faster than politics will
“The period of globalization has ended. You need to build multiple supply chains, redundancy, new manufacturing systems, and all of that. Why aren’t people putting money into it? They won’t. It wasn’t the great [financial] returns in the ’70s that got people to put money in that space. It was shortages. It was lines.
“People don’t buy these stories until you run out. That’s gonna hit middle class America and change their lifestyles like they’ve never seen before, I think it’ll take the actual shortage to get people to move, and then we get the capital to move, and it’s a different ballgame.
“In this 29 July 2026 episode, Nate is joined by Jeff Currie, a former commodity strategist at Goldman Sachs and as a current senior advisor at The Carlyle Group. In Currie’s eyes, the West’s refusal to admit scarcity since the ’70s has left it structurally unprepared, particularly compared to China’s security-driven build-out of nuclear, solar, and battery capacity.
“From your seat at Carlyle, you’re watching the Iran war, the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz this morning, and the Ansar Allah attacks against a Saudi tanker. So what did we do? We shut the Red Sea. We have shut the Black Sea. We’ve taken out half of the refinery capacity out of Russia. And you still see the market struggling to hold a hundred dollars a barrel at this point in time.
“But when you look at crude, the reason why everyone is convinced that Trump will taco (“Trump always chickens out”) is what can he pull out of the hat to taco with? He had the MOU before, that he could pull out of the hat to taco with. And at this point right now, the terms of any taco would be far worse than the previous one.
“When I went to Salomon Brothers, I managed money for billionaires back then. That was my job, and one of them started trading oil futures. And so I learned the ins and outs and the special qualities of oil, and I realized a barrel of oil can do five years of human labor, and oh my gosh, this stuff is depleting. And so I started to view the world from an energy lens.
“And here we are thirty years later, and I don’t think Wall Street still understands that oil, diesel, jet fuel, and the like are the hemoglobin in our global system. And I think we’re bombing without any coherent plan. So where do we stand today, on the oil storage/price situation?
“I think that, in products, you’re already there. We are at critical levels. If we look at the three-two-one crack spread, which gives you a three weight to gasoline, a two weight to diesel, and a one weight to crude oil, think how it’s the value of the products versus crude oil.
“It’s $60 a barrel. I’ve never seen it this high, and no one has. Which is telling you at $100 a barrel [for crude], the products are at $160. What happened to get us to this extreme shortage in products has to do with we’ve knocked out refineries in the Arab Gulf, and we did not send out product when we had the ability to send it out. We sent out crude. You should’ve been sending out products, but you can’t send out the products [now] because the ships are flammable.” [click the links for the full articles]
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