🌏️ Solar For All

Plus: low-altitude satellites, pumped hydro energy storage, and tiny frogs

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Welcome to the week!

I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times at this point, but it’s March already, somehow? Time keeps on slipping and the news keeps on news-ing.

Let’s get to it.

This week:

  • 🔋 Battery supply chains

  • 🤳Smartphone-free kids

  • 🥜New food allergy treatment

  • 📈Nvidia stock blasting off

  • And more

Have a great week,

— Willow

This is science for people who give a shit.

Every week, we help 28,000+ humans understand and unfuck the rapidly changing world around us. It feels great, and we’d love for you to join us.

New Shit Giver Nicole wants to help solve “climate - clean air and clean water.“

The essentials! Keep an eye on our Action Steps (and many of our podcast conversations!), these topics are our bread and butter.


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From My Notebook header

⚡️ Climate change:

🦠 Health & Bio:

💦 Food & Water:

  • A drug historically used to treat asthma and hives has been approved to treat severe food allergies (which are on the rise, for some reason), having been found to cut the risk of life-threatening allergic reactions

  • Check out these charts for a visual of just how big factory farming is, and how they just keep getting bigger

  • 🌎️ Scientists are using AI to find genetic traits in kelp that can make kelp forests more resilient to a warming ocean

  • Remember the applesauce that was tainted with lead last year? The receipts are in on how the hell contaminated food for kids ended up in stores

👩‍💻 Beep Boop:

*🌎️ = Global news story

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Last week’s most popular Action Step was finding a volunteer opportunity with Doctors Without Borders.

  • 🌍️ Donate to charity: water to support sustainable, community-owned water projects around the world.

  • Volunteer with your local Sierra Club chapter to fight for clean air in your community.

  • 🌎️ Get educated about becoming a climate justice activist by taking a course from Fossil Free University.

  • Be heard about permanently and sustainably protecting SNAP benefits.

  • 🌍️ Invest in scaling climate solutions with Carbon Equity.

*🌎️ = Global Action Step

The climate clock is ticking faster and faster.

How can we use capitalism to undo the bad stuff that capitalism did and maybe even make things better?

That's today's big (loaded) question, and my returning guest is Akshat Rathi.

Akshat is a London-based senior reporter, newsletter writer, and podcaster for Bloomberg News. He is here today to talk about his first book, Climate Capitalism.

This wonderful book tells the stories of people building solutions at scale to tackle one of humanity's greatest challenges. Some solutions we've already built, like solar and batteries, and some we're still working on because they take a lot of work, and money, and politics.

In a world where journalism is going bye-bye, and the climate clock is ticking, but we've made so much progress, and we can make so much more, Akshat's reporting in this book couldn't be more timely, as we seek to answer the question, where are we on this timeline?

📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Overcast
Listen on Spotify

Biofuels. Are they a real climate solution or is it just greenwashing?

When I hear terms like “carbon neutral” or “offset” or “net-zero” (as opposed to real zero), I’m giving an immediate side-eye, and these are terms that often go hand in hand with biofuels.

Sure, they’re technically renewable.

But does that mean they’re clean, or the best use of our limited time and resources? Read our biofuels explainer for the low-down

The smallest vertebrate of them all.

🙋‍♀️ Vote!

In last week’s poll, 74% of you said we should obviously have a constitutional right to a healthy environment.

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