Climate & Sustainability — Posts
15 posts on "Climate & Sustainability" by Shlomo Strauss — bilingual writing on technology, science, and business.
- The Technologies Turning Carbon Into a Profitable Industry — New technologies are turning carbon capture from a costly necessity into a profitable industry by using emissions to create resources like concrete.
- Sugar cane: from white sugar to jet fuel and nano-cellulose — The world's highest-yield crop produces far more than table sugar — its byproducts include bioplastics, sustainable aviation fuel, Lego pieces, and…
- Vertical forests: why green buildings fail and what makes them work — A tale of two green projects — Chengdu's mosquito-plagued ghost towers and Milan's celebrated Bosco Verticale — reveals what separates failure from…
- Ghost flowers of the Mekong Delta: harvesting lotus at dawn — Each monsoon season in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, local women harvest white lotus blossoms by boat at dawn, in a tradition rooted in ecology, cuisine, and…
- Aluminium is the most recyclable material humans use — From Napoleon's dinner table to modern recycling plants, aluminium's near-perfect recyclability and staggering energy savings make it unlike any other…
- Duck flocks as pest control: a low-tech farming method with — A traditional Asian practice of releasing duck flocks into rice paddies boosts soil fertility, suppresses weeds, and according to a 2013 study of 1,000…
- The skydiver who seeded 100 million trees over the Amazon — Brazilian skydiving record-holder Luigi Cani spent five years planning a single jump that scattered 100 million tree seeds over the Amazon, with satellite
- A controlled nuclear blast to reverse decades of carbon emissions — A proposed geoengineering plan would use an 81-gigaton nuclear detonation to pulverize basalt rock, absorbing 30 years' worth of global carbon emissions…
- 20,000 people in one building: what a Chinese megablock reveals about — Using a Chinese residential megacomplex and a bacterial growth thought experiment, the post illustrates how exponential population growth can overtake us…
- Google's new California office is built from wood, and the carbon — Google's new timber office building emits 96% less carbon than a concrete-and-steel equivalent, raising questions about sustainable construction and its…
- The 15-minute city model and what it means for urban commuters — Fort Myers is redesigning itself around walkability, prompting a practical look at whether paying more to live closer to work saves time and money.
- Antarctica's thaw is turning a frozen continent into a geopolitical — As global warming melts Antarctic ice and exposes vast natural resources, international disputes over the continent's ownership are intensifying.
- From paper-savers to power-hungry: the environmental cost of modern — A 1994 photo of Bill Gates illustrates how computing shifted from saving forests to consuming vast amounts of fossil-fuel energy in the age of AI and…
- Serbia's lithium protests expose the environmental cost of the EV — As automakers celebrate Rio Tinto's renewed lithium mining license in Serbia, mass protests highlight the ecological destruction that fuels the green…
- Chinese farmers are using precision lasers to eliminate weeds without — Precision laser systems now let Chinese farmers detect and destroy weeds on the spot, offering a cheaper and less toxic alternative to chemical herbicides.