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The effects of accelerating man-made climate change bring investing opportunities and changes in consumer habits linked to environmental concerns and resource use. Here are select dispatches from media and academia focusing on the solution-focused companies, ESG investors and their advisers, as well as the policy-makers, enterprising individuals and scientists preparing for tomorrow.
Gas companies want to recycle your manure. Companies in the U.S. natural gas industry have begun to scale up a program to sell methane that’s recycled from sources like hog-feeding farms and sewage plants as a replacement for natural gas drawn from wells, E&E News reports. “Poop is gold today,” Randy Jordan, owner of a Massachusetts dairy farm, recently explained to a Boston television reporter, in a clip cited by E&E News.
The waste made by his 800 Holstein cows was mixed with food waste that was collected from supermarkets and dairies by Vanguard Renewables, a Wellesley, Mass., company. It loaded the waste into a fat, rubber-domed silo, called an anaerobic digester, that it built on Jordan’s farm. The waste was then mixed up and heated for a month. Those silos “function like a giant cow’s stomach,” said John Hanselman, chairman and CEO of Vanguard, which was started with a chain of methane-producing farms in New England, according to the report. The enzymes and methane from the manure helped break down the food. That released more methane. The result, after the gas was purified and concentrated to pipeline standards, was enough natural gas to power and heat 1,600 homes. It raised Jordan’s income by between 15% and 25% per cow, Vanguard estimates.
Read:General Motors hopes to convince Wall Street to bet on its electric cars
And:Cars reached record fuel efficiency, EPA data shows, just in time for a Trump rollback
China’s coal use still dominates world stats. London-based think-tank Ember found in a report issued this week that China’s use of coal increased from 2007 to 2019 to a point where the huge economy is now responsible for 50% of all coal-fired electricity generation. The group reports that while U.S. coal-fired electricity generation has been cut in half since 2007, 65% of that capacity has been replaced by natural gas, with 35% being replaced by renewables such as wind and solar power. The shift has resulted in a drop in greenhouse gas emissions of 19%, when the methane emitted by natural gas was factored in. In Europe, coal generation also halved, but that capacity was replaced entirely by renewables, resulting in a 43% drop in emissions.
There’s a name for that. Climate-change anxiety has become so prevalent that the American Psychological Association has released a 69-page guide to advise mental health-care providers on how to deal with it. With the manual comes a new word for describing the condition: solastalgia, or the distress induced by environmental change and the degradation of one’s home place.
Read:Why climate change is also a health care story — it’s the biggest health threat this century
