Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
Canadian Wildfires Hurt Air-Quality Levels in U.S. (WSJ)
Don’t Blame Canada (H)
What does the perfect carbon price look like? (E)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
![Inside Charm Industrial's big bet on corn stalks for carbon removal | MIT Technology Review Inside Charm Industrial's big bet on corn stalks for carbon removal | MIT Technology Review](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4067c49a-2567-4dda-9a5b-bb4e78760dfa_3000x1688.jpeg)
Carbon removal technology startup Charm Industrial raised a $100M Series B led by General Catalyst (FN)
Forge Nano, a startup developing precision nano-coating technology to optimize battery life and performance, raised $50M+ in funding led by Korea's Hanwha Corporate Venture Capital (FN)
Mycelium technology company Ecovative (it makes alt food and clothing material) raised a $30M Series E led by Viking Global Investors (BW)
WaveBL, a provider of electronic bills, raised a $26M Series B led by NewRoad Capital Partners (PRN)
OXCCU, a two-year-old London startup that has developed a process to convert carbon dioxide and hydrogen into aviation fuel, raised a $22.7 million Series A round led by Clean Energy Ventures
Sourcemap, a provider of supply chain mapping and monitoring software that helps customers root out social and environmental issues, raised a $20M Series B led by Energize Ventures (PRN)
Amogy, a three-year-old Brooklyn startup that is attempting to power vehicles by creating electricity out of ammonia, raised an $11 million Series B extension, increasing the total size of its Series B to $150 million. Investors included Marunouchi Climate Tech Growth Fund (A)
Chamberlain Coffee, a sustainable and organic coffee brand, raised a $7M round led by Blazar Capital, founder and investor Emma Chamberlain, and United Talent Agency (FN)
Carbon removal marketplace Nori raised $6.3M in funding led by M13, Toyota Ventures, Placeholder, and Cargill (BW)
Green Theory
When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler
As a child on the US homefront during the Second World War, recycling aluminum from gum wrappers, carefully pried from their waxpaper counterparts, you might have felt yourself part of defeating fascism, and defending freedom. In US modern consumer culture, on the other hand, sorting and recycling scraps of packaging doesn’t fit into the large-living lifestyle that advertising perpetuates.
WWII by no means represents a flawless moral period for the US. Leaving alone any violent actions abroad, the racist imprisonment and robbery of Japanese Americans by the government highlights the greed and neglect for human welfare that war can overshadow. Further, the US war profits, though taxed highly, sparked the modern military industrial complex, and must be credited with tens of thousands, if not millions, of lives taken violently since then.
Still, the Second World War may be the last national-scale model of US resource conservation as both a social good and obligation, as well as a legal requirement, in many cases. The National Park Service recounts that “[s]acrificing certain items during the war became the norm for most Americans. It was considered a common good for the war effort, and it affected every American household.” Though systems such as ration cards enforced limits to consumption, there was also an air of solidarity undergirding the changes.
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How did we get from the unity of free homefront families to the divisive, decadent culture of individualism we see today?
The Culture of Affluence
Living in the US today, the prevalence and power of consumerism may seem to have been a fixture of the American experiment from its outset. Going back 15 years, Dr. Madeline Levine was raising the alarm on what she termed “the culture of affluence.” Dr. Levine elaborates, identifying and challenging the culture of affluence:
Here's the problem: the statistics for emotional problems among privileged kids are startling. There has been a large upswing in everything from depression, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse to psychosomatic disorders…
Money is not the culprit here. …
The culprit is the "culture of affluence," and it affects a wide swath of people living in America. The "culture of affluence" values "stuff" over people, competition over cooperation, and the individual over the group [emphasis added] … we are saturated with a culture that, in spite of our affluence, is bankrupt. It is sickening our children just as it is sickening us. —Dr. Madeline Levine, NAIS Fall 2007
Whether you call it consumerism or the culture of affluence, the indulgent and self-centered ‘American way’ is, in fact, a more recent phenomenon. Steam really picked up with “[t]he advent of the television in the late 1940s,” which Wikipedia explains as “an attractive opportunity for advertisers, who could reach potential consumers in the home using lifelike images and sound. The introduction of mass commercial television positively impacted retail sales.”
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This rise of retail sales after the war quickly swept aside the scarcity and solidarity of wartime. As Jennifer Steinhauer writes for the New York Times, “the fresh-vegetable trends of World War II were almost immediately subsumed by postwar Jell-O molds, cake mixes and frozen dinners — all markers of modern living at the time.” Consumption became synonymous with the US definition of freedom, after the fascist empires fell.
From TV to Today
The next few decades brought about such strong consumerist forces, they overpowered President Carter’s bid for energy conservation, despite the backdrop of rampant inflation and the gas crisis of the ‘70s. NPR reports about his administration’s focus on efficiency, rather than extractive, false abundance:
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JIMMY CARTER: All of us must learn to waste less energy. Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night, we could save half the current shortage of natural gas.[JEFF BRADY, BYLINE]: You know, some people made fun of him for this. That's how unusual the idea of energy conservation was at the time…
Reagan beat Carter in a landslide election and came in with different policies. Since then, the country's conservation and alternative energy efforts, they've progressed in fits and starts, depending on who's president. –NPR, Feb 2023
Those fits and starts have cost the US dearly, and as consumerism conquered more spheres of public and private life, the internet, social media, and smartphones offered a new TV-level boom for advertising, and for teen depression. Mental health for children and teens hasn’t gotten better since Dr. Levine’s 2007 piece.
In exploring the culprits of teen depression today, Dr. Jean Twenge unpacks the role of social media in deepening divides and negative mental health outcomes for teens. These trends consolidated and spiked in the years following Levine’s warnings. Advertising’s new vector—the video billboard in every pocket, all the time—unfurled a new tentacle of the culture of affluence: a tentacle even more intimate and embedded than the living room TV set.
Carter failed to shift the consumer paradigm back to a patriotic collectivist conservation, but we may need to harness this spirit to cooperate to protect human flourishing from self-destructive, selfish consumption.
Good times for teens on the homefront?
Dr. Twenge set out to examine if any intuitive societal indicators of teen depression showed up in the data. In ensuring she hadn’t missed something, she and her fellow researchers wanted to “consider these alternative explanations and see if they fit the data.
So wars — well, if that were the case, wouldn’t you expect teen depression to have been the highest — well, especially, during World War II?
No, it was lower by the measures we have then.” Twenge does go on to cite that other US foreign wars aren’t correlated with downturns in teen mental health (at least, undrafted teens’ mental health).
At the same time, WWII had the highest US casualties of any foreign war. At its outset, the US had far less secure of a hold on global power, than in the decades that followed. That teen mental health didn’t bottom out should stand out as downright shocking. How could spirits have stayed so high?
The US and its allies demanded citizens take steps to curb their consumption, whether duly or not. These demands created different dominant social focuses and understandings than we share today.
Imagine if one third of your produce was coming from your own garden, as was the case from US Victory Gardens during WWII. How much more grateful for, and connected to, our food would we feel?
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What if gas cars weren’t allowed to drive faster than their most fuel-efficient speed (around 55mph)? Wartime restrictions on speed limits were implemented to preserve not only fuel, but also rubber. If these conservation-focused caps stayed in place, perhaps we could have designed US life for something cleaner and healthier than a default of asphalt, and gas guzzling transit.
The Rosie the Riveter National Historic Park, in Richmond, California, summarizes: “The elimination of waste was a key aspect in achieving victory over the fascist empires of Europe and Asia.”
Old habits, same victims, & new enemies
Whether or not it played a role in bolstering teen mental health, uniting against a common enemy made conservation and waste reduction hip and cool!
The propaganda poster above—though dramatic—contains an important lesson. Drawing Hitler put a face to the forces of evil and violent racism, and connected resource conservation to the fight against that evil, violent racism. During WWII, as today, extravagant personal consumption further enriched the powerful, who were looting society, and subjected the least fortunate to even worse fates.
There is a cost in human health (and life) for our waste, and resource-intensive indulgence. Since modern US society imposes nearly zero accountability for wastefulness (often instead rewarding the wasteful, and ignoring or mocking the dutiful conservators), it’s harder to see the connection between personal excesses of Western living, and how these choices hurt the most vulnerable first, and hurt them the worst.
The US may currently lack a single modern face to stand in for evil: an individual who everyone agrees poses a threat to society, and profits off of our wastefulness. The faceless systems that unite to perpetuate the fossil fuel economy and consumerism defy a unifying image—one that could sit in the passenger seat of the empty muscle car, driven alone.
Even if the worst perpetrators of climate change can’t be reduced into one satisfyingly punchable face, we can listen to the most vulnerable, and invoke these victims’ sacrifices, rather than the perpetrators’ apparitions. Both sides’ outcomes lay tied up in our food, travel, and trades, today—global political war on or not.
The Closer
Photo by my friend Liz as she flew into NYC on Wednesday.
(Prediction: a dozen+ new NYC-based climate tech VCs launch by EOM)