Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
Curbing climate change one cow burp at a time (PSU)
The Hazy Days of Summer (NY)
I Told You So are the four least satisfying words in the English language (BM)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
Swedish EV battery maker Northvolt raised a $1.2B round led by BlackRock (TC)
Rondo Energy, a provider of zero-carbon industrial heat and power, raised $60M in funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, and more (FN)
Smart home energy startup dcbel raised a $50M+ Series B led by Volvo Cars, Coatue, Kevin Mahaffey, Real Ventures, and more (FN)
Electric Era Technologies, a Seattle-based company that specializes on EV fast-charging infrastructure, raised $11.5M in a Series A led by HSBC Asset Management (FN)
Soil carbon measurement startup Yard Stick raised a $10.6M Series A led by Toyota Ventures Climate Fund (FN)
Phospholutions, a startup developing sustainable fertilizer technology, raised $10.2M in funding led by Advantage Capital (FN)
Verdigris Technologies, a Moffett Field, CA-based provider of AI-powered energy management solutions, raised $10M in a funding round led by DCVC and Solea Energy (FN)
Cascade Biocatalysts, a biomanufacturing startup focused on green chemistry, raised a $2.6M pre-seed round led by Ten VC (BW)
Goodwings, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based provider of climate-focused SaaS travel management platform, raised a $1.5M seed round led by Global Cleantech and JTB USA (FN)
American Battery Factory, an emerging battery manufacturer developing the first network of LFP battery cell gigafactories in the US, raised ‘significant development capital’ through a Series A led by Lion Energy (PRN)
Green Theory
Green Benjamins
You might know him from the hundred dollar bill, or as the discoverer of electricity. This polymath and inventor also helped found a nation: the #1-polluting United States of America.
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270 years after Benjamin Franklin’s discoveries, electrification powers the energy transition. Still, copious emissions and vast environmental degradation loom from agriculture, especially animal agriculture. What invention could the forefather of electricity offer to cure this crisis?
Franklin wrote often of the virtues of moderation in eating and drinking—moderation to which he credited much of his early success in life. Less popular in his meat-loving nation, one of Franklin’s largest self-admitted leaps forward came when he opted to try a vegetarian diet.
A ‘vegetable diet’
At sixteen, indentured to his older brother, Franklin worked at a printing press, and boarded with the other press workers in a family’s Boston home. As he recalls in his autobiography, when Franklin read The Way to Health, a treatise from Thomas Tryon, he learned of “a vegetable diet” and “determined to go into it.” He quickly caused commotion in the boarding house, reflecting:
“My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my singularity. I made myself acquainted with Tryon’s manner of preparing some of his dishes, such as boiling potatoes or rice, making hasty pudding, and a few others, and then proposed to my brother, that if he would give me, weekly, half the money paid for my board, I would board myself. He instantly agreed to it.” —Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
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Franklin didn’t give up when his vegetarianism made others uncomfortable. Instead, he saw the margin open in his food budget, and pursued his new diet. Indeed, still today, vegetable-rich diets are less expensive, with meat and fish ballooning one’s grocery bills the most.
Trading Meat for Books
Franklin’s scheme to decline the boardinghouse meat in exchange for cash offered further opportunities. Even though his funds were already half the regular boarding budget, Franklin’s vegetable diet was so affordable he “could save half” of this remainder, thus creating—out of meat money—“an additional fund for buying books.”
In his new habits of dining, he also had more time for “study, in which I made greater progress, from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.”
Franklin claims his new diet helped open up the time and energy to re-learn the skills and ideas he’d failed to grasp as a young student, with subjects including “Arithmetick … Navigation … geometry … Locke on Human Understanding” as well as “the Art of Thinking…Socrates” and more.
What if we redirected US meat spending toward education, today? The US meat market could pay for over 10 million public school pupils’ educations each year, over 20% of all public school students.
Preaching without Practicing
For a year, Franklin kept his vegetable diet, and “consider’d…the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable.” Reasonable indeed.
Suddenly, when sailing across the Atlantic to London at 17, upon seeing fish inside the belly of a caught fish, Franklin wavered, and decided he, like the bigger fish, could partake, “returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet” from then on. He remarks how convenient it was to find a rationalization to revert, however weak it may have been.
Still, Franklin would continue to preach moderation, publishing in 1734:
“Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, & sloth; Or the Gout will seize you and plague you both.” [was this supposed to rhyme?] —Poor Richard’s Almanack
Unable to abide by his own guidance, Franklin began to suffer from gout a few decades later, and by 1780 he joked about his health troubles in a satirical piece, Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout, where his disease is one of the characters.
Franklin’s gout mocks him for devouring “slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested.” Though able to reflect on his mistakes, he couldn’t seem to change his lifestyle accordingly.
Poor Richard’s Veggie-Wrap
10 years later, Franklin died of a pulmonary problem, complicated by gout. Researchers in 2008 determined Franklin’s diet was one of the risk factors that “converged and conspired against him” in raising his uric acid levels, causing gout and other health issues.
As a gastroenterologist, Dr. Franklin (relation unclear), noted in a 2021 essay–Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic life overseas prompted him to adopt the diets of his host countries, and the English upper class consumed “prodigious quantities of cold meats.” Whatever his reasons, Franklin’s daily life veered from his Poor Richard projections as a young man.
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Even if Franklin couldn’t live up to his own ideals, his recounting of vegetarianism’s role in his early life leaves an essential lesson for lifestyle changes, in the age of the climate crisis.
Franklin’s stint with the vegetable diet highlights what he gained from reimagining his relationship with food and animals, rather than categorizing his new practice merely in terms of loss.
Could sticking more to veggies into adulthood have helped him live longer, or in less pain? Franklin may have recognized where he went wrong, but it was too late. On a societal or personal scale, how might we shift to healthier, lower-emissions food systems? Can we do it faster than Franklin?
Post Script
Early in his work in electricity, Franklin “proposed a dinner party where a turkey was to be killed via electric shock and roasted on an electrical spit,” noting that his previous attempts tasted “uncommonly tender.” The electrical spit didn’t quite catch on, but how did he manage this operation in the mid-1700s?
The Closer
NatGeo’s pic of a tick we featured recently.