Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
The Hydrogen Ladder (ML)
The Pathway to Clean Hydrogen Commercial Liftoff (DOE)
Can a viable industry emerge from the hydrogen shakeout? (E)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
Refurbed, a Vienna-based marketplace for refurbished electronics, raised a $57M Series C led by Evli Growth Partners and C4 Group (EU)
Niron Magnetics, a startup manufacturing rare earth-free permanent magnets, raised a $33M round from GM Ventures, Stellantis Ventures, and others (FN)
Letoon Holding Ltd., a UK-based company focused on recovering high-value ingredients from vegetable waste, raised $24.5M in financing from Nimbus Capital (BW)
Renewable energy infrastructure company Talus Renewables raised a $22M Series A led by Material Impact and Xora Innovation (VC)
IperionX, a more sustainable titanium producer, raised $16.7M in funding led by B Riley Principal Investments, Fidelity International, Inherent Group, and others (BW)
Princeton NuEnergy, a startup focused on recycling and commercializing lithium-ion battery materials, raised a $16M Series A led by Wistron Corporation (FN)
Aclarity, a startup helping eliminate PFAS from the environment, raised a $15.9M Series A led by Aqualateral (VC)
Ambercycle, a molecular regeneration technology company for the fashion industry, raised $5M in funding led by Drive Catalyst (FN)
Airloom Energy, a Wyoming-based energy company focused on wind energy generation, raised a $4M seed round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures (FN)
Green Theory
Chocolate or Cheese: Food Emissions
As the famed line in economics puts it: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Indeed, our foods come with many costs, including when catered by your employer, or served at home by a close friend. Even paying tax and tip on top of a meal doesn’t really cover it. Sure, you can eat a meal without spending cash at a restaurant or grocery, but although some food literally grows on trees, one must still consider the infrastructure, water, time, and nutrients essential to a fruit blossoming. That’s just the beginning.
Between public health impacts, environmental damage, pollution, and more, foods contain these additional costs: costs which are hidden by artificially low prices. Someone has to pay the tab for these hidden costs, and that someone is all of us.
How can we limit our diets’ burden on our fellow humans and the planet?
One common place to start is by finding the most emissions-intensive foods, and then working to reduce or remove them from one’s diet.
Still, defining which foods are the most emissions-intensive can be difficult. Charts such as this one from Visual Capitalist, a few weeks back, come in handy for knowing foods’ emissions and comparing foods that are typically weighed. It could overstate, however, the role of dark chocolate in US food emissions. Clocking in at #2, above cheese and pork, in emissions per kg, dark chocolate only accounts for 1-4% of US food emissions, far less than cheese (10%) or pork (6%).
Other charts focus on the emissions per calorie, or emissions per calorie of protein, and even though these energy-based figures are more relevant to comparing eating choices, they share with the weight-based chart in obscuring the true sources and scale of excess in the American diet.
By combining consumption with emissions data, we can answer:
Where does the average American’s food emissions come from?
What did we find?
About half of all US food emissions come from beef consumption. Even though Americans eat more pounds of poultry than beef, and consume more pounds of milk than beef, beef emissions dwarf poultry and milk emissions combined. Cow-based products (including beef, cheese, and milk) make up over 64% of the annual emissions across all of these foods.
Plant-based foods (shown in green) are diverse and make up less than one fifth of food emissions, while meat (red) and other animal products (yellow) number among the largest categories of emissions. Still, the change in land use driven by coffee and dark chocolate, and resultant emissions, cannot be ignored.
As individuals shift to more plant-based foods, the plant-based share of food emissions will grow, but total emissions will plummet. Replacing all beef calories with tofu, for example, would still put tofu below poultry as an emissions source, for the average American.
Limits to this chart include its oversimplification of food impacts within and across food categories. Not every pound of each of these foods will result in the same emissions, and almost no one eats all of these foods in these quantities. Further, given social dangers uniquely posed by animal agriculture (collapse of useful human antibiotics, health risks and societal burden associated with eating red meat, and more)—let alone the horrific factories supplying 99% of US meat—plant-based foods hold other forms of value to which emissions-based analyses are blind.
The more completely we consider the impacts of our foods, the closer we will be to a just food transition, and a cleaner, safer world for everyone. Though only one lens, identifying our food emissions shines a light on where we ought to pursue new foods and new food systems.
The Closer
Photophores have a wide range in structure from a simple group of photogenic cells to organs with photogenic cells surrounded by reflectors, lenses, light guides, color filters and muscles— used to lure prey & become invisible to predators at a moments notice. (Source)