Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:Â
Russell Gold’s Superpower
Scaling the US East Coast offshore wind industry to 20 gigawatts and beyond (M)
The GreendicatorÂ
Top Deals of the Week
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Plant-based protein brand ALOHA raised a $68M round from SEMCAP Food & Nutrition (VC)
Profluent, a two-year-old startup based in Berkeley, CA, that specializes in AI-driven protein design, raised a $35 million round led by Spark Capital, with previous investors Insight Partnersand Air Street Capital also taking part. More here.
Eco-friendly personal care startup 900.care raised a $23M round led by Lombard Odier Investment Managers (TC)
Evoloh, a startup manufacturing electrolyzers for hydrogen production, raised a $20M Series A led by Engine Ventures (TC)
Ember, an electric bus network company, raised an $11M Series A led by Inven Capital, 2150, and AENU (FN)
CemVision, a four-year-old Swedish startup that is focused on creating sustainable cement by using recycled industrial waste from the steel and mining industries, raised a $10.8 million seed round. Investors included Polar Structure, Backing Minds, and Zacua Ventures. Sifted has more here.
Sustainable sourcing platform Circular.co raised $10.5M in funding: a $5.3M round backed by Maniv, Oxygea, and Eclipse and a previous $5.2M seed round led by Eclipse (BW)
AirMyne, a two-year-old startup based in Berkeley, Ca., that is developing a technology for capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air in order to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases, raised a $6.9 million seed round. Alumni Ventures, Y Combinator and others participated in the deal. TechCrunch has more here.
Pelikan Mobility, a two-year-old Paris startup that offers a leasing service for EV fleets that employs customized leasing plans, raised a $4.3 million seed round. Participants in the deal included Pale Blue Dot, Frst, and Seedcamp. TechCrunch has more here.
Allium Engineering, a startup improving infrastructure durability and sustainability, raised a $3.3M seed round led by Propeller (VC)
Amber, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that offers extended warranty plans for electric vehicles, particularly Tesla models, covering critical parts and potential repair costs after the manufacturer's warranty expires, raised a $3.2 million seed round co-led by Era and Primer Sazze. TechCrunch has more here.
Green Theory
Give up your home to end all wars?
If someone told your community you could bring about peace on earth, just by packing up and leaving, would you abandon your home? What if your family had lived there, in concert with the land and sea, for thousands of years?
The US military proposed this bargain to the islanders of Bikini Atoll, in early 1946. They suggested that detonating nuclear weapons on the islanders’ home would usher in a new era of peace, and the community acquiesced, trusting in a chance to return to a rehabilitated atoll, one day.
That day of homecoming still hasn’t arrived, 77 years later, as the human, ecological, and moral devastation unleashed upon the tranquil, 29-archipelago Marshall Islands persists to this day.
By violating the balance of the web of life, irreversible on the scale of human generations, the US bombings turned a pocket of human harmony with nature into a sea of carcinogens and widespread despair.
Plundering the Pacific
Within 60 seconds of the US’ largest-ever nuclear detonation, the explosive plume of Castle Bravo had expanded 7 miles across, and stretched nearly 9 miles into the sky. At such a colossal height, the Bravo mushroom cloud could be seen from 265 miles away.
For Mina Titus, a 6-year-old girl about 100 miles east on Rongelap Atoll, the bright flash and glass-shattering shockwave that bookended the appearance of the toxic column were just a few of the early signs that life for her community would be forever changed by these blasts.
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In her mid-70s today, Titus survives as one of about 20 islanders who remember the Bravo bomb, and life before exile from her home. Castle Bravo was far from the only detonation, and Bikini and Rongelap just two of the dozen or so atolls with dangerous radiation exposure, impacting tens of thousands of people.
As Chloe Shrager summarizes in her in-depth report on the unheard stories of broken promises and violence inflicted on the Marshallese by the US:
Between 1946 and 1958, a total of 67 nukes were exploded in the Marshall Islands — the equivalent of dropping 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for a dozen years.
The twelve-year bombing campaign vaporized entire islands and dotted lagoons with radioactive bomb craters, forever displacing generations of Marshallese from their paradisiacal home turned nuclear wasteland. —Chloe Shrager, Forgotten Fallout
Decades of Abuse
The hellish 24 hours that followed the Castle Bravo detonation brought burns and rashes to the skin of Rongelap islanders. Everything was covered in fine, radioactive ash: poisoning food sources, and turning the sandy beaches toxic. Within a few days, the government decided to evacuate everyone, and the weeks of isolation and humiliation that followed introduced yet new lesions and sufferings to the victims.
Next, the US decided to leave Rongelap islanders on an island without any traditional food sources for 3 years. Then, still knowing their atoll to be unsafe, the US government opted to repopulate Rongelap, in order to study the effects of dangerously high radiation exposure.
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To ensure their immoral human experiment had a control population, the US not only brought back Rongelap islanders, but also invited other Marshallese folks (with lower levels of previous radiation exposure) to unknowingly participate. When teams of US and Marshallese contractors were brought in to clean up 3 heavily radiated atolls in the 1970s, they weren’t informed of the inherent danger, and used no protective gear whatsoever.
Under the pretense of beneficent medical care, Westerners studied these communities over the coming decades: through generations of horrific birth defects, premature deaths, unrecoverable food systems, and life-long battles with multiple cancers.
Still not Sorry
This past year, the Marshall Islands had a chance to renegotiate terms of their unfair and unfulfilled compact with the United States. Strongarmed by Congress, however, the opportunity was squandered, and the US still doesn’t financially honor the legacy of nuclear violence brought upon Marshallese islanders.
Short of the billions of dollars in damages still owed to the people of the Marshall Islands, one could at least hope the US would recognize the immorality of the harm caused, and apologize to the victims. Unfortunately, the Congressional bill of formal apology has yet to be approved, prolonging insult to some of the most grave injuries inflicted on precious humans and ecosystems.
While bombs once heedlessly destroyed landmass and living coral reefs, and the seascape and communities hold the scars to this day, climate change introduces another threat to the chains of small islands, and the people who have called them home for thousands of years: sea level rise. Having destroyed many of the native food sources that enabled millennia of human settlement, the US leaves just portions of the shrinking land itself: a shell of the rich, abundant ecosystems that linked the people of Marshall Islands to their ancestors, and sustained them well into the 20th century.
Environmental racism long predates the Cold War, but fighting for environmental justice today, we can strive to protect human flourishing and biodiversity in the future. Whether standing up to pig waste practices in North Carolina, or demanding US accountability to the people of the Marshall Islands, it’s essential to safeguard everyone’s right to life and liberty, before your community finds itself as the next ground zero.
Special thank-you to Chloe Shrager and Inkstick for unearthing this too-overlooked story of ecological harmony, replaced by environmental injustice, war, and empire. Read the full story here:
Forgotten Fallout: The Unfulfilled Promise of Nuclear Justice for the Marshallese
The Closer
One of National Geographic’s 2023 Photos of the Year.