MoMA Design Thinking, Deep-Sea Mining Watch, Coal-Free Finland, and More!

Hey climate heroes! Welcome to The Climate Roundup, where we round up the change, er the news about climate and the environment. As part of the Gen E community, we thank you for making climate action part of everyday life. (Reading this newsletter counts!)

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In Pop Culture:

🧑‍🎨 The MoMA exhibit, “Pirouette: Turning Points in Design” explores how the design of everyday objects can have an outsized influence on society at large. This can be good, bad, and everything in between. When we imagine the world we want for ourselves, the solutions live in the origin of design. We are living in a fossil-fueled world based on the design of energy infrastructure and power sources put in place generations ago. Our modern day social connections and ‘time spent’ have been deeply influenced by digital platforms designed to steal our attention. Being mindful and intentional of both the short and long term consequences of design choices across everything that we, as humans, put out into the world can truly shape our realities. “Pirouette” features a wide array of objects and images from the Post-It Note to emojis to the above pictured ‘climate spiral’. The ‘climate spiral’ was designed by Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist who has a special talent for translating complex data into easy to digest visuals (he’s the creator of ‘climate stripes’, which we’ve featured in this newsletter). The ‘climate spiral’ is an animated representation of the annual increase in global temperatures since humans began burning fossil fuels.

Philanthropy At Work:

🐓 The Humane League released their 2024 Impact Report. They spared 4.6 million hens from cages around the globe, and drove local and state legislative progress by passing legislation to ban octopus farming, curb factory farms’ environmental impact, and support the transition to a plant-based food system, among more wins!

In Environmental News:

🏠 Geothermal heat pumps could be coming to a newly developed residential neighborhood near you! Let’s shelve the problematic nature of clearing land for development for now, and instead, let’s celebrate a new partnership between Google X-incubated startup, Dandelion Energy, and Lennar, a national residential home developer. Together, they aim to drive down the price for residential use of this clean, renewable source of energy lurking right beneath our feet. They’ll build 1,500 homes that will feature geothermal energy for heating and cooling. The first project will be in Colorado.

🇫🇮 Finland is the latest country to put an end to its coal-burning era, with the caveat that some coal may be used to supplement their mix. Still, as of this month, the country has shut down its last coal-burning power plant, 4 years ahead of schedule! Finland’s emissions may be small compared to larger economies, but they are an inspiring example of doing the right thing no matter your size or stature.

🔦 There’s big interest in extracting the critical minerals that lie on the deep sea floor. The International Seabed Authority, part of the UN, has been working to create rules of law for deep-sea mining in international waters, but has not come to any final decisions due to disagreements on ‘acceptable’ levels of environmental impacts. There isn’t even consensus that this mining can be done at all without major environmental harm, hence the warranted delay in allowing this activity. But mining companies have been chomping at the bit to commercialize and scale their exploratory activity, and they may have found an ally in Trump. Their plan is to circumvent international rules by simply just doing it via a pending executive order that would fast track permits granted by the United States. The move has pissed off over 40 nations, mostly from an economic and rule-following perspective. From the environmental perspective, it’s hard to see how this won’t be net bad. We simply don’t know much about the deep ocean, as only 1% of it has been explored. Consider how deep-sea mining would work: heavy robotic trucks would essentially bulldoze the ocean floor, sucking up the mineral-rich nodules (rocks), while kicking up sediment (including carbon-sequestering sediment) and dust miles high and wide, crushing anything in their path, and creating sound and light pollution for the first time way down under the sea. HARD NO.

👎 Last year, the SEC adopted rules that would require publicly traded companies to disclose their climate-related risks and greenhouse gas emissions. On cue, the anti-ESG brigade, consisting of 25 Republican state attorneys general, swiftly sued to tie the rules up in court. Last week, the now Republican-led SEC decided to no longer defend these climate disclosure rules in court, essentially killing their implementation for now. But guess what? The very real and tangible impacts of climate change on physical assets, infrastructure, supply chains, and natural resources will inevitably hurt shareholder returns and the US economy. Ignoring this is just dumb. Several other *enlightened* countries are already requiring or developing climate risk disclosures, so global corporations will have to do this anyway. And smart investors will absolutely be looking at exposure to climate risk, because it’s real! This is just one more in a heaping pile of examples that the US is falling way behind on the very real global transition to a cleaner, more resilient economy. Semafor has a great summary for more on the SEC situation.

📉 Speaking of getting left behind, here are 5 waysthe US could become the losers in the global clean energy transition due to Trump’s ‘war on clean energy’. This comes from the climate reporting arm of Bill Gates’s firm, Breakthrough Energy. And yes, tariffs made the list. We couldn’t leave out the star of last week’s news cycle!

Nature Outro