A few climate-related photos from my summer travels
Lenox, Massachusetts
Here’s an ice cream truck cooled by a heat pump (the condenser’s mounted near the top), something I’d never seen before. Most ice cream trucks use gas generators to power their equipment (soft serve machines, for example, pull multiple kilowatts). They’ll occasionally have a rooftop AC unit, but usually not, it gets too expensive. This Berkshire Cone ‘truck’ is permanently plugged in, enabling cleaner power (as clean as the local grid) for the freezer units and heat pump AC. And that’s great to see – it was ninety degrees that day and the cones were melting fast, but the kids inside scooping them stayed cool. Not to mention that the ice cream freezer likely needed a lot less juice because it wasn’t fighting ninety degree temps.
Of course, I got an ice cream here – mint chip. Mint chip’s one of my favorite flavors, though lately I’ve been aware of some controversy about it. I thought it was the artificial green color you sometimes get (I’m fine with that), but apparently it’s because Buzzfeed in 2018 called mint chip gross, saying it tasted like toothpaste. Well, it’s 2024 now and Buzzfeed is circling the drain, while mint chip is as popular as ever. That’s what you get for publishing slanderous lickbait.
Honolulu, Hawai’i
Here’s a wild scene: tombstones and transformers. Behind this historic cemetery in downtown Honolulu (for 19th century colonizers and missionaries) are hundreds of Hawaiian Electric pole transformers waiting to be installed. And they will be: Hawai’i has been a leader in solar, battery storage and shutting down fossil fuel plants (see Canary Media’s extensive coverage), and has a huge opportunity to save more money by further reducing its imports of expensive fossil fuels (mostly oil). Which is awesome, because after two hundred years of extractive colonialization, Hawai’i needs all the independence it can get… including energy independence.
Up close, these transformers look like robots. But they’re actually just big analog tanks of oil surrounding a magnetic metal core. I’m excited for any improvement in transformer technology. They need to be smarter and more like network switches, and we need lots of them: there’s currently a global shortage due to increased electrification (EVs, AI data centers) and the need to harden the grid against extreme weather and fires like last years’ in Lahaina on Maui (Hawaiian Electric will pay half of the $4B settlement to compensate those affected).
Hilo, Hawai’i
Hilo, a minimally-touristy town on the Big Island’s east side, is a great base for exploring volcanoes and nature, swimming with turtles etc. One don’t-miss destination is the Hawai’i Tropical Botanical Garden, an amazing collection of tropical plants and flowers (can you say orchids) set amongst with waterfalls, along with attempts to explain the area’s history. Such as this mossed-over remnant of a 19th century Portuguese wood-burning bread oven, in the upper middle of the photo. The Big Island coast has many sacred spots for native Hawai’ans. But the physical remains here are mostly from colonialists, like this oven or the metal anchors for ziplines used to ferry bags of sugar cane from atop the cliffs to ships to bring them to California for refining.
Here’s a recipe for the Hawaiian version of Portuguese sweetbread (Pan Doce); of course these days you can make it in an electric oven, though the Kona Historical Society still makes it the wood-fired way. Over two billion people cook with fuels like wood, kerosene, and animal dung today, at great cost to their own health and the planet’s. Not to mention the 40 million U.S. households who cook with gas (same problems). I hope we can productize electric cooking faster and get them switched over asap.
Hanover, New Hampshire
A friend who works at Dartmouth gave us a campus tour, and we discovered a very cool project underway to convert the school’s oil-fired heating system to a clean geothermal, fully electrified system. Dartmouth’s one of several major campuses doing this (Princeton, Smith, Oberlin, Brown, Cornell, Mount Holyoke, William and Mary, Carleton, etc). But that’s only because some climate-aware alumni in 2020 forced it to abandon a plan to switch to burning wood chips instead. It’ll take lots more alumni pressure like that to get the majority of U.S. campuses to stop burning fuels and emitting like crazy; many unfortunately are still today building new gas-powered cogeneration plants, locking in methane emissions for decades to come.
Dartmouth’s new system will use water pipes (in place of its existing steam pipes) to carry heating and cooling to its buildings. Electrically powered heat pumps will heat and cool the water, but with a geologic assist: excess summer heat will get ‘exchanged’ deep underground to be ‘stored’ until winter, and in winter, the reverse will happen (the heat goes back to the buildings). This kind of ‘geo-exchange’ system works very efficiently in northern climates, where ground temperatures stay relatively stable even as air temperatures fluctuate dramatically.
Boston, Massachusetts
We spent a couple days in Boston’s new Seaport District… see my separate post about the $20 Billion climate risk there. At the Seaport’s Lucid Motors store, I saw this cool model of their electric motor drivetrain. I don’t have much to say about Lucid Motors or their store (kind of a tech bro hangout, I got out quickly), but I thought the model was cool.
Boston, Massachusetts
There’s a great park in the Seaport with lots of educational signage about climate change and its impacts, including these beautiful climate stripes. Here’s a good article if you want to learn more about the climate stripes, which show up all over the world these days. I don’t know how effective they are – whether they inspire people to learn more, do more, freak out, turn off, or what. But it’s a consistent message, and that can’t hurt.
Boston, Massachusetts
This obviously isn’t a photo I took, but while boarding our flight in Boston, I did see a United sign with Oscar on it. United has hired Oscar to tell the world how great they’re doing on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). SAF doesn’t scale, unless we use crops to make it, resulting in even more emissions. But if Oscar tells people it’s a good solution to flying’s climate problem, they may believe it. How much did United pay Sesame Workshop, Oscar’s owner, to borrow some of Oscar’s credibility? Between $100 and $250 thousand, (plus some frequent flyer miles… I’m not kidding). Really Sesame Workshop? Why would you sell out the planet so cheap, when you have almost half a billion dollars in the bank?
Honolulu, Hawai’i
I’ll end with a rainbow: on our ride into Honolulu from the airport, I saw the biggest one I’d ever seen. And it was easy to photograph, because we were stuck in a huge traffic jam on the massive freeway that bisects the city. Honolulu is a total car culture, crisscrossed by huge boulevards, with long commutes based on a lack of affordable housing. And not very walkable at all. But there is hope. The city has a good bus system, a robust bike share program, and a monorail transit system under construction (though decades delayed and way over budget). And most important, lots of rainbows!
