March 2021 Environmental Policy News: Batteries, Fish Farming, and More

Photo by Guillaume Bassem

Here’s the best of what we’ve read over the last month.

“Sisai began supplementing his income from the fish market by selling trinkets near the tourist resorts in the evenings.’Sibijan deben,’ he said in Mandinka, one of the region’s major languages. The phrase refers to the shade cast by a palm tree and is used to describe the effects of extractive export industries: the profits are enjoyed by people far from the source.”
— Fish Farming Is Feeding the Globe. What’s the Cost for Locals? (The New Yorker)

“Still, car experts believe battery-powered models—which are mechanically much simpler than those with gasoline engines, with fewer moving parts—will ultimately prevail. The internal combustion engine, or ICE, has been engineered to near-perfection over a century, said Sandy Munro, an auto-industry consultant who takes apart about two dozen cars a year, stripping them to their parts to study the materials, technology and assembly. The innovation of the battery-powered EV, by contrast, has barely begun. ‘Right now, we’re basically scratching the surface,’ he said. ‘The ICE age is coming to an end.’”
— The Battery Is Ready to Power the World (The Wall Street Journal)

“If you overlaid a map of the country’s coronavirus hot spots with its actual hot spots — that is, neighborhoods with the highest levels of extreme heat — the maps would be virtually the same. These hot spots, better known as “heat islands,” are hotter than other neighborhoods because they often have large expanses of concrete, less greenery, higher density housing, lower average incomes and poorer health status than more affluent neighborhoods. Those same factors have also contributed to skyrocketing Covid-19 caseloads in those neighborhoods.”
— A complicating factor in combating Covid hot spots: Heat (Politico)

“Now, a spate of studies, including one published last week, suggests this northern portion of the Gulf Stream and the deep ocean currents it’s connected to may be slowing. Pushing the bounds of oceanography, scientists have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across the Atlantic to better understand the complex network of currents that the Gulf Stream belongs to, not only at the surface, but hundreds of feet deep.”
— In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers (The New York Times)

“In Central Pennsylvania, there are monuments to the dead. Inside century-old barns and farmhouses, ceiling beams and wide floor planks that are straight grained and honey red with age serve as reminders of one of the deadliest epidemics to ever reach American shores. Between 1904 and 1940, some 3.5 billion American chestnut trees, the giants of the Appalachian hardwood forest, succumbed to a fungal blight called Cryphonectria parasitica.”
— The Demise and Potential Revival of the American Chestnut (Sierra)