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Can Switzerland Ever Become a 2,000-Watt Society?

News Feed
Tuesday, November 15, 2022

In late October, the International Energy Agency predicted for the first time that demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future and that renewable energy investment would reach a new high by 2030. But to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, the agency added, countries around the world would need to do more—particularly greater investment in renewables. “If we want to hit those more ambitious climate targets, we’d likely need to see about $4 trillion in clean energy investment by 2030,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, told The New York Times.This prescription—more renewables—represents a kind of mainstream consensus on climate change. It’s a soothing message: that we can just swap out one type of energy for another without changing anything else. But while more renewables are undoubtedly needed, a growing chorus of experts warn that avoiding catastrophe won’t be possible unless wealthy countries actually reduce their energy consumption. Countries can transition away from fossil fuels much more easily, they say, if they have lower overall energy requirements; while wind and solar power are renewable, the minerals needed to make batteries to capture that energy aren’t. “Climate experts who suggest that we’ll be able to get out of this by basically just building out renewables—that no one will be forced to use less energy or be inconvenienced in any way—are doing a grave disservice to humanity,” wrote NASA scientist Peter Kalmus on Twitter recently. “I am not talking about people voluntarily using less energy and changing their lifestyles. Far from it. Instead I am talking about the clear need for policies that begin prioritizing uses of energy and phasing out fossil fuels in a coordinated and equitable way.”Energy reduction may seem daunting. But it’s not without precedent.In the 1990s, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH Zurich, who were investigating how much energy the average person needed to live a good life came across the research of the Brazilian scientist José Goldemberg. In the 1980s, Goldemberg calculated that “by shifting to high-quality energy carriers and by exploiting cost-effective opportunities for more efficient energy use,” every person in the world could meet their basic needs—including eating, getting around, and heating their homes—“and much more” with just 1,000 watts of continuous energy; that is, approximately the amount of energy required to continuously operate an efficient vacuum cleaner.When researchers at ETH considered how much the average person should consume in the years to come, they suggested 2,000 watts—the amount required to continuously power a hair dryer. (Some experts have argued that even 2,000 watts is too high.) At the time, 2,000 watts was the global average. In Western Europe, the average was just under 6,000 watts. In the United States, it was 12,000 watts. Switzerland had not been a 2,000-watt society since the 1960s; returning to that level would require a reduction of energy use by two-thirds. For ETH researchers, the 2,000-watt society wasn’t just a vehicle for achieving domestic carbon reduction goals; it was also a vision of global equity on a planet with finite resources. If wealthy countries like Switzerland could decrease their energy consumption to sustainable levels, the logic went, it would give poor countries—like Bangladesh, a 500-watt society in 2004—the space to bring its energy consumption up to 2,000 watts without surpassing planetary boundaries. “There are other peoples of the planet who also have rights—the right to survive, the right to get a little bit of food every day,” Dominic Notter, a scientist formerly with the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, explained to me by Zoom. “We limit their rights with our behavior.”Conventional thinking holds that ever-increasing energy consumption is critical for social and economic development. Yet the 2,000-watt society concept nonetheless caught on quickly. In 2002, the Swiss Federal Council endorsed the idea. In a 2008 referendum, more than three-quarters of the Zurich population voted in favor of reducing energy consumption in the city to no more than 2,000 watts per capita while reducing greenhouse gas emissions to one ton annually per capita by 2050 without the use of nuclear energy, making it the first city in the world to give the concept democratic legitimacy.As of 2020, according to the Swiss government, more than 100 towns and municipalities as well as 23 of the country’s 26 cantons have set the goals of the 2,000-watt society in their energy policy targets. Other cities in Europe and beyond—including Basel, Munich, Vancouver, and Canberra—have also pursued planning based on the 2,000-watt concept. “If an industrial country like Switzerland can prove that this goal is attainable, this would open new perspectives to much more populated countries,” said Marco Morisini, a former senior sustainability scientist at ETH Zurich. “This could perhaps be not one of the minor endowments of this small country to the global community.”So-called “decoupling” of energy use from economic growth has been a longtime dream for policymakers who’d like to keep capitalism but make it greener. Some now think Switzerland is succeeding: Between 2000 and 2020, as per capita primary global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions both continued to rise globally, the numbers in Switzerland appear to have declined. According to the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, per capita primary energy use in the country has fallen by a third, from 6,000 watts to just under 4,000 watts, and per capita greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by almost 50 percent. While “intensified measures must be implemented in the future,” the FOE reports, the goals of the 2,000-watt society are still on track to be met between 2050 and 2100. “The direction is right, the pace is possibly a bit too slow,” an FOE representative told me.Some Swiss climate experts and government officials, however, are not so sure. Without more substantial changes to Swiss lifestyles and politics, they say, the 2,000-watt society will remain elusive. The question now is: Are the Swiss people on board?  From the beginning, increasing energy efficiency in buildings has been a primary area of activity in Switzerland’s 2000 Watt project. It’s a commonsense target. After all, a majority of energy consumption occurs in buildings, and it’s a relatively easy place to make improvements. “In the building sector we have all we need. We have labels, we have norms, standards, products. For new buildings we are fine,” said Roland Stulz, the former director of the 2000 Watt project. Buildings also present the path of least political resistance. “In principle, nobody has anything against living in a well-insulated house. It can still be a villa for bigwigs,” said Dieter Imboden, president of the National Research Council and professor of environmental physics at ETH Zurich.For a 2008 article on the 2,000-watt society in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert visited the Zurich headquarters of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, a building designed to meet the requirements of the 2,000-watt society, which uses four times less energy than a conventional building. Escorted to the premises in a Volvo that runs “on compressed natural gas produced in part from rotting vegetables,” Kolbert marveled at the building, noting its temperature-regulating exterior glass panels, its specially designed toilets, and its solar collectors.The building supposedly proved, according to a report prepared for the 2008 World Sustainable Building Conference, that not only is the vision of a 2,000-watt society “practicable for office buildings but also that this can be achieved by using conventional materials and existing technologies.” But the report noted that creating such a building was only possible with a team of highly qualified architects, planners, and specialists and that transforming the country’s building stock would require something like an army of such individuals.In the years since Kolbert’s visit, a mobilization does seem to have taken place. In 2011, ETH Zurich launched Novalantis, a program tasked with executing projects—including the expansion of a municipal hospital and the redevelopment of a nursing home—that would demonstrate the “real-life feasibility of 2,000-watt society concepts and technologies.” The Swiss Federal Office of Energy, meanwhile, developed a 2,000-watt site certification for large developments, and in 2012, Zurich’s Greencity district—“a model and example for the city of the future”—became the first to be certified. Since then, 44 other developments—largely new constructions—have been certified across the country.In Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city, the government introduced several initiatives designed to improve energy efficiency in existing homes and buildings. Over the years, thousands of contractors and planning teams have made use of the city’s “energy coaching” program, which connects them with specialists who provide low-cost advice on “all issues involved with the energy optimisation of buildings.” A similar environmental consultation program was designed specifically for small and medium-size businesses. Zurich’s city-owned power company, meanwhile, started letting customers borrow measuring devices to detect “electricity guzzlers” in their homes.This flurry of activity tells a compelling narrative about a country of “trailblazers,” showing the world a 2,000-watt future can “look very bright,” as CBS put it in 2008. But is it enough to explain the reported dip in Switzerland’s per capita energy consumption? Not exactly, according to Tom Blindebacher, who has led Switzerland’s 2000 Watt program for the past 12 years. The numbers, he said, don’t tell the full story of the change—or lack thereof—in Switzerland in the last 20 years. Switzerland’s reduction in primary energy consumption, Blindebacher told me, is due in part to changes in the Swiss population, which has grown by more than one million since 2000. Since a greater number of people are living in roughly the same number of buildings and using existing infrastructure, energy use appears to drop. Another explanation is the exodus of industry from the country. Since the so-called “gray energy” used to manufacture imported goods doesn’t count toward Switzerland’s energy balance sheet, energy consumption appears to drop as more goods are imported. (With gray energy included, Switzerland’s energy consumption was more than 10,000 watts per person in 2011.) A similar illusion occurs when people buy gasoline abroad. “When energy prices in Switzerland are higher than in Germany, people start to fill up their tanks in Germany. Then it seems like we in Switzerland have reduced our energy consumption. There were years where that happened. But we didn’t drive less with our cars,” Blindebacher said.Then there’s the changing energy mix. While most of the energy—some 60 to 67 percent—put into the process of burning fossil fuels in a thermal power plant is lost, this doesn’t happen with renewables. So as Switzerland has phased out fossil fuels and increased the share of renewables to around 30 percent, demand for energy has declined. But according to Blindebacher, it doesn’t mean that energy use is markedly less. In fact, according to the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics, final energy consumption—that is, the amount of energy people actually consume—has remained relatively static. In 2000, it was 847,350 terajoules; in 2019 (before Covid-19 wreaked havoc on statistics), it was 836,230 terajoules. “Do I think that Swiss people live more efficiently than 10 years ago? No, I don’t think so,” Blindebacher said.Energy efficiency was never meant to be the sole driver of Switzerland’s 2,000-watt transformation. “It will not happen without lifestyle change,” Rahel Gessler of Zurich’s Office for Environmental and Health Protection said bluntly in 2011.What kind of lifestyle change, exactly? While the 2,000-watt society is precise in its goal, Swiss officials tend to shy away from recommendations in hard numbers. But the broad strokes are easy to find. A document on the Swiss Federal Office of Energy’s website, for instance, offers several “principles of action” for achieving a 2,000-watt society, such as “Skip flights,” and “Keep distances short and, if possible, cover them on foot, by bike or by public transport.” A document from the city of Zurich, meanwhile, recommends adopting a diet that consists “predominantly of plant-based products” and buying fewer new consumer goods by sharing and repairing as much as possible.Some Swiss people have surely gotten this message and are attempting to live more energy-moderate lifestyles. In Zurich, for instance, a group led by the anarchist utopian author Hans Widmer is planning to form a 500-person cooperative, Nena1, where residents would live in 1,000-watt-compatible housing with a “personal upper limit of 2000 watts.” But bringing such lifestyles beyond a small niche requires policy change, said Troy Vettese, an environmental historian at the European University Institute and co-author of the book Half-Earth Socialism. Riding a bike instead of driving a car, for instance, “is easier to do if there are lots of bike lanes and you don’t feel like you’re going to die.”But 2,000-watt policies can’t just focus on facilitating energy-moderate behavior, according to Morisini; they must also discourage or even eliminate energy-intensive behavior. “A flexible energy fee could be conceived: lower prices for basic energy consumption and progressive higher prices for conspicuous energy consumption,” Morisini wrote in a 2008 paper presented at the conference Ethics and Climate Change: Scenarios for Justice and Sustainability. “Taxing consumption instead of incomes, first proposed by Thomas Hobbes three centuries ago and a recurrent theme in economics, could be applied to energy policy.”Swiss policymakers have several times attempted to advance systemic changes toward energy reduction. Traffic planners in Zurich have, as a 2011 New York Times report put it, “been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers” and reclaim public space for pedestrians. A revision to the country’s national climate law that would have increased taxes on flying and driving narrowly failed in 2021 after the oil and auto lobbies mobilized against it. A proposal to end factory farming, meanwhile, failed at the polls in September. But generally, Morisini argues, such social reforms are “rarely considered as options, debates on them are frowned upon, and, instead, vast resources are still invested to convince people to boost their consumption.”Reducing people’s habitual energy consumption is mostly framed as a personal choice, not a matter of government intervention. In Zurich, for instance, the city offers a 2,000-watt calculator, which allows residents to figure out their energy consumption so they can adjust it accordingly on their own. The city government, meanwhile, has framed its role in bringing about a 2,000-watt society as a “role model” that can provide “attractive examples” of a 2,000-watt lifestyle. The city, however, has often shown considerable restraint in using its bully pulpit. In 2011, for instance, it began offering a “Menu Plus”—a menu composed mostly of seasonal, regional, and vegan products designed to have “60 percent less impact on the climate”—in four of its staff cafeterias. But the city stopped short of suggesting that this less energy-intensive way of eating should be required or incentivized. “We don’t want to tell people what to eat,” said Beat von Felten, a project manager with the city.This rhetorical passivity, according to Christian Schaffner, the executive director of the Energy Science Center of ETH Zurich, is a reaction to a perceived reality: Swiss people don’t actually want to use less energy. “If you ask people in general, ‘Do you want to save the climate?’ they will say yes. If you ask them, ‘Are you OK if we forbid you to drive your private car into the city?’ they will say no,” he told me. Even in a country where a reduction of energy consumption has been approved by voters in several cities, several Swiss officials claim that so-called energy sufficiency, i.e., a reduction to sustainable levels through behavior change, is just too politically perilous to propose. “If you talk about sufficiency, you don’t get elected. So nobody talks about sufficiency,” Blindebacher said.Even with the war in Ukraine disrupting fossil fuel supply chains in Europe, lifestyle changes to reduce energy consumption remain a tough sell. A new Federal Office of Energy campaign calls on the Swiss population to “reduce energy consumption in everyday life without sacrificing quality of life,” in light of energy shortages resulting from the war. But such campaigns fail to convince even people like Daniel Kellenberger, who until recently headed up the 2,000-watt site certification program and, when reached for an interview, was on a road trip through the United States. “People are not prepared to change their behavior, I can see that by myself. I mean, I still like to travel, I love to see other countries,” he said. “I can use my bike, I can take public transport, I can buy an electric car, I can heat my house with renewable electricity. But the last part, just not eating meat anymore and not flying everywhere. That’s going to be the tough one.”This resistance isn’t just a matter of personal preference or Swiss culture. Energy reduction also conflicts with something much more pervasive and powerful: a capitalist society’s imperative for limitless growth. According to Toni W. Püntener, Zurich’s former deputy head of the Energy and Sustainability Department, “this focus on growth is probably the biggest stumbling block” to achieving a 2,000-watt society. While Blindebacher agrees that “capitalism, or this whole idea of growth, doesn’t do us a lot of good,” he still thinks progress is possible: “There’s a lot to do before changing the system,” he said, noting further improvements yet to be made in renewable energy and efficiency.Those measures, though, may not be enough to make Switzerland a 2,000-watt society. Barring significant sufficiency measures in the near future, according to Swiss energy experts, Switzerland is likely to see energy consumption plateau at unsustainably high levels. According to a 2016 report on Zurich’s 2,000-watt progress, “many of the most effective measures have already been implemented or are planned”; the city will have a per capita energy consumption of 3,500 watts by the middle of the century. The authors of a 2011 study, meanwhile, noted that the canton of Basel-Stadt could only achieve a 2,000-watt society by 2075 if “all economically, socially, and ecologically viable technical options for increasing energy efficiency and introducing renewable energy are exhausted”—not the most likely scenario. According to a 2007 analysis by Thorsten Frank Schulz, then a doctoral candidate at ETH Zurich, “using the technologies at hand by the middle of the century, we could lower the primary-energy consumption to 3500 Watts per capita … at maximum.”Perhaps the gloomiest signal yet has been a string of bilateral agreements the Swiss government has pursued in recent years with developing nations, including Peru, Ghana, and Senegal. According to these agreements, as The New York Times reported this week, Switzerland will avoid the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions within its own borders by paying poorer nations to reduce emissions in theirs. While Switzerland is a small country—it accounts for less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—the stakes are high, as others watch how its 2,000-watt experiment fares. “Should no one single industrialized country be able to live in shared prosperity without much less than 6,000 watts per capita, this would be a dangerous message for the developing countries,” argued Morisini in his 2008 paper. To Blindebacher, Switzerland, as the country that has been pursuing a 2,000-watt society the longest, still has the best chance to present an example to the world. “Someone must try,” he said. “And who if not we, as one of the richest and the smartest and the freest countries in the world?”

In late October, the International Energy Agency predicted for the first time that demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future and that renewable energy investment would reach a new high by 2030. But to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, the agency added, countries around the world would need to do more—particularly greater investment in renewables. “If we want to hit those more ambitious climate targets, we’d likely need to see about $4 trillion in clean energy investment by 2030,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, told The New York Times.This prescription—more renewables—represents a kind of mainstream consensus on climate change. It’s a soothing message: that we can just swap out one type of energy for another without changing anything else. But while more renewables are undoubtedly needed, a growing chorus of experts warn that avoiding catastrophe won’t be possible unless wealthy countries actually reduce their energy consumption. Countries can transition away from fossil fuels much more easily, they say, if they have lower overall energy requirements; while wind and solar power are renewable, the minerals needed to make batteries to capture that energy aren’t. “Climate experts who suggest that we’ll be able to get out of this by basically just building out renewables—that no one will be forced to use less energy or be inconvenienced in any way—are doing a grave disservice to humanity,” wrote NASA scientist Peter Kalmus on Twitter recently. “I am not talking about people voluntarily using less energy and changing their lifestyles. Far from it. Instead I am talking about the clear need for policies that begin prioritizing uses of energy and phasing out fossil fuels in a coordinated and equitable way.”Energy reduction may seem daunting. But it’s not without precedent.In the 1990s, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH Zurich, who were investigating how much energy the average person needed to live a good life came across the research of the Brazilian scientist José Goldemberg. In the 1980s, Goldemberg calculated that “by shifting to high-quality energy carriers and by exploiting cost-effective opportunities for more efficient energy use,” every person in the world could meet their basic needs—including eating, getting around, and heating their homes—“and much more” with just 1,000 watts of continuous energy; that is, approximately the amount of energy required to continuously operate an efficient vacuum cleaner.When researchers at ETH considered how much the average person should consume in the years to come, they suggested 2,000 watts—the amount required to continuously power a hair dryer. (Some experts have argued that even 2,000 watts is too high.) At the time, 2,000 watts was the global average. In Western Europe, the average was just under 6,000 watts. In the United States, it was 12,000 watts. Switzerland had not been a 2,000-watt society since the 1960s; returning to that level would require a reduction of energy use by two-thirds. For ETH researchers, the 2,000-watt society wasn’t just a vehicle for achieving domestic carbon reduction goals; it was also a vision of global equity on a planet with finite resources. If wealthy countries like Switzerland could decrease their energy consumption to sustainable levels, the logic went, it would give poor countries—like Bangladesh, a 500-watt society in 2004—the space to bring its energy consumption up to 2,000 watts without surpassing planetary boundaries. “There are other peoples of the planet who also have rights—the right to survive, the right to get a little bit of food every day,” Dominic Notter, a scientist formerly with the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, explained to me by Zoom. “We limit their rights with our behavior.”Conventional thinking holds that ever-increasing energy consumption is critical for social and economic development. Yet the 2,000-watt society concept nonetheless caught on quickly. In 2002, the Swiss Federal Council endorsed the idea. In a 2008 referendum, more than three-quarters of the Zurich population voted in favor of reducing energy consumption in the city to no more than 2,000 watts per capita while reducing greenhouse gas emissions to one ton annually per capita by 2050 without the use of nuclear energy, making it the first city in the world to give the concept democratic legitimacy.As of 2020, according to the Swiss government, more than 100 towns and municipalities as well as 23 of the country’s 26 cantons have set the goals of the 2,000-watt society in their energy policy targets. Other cities in Europe and beyond—including Basel, Munich, Vancouver, and Canberra—have also pursued planning based on the 2,000-watt concept. “If an industrial country like Switzerland can prove that this goal is attainable, this would open new perspectives to much more populated countries,” said Marco Morisini, a former senior sustainability scientist at ETH Zurich. “This could perhaps be not one of the minor endowments of this small country to the global community.”So-called “decoupling” of energy use from economic growth has been a longtime dream for policymakers who’d like to keep capitalism but make it greener. Some now think Switzerland is succeeding: Between 2000 and 2020, as per capita primary global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions both continued to rise globally, the numbers in Switzerland appear to have declined. According to the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, per capita primary energy use in the country has fallen by a third, from 6,000 watts to just under 4,000 watts, and per capita greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by almost 50 percent. While “intensified measures must be implemented in the future,” the FOE reports, the goals of the 2,000-watt society are still on track to be met between 2050 and 2100. “The direction is right, the pace is possibly a bit too slow,” an FOE representative told me.Some Swiss climate experts and government officials, however, are not so sure. Without more substantial changes to Swiss lifestyles and politics, they say, the 2,000-watt society will remain elusive. The question now is: Are the Swiss people on board?  From the beginning, increasing energy efficiency in buildings has been a primary area of activity in Switzerland’s 2000 Watt project. It’s a commonsense target. After all, a majority of energy consumption occurs in buildings, and it’s a relatively easy place to make improvements. “In the building sector we have all we need. We have labels, we have norms, standards, products. For new buildings we are fine,” said Roland Stulz, the former director of the 2000 Watt project. Buildings also present the path of least political resistance. “In principle, nobody has anything against living in a well-insulated house. It can still be a villa for bigwigs,” said Dieter Imboden, president of the National Research Council and professor of environmental physics at ETH Zurich.For a 2008 article on the 2,000-watt society in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert visited the Zurich headquarters of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, a building designed to meet the requirements of the 2,000-watt society, which uses four times less energy than a conventional building. Escorted to the premises in a Volvo that runs “on compressed natural gas produced in part from rotting vegetables,” Kolbert marveled at the building, noting its temperature-regulating exterior glass panels, its specially designed toilets, and its solar collectors.The building supposedly proved, according to a report prepared for the 2008 World Sustainable Building Conference, that not only is the vision of a 2,000-watt society “practicable for office buildings but also that this can be achieved by using conventional materials and existing technologies.” But the report noted that creating such a building was only possible with a team of highly qualified architects, planners, and specialists and that transforming the country’s building stock would require something like an army of such individuals.In the years since Kolbert’s visit, a mobilization does seem to have taken place. In 2011, ETH Zurich launched Novalantis, a program tasked with executing projects—including the expansion of a municipal hospital and the redevelopment of a nursing home—that would demonstrate the “real-life feasibility of 2,000-watt society concepts and technologies.” The Swiss Federal Office of Energy, meanwhile, developed a 2,000-watt site certification for large developments, and in 2012, Zurich’s Greencity district—“a model and example for the city of the future”—became the first to be certified. Since then, 44 other developments—largely new constructions—have been certified across the country.In Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city, the government introduced several initiatives designed to improve energy efficiency in existing homes and buildings. Over the years, thousands of contractors and planning teams have made use of the city’s “energy coaching” program, which connects them with specialists who provide low-cost advice on “all issues involved with the energy optimisation of buildings.” A similar environmental consultation program was designed specifically for small and medium-size businesses. Zurich’s city-owned power company, meanwhile, started letting customers borrow measuring devices to detect “electricity guzzlers” in their homes.This flurry of activity tells a compelling narrative about a country of “trailblazers,” showing the world a 2,000-watt future can “look very bright,” as CBS put it in 2008. But is it enough to explain the reported dip in Switzerland’s per capita energy consumption? Not exactly, according to Tom Blindebacher, who has led Switzerland’s 2000 Watt program for the past 12 years. The numbers, he said, don’t tell the full story of the change—or lack thereof—in Switzerland in the last 20 years. Switzerland’s reduction in primary energy consumption, Blindebacher told me, is due in part to changes in the Swiss population, which has grown by more than one million since 2000. Since a greater number of people are living in roughly the same number of buildings and using existing infrastructure, energy use appears to drop. Another explanation is the exodus of industry from the country. Since the so-called “gray energy” used to manufacture imported goods doesn’t count toward Switzerland’s energy balance sheet, energy consumption appears to drop as more goods are imported. (With gray energy included, Switzerland’s energy consumption was more than 10,000 watts per person in 2011.) A similar illusion occurs when people buy gasoline abroad. “When energy prices in Switzerland are higher than in Germany, people start to fill up their tanks in Germany. Then it seems like we in Switzerland have reduced our energy consumption. There were years where that happened. But we didn’t drive less with our cars,” Blindebacher said.Then there’s the changing energy mix. While most of the energy—some 60 to 67 percent—put into the process of burning fossil fuels in a thermal power plant is lost, this doesn’t happen with renewables. So as Switzerland has phased out fossil fuels and increased the share of renewables to around 30 percent, demand for energy has declined. But according to Blindebacher, it doesn’t mean that energy use is markedly less. In fact, according to the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics, final energy consumption—that is, the amount of energy people actually consume—has remained relatively static. In 2000, it was 847,350 terajoules; in 2019 (before Covid-19 wreaked havoc on statistics), it was 836,230 terajoules. “Do I think that Swiss people live more efficiently than 10 years ago? No, I don’t think so,” Blindebacher said.Energy efficiency was never meant to be the sole driver of Switzerland’s 2,000-watt transformation. “It will not happen without lifestyle change,” Rahel Gessler of Zurich’s Office for Environmental and Health Protection said bluntly in 2011.What kind of lifestyle change, exactly? While the 2,000-watt society is precise in its goal, Swiss officials tend to shy away from recommendations in hard numbers. But the broad strokes are easy to find. A document on the Swiss Federal Office of Energy’s website, for instance, offers several “principles of action” for achieving a 2,000-watt society, such as “Skip flights,” and “Keep distances short and, if possible, cover them on foot, by bike or by public transport.” A document from the city of Zurich, meanwhile, recommends adopting a diet that consists “predominantly of plant-based products” and buying fewer new consumer goods by sharing and repairing as much as possible.Some Swiss people have surely gotten this message and are attempting to live more energy-moderate lifestyles. In Zurich, for instance, a group led by the anarchist utopian author Hans Widmer is planning to form a 500-person cooperative, Nena1, where residents would live in 1,000-watt-compatible housing with a “personal upper limit of 2000 watts.” But bringing such lifestyles beyond a small niche requires policy change, said Troy Vettese, an environmental historian at the European University Institute and co-author of the book Half-Earth Socialism. Riding a bike instead of driving a car, for instance, “is easier to do if there are lots of bike lanes and you don’t feel like you’re going to die.”But 2,000-watt policies can’t just focus on facilitating energy-moderate behavior, according to Morisini; they must also discourage or even eliminate energy-intensive behavior. “A flexible energy fee could be conceived: lower prices for basic energy consumption and progressive higher prices for conspicuous energy consumption,” Morisini wrote in a 2008 paper presented at the conference Ethics and Climate Change: Scenarios for Justice and Sustainability. “Taxing consumption instead of incomes, first proposed by Thomas Hobbes three centuries ago and a recurrent theme in economics, could be applied to energy policy.”Swiss policymakers have several times attempted to advance systemic changes toward energy reduction. Traffic planners in Zurich have, as a 2011 New York Times report put it, “been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers” and reclaim public space for pedestrians. A revision to the country’s national climate law that would have increased taxes on flying and driving narrowly failed in 2021 after the oil and auto lobbies mobilized against it. A proposal to end factory farming, meanwhile, failed at the polls in September. But generally, Morisini argues, such social reforms are “rarely considered as options, debates on them are frowned upon, and, instead, vast resources are still invested to convince people to boost their consumption.”Reducing people’s habitual energy consumption is mostly framed as a personal choice, not a matter of government intervention. In Zurich, for instance, the city offers a 2,000-watt calculator, which allows residents to figure out their energy consumption so they can adjust it accordingly on their own. The city government, meanwhile, has framed its role in bringing about a 2,000-watt society as a “role model” that can provide “attractive examples” of a 2,000-watt lifestyle. The city, however, has often shown considerable restraint in using its bully pulpit. In 2011, for instance, it began offering a “Menu Plus”—a menu composed mostly of seasonal, regional, and vegan products designed to have “60 percent less impact on the climate”—in four of its staff cafeterias. But the city stopped short of suggesting that this less energy-intensive way of eating should be required or incentivized. “We don’t want to tell people what to eat,” said Beat von Felten, a project manager with the city.This rhetorical passivity, according to Christian Schaffner, the executive director of the Energy Science Center of ETH Zurich, is a reaction to a perceived reality: Swiss people don’t actually want to use less energy. “If you ask people in general, ‘Do you want to save the climate?’ they will say yes. If you ask them, ‘Are you OK if we forbid you to drive your private car into the city?’ they will say no,” he told me. Even in a country where a reduction of energy consumption has been approved by voters in several cities, several Swiss officials claim that so-called energy sufficiency, i.e., a reduction to sustainable levels through behavior change, is just too politically perilous to propose. “If you talk about sufficiency, you don’t get elected. So nobody talks about sufficiency,” Blindebacher said.Even with the war in Ukraine disrupting fossil fuel supply chains in Europe, lifestyle changes to reduce energy consumption remain a tough sell. A new Federal Office of Energy campaign calls on the Swiss population to “reduce energy consumption in everyday life without sacrificing quality of life,” in light of energy shortages resulting from the war. But such campaigns fail to convince even people like Daniel Kellenberger, who until recently headed up the 2,000-watt site certification program and, when reached for an interview, was on a road trip through the United States. “People are not prepared to change their behavior, I can see that by myself. I mean, I still like to travel, I love to see other countries,” he said. “I can use my bike, I can take public transport, I can buy an electric car, I can heat my house with renewable electricity. But the last part, just not eating meat anymore and not flying everywhere. That’s going to be the tough one.”This resistance isn’t just a matter of personal preference or Swiss culture. Energy reduction also conflicts with something much more pervasive and powerful: a capitalist society’s imperative for limitless growth. According to Toni W. Püntener, Zurich’s former deputy head of the Energy and Sustainability Department, “this focus on growth is probably the biggest stumbling block” to achieving a 2,000-watt society. While Blindebacher agrees that “capitalism, or this whole idea of growth, doesn’t do us a lot of good,” he still thinks progress is possible: “There’s a lot to do before changing the system,” he said, noting further improvements yet to be made in renewable energy and efficiency.Those measures, though, may not be enough to make Switzerland a 2,000-watt society. Barring significant sufficiency measures in the near future, according to Swiss energy experts, Switzerland is likely to see energy consumption plateau at unsustainably high levels. According to a 2016 report on Zurich’s 2,000-watt progress, “many of the most effective measures have already been implemented or are planned”; the city will have a per capita energy consumption of 3,500 watts by the middle of the century. The authors of a 2011 study, meanwhile, noted that the canton of Basel-Stadt could only achieve a 2,000-watt society by 2075 if “all economically, socially, and ecologically viable technical options for increasing energy efficiency and introducing renewable energy are exhausted”—not the most likely scenario. According to a 2007 analysis by Thorsten Frank Schulz, then a doctoral candidate at ETH Zurich, “using the technologies at hand by the middle of the century, we could lower the primary-energy consumption to 3500 Watts per capita … at maximum.”Perhaps the gloomiest signal yet has been a string of bilateral agreements the Swiss government has pursued in recent years with developing nations, including Peru, Ghana, and Senegal. According to these agreements, as The New York Times reported this week, Switzerland will avoid the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions within its own borders by paying poorer nations to reduce emissions in theirs. While Switzerland is a small country—it accounts for less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—the stakes are high, as others watch how its 2,000-watt experiment fares. “Should no one single industrialized country be able to live in shared prosperity without much less than 6,000 watts per capita, this would be a dangerous message for the developing countries,” argued Morisini in his 2008 paper. To Blindebacher, Switzerland, as the country that has been pursuing a 2,000-watt society the longest, still has the best chance to present an example to the world. “Someone must try,” he said. “And who if not we, as one of the richest and the smartest and the freest countries in the world?”

In late October, the International Energy Agency predicted for the first time that demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future and that renewable energy investment would reach a new high by 2030. But to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, the agency added, countries around the world would need to do more—particularly greater investment in renewables. “If we want to hit those more ambitious climate targets, we’d likely need to see about $4 trillion in clean energy investment by 2030,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, told The New York Times.

This prescription—more renewables—represents a kind of mainstream consensus on climate change. It’s a soothing message: that we can just swap out one type of energy for another without changing anything else. But while more renewables are undoubtedly needed, a growing chorus of experts warn that avoiding catastrophe won’t be possible unless wealthy countries actually reduce their energy consumption. Countries can transition away from fossil fuels much more easily, they say, if they have lower overall energy requirements; while wind and solar power are renewable, the minerals needed to make batteries to capture that energy aren’t. 

“Climate experts who suggest that we’ll be able to get out of this by basically just building out renewables—that no one will be forced to use less energy or be inconvenienced in any way—are doing a grave disservice to humanity,” wrote NASA scientist Peter Kalmus on Twitter recently. “I am not talking about people voluntarily using less energy and changing their lifestyles. Far from it. Instead I am talking about the clear need for policies that begin prioritizing uses of energy and phasing out fossil fuels in a coordinated and equitable way.”

Energy reduction may seem daunting. But it’s not without precedent.

In the 1990s, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH Zurich, who were investigating how much energy the average person needed to live a good life came across the research of the Brazilian scientist José Goldemberg. In the 1980s, Goldemberg calculated that “by shifting to high-quality energy carriers and by exploiting cost-effective opportunities for more efficient energy use,” every person in the world could meet their basic needs—including eating, getting around, and heating their homes—“and much more” with just 1,000 watts of continuous energy; that is, approximately the amount of energy required to continuously operate an efficient vacuum cleaner.

When researchers at ETH considered how much the average person should consume in the years to come, they suggested 2,000 watts—the amount required to continuously power a hair dryer. (Some experts have argued that even 2,000 watts is too high.) At the time, 2,000 watts was the global average. In Western Europe, the average was just under 6,000 watts. In the United States, it was 12,000 watts. Switzerland had not been a 2,000-watt society since the 1960s; returning to that level would require a reduction of energy use by two-thirds. 

For ETH researchers, the 2,000-watt society wasn’t just a vehicle for achieving domestic carbon reduction goals; it was also a vision of global equity on a planet with finite resources. If wealthy countries like Switzerland could decrease their energy consumption to sustainable levels, the logic went, it would give poor countries—like Bangladesh, a 500-watt society in 2004—the space to bring its energy consumption up to 2,000 watts without surpassing planetary boundaries. “There are other peoples of the planet who also have rights—the right to survive, the right to get a little bit of food every day,” Dominic Notter, a scientist formerly with the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, explained to me by Zoom. “We limit their rights with our behavior.”

Conventional thinking holds that ever-increasing energy consumption is critical for social and economic development. Yet the 2,000-watt society concept nonetheless caught on quickly. In 2002, the Swiss Federal Council endorsed the idea. In a 2008 referendum, more than three-quarters of the Zurich population voted in favor of reducing energy consumption in the city to no more than 2,000 watts per capita while reducing greenhouse gas emissions to one ton annually per capita by 2050 without the use of nuclear energy, making it the first city in the world to give the concept democratic legitimacy.

As of 2020, according to the Swiss government, more than 100 towns and municipalities as well as 23 of the country’s 26 cantons have set the goals of the 2,000-watt society in their energy policy targets. Other cities in Europe and beyond—including Basel, Munich, Vancouver, and Canberra—have also pursued planning based on the 2,000-watt concept. “If an industrial country like Switzerland can prove that this goal is attainable, this would open new perspectives to much more populated countries,” said Marco Morisini, a former senior sustainability scientist at ETH Zurich. “This could perhaps be not one of the minor endowments of this small country to the global community.”

So-called “decoupling” of energy use from economic growth has been a longtime dream for policymakers who’d like to keep capitalism but make it greener. Some now think Switzerland is succeeding: Between 2000 and 2020, as per capita primary global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions both continued to rise globally, the numbers in Switzerland appear to have declined. According to the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, per capita primary energy use in the country has fallen by a third, from 6,000 watts to just under 4,000 watts, and per capita greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by almost 50 percent. While “intensified measures must be implemented in the future,” the FOE reports, the goals of the 2,000-watt society are still on track to be met between 2050 and 2100. “The direction is right, the pace is possibly a bit too slow,” an FOE representative told me.

Some Swiss climate experts and government officials, however, are not so sure. Without more substantial changes to Swiss lifestyles and politics, they say, the 2,000-watt society will remain elusive. The question now is: Are the Swiss people on board?  


From the beginning, increasing energy efficiency in buildings has been a primary area of activity in Switzerland’s 2000 Watt project. It’s a commonsense target. After all, a majority of energy consumption occurs in buildings, and it’s a relatively easy place to make improvements. “In the building sector we have all we need. We have labels, we have norms, standards, products. For new buildings we are fine,” said Roland Stulz, the former director of the 2000 Watt project. Buildings also present the path of least political resistance. “In principle, nobody has anything against living in a well-insulated house. It can still be a villa for bigwigs,” said Dieter Imboden, president of the National Research Council and professor of environmental physics at ETH Zurich.

For a 2008 article on the 2,000-watt society in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert visited the Zurich headquarters of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, a building designed to meet the requirements of the 2,000-watt society, which uses four times less energy than a conventional building. Escorted to the premises in a Volvo that runs “on compressed natural gas produced in part from rotting vegetables,” Kolbert marveled at the building, noting its temperature-regulating exterior glass panels, its specially designed toilets, and its solar collectors.

The building supposedly proved, according to a report prepared for the 2008 World Sustainable Building Conference, that not only is the vision of a 2,000-watt society “practicable for office buildings but also that this can be achieved by using conventional materials and existing technologies.” But the report noted that creating such a building was only possible with a team of highly qualified architects, planners, and specialists and that transforming the country’s building stock would require something like an army of such individuals.

In the years since Kolbert’s visit, a mobilization does seem to have taken place. In 2011, ETH Zurich launched Novalantis, a program tasked with executing projects—including the expansion of a municipal hospital and the redevelopment of a nursing home—that would demonstrate the “real-life feasibility of 2,000-watt society concepts and technologies.” The Swiss Federal Office of Energy, meanwhile, developed a 2,000-watt site certification for large developments, and in 2012, Zurich’s Greencity district—“a model and example for the city of the future”—became the first to be certified. Since then, 44 other developments—largely new constructions—have been certified across the country.

In Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city, the government introduced several initiatives designed to improve energy efficiency in existing homes and buildings. Over the years, thousands of contractors and planning teams have made use of the city’s “energy coaching” program, which connects them with specialists who provide low-cost advice on “all issues involved with the energy optimisation of buildings.” A similar environmental consultation program was designed specifically for small and medium-size businesses. Zurich’s city-owned power company, meanwhile, started letting customers borrow measuring devices to detect “electricity guzzlers” in their homes.

This flurry of activity tells a compelling narrative about a country of “trailblazers,” showing the world a 2,000-watt future can “look very bright,” as CBS put it in 2008. But is it enough to explain the reported dip in Switzerland’s per capita energy consumption? Not exactly, according to Tom Blindebacher, who has led Switzerland’s 2000 Watt program for the past 12 years. The numbers, he said, don’t tell the full story of the change—or lack thereof—in Switzerland in the last 20 years. 

Switzerland’s reduction in primary energy consumption, Blindebacher told me, is due in part to changes in the Swiss population, which has grown by more than one million since 2000. Since a greater number of people are living in roughly the same number of buildings and using existing infrastructure, energy use appears to drop. Another explanation is the exodus of industry from the country. Since the so-called “gray energy” used to manufacture imported goods doesn’t count toward Switzerland’s energy balance sheet, energy consumption appears to drop as more goods are imported. (With gray energy included, Switzerland’s energy consumption was more than 10,000 watts per person in 2011.) A similar illusion occurs when people buy gasoline abroad. “When energy prices in Switzerland are higher than in Germany, people start to fill up their tanks in Germany. Then it seems like we in Switzerland have reduced our energy consumption. There were years where that happened. But we didn’t drive less with our cars,” Blindebacher said.

Then there’s the changing energy mix. While most of the energy—some 60 to 67 percent—put into the process of burning fossil fuels in a thermal power plant is lost, this doesn’t happen with renewables. So as Switzerland has phased out fossil fuels and increased the share of renewables to around 30 percent, demand for energy has declined. But according to Blindebacher, it doesn’t mean that energy use is markedly less. In fact, according to the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics, final energy consumption—that is, the amount of energy people actually consume—has remained relatively static. In 2000, it was 847,350 terajoules; in 2019 (before Covid-19 wreaked havoc on statistics), it was 836,230 terajoules. “Do I think that Swiss people live more efficiently than 10 years ago? No, I don’t think so,” Blindebacher said.


Energy efficiency was never meant to be the sole driver of Switzerland’s 2,000-watt transformation. “It will not happen without lifestyle change,” Rahel Gessler of Zurich’s Office for Environmental and Health Protection said bluntly in 2011.

What kind of lifestyle change, exactly? While the 2,000-watt society is precise in its goal, Swiss officials tend to shy away from recommendations in hard numbers. But the broad strokes are easy to find. A document on the Swiss Federal Office of Energy’s website, for instance, offers several “principles of action” for achieving a 2,000-watt society, such as “Skip flights,” and “Keep distances short and, if possible, cover them on foot, by bike or by public transport.” A document from the city of Zurich, meanwhile, recommends adopting a diet that consists “predominantly of plant-based products” and buying fewer new consumer goods by sharing and repairing as much as possible.

Some Swiss people have surely gotten this message and are attempting to live more energy-moderate lifestyles. In Zurich, for instance, a group led by the anarchist utopian author Hans Widmer is planning to form a 500-person cooperative, Nena1, where residents would live in 1,000-watt-compatible housing with a “personal upper limit of 2000 watts.” But bringing such lifestyles beyond a small niche requires policy change, said Troy Vettese, an environmental historian at the European University Institute and co-author of the book Half-Earth Socialism. Riding a bike instead of driving a car, for instance, “is easier to do if there are lots of bike lanes and you don’t feel like you’re going to die.”

But 2,000-watt policies can’t just focus on facilitating energy-moderate behavior, according to Morisini; they must also discourage or even eliminate energy-intensive behavior. “A flexible energy fee could be conceived: lower prices for basic energy consumption and progressive higher prices for conspicuous energy consumption,” Morisini wrote in a 2008 paper presented at the conference Ethics and Climate Change: Scenarios for Justice and Sustainability. “Taxing consumption instead of incomes, first proposed by Thomas Hobbes three centuries ago and a recurrent theme in economics, could be applied to energy policy.”

Swiss policymakers have several times attempted to advance systemic changes toward energy reduction. Traffic planners in Zurich have, as a 2011 New York Times report put it, “been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers” and reclaim public space for pedestrians. A revision to the country’s national climate law that would have increased taxes on flying and driving narrowly failed in 2021 after the oil and auto lobbies mobilized against it. A proposal to end factory farming, meanwhile, failed at the polls in September. But generally, Morisini argues, such social reforms are “rarely considered as options, debates on them are frowned upon, and, instead, vast resources are still invested to convince people to boost their consumption.”

Reducing people’s habitual energy consumption is mostly framed as a personal choice, not a matter of government intervention. In Zurich, for instance, the city offers a 2,000-watt calculator, which allows residents to figure out their energy consumption so they can adjust it accordingly on their own. The city government, meanwhile, has framed its role in bringing about a 2,000-watt society as a “role model” that can provide “attractive examples” of a 2,000-watt lifestyle. The city, however, has often shown considerable restraint in using its bully pulpit. In 2011, for instance, it began offering a “Menu Plus”—a menu composed mostly of seasonal, regional, and vegan products designed to have “60 percent less impact on the climate”—in four of its staff cafeterias. But the city stopped short of suggesting that this less energy-intensive way of eating should be required or incentivized. “We don’t want to tell people what to eat,” said Beat von Felten, a project manager with the city.

This rhetorical passivity, according to Christian Schaffner, the executive director of the Energy Science Center of ETH Zurich, is a reaction to a perceived reality: Swiss people don’t actually want to use less energy. “If you ask people in general, ‘Do you want to save the climate?’ they will say yes. If you ask them, ‘Are you OK if we forbid you to drive your private car into the city?’ they will say no,” he told me. Even in a country where a reduction of energy consumption has been approved by voters in several cities, several Swiss officials claim that so-called energy sufficiency, i.e., a reduction to sustainable levels through behavior change, is just too politically perilous to propose. “If you talk about sufficiency, you don’t get elected. So nobody talks about sufficiency,” Blindebacher said.


Even with the war in Ukraine disrupting fossil fuel supply chains in Europe, lifestyle changes to reduce energy consumption remain a tough sell. A new Federal Office of Energy campaign calls on the Swiss population to “reduce energy consumption in everyday life without sacrificing quality of life,” in light of energy shortages resulting from the war. But such campaigns fail to convince even people like Daniel Kellenberger, who until recently headed up the 2,000-watt site certification program and, when reached for an interview, was on a road trip through the United States. “People are not prepared to change their behavior, I can see that by myself. I mean, I still like to travel, I love to see other countries,” he said. “I can use my bike, I can take public transport, I can buy an electric car, I can heat my house with renewable electricity. But the last part, just not eating meat anymore and not flying everywhere. That’s going to be the tough one.”

This resistance isn’t just a matter of personal preference or Swiss culture. Energy reduction also conflicts with something much more pervasive and powerful: a capitalist society’s imperative for limitless growth. According to Toni W. Püntener, Zurich’s former deputy head of the Energy and Sustainability Department, “this focus on growth is probably the biggest stumbling block” to achieving a 2,000-watt society. 

While Blindebacher agrees that “capitalism, or this whole idea of growth, doesn’t do us a lot of good,” he still thinks progress is possible: “There’s a lot to do before changing the system,” he said, noting further improvements yet to be made in renewable energy and efficiency.

Those measures, though, may not be enough to make Switzerland a 2,000-watt society. Barring significant sufficiency measures in the near future, according to Swiss energy experts, Switzerland is likely to see energy consumption plateau at unsustainably high levels. According to a 2016 report on Zurich’s 2,000-watt progress, “many of the most effective measures have already been implemented or are planned”; the city will have a per capita energy consumption of 3,500 watts by the middle of the century. The authors of a 2011 study, meanwhile, noted that the canton of Basel-Stadt could only achieve a 2,000-watt society by 2075 if “all economically, socially, and ecologically viable technical options for increasing energy efficiency and introducing renewable energy are exhausted”—not the most likely scenario. According to a 2007 analysis by Thorsten Frank Schulz, then a doctoral candidate at ETH Zurich, “using the technologies at hand by the middle of the century, we could lower the primary-energy consumption to 3500 Watts per capita … at maximum.”

Perhaps the gloomiest signal yet has been a string of bilateral agreements the Swiss government has pursued in recent years with developing nations, including Peru, Ghana, and Senegal. According to these agreements, as The New York Times reported this week, Switzerland will avoid the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions within its own borders by paying poorer nations to reduce emissions in theirs.

While Switzerland is a small country—it accounts for less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—the stakes are high, as others watch how its 2,000-watt experiment fares. “Should no one single industrialized country be able to live in shared prosperity without much less than 6,000 watts per capita, this would be a dangerous message for the developing countries,” argued Morisini in his 2008 paper. To Blindebacher, Switzerland, as the country that has been pursuing a 2,000-watt society the longest, still has the best chance to present an example to the world. “Someone must try,” he said. “And who if not we, as one of the richest and the smartest and the freest countries in the world?”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Who turned out the lights? Los Angeles-area landmarks go dark in observance of Earth Hour

Lighting at some local Los Angeles landmarks will go dark from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday in observance of Earth Hour, an annual event promoted by the World Wildlife Foundation.

The famed Pacific Wheel at Santa Monica Pier and the glowing Gateway Pylons at Los Angeles International Airport are just a couple of the local landmarks that will go dark Saturday night in observance of Earth Hour. “Tonight, LAX will temporarily turn off its iconic gateway pylons in observance of Earth Hour. The pylons will be lit green before going dark from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. in unison with other city-owned buildings and famous landmarks across Los Angeles,” the airport posted on social media. Earth Hour, which began in Australia in 2007, is sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund. The event is intended to engage the public’s interest in matters involving global warming and to encourage individuals and businesses across the globe to dedicate an hour to activities benefiting Earth’s environment.The Ferris wheel at Santa Monica Pier, which bills itself as the world’s only solar-powered wheel, will turn off all but its wheel rim safety lights. The lights-off event can be viewed online at the Pacific Park website. “In an increasingly divided world, Earth Hour serves as a beacon of positivity, hope and inspiration to rally as many people as possible, in particular people who are not fully engaged with the environmental crisis yet,” read a statement from Pacific Park operators. Newsletter You're reading Boiling Point Sammy Roth gets you up to speed on climate change, energy and the environment. Sign up to get it in your inbox twice a week. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Tightened fishing regulations: No pickled fish this Easter?

This year pickled fish may not be possible for many as there might be shortages of this delicacy amidst tightened fishing regulations. The post Tightened fishing regulations: No pickled fish this Easter? appeared first on SAPeople - Worldwide South African News.

Many South Africans follow a tradition of eating pickled fish or snoek over Easter. The tradition originated in Cape Town. This year, however, this may not be possible for many as there might be shortages of this delicacy amidst tightened fishing regulations. TIGHTENED REGULATIONS The Department of Forestry Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) has tightened regulations on catch limits for small-scale fishers. In addition, traditional fishers are experiencing delays in permit processing and reductions in permitted boats, according to Biz Community. More recently, the DFFE enlisted the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to inspect fishing vessels. This sparked concerns among fishers along the West Coast about meeting the demand for snoek over the Easter weekend. Maria Welcome, spokesperson for environmental society organisation Green Connection, said fishers along the West Coast were struggling with quotas to meet the demands of fish supply. “Snoek migration starts a cultural ritual that has been practiced for as long as fishers can remember. Eager consumers of snoek and partakers in the Easter weekend fish rituals and delicacies should be warned – the shelves and pantries may be empty this year,” she said. AFFECTED FISHERMEN Welcome said that the government informed many of the 62 newly formed fisheries co-operatives who only received their rights recently, of quota cuts. For many, this meant that more than half of their fishers will not be able to go to sea to catch snoek or any other traditional line fish. A small-scale fisherman from Port Nolloth, Walter Steenkamp, expressed his disagreement with the situation. He said that the government is trying to cut them out of the fishing industry, according to IOL. “We’re trying to make a business. The government must try to bring co-management in so that we can negotiate and sit around one table and put the regulations and everything on the table. We are suffering as small-scale fisheries. This government doesn’t care for us,” said Steenkamp. ALSO READ: Zuma loses court bid to remove Billy Downer from corruption trial The post Tightened fishing regulations: No pickled fish this Easter? appeared first on SAPeople - Worldwide South African News.

Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court

After the Honduran president repealed a law granting unfettered authority to outside investors, the cryptoquistadors took the dispute to a World Bank arbitration court. The post Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court appeared first on The Intercept.

A group of prominent international economists is applauding the recent move by Honduran President Xiomara Castro to push back against American crypto investors attempting to seize billions in public money from the Central American nation. The crypto crew is exploiting a dispute mechanism nested inside the World Bank, created by an obscure provision of the Central America Free Trade Agreement. Castro has deemed the forum, called the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID, to be an illegitimate usurpation of Honduran sovereignty and has hit upon an elegant solution: She has taken steps to withdraw Honduras from ICSID. The crypto crowd is crying foul. The spectacular battle playing out in Honduras and inside global financial institutions blends the 19th-century American legacy of gunboat diplomacy and banana republicanism with a contemporary twist: The lead group of investors battling Honduras by exploiting international financial institutions is made up of a band of crypto-libertarians. The fight presents an almost-impossible-to-believe scenario: A group of libertarian investors teamed up with a former Honduran government — which was tied at the hip with narco-traffickers and came to power after a U.S.-backed military coup — in order to implement the world’s most radical libertarian policy, which turned over significant portions of the country to those investors through so-called special economic zones. The Honduran public, in a backlash, ousted the narco-backed regime, and the new government repealed the libertarian legislation. The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies. Since Castro took office in 2021, the World Bank’s ICSID has seen investors bring no fewer than 10 cases targeting her government. The largest case, brought by U.S. corporation Próspera Inc., seeks more than $10 billion in compensation, which would equal roughly a third of the country’s GDP. Próspera, rooted in the world of crypto finance, describes itself as a “platform [that] powers the development of new cities in special economic zones that maximize generalized prosperity and wealth creation.” A city the company set up in Honduras accepts bitcoin as official tender. In an open letter published on Tuesday, the economists argued that Castro’s decision was a smart move. “We view the withdrawal as a critical defence of Honduran democracy and an important step toward its sustainable development,” reads the letter, which was organized by Progressive International, a left-leaning coalition. “For decades, international arbitration courts like ICSID have allowed corporations to sue states and restrict their freedom to regulate in favour of consumers, workers and the environment. Since 1996, governments in Latin America alone have been forced to compensate foreign corporations over $30 billion, intimidating regulators away from raising minimum wages, protecting vulnerable ecosystems, and introducing climate protections, among other domestic policy priorities. We find scant economic evidence that mechanisms like ICSID stimulate meaningful foreign direct investment, in return.” At issue are so-called ZEDEs created by previous governments of Honduras. The law that established ZEDEs — short for Zone for Employment and Economic Development — effectively carved out portions of Honduras and turned them over to American investors, who operate as effective sovereign governments. The ZEDEs could one day control 35 percent of Honduras’s territory, according to the United Nations, which has said that the zones raise human rights concerns. It took enormous political muscle more than a decade ago to force the ZEDEs into law. They only became possible when Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a U.S.-backed coup in 2009. After Zelaya was ousted, a new election brought in President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who quickly moved to undo Zelaya’s social reforms, attacking workers rights and reneging on land reform efforts. The Supreme Court struck down the first version of the ZEDEs law as unconstitutional, but after the constitution was amended and four new justices were added to the Supreme Court, the law stuck in 2013. Lobo Sosa’s rise was fueled not just by U.S. support but also by narco-trafficker cash, according to U.S. prosecutors who convicted Tony Hernández, the brother of former President Juan Orlando Hernández, for trafficking “monumental” amounts of cocaine. Juan Orlando Hernández was Lobo Sosa’s successor and was himself convicted of drug trafficking earlier this month in a U.S. federal court. He was president of the National Congress, Honduras’s legislative body, from 2010 to 2013, and was a primary mover of the ZEDEs legislation. He also led the overnight takeover of the Supreme Court that enabled their implementation. Prosecutors in the Tony Hernández case linked the brothers with Lobo Sosa in their sentencing memorandum. “Between 2004 and 2019, the defendant secured and distributed millions of dollars in drug-derived bribes to Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa and other politicians associated with Honduras’s National Party,” prosecutors wrote. So to put the ZEDEs in context: The radical “free market” intervention was only jammed into law as the result of a military coup and the stacking of the Supreme Court. The ZEDEs were then enacted and implemented for the benefit of U.S. investors by two narco-governors. On March 8, in celebrating the conviction of the former Honduran president who shepherded the law into being, and then oversaw its implementation, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that Hernández — a man propped up throughout his tenure by his allies in the State Department — oversaw “a narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity.” Zelaya was overthrown ostensibly over his attempt to extend his presidency to what was deemed an unconstitutional second term. Yet Hernández breezily ran for reelection in 2017 and claimed victory amid an absurd amount of irregularities, all of them brushed aside by a supportive Trump administration. The years of chaos and violence led to a surge of migration toward the U.S. border. The U.S. had no evident problem with that freewheeling narco-state while Hernandez was in office and remained useful, yet once Castro took power in a backlash to the U.S.-fueled corruption, the United States suddenly rediscovered its respect for the rule of law and the sanctity of contracts with U.S. investors. Castro quickly and successfully moved to repeal the ZEDEs law in the face of intense bipartisan U.S. pressure to maintain them. The American response has been to repudiate the very idea of Honduran democracy and sovereignty, with investors using the World Bank’s ICSID to force the new Honduran government to respect the policies carried out by the former president now sitting behind federal bars. Among the dozens of signatories to the Progressive International praising Castro’s decision to exit the arbitration court are prominent South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang; Chilean Gabriel Palma, of the “Palma Ratio of inequality”; American economist Jeffrey Sachs; former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis; British economist Ann Pettifor; and Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh. Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, has been fighting the crypto crew for years and welcomed Castro’s move. “The Honduran people overwhelmingly opposed the ZEDE law, and when the Honduran legislature unanimously repealed this law, that should have been the end of the story,” she said. “This is just the latest example of corporations abusing this ISDS mechanism to challenge environmental, health, land use, and other public interest policies around the hemisphere. Honduras was wise to withdraw from the World Bank venue where many of these cases are brought as an important first step.” In its case before the ICSID, Próspera retained a top lobbying firm, employing former Democratic lawmaker Kendrick Meek, to pressure Honduras to pay up. Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, came out against the effort by Próspera to exploit the dispute resolution system to undermine Honduran sovereignty. “In the case of Próspera,” they write, “a ZEDE located largely on the Honduran island of Roatán, investors have created a governing council where 44 percent of members are appointed by the private company and 22 percent are elected by landowners in a system where their number of votes is proportional to the size of their property.” A conference Próspera held on Roatán last year signaled the company’s ethic. “Próspera aims to be the best jurisdiction for the crypto/web3 industry in the world, and we welcome the best ideas on how to achieve that with a sound legal framework,” said Chris Wilson of Próspera in publicity materials that described the confab as “specifically designed for legal hackers, crypto lawyers, jurisdictional polymaths, and businesses that want to create better laws to do business under.” The company’s response to a request for comment on the letter from the economists was representative of the unusual corporate structure it has been able to implement. The company’s communications director told The Intercept that a response to our questions would be submitted by Jorge Colindres, representing the “Office of the Technical Secretary.” Colindres’s email signature alludes to the public-private nature of the corporation, reading: Jorge Constantino Colindres Technical Secretary – Próspera ZEDE Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico República de Honduras Manager – General Service Provider Colindres responded as a government official. “Attached you will find my office’s statement on the unconstitutional withdrawal from ICSID by the Honduran government,” he said. His statement insisted: Próspera ZEDE is [a] local government and special economic zone of the Republic of Honduras. It is governed by the Technical Secretary, a Honduran citizen by birth, appointed by the Government of Honduras and empowered by article 329 of the Honduran Constitution and the ZEDE Organic Law to oversee the implementation of new policies and rules designed to foster economic development, facilitate job creation, attract national and foreign direct investment, and safeguard the fundamental rights of the workers and residents of this special jurisdiction. National and foreign companies alike are bound to comply with Próspera ZEDE Rules, which are Honduran rules, as they have been adopted by a local government of Honduras with the legal blessing of the country’s Executive Power, National Congress, and Supreme Court of Justice. Colindres claimed that the ZEDEs had resulted in more than $100 million in foreign investment so far, and that Castro had not gotten approval from the National Congress to withdraw from the World Bank’s dispute body. “We stand proud of our achievements in job creation and investment attraction, which run in stark contrast to the job killing policies of the national government, and we continue undeterred in our mission to transform the Honduran economy and catalyze prosperity through the oasis of economic freedom and rule of law that Próspera ZEDE offers to the Honduran people,” Colindres said. Fernando Garcia, a presidential commissioner appointed by Castro to oppose the ZEDEs, said that while the Honduran Constitution requires the National Congress to ratify new international treaties, it does not require the executive branch to notify the legislature ahead of a withdrawal. “The ICSID convention establishes the possibility of a sovereign state’s withdrawal from its convention,” Garcia told The Intercept. He added that the arbitration court has already legally accepted Honduras’s withdrawal, effective August. This does not, he said, “prevent those who have requested arbitration from proceeding in accordance.” The post Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court appeared first on The Intercept.

Connecticut wants to penalize insurers for backing fossil-fuel projects

A new bill could impose a fee on any company insuring a fossil-fuel project in the state.

The nation’s insurance industry has gone haywire in recent years amid a succession of floods, fires, and other climate-fueled disasters. These catastrophes have forced carriers to pay out billions in claims, and many have responded by raising premiums in disaster-prone states like Florida and Oregon or leaving certain markets altogether. But many of these companies also provide coverage for fossil fuel projects, like pipelines and natural gas power plants, that would never be built without their backing. This gives the insurance industry a unique role on both sides of the climate crisis: insurers are helping make the problem worse by underwriting the very projects that warm the earth even as they bear the costs of mounting climate disasters and pass them on to customers. Legislation in Connecticut, the capital of the American insurance industry and home to several of its largest carriers, could make insurers pay for that contradiction. If passed, the bill, which just cleared a committee vote in the state senate, would move toward imposing a fee for any fossil-fuel projects companies insure in state. That revenue would go into a public resilience fund that could underwrite sea walls and urban flood protection measures. “It’s important to begin to hold [insurers] accountable for how they’ve played it both ways in terms of climate change,” said Tom Swan, the executive director of Connecticut Citizen Action Group, an economic justice nonprofit that has joined several environmental organizations in lobbying the legislature to pass the bill along with several environmental organizations. “People are seeing skyrocketing rates, or they’re pulling out of different areas, and they continue to underwrite and invest in fossil fuels at a pace much greater than their colleagues across the globe,” he said.  The group pushed a more aggressive proposal last year that would have charged insurers a 5 percent fee for any fossil fuel coverage they issued in the United States, but that bill failed after critics raised several legal questions. In particular, the industry argued that the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause prohibits taxing a company’s out-of-state business. The new version, attached as an amendment to a climate resilience bill proposed by Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, would only require the state to produce a proposal for an insurance mechanism. The surcharge would apply only to fossil-fuel projects these companies insure in Connecticut, avoiding that constitutional challenge. The assessment would apply not only to new pipelines and fuel terminals, which require ample insurance to attract lenders and investors, but to current coverage for existing infrastructure as well. This means anyone covering the state’s dozens of oil- and gas-fueled power plants would be contributing to the resilience fund. A report from Connecticut Citizen Action Group and several other environmental nonprofits found that the state’s insurers have together invested $221 billion in fossil fuels. Supporters argue the reduced fee would still raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for climate resilience. Connecticut received about $318 million in FEMA disaster aid between 2011 and 2021, or about $149 in spending per capita, according to the climate adaptation nonprofit Rebuild by Design. That puts the state well below disaster-prone locales like Louisiana, which saw $1,736 in federal disaster aid per capita, but far above those like Delaware that haven’t experienced a major disaster in the past decade. Eric George, the president of the Insurance Association of Connecticut, the state’s largest insurance trade association, said the organization would “strongly oppose” any surcharge, but added that he was still studying the bill. The state’s insurance commissioner has testified in favor of the legislation, saying it has his department’s“full support.”  The legislation comes as other states, including Vermont and Maryland, introduce “polluters pay” bills to hold oil producers accountable for climate damages. Connecticut’s proposed law is an iteration of that effort focused on an area where state regulators wield significant influence, said Risalat Khan of the Sunrise Project, a nonprofit focused on energy transition policy.  “People are very directly seeing their premiums rise, in relation to climate disasters,” he said. “There’s a direct question there of, why aren’t state level regulators using more of their power to take local action?” The significance of this financing mechanism could vary from state to state, says Benjamin Keys, a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on climate insurance risks.  “One major issue is that the fuels are collected and burned everywhere, but the pain of natural disasters is local in nature,” he said. Because of that, he questioned whether the financing mechanism “would be feasible for all communities to emulate, because many places have [lots of] disasters hit, but very little in the way of fossil fuel production.” Florida, for instance, doesn’t have much more fossil-fuel infrastructure than Connecticut, but faces extreme weather and other catastrophes far more often. Even though the legislation is weaker than the previous version, supporters say passing it in the home of the country’s insurance industry would send a message to big companies that are still underwriting oil and gas projects. “I think it’s a good policy, but from a narrative-setting perspective, it’s really important,” said Swan. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Connecticut wants to penalize insurers for backing fossil-fuel projects on Mar 19, 2024.

Managing ‘Brown Gold:’ the Challenges—and Opportunities—of Spent Substrate

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. The lumpy blocks are spent substrate, the living material left over after growing  mushrooms. Composed of sawdust and soy pellets woven through with mycelium—the thread-like aspect of the fungus from which mushrooms sprout—spent […] The post Managing ‘Brown Gold:’ the Challenges—and Opportunities—of Spent Substrate appeared first on Civil Eats.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. Collar City Mushrooms occupies a small building along the post-industrial waterfront of Troy, New York. Out back, baking in the winter sun between a shed and a yellow Volkswagen bus, sits a waist-high heap of what looks like dozens of giant Frosted Mini-Wheats, each roughly the size of a cinder block. The weathered caps of oyster mushrooms sprout defiantly from various points in the pile. The lumpy blocks are spent substrate, the living material left over after growing  mushrooms. Composed of sawdust and soy pellets woven through with mycelium—the thread-like aspect of the fungus from which mushrooms sprout—spent substrate is a unique kind of waste. It’s also one with many potential uses; it can be used as compost, as a means of decontaminating soil, as biofuel, and simply for growing more mushrooms. And while each of those uses could provide revenue potential for mushroom farms, the expanding piles of spent substrate also represent a mounting logistical challenge. “If you’re gonna do it, awesome, but account for this waste stream you’re producing and how you’re gonna get it off of your property.” “Right now, we have people picking it up almost as a favor for us, because otherwise what are we doing with it?” said Avery Stempel, Collar City’s co-founder, as we gazed upon the pile. Stempel currently takes most of the material to a nearby compost facility, but local farms, gardeners, and florists also take a portion. So do individuals, whether for compost in their gardens or just to grow mushrooms at home. “People will come and buy a bucket for five bucks,” Stempel said. Before it’s put to work growing mushrooms, substrate is carefully mixed and sterilized to maximize efficiency and prevent competition for the fungus. Protected inside breathable plastic bags, the sawdust and soy hulls are inoculated with an edible mushroom strain, then stacked on racks in climate-controlled rooms. The bags are sliced open when the mycelium is ready, and out sprouts the first “flush” of mushrooms. To make the best use of space, many farms will dispose of the blocks after a single flush, but each block is capable of several rounds of mushroom production. In this sense, the substrate isn’t really “spent.” Spent substrate waiting to be collected and reused. (Photo courtesy of Central Texas Mycological Society) Collar City is a relatively small operation, producing up to 1,000 pounds of mushrooms a week. An hour south, in Hillsdale, New York, Tivoli Mushrooms produces around 20,000 pounds per week, and it’s currently only using half the capacity of its new 15,000-square-foot facility. Soon after moving in, Co-founder Devon Gilroy reached out to a neighboring organic farm, offering the spent substrate for free as compost if they would simply take it off his hands. It wasn’t a tough sell. “They showed up like two weeks later with a tractor and a big truck to load it in,” he said. “They insisted on paying us for the substrate, which really helped.” More Mushrooms, More Problems From a revenue perspective, specialty mushroom substrate’s greatest value is currently as compost, which can sell for around $150 per cubic yard. It has a low pH level, useful in soils with low acidity, and a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of roughly 40 to 1, which is close to ideal for building healthy soil. Spent substrate is also a useful addition to vermicompost—worms love to eat mycelium, and in doing, so they also break down woody debris and support soil biodiversity. It is also an excellent addition for  structure and water retention. But that doesn’t mean every mushroom farm has an easy time finding a second life for its spent substrate, and the quandary of how to make use of the material is growing along with the scale of the specialty mushroom industry. “If you’re gonna do it, awesome, but account for this waste stream you’re producing and how you’re gonna get it off of your property.” That’s the advice Amanda Janney, founder of KM Mushrooms in California, offers new farmers. Janney’s farm is about as modest as they come, operating out of her home in Santa Rosa. As the farm’s output quickly grew, from 20 pounds of mushrooms a week to around 300, the leftover material quickly became a logistical problem to be solved. “In the beginning when we were doing really low volume, it was not much of a consideration; giving bags of spent substrate out via Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace was sufficient,” said Janney. “Then production increased a lot faster than I had planned on, which is a great thing, but a big piece of it became connecting with farmers that were interested in [taking substrate] and getting a workflow to move it off the property quickly.” In 2022, driven in large part by consumer interest in meat alternatives, global revenues for mushrooms were predicted to more than double to over $110 billion by 2030. The nutraceutical market for medicinal mushrooms—such as reishi, lion’s mane, and cordyceps—may follow a similar trajectory, with one forecast suggesting the market could triple to reach $62 billion by 2032. The vast majority—95 percent—of the mushroom production in the U.S. is in Agaricus: the common cremini, button, or portobello (all the same species). Every other variety, be it shiitake or oyster, falls in the specialty mushroom category. In the U.S., Agaricus mushrooms are produced in vast quantities by well-established farms, often generations old and mostly located in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Grown in a combination of manure and straw, they produce a distinct kind of spent substrate that is also used as compost, though it is a very different material from specialty mushroom substrate, with fewer applications. To farm button mushrooms cost-effectively is very labor- and space-intensive, and to take up producing them at small scales doesn’t make a lot of economic sense. “It’s a huge opportunity on a spreadsheet, but on the operational side, it’s like, ‘Get this stuff out of here right now.’” By comparison, it is relatively easy to grow enough oyster mushrooms to sell at market for more than $10 per pound, compared to around $5 per pound for button mushrooms. It’s also easy to buy a few ready-to-grow kits for home growers. For these and other reasons, specialty mushrooms are what most small and emerging farms are likely to grow. Sales of specialty mushrooms increased 32 percent between 2021 and 2022 alone, which means an equivalent increase in spent substrate, and more questions about what to do with it. On the extreme end of substrate volume are the emerging mycelium materials companies, like MycoWorks and Ecovative. [Disclosure: The author worked for Ecovative in 2022 and 2023.] Based on oyster mushroom mycelium, Ecovative ships most of its substrate off as compost, and the possible uses it is exploring include selling part of the enormous output of leftover substrate to farms in Pennsylvania for a second act producing mushrooms. There’s a limit to that market, though: “To be frank, you couldn’t possibly eat enough oyster mushrooms in the U.S. to use all the substrate we’re going to make if we meet our goal,” said Ecovative CEO Eben Bayer. “It’s a huge opportunity on a spreadsheet, but on the operational side, it’s like, ‘Get this stuff out of here right now.’” A Community Solution to Substrate Waste Emerges in Texas Rather than relying solely on the market, the question of what to do with substrate is largely being answered by communities local to the specialty mushroom farms. In Austin, for instance, the Central Texas Mycological Society (CTMS) has organized a network of about two dozen locations for free spent substrate pickup. They report that some 9,000 people have signed up since the program started three years ago, with a surge during the pandemic, when interest in homegrown mushrooms took off dramatically. “With spent mushroom substrate, we saw this opportunity to keep people connected,” said Angel Schatz, a lead organizer of the CTMS, whose front yard was the original drop-off point for the program. What people do with the material, though, is their own business. “I know a lot of people are growing the mushrooms, getting a second flush out of the bags, but we don’t want to steal the thunder from the commercial farms in any way, so we start first with teaching people the composting methods.” Photo courtesy of Central Texas Mycological Society Until recently, a significant amount of spent substrate for the CTMS pickup program came from Smallhold, which quickly became a prominent specialty mushroom grower over the last five years, before declaring bankruptcy in early February. With facilities in Los Angeles, Austin, and New York, the company’s objective was to grow specialty mushrooms near major cities. Each of its three large farms generated about 80 to 100 cubic yards of spent substrate per week, and the company employed a team dedicated to finding productive uses for the material. “At the end of the day, this is a valuable material,” said Travis Breihan, who was the company’s impact manager in charge of researching uses for spent substrate. “But it is a new material on the scene, and it’s not like there was an established industry of people second-flushing blocks, or using it as a garden amendment, or even a larger-scale farm amendment. So, I think it’s early in the world of adoption, but all signs are very strong that it’s a great area of focus for the mushroom industry overall.” CTMS isn’t concerned about losing the Smallhold  substrate. “We still work with another farm that produces around 1,900 spent substrate blocks a week, and they will probably grow now because Smallhold won’t be here. Meanwhile, besides giving away blocks, CTMS is working with local farms, food producers, and environmental remediation projects that utilize the material for cleanup of contaminated sites, such as the Circle Acres nature preserve on the edge of Austin. Given the limitations that scale creates for transporting and productively using spent substrate, any future market for the material may indeed be shaped most by smaller operations. Specialty mushrooms lend themselves to this dynamic. They don’t ship well over long distances, and can run on the waste streams—such as sawdust—of nearby industries. It can take many different shapes and, crucially, sizes. As the specialty mushroom industry grows, spent substrate may find a market for secondary mushroom production, or for building and remediating soil and waterways. The potential of the material may best be realized in connecting mushroom production with other food- and soil-based initiatives, and in  supporting more circular, regional economies. “The least we can do is make sure the cycle is complete, and put it back into the soil rather than a dump site,” said Schatz. The post Managing ‘Brown Gold:’ the Challenges—and Opportunities—of Spent Substrate appeared first on Civil Eats.

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