"'Masdar City is dismissed because the tech side didn’t work. It's seen as an eccentric experiment of an oil-rich state,' says Sarah Moser, an assistant professor at McGill University in Canada who studies new cities. 'But what's simple and radical about it is that there’s almost no direct sunlight that reaches the pedestrian level.'"

"A crew without much technical knowledge can manufacture and assemble the structures’ eight panels and the interior bamboo beams that support them on-site. Lari designed them so that homeowners can easily make repairsand even additions...If a flood is coming, homeowners can dismantle the structure’s bamboo skeleton from its permanent foundation and move it to higher ground. Bigger buildings, such as community centers, stand on stilts several feet high."

"Insect start-ups hope large facilities will help them get their foot in the door with big buyers in the market for fish and livestock feed, pet food and fertilizer. 'If you are just [producing] a few tons or tens of tons you don’t exist,' said Antoine Hubert, co-founder of Ynsect,a French start-up that specializes in mealworms. 'This is why we have to design something pretty massive, because you need thousands of tons if not tens of thousands of tons to exist for a single buyer.'"

"Restoring global forests where they occur naturally could potentially capture an additional 226 gigatons of planet-warming carbon, equivalent to about a third of the amount that humans have released since the beginning of the Industrial Era, according to a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature."

"A lot of the drivers for recent protests of copper mines, and of the companies producing them, are due to ESG concerns. It remains unclear if the connection will be made that without copper there will be no energy transition, or if the snake will simply keep eating its tail."

"Air pollution from rudimentary cooking fuels such as charcoal, firewood, coal, agricultural waste and animal dung causes 3.7 million premature deaths per year, ranking it the third largest cause of premature death globally, according to the report."

"More than 120,000 acres have just been set aside as a conservation area in Idaho. As Boise State Public Radio reports, the Bennett Hills conservation area covers more than 120,000 acres of rolling grasslands in southwest Idaho, home to upland game bird species and wintering elk and mule deer."

"The startup’s weapon of PFAS destruction incorporates technology from the University of Washington and the Colorado School of Mines. It annihilates the pollutants in a device that can reach high pressure and temperature — hitting 570 degrees Fahrenheit. To that they add lye — an ingredient in soap — to create a caustic environment. The conditions dismantle the PFAS, breaking off the compound at its head, chopping up its spine of carbon molecules, and lopping off the fluoride molecules that run along the backbone."

"Part of the challenge is that biochar doesn’t exactly fit into the standard American farming curriculum. It’s neither a fertilizer nor a pesticide, and it doesn’t supercharge crop production. ​'It’s not something that’s likely to double yield,' said Milton McGiffen, a cooperative extension specialist and agricultural researcher at the University of California, Riverside. Still, McGiffen said, biochar’s benefits are clear, particularly when it’s added to soils that have a lot of sand or clay and struggle to hold on to water and nutrients."