Good Company & Davos
Writing a book about how your publisher harms the environment. Also, the declining relevance of Davos.
Featured Articles
A Good Company
Harper's Magazine • 22 Jan 2025 • ~6750 words
Justin Nobel is writing a book on the environmental threats of oil and gas, which will be published by Simon & Schuster. There is only one problem: S&S was sold to KKR, a private equity firm with significant investments in oil and gas.
I reached out to a number of sources in the months following the KKR announcement to get their take on what I had done. Many environmental activists believed I had made the right decision. Jesse Lombardi, the former bank robber, wondered if KKR had purchased Simon & Schuster simply to kill my book. It was flattering that he would think so.
At the Summit
Harper's Magazine • 22 Jan 2025 • ~7850 words
Caitlín Doherty writes about the last days of Davos as its relevance is waning.
On display everywhere was a peculiarly confounding form of circular reasoning that ran from the top of the WEF hierarchy to the bottom-end sites of the Promenade: the best way to change the world is to create a valuable business; to be valuable, a business must change the world. Within globalized capitalism’s ongoing crisis of declining profit rates, however, new arrivals quickly hit a logical bump in the road: How to make money to change the world, through changing the world, when nothing seems to yield a reliable buck anymore? Their answer seemed to be: Go found a company whose only purpose is to claim to know how to change the world, conjure up an unnecessary crypto subcomponent, host a series of meaningless panels at Davos, and hope investors as clueless and desperate for solutions as you are turn up to throw money at it.
Recommended Articles
Nevada’s Lithium Could Help Save the Earth. But What Happens to Nevada?
New York Times • 24 Jan 2025 • ~4250 words • Archive Link
Many climate experts see its deserts as a place to build the green-energy future. For two local activists, the price is too great.
Their work highlights the difficult calculus stakeholders must grapple with as they confront climate change. To help prevent catastrophic global warming that will devastate ecosystems, the nation needs to build renewable-energy infrastructure. Domestically mined lithium is crucial to that infrastructure, green-energy advocates say, even if it means the prospect of destruction in parts of southwest Nevada. “There’s always a trade-off,” says Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering who studies energy. “But we have to do something. And the cleanest thing to do is add solar, to add wind, and that will replace much dirtier fossil fuels.”
Chemical laws
Aeon • 24 Jan 2025 • ~2500 words
Often dismissed as the poor cousin of the sciences, chemistry has revealed natural laws that illuminate our Universe
They had divergent views on how their field is placed among the rest. The physicists were a bit snobbish towards chemists, and so were chemists towards biologists. Everyone claimed some form of superiority. Physicists would say that chemistry is just applied physics; chemists would say that biology is just applied chemistry; biologists would claim that life’s complexity cannot be captured solely by analysing atoms and molecules. A cartoon even circulated that captured that competition. Funnily enough, in the illustration, it is the mathematician who ultimately wins the game, supposedly practising the purest form of scientific enquiry.
Primitive Atlas of Glass Circuits
Aether Mug • 23 Jan 2025 • ~2550 words
Aren't we all air converters?
In this view of the world, there are only two kinds of things: "stuff" going around and "systems" where something happens. It doesn't matter what the system is, as long as some kind of "stuff" can pass through it. It's so general that you may think it almost useless, but think again! It's enough to change how we see the world, and its generality means it can tell us something about anything.
Searching For Climate Salvation In Deep Hellfire
NOEMA • 23 Jan 2025 • ~5950 words
Geothermal energy has become the renewable that got left behind as solar and wind accelerate. Why then do its most determined advocates still insist it could be the key to the renewable energy transition?
In an age when energy policy is so often hostage to fierce partisanship, there is hope that geothermal can be politically agnostic, too — the one clean energy solution that could satisfy climate change campaigners and the “drill baby drill” lobby alike.
The Lava Shapers Of Iceland
Landscape Architecture Magazine • 23 Jan 2025 • ~2500 words
The country's fiery liquid landscape shifts, on a massive scale. By Michael Dumiak Kristín Jóhannsdóttir woke at two in the morning, looked from her window over fields to the east, and saw curtains of fire. It was 1973. She thought the Soviets were coming. Then she wondered if there would be school the next day.
There are few other places in the world where the built environment is so tied to natural elements, with its limited palette (Iceland has four types of native trees), its geography and geology, and its energy sources. Iceland is an indescribably stunning place, but people live here, too: It’s not just a collection of natural parks. To an unusual degree, the tension is visible here: Do we make landscape, or does landscape make us?
An ex-NBA player’s plan for a $5-billion Las Vegas arena is an empty pit. What went wrong?
Los Angeles Times • 23 Jan 2025 • ~4300 words
A former NBA player repeatedly promised to build a resort-arena on the Las Vegas Strip. Investors and Nevada officials believed him. Then it all fell apart.
The defining feature of the lot is a vast pit excavated for the project. Storms filled it with greenish water, spawning online quips about the “All Net Arena swamp” and prompting health officials to survey for mosquitoes. In an email to the county, a man whose condo overlooks the pit called it “lake malaria.”
Why Did ‘Woj’ Take a 99% Pay Cut? To Save the Team He Loves.
New York Times • 22 Jan 2025 • ~4200 words • Archive Link
Adrian Wojnarowski is trying to help St. Bonaventure’s tiny basketball program thrive in the scary new world of college sports.
Celebrity status has a half-life, especially when much of your fan base consists of teenage boys. Now that he no longer appears on ESPN, Wojnarowski figures he has maybe five years to parlay his own name and image into enough revenue to assure the Bonnies’ status in the future. When he is asked why he would walk away from $20 million still left on his ESPN contract to spend his days driving through the snow to half-empty arenas, this is what he tries to explain. A reporter his entire adult life, he has immersed himself in other people’s teams. St. Bonaventure basketball is his team. And as the ground continues to shift beneath college sports, perhaps only he can save it.
