Equilibrium/Sustainability — Presented by The American Petroleum Institute — Louisianans slam government for ‘Third World’ conditions after Ida

Today is Tuesday. Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Subscribe here: digital-staging.thehill.com/newsletter-signup. 

A month after Hurricane Ida ravaged swaths of the Gulf Coast, Louisianans are slamming local and federal government agencies for their failure to pick up the pieces.

“You want to know what’s been going on to help these people? Pretty much nothing,” Talisa Clark, a community activist from a town near Houma, about 60 miles southwest of New Orleans, told Reuters. “There are no state or federal boots on the ground to help. It’s looking like a Third World country’s efforts down here.” 

While a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spokesman told Reuters that the agency was working as quickly as possible to repair destruction, the news outlet said that there was no heavy equipment, trucks or workers helping individuals on the ground.

It’s not just Louisians; disadvantaged communities across the U.S. are enduring the worst consequences of the climate crisis, according to a new study from the Environmental Justice Foundation, covered by The Hill. And that inequity is by no means limited to flooding and hurricanes; deadly heat exposure is endangering a “disproportionately vulnerable” segment of city dwellers, experts told The Hill in a story on Tuesday morning. 

Today we’ll look at a few of the world’s top scientists, who have been working for decades to help steer humanity out of this crisis: the three winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics. And then we’ll look at a sustainable toilet paper company that has raised over $40 million off the idea that customers want businesses to present solutions to that crisis. 

For Equilibrium, we are Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Please send tips or comments to Saul at selbein@digital-staging.thehill.com or Sharon at sudasin@digital-staging.thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @saul_elbein and @sharonudasin. 

Let’s get to it.

 

Nobel Prize winner: Governments must take ‘urgent’ action on climate

Governments must take “urgent” action to combat the escalating threat of climate change, physics Nobel Prize winner Giorgio Parisi told reporters on Tuesday.  

Parisi earned one-half of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics, while Japanese-American Syukuro Manabe and German Klaus Hasselmann each received a quarter share, “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems” — and how these systems contribute to the planet’s changing climate, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced at a partially in-person, partially virtual ceremony in Stockholm.  

Act fast, act now on climate: “It is very urgent that we take a real, very strong decision and we move [at] a very strong pace,” Parisi said in a video call from Italy with reporters on the ground at the ceremony. “It’s clear for the future generation we have to act now in a very fast way — and not with a strong delay.”

Manabe and Hasselmann received their share “for the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming,” while Parisi received his award “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” The total prize amount is 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million). 

Drawing hidden meaning from disorder: Parisi, a 73-year-old physicist at the Sapienza Università di Roma, uncovered hidden patterns in disordered complex materials in about 1980 — a discovery that the Academy characterized as “among the most important contributions to the theory of complex systems.” His findings enabled scientists to describe many other apparently random materials and phenomena in physics, mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning, an Academy statement said. 

“What is quite clear is that the effect of climate changing is that more energy is emitted in the atmosphere, and if you have more energy in the atmosphere, the chance of extreme events is going to increase very strongly,” Parisi told reporters.

A MESSAGE FROM API 

 

The Environmental Partnership recently released its annual report highlighting its new flare management program that reported a 50 percent reduction in flare volumes from 2019 to 2020. Read more.

‘WE ARE ENTERING A SITUATION WHERE THERE IS NO TURNING BACK’

Building the ‘foundation’ of climate models: “Suki” Manabe, a senior meteorologist at Princeton University, demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to rises in temperatures on the Earth’s surface, according to the Academy. Now 90 years old, Manabe pioneered the development of physical models of the Earth’s climate in the 1960s, a statement from the Academy said.  

“The whole field of climate modeling originates with Suki,” Gabriel Vecchi, Princeton professor of geosciences and director of the High Meadows Environmental Institute, said in a news release from Princeton. 

Manabe’s work included the first simulations of how the climate system responds to increasing greenhouse gases, enabling scientists to understand shifts in rainfall and changes in storms, Vecchi explained. 

“And he, in doing so, not only illustrated some of the potential consequences of global warming, but gave us a roadmap of how to do climate science,” Vecchi said. 

Linking heat to human emissions: Finally, Hasselmann, of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, created a model that connected weather and climate about 10 years after Manabe’s work — demonstrating the reliability of such models despite the chaotic nature of weather, according to the Academy. 

Scientists have used his methods to prove that rises in atmospheric temperature are due to human emissions of carbon dioxide, a statement from the Academy said. 

Last words: “In 30 to 100 years, depending on how much fossil fuel we consume, we will face a very significant climate change,” Hasselmann, now 89, said in a 1988 interview, according to a news release from the Max Planck Institute. 

“Climate zones will shift, precipitation will be distributed differently. Then we will no longer be able to talk about random results,” he said. “We should realize that we are entering a situation where there is no turning back.” 

To read the full story on The Hill’s site, please click here.

 

Investing turnaround for makers of sustainable toilet paper 

The sustainable toilet paper company Who Gives A Crap just raised $41.5 million from investors who are banking on the idea that environmental responsibility could boost business — a big change for a company that used to have “investors laugh us out of the room,” co-founder Danny Alexander told Equilibrium. 

Why? Their pitch read like a trifecta of bad ideas. They were selling toilet paper, a bulky, low profit-margin category; the three founders had no experience in it; and their business model was built on giving away half their profits to securing access to clean water in developing countries.

“It didn’t seem like a great bet,” Alexander admitted. 

But the culture was different too. When they started, a social enterprise mission was seen as “cute,” or “a nice story,” he said. “I wouldn’t even call it skepticism in the investor community. There was just no belief that it was a really viable business model.”

The company disagreed: Simon Griffiths, the co-founder, had been toying with the idea of selling some sort of common consumer packaged product and giving away part of the profits — when he “walked into a bathroom one day and saw the toilet paper,” Alexander said. 

“And in that moment he had the brand name, the mission and the product, all in his head.”

Disrupting toilet paper: Toilet paper was uniquely suited for disruption, the three co-founders believed. 

“When you question whether it makes sense to cut down a tree, and use it for one or two seconds to clean your rear end…it really does not make sense to be cutting down trees to make toilet paper,” Alexander said.

Who Gives A Crap makes their rolls out of recycled paper and more sustainable, fast-growing fibers like bamboo.

But the sustainability pitch had to be secondary, they believed; it could make the difference for a wavering customer, but only if more immediate things — speed of shipping, comfort — were satisfactory.  

 

DIRECT TO CONSUMER

Without access to investment capital, Who Gives a Crap had to “bootstrap,” or run off a combination of the founders’ savings, company profits and a little bit of debt. Like many companies, they “ran lean” — with limited inventory on hand — right into the teeth of the pandemic.

They were quickly overwhelmed, Alexander said. Within 24 hours in late March 2020, they “went from normal to 28 rolls of paper per second.” 

As their supply chains faltered, they scrambled to add a “sold out” function to their website and broke up year-supply boxes of rolls into smaller packages to meet immediate orders.

A supply shift: Continuing global supply chain problems showed that “volatility is the new normal,” Alexander said. So the company is working to expand some of its production and distribution out of Asia and closer to its North American customers.

All of this — as well as the company’s broader plans to burnish its sustainability credentials by electrifying its delivery fleet and production process — costs money, which is what drove Alexander and company to reach out for investment again.

They found a changed financial world: When they asked one investor, who struck Alexander as “a ruthless capitalist,” how donating millions of dollars in profits would impact a future public stock price, his answer “flabbergasted” them.

Last words: The investor said that “the impact model is actually our competitive advantage,” Alexander said, “because it’s baked into our core.” Their competitors, by contrast — like Quilted Northern or Procter & Gamble — “‘will have to retrofit it and are going to be on the back foot when it comes to winning that battle,” the investor added.

A MESSAGE FROM API

 

The Environmental Partnership recently released its annual report highlighting its new flare management program that reported a 50 percent reduction in flare volumes from 2019 to 2020. Read more.

Tech Tuesday 

Social concerns and government oversight dog TikTok, Facebook and Tesla.

Tesla must pay more than $130M to Black employee for “racially hostile work environment” 

• A California jury found that carmaker Tesla failed to protect elevator operator Owen Diaz from a “racially hostile environment” at its Fremont, Calif. factory, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• The jury took four hours to find Tesla liable for $6.9 million in compensatory damages and $130 million in punitive damages. 
• Diaz could only sue because he was hired by a third party agency — which made him immune to Tesla’s policy of mandatory arbitrations for employees.
• On Thursday, Tesla shareholders will vote on whether to prepare a report to see “how the company’s use of mandatory arbitration affects employees and corporate culture,”  which “Tesla’s board has urged investors to vote against,” the Journal reported.  

China will refrain algorithms deemed unfair, deceptive

• China will be a “regulatory innovator” in its recently announced crackdown on the algorithms behind tech platforms, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• Delivery apps Meituan and Didi have faced demands to “make the algorithms that determine workers’ tasks and pay more transparent,” while the government has warned tech companies against using algorithms that control dynamic or “surge” pricing, which changes based on the time, location or identity of a person making a request .
• The impacts will spill across China’s tech sector and over its borders. 
• “The regulatory climate is clear, and we need to start thinking about how to adjust accordingly,” said a manager at China-based ByteDance Ltd, whose TikTok platform uses algorithms to determine which short videos get served to its more than 100 million United States users.

ESG investors likely to be unfazed by Facebook fallout, expert tells CNBC

• Leading up to a Tuesday Senate hearing on allegations that Facebook is harming youth, CNBC explored whether there would be any long-term impacts on the company’s stock — particularly from an environmental, social and governance (ESG) perspective. 
• “I’m sad to report that this is likely going to blow over,” Gene Munster of Loup Ventures told CNBC. “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp — what they have is a global directory. This is something that is not even close to being replicated.”
• What could change things, according to Munster, is if the fallout sways ESG investors. Most likely, however, they will continue justifying investments in Facebook because they want access to the network, Munster told CNBC. 
• At the Senate consumer protection subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen spent hours divulging how the network harms young people, ultimately leading to a bipartisan call for the regulation of Facebook, The New York Times reported. 

 

Please visit The Hill’s sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. Have a great weekend; we’ll see you on Wednesday. 

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