I think this is a great time for our country to shift its economic priorities. Rather than try to lead the world in producing oil, what if we instead focused on leading the world in renewable energy?

I’ve decided to write about the COVID-19 virus, and the reason is simple - I’m an environmentalist because of my love for humanity, and the actions that we all take now in response to this virus can save human lives.

As the world changes and climate action becomes more urgent, we will need the latest data on what we can all do to solve this enormous challenge.

I took a deep breath and smelled…nothing. If anything, it smelled like crisp, fresh, unpolluted air. I certainly didn’t detect any unpleasant odors I would have previously associated with composting.

We need to stop our collective carbon-loading of the atmosphere, but that need is often met by objections like “my emissions are small so they’re okay” or “what about China and India?” Classic free-rider justification.

Doing right by the planet is a complicated and nuanced endeavor. It’s important that we all keep learning, doing our best, and not beating ourselves up when our best laid schemes go awry.

In The New Carbon Architecture, Bruce King and his merry band of authors unpack all of the ways in which we can eliminate embodied carbon emissions when constructing buildings, and even go beyond to construct carbon negative buildings.

Basically, they claim to have found the Holy Grail of the circular economy. They’ve developed a process to take generic waste that would otherwise be put in a landfill and turn it instead into a useful thermoplastic.

By burning fossil fuels these last couple hundred years, we’ve been borrowing against our carbon budget and our climate future. Trillions of tons of carbon have been spent into the atmosphere, and we now need to pay them back by returning them to the earth.