B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

• People get a visceral thrill out of driving, according to a study by a company that makes motor oil. (Jalopnik)
• The cost of a new car keeps rising, and more and more motorists are putting themselves into dangerous amounts of debt to own one. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon is worst in the sprawling Sun Belt exurbs, where drivers in eight states between Georgia and New Mexico are most likely to be overspending on cars, going into debt equivalent to at least half their income. (Wallet Hub)
• Climate change is ruining a lot of the natural sites along a cross-country road trip (Grist), which, ironically, is partly because people are taking 9,000-mile road trips by car.
• Volvo has developed technology allowing cars to warn drivers in other cars about hazards ahead. (The Verge)
• The Nashville Scene took a deep dive into the city’s efforts to dig itself out of a deadly hole in regards to street safety.
• For a limited time only, Oregon residents can get a rebate on an electric vehicle. (Oregonian)
• Pittsburgh’s guerrilla crosswalks are a cry for help. (City Paper)
• In lieu of actual pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, Las Vegas is using AI to detect when people want to cross the street, and it’s working about as well as AI usually does. (Jalopnik)
• St. Louis is considering demolishing a vacant parking garage as part of an urban revitalization effort. (STL NPR)
• In Phoenix, 80 percent of crashes between cars and light rail trains are the drivers’ fault. (Fox 10)
• In Seattle, Sound Transit is moving forward with a fare gate pilot program at 14 light rail stations. (KING)
• Converting the Jacksonville Skyway to buses would cost almost $300 million. (Times-Union; paywall)
• Richmond is dramatically broadening its approach to Vision Zero. (Axios)
• The European Union estimates that transportation noise contributes to 12,000 premature deaths per year. (Brussels Times)
• Bogota is proof that traffic calming works on arterial roads. (The City Fix)

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Karen Seto at Yale University and Zhe Zhu at the University of Connecticut to talk about their new study, The Urban Pulse. We talk about using granular satellite data to measure change in cities and the processes of urbanization.

Longtime listeners know the deal: Hit play on the audio player embedded below, read a full albeit AI-generated transcript here, or check out the edited excerpt at the end of this post.

Jeff Wood: How did you all collect the data, and how frequent was the pulse that you measured?

Zhe Zhu: It’s from Landsat and Sentinel-2. This data came from the NASA Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 data. It’s a NASA program that combines medium-resolution images into a 30-meter-by-30-meter resolution cell and removes all the sensor-to-sensor differences. It’s very good at detecting clouds and obtaining a clear observation.

About every three days, you’re going to get an observation based on how cloudy your locations are. And the data removes these atmospheric influences ands bi-directional differences when you view the same vantage point from different locations. The images are very consistent if there’s no change. When there’s change, we can see it based on this time series.

Jeff Wood: How do you see it? There’s so much data and information — how do you actually measure that change? You can see it if you look at one satellite image and another, but how do you systematize that so that you can actually, over time, collect this information?

Zhe Zhu: We built a time-series approach with two components. The first component is the code algorithm, which continuously monitors land disturbances. It basically drills through the time series. You can model what the surface will look like if nothing changes. Take the phenology of trees, which measures their seasonal life cycles. Phenology is going to have up and downs for different kind of conditions: the solar angle, the solar elevation, the topography, and so on.

The second component is where deep learning, machine learning comes in. We need to classify these breaks and the changes we observe. We need to make sure what is real: construction instead of deforestation or some other kind of non-construction related change. We use deep learning because the human patterns are very unique, so we need to combine the time series data and spatial pattern data in order to classify whether something is really a construction-related change instead of, for example, a fire or some other change that occurred on the land’s surface.

Karen Seto: One thing that is so novel about the methodology that Zhe developed is that it departs from the more conventional way of using satellite data, where you take the raw data and classify it into classes, right? Roads, buildings, agriculture — you do it to the next one, and the next one.

Zhe’s method takes the ostensibly raw data with minimal correction to see the signal, and then once there’s a change in the signal, you can say, “Oh, what is that class, given that there’s this big jump?” The methodology treats change as an inherent part of the signal.

Jeff Wood: When you looked into some of the changes, was there anything that was really interesting or jumped out at you? Like, maybe they’re building a subway in Shenzhen or they’re making these changes in Lagos? What are some of the things that popped out to you?

Karen Seto: Well, Zhe and I looked at the data for Dubai right after COVID, and we said, “Oh, this neighborhood in Dubai has no effect. There’s no COVID effect. There’s no drop in activity.” Whereas in other places in Dubai and in other parts of other cities, there was a clear drop. COVID happened, and there were shutdowns — but in this one neighborhood, everything stayed the same. So we, we did some research on that neighborhood, and it certainly corroborated what the data showed. It was surprising.

Jeff Wood: What was happening in that neighborhood? I’m curious.

Karen Seto: Continued development. People were still out and about.

Jeff Wood: Just going around, doing their thing.

Karen Seto: Yep.

Zhe Zhu: Yeah. And the spikiness of the urban development is also something I’m quite surprised about. I always thought of urbanization as something you do steadily, whether increasing or decreasing, but it is not. Lack of development can dominate for a few years, and then you get a big spike, and then nothing happens for a few years.  We see that in a lot of places.

In the late 1980s, the city of Phoenix, Arizona made a bet: If residents no longer had to sort glass from paper from plastic, more of them would recycle. Single-stream recycling was born—one bin, one truck—and it spread fast. By 2010, nearly two-thirds of U.S. recycling programs had switched. Europe and Japan, however, didn’t follow suit; they opted for multiple bins and consumer sorting, betting that purity rather than convenience was the real prize.

Then came 2018. China upended the recycling world with the “National Sword,” a policy with an intimidating name that slammed the door on contaminated imports. Overnight, single-stream’s hidden costs became visible.

At first, it looked like the end of the debate between single stream and dual stream. But it turned out to be an inflection point. What followed has been a period of experimentation. Some materials recovery facilities are adapting, investing in optical sorters and robotics. A handful of cities have reversed course to dual-stream, reigniting the debate.

The stakes are far bigger than sorting logistics. The EPA estimates recycling a ton of mixed materials avoids nearly 2.8 metric tons of CO2-equivalent versus landfilling it. In 2018 alone, recycling and composting kept an estimated 193 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent out of the atmosphere—roughly the annual emissions of 42 million cars.

Contamination undermines this emissions math; convenience and greater participation shores it up. So what combination of technology, economics, and human behavior will bend the emissions curve further—now and in the future? 

 

Source: Statista by CC • • • The Climate Case for Single Stream 

1. Quantity over quality. Contamination is single-stream’s Achilles heel—but it might be offset if more material is recycled. A number of municipalities that switched to single stream have reported increased collection rates ranging from 20% to as high as 84%.  And if the numbers are right, this can translate into carbon savings. A 2022 life-cycle analysis paper focusing on Virginia found that single stream actually saved about 4% more carbon thanks to the higher participation rate. 

2. Robots could sort it out. Single-stream recycling doesn’t ask people to sort their recycling, but that doesn’t mean the recycling doesn’t get sorted. It just happens at the collection center instead. AI-powered sorting robots equipped with cameras and trained to recognize and grab different types of plastic promise to make the process extraordinarily efficient. One manufacturer boasted their machines were able to help the facility hit a 99% purity rate and pick out as many as 55 items per minute. 

3. Less trucks, lower emissions. Picture a recycling truck in a single-stream set-up, trundling through a neighborhood. By the time that truck has completed its route and gone down each and every street, it may have burned 100 miles worth of fuel. As Quartz pointed out, garbage trucks are basically the worst vehicle possible in terms of fuel efficiency. That may be bad enough, but since multi-stream set-ups often need multiple trucks to keep waste streams separate, they need to run that 100 miles several times to finish the job, increasing their emissions level well over the single-stream truck’s route. That said, electric trucks do exist and are starting to roll out. And since these don’t produce emissions themselves, the distinction may soon be moot.

• • • The Climate Case for Multi Stream  

1. Quality over quantity. Multi-stream recycling turns out cleaner material. This is important since contaminated recycling often ends up in a landfill where paper and other organic material decomposes and emits methane and other greenhouse gases. U.S. landfills overall spew the equivalent of 24 million cars worth of emissions per year—and this might be a severe underestimate. High-end landfills do capture some of this methane, but most don’t. Refuse could also go into an incinerator to generate energy. But waste-to-energy schemes have been held back by high costs and big questions around how much they actually save in emissions. The BBC called them as bad as coal.

2. Less downcycling. So let’s say you throw a clear plastic PET bottle into a single-stream recycling bin. It is then mixed with all kinds of other plastic, and unfortunately once melted down, it can never be a drink bottle again. Instead, it’s turned into other, less valuable things like tote bags. That’s what’s known as downcycling. In terms of carbon, downcycling is better than a landfill. But it’s not that much better. One analysis put downcycling’s savings at only 4% compared to incineration (even in the best case waste-to-energy scenario), compared to 27% savings if it was same-cycled. And, as Grist pointed out, downcycling may ultimately be more about delaying landfill, not wholly preventing it. Multi-stream recycling, with its cleaner end products better avoids this problem.

3. Participation is an American problem. Single-stream schemes might seem to boost participation rates, but you know what else does? Being German. The EU as a whole, which mandates multi-stream recycling, enjoys an average municipal recycling rate of about 40%. Germany in particular hits a whopping 69%, thanks to very clear guidance on bin usage as well as pay-as-you-throw schemes, where households pay for garbage by weight, rather than a flat fee. Meanwhile, the single-stream-loving US lags behind at only about 32%.

 

• • • What to Keep An Eye On

1. Shipping and handling. Shipping raw materials can add significant emission costs and even cancel out the benefits of recycling. One report found that the emissions from truck transport outweigh the emissions benefits for recycled fiber after only 360 miles. Glass was better, at 1,150 miles, and metals could go upwards of 3,200 miles before their benefits petered out, but there was always a limit. Similarly, making a special trip in your car to return reusable containers to the store could end up producing more greenhouse gases than you save using the containers in the first place.

2. Better recycling through chemistry. Many plastics can’t really be recycled currently, no matter how they’re sorted. But new tech using advanced chemistry, enzymes, or even microbes might change that. Recently, for example, a team at Cambridge University built a solar reactor that turns old plastic bottles into clean hydrogen fuel. Another group of chemists in China developed a process to convert hard-to-recycle styrofoam waste into high quality jet fuel at a cost competitive with petroleum-based fuels. And still another lab announced a new chemical process transforms plastic waste into an effective carbon capture material. Many more such innovations are are making their way into commercial markets.

3. What’s powering the recycling plant? Recycling plants require energy to operate and where this energy comes from may end up mattering more than any of the material that actually passes through its doors. When researchers ran the numbers for paper recycling, for example, the results were sobering. If all wastepaper was recycled, emissions could increase by 10%. That’s because recycling paper uses more fossil fuel electricity than making new paper. The emissions would drastically go down if paper production and recycling were powered by renewable energy.“In our analysis,” they note, “landfill practices mattered more than material flows, and energy use mattered the most.”

 

Top image: by Dropflare/Adobe Stock

Cement is one of the most-used manmade materials in the world. And the kilns that produce this in-demand building material belch about 8 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions.

But a team from ETH Zurich and the US company Heirloom Carbon Technologies now propose a way to dramatically cut emissions from future cement factories. By employing established technologies, cement factories could not only capture their own emissions, the researchers write in the journal Chem Circularity, but also remove additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

The world produces about 4 billion tons of cement every year. Manufacturing cement, which is the key ingredient of concrete, is notoriously difficult to decarbonize. That’s because it requires heating limestone at high temperatures in large fossil fuel-burning kilns. And the chemical reaction itself releases carbon dioxide.

The ETH team proposes powering kilns with clean electricity rather than fossil fuels. That would cut the carbon emissions from heat production. Heirloom Carbon’s direct air capture technology would then capture the carbon dioxide released during limestone conversion. The gas would be compressed and permanently stored underground.

The company’s DAC technology, called calcium looping, is “uniquely positioned for such integration,” the team writes in the paper. That’s because the process cycles calcium between two compounds: calcium carbonate and calcium hydroxide. These are the same materials and chemical conversion steps used in cement manufacturing.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:A shock to the system could slash cement’s emissions

 

Limestone, or calcium carbonate, is the starting point. When heated, the limestone breaks down into calcium oxide, also known as quicklime, and carbon dioxide. In the proposed system, adding water to the quicklime would make it absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn back into limestone, and the loop would continue.

According to the researchers’ calculations, electrifying the kiln and using calcium-looping DAC could reduce the climate impact of cement production by 78% by 2050.

Heirloom has been running a plant in California since 2023. The plant can capture 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. “Heirloom was an ideal partner for us because the company is already operating the first calcium looping DAC systems on a commercial scale,” said Vittoria Bolongaro, a graduate student and lead author of the paper, in a press release.

The team analyzed various energy scenarios. These included operating the plant using the current US electricity mix; using a clean electricity mix consisting of wind and solar energy; and a fully autonomous clean-energy system with photovoltaics and battery storage.

“We were able to show that the technology has a net-negative carbon footprint,” Bolongaro said. “In other words, commercial calcium looping DAC plants with carbon dioxide storage remove more carbon dioxide than they generate over their entire lifecycle.”

Source: Vittoria Bolongaro et al. Life cycle assessment of solid calcium-looping direct air capture and its synergistic dual use for net-negative cement. Chem Circularity, 2026

Image: Getty images for Unsplash+

• Angie Schmitt wrote about how the big-box retail model is killing smaller stores and thus walkable neighborhoods, forcing everyone who lives downtown to drive miles to the suburbs just to pick up a tube of lipstick. Sure, Costco is cheaper, but in the long run how much are you saving if you need to buy an SUV to get there? (Love of Place)
• Meanwhile, shopping malls are becoming more like downtowns in that they’re starting to charge for parking — which, as Donald Shoup taught us, is never actually free. (USA Today)
• Sprawl has been the key to the Sun Belt’s success because cities can keep building more cheap housing without any opposition from existing neighborhoods. Now that temperatures are rising, they have to figure out how to cool down all those asphalt ovens. (We Can Have Nice Things)
• This just might be a conflict of interest: More than 300 local governments seeking federal funding to recover from damage caused by climate change hired lobbyists who also work for the fossil fuel industry. (The Guardian)
• The Trump administration’s justification for building roads on remote federal lands is to fight forest fires, but bringing more people into those areas is likely to cause more fires. (Heatmap; registration required)
• Two programs in California and Denver show that people really like e-bike rebates. (Government Technology)
• South Carolina and the Federal Highway Administration are spending $2.7 billion to fix one freeway interchange. (The State)
• Seattle’s Sound Transit could use a value capture tool called tax increment financing to pay for the Ballard Link. (The Urbanist)
• Bus rapid transit on Maryland Parkway in Las Vegas has cut commuting times by 20 percent. (Sun)
• Columbus is still tweaking its bikeshare and e-scooter policies. (Axios)
• Wichita is testing a Douglas Avenue road diet for six months. (KAKE)
• The Transit Brief takes a look at what Montreal could have built if construction costs in Canada were as low as Europe’s.
• Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers are the big winners of Trump’s war on Iran, which has lifted EV sales everywhere but the U.S. (Yale Climate Connection)

Mayor Mamdani will not tear down the deteriorating triple-cantilevered stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and instead pursue his own version of long-stalled plans to rebuild the segment over 10 years using a bypass structure that city officials say will be temporary.

Mamdani’s plan, which he will unveil on Monday, differs from previous plans for a temporary highway structure by not expanding the highway’s footprint through the Brooklyn waterfront. Construction will start in 2030, wrap up in 2040 and extend the structure’s lifespan to 2080, city officials told reporters at a closed briefing last week.

Past attempts to rebuild the city-owned “BQE Central” segment of the highway fizzled out under mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, who attempted to get federal funding for the effort.

The city spends $160 million a year maintaining the structure in lieu of a long-term solution, the administration said. DOT bean counters insist that any shutdown would risk diverting a “significant portion” of the 130,000 daily car and truck trips onto local streets.

“For decades, prior administrations have failed to deliver urgent long-term repairs to BQE Central — but we can no longer afford to wait for the perfect solution,” Mamdani said in a statement. “This plan allows us to safely fix the BQE without slowing our city down or wasting decades more on magical thinking. The cost of inaction is too high, and the risks to New Yorkers are too important to delay any longer.”

We're done kicking the can down the road. Here's how we're fixing the city-owned section of the BQE. pic.twitter.com/ln0it98s1w

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) August 24, 2026

The Department of Transportation plans involve building a temporary two-tiered bypass highway next to the 0.4-mile cantilever along Furman Street, between Atlantic Avenue and Columbia Heights. The detour road will continue over the Brooklyn Bridge approach at Vine Street to connect back into the rest of the BQE, though its exact route near the bridge is still under consideration.

Mamdani and his team vowed not to increase the BQE’s footprint, and to keep it at two lanes in each direction, after his predecessor Eric Adams proposed rebuilding the highway as a three-lane road. But officials who briefed the media last week reiterated the city’s longstanding position that tearing the road down entirely would unleash its traffic onto local streets — despite growing calls for the city to seize the chance and phase out the BQE.

“While the city and the state must right the wrongs of Robert Moses with the BQE and other infrastructure plowed through urban communities, decades of political paralysis have left us out of options,” DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn said in a statement. “Confronting the reality of cracked concrete, exposed steel and extensive rust damage simply cannot wait for another blue-ribbon commission.”

In another statement, Deputy Mayor for Operations Julia Kerson warned the highway’s collapse would force “cars and heavy trucks…onto local streets” and disrupt “key freight transportation networks.”

“We must and will act now,” Kerson said.

If realized, the decade-long project will cost $4 billion and effectively lock the highway in place for the next half-century, but Mamdani will likely encounter local resistance.

In 2018, the de Blasio administration faced stiffed resistance to its plan to build a six-lane replacement highway atop the popular Brooklyn Heights Promenade. De Blasio ultimately kicked the can down the road, making patchwork fixes and converting the highway segment from three lanes to two to lighten the load on the aging structure. His successor Eric Adams unsuccessfully pitched the federal government to rebuild the BQE to last for another century and flirted with rewidening the highway to six lanes at the behest of car-first Brooklyn Democratic Party bigwigs, but never got sign-off from Uncle Sam.

The Mamdani administration’s plan seems designed to reduce the backlash this time by building the interim structure lower than the promenade — about at the height of the northbound upper roadway of the cantilever.

DOT will close portions of the scenic walkway for the repairs, however, but officials promised to keep it partially open at all times. DOT also plans to reconstruct the adjacent Columbia Heights overpass during the work as well.

The project will impact a long list of park space, including Squibb Park, Hillside Dog Park, Anchorage Plaza, Clumber Corner, Bar and Grill Park, Adam Yauch Park, and part of Harry Chapin Playground, according to City Hall.

The temporary bypass along Brooklyn Bridge Park will be within Furman Street’s right-of-way, but officials insisted that access to Brooklyn Bridge Park from that road will remain throughout construction.

DOT plans to ask the state to alienate parkland as part of the project, but officials vowed to tear down the temporary roadway and restore the green spaces after the work wraps.

Brooklyn Heights residents and other civic and environmental groups formed a coalition in 2024 calling on the city and state to reimagine the entire BQE corridor, from the Verrazzano Bridge and the Kosciuszko Bridge, and move away from a highway.

There are plenty of successful examples of highway removal projects, like the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, which officials in the Korean capital turned into a river walk. Closer to home, there’s the removal of Alaska Way Viaduct in Seattle where traffic “just disappeared,” the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, and, of course, the collapse of the West Side Highway in Manhattan.

Gov. Hochul also recently called off an expansion of the Cross-Bronx Expressway following pushback by residents and extensive coverage by Streetsblog.

DOT leaders said such an effort would need buy-in from the state, which controls most of the BQE, to scale back its portion of the expressway as well, along with support from the federal government, since the thoroughfare is also part of the interstate highway system.

DOT took over the cantilever project from the state during the de Blasio era; planning for the project goes all that way back to 2006. The city only owns the 1.5-mile portion of the roadway between Atlantic Avenue and Sands Streets, while the state owns and operates the remaining stretches. Albany has shown no interest in taking down the highway.

Despite DOT’s stated fears of spilling highway traffic to local streets, that already happens with motorists getting off the highway and taking shortcuts around the trenched section in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, before getting back on at Atlantic Avenue.

Experts have for years recommended the city close off the Atlantic Avenue interchange to discourage the cut-through traffic and calm the chaotic on-ramps near Brooklyn Bridge Park. DOT has been studying closing the on-ramps as part of a redevelopment of the nearby Brooklyn Marine Terminal, but any work on interchanges would trigger a federal review, officials said.

The city will launch an environmental review by mid-2028, and start construction in 2029, before moving traffic onto the bypass the following year, officials said.

Tejido Global de Alternativas: Declaración Popular de Bandung [ English ] [ Español ] [ Français ] [ Português] [ Kurdish] Emitida en la segunda Asamblea presencial celebrada en Bandung, Indonesia, del 11 al 17 de abril de 2026. A los pueblos del mundo y a quienes luchan contra todas y cada una de las formas de opresión e injusticia. A toda la vida, incluidas todas las especies no humanas. A los gobiernos de los Estados-nación del mundo y a las instituciones internacionales.

Global Tapestry of Alternatives: People’s Bandung Declaration [ English ] [ Español ] [ Français ] [ Português] [ Kurdish] Issued after the second in-person Assembly of the Global of held in Bandung, Indonesia, 11-17 April 2026 To the peoples of the world and to those struggling against any and all forms of oppression and injustices. To all of life, including all non-human species. To the nation-state governments of the world, and to international institutions.TapestryAlternativesalternativ…

Videos Here we will publish the videos we made in the Assembly

Report Here we will publish the PDF report

[ Tejedores] TGA es una “red de redes”. Cada una de esas redes actúa en diferentes partes del planeta identificando y conectando Alternativas. Son los Tejedores. [ Apoyos] Diversas organizaciones progresitas, post-desarrollo y/o anti-capitalistas apoyan esta iniciativa. Tambien lo hacen académicos, activistas y referentes.

Democracia radical y autonomía: ¿a qué nos referimos? - Una conversación Introducción En todo el mundo, muchas personas sienten que la democracia no está funcionando. La idea de un gobierno basado en la representación mediante sistemas electorales parecía muy prometedora, pero está demostrando fracasar. Quizá el problema sea más profundo que una simple mala implementación: lo que comúnmente se llama democracia conserva, a menudo, los rituales como elecciones, los partidos, la representación y …

When logging companies cut down trees to thin overcrowded forests, they are left with a costly headache: giant mounds of limbs and spindly trunks worth so little that it’s easier to burn them.

But they could turn this biomass trash into carbon-rich treasure, both making money and trapping much of the carbon dioxide that rises into the atmosphere from these blazing slash piles, according to new research.

In many parts of the arid western United States, companies could earn billions of dollars by simply burying the wood debris underground and selling carbon credits, according to research published today in Science Advances.   

The new work shows that “pairing these two pathways together could enable more forest restoration as well as carbon storage,” said Sinéad Crotty, an ecologist and manager at the Carbon Containment Lab, a Connecticut-based nonprofit that studies ways to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

The strategy is deceptively simple. Plants are the ultimate carbon capture device, sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in wood and leaves. But the long-term fate of that carbon hinges on what happens when those plants are cut down or die.

Burn them, and much of it goes back into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming. Let them decay, and the same thing happens. But if you stick them underground and shield them from the air, much of that carbon should stay put. After all, that’s basically what happened with all that oil and coal we are now burning. It was once ancient vegetation buried under sediment.

 

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While people are wrestling with the climate crisis, there is a simultaneous forest health emergency. Many western U.S. forests are overgrown and filled with flammable vegetation, thanks to a combination of dense forests that regrew after logging and decades of suppression of wildfire and Indigenous burning. Pair that with the current mega drought gripping much of the region and you have a recipe for the massive wildfires that blanket states in smoke this time of year.

Crotty and her collaborators wanted to see how viable it would be to tackle both the climate and forest problems by finding a revenue stream to help pay for forest thinning while simultaneously capturing some of the carbon inside the vegetation.

They compared the costs and carbon emissions from different scenarios: the conventional approach of burning the wood waste; burying it in a specially made landfill; burning it for energy and capturing the carbon rising from the smokestacks; letting it rot; or cooking it into a charcoal-like substance called biochar.

To make the calculations more realistic, the scientists considered factors that could affect the cost and effectiveness. They estimated the distance from forest thinning to sites where the wood could be buried or burned. They mapped variables such as rainfall that would influence how deep the wood needed to be buried to avoid rotting and emitting greenhouse gases.

The modeling revealed that in many cases, burying the vegetation made the most sense. Over a century, burning keeps just 4.5% of the carbon stored. Letting it rot is nearly as bad. Biochar stored 44% of the carbon. By contrast, burial in a special landfill captured 78% of the carbon, on par with the 81% from burning and carbon capture. With such carbon capture projects extremely rare, burial appears more realistic in the short term.

The financial math backed up these findings. Burning is the costliest, losing $49 for every ton of carbon dioxide due to expenses such as manpower and planning. If companies can sell carbon credits for $100 per metric ton—a common benchmark in the carbon credit world—burial would earn around $21 per ton, bioenergy would earn $12 and biochar would break even if the leftover char is sold.

With the federal government proposing to treat 3.5 million acres of forest this year, those cost differences add up. Rather than costing $3.1 billion to burn the leftovers, burial could store some 60 million tons of carbon dioxide and earn around $2 billion, the scientists found.

Some companies already see the possibility of spinning this wood waste into buried gold. One company, Graphyte, is turning wood into solid blocks, encasing them in plastic and burying them. It plans to open a plant in Arizona using wood from forest thinning. Colorado-based Woodcache is burying slash on a small scale, while Mast Reforestation is entombing dead trees left after wildfires.

Still, the researchers caution that burial won’t always be the right answer. Factors like soil conditions and rainfall can affect whether the carbon, once buried, will stay in the ground.

“In the wrong soil, digging a burial chamber can release more carbon than the wood could ever store,” cautioned Leah Clayton, the paper’s lead author and incoming Ph.D. student at Stanford University who previously worked at the carbon lab.

That puts a premium on detailed planning for individual sites.

“No single pathway is a silver bullet,” said Clayton. “But there are promising opportunities everywhere.”

Clayton, et. al. “Near-term, geospatial opportunity for biomass carbon storage to address the wildfire and climate crises.” Science Advances. Aug. 26, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

On his first day in office, Mayor Mamdani told New York City that his administration would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism” and promised that City Hall would “use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.”

More than seven months later, Mamdani announced that would he start wearing a bike helmet on his frequent rides across the city, apparently in response to the pleas of his constituents. “You’re right, I’ve gotta do better,” he said in a video published on Aug. 18. “Safety first, New York. See you out there.”

The video garnered 26 million views on X. New Yorkers heaped praise on Hizzoner’s announcement, while reporters gushed over the mayor’s message. The New York Times lauded the mayor for “finally” donning the protective headgear, while the Department of Transportation advertised one of its routine free helmet giveaways.

The announcement combined everything that Mamdani loves about the city with everything that the city loves about Mamdani: cycling, safety, vertical video and a sense of protectiveness around their globally famous mayor.

Yet the same announcement further entrenched a persistent narrative that assigns responsibility for road safety to individual cyclists while downplaying the government’s role in designing safer streets.

That narrative is completely false. The chief culprits of traffic violence are car drivers who terrorize the city’s streets, maim and kill its residents and evade any punishment for doing so.

This became painfully clear when three drivers — none of whom Mamdani’s NYPD has arrested or even identified — slaughtered three cyclists in three separate crashes in less than a week. At least two of those cyclists were wearing a helmet. But helmets are no match for three-ton motor vehicles.

Mamdani’s focus on helmets distracts from that reality. It paints deadly crashes as the failure of vulnerable road users to protect themselves, rather than as the failure of government to stop completely avoidable carnage.

“We are as a nation eternally distracted by the idea that personal responsibility can save us so that we can excuse widespread preventable death,” said Jessie Singer, who wrote the book about car crashes and has critiqued helmet campaigns in the past.

“Helmets are great,” Singer added. “Helmets serve a practical function of protecting your head if you fall off your bike and hit the asphalt — [but] even the manufacturers of helmets will tell you that they’re not made [to protect cyclist from] cars.”

Some advocates praised Mamdani for putting safe and affordable transportation at the top of his agenda and normalizing cycling as a prominent public figure.

“I thought the mayor’s video was cute and I actually see it as his mainstreaming of bicycling,” said Ben Furnas, executive director of Transportation Alternatives.

And Singer concurred, adding, “As much as I see all of the problems with the helmet discourse, I appreciate that Mamdani is willing to say, ‘I’m listening to what you all are complaining about.’”

But the mayor’s video, with its focus on individualistic talking points, perturbed other street safety activists. “I’d rather he’d keep the focus on institutional solutions to this public health crisis,” said Doug Gordon, who co-hosts the War on Cars podcast and co-wrote a book about building a post-car society. “There’s almost never good timing for an elected official to post a helmet video in a city where you have an average of one or two cyclists or pedestrian fatalities every other day.”

Helmets aren’t entirely useless, and they reduce the risk of head injury by up to 88 percent. Furnas pointed out that the gear is especially useful for electric mobility devices that can achieve much faster speeds. “In those types of crashes a head injury is a real risk,” he said. “The bottom line is it’s never a bad idea to pop on a helmet when you’re riding a bike.”

Still, some cyclists question the efficacy of helmets and wonder if other factors — like people riding more safely or better infrastructure — more accurately explain their alleged correlation with lower injury rates.

“It’s a mistake to focus your narrative on ‘wear your helmet,'” said Kevin Montgomery, who penned a provocative essay that argued helmets are useless and still believes their benefits are questionable. “It’s a bad faith argument a lot of the time, spoken by people who don’t necessarily have any interest in cycling themselves.”

Changing the story

Helmets shift the narrative away from government’s role in protecting people on the road toward one of personal responsibility. Singer compared helmet campaigns to the signs that some cities hang near highways to instruct drivers to slow down — even though the highways encourage high speeds.

“They’re looking to comfort themselves,” Singer explained. “It’s a way of saying, ‘This couldn’t happen to me, I know better.'”

Academic research supports this line of thinking. Studies have found that more people don protective gear in countries, like the United States, where it is less safe to bike. The authors of a 2017 study argued that American cities routinely tie helmet campaigns to car-first policies that “hamper efforts to actually improve bicycle safety” and uphold a culture of “unfettered automobility.” Canadian provinces that mandate helmets do not register lower injury rates.

When governments design streets to protect everyone — such as in the Netherlands or cycling-friendly cities like Copenhagen — people rarely wear helmets and their crash and injury rates remain low.

“What distinguishes them is a really high quality street design,” said Furnas. “My sense is the Mamdani administration understands this and is really focused on having a high-quality protected bike lane network.” However, the rise of much faster e-bikes has driven an increase in injuries — even in the Netherlands, where acoustic bike crash rates have otherwise remained flat.

Here in New York City, the post-pandemic explosion of e-bikes and other battery-powered devices has brought about more emergency room visits. But cars still account for the vast majority of road deaths, and recent studies continue to reinforce that better street infrastructure as the primary means of curbing traffic injuries and deaths.

A spokesperson for Mamdani emphasized that the administration has championed both helmets and safer street design. Under the new mayor, DOT relaunched several bike and bus lane projects that were abandoned by the more car-focused predecessor Eric Adams.

“New Yorkers shouldn’t have to choose between wearing helmets that help protect against head injuries and infrastructure designs that reduce fatalities and ensure that everyone is protected when using our roads,” said Jeremy Edwards. “This administration is providing both, and we will continue to do so.”

Known dangers

On the same day Mamdani posted his video, two New York City drivers killed two cyclists and fled. Within a week, a motorist mowed down a third cyclist and fled. The three wrecks took place on streets with car-dominant infrastructure that endanger New Yorkers — a reality made clear by the many people whom car drivers injured in collisions in the same places.

Paulina Tec Choc, 29, was waiting at the corner of Jamaica Avenue and Cypress Hills Street in Brooklyn on her e-bike around 5:50 a.m., when a motorist struck her from behind and ran her over before fleeing.

Tec Choc, who was wearing a helmet, suffered “severe trauma to the head and body” and died at a nearby hospital. “She always wore a helmet,” said her boss, Osman Cevallos. The intersection where she died recorded 57 reported crashes that injured 29 people, including three more cyclists and four pedestrians, over the last five years.

Cypress Hills Street is supposed to include a protected cycling lane, according to the Department of Transportation‘s bike map, but the path only has paint at the corner where a driver murdered Tec Choc. The remainder of the intersection is a typical New York car sewer: wide roadways with slip lanes and two-way traffic. All of these features encourage fast and dangerous driving.

Jamaica Avenue and Cypress Hills Street is a car sewer.

The second fatal crash occured just before 9:30 p.m. at Bruckner Boulevard and Longwood Avenue in the Bronx, where a speeding motorist blew through a red light and initiated a chain-reaction crash with multiple vehicles, killing 51-year-old father-of-five Angelo Camero, who was cycling home, and injuring another 37-year-old woman in a car.

The intersection features a two-way bike path on the sidewalk, but it is completely surrounded by wide roadways that induce fast, unsafe driving. 120 people have been injured there in 139 reported collisions since 2022, including another three cyclists, a pedestrian, and 113 people in cars.

The third cyclist, 40-year-old Brooklynite Mamadou Diallo — who was also wearing a helmet — was making a left turn at East 54th Street and Avenue I when the driver of a BMW sedan slammed into him.

Although this intersection saw fewer reported crashes than the other two — five collisions, including two that injured a cyclist and a pedestrian over five years — its design still lacks safety infrastructure for people outside of cars, despite the nearby school. This pattern persists across much of Brooklyn’s southern half.

Transportation Alternatives called on Mamdani to come up with a comprehensive plan in response to the spate of deaths, and the group plans to stage a “die-in” at City Hall Park at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday.

“Overwhelmingly, the threats for cyclists are from cars and there’s a very limited amount of things a helmet can do when you’re struck by a driver,” Furnas said.

Additional reporting by Poppy Wilkinson

Strategically placed greenbelts in the suburbs could cool some of the world’s biggest cities by almost half a degree across at least half their area, according to a new analysis.

The findings suggest an old but often overlooked strategy to manage the urban heat island effect, the tendency for cities to be a few degrees hotter than surrounding landscapes due to their extensive pavement, concrete and steel buildings, and lots of people packed together.

In recent years, many cities have tried planting trees to help mitigate heat. But some are still sweltering through increasingly warm summers. The new study suggests a solution might be found outside the cities themselves.

“For urban cooling, where we place vegetation can be just as important as how much vegetation we have,” says study team member Shi-Jie Cao, director of the Center for Sustainable Built Environment at Southeast University in Nanjing, China.

Cao and his collaborators were inspired by an urban planning pattern characteristic of traditional Chinese villages known as the mountain-water-forest (MWF) framework, in which “settlements are backed by mountains, facing water bodies, and are embedded within surrounding forests,” the researchers write in Nature Cities.

The team set out to explore whether this approach could also apply to today’s large, heterogeneous metropolises. They used a computer model to gauge how temperatures in the urban core on a hot summer day would be affected if suburban areas upwind of a city were converted to either woodlands or built-up areas.

The strategy could help cool both Beijing, a city built on a plain at the base of mountains, and Shanghai, located on the coast, the researchers found. Analysis based on these two cities revealed the mechanisms involved: first, the suburban vegetation creates a cool mass of air, and then prevailing winds sweep the cooler air from the suburbs into the city.

 

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The researchers then analyzed six additional mega cities—Cairo, Kinshasa, São Paulo, Houston, Sydney, and London—to see how widely applicable the approach might be. “One of the most striking results was how robust the basic cooling mechanism was across cities with very different climates, topographies, and urban forms,” Cao says.

Across the eight cities, the upwind greening approach could reduce temperatures on a hot summer day by an average of 0.4 °C across at least half the city area. The exact magnitude, timing, and spatial extent of the cooling varied from city to city, “but the underlying pathway—creating cooler air upwind and transporting it into the city—remained remarkably consistent,” says Cao.

The analysis shows not just the potential but the limits of the strategy. The cooling effect is more modest and localized in Shanghai than in Beijing because Shanghai’s cooling sea breezes don’t align perfectly with the locations where suburban trees could be planted.

“This is not simply a call to plant more trees everywhere,” Cao says. “The strategy works best where cities have relatively persistent wind pathways and sufficient space for greening on the upwind side.”

Of course, that space for suburban greening might already be taken up by houses, roads, and industry, so creative approaches to creating multi-functional landscapes—and getting local governments and others stakeholders on board—will be necessary.

But the real lesson from traditional village design is a more general one, Cao says: “We hope the study encourages cities to think beyond isolated green spaces and consider vegetation, wind, topography, water, and the surrounding landscape as an interconnected climate-regulation system.”

Source: Yang M. et al. “Overlooked upwind greening for urban cooling.” Nature Cities 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

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