Aerial shot of the Rohingya Refugee Camp. Credit: Zakir Hossain Chowdhury

 Claire Krummenacher

How to increase tree equity across the United States - American Forests, the oldest conservation organization in the U.S., just released an updated version of its Tree Equity Score, a public mapping tool that measures tree canopy, health, income, and surface temperature to calculate a score indicating the degree of need for increased tree coverage in a particular neighborhood. The tool was initially developed based on evidence that trees provide numerous benefits to urban neighborhoods, including lowering stress, storing carbon, reducing runoff, acting as noise breaks, and lowering temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and has now expanded fivefold to cover every urban area in the country and incorporate updated data from the 2020 Census. Cities like Detroit have used the data to highlight tree coverage disparities and advocate for tree-planting programs in low-income, non-white neighborhoods with great success - since the city's tree equity partnership launched last fall, the team's efforts (primarily led by formerly incarcerated residents) have bolstered tree planting in the city by 500%, with the goal of planting 75,000 trees within five years. 

 Tim Treuer

Green heat - One of my favorite start-ups got some attention this week in a story in the Financial Times. The company is called Rondo Energy, and their big idea is, well, to heat up big stacks of bricks. We should back up a step to understand why that's a profoundly regenerative idea. About 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from our need for industrial heat. Currently, we burn fossil fuels to generate the high temperatures needed for cement manufacturing, steel production, mineral refining, and so many other activities required for both the world we live in now and building the sustainable world we seek in the future.

What's more, fossil fuel power plants are also fundamentally an exercise of using heat to create steam and drive a turbine, and the reason we can't replace them all with much cheaper and greener wind and solar is because of intermittency issues. The brilliance of Rondo Energy's 'rocks in a box' idea is that it can solve emissions from both industry and power plants at the same time. Covered in detail here, the basic approach is to take excess solar and wind power, turn it into heat stored in cheap bricks in a big, insulated container, and then tap that heat in place of burning fossil fuels to drive industrial processes or run steam turbines to create electricity when the sun isn't shining, and the winds aren't blowing (and with energy loss of <1% per day, they can store it for quite a while!). I love that an idea as simple as heating up a bunch of bricks could solve our fundamental need to electrify everything and develop cheap energy storage.

Rondo's heat battery at Calgren Renewable Fuels in Pixley, CA, is the highest temperature electric thermal energy storage system in commercial operation worldwide, producing the world’s lowest carbon intensity ethanol. Image courtesy of Rondo Energy Take Action on Nexus Learn how to power cement production with renewable energy and develop low-emission cement alternatives that sequester carbon and reduce industrial waste with our Green Cement Nexus. Support our work We rely on the generous support of our fellow regenerators! Please consider making a one-time or recurring donation to keep Project Regeneration and The Waggle going.