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Houston has its first vinyl-record manufacturer and it’s located in the East End

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Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Patricia Ortiz/Houston Public MediaJoel Hoyle’s first customer was a Houston-area band called Ghost Party. Their vinyl record is playing in the testing room at 610 Record Manufacturing.610 Record Manufacturing takes tiny PVC pellets and turns them into plastic pucks which are then flattened with metal stamps that have the grooves needed to hear music from a vinyl record. It’s the first vinyl record manufacturer in the Houston area, and it’s located within the East End’s $38 million innovation hub that opened three years ago. Joel Hoyle is the owner of the manufacturer. “I don’t remember a day without music, but I do remember being about 8 years old, riding in the car with my parents… one of them asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, and with no hesitation at all whatsoever, I was like, ‘I wanna be President of United States and a rock star,'” he said with a laugh. Hoyle’s first instrument was a guitar. He started playing when he was about 13 years old, and said he got into a band as soon as possible. He even got the chance to hit the road a few times. “I got called ‘band mom.’ The one who handled all the business stuff in the band,” he said. As he got older, Hoyle eventually chose to get a suit-and-tie job to pay the bills. But he quickly learned he didn’t “really get along well with Corporate America”. He began thinking about opening his own business and eventually settled on a vinyl-pressing facility. He officially opened up the shop on June 10 of this year, in honor of the company name. The New York Times reports vinyl records are now the music industry’s highest-grossing physical format. According to Billboard charts, 2023 was also the 18th consecutive year vinyl album sales grew in the U.S. Patricia Ortiz/Houston Public MediaJoel Hoyle next to one of two machines he uses to press vinyl records.Hoyle said music lovers like the physicality of records. “Getting [the record] nice and clean, turning the table on, the whole ritual. Everything about it. Putting the needle on, waiting for that sound to come in. Especially with something you haven’t heard before,” he said. “…I think also, maybe on a little bit larger scale, everything being attached to the digital world more so every day, I think kinda human nature, we like things that we can physically hold in our hand.” Some music experts will argue vinyl has the best sound because its frequency is usually closer to what the human ear can hear. According to the National Institute of Health, humans can detect frequencies from 20 Hz to 20kHz. Vinyl records can have frequencies ranging from 7Hz to 50kHz according to Furnace Record Pressing, the largest vinyl-pressing manufacturer in the nation. Furnace Record Pressing was acquired by the heavy metal rock band, Metallica, just last year as reported by Variety. “That’s why a lot of people describe the sound of records as being natural and warm,” Hoyle said. “And it’s true, it’s because it is. It’s a natural fit to our ears. … if you’re going for pure, direct replication of sound, a CD is probably gonna be one of the best things.” He said CDs and records are some of the best ways to support smaller artists. “Unless you’re large enough to get the good streaming contract, you’re not making any money from streaming,” he said. “You’re making money from selling something like records.” Customers of vinyl-pressing manufacturers can range from independent artists and bands to record labels and managers. Hoyle said he’s only had a few customers so far, but his first one was a Houston-area band named Ghost Party. VIDEO Local artists have a chance to listen to the master copy of their vinyl record in person, which Hoyle said speeds up the manufacturing process because he doesn’t have to ship the record back and forth if the artist isn’t satisfied with it. In the past, record-making has come with environmental concerns. According to a report from the Vinyl Record Manufacturers Association and Vinyl Alliance, found that 50% of emissions that come from record-making stem from the PVC material it’s made out of. Still, the environmental impact of buying a record is significantly smaller than filling up a car with a tank of gas, according to the report. Hoyle also said the process has become more environmentally friendly over the years and there are still more ways to keep improving. “Old school pressing plants were notoriously dirty, grimey places. Hydraulic oil all over the floor, steam flying everywhere, and dumping a lot of water down the drain. Pretty much no record-pressing plant on the planet does that anymore. … much more environmentally conscious industry, which is absolutely fantastic,” he said. Hoyle said he’s hoping to eventually reach out to some schools in the area to get added to field trip lists and teach the youth about record-making. But for now, he’s mostly focused on reaching out to more local artists. “People have different names for it. I call it Houstonitis. A lot of people in Houston still seem to think that we’re an underdog city in the music world, and we’re not,” Hoyle said. “This is where the talent’s from.”

610 Record Manufacturing is the first vinyl record manufacturer in the Houston area, and it's located within the East End's $38 million innovation hub that opened three years ago. Joel Hoyle is the owner of the manufacturer.

Joel Hoyle's first customer was a Houston-area band called Ghost Party. Their vinyl record is playing in the testing room at 610 Record Manufacturing.

Patricia Ortiz/Houston Public Media

Joel Hoyle’s first customer was a Houston-area band called Ghost Party. Their vinyl record is playing in the testing room at 610 Record Manufacturing.

610 Record Manufacturing takes tiny PVC pellets and turns them into plastic pucks which are then flattened with metal stamps that have the grooves needed to hear music from a vinyl record.

It’s the first vinyl record manufacturer in the Houston area, and it’s located within the East End’s $38 million innovation hub that opened three years ago. Joel Hoyle is the owner of the manufacturer.

“I don’t remember a day without music, but I do remember being about 8 years old, riding in the car with my parents… one of them asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, and with no hesitation at all whatsoever, I was like, ‘I wanna be President of United States and a rock star,'” he said with a laugh.

Hoyle’s first instrument was a guitar. He started playing when he was about 13 years old, and said he got into a band as soon as possible. He even got the chance to hit the road a few times.

“I got called ‘band mom.’ The one who handled all the business stuff in the band,” he said.

As he got older, Hoyle eventually chose to get a suit-and-tie job to pay the bills. But he quickly learned he didn’t “really get along well with Corporate America”. He began thinking about opening his own business and eventually settled on a vinyl-pressing facility. He officially opened up the shop on June 10 of this year, in honor of the company name.

The New York Times reports vinyl records are now the music industry’s highest-grossing physical format. According to Billboard charts, 2023 was also the 18th consecutive year vinyl album sales grew in the U.S.

Joel Hoyle next to one of two machines he uses to press vinyl records.

Patricia Ortiz/Houston Public Media

Joel Hoyle next to one of two machines he uses to press vinyl records.

Hoyle said music lovers like the physicality of records.

“Getting [the record] nice and clean, turning the table on, the whole ritual. Everything about it. Putting the needle on, waiting for that sound to come in. Especially with something you haven’t heard before,” he said. “…I think also, maybe on a little bit larger scale, everything being attached to the digital world more so every day, I think kinda human nature, we like things that we can physically hold in our hand.”

Some music experts will argue vinyl has the best sound because its frequency is usually closer to what the human ear can hear. According to the National Institute of Health, humans can detect frequencies from 20 Hz to 20kHz.

Vinyl records can have frequencies ranging from 7Hz to 50kHz according to Furnace Record Pressing, the largest vinyl-pressing manufacturer in the nation. Furnace Record Pressing was acquired by the heavy metal rock band, Metallica, just last year as reported by Variety.

“That’s why a lot of people describe the sound of records as being natural and warm,” Hoyle said. “And it’s true, it’s because it is. It’s a natural fit to our ears. … if you’re going for pure, direct replication of sound, a CD is probably gonna be one of the best things.”

He said CDs and records are some of the best ways to support smaller artists.

“Unless you’re large enough to get the good streaming contract, you’re not making any money from streaming,” he said. “You’re making money from selling something like records.”

Customers of vinyl-pressing manufacturers can range from independent artists and bands to record labels and managers. Hoyle said he’s only had a few customers so far, but his first one was a Houston-area band named Ghost Party.

Local artists have a chance to listen to the master copy of their vinyl record in person, which Hoyle said speeds up the manufacturing process because he doesn’t have to ship the record back and forth if the artist isn’t satisfied with it.

In the past, record-making has come with environmental concerns. According to a report from the Vinyl Record Manufacturers Association and Vinyl Alliance, found that 50% of emissions that come from record-making stem from the PVC material it’s made out of. Still, the environmental impact of buying a record is significantly smaller than filling up a car with a tank of gas, according to the report. Hoyle also said the process has become more environmentally friendly over the years and there are still more ways to keep improving.

“Old school pressing plants were notoriously dirty, grimey places. Hydraulic oil all over the floor, steam flying everywhere, and dumping a lot of water down the drain. Pretty much no record-pressing plant on the planet does that anymore. … much more environmentally conscious industry, which is absolutely fantastic,” he said.

Hoyle said he’s hoping to eventually reach out to some schools in the area to get added to field trip lists and teach the youth about record-making. But for now, he’s mostly focused on reaching out to more local artists.

“People have different names for it. I call it Houstonitis. A lot of people in Houston still seem to think that we’re an underdog city in the music world, and we’re not,” Hoyle said. “This is where the talent’s from.”

Read the full story here.
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Power-Thirsty AI Turns to Mothballed Nuclear Plants. Is That Safe?

As Microsoft strikes a deal to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island to power AI, nuclear specialists weigh in on the unprecedented process

Microsoft announced on 20 September that it had struck a 20-year deal to purchase energy from a dormant nuclear power plant that will be brought back online. And not just any plant: Three Mile Island, the facility in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania, that was the site of the worst-ever nuclear accident on US soil when a partial meltdown of one of its reactors occurred in 1979.The move, which symbolizes technology giants’ need to power their growing artificial-intelligence (AI) efforts, raises questions over how shuttered nuclear plants can be restarted safely — not least because Three Mile Island isn’t the only plant being brought out of retirement.Palisades Nuclear Plant, an 805-megawatt facility in Covert, Michigan, was shut down in May 2022. But the energy company that owns it, Holtec International, based in Jupiter, Florida, plans to reopen it. This reversal in the facility’s fortunes has been bolstered by a US$1.5-billion conditional loan commitment from the US Department of Energy (DoE), which sees nuclear plants — a source of low-carbon electricity — as a way of helping the country to meet its ambitious climate goals. The Palisades plant is on track to reopen in late 2025.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.“It’s the first time something like this has been attempted, that we’re aware of, worldwide,” says Jason Kozal, director of the reactor safety division at a regional office of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in Naperville, Illinois, and the co-chair of a regulatory panel overseeing the restart of Palisades.Here, Nature talks to nuclear specialists about what it will take to restart these plants and whether more are on the way as the world’s demand for AI grows.A change in fortunesSince 2012, more than a dozen nuclear plants have been shut down in the United States, in some cases as a result of unfavourable economics. Less cost-effective plants — such as those with only a single working reactor — struggled to remain profitable in states with deregulated electricity markets and widely varying prices. Three Mile Island, owned by the utility company Constellation Energy in Baltimore, Maryland, is a prime example. Today, 54 US plants remain in operation, running a total of 94 reactors.Nuclear energy, which accounts for about 9% of the world’s electricity, has seen some resurgence internationally, but is also competing with other energy sources, including renewables. After the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Japan suspended operations at all of its 48 remaining nuclear plants, but these are gradually being brought back online, in part to cut dependence on gas imports. By contrast, Germany announced a phase-out of its nuclear plants in 2011, and shut down its last three in 2023.In the United States, nuclear energy’s fortunes might be turning as technology companies race to build enormous, energy-gobbling data centres to support their AI systems and other applications while somehow fulfilling their climate pledges. Microsoft, for instance, has committed to being carbon negative by 2030.“It’s further confirmation of the value of nuclear, and, if the deal is right — if the price is right — then it makes business sense, as well,” says Jacopo Buongiorno, the director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.A new startThis isn’t the first time that the United States has brought a powered-down reactor back online. In 1985, for example, the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility company, took the reactors at its Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Athens, Alabama, offline. After years of refurbishment, they were brought back online, with the final reactor restarted in 2007.The cases of Palisades and Three Mile Island are different, however. When those plants closed, their then-owners made legal statements that the facilities would be shut down, even though their operating licenses were still active. Three Mile Island, which will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center under the proposed restart, shut down its single remaining functional reactor in 2019.Because the plants were slated for shutdown and safety checks were therefore stopped, regulators and companies must now navigate a complex licensing, oversight and environmental-assessment process to reverse the plants’ decommissioning.Safety checks will be needed to ensure, among other things, that the plants can operate securely once uranium fuel rods have been replaced in their reactors. When these plants were decommissioned, their radioactive fuel was removed and stored, so the facilities no longer needed to adhere to many exacting technical specifications, says Jamie Pelton, also a co-chair of the Palisades restart panel, and a deputy director at the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in Rockville, Maryland.It will be no small feat to reinstate those safety regulations: to meet the standards, infrastructure will need to be inspected carefully. According to Buongiorno, any metallic components in the plants that have corroded since the shutdowns, including wires and cables used in instrumentation and controls, will need to be replaced.The plants’ turbine generators, which make electricity from the steam produced as the plants’ fuel rods heat up water, will also get a close look. After sitting dormant for years, a turbine could develop defects within its shaft or corrosion along its blades that would require refurbishment. In the case of Palisades, the NRC announced on 18 September that the plant’s steam generators would need further testing and repair, following inspections conducted by Holtec.Nuclear’s prospectsAs the plants near their restart dates, their operators will also have to contend with a challenge faced by even fully operational plants: the need to source fresh nuclear fuel. US nuclear utility companies have long counted on the international market to buy much of the necessary raw yellowcake uranium and the services that separate and enrich uranium-235, the isotope used in nuclear reactors’ fuel rods. Russia has been a major international supplier of these services, even after the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, because US and European sanctions have not targeted nuclear fuel. But to minimize its reliance on Russia, the United States is building up its own supply chain, with the DoE offering $3.4 billion to buy domestically enriched uranium.There probably won’t be too many other restarts of mothballed nuclear plants in the United States, however, even as demand for low-carbon electricity grows. Not every US plant that has been shut down is necessarily in good enough condition to be easily refurbished — and the idea of reopening some of those would meet with too much resistance. As an example, Buongiorno points to New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, which was closed in 2021. The plant’s proximity to New York City had long provoked criticism from nuclear-safety advocates.But that doesn’t mean that all of these sites will remain unused. One option is to build advanced reactors — including large reactors with upgraded safety features and small modular reactors with innovative designs — on sites where old nuclear plants once stood, to take advantage of existing transmission lines and infrastructure. “We might see interest in the US in building more of these large reactors, whether that’s fuelled by data centres or some other applications,” Buongiorno adds. “Utilities and customers are exploring this at the moment.”This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 30, 2024.

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A federal attempt to foster ‘high-integrity voluntary carbon markets’ falls short, experts say

New guidance for credit-based derivatives gives “imprimatur to a system that doesn’t have credibility to begin with.”

After two years of meetings and consultation with the public, a little-known federal regulator this month issued its final guidance on the trading of derivatives based on carbon credits, the certificates companies buy and sell on a voluntary basis to say they’ve offset their greenhouse gas emissions. Experts had hoped that the guidance from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, would address widespread concerns about carbon credit-related fraud — essentially, the fear that credits are not delivering their promised emissions reductions. Scientific articles and media investigations over the past several years have revealed that many credits are based on forest conservation projects in areas that were never in danger of being chopped down, or that they sequester carbon in ways that are unlikely to last more than a few years. In a statement, CFTC Chair Rostin Behnam called the guidance “a critical step in support of the development of high-integrity voluntary carbon markets.”​​ But experts and environmental groups aren’t so enthused. Some don’t think it’ll make much of a difference, due to its limited reach, while others worry the guidance will lend undue legitimacy to the idea of carbon credits — the majority of which they believe shouldn’t be traded in the first place. “It’s giving this imprimatur to a system that doesn’t have credibility to begin with,” said Clara Vondrich, senior policy counsel for the nonprofit Public Citizen. To understand what’s going on, it’s important to understand the purpose of the CFTC. The agency was created by Congress in 1974 to regulate the U.S. market for derivatives, contracts in which prices are derived from the value of an underlying asset or benchmark. One easy-to-understand derivative is called a futures contract, a promise to sell an asset at a particular price at some point in the future. Farmers might sell futures contracts to lock in a selling price for wheat, protecting themselves from a future price collapse. In that case, the CFTC’s job is to ensure that the wheat actually gets delivered. Since 1974, however, the CFTC has sought to regulate increasingly complicated derivatives products. Carbon credit-based futures contracts are a prime example: In this case, a company buys a contract for credits based on emissions reductions that have not yet happened, but are promised to occur at some point in the future. Compared to the wheat example, it’s much less clear what counts as legitimate delivery of the carbon credit. It depends in large part on whether the credits really will cause the emissions reductions that buyers expect them to. As the CFTC was drafting its guidance, experts urged the agency to take a proactive role in regulating not only carbon credit-based derivatives, but also the credits themselves. No other federal agency has taken on that task, and there were hopes that the CFTC could do so — potentially by invoking its anti-fraud authority over markets for products whose derivatives are listed on CFTC-regulated exchanges. “If there is a commodity and if that commodity has a derivative on a regulated exchange,” said Todd Phillips, an assistant professor of law in the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, “the CFTC has authority over the underlying” commodity. Last year, there were indications that the CFTC could be gearing up to regulate carbon credits. In June 2023, the agency put out a whistleblower alert asking the public to report manipulation in the voluntary carbon market, and not long after, it announced a new Environmental Fraud Task Force to help investigate cases of “fraud and misconduct” in offset-related markets. One of the CFTC’s five commissioners, Christy Goldsmith Romero, explicitly said in December that the agency’s anti-fraud authority should extend to the underlying market for carbon credits — “given the potential for impact to the derivatives markets.” Several high-profile carbon credit projects have claimed to protect parcels of rainforest that were never in danger of being chopped down. Jody Amiet / AFP via Getty Images But the final guidance — which is not legally binding, but rather intended to help clarify exchanges’ obligations under existing CFTC regulations — came up short of what many experts were hoping for. The 99-page document mostly asks futures exchanges to conform to an existing set of best practices for carbon accounting, as defined by a nonprofit governance body called the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, or ICVCM. These best practices involve transparent calculations of greenhouse gas emissions, third-party verification, and reporting on whether credits represent emissions reductions that would not have otherwise taken place. There are two potential problems with this approach. First, according to Phillips, the CFTC’s deference to the ICVCM essentially restricted its purview. “What the CFTC has done with this guidance is they have said that only offsets that meet the ICVCM standards can be listed on exchanges,” he said. “Which means there are no low-quality offsets that will be listed on exchanges, which means the CFTC does not have anti-fraud authority there.”  In other words, the CFTC designed its guidance in such a way that it cannot do anything about the underlying voluntary markets’ low-quality carbon credits, which are the most likely to be fraudulent. The guidance is “extremely limited in reach,” as Erin Shortell, a legal fellow at the nonprofit Institute for Policy Integrity, put it in a blog post. The second issue is that not everyone trusts the ICVCM standards to insure against issues like reversal, where credit projects prematurely release their stored carbon — such as when a forest tied to carbon credits is destroyed by a wildfire — or double-counting, where the same emissions reductions are counted by two separate entities. Rebecca Sanders-DeMott, director of ecosystem carbon management for the pro-carbon market nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, said in a statement that the CFTC was “continuing to rely on crediting protocols that are in need of a major overhaul.” In response to Grist’s request for comment, the ICVCM referred Grist to Nat Keohane, one of the organization’s senior advisers and president of the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Keohane said the ICVCM’s standards for carbon credits were developed in a “transparent and rigorous” fashion meant to model a regulatory process, and that they adequately address concerns about credits’ legitimacy. “These are expert issues,” he added. “They take a lot of specialized expertise … and I don’t think anybody would say that the CFTC has the kind of requisite understanding of the real issues and the details involved” not to defer to the knowledge of other groups such as the ICVCM.  While Sanders-DeMott’s organization believes better regulation is needed to help the voluntary carbon market grow — and “play a meaningful role in addressing climate change” — other advocacy groups think the market has been too plagued with problems to be redeemed.   According to Phillips, the root of the problem is that the CFTC was never designed to be a climate watchdog for the federal government. To the extent that markets for carbon credits and their derivatives should exist, he said, Congress needs to create a new agency — or designate an existing one — to be their overseer.  As an example, he pointed to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a nonprofit corporation created by the federal government in 2002 to oversee audits of U.S.-listed public companies. Previously, corporate auditors had been entirely self-regulated — much like the voluntary carbon market is today. At present, “everyone has an incentive to just cut corners and allow low-quality offsets to exist,” Phillips said. “There is no government entity whose job it is to ensure that low-quality offsets are taken off the market, and someone needs to have that responsibility.”  This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A federal attempt to foster ‘high-integrity voluntary carbon markets’ falls short, experts say on Sep 30, 2024.

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Could pawpaw, the US-native fruit, become the new kiwi or mango?

Pawpaw, a tree fruit that can help farmers and the environment, stays resilient in face of a climate crisisAbout five years ago, Matt Feyerabend, co-owner of an Arkansas ice-cream business, wanted to explore new flavors and use more native fruits, so while delivering a batch of product to a restaurant in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, he asked if anyone knew a grower of pawpaws, a tree fruit native to the United States with a flavor described as a mix between a mango and a banana.A server said her father, a veterinarian, had trees on his property. Feyerabend and his wife, Meghan, now annually purchase hundreds of pounds of the fruit from the vet and other growers and sell pawpaw ice-cream and other treats containing the fruit and its seeds. Continue reading...

About five years ago, Matt Feyerabend, co-owner of an Arkansas ice-cream business, wanted to explore new flavors and use more native fruits, so while delivering a batch of product to a restaurant in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, he asked if anyone knew a grower of pawpaws, a tree fruit native to the United States with a flavor described as a mix between a mango and a banana.A server said her father, a veterinarian, had trees on his property. Feyerabend and his wife, Meghan, now annually purchase hundreds of pounds of the fruit from the vet and other growers and sell pawpaw ice-cream and other treats containing the fruit and its seeds.They are part of a growing industry. In recent years, people have started pawpaw festivals around the country, and in 2022, the US Department of Agriculture included the fruit in its agricultural census for the first time and reported that the country had almost 1,500 farms containing 800 acres of the fruit.Growers are trying to meet the increased demand but faced challenges this year because some trees flowered earlier than normal and were then hit by a late-season frost that destroyed some of the crop.Scientists said the unusual weather was related to the climate crisis and say that such events could create problems for growers, just as the industry in the US is taking off.Still, people in the industry remain optimistic about pawpaw’s potential because it is native to the United States and there are many varieties around the country. As such, the crop could be able to better adapt to the effects of the climate crisis than fruits like apples and peaches.“Since there are native stands of [pawpaws] all over the country, we have so much variation and lots of stuff with great fruit quality,” said Adam D’Angelo, director of research at Project Pawpaw, a company that aims to develop new varieties of the fruit. “We are able to draw upon that to make sure that we still have crops that can perform in varying conditions.”The pawpaw is the largest edible fruit native to the United States, and the crop typically ripens in the fall. It has a shelf life of just two to three days, which makes selling it harder.Universities have invested in research programs to improve propagation of the plant.Pawpaw enthusiasts have also launched festivals that have increased awareness of the fruit.D’Angelo thinks the fruit can help small farmers and the environment.“This tropical-tasting, delicious fruit that grows right here is, in some ways, displacing tropical fruit that is being shipped across the world”, which raises greater environmental and ethical concerns than something grown locally, said D’Angelo, who grew up in a family with a garden center and nursery in northern New Jersey.Feyerabend was unsure how to introduce a pawpaw flavor to Pure Joy Ice Cream customers not familiar with its taste, so he made a sorbet in which he used lime juice to “accentuate the tropical notes in the pawpaw fruit”, he said.Customers liked it.“They weren’t even super interested in what the pawpaw was. It wasn’t for any interest in tropical fruit or native fruit. They were legitimately just enjoying the flavor of it,” said Feyerabend, who went to one pawpaw festival in 2023 and plans to sell at four this year.But one of his suppliers recently had a webworm infestation damage his crop. The fruit was still usable, Feyerabend said. The farmer released wasps – rather than a pesticide spray – to attack the worms.“It’s a very valuable fruit” and “requires a fraction of the inputs of a traditional fruit crop and far less spraying”, D’Angelo said.Still, farmers in Ohio and Kentucky reported that the early flowering this year created a bitter taste.Kentucky State University, which has a pawpaw research program, lost 40% of its crop to unusual weather, said Kirk Pomper, a horticulture professor at the school. Still, he thinks that pawpaw farmers can adjust to new weather patterns by planting orchards on north-facing hillsides to slow the flowering and investing in new irrigation methods to contend with more frequent draughts, he said.“It’s just going to make it a little more challenging,” said Pomper, who has worked on the fruit for two decades.Pomper remains optimistic about the fruit’s potential because people have become more adventurous in what they eat, he said. He envisions pawpaws following a trajectory similar to fruits like the kiwi and mango, which became more popular in the United States in recent decades.“The pawpaw fits right in there with that tropical-like flavor, even though it’s grown in temperate areas,” Pomper said.People in the industry also expect entrepreneurs to find more uses for the pawpaw pulp. In addition to making ice-cream with it, Feyerabend delivered pawpaws to a local brewer who planned to make a beer with the fruit.Still even if the pawpaw market continues to grow, D’Angelo does not think people should dedicate an entire farm to the fruit.“Diversification is essential. If you have a bad year for pawpaws, you might have a great year for chestnuts, right?” D’Angelo said. “Spreading out that risk is what is going to help foster resilience in our food system and is going to help keep small farms innovating and keep them viable.”

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Climate
Crisis

NY Judge Denies Governor’s Bid to Toss Suit Challenging Decision to Halt Manhattan Congestion Fee

A New York judge has denied Gov. Kathy Hochul’s request to toss out lawsuits challenging her decision to halt a new congestion fee for drivers into Manhattan

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York judge on Friday denied Gov. Kathy Hochul’s request to toss out lawsuits challenging her decision to halt a new congestion fee for drivers into Manhattan. The tolling program, which had been set to start June 30, would have imposed on drivers entering the core of Manhattan a toll of about $15, depending on vehicle type, in order to generate about $1 billion annually for transit improvements. Andrew Celli, a lawyer representing the City Club of New York, one of the local groups that has sued Hochul, said afterward that the judge’s ruling means the lawsuits will move forward and the governor will have to justify her actions in court.“What the judge did here is he said that congestion pricing will not be delayed by legal technicalities,” he said outside court. “That’s a huge victory for people that care about the law and people that care about congestion pricing.”Alan Schoenfeld, a lawyer representing Hochul and the state Department of Transportation in the lawsuits, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Groups challenging the governor’s decision, including the Riders Alliance, the Sierra Club and the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, argue the Democrat violated the state’s laws and constitution when she indefinitely paused the fee just days before its planned launch.Hochul at the time cited economic concerns, suggesting it wasn’t the right time to impose a new toll scheme as local businesses and residents were still recovering financially from the coronavirus pandemic. In court Friday, Celli argued that state lawmakers deliberately did not give the governor’s office authority on when the fee would be imposed when it passed it into law in 2019.Instead, he argued, the legislature charged the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which oversees the bridges and tunnels in the New York City area, with making that final decision in order to remove politics from the equation. “She doesn’t have the discretion,” Celli said. But Schoenfeld said it was a “demonstrably false” to suggest that state lawmakers intended to put the tunnel and bridge authority “unilaterally” in charge of congestion pricing.He argued that the law also recognizes the critical role the governor’s office and state DOT play in the process.Engoron, at points in the hearing, appeared unmoved by Schoenfeld’s arguments. He also joked at the outset of the hearing that he drove into Manhattan for the hearing and the traffic was terrible.“Can’t anyone do anything about that?” Engoron said to laughs before launching into the proceedings. Dror Ladin, a lawyer with Earthjustice, which represented some of the groups challenging Hochul, also argued that the months since the governor’s decision this summer have been damaging.He says New Yorkers have dealt with more traffic, more negative health and environmental consequences from air pollution and further delays in desperately needed transit system upgrades.“There’s a real harm here,” Ladin said. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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Column: Desperate for good news about climate change? Consider the pace of clean energy growth

Solar, wind, hydrogen and other renewable technologies are likely to become cheaper and available at a rapid clip, creating huge business and political opportunities.

Climate change has been viewed almost universally as a burden, a hot potato to be passed from country to country at annual climate change conferences. Although it’s widely known that climate-friendly solar and wind energy have become cheaper and easier to produce, most don’t realize that they are very likely to get even less expensive and grow quickly. That will have enormous political and business consequences, creating not just hazards but also tremendous opportunities.Because technological progress depends on unforeseen innovations, it is to an extent unpredictable: We don’t know what the next innovation will be. Nonetheless, the rate at which a given kind of technology improves is remarkably predictable.The best-known example is Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore, who would go on to co-found Intel, predicted that microchip density would double every two years, a projection that has proved accurate to this day. As the density of these components has increased, their relative cost and energy consumption has fallen and their speed has accelerated. As a result of this exponential improvement in efficiency, today’s computers are about a billion times more powerful than they were when Moore made his prediction.Like computer chips, many other technologies also get exponentially more affordable, though at different rates. Some of the best examples are renewable energy technologies such as solar panels, lithium batteries and wind turbines.The cost of solar panels has dropped an average of 10% a year, making them about 10,000 times cheaper than they were in 1958, the year of their pioneering use to power the Vanguard 1 satellite. Lithium batteries have cheapened at a comparable pace, and the cost of wind turbines has dropped steadily too, albeit at a slower rate.Not all technologies follow this course, however. Fossil fuels cost roughly what they did a century ago, adjusted for inflation, and nuclear power is no cheaper than it was in 1958. (In fact, partly due to heightened safety concerns, it’s somewhat more expensive.)The global deployment of technologies follows another pattern, called an S curve, increasing exponentially at first and then leveling out. Careful analysis of the spread of many technologies, from canals to the internet, makes it possible to predict the pace of technological adoption. When a technology is new, predictions are difficult, but as it develops, they get easier.Applying these ideas to the energy transition indicates that key technologies such as solar, wind, batteries and green-hydrogen-based fuels are likely to grow rapidly, dominating the energy system within the next two decades. And they will continue to get cheaper and cheaper, making energy far more affordable than it has ever been.This will happen in electricity generation first and then in sectors that are harder to decarbonize, including aviation and long-range shipping. Green-hydrogen-based fuels are particularly important as they have the potential to provide long-range storage to power the grid when wind and sun are not available. Although the technology is still in its early stages and presents challenges, it has already dropped substantially in cost, and studies of similar technologies suggest these fuels could improve as rapidly as solar energy.All of this is great news for the climate. We are improving and adopting technologies that can wean us from fossil fuels just when we really need them.The transition has up-front costs, but the long-range benefits are huge. The future savings more than offset present investments to the extent that the transition would make sense from a purely economic standpoint even if we weren’t worried about climate change.The sooner we make investments and adopt policies that enable the transition, the sooner we will realize the long-term savings. And the transitions will bring many other bonuses, including better energy security, less pollution, improved health, reduced environmental harm and more stable energy prices.Although energy accounts for only about 4% of global output, the rest of the economy depends on it. A rapid transition will create winners and losers, shaking up global commerce and geopolitics. Fossil fuel producers that don’t pivot quickly will go out of business, and petrostates will suffer.This is a great example of what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” It’s bad for incumbents but an enormous opportunity for challengers vying to take their place. Those who rise to the occasion will prosper, and those who ignore it will perish.Just as Moore’s Law helped chip designers predict and plan for the future, its generalizations provide guideposts that can help us ensure that the energy transition proceeds not just quickly but also smoothly and profitably.J. Doyne Farmer is the director of the complexity economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University’s Oxford Martin School. He is the author of “Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World.”

Business
Climate
Energy

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