| | | | | Welcome! Today, The Washington Post's new Climate Lab column 🎺 and stinky flowers. But first, clearing out the drafts. | |  | | "The past is never dead," wrote American author William Faulkner. "It's not even past." That's rarely more true than for the buildings we live in. Long-dead architects dictate many of the energy decisions we make today. | | Take drafty Victorian-style houses in the United Kingdom. These stately homes were built when "town gas" — a potentially deadly mixture of hydrogen and carbon dioxide — was replacing coal fireplaces. Drafts were considered a feature to flush out pollution. Today they're an expensive heat drain as the country tries to slash emissions from its housing stock — a third of it predates the end of World War II. | | Britain is not alone. In most of the world, aging houses boast the energy efficiency of Victorian architecture. So how do you change the past to enable a better future? The world's buildings account for about 40 percent of CO2 emissions. To bring this down we'll need to embark on a massive retrofitting campaign unlike any the world has ever seen. Until now, this task has been mostly up to contractors working on a house-by-house basis. Yet things are starting to change. In the U.K., contractors are standardizing low-carbon retrofits, making it easier to do them at scale. In the Netherlands, robots can lay 2,000 sections of insulation into panels resembling bricks in about 20 minutes, slashing the time and cost of building overhauls. | |  | | As the planet warms, more people are dying of heat exposure. At the same time, the number of deaths tied to cold has fallen significantly, a major scientific study reports. Will hotter temperatures save lives overall? Harry Stevens looks into it in his first Climate Lab column. | | | Harry Stevens/The Washington Post | | Milder winters may indeed spare people in the globe's wealthy north, who can also afford to adapt to hotter summers. Yet heat will punish people in warmer, poorer places, where air conditioning will often remain a fantasy. | | | Dirt is a miraculous thing: A living, breathing melange of bacteria, fungi, invertebrates, organic matter and minerals. Virtually every plant we grow depends on it. Yet we treat it like, well, dirt. | | Next week I'll be writing about composting, the rightful home for much of the food that gets thrown away. Homes are the biggest food-waste offenders in the United States. | | | Next week's column will explain how to compost, even if you never thought you would. | | | On Wednesday, the White House issued rules to make EV charging more uniform across the country, including a requirement that charging stations that get federal funding have consistent plug types. The Biden administration also revealed that Tesla, which claims the largest fast-charging network in the country, has agreed to open a portion of its network to non-Tesla drivers. | | | I grew up with wood storks stalking the mangrove lagoons outside my Florida home. Even then, I knew they were rare, a victim of the drainage of the Everglades and surrounding wetlands. While the stork, also known as a wood ibis or flinthead, won't win any beauty contests, it has scored a huge victory: its likely removal from the federal list of U.S. endangered and threatened wildlife. | | | The 50-year-old Endangered Species Act helped coordinate an ecosystem-wide recovery effort in Florida, the birds' main U.S. nesting ground. The species has rebounded from 5,000 nesting pairs when it was listed in 1984 to about 10,000 today. | | | Helleborus foetidus. (Climate Coach reader) | | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Climate Coach in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday. | | See you next Tuesday, Michael Coren, Climate Coach | | | | | | | | | |
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