The Daily Valet. - 11/4/21, Thursday

✔️ Should We Dim the Sun?

Thursday, November 4th Edition

Cory Ohlendorf, Editor in Chief of Valet.

Today’s Diwali … wishing all who celebrate love, light and prosperity.

Cory Ohlendorf, Editor ⋯ @coryohlendorf

Today’s edition is presented by

Today’s Big Story

Should We Dim the Sun?

Injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere could turn down the heat on Earth

Recently, geoengineering has become a hot topic, so to speak. The most discussed, and most controversial, is solar geoengineering—an idea that would see light from the sun dimmed by injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere. Less sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth means less heat trapped by carbon dioxide.

Solar geoengineering doesn’t address the underlying cause of human-driven climate change: carbon emissions. However, some scientists argue that it could be a cheap, important tool in our climate change toolkit, if only we were able to research it more thoroughly.

Others, including environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth, have opposed solar geoengineering, writing that it “will take us in the wrong direction” and is an “attempt by those most responsible for climate disruption to continue polluting.”

So how would it work, exactly? The plan would entail flying a suite of aircraft 30-odd miles above earth’s surface to inject millions of tons of sulfate particles into the air. High up in the stratosphere, these particles would shroud the globe in a chemical mirror, reflecting away some of the sun’s radiation before it could be trapped by greenhouse gases.

The chemistry is powerful: just a few grams of sulfates in the stratosphere can offset warming from one ton of carbon dioxide, a ratio of nearly 1 million to one.

Of course, for all its potency, solar geoengineering cannot serve as a replacement for cutting CO2 emissions entirely. Instead, researchers imagine it could buy time for the transition away from fossil fuels or, assuming this transition comes easily, further minimize the human suffering caused by warming.

↦ In Nature: Volcanic eruptions are their own form of this with plumes of smoke that dim the sun. A large eruption in 1991 dropped planetary temperatures by half a degree.

Inflation Is at a 30-Year High

Here’s how the Federal Reserve plans to deal with it

The Federal Reserve is caught in a precarious balancing act as it tries to steer the country out of an unprecedented pandemic.

On one side, the Fed feels the economy still needs help given that the U.S. has yet to recover nearly 5 million jobs that were lost during the pandemic. But the Fed is also facing another opposing problem: Inflation has climbed to its highest level in three decades.

And after six months of higher prices touching everything from food to energy prices, some economists say the phenomenon appears to be sticking around—and could last well into 2022.

But Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told NPR's Morning Edition on Wednesday she expects inflation to come down in the second half of next year as supply bottlenecks sort themselves out.

↦ FYI: About half of Americans say they now expect the economy to worsen in the next year, compared with just 30% who think it will get better.

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Boeing to Build Satellite Internet Constellation

Over 140 satellites will beam broadband around the world

Boeing has secured FCC approval to deploy and operate a satellite internet system capable of beaming high-speed broadband down to consumers on Earth. On Wednesday, the U.S. regulator signed off on the company's application for the “V-band Constellation” satellite system, originally filed back in 2017.

The plan involves placing 132 satellites into low Earth orbit at an altitude of about 656 miles. Another 15 will be launched to “non geostationary orbit” at an altitude between 16,998 to 27,478 miles. The company says it wants to use the satellites to offer “internet and communications services to residential consumers, government and business users in the United States, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands” while the network gets built out, but on a global basis once it's complete.

According to The Verge, all 147 satellites would broadcast in the V-band, a higher-frequency slice of the wireless spectrum than the Ka and Ku bands used by SpaceX's Starlink network or Amazon's yet-to-be-deployed Project Kuiper satellites.

SpaceX has previously expressed concern that Boeing's proposal to launch into already-crowded low orbits could increase the risk of a collision with other satellites. In 2019, SpaceX told the FCC that it believed Boeing's network would create a “clear danger of harmful interference,” reports Reuters.

↦ FYI: By comparison, SpaceX and Amazon have far grander plans for their networks, with each consisting of thousands of satellites.

The End of Avocados?

Chefs are ditching avocado because it’s unsustainable. Maybe its trend is just over.

Chefs at restaurants across the globe are scratching avocados from their menus, replacing popular dishes like guacamole with alternative dips made from beans and seeds that have smaller carbon footprints.

This next stat will shock you (it did me): One avocado requires 60 gallons of water to grow. Two small avocados sold together in a package at grocery stores have roughly the same carbon footprint as four pounds of bananas.

Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City, University of London, told Eater this is what happens when “an exotic food becomes normalized with no thinking through of the consequences.” The key there, however, is that avocado has become thoroughly normalized.

At the same time, the average national price of a single Hass avocado reached $2.10 in 2019. And it's fair to assume that by the time avocado toast shows up on the menu at Dunkin', the trend is over. Chefs could probably have phased out avocado on their menus without much fanfare, but nods toward sustainability have also become their own trend. Sure, it's the right thing to do, but it's also good for business to be seen making that choice.

↦ FYI: Long before avo toast became obligatory on American brunch menus, it was big in Australia, where newspapers mentioned it as far back as 1929.

In Other News

↦ Life Expectancy Fell Sharply in the U.S. Last Year Among High-Income Countries

↦ Crypto Investors Buy 40 Acres of Land in Wyoming to Build Blockchain City

↦ Will Ferrell Turned Down $29 Million for ‘Elf’ Sequel

Other Things We’re Talking About Today

The Mercedes EQS

Tom Ford

The afterburn effect

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