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This seems highly specific.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may be rolling back the United Kingdom’s plans to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars and space heaters, but England is forging ahead with sweeping bans on single-use plastic. Starting October 1, it will be illegal for businesses in England to distribute non-reusable plastic plates, bowls, or cutlery. Certain types of styrofoam cups and food containers are also banned. Also, inexplicably, balloon sticks.
WTF is a balloon stick? This is the question I had when I received a press release this morning from Business Waste UK, a commercial waste hauling company, which informed me that eight out of 10 party shops “can't get down with the idea” of banning plastic balloon sticks, according to its research. I am not a parent, and I haven’t been a balloon-impressed child for quite some time, so excuse me if I’m terribly out of the loop on this. But apparently many party retailers sell plastic rods that attach to the knot of a balloon, so the balloon looks like it’s floating even if it’s not filled with helium.
That actually sounds pretty clutch. I recently learned, while reporting on the potential discovery of a room temperature superconductor, that helium is a finite resource, and we’re running out of it. Liquid helium is essential to cooling down the very hot superconductors inside MRI machines, and doctors are worried about a global shortage. Not to be a party pooper, but it seems more criminal to be filling balloons with helium than levitating them on plastic sticks.
I mean, ideally we don’t do either, and that might be the direction the balloon industry is going in anyway, at least in the U.K. Helen Garrett, the owner of the party supply company Creative Decorations, wrote in a blog post in 2020 that she has changed all of her plastic balloon sticks to paper balloon holders. Business Waste UK cites the post as an example that “alternatives are already hitting the market,” meaning there’s no need for a ban.
What’s especially mysterious is that in May, a U.K. committee that assesses the quality of evidence and analysis used to inform government regulations, published a mixed report on the proposal to ban plastic balloon sticks. While the committee deemed the rule “fit for purpose,” it also questioned the underlying need to prohibit balloon sticks, writing that the government’s impact assessment “fails to make a clear case for what the precise problem to be addressed is in relation to plastic balloon sticks specifically.”
I couldn't find the impact assessment referenced online, but I did find this 2018 assessment commissioned by the U.K. government which concluded that “the case for banning plastic balloon sticks appears tenuous.” The report found that they are a comparably small volume product next to plastic plates or cutlery, and there’s little evidence they’re a significant source of litter.
The ban is part of a broader pledge by the U.K. government, made back in 2018, to “eliminate all avoidable plastic waste by 2042.” It’s not like balloon sticks are the first to go. Retailers have already been forced to charge customers for single-use plastic bags since 2015, a policy that has reportedly led to a 98% drop in use in England. The U.K has also cleansed many of its products of microbeads and banned plastic straws, stirrers, and plastic-stemmed cotton swabs. Apparently cotton swab sticks were one of the top 10 types of plastic found littered on beaches, but after the ban in 2020, they dropped lower on the list.
Plastic takes hundreds of years to break down, is harmful to species “across all levels of biology,” and is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Balloon sticks certainly sound like an “avoidable” form of plastic waste, or at the very least, a dispensable one. But I do wonder why they’ve been singled out. I mean, what about those little plastic pull tabs that come on milk cartons? Or those plastic circles inside water bottle caps? Or, as Business Waste UK points out, what about the millions of crisp packets thrown away every day, “creating as many items of waste in 24 hours as balloon sticks do in 365 days.”
What about balloons themselves?
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Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
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The island is home to one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world.
A top aide to incoming President Donald Trump is claiming the president-elect wants the U.S. to acquire Greenland to acquire more rare minerals.
“This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources,” Trump’s soon-to-be national security advisor Michael Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters Thursday night, adding: “You can call it Monroe Doctrine 2.0, but it’s all part of the America First agenda.”
Greenland is rich in “rare earths,” a class of unique and uncommon hardrock resources used for advanced weaponry, electronics, energy and transportation technologies, including electric vehicles. It is home to the Kvanefjeld deposit, believed to be one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world. Kvanefjeld is also stuffed with uranium, crucial for anything and everything nuclear.
Experts in security policy have advocated for years for Western nations to band together to ensure that China, which controls the vast majority of the world’s rare earth minerals, does not obtain a foothold in Greenland. U.S. and Danish officials have reportedly urged the developer of the island’s Tanbreez deposit — rich in the rare earths-containing mineral eudialyte — not to sell its project to any company linked to China. Eudialyte also contains high amounts of neodymium, an exceedingly rare metal used in magnets coveted by the tech sector.
If the U.S. somehow took control of Greenland, it could possibly seize these resources from Denmark, a NATO ally, and the Greenlandic home-rule government. So too could it lead to Greenlanders losing control of their homeland. The country’s minerals have been a major source of domestic debate, as politicians critical of mining have won recent elections and regulators have since fought with mining companies over their plans.
Waltz didn’t go into that much detail on Fox. But he made it clear how the incoming administration sees the situation around control of the island.
“Denmark can be a great ally, but you can’t treat Greenland, which they have operational control over, as some kind of backwater,” Waltz told Waters. “The people of Greenland, all 56,000 of them, are excited about the prospect of making the Western Hemisphere great again.”
Kettle offers parametric insurance and says that it can cover just about any home — as long as the owner can afford the premium.
Los Angeles is on fire, and it’s possible that much of the city could burn to the ground. This would be a disaster for California’s already wobbly home insurance market and the residents who rely on it. Kettle Insurance, a fintech startup focused on wildfire insurance for Californians, thinks that it can offer a better solution.
The company, founded in 2020, has thousands of customers across California, and L.A. County is its largest market. These huge fires will, in some sense, “be a good test, not just for the industry, but for the Kettle model,” Brian Espie, the company’s chief underwriting officer, told me. What it’s offering is known as “parametric” insurance and reinsurance (essentially insurance for the insurers themselves.) While traditional insurance claims can take years to fully resolve — as some victims of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire know all too well — Kettle gives policyholders 60 days to submit a notice of loss, after which the company has 15 days to validate the claim and issue payment. There is no deductible.
As Espie explained, Kettle’s AI-powered risk assessment model is able to make more accurate and granular calculations, taking into account forward-looking, climate change-fueled challenges such as out-of-the-norm weather events, which couldn’t be predicted by looking at past weather patterns alone (e.g. wildfires in January, when historically L.A. is wet). Traditionally, California insurers have only been able to rely upon historical datasets to set their premiums, though that rule changed last year and never applied to parametric insurers in the first place.
“We’ve got about 70 different inputs from global satellite data and real estate ground level datasets that are combining to predict wildfire ignition and spread, and then also structural vulnerability,” Espie told me. “In total, we’re pulling from about 130 terabytes of data and then simulating millions of fires — so using technology that, frankly, wouldn’t have been possible 10 or maybe five years ago, because either the data didn’t exist, or it just wasn’t computationally possible to run a model like we are today.”
As of writing, it’s estimated that more than 2,000 structures have burned in Los Angeles. Whenever a fire encroaches on a parcel of Kettle-insured land, the owner immediately qualifies for a payout. Unlike most other parametric insurance plans, which pay a predetermined amount based on metrics such as the water level during a flood or the temperature during a heat wave regardless of damages, Kettle does require policyholders to submit damage estimates. The company told me that’s usually pretty simple: If a house burns, it’s almost certain that the losses will be equivalent to or exceed the policy limit, which can be up to $10 million. While the company can always audit a property to prevent insurance fraud, there are no claims adjusters or other third parties involved, thus expediting the process and eliminating much of the back-and-forth wrangling residents often go through with their insurance companies.
So how can Kettle afford to do all this while other insurers are exiting the California market altogether or pulling back in fire-prone regions? “We like to say that we can put a price on anything with our model,” Espie told me. “But I will say there are parts of the state that our model sees as burning every 10 to 15 years, and premiums may be just practically too expensive for insurance in those areas.” Kettle could also be an option for homeowners whose existing insurance comes with a very high wildfire deductible, Espie explained, as buying Kettle’s no-deductible plan in addition to their regular plan could actually save them money were a fire to occur.
But just because an area has traditionally been considered risky doesn’t mean that Kettle’s premiums will necessarily be exorbitant. The company’s CEO, Isaac Espinoza, told me that Kettle’s advanced modeling allows it to drill down on the risk to specific properties rather than just general regions. “We view ourselves as ensuring the uninsurable,” Espinoza said. “Other insurers just blanket say, we don’t want to touch it. We don’t touch anything in the area. We might say, ’Hey, that’s not too bad.’”
Espie told me that the wildly destructive fires in 2017 and 2018 “gave people a wake up call that maybe some of the traditional catastrophe models out there just weren’t keeping up with science and natural hazards in the face of climate change.” He thinks these latest blazes could represent a similar turning point for the industry. “This provides an opportunity for us to prove out that models built with AI and machine learning like ours can be more predictive of wildfire risk in the changing climate, where we’re getting 100 mile per hour winds in January.”