2 August 2023. Oil | Food
The battle lines around Big Oil // The low tech world of cricket farming [#482]
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1: The battle lines around Big Oil
It’s hard to avoid writing about climate at the moment, and Bill McKibben’s Substack, The Crucial Years, is one of the places to go. I’m going to mix and match between two of his most recent newsletters here.
It was McKibben who first made me understand why a degree of climate change mattered, in the early 2000s.
That was in an article for Granta, in a themed edition published in 2003 called The Overheating World, under the editorship of the late Ian Jack. McKibben’s article was headlined, ‘Worried? Us?’.
It’s worth sharing the beginning of that 20-year old piece here:
For lifteen years now, some small percentage of the world’s scientists and diplomats and activists has inhabited one of those strange dreams where the dreamer desperately needs to warn someone about something bad and imminent; but somehow, no matter how hard he shouts, the other person in the dream—standing smiling, perhaps, with his back to an oncoming train—can't hear him.
2003 was quite late, because McKibben had written a book in 1989 called The End of Nature which was his first attempt to write for a general audience about climate change.
I’m sharing this now because in the week where we hit record temperatures on Earth, he wrote a column called ‘I told you so’, although the sub-title went on to add the worlds, “are the four least satisfying words in the English language.”
All the same:
(I)t feels like I’ve spent the subsequent three-and-a-half decades warning that eventually we’d get to this particular July: the hottest day and week and month on record. And long before records too: it seems almost certain that this is the hottest weather on our planet in 125,000 years; Jim Hansen made a quite reasonable case Friday that it is already or soon will be hotter than it’s been for a million years, which is to say before the evolution of homo sapiens.
And part of the column is about his regret that what he has managed to do hasn’t had enough of an impact:
Others have done more and better, but that hasn’t been enough either. ‘I told you so’ is, in this case, just a different way of saying ‘I couldn’t figure out the right words’ or ‘I couldn’t mobilize enough others.’ Kind people say ‘you tried,’ and I have, but that’s also another way of saying ‘you blew it.’
And before someone says it, yes, he knows that thinking of it like this “is grandiose bordering on narcissistic”; it’s a moment, and maybe a necessary moment for him. As he says afterwards, climate change is a vast collective problem.
But the deeper problem of climate change is that large chunks of the “collective” think that it is a problem they can ignore, or bullshit about, and those people tend to have better access to money and political power and influence.
I’m not writing here about the British prime minister, since I did all of that here on Monday. I’m writing about Blackrock, the world’s largest asset management company, which has done more posturing about climate issues than any of its competitors.
McKibben’s very next newsletter after the ‘I told you so’ one was about Blackrock’s decision to appoint the Chief Executive of Saudi Aramco to its board. Saudi Aramco has been responsible for more carbon emissions than any other company on the planet:
It is the ultimate signal that the world’s financial community has decided to essentially give up on even the modest commitments they made a couple of years ago in Glasgow, where they said they would work to decarbonize their portfolios.
McKibben’s piece sent me off to do some quick research. I was hoping to find some chutzpah rich statements from Blackrock’s usually much-quoted boss Larry Fink that I could deploy here in an ironic fashion. I did find that:
His leadership experience, understanding of the global energy industry and the drivers of the shift towards a low carbon economy, as well as his knowledge of the Middle East region, will all contribute meaningfully to the BlackRock Board dialogue.
But I also found a newly published report from a US research business, FinanceMap, that noted that the world’s largest 45 asset management businesses weren’t walking their talk on climate change. Of course, this may not be to anyone’s great surprise. But it is still useful to have the evidence:
The FinanceMap analysis finds that the world’s largest asset managers have not improved their climate performance over the past two years and in some cases have reversed positive trends, despite most having set net-zero-by-2050 targets through initiatives such as the high-level Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM).
Collectively, the analysis found that asset managers hold 2.8 times more equity value in fossil-fuel-production companies than in green investments in the assessed sample.
American asset managers have always been behind their European counterparts here, and they seem to have fallen back further, for example by being less willing to support environmental-minded shareholder resolutions. FinanceMap suggests that this is a result of the politicisation of ESG investing by US Republicans.
This shift has occurred amid growing moves by U.S. state governments to ban investing pension money and other accounts in investments that consider ESG guidelines when picking stocks.
In his piece, McKibben matches this point with another one: the huge profits made by the oil companies since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. Because basically, for all its noise, Blackrock has never seen a dollar it didn’t like.
So, while McKibben points out that you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist when things like this are happening in plain sight, the purpose of his article is to point out that this politics cuts both ways.
He points to the New York City Comptroller, Brad Lander (NYC’s “money guy”), who responded to the extreme American heat with a video pointing out that New York’s banks were still bankrolling the fossil fuel sector. (I’ve lifted this straight from McKibben’s article):
And when Blackrock announced the Saudi Aramco appointment to its board, Lander also made a tough statement to Bloomberg:
“BlackRock has clearly stated that climate risk is an investment risk, but actions speak louder than words.”
This is more than a war of words. Blackrock is currently the largest asset manager for New York City, and New York City has a lot of money. It could move its money. And at the same time, Los Angeles Times published a strong editorial, headlined:
Hoping fossil fuel giants will see the light on climate hasn’t worked. Change only comes with mandates and force.
At the top of this piece, I said that McKibben had made me understand that every degree mattered. Actually, every one-tenth of a degree matters, as he points out in his ‘I told you so’ piece:
We know from a recent study that every tenth of a degree in temperature rise that we prevent keeps 140 million of our brothers and sisters in habitable zones on this planet(emphasis in original).
And the politics of that now come up hard against how we are going to confront the fossil fuel companies. It’s probably the most urgent political task right now. As McKibben says:
(N)othing has changed my basic conviction about the key: we need to keep building huge movements to finally break the political power of the fossil fuel industry and force the emergency conversion to clean energy.
2: The low tech world of cricket farming
We’re likely to end up with more insect protein in our diets. So it was interesting to see a piece in Public Books about trying to scale cricket farming in Iowa. Spoilers, but this story doesn’t turn out quite the way you expect it to.
The farmer who is trying to do this is Shelby Smith, who runs a business called Gym-N-Eat Crickets (say it fast), which raises, processes and sells crickets for human consumption. This is where the crickets are raised:
Eleven feet wide by 54 feet long, the boxy, metal-sided building was once a single-wide trailer home. Now it’s kept at a humid 87 degrees Fahrenheit year-round and churns out millions of crickets every 45 days. The crickets live inside 50-gallon plastic storage containers stacked on four tiers of metal wire shelving that lines the length of the barn on either side.
(Image: Paolina Lu/ Public Books)
Farming crickets isn’t new. They’ve been grown as fishing bait and food for specialist pets. What’s new is growing them for human consumption, as ‘alternative proteins’:
Collectively, “alternative proteins” are framed as potential replacements for industrially raised, grain-fed livestock, an existing industry maligned as heavily polluting and inefficient in its use of resources. “Minilivestock,” as crickets are called, are praised for their high nutritional value and low levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and for the relatively small footprint of land and amount of water required to raise them.
But this is a relatively untested business, and there are competing models. Some companies have gone down the higher tech, automated route. Shelby Smith thinks this is the wrong way to go. She is betting on low-tech solutions.
The writer of the piece, Paolina Lu, had worked in Smith’s barn for six months as part of her doctoral thesis on alternative proteins, and she identifies the problem of growing crickets as being a problem of labour.
For example, crickets may be small but they still produce waste. So Smith is looking at learning from the pig farming industry, where slats under the pens allow the waste to run off and save people much of the effort of mucking them out.
Smith has also been working on a contract model to scale cricket farming, effectively setting up neighbouring farmers with the equipment to start doing it in spare outbuildings, insulated to maintain temperatures. This is also a model drawn from the pig farming industry (even the contract is borrowed from it.) The big difference, of course, is that everything is scaled down, including the start-up costs:
Smith’s allegiance to “low-tech” methods goes hand in hand with her contract farming model of scaling up. The “low-tech” and accessible materials she uses—cardboard egg flats, paper plates, mason jars, plastic storage containers, gravel—make it easy, at least in theory, for a contract farmer to start their own cricket farm.
She also has a YouTube channel where she shared tips on cricket farming.
There’s also an innovation model that sits behind this contract farming model: more farms mean more “iterative tinkering”, in which people make steady improvements to the low tech set up. The article has an example of this from Frank, a contract farmer who found a much more efficient way to build cricket housing from the egg flats. Egg flats? Well, Iowa produces more eggs than any other state in America, so egg flats are cheap and widely available:
Frank’s “low-tech, common-sense” innovation (is) a form for stacking cardboard egg flats that he codesigned and created with a few of his cousins, who are welders. It’s made by welding together a few pieces of sheet metal at a right angle. It may not look like much, but when I visited Frank after a few months of working in Smith’s cricket barn, doing the tedious work of balancing delicate egg flats into neat, tight stacks, I could appreciate the truly revolutionary nature of this little blue metal form.
As Lu says, Shelby Smith had sung the praises of Frank’s innovation even before she had arrived in Iowa for the first time:
“In terms of efficiency of practice, it takes stacking egg flats from a two-minute job to a 20-second job,” she said. “But that’s not going to raise you $16 million. You’re not going to patent that. I can’t go to a panel of investors and be like, ‘I need $16 million to build it.’ That’s why I said I’m not in the game. I’m not interested in venture capital.”
(Image: Paolina Lu/ Public Books)
It all sounds good in theory. But Smith’s business model hasn’t worked out. None of the six contract farmers who diversified into cricket farming, including Frank, have stuck it out. Smith has more demand for crickets than she can meet, but is having problems raising finance and scaling her model to meet it:
Large insect agriculture firms will be the first to tell you there’s a reason they have decided that creating large-scale, automated rearing facilities is the way to go. Farming crickets the “low-tech” way requires physically demanding manual labor in hot and humid conditions that must be done every day.
Lu characterises the failure of this low-tech model in an interesting way,
mixed as it is with inspiring utopian visions of collective progress, successful innovations never widely adopted, failures that become the impetus for dreams of new avenues of growth, and searches for public and private funding that lead to dead ends.
And she suggests that perhaps the low tech and the high tech model aren’t so far away from each other. The low-tech version conjures for us images of the “the side-hustling yeoman farmer who builds wealth and his own good character through hard agricultural work”. It’s probably not the best way to organise a deep transformation of our food system.
Other writing: music
I have a review of a recent concert by the English guitarist Martin Simpson over at the Salut!Live blog. Here’s an extract:
The range of his repertoire is broad; his own songs are supremely well-crafted; and he moves between folk and blues and roots and bluegrass effortlessly, perhaps a result of his long period living and working in the United States…
Simpson has been working on a project with the American musician and producer Thomm Jutz, making a record of the Appalachian songs of Mary Sands and Jane Gentry. These were collected in the early part of the 20th century by Cecil Sharp. It’s one of those projects that involves a whole range of musicians from both sides of the Atlantic… Simpson shared his song from the record, All You Fair and Tender Ladies, featuring Cara Dillon with sublime vocals, which has been released as a single before the record comes out in September.
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