Equilibrium/Sustainability — Eiffel Tower chef hypes climate-friendly cuisine
A Michelin-starred chef is set upon showcasing climate-friendly cuisine at his highly visible first-floor restaurant in Paris’s Eiffel Tower, according to Reuters.
The “Madame Brasserie” restaurant offers seasonal and local ingredients that are cooked with minimal energy — in attempt to show the restaurant industry how a greener meal can be provided, Reuters reported.
“These leeks, in season now, were grown less than 50 km from here,” the chef, Thierry Marx, told the outlet.
“We cook them in their own juices and we dress them with shoots of herbs grown in an organic garden within the Paris ring-road and delivered by bicycle,” he said.
Such a dish, he explained, is simple to both make and eat and also has a limited carbon impact, according to Marx.
Marx, who earned his first Michelin in 1998, opened the restaurant in June with the aim of saving water and energy, Reuters reported.
His team members prepare food using copper casseroles on induction cookers, which heat only the pans rather than the entire kitchen, according to Reuters.
“We are in the middle of an energy crisis and an environmental crisis, we cannot assume that this does not concern us because we run a restaurant,” Marx said.
Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. I’m Sharon Udasin. Send tips and feedback. A friend forward this newsletter to you? Subscribe here.
Today we’ll start in California, where regulators have approved a new desalination facility. Then we’ll look at just how widespread the U.S. drought has become.
Plus: Why the Environmental Protection Agency is saying that Louisiana may have discriminated against Black communities.
California approves new desalination plant
The California Coastal Commission has approved plans for a small desalination project in Orange County — just six months after rejecting a proposal for a larger plant nearby.
Commission consensus: Approval was unanimous — with conditions — for the Doheny Ocean Desalination Project, located near the Pacific Coast Highway in Dana Point, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The facility, which will produce potable drinking water from seawater, will be run by the South Coast Water District.
Doheny will connect to an existing municipal system and feature what officials have deemed an environmentally superior design.
Seawater will be pumped through fully submerged intake wells that run beneath the beach, to minimize harm to marine life.
Taking the situation seriously: “We have really significant water problems in the state,” Kate Huckelbridge, senior deputy director of the Coastal Commission, told the Times prior to the decision.
“I think we’re in a situation where we need to be really serious about investigating all of the options,” she added.
California is not new to desalination: The $140 million facility will join 12 existing desalination plants operating throughout California, CNBC reported.
California’s biggest facility is the Carlsbad project near San Diego, which generates 3 million gallons of drinking water daily — the largest such site in the western hemisphere, according to CNBC.
When will Doheny start running? The desalination plant will be complete in 2027 and will have the capacity to supply up to 5 million gallons of drinking water daily, Rick Shintaku, general manager of the water district, told the Times.
This quantity should be enough to cut the district’s dependence on imported water from 90 percent to between 20-40 percent, Shintaku said.
The controversy surrounding desalination: While the Commission’s approval was unanimous, it came with a list of conditions, the Times reported.
One such condition includes working with California Department of Parks and Recreation to replace the campsites it must shut down during construction, according to the Times.
Why was the previous project rejected? That facility — called Poseidon — was a $1.4 billion proposal for Huntington Beach, also located in Orange County, according to CNBC.
The project was unanimously rejected by the same commission in May.
Among the objections were exorbitant water costs, potential threats to marine life and hazards the facility could have created such as sea-level rise and flooding.
Desalination decisions on the horizon: Another desalination project proposed for Monterey County will come up for a vote next month, CalMatters reported.
This plan is expected to generate much more controversy, as it has faced much more local opposition and would be a private operation, rather than a public one, according to CalMatters.
US confronts most widespread drought since 2000
More than 80 percent of the U.S. is facing abnormally dry conditions — the most widespread area since the turn of the century, according to The Washington Post.
Breaking records: A recent update from the U.S. Drought Monitor showed that nearly 82 percent of the U.S. is confronting such weather, the Post reported.
That’s the biggest percentage since the drought monitor was launched in 2000, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Jonathan Erdman.
The only other time that this figure topped 80 percent was in July 2012, Erdman tweeted.
A pervasive problem: While severe to exceptional drought has long been common in the West, parts of the Northeast and Midwest are also now experiencing such conditions, the Post reported.
Waterless in the West: Today, all but 5.23 percent of the West — defined by the U.S. Drought Monitor as the states of Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Nevada and California — is unusually dry, according to the Post.
That’s better than last year’s situation, in which all by 2.57 percent was unusually dry.
All of California, which the Post described as “ground zero of the drought in the West,” is experiencing at least moderate drought conditions.
Hot in the High Plains: Less than a tenth of the High Plains — Colorado, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas — is drought-free, the Post reported.
The worst conditions affect Nebraska and Kansas.
Current forecasts indicate little-to-no precipitation in the High Plains in the next week.
Sizzling in the South: Drought conditions over the past year have grown considerably worse in the South — Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, according to the Post.
The worst by far is Oklahoma, where almost the entire state is experiencing drought.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) issued an executive order earlier this week to help farmers maintain their businesses.
Misfortune on the Mississippi: Portions of the Mississippi River, which traverses the High Plains and the South, are reaching water level lows that haven’t been observed in three decades, The Wall Street Journal reported.
This situation is disrupting what the Journal described as “a vital supply lane for agriculture, oil and building materials.”
Without reliable water flow, businesses like barge and towboat operators, as well as farmers and factories, are also suffering.
A river that can’t shut down: While October is typically a month of lower water levels on the Mississippi, the region received no major storms during hurricane season, according to the Journal.
“America is going to shut down if we shut down,” Mike Ellis, chief executive of Indiana-based American Commercial Barge Line, told the Journal.
Beyond Meat to cut 20 percent of its workforce
Beyond Meat has announced plans to slash its global workforce by almost 20 percent as the company focuses on reducing its expenses, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The plant-based meat firm has also named a new chief financial officer and parted ways with its chief operating officer, Douglas Ramsey, whom authorities said allegedly bit a person’s nose, according to the Journal.
Why the cuts? In a securities filing on Friday, Beyond Meat attributed the cuts to lower demand for its products and the impacts of competition on sales, the Journal reported.
“Additionally, the company believes it was negatively impacted by decisions made by distributors and customers, such as changes in inventory levels and postponed or canceled promotions,” the filing stated, per the Journal.
‘Juggernaut’ in decline: Beyond Meat has long been a market leader in the plant-based meat sector, alongside its rival, Impossible Foods, CNN reported.
The company was what CNN described as “a Wall Street juggernaut” following its IPO in 2019 but has since then struggled to meet its goals.
ICYMI: EPA accuses Louisiana of discrimination
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said in a Wednesday letter that Louisiana may have discriminated against Black communities facing air pollution in the state, our colleague Rachel Frazin reported for The Hill.
Subjected to discrimination: The EPA raised concerns about residents who live near a plant operated by the company Denka, in a letter to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) and Department of Health.
The facility emits chloroprene, which the agency said is likely to cause cancer.
The EPA said that the LDEQ’s “actions or inactions” may have subjected Black residents living or attending school in the area to discrimination.
Failing to act: The letter also criticized LDEQ for failing to act appropriately both on the facility’s permit renewable and applying nondiscrimination requirements, Frazin reported.
In one instance, per the letter, state environmental officials referred to resident fears about chloroprene as “fear mongering.”
LDEQ also did not provide accurate information to the residents, according to the letter.
A causal link: “There appears to be a causal link between LDEQ’s actions and inactions in administering its air permitting program and the adverse and disproportionate distribution of the cancer and toxicity risks from chloroprene exposure, by race,” the letter said.
What do LDEQ and Denka have to say? LDEQ spokesperson Greg Langley declined to comment on the letter’s specifics, but he stressed that the letter was not a final finding, Frazin reported.
Meanwhile, Jim Harris, a spokesperson for Denka, argued that the EPA was overestimating chloroprene’s risks and detailed steps the company was taking to cut its releases.
Concern remains: But the EPA reiterated its concern that LDEQ’s air pollution control program “continues to subject the predominantly Black residents and school children of St. John the Baptist Parish who live and attend school near Denka, to disparate impacts on the basis of race.”
Follow-up Friday
In which we revisit some of the issues we’ve explored this week.
U.S. and its partners working on price cap for Russian oil
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) on Wednesday reduced its forecasts for global economic growth as a justification for cutting oil production. The U.S. and its allies are now scrambling to draft an agreement on a price level cap for Russian oil, as a way to contain global prices, The Wall Street Journal reported.
EU energy commissioner looks to eastern Mediterranean gas as Russian replacement
Earlier this week, Israel and Lebanon signed a U.S.-brokered deal that will enable gas extraction from a disputed maritime territory. EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson told a forum on Friday that eastern Mediterranean gas deposits can help replace Russia’s supply to Europe at an “accelerated pace,” The Associated Press reported.
Oxygen fluctuations could have accelerated early animal evolution: study
We covered how national park animals are likely to change their behaviors in the presence of just a few people. A new study in Science Advances explores distant past change in animals — “wild” fluctuations in atmospheric oxygen levels a billion years ago that could have accelerated early animal evolution.
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