Restoring the Soil Carbon Sponge

In my research on climate companies, I've come across a lot of companies that have a lot of buzzwords in their descriptions,
but it's hard to tell what they actually *do*. Then there are companies with a very clear idea and easily discernible impact. I thought I'd keep a list of some companies that I think are doing 
exciting work. I'll update the list as I come across more... so far they are just in alphabetical order.

## BlocPower
**Solution Area**: Electrification 
**Website**: <a href="https://www.blocpower.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.blocpower.io</a>

Installing affordable heat pumps in residential buildings and historically underserved neighborhoods. 

There's a great [MCJ Collective](https://www.mcjcollective.com/my-climate-journey-podcast/donnel-baird) podcast episode with the founder Donnel Baird.


## Earthshot Labs
**Solution Area**: Restoration, Nature-Based Solutions 
**Website**: <a href="https://www.earthshot.eco/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.earthshot.eco</a>

A platform to make financing for ecological restoration easier, offering ecological forecasting, financial modeling and risk assessment for investors and land stewards. 

Their work culture also seems pretty unique, and they put the requirement for indigenous equitability front-and-center.

## Form Energy
**Solution Area**: Energy Storage 
**Website**: <a href="https://formenergy.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">formenergy.com</a>

Renewable energy is famously "bursty" so needs energy storage solutions. Form Energy has developed an iron-air battery capable of storing electricity for 100 hours at system costs competitive with legacy power plants. 

## Full Harvest
**Solution Area**: Food Waste 
**Website**: <a href="https://www.fullharvest.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.fullharvest.com</a> 

Online B2B marketplace connecting farmers with commercial produce buyers where they can purchase surplus and imperfect produce.

## Novi Connect
**Solution Area**: Supply Chain Transparency 
**Website**: <a href="https://www.noviconnect.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.noviconnect.com</a>

Integrates a lot of info from the global raw materials market, which is traditionally quite fragmented and opaque, to help companies verify that all the ingredients and packaging used for their products meet their promised ethical and environmental standards. Started in clean beauty products, but is now branching out to food and household items.

## Regrow
**Solution Area**: Regenerative Agriculture 
**Website**: <a href="https://www.regrow.ag/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.regrow.ag</a>

MRV (Measure, Verify, Report) software and more for regenerative agriculture.

## Rheaply
**Solution Area**: Circular Economy 
**Website**: <a href="https://rheaply.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">rheaply.com</a>

Takes everything from an office building that isn't being used in one company and puts it on marketplace for other companies. There is so much office waste that can't be easily recycled and almost brand-new. Just from personal observation, kind of appalling. I can't find the financial numbers or tonnage of things that would be saved from landfill, but I'm sure it would be huge.

## SkyTruth
**Solution Area**: Earth Satellite Monitoring & Public Accountability 
**Website**: <a href="https://skytruth.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">skytruth.org</a>

Uses the same remote sensing techniques traditionally used by resource-extraction industry (that use them to find and exploit mining or drilling sites) to identify harmful human activites that might otherwise be obfuscated (e.g., forest clearcutting, oil spillage). Also uses machine learning. Publishes data and maps for free to the public to hold industries and governments accountable. 

## Sphere
**Solution Area**: Climate Investing 
**Website**: <a href="https://www.oursphere.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.oursphere.org</a>

Finally provides climate-friendly fund option for the 401(k) platforms that your company uses. There is currently $320 billion invested in fossil fuel companies through 401(k)s, and most 401(k) platforms don't have an option to pick a ready-made fossil-fuel free fund. 

## Twelve
**Solution Area**: Carbon Transformation 
**Website**: <a href="https://www.twelve.co/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.twelve.co</a>

Chemical company started by academics from Stanford University, now doing R&D at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. 

Takes CO2 + water + renewable energy + catalyst --> ::: undergoes transformation that they call industrial photosynthesis::: --> yields carbon products that were traditionally created through petrochemicals. 

This not only pulls CO2 from the air, but also could make the transition off petrochemicals much easier for society. They want to normalize 'CO2Made' label on products. 


## WeaveGrid
**Solution Area**: Electric Grid 
**Website**: <a href="https://www.weavegrid.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.weavegrid.com</a>

Works with 3 segments of the problem area: utilities, OEMs, and EV drivers to build the infrastructure needed across the country to make electic car charging super easy.

Climate Companies to Watch

I wanted to make note of some high-quality courses and excellent teachers here.
This is the path I took to dive into web development.

### [The Odin Project](https://www.theodinproject.com/)
#### HTML / CSS (Flexbox, CSS Grid)

I actually came across this project in 2014 when it was first getting started and really liked it, so when I was getting back into learning again, I was glad to see that it was still around and even better! 

High quality content, all free, community-sourced, and project-based.

It also goes into either Ruby on Rails or a Node.js track, but by the time I got to the 6th project, I wanted to dive deeper into React. That was when I found...

### [Scrimba](https://scrimba.com/)
#### React, Responsive Design

Bob Ziroll does a really good job with this [Learn React for free](https://scrimba.com/learn/learnreact) course. 

He explains concepts clearly, you get to practice in the browser by yourself (using their 'scrims'), and by the end of the course, I was ready to start on my own project from scratch. Scrimba also has an active Discord community where you can ask any questions.

That is when I realized I needed to learn responsive design. I went through the 'Responsive Design' module in the [Frontend Developer Career Path](https://scrimba.com/learn/frontend), taught by Kevin Powell, and this was also quite helpful. 

That was when I jumped off into my <a href="/#project_crossword">crossword project</a> for about three months.

Afterwards, I wanted a deeper dive into JavaScript, and found... 

### [Frontend Masters](https://frontendmasters.com/)
#### Advanced JavaScript

[Will Sentance](https://frontendmasters.com/teachers/will-sentance/) is an amazingly engaging teacher. If I am being honest,
learning the intricacies of different programming languages is not a passion of mine, but I was riveted the whole time.

I went through his [JavaScript: The Hard Parts, v2](https://frontendmasters.com/courses/javascript-hard-parts-v2/) and [The Hard Parts of Servers & Node.js](https://frontendmasters.com/courses/servers-node-js/). 

#### To Do

I've also started watching:

* [Website Accessibility, v2](https://frontendmasters.com/courses/accessibility-v2/), with Jon Kuperman
* [Design for Developers](https://frontendmasters.com/courses/design-for-developers/), with Sarah Drasner
* [Design Systems with React & Storybook](https://frontendmasters.com/courses/design-systems/), with Emma Bostian

All the Frontend Masters courses I have looked at so far have been really high quality. 

Other things on my to-do list:
* [Modern Search Engine Optimization (SEO)](https://frontendmasters.com/courses/modern-seo/), with Mike North
* One of the [TypeScript](https://frontendmasters.com/courses/?q=typescript) courses

I'll update this as I go through them!

A Guide to Learning Web Dev for Software Engineers

I read some incredibly heartening news today! Enric Sala with National Geographic published an 
<a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/once-devastated-these-pacific-reefs-have-seen-an-amazing-rebirth-feature">article</a> 
(paywalled, but <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/11/02/1132950728/coral-reef-resurrected-climate-change-bleaching-protection-nat-geo">NPR</a> also covered it in less detail)
about the remarkable recovery of previously devastated corals around the southern Line Islands. 
In 2015 and 2016, the strongest El Niño ever recorded passed through the area, and half the corals died.
When Sala's team was able to check back in 2021, dreading what they would find, they were surprised to 
see that much of the reef had come back to life. 

Sala writes: 
> What did we learn from the recovery of these “super reefs”? The corals that were resistant to the phenomenal 2015-16 El Niño provided the reefs’ resilience. 
> The southern Line Islands lie in one of the hottest hot spots of warming in the Pacific Ocean, so the corals here apparently have adapted to heat.
> 
> For new corals to grow over dead ones, though, the skeletons need to be covered by pink encrusting corallines instead of fleshy seaweed. 
> What provided these ideal conditions in the southern Line Islands? We believe one reason is the off-the-charts abundance of herbivorous fish—the enormous parrotfish 
> and schools of hundreds of surgeonfish. They’re grazers, the zebras and antelope of the reef, and they gobble every tiny fleshy alga that dares to grow on the dead coral.
> When you’re diving in the shallows, you hear those fish scraping at the reef nonstop. Crustose coralline algae, which have calcareous skeletons, survive the grazing. 
> The fish prefer to eat the equivalent of yummy lettuce rather than limestone.
> 
> That observation reinforces the conclusion we reached in 2009: Full protection from fishing, and the enormous fish biomass it yields, is necessary for a reef 
> to be able to bounce back. Full protection promotes resilience. But will it be sufficient if extraordinary warming events like the 2015-16 El Niño become more frequent? 
> Will these reefs have enough time to recover in between crises? We don’t know.

There are also caveats. Though the coral in aggregate recovered, specific species might not:
> The reefs were back with exuberance, but they were changed. Here and there, Pocillopora that had died in 2015-16 were recovering slowly, sometimes on top of their dead, 
> like trees sprouting from stumps in a coppiced forest. But most of the space left by the dead corals had been filled by other species.

And the giant clams, which are amazing ocean filters, were still devastated:
> In 2009 we had counted more than 29 giant clams per square yard in those areas; in 2021 three hours of swimming over the lagoon reefs revealed only five living clams. 
> The seawater temperature in 2015-16 probably had been much higher in the lagoon than in the fore reef around the atoll. That created a lethal clam bake, 
> from which the giant clams may never recover.

It also seems like the explanation given for the recovery is still only a hypothesis.

Nevertheless, the complexity of ecology is always surprising us.
It brings to mind our attempts at mapping the human brain. 
There are so many connections we cannot yet see,
just as artificial neural networks are still nowhere near the simple, 
flexible intelligence we take for granted in organic beings. 
In both cases, we still don't really understand what it is that makes
the world come to life.

As such, it is another reminder 
that nature often does a much better job at restoring itself than any human interventions can. Which makes it even more important 
to preserve as much biodiversity as we can everywhere. We don't know how everything works, but we know there is wisdom in our ecosystem. 

It reminds me of a quote I heard once by Leo Szilard that has always stuck with me. Szilard was a physicist that patented
the idea of a nuclear fission reactor in 1933 and worked on the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb as a deterrent against Nazi Germany. 
But he also <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/leo-szilards-fight-stop-bomb">fought publicly</a> and in vain to stop the atomic bomb from being used. 
He wrote simply: 

> Do not destroy what you cannot create.

And that includes of course the coral, the fish, the clams.

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