Coming up for air
Coming up for air
A story about climate technologists becoming climate migrants
Departures
Team Coral was, until recently, based in the beautiful mountain town of Bend, OR. We highly recommend visiting; It’s an adult summer camp with unparalleled access to hiking, skiing, and climbing, a fantastic food scene, and culture based around the magnificent Deschutes River. As recently as six months ago, we planned to buy a house, raise a family, and ultimately retire there. And then, this summer happened.
The Oregon state government published a chart showing the acreage of protected land that has burned in wildfires year over year, with data over the past three decades. Click over and take a look, we’ll wait. This is reasonably self explanatory, but to emphasize; 8 of the 10 worst years in the past decade, and that’s only through 2022. 2024 will be the worst year on record by about double.
In Bend itself, temperatures are spiking. The town averaged 7 annual days of over 91 degrees as recently as 1990; That number has trended over 24 annual days since 2010, and is projected to be 35+ days as soon as 2050. Air quality is similarly declining, with a jump in days of hazardous air quality from 0.4 days per year from 1989 to 2016, up to 10 days per year from 2017 to 2022. This year, the horrific air quality was not wholly an Oregonian problem; Much of the smoke blanketing the Cascades came from the Park Fire in northern California, a blaze so destructive that it’s still burning nearly two months after ignition, and has a Wikipedia page.
The weekend we left Bend, the AQI was over 100 and had been for weeks, we drove past the remnants of a half-dozen fires within a few hundred yards of one of only three major highways out of the area, and the only local airport of any size had recently been shut down for 36 hours due to a fire nearby. Within the week following, there was an active blaze and numerous evacuation orders within 4 miles of our previous building. Thanks, phone alerts.
To be abundantly clear, nobody should feel the slightest bit sorry for us. We have fully remote careers, good health, and the disposable income to hide from the smoke behind a wall of air conditioning and hepa filters. When the combination of smoke, heat, and underlying medical conditions became problematic, we moved. And that’s the point. Virtually nobody has the same optionality.
We wish they did. Check out this article from NASA about trends in wildfires in the Western US. Spoiler; The count and size of wildfires are increasing drastically, and this trend shows no signs of abatement. If you’re worried about fire touching your own home, it probably won’t in the short term. Only about 11% of land in the Western US has burned, this is of course concentrated away from population centers, and there’s strong data showing that those areas most vulnerable to fire are those that have already burned.
But. The US population continues to move West and South, and is growing overall. Bend passed 100k residents in early 2022 (probably), and projects 160k residents in 2045. It is currently working on expansion of the official city boundary. Expansion into what? The areas that, as of this writing, were on fire less than a month ago. Each mile of growth in the radius of a circle expands the perimeter needing defense by 3 miles. This movie is going to play out again, and again, and again. We think it’s likely that a town of over 100k residents somewhere in the US will burn to the ground in the next decade. There have been a half dozen close calls in the past 3-4 years.
The fires may not be the worst of it. Fires mean smoke, and we’ve not yet begun to reckon with the population-wide effects of a couple of dozen days of wildfire smoke per year. While the science on this subject is not where it should be, we think it is productive to track educational outcomes, coronary disease, stroke, and lung cancer in the worst AQI regions for the next 2-3 decades. It’s going to get bad.
What to do?
If you’re reading this piece as an all-too-public therapy session… Well, that’s fair. We’re working on it. Still, there is much about this experience that clarified our thinking and focused our attention going forwards. Here are some things we think we think;
Wilderness firefighters are disgracefully underpaid, underequipped, and underappreciated. Here’s a good overview from PBS. Most are seasonal workers, with no certainty of ongoing income or health benefits. The US needs to pass a Federal law establishing a robust pension program, excellent year-round health benefits, and a “low end of pro-athlete” compensation scheme for these workers. Given that national capacity for these roles is ~18,000 per year, this program would cost perhaps $3-4bn annually, which is basically nothing in the Federal budget, and be wildly popular with essentially everyone. Hey VP Harris, freebee!
Request for startup; Where is the Anduril of firefighting? Let’s get a bunch of badass hardware and software jockeys together, give them a couple of billion dollars, and work on re-imagining every part of the national fire readiness program with cutting edge technology. Some areas of focus; Suppression drones that can reach and quash ignition sites rapidly, superior fire suppressants, satellite-based predictive analytics for fires, lighter and longer-lasting power tools, lighter rebreathers and protective clothing, and so much more. This is a difficult company, and likely needs to be started by someone who’s sold to the government at scale, but what an immense, and immensely lucrative good could be done there.
Current federal regulations state that employers have to provide ventilators for outdoor workers to use on a voluntary basis when the local AQI hits 100, and that ventilators are mandatory only at an AQI of 500. For context, an AQI of 64 for 24 hours amounts to the smoking of one cigarette. An AQI of 500 is 30 cigarettes per day, or about 10 in an 8 hour construction shift. This is, of course, insane. The government should drop the limit for ventilator availability to 50, the mandate to 100, institute a mandatory work stoppage at 200, and backstop wages for any time lost. While we’re at it, let’s throw in a couple of billion dollars to make and distribute ventilators at cost, to anyone who wants them.
Similar rules should apply to schools, with a simple addition; Just put a HEPA filter into every classroom in the country. This will cost a lot of money. There are about 110k schools in the US from elementary through highschool, and so let’s estimate 2m classrooms. A Shark air purification device with a hepa filter and 500 square foot capacity costs $140 from Home Depot. Assuming the government buys said devices at the consumer price, which it will not, that’s $280m, repeated every 2 years or so. Which, now that we think about it, is essentially no money, given the promising science showing that better air quality in school positively boosts academic performance, along with the harder-to-measure health benefits. School lunches are a critical vector in making sure that kids get proper nutrition for at least one meal daily. Let’s do the same with 6-8 hours of excellent air quality per day.
Lastly… Request for startup; Air purification. We’re delighted, genuinely, by the wave of new air purifiers continuing to hit the market. They appear to be largely excellent devices, but are marketed as premium products and therefore have the price points to match. Where is the Honda Accord of air purification? We’d love to see three products; a 500 square foot hepa purifier with a $75 price point, a ventilator for essential workers, and an N95 mask, all at similarly low prices. We’d even encourage a Bonobos-style “sell one, give one” program for the latter two products, with the donations largely heading to emerging markets overseas. A startup that focuses relentless engineering expertise into creating an excellent purifier at that price will own the large majority of the market which can’t afford Dyson et al, and can lock up endless revenue through a full commercial sales motion into enterprise, NGOs, and the government. If anyone wants to start the company, we’re your first angel check.
It’s good to be back. There is much to do. More soon.
Please consider forwarding this piece to a friend or tossing it on the social platform of your choice. Coral Carbon is free and always will be, and every subscriber helps us keep doing this. If you want to work with us directly, stop by our new online home;
https://www.coralcarbon.io/