What’s the Plan for Plastic? (Pt. I)

I’m excited to share the first part of a deep dive I’ve been working on for the past two months (hence the lack of #content lately). Enjoy! The ubiquity of plastic is hard to overstate. You might wake up, squeeze some toothpaste out of a polyethylene tube onto the nylon bristles of a polypropylene toothbrush,… Continue reading What’s the Plan for Plastic? (Pt. I)

The State of Energy in Five Graphs

I think it’s important to know some basic facts about energy. Here are the five favorite figures I’ve collected for this, some made by me. 1: Global primary energy consumption by source[1] World energy consumption has increased dramatically in recent history, a trend that’s more exponential than linear. There’s an ~800% increase since 1950, mainly… Continue reading The State of Energy in Five Graphs

Haber & Bosch: Heroes or Not?

The Haber-Bosch process is perhaps one of the most widely known industrial chemical processes. I won’t describe the history in too much detail (there’s Wikipedia for that), but in a nutshell, it’s a chemical process for making ammonia (NH3) from nitrogen (N2) and hydrogen (H2) invented in 1909. N2 + 3H2 → 2NH3 This doesn’t… Continue reading Haber & Bosch: Heroes or Not?