Tag: climate change

a collage of 7 photos on 7 occasions where food scrap waste dropped off at a collection site in the City of Chicago

I’ve been composting using the city’s food scrap dropoff program for two years now

January 18, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Data summary:

  • 13 total dropoffs
  • Timespan: October 18, 2023 to December 26, 2025 (about 26 months)
  • Total volume: 13 × 101 oz = 1,313 ounces (about 10.3 gallons)
  • Average frequency: roughly once every 2 months

Last month I made the thirteenth trip to a City of Chicago food scrap dropoff site at 1758 S Clark St. After two years I think it’s a good moment to count how long and how often I’ve been dropping off scraps for composting. I started collecting food waste soon after I learned the city was starting the program, and I dropped off the first collection on October 16, 2023. This means I’ve been hauling my trusty 101-ounce IKEA HÅLLBAR plastic bin to this spot for just over two years now.

That food waste decomposing in landfills causes a significant amount of methane release into the air and that methane traps more heat than CO2. Although there is still a lot more CO2 than methane released I thought that I can do a little more, and the site being over a mile away means I’m forced to go for a short bike ride even if I don’t otherwise feel like it.

What do the numbers say

  • Over 26 months, I’ve diverted about 1,313 ounces of food scraps from the landfill—that’s about 10.3 gallons of mostly banana peels, coffee grounds, and eggshells (I am using the volume of the bin rather than weights I’ve measured)
  • On average, I make the trip roughly every two months, though the intervals have varied quite a bit.
  • Looking back at my photo timestamps, I notice some interesting patterns. In 2024, there was a long gap between my July dropoff and my December one—over four months.
  • But 2025 has been different. I’ve made six trips this year alone, with intervals as short as 34 days between visits.

The Clark Street dropoff isn’t particularly close to my apartment, and I’ll admit that’s been a barrier. On days when I don’t feel like making the trip, that container sits in my fridge a little longer, and gets full to a point where I divert food waste to the trash. Curbside pickup would change everything—but until that happens, I’m still glad the city offers the dropoff sites.

Reading “climate-fi”

September 7, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Climate-fi is a genre of novels in which the effects of climate change are central to the plot. I have become more of a fan of climate fiction commensurate with the frequency of books being published.

The first climate-fi story I read – before I knew the genre name – was “The Water Knife” by Paolo Bacigalupi. That came out in 2015 and it wasn’t until 2020 that I picked up the genre again.

Here are books I recommend:

  • The Water Knife explores the realistic issues of freshwater supply and who has the right to water sources in the Southwest. This is especially relevant to problems and discussions today, given that people in Arizona are having to buy water from the private market, governments are not approving proposed developments unless they come with new water sources, the state continues to usurp water from upstream freshwater sources, land use is single-use and sprawling, and historic water rights are still a source of conflict.
  • Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. The protagonist and her family live in a tenuous gated community in the near future of a United States ravaged by climate change and other economic and political upheavals. She eventually travels towards a place to establish a better community based on a religion she invents.
  • Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, opens in the “almost present” day describing a heat wave in South Asia during which the wet bulb temperature challenges the body’s ability to cool itself and many people die. A climate terrorist group forms to force the world to adapt to and mitigate climate change globally otherwise the poorest people will suffer the most during the crisis. (KSR personally sees cities as a climate change solution.)
  • Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson opens with a riveting story of the Dutch queen’s plane crashing in Texas and then winds around the world narrating seemingly unconnected climate change-related events. The story then focuses on how shooting sulfur into the atmosphere has an effect on how much energy of the sun reaches Earth, something that actually happened last year.

What climate fiction books and stories do you recommend?

“Termination Shock” by Neal Stephenson

Department of Road Diets: the carbon tax

September 16, 2013 / / 6 Comments

Grand Avenue over the Kennedy Expressway. Its four lanes look like this – empty – most of the day. But then there are times of the day where people who bike, take the bus, and drive all need to “share the road”. That failed strategy has led to increased road rage, slow transit, and dead bicyclists. Time to put roads like this on a diet. 

My friend Brandon sent me an article about the one-page solution to (mitigating) climate change in the United States that NPR posted this summer.

But Henry Jacoby, an economist at MIT’s business school, says there’s really just one thing you need to do to solve the problem: Tax carbon emissions.

“If you let the economists write the legislation,” Jacoby says, “it could be quite simple.” He says he could fit the whole bill on one page.

Basically, Jacoby would tax fossil fuels in proportion to the amount of carbon they release. That would make coal, oil and natural gas more expensive. That’s it; that’s the whole plan.

This new carbon tax would support different infrastructure construction and expanded government agencies with which to manage it. It would support a Department of Road Diets. Road diets are projects that reduce the number of lanes for cars on a roadway, either by reducing the width of the roadway, or converting the general purpose lanes to new uses, like quickly moving buses or giving bicycles dedicated space.

See, in the carbon taxed future, people will want to drive less and use more efficient modes of transportation like transit and bicycles. And those uses will need their own space because the status quo in our cities (except the ones in the Netherlands) of having each mode compete for the same space isn’t working. It results in frustration, delay, and death.

Enter the Department of Road Diets. We have millions of miles of roadways that will need to go on diets so a department dedicated to such transformation would be useful. The agency would be in charge of finding too-wide roads and systematically putting them on diets, I mean, changing their cross section to less carbon-intensive uses.

Unaffected by weather, or politics at COP15

December 18, 2009 / / 0 Comments

The Danish mail delivery worker rides their bike in the winter. No need to jump start dead batteries or leave the engine running. No fuel, no emissions. No politics.

Look at how many bags of mail the bicycle can carry. Check out the bicycle’s wheeled stand system (see the small gray wheels behind the front bike wheel). When the worker has reached their destination, they can deploy the small wheels (think training wheels for a child) and walk with the bike.

For the Christmas and holiday shopping season, United Parcel Service (UPS) hires part-time workers to deliver packages via bicycle.

The company started bike delivery in 2008 in Portland, Oregon. I should probably say re-started, because UPS was founded in Seattle, Washington, by a young person riding his bicycle to deliver goods. This year, UPS expanded the program to Silicon Valley, California (video).

UPS can’t get all the credit for super-ultra-low-emissions vehicles (don’t forget a van still trucks these packages to a drop off site for the bike worker). Messengers, cycle couriers, and food delivery people work all year round in every major American city.