[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly K Squid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. We've all heard about the terrible Himalayan flash flood in August that traveled nearly 100 kilometers down the Lendecola and Trishuli Kola rivers on the Nepali Chinese border. The flood devastated towns and villages along the way, killing at least 1300 people and leaving more than 5000 missing in the two countries.
The flood was triggered by a landslide and collapse of a glacier into the river below, creating a wall of water that traveled at more than 150 miles per hour.
The causes remain under investigation, but climate change appears to have played a major role in the disaster.
My guest today is Jonathan Mingle, an independent journalist and author whose reporting and writing is mostly focused on the science and politics of climate change, energy, health, and technology.
In 2015, he published Fire and Ice Soot Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World, in which he reports about the shrinking glaciers across the Himalayas and California, the role of black carbon in that shrinkage, and the impacts on the people and nature who live there. In 2024, he published Gaslight, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and the Fight for America's Energy Future, which won the 2025 Reed Environmental Writing Book Award.
Jonathan Mingle, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Thank you. It's great, Great to be with you.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: So, Jonathan, just after the disastrous flood on the Nepali Chinese border, you published a piece in the New York Times called Nepal's Catastrophic Flood Heralds a New Age of Disasters.
Can you tell us something about what you know about the causes of the disaster? And I know you also spent a fair amount of time, not there where it happened, but in, in the Himalayas, in, in Ladakh, was it?
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I've spent a lot of time in Ladakh in northern India, but also in, in Nepal and, and Bhutan and other parts of the region.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: Okay, so based on what you know and, and based on what you've read in this, this study that was just released this week, what were the causes of the disaster?
[00:02:27] Speaker B: So, you know, Earth scientists, climate scientists, glacier experts have done some heroic and quick work to analyze what caused this catastrophe a few weeks ago in northern Nepal and Tibet. And, you know, at first there was speculation in the immediate aftermath that an earthquake had happened because seismologists, you know, detected something like a 5.2 Richter scale event. And it turned out, you know, very quickly, you know, thanks to Satellite imagery experts deduced that something else had happened.
They weren't sure at first. Was it a glacial lake outburst flood? Was it a glacier calving off and damming up a river and then the river kind of burst through the dam all at once? There were different theories, but now we know, and this just this week, World Weather Attribution scientists have published a pretty thorough analysis of this event and the factors leading to it.
We know with confidence that what happened involved an ice rock avalanche. So basically, you know, as I wrote with incomplete information in that New York Times piece, that that week, in the immediate aftermath of the event, it does look like what happened here was some combination of permafrost in these high mountains thawing, destabilizing the rock itself, the mountainside itself giving way.
The glacier on top of it, which has been retreating rapidly in recent years and decades, exposing that dark mountain flank, speeding up, melting.
A combination of warm temperatures and just the topography of how the glacier sat on this mountain conspired to, you know, all at once, suddenly, this massive rock and ice collapses 4,000ft, you know, off the side of Longtong Lirong Mountain, the northern side, into the valley below. And, you know, as best the experts can tell, a whole lot of ice, some of which was buried, some of which fell off this glacier turned to water meltwater very rapidly.
And the debris, boulders, mud, sediment, water and everything, it swept, you know, as it barreled downstream, you know, a giant wall of slurry with the consistency of, you know, wet concrete, a kind of alpine tsunami sped down the valley of the Trishuli River. And just people downstream didn't have enough time.
They had very little warning, if any warning, of what was coming their way.
But the long story short, as we've seen from these analyses, is that climate change is clearly implicated in this tragedy. Right? There were very high temperatures in the days and weeks leading up in this immediate region that probably contributed to this permafrost which knits together these mountains thawing. And then you get this cycle of melt water infiltrating those cracks, freezing, expanding, melting again, just kind of tearing the mountainside apart.
And it's not the kind of risk that we're prepared to monitor. You know, in. In a place like Himalaya, just so many mountains, very remote areas, hard to get to and study up close, let alone monitor.
As I wrote in the piece, it's a new kind of hazard that people who have been studying this region and how climate change is affecting the Himalaya and other alpine regions for decades, they've been tracking lots of risks.
This is the kind of risk that, you know, has caught a lot of people tragically by surprise.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: I managed to skim through that report, which, and I'll put the connection, the link to the report in the blurb for the show on the station's website.
But I mean, it was very interesting. Part of what they surmised was that there was an earthquake about what, 10 years ago there, a fairly big earthquake that may have contributed to the loosening of what looks like a fault in the topography. That and the fact that water under compression is nearly frictionless.
So, you know, it's a really interesting piece, although there are parts of it which were certainly beyond my pay grade. Has this happened before? I mean, is this in, in this region? Is this anything new, first of all?
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Well, I'll just start by saying that you're right. They did mention the 2015 earthquake, which killed several thousand people across Nepal. But the worst hit part of Nepal was the village of Longtong, directly on the south side of the Same Mountain. In 2015, it was virtually wiped off the face of the earth by an ice rock avalanche. Now, of course, the precipitating event was that earthquake. 7.8 I think scale earthquake shook loose this giant mass of rice, ice and rock. But in an analysis that came out a couple years ago, found that climate change probably contributed to that event as well because of anonymous anomalously high temperatures leading up to that event had kind of just exacerbated the impact of that earthquake.
And so just, you know, just to point out, like these are incredibly complex events to tease apart all the factors contributing to them.
But in some ways it's kind of the most predictable impact of warming. Right, is that ice melts. It doesn't take, you know, geophysics Ph.D. to, to understand that.
And we're seeing just dramatic changes, you know, in the region because of it. To your question of whether this has happened before, in 2021 in the state of Uttarakhand in India, in Chamoli District, there was an event like this where very warm kind of period. I think it was June and side of, you know, a similar elevation, I think 17,000ft or so, rock ice detachment plunging down to the river below, causing a very large and sudden flood that became a debris flow situation. So not just water but like just mud and boulders and that destroyed some hydropower facilities and I think killed nearly 200 people.
That was a similar type event. The Nepal event is on a much bigger scale. Of course there are, I think, latest numbers I saw somewhere in the order of 1500 people confirmed dead, but thousands are still missing.
And we don't know about Tibet. There's less information coming from that side of the border.
There are also events in the Alps in recent years that are. Seem to be a similar dynamic where permafrost, Alpine permafrost thaw is destabilizing these rock faces. And you get this combined rock ice landslide event. And there was a village in Switzerland, I think a year ago that was almost entirely buried.
They were able to evacuate people because they were monitoring.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: They were monitoring, right.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: And they were keeping an eye on it. So there's the difference.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask about, about that, the topography of the area.
I wouldn't say it's unusual, but it's, it's pretty rough. You've got these, these narrow river valleys, these canyons that have been settled. And there's a. There's an old saying to the effect that there's no such thing as a natural disaster.
There's only people living in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And the development that's gone on in these river valleys is kind of notable. So, you know, why are people living in such dangerous places if there are these high risks, you know, even though they. Nobody knows when something like this might happen? That's, of course, part of the problem. Right, is you can warn about it. It's kind of like the big earthquake in California. We know it's coming, we don't know when. But what are the rationale for people living in these valleys?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: You know, I, having traveled across the region and I've been, you know, in 2011, while researching my first book, Fire and Ice, which is largely about, you know, this phenomenon, glacier retreat in, in the region.
I spent time in this, in the valley, in this town of Sia, through Bay, which is now gone. It's just erased by this flood and in long time, which is also erased by that 2015 event. And I found myself after that earthquake thinking about that question, you know, did people understand the risk? And I've thought about this too, in other parts of the, the Himalayan region, like Ladakh, because, you know, there, there are avalanches in the winter, there are monsoon floods. You know, in a lot of these parts of Nepal, every summer, roads wash away.
And then there are these glacial lake outburst floods, which is something we could talk about, but a risk, it's well documented, but increasing like this, you know, threat hanging over a lot of communities around the region. As the glaciers melt, they leave these lakes that suddenly burst their dams and threaten people downstream. I think the answer is people have been there for many centuries and millennia in these high altitude valleys and they probably settled there because they found like a reliable source of water, some kind of arable land or place to graze their animals. A lot of pastoralists, communities.
And I will say, you know, in many of these places, almost all of them out of necessity, people are incredibly well adapted to the rigors of the environment. Right.
And the terrain. And they've evolved, you know, agricultural practices, labor sharing, water sharing, water management, irrigation practices that are really effective.
But I think the big story that we're seeing is that the climate is warming so fast, the rate of change is so quick, that it is, it's revealing the limits of adaptation even for communities that have been there for, you know, the community I wrote about in that book, been there at least a millennium and they had to move because they were running out of water. And whether you're talking about, you know, the risks of glacier retreat in the Himalaya, you know, we can talk about what you break them down.
Drought, floods.
The big story to me is that the places are changing so fast. The conditions, the physical conditions.
It's almost like the place is leaving the people. People aren't going anywhere. Like the people have been living in this part of Nepal for a long time.
There was just no what, you know, why would you expect an event like this? Certainly not in living memory, but even in oral histories, you know, let me,
[00:14:28] Speaker A: let me draw a parallel here. I'm sorry I'm interrupting you, but I can't resist this. That I remember reading after the Fukushima disaster, you know, when the tsunami basically destroyed the emergency pumps, which was for some reason down low. Right.
It was pointed out that there were markers up on the, on the hillsides recording historical tsunamis and that the, the designers and builders of the plant, you know, didn't see them or ignored them or something. And I would have thought, you know, that floods in these valleys would have happened before and that would be part of the sort of oral history of the place in the report. And I did manage to skim all the way through it there. There is a section about development in the valleys and, and I think a comment that people had moved down from higher up because of development. Of course, the rivers are a means of communication, the river valley, but, but they had moved down there because of, you know, for, because of the development and, and growth in the area.
And the activity was down in the river bottom rather than up on the hills. And so I'm just wondering, I don't know that if anyone has, you know, examined that. I'm just wondering if there was any kind of oral history about the risks of living in the river bottom.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: I mean, I'll give you another example. So the region I'm most familiar with, Ladakh, which is in the rain shadow, so it's north of the great Himalayan range, but the far northern part of India. Right.
The main city there is called Lehman.
And Lay has seen rapid growth as whether it's nomads from the Chung Tong region, Tibetan plateau moving in, it's their way of life changes, seeking opportunity, economic opportunity, schools for their kids, or villagers from western Ladakh, you know, agriculture. Different pressures, economic or climate pressures, make it hard to be a farmer. A lot of people move to town to seek opportunity. That's like an age old, familiar story.
Same in Lay as, as is true in this part of Nepal, as you say in 2010. And again, Ladakh is a place that gets very little rain. You can measure it in like centimeters per year because the monsoon doesn't penetrate the wall formed by the Himalaya. So they rely entirely on snow and ice melt for water, almost entirely. In lay, in 2010, there was a cloud burst, a sudden intense downpour on the hills above the city, just liquefied entire slopes. Right. And within, you know, while people slept. And while people slept, you know, 30, 40 foot high mudslide boulders just buried. People wiped out parts of the town.
And at least 100 people died, they don't know how many, because Nepali laborers, they don't know how, were working, you know, on the outskirts of the city near the Indus river, swept away.
People if, and I talked to people and a lot of friends and people, you know, I used to work with had no, no memory of that kind of event. Right. And not prepared for it, obviously.
And so it's the kind of phenomena where it's hard to say, are people moving into harm's way?
Well, clearly.
But how do you anticipate a downpour like that in a region that really doesn't get rainfall events like that.
And maybe now, you know, due to, you know, climate change, can expect more unpredictable severe weather events like that as we are in the here in the US Like I live in Vermont.
In Vermont, we had historic floods in 2023.
And I've written, I've written about this too. And you know, when Vermont was settled in the 1700s, 1800s, people settled in the river valleys because they built mills, you know, to process lumber to build their homes, and then all the roads follow the rivers.
So now we're in a situation where most of Vermont people in Vermont live in floodplains and inadvertently built all their towns and villages and roads and infrastructure in what we are now learning is harm's way.
And it's, you know, as one planner put it to me, it's a $30 billion problem, you know, to get all that infrastructure out of harm's way as the climate warms and as these downpour events become more frequent and intense. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a worldwide story.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: I think you're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Jonathan Mingle, an independent journalist and author who write reports and writes on science and politics of climate change, among other things. And we've been talking about the recent disaster in Nepal where rock slide and ice, part of a glacier fell into a river valley and caused this catastrophic flood, which ran downstream at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour. And, Jonathan, what does this tell us? This event tell us about the limits of adaptation to climate change, especially in the Global south, and especially for poor countries whose contribution to the problem is quite small.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: I think it's a very stark and tragic reminder that some changes cannot be adapted to, especially in parts of the Global south, as you say, that don't have the resources to deal with this kind of event. I saw, you know, a couple of weeks ago, a government official in Nepal, you know, said preliminary estimates, $5 billion to recover and rebuild and just help people relocate from this event. I think 14 different hydropower facilities, either under construction or completed, were damaged or destroyed.
You know, that was revenue that Nepal was counting on exporting that hydropower to India.
You know, there's, it's just an enormous human tragedy, but also economic hit for Nepal, you know, $5 billion, that's what, like a tenth of their economy.
And as you say, like, Nepal has done virtually nothing to cause the warming that we now know contributed to this event.
I think nepal ranks like 160th globally in terms of its CO2 emissions.
And so it really is a very sharp illustration of, you know, the ratcheting injustice as the world gets warmer, as warming accelerates, it's accelerating particularly quickly in the Himalayas, by the way, and South Asia.
I just saw a study, I think, last week estimating that Himalayan glacier loss, mass loss has increased like 65% in the last decade. Right. So it's speeding up.
That's the Kind of change that communities like in this valley of northern Nepal or in the Zanskar Valley that I wrote about in my book Fire and Ice, like there's only so much people can do with very limited resources to either pick up and relocate, you know, their lives, like reinvent their way of life, rebuild, build a new village, as in the case of, you know, the story I tell in that book. Because they were running out of water because their glaciers retreating, you know, at a certain point, the only solution, well, at every point, the ultimate solution is to reduce, you know, the greenhouse gas emissions that are. Are driving more and more people towards that hard limit of what can be adapted to. Right. Like these people had 30 minutes.
That's how, that's how quickly, you know, it reached some of the communities downstream from where the, the mountain fell. And, you know, I think it was moving almost 100 miles an hour at some points. It went 60 kilometers downstream.
And it's just like the speed of this event.
To me, it's so illustrative of this larger problem. Right. The speed of change is not eliciting an appropriate, appropriately, you know, speedy response, policy response, whether we're talking about adaptation or mitigation.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I know this was a. This is something we were. Was already being written about 40 years ago.
So it's this, this observation about the, you know, inequality, the environmental injustice and inequality between north and south and where the impacts were going to land.
Why don't we talk a little bit about your book Fire and Ice, because there are a number of things in there that, that relate to this and some other things that I wanted to pursue. You. You wrote about melting of glaciers and snow in California when you wrote the book.
You know, it's hard to remember. There have been so many droughts in California. It's hard to remember that particular one.
But what's going on with Cal in California in terms of glacial melting and, and snow melt?
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Well, I think the trend is sadly similar, you know, to what we're seeing in the Alps in the Himalaya. You know, the numbers vary, but, you know, I think in the, in the book I wrote about the winner of 2012, was it something, something, something like that? Yeah, anyway, that it may have been 2014, but, you know, I wrote about a winner where the Snowpack was around 12%, I think, of historic levels. I think this past winter your Snowpack was like 18% of the historical average. And I was in Colorado visiting my wife's family this summer. There was no snow on the mountains there, which is Very unusual. And it was at a similar historic low. So this is a trend that, you know, has been well observed and seems to be getting worse.
The snowpack is this frozen reservoir, right. It's like it provides this incredibly valuable storage function and releases that melt water in a, in a kind of steady way through the spring and summer. And what we're seeing in a lot of these alpine environments, including the American west, is that it's, the snowpack's melting earlier.
Snow is less reliable. Right. We saw this last winter and, and then it's melting earlier, leaving less available for agriculture and other uses later in the summer.
And so you'll get lost, you know, harvests because of that. And it's kind of like, you know, the entire United States in a sense is downstream of the Sierra Nevada. Right.
Because California grows what, like half of the vegetables we consume in the US and like 3/4 of our fruit and nuts.
And so that's like an impact that everyone feels.
And I think, you know, the projections don't, don't look good as similar to the Himalaya. You know, in the Himalaya, at current rates of warming, it's more likely than not that we'll lose 75 to 80% of glacier volume right across the Himalaya. That's, which is just a staggering thing to contemplate.
But it doesn't look much better, you know, out in California, last I checked, you know, know projections are that you might lose like two thirds of kind of the snow water storage function of the snowpack, well you know, by mid century compared to the long term historical average. So it's the kind of thing that like, that's infrastructure. Right. In the same way like you drive through a town and you see the water tank, you know, storing water looming above it.
We all take it for granted. But people, I can tell you, people in Nepal, India, Bhutan, other parts of the region I've reported from are acutely aware of the value of that frozen reservoir that they're losing.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I just wanted to make the observation that of course the California water system is very highly engineered.
Yes, which, you're right, which, which makes a big difference in terms of, you know, when water can be released and how it can be controlled.
And I also wanted to point out that California produces a lot of food for the rest of the country, but it uses a lot of water to produce crops that are not necessarily all that, you know, useful for the rest of the, of the country.
You know, and this is sort of, we keep reading, you know, 80% of the water in California is consumed by agriculture.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: Those of us in the cities are always, you know, being blamed for excessive water use. It's a.
It's a highly subsidized system. I mean, you know, all of this in my list.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:28:32] Speaker A: And so there's how much of the
[00:28:34] Speaker B: water in the Colorado river system goes to growing alfalfa.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: Cattle feed. It's more than half, I think.
[00:28:41] Speaker A: And it's interesting that, you know, that's not something that gets talked about very much when we're talking about this question of water availability and distribution. Well, let's get back to the book. One of the questions that I have is, how did you end up in Ladakh in the first place?
[00:28:59] Speaker B: Well, I, I, My first trip there, I was 23 years old, and I quit my job in Boston at a nonprofit, and I just, I, I wanted to go to the mountains, and I had known someone who had taught there at a school, and so I went to teach. I was a volunteer, and that was the start of a long love affair with that region.
And I wound up going back when I was in graduate school at UC Berkeley to do field research on household energy use in Jammu and Kashmir. So that part of northern India, especially Ladakh.
And then I found myself working on passive solar heating projects.
And that work drew me to this one village in a very remote part of Ladakh in Zanskar, where I encountered these people who were building a new village from scratch because they were running out of water. And so that was the seed of that book, that encounter in 2008.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: And I gather you. You learned the language, the local language?
[00:30:07] Speaker B: I did, yeah.
[00:30:08] Speaker A: I, I was impressed by that.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: It's a. It's a little rusty now, but. Because I haven't been back in a while, but, yeah, I learned to speak Ladakhi, which is a language that's distinct from, but related to Tibetan.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: And did you learn it there on. In the field or. Or did you.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: I did.
Out in the villages. Not a lot of people spoke English, and so if you wanted to figure out where the bathroom was or, or, you know, if anything, you. You needed to pick up the language quick.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: A lot of the book is about. About black carbon and the, the sources of that and its role in. In the melting of, you know, the ice. First of all, what is black carbon? And, you know, I would also like to talk a little bit about the, the household energy question, about the cooking stove issue.
But to start with, what is black carbon? And why does it matter?
[00:31:07] Speaker B: Right. So black carbon is what scientists. It's their term of art for soot that, you know, they'll quibble, but that's basically, it's. It's just a scientific name for these dark light absorbing particles that are the product of incomplete combustion. So whenever you burn any fuel incompletely, you're going to have all kinds of combustion products.
And one of them is black carbon. And if you hold a spoon over a candle, you know, you'll see it, you'll. It quickly gets coated in soot, right? So these are very fine particles that other toxic stuff can kind of glom onto.
But it comes from diesel engines.
It comes from, you know, if you travel through north India, you'll see brick kilns making bricks using coal, pumping out dark clouds that kind of are pointed towards the Himalaya. It comes from burning wood and dung and other biomass or charcoal in inefficient stoves, as 2 billion people do around the world to cook their meals.
So it can come from a variety of sources, but the common thread is inefficient combustion of.
Of some kind of fuel.
And the reason it's important and the reason I spent four years writing a book about it is it is a bad climate actor. It is incredibly good at absorbing solar energy and capturing it and turning it into heat. And it's really bad when it settles on snow and ice because it reduces the amount of light that they reflect the surfaces of glaciers and snowpack, and it's like a heat bomb and it speeds up melting.
It's also worth worrying about because it's a huge health risk.
So, you know, black carbon is a form of fine particulate matter that is especially bad to breathe and has all kinds of cardiovascular, obviously respiratory impacts, but also cognitive. I think we're learning more and more.
So those are the reasons to care about it. That's why I wrote a book about it a decade ago.
And, you know, we're seeing. Even just this past week, a new study came out. I think it says it estimates that black carbon is responsible for about a third of Himalayan glacier loss. You know, that's been observed in recent decades. So it's a big driver of this glacier retreat, certainly in that part of the world.
In the past, you know, in the Alps too, and in the US as well, it was more of a problem.
But it's especially insidious in, you know, much of Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia, where people, a lot of people still rely on these cook stoves, using these solid fuels to meet their. Their daily needs.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: What fraction of the black carbon in that region comes from cook stoves.
[00:34:43] Speaker B: I think in the global. Well, I should say in, in Africa and asia, broadly speaking, 60 to 80%.
More than half. More than half, yeah. Whereas in the US And Europe, most black carbon comes from diesel.
Diesel engines.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So. So you went to study household energy use. I won't, I won't ask who sent you, sent you there.
But what was the, what was you, what were you trying to, to understand?
And were you involved in any way in, you know, providing assistance or, or help to people to, to change the way that they work, the things that.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Cook with you?
[00:35:28] Speaker A: Were you implicated in the attempt to, to provide, you know, more efficient cook stoves? That's basically the question.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: I didn't really work directly on cook stove projects.
The part of, you know, the region that I spent the most time in, people use these traditional stoves and they burn dung, yak dung, you know, not a lot of wood growing in the rain shadow of the hill Himalaya, because there's no rain.
So they would gather some woody biomass, but a lot of dung burning, but they needed it for heating. It's really cold, you know, minus 20 degrees. Not uncommon in the winter. And so they not only cooked their meals on these stoves, they also heated their homes.
That's a little different from if you go to Ghana or, you know, Bangladesh, you know, where people are mostly using these stoves for cooking. Right. Not for heating. It's a different kind of problem.
So I was involved in seeing whether passive solar heating could kind of reduce some of the dependence on that health damaging, hard to procure, very labor intensive, polluting fuel heating needs.
And I did, yeah, I worked on a bunch of projects and that was what led me to this village, Kumik.
That wound up being at the heart of the story I tell in Fire and Ice and how I. They wanted help designing. They were building new homes in their new village and some of them had heard about passive solar heating and wanted to know more and wanted to know if I could help you.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Jonathan Mingle, an independent journalist and science writer who focuses on climate change. And we've been Talking about his 2015 book, Fire and Ice, which looks at a region in Ladakh, essentially, and then at how people are living in, in a village there which is being moved because it lacks water, and then expands the focus to black carbon and attempts to try and address that particular problem.
How successful has this Effort to puts passive solar in place been in your,
[00:37:56] Speaker B: you know, in certain parts of Ladakh it's, it has been successful and there even the Indian army has adopted passive solar for barracks and even tents.
There's a well known engineer and climate activist named Sona Mangchuk in Ladakh who I write about in the book and he's become one of India's best known kind of climate figures.
And he has designed these solar heated buildings, solar heated schools across the region which worked very well, but also for, for the Indian army in Zansgar. Yeah, some homes have adopted these techniques. So I wouldn't say it's like, you know, transformed how people build, but it's definitely become something that most people are aware of as an option.
[00:38:52] Speaker A: Yeah. For, for solar nerds. What are the technologies that are, are being that were adopted?
[00:38:59] Speaker B: I'm yeah, so there's indirect and direct, you know, absorption of basically you're trying to use thermal mass to capture. And this is a very sunny part of the world, like 340 days of intense high altitude sunny year.
So. And it's really cold, so it's perfect and it's dry. So you can use mud brick like adobe or rammed earth to store the heat that you capture either through glazing, like glass, big windows, south facing windows, or attached greenhouses.
You know, a lot of the designs depend on practical considerations of like how do you keep the snow from puncturing your, you know, greenhouse as it builds up or the yak, you know, from putting a hole in your window. But also aesthetic people want, you know, want their homes to look, look good and impress their neighbors and you know, those kind of universal kind of cultural factors.
But the basic idea is you're, you're storing incident sunlight in, you know, earth walls or stone floors and it re radiates that heat out at night.
So you know, this, the design strategies try to create these thermal mass batteries for the homes.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: Well, so let's talk a bit about, about cook stove initiatives. You know, I don't know how much attention you've paid, but I know that there have been repeated waves of, of efforts to, to bring new, more efficient cook stoves to the Global South.
And I mean, I'm a little surprised that there's still, this is still happening. One would have thought this would be a problem that would have been solved, you know, 40 years ago.
So you know, what are the, what are the problems that arise when trying to implant or transfer this kind of technology into the Global South?
[00:41:03] Speaker B: You know, there'd be so Many, so many efforts, so many waves of like both development, you know, agency initiatives, national programs in different countries, non profits, carbon credit startups. I mean, a lot of people have tried to tackle this problem and yet hasn't really gotten that much better over the last 40 years.
As you say, as a technical problem.
I'm not going to say it's like easy, but it's surmountable, right? I mean, we're on the verge of having our artificial general intelligence and robot armies, right? Apparently.
I think we can figure out how to improve combustion, you know, in a, in a cook's wood cook stove. And, and a lot of people have come up with ingenious ways to do that. I think the much harder problem is like political economy, right? The, the simple answer to the question, why is it that today still, you know, 2.2 billion people mostly, and by the way, it's mostly women and children exposed to the smoke, they're tending the fires, gathering the fuel, mostly in sub Saharan Africa, South Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia.
Why is it that they're still, they still have to rely on basically cooking over an open fire in your living room? It's basically what it is, right?
There are different stove designs, traditional stoves, improved stoves, but like you're still getting all, it's like smoking packs of cigarettes a day in terms of the soot and other combustion byproducts you're breathing.
Why is that? Well, I think the simple answer is like, it just hasn't been a priority for governments, multilateral development banks, aid agencies. I mean, there's so many reports written over the years and like new initiatives, and yet, you know, they on the same panels that, you know, in Davos or wherever else they're meeting, you know, why can't we crack this issue?
I think you one has to conclude that decision makers don't care enough about it. Maybe because it mostly impacts women and children in the global south, right.
Although people in global health, you know, public health circles will tell you it is one of the biggest bang for your buck investments you could possibly make.
And so if I were to zoom out, you know, without like getting into, you know, critiquing individual cook stove efforts over the years, I think the big picture is that it needs to be treated like in infrastructure investment, right? Like there are success stories like in Indonesia in 2007, basically weaned most of its population off of kerosene, which is a really polluting kerosene, produces a ton of black carbon, by the way,
[00:44:13] Speaker A: when
[00:44:13] Speaker B: you burn it for cooking or Lighting. They weaned a lot of most of their population off of kerosene for cooking onto lpg, liquefied petroleum gas.
And that was very successful. That reduced pollution they're exposed to. But now people are hooked on lpg, and guess what? The price just skyrocketed because of the Strait of Hormuz closure.
And so, you know, it takes careful policy design and it's, you know, it's. It's not like a simple problem, but it could be done if, you know, people at the highest level cared about it. And that has always mystified me. And in the decades since my book came out, it's pretty depressing to see how little progress has been made to reduce black carbon in Alpine regions. But also, this household energy piece of.
Should be unacceptable that more than a quarter to a third of humanity still has to basically cook the way humans were cooking hundreds of thousands of years ago. I don't know.
[00:45:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Let me make two observations. The first one is that, of course, the bang for the buck is an example of an externality that. That is very difficult to monetize.
I'm not excusing the decision makers or the.
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:45:39] Speaker A: Investors. Right. It's. It's like so many things having to do with avoiding health and other impacts.
You know, you can talk about dollar value, but there isn't any money in the bank related to that. I mean, I guess that's what carbon credits were supposed to do. And the other interesting thing is that oftentimes, and I don't know if it's still the case, But I know 40 years ago, a lot of these stoves were, you know, kind of technological marvels, which, when they broke down, were impossible to repair.
I have a colleague who basically says if it can't be repaired in a bicycle shop, it's not probably worth acquiring just because of, you know, where are the parts going to come from, what are they going to cost and the like. So I'm not up on current stove technology, so I don't know exactly what's going on in that respect. But. But this has been, you know, the bane of technology transfer for, well, since I guess Harry Truman announced point four in 1950.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. And Kirk Smith, who is the godfather of household air pollution Studies and UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and, you know, did more to kind of initiate this field of research than anyone.
You know, he would. He would beat that drum, you know, and tell you, like, I've seen this too, traveling in rural China and in India, like, discarded stoves. Right. People are like, I had this thing, I used it for a week or a month and didn't work. It broke down, or it's not meeting my needs. And so you have this issue where people will even have an LPG stove and they'll still use dung, you know, to cook certain foods, fuel stacking, you know, they call it in. In the field.
And how do you. It is. That is a tough problem to solve. And we all do it. We all use different kind of technologies to cook with. Right.
And, you know, it's.
Yeah, as I said, it's. It's not an easy problem, but it's the kind of problem that I think people are finally realizing needs to be approached at the level of, like, infrastructure planning. And I think we're finally at a moment where, you know, for instance, induction cooking, electric cooking, is with more within reach, getting more within reach of more people. It's, obviously, it's got to be affordable if someone wants to adopt it and sustain use. That's the thing you're trying to get, sustained use.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
Well, we're. We're almost at the end of our time together, and I was just wondering, what are you working on these days?
[00:48:21] Speaker B: You know, I.
The last several years, I've been reporting and writing a lot about electric utilities, natural gas utilities here in the US I had a. I wrote a. My second book was about a.
It was about a group of people in Virginia, West Virginia, who were fighting people fighting the natural gas pipeline that was coming out of the Marcellus Jail through Virginia.
[00:48:53] Speaker A: And
[00:48:55] Speaker B: that book, you know, as someone, a friend and editor I've worked with pointed out to me, she pointed out, you know, you seem to be drawn to stories of mountain communities in crisis and coming together to. And I was like, wow, I'd never thought of that. I think that's. That's kind of true. That is a thread through some of my work, you know, and I am drawn to these stories of, like, people coming together across boundaries or, you know, divides in solidarity in the face of not just climate change, but other kinds of challenges.
And so I'm. Right now I'm also working on a project about Lake Champlain here, where I live in Vermont, and how people. It's heavily polluted and has been for decades, and what can people hear in the, in the, the basin where I live due to.
To tackle that.
[00:49:51] Speaker A: Are you, Are you planning on. On writing a book about that?
[00:49:55] Speaker B: I'm not, but I'm early in that reporting project, and who knows where these things lead? You know, that's the lesson I've learned is you have this encounter and you just can't stop thinking about a set of questions or people who are, you know, why are they doing this? What motivates them? And, and you just, if, if you, if you find yourself, you just can't stop thinking about it, it's probably a good sign that you should kind of chase that and see where it leads.
[00:50:25] Speaker A: Last question. Where can people find out more about your work?
[00:50:29] Speaker B: I have a website, Jonathan mingle.com where some of my writing and my two books are on there, and I am on Blue sky occasionally.
And I'm just writing as an independent journalist. I write for a range of outlets.
I contribute to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Yale Environment360, and my own hometown newspaper here in Vermont, which is called Seven Days.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: All right. Well, Jonathan Mingle, thank you for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
[00:51:05] Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me, Ronnie.
[00:51:07] Speaker A: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Jonathan Mingle, an independent journalist and author whose reporting and writing is mostly focused on the science and politics of climate change, energy, health and technology.
He talked today in part about the Nepali Chinese flash flood that killed over 1200 people and left more than 5000 missing in August.
In 2015, he published Fire and Ice Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World, which reports about the shrinking glaciers across the Himalayas and California. You can read the report on the Himalayan disaster by Googling the following Rapid warming in the Himalaya exacerbates geohazard cascades beyond adaptation limits. I've also put the link to this report in the blurb for this show on the KSQD website.
If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] Sustainability now, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites. If you'd like to hear about forthcoming shows, please drop me an email@ronnie lsqd.org so thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K SQUID your community radio station, and keep it going. And so, until next, every other Sunday, Sustainability Now.
