The dream is cosplay entrepreneurship at its finest: harvest giant kelp from the ocean, convert it to biofuel, and power the world’s aircraft and cargo ships on seaweed.
MIT climate scientists and torchbearers in the prestige press are getting excited about kelp again. The vision is disturbed only by the minor complication that it would take 700,000 square miles of kelp farms, the proposed enterprise competes with the world’s most technically advanced large-scale industry, and the program was tried, abandoned in the 1970s when oil prices stabilized, revived, and is now stalling again for identical reasons.
MIT Sloan remains undaunted: its Catalytic Climate Finance Project proposes to bridge the “missing middle” between technologies that don’t work and markets that don’t want them by deploying philanthropic capital.
How did this reanimated zombie of a story find its way back into print?
MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing dispatched six apprentice climate missionaries on a “four-day intensive weekend” with the Associated Press climate desk, returning with both bylines and invigorated zealotry. Among the illuminated: Zoe Beketova, who reported that the collaboration made her “really excited to keep exploring climate stories,” and Ana Georgescu, who described the AP newsroom as “like stepping into a real newsroom,” an observation that deserves a moment of quiet reflection.
Our class of useful idiots in training emerged credentialed, energized, and spiritually renewed, ready to explain to a skeptical public why the climate gravy train still has seats available. The kelp piece ran under the joint byline “MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing via AP,” which is either the most honest description of climate journalism ever published or a clerical error.
The Associated Press and its climate coverage machine have received over $600 million in “philanthropic” support from the usual suspects. Because there is zero chance that the AP could support its mission with revenue from customers.
Story suggested by MIT News