Category: Energy/Environment

Global Warming Allows German Wine Entrepreneurs to Grow a “Superb” Chardonnay

In my Openness book, I argue that the costs of global warming have been exaggerated, partly because environmentalists forget that entrepreneurs can adapt, either lessening the costs, or sometimes even creating benefits. A case of creating benefits is apparently now the growing of “superb” chardonnay wine in Germany:

(p. D4) What accounts for the arrival of . . . German chardonnays? Certain wine regions like Rheinhessen, the Pfalz and the Obermosel have limestone soils, which chardonnay has a special affinity for, but the warming climate has made it possible to ripen chardonnay sufficiently to make superb wines.

Climate change influenced decisions to plant chardonnay in other ways as well.

“Climate change for us does not just mean it’s getting warmer and warmer, it means everything is getting more extreme — frost risk, weeks without rain, hailstorms,” said Klaus Peter Keller, . . . . “Therefore, we must spread the risk a bit more than we would 30 or 40 years ago. Rather than 100 percent riesling we have now 70 percent riesling, 15 percent pinot noir, 10 percent chardonnay and 4 percent others, and we think that will be the structure for the coming 30 or 40 years.”

Mr. Keller said he had wanted to plant pinot blanc rather than chardonnay but that their son Felix had pushed for chardonnay.

“Felix was right,” he said. “Chardonnay is much better adapted to climate change, with thicker skins, and it transmits the soil much better than pinot blanc.”

Felix Keller said by email that his grandfather had tried planting chardonnay in 1988, but that the timing had been wrong.

“Back then, it didn’t ripen every year,” he said. “It took us until 2018 to try again. We believe chardonnay has a bright future in Germany because we now have the climate that used to be in Burgundy in the early ’90s.”

For the full commentary see:

Eric Asimov. “The Pour; A Surprise From Germany: Chardonnay.” The New York Times (Weds., March 5, 2025): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated March 4, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

My book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

E. Coli in Organically Grown Carrots Kill One and Sicken 39

Many years ago, when ConAgra was still headquartered in Omaha, I heard a speech by the then-C.E.O. in which he argued that big food producers have processes in place to make food safer than the processes often used by smaller independent local and organic farmers. Stories of contamination of organic food do not prove, but are consistent with, his argument. For instance it was reported in 2024 that organic carrots contaminated with E. Coli killed one person and made 39 others sick. Trader Joe’s was one of the stores where contaminated carrots were sold.

E. Coli in organically grown carrots was reported in:

Johnny Diaz. “Organic Carrots Behind Outbreak of E. Coli; 39 Sickened, 1 Dead.” The New York Times (Tues., November 19, 2024): B5.

(Note: the online version of the article was updated Nov. 18, 2024, and has the title “1 Dead and Dozens Ill in E. Coli Outbreak Linked to Organic Carrots.”)

Songbirds Adapt to Global Warming by Shrinking in Size

In my Openness book I argue that global warming is not as much of a threat as many claim. One part of my argument is that humans, and non-human life too, is much more adaptable than the environmentalists realize. Songbirds discussed below exemplify the point.

(p. A3) North American songbirds have been shrinking steadily in size over the past 40 years, according to scientists who measured tens of thousands of the feathered creatures from dozens of different species and attributed the changes to rising temperatures.

As the birds’ bodies got smaller, their wings gradually got longer, the scientists said in a paper published Wednesday [Dec. 4, 2019] in the journal Ecology Letters. The longer wings, the researchers said, may help offset the loss of body mass so the birds can fly efficiently on their long migrations.

. . .

Warm-blooded animals are generally larger in cold climates and smaller in warm climates because more compact creatures usually release heat more quickly, according to biologists and ecologists.

Given the well-established link, many scientists had predicted in recent years that global warming would affect the size of many animals. Yet until recently, there wasn’t much evidence of the effect at work during modern warming trends.

The new findings are the latest in a series of technical reports this year that link changes in body size among birds to warmer temperatures around the world.

Last month, researchers in Australia who studied physical changes in 82 songbird species, including honeyeaters, fairy-wrens and thornbills, reported in the Royal Society B journal that birds there have grown smaller due to warming over the last half-century, as the annual mean temperature increased regionally by about 0.012 degrees Celsius. They based their conclusions on an analysis of 12,000 museum specimens.

In March [2019], researchers at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who tracked the weight of a long-tailed songbird common across Africa called the mountain wagtail found the species gradually became lighter between 1976 and 1999, as regional temperatures increased by 0.18 degrees Celsius. They published their findings in the journal Oecologia.

For the full story see:

Robert Lee Hotz. “Songbirds Shrink in Size, Study Finds.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 5, 2019 [sic]): A3.

(Note: bracketed date and year added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 4, 2019 [sic], and has the title “Songbirds Are Shrinking in Size, Study Finds.”)

My book mentioned above is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The academic paper in Ecology Letters, mentioned above, is:

Weeks, Brian C., David E. Willard, Marketa Zimova, Aspen A. Ellis, Max L. Witynski, Mary Hennen, and Benjamin M. Winger. “Shared Morphological Consequences of Global Warming in North American Migratory Birds.” Ecology Letters (2019).

The academic paper in the Royal Society B journal, mentioned above, is:

Gardner, Janet L., Tatsuya Amano, Anne Peters, William J. Sutherland, Brendan Mackey, Leo Joseph, John Stein, Karen Ikin, Roellen Little, Jesse Smith, and Matthew R. E. Symonds. “Australian Songbird Body Size Tracks Climate Variation.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286, no. 1916 (2019).

The academic paper in the Oecologia journal, mentioned above, is:

Prokosch, Jorinde, Zephne Bernitz, Herman Bernitz, Birgit Erni, and Res Altwegg. “Are Animals Shrinking Due to Climate Change? Temperature-Mediated Selection on Body Mass in Mountain Wagtails.” Oecologia 189, no. 3 (2019): 841-49.

Musk’s Defense of Free Speech Leads an E.V. Hater to Become a Tesla Cybertruck Lover

I admire Elon Musk’s energy, his ability to focus his mind in spite of distractions, and his ambitious entrepreneurship. The kid in me who got up early to watch Apollo space launches admires his ambition to take us to Mars. But what I admire most is his willingness to put that ambition at risk by spending $44 billion to buy Twitter (now X) in order to defend free speech. Too often entrepreneurs will put their dream above everything else. Musk put free speech above his dream.

And it’s not just the $44 billion. Many of his actual and potential Tesla customers are left-wing environmentalists who criticize his purchase of Twitter, and later his leading D.O.G.E. If that dislike leads to lower sales and profits at Tesla, then Musk will have even fewer funds to take us to Mars.

But the outcome is not certain. Maybe a society with free speech is one that is more likely to allow Musk the freedom to take trial-and-error risks to get us to Mars. And there is a small chance that Tesla will sell more cars because of his principled stand.

Tesla owners who supported Harris for President are buying bumper stickers to slap on their Teslas that read “I Bought This Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy” (Peyser 2024, p. D4).

But consider Berkeley Professor Morgan Ames who bought a Tesla in 2013. Even though she did not like Elon Musk’s views she later bought a second Tesla “because she couldn’t find other electric cars that matched Tesla’s capabilities” (Peyser 2024, p. D4).

And there is Oklahoman Sean Ziese who said to his wife: “If Elon is going to start supporting conservatives and free speech, I’m going to start supporting Elon, even though I hate E.V.s” (Ziese as quoted in Peyser 2024, p. D4). Then Ziese went out and bought himself a Tesla Cybertruck.

Ziese now concludes that his driving a Tesla Cybertruck is “a really neat experience. It never would have happened if Elon never would have bought X, and, you know, got free speech going again” (Ziese as quoted in Peyser 2024, p. D4).

The source article quoted above is:

Eve Peyser. “Tesla Owners Don’t Drive Away Quietly.” The New York Times (Thurs., December 19, 2024): D4.

(Note: the online version of the Eve Peyser article has the date Dec. 11, 2024, and has the title “For Tesla Owners, a Referendum Through Bumper Stickers.”)

To Kill a Dam, Environmentalist “Scientists” Lied About the Existence of the So-Called “Snail Darter”

In the 1970s the building of a dam in Tennessee was delayed because environmentalists claimed that its construction would threaten the extinction of a small fish they called the “snail darter.” Now fish biologists have established that there is no snail darter. The fish previously identified as a “snail darter” has the DNA of a small fish called a “stargazing darter” which was not, and is not, endangered.

A co-author of a new study says that this was no innocent mistake.

Dr. Near, . . . a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered.

Dr. Near contends that early researchers “squinted their eyes a bit” when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville.

“I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the ‘conservation species concept,’ where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,” Dr. Near said.

In other words environmentalist “scientists” deliberately lied in order to promote their political agenda of cutting energy production.

The New York Times article quoted above is:

Jason Nark. “How a Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction.” The New York Times (Sat., Jan. 4, 2025): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of The New York Times article was updated Jan. 4, 2025, and has the title “This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction.”)

The academic paper co-authored by Near, that Nark summarizes in The New York Times article mentioned and cited above is:

Ghezelayagh, Ava, Jeffrey W. Simmons, Julia E. Wood, Tsunemi Yamashita, Matthew R. Thomas, Rebecca E. Blanton, Oliver D. Orr, Daniel J. MacGuigan, Daemin Kim, Edgar Benavides, Benjamin P. Keck, Richard C. Harrington, and Thomas J. Near. “Comparative Species Delimitation of a Biological Conservation Icon.” Current Biology. Published online on Jan. 3, 2025.

New Evidence American Indians Were Eating a Lot of Mammoth Meat During the Time When Mammoths Became Extinct

Scientists once thought that the extinction of megafauna like mammoths was due mainly to climate change. But the extinction in America coincided with the arrival of humans, leading some to argue that early indigenous American Indians killed off the mammoths. This goes against the politically correct stereotype that American Indians were mostly peace-loving environmentalists.

A recently published article provides additional evidence. Using a skull from the Clovis period, roughly during the period when mammoths became extinct, the authors were able to conclude from the young child’s “isotopic signature” that two-thirds of the child’s diet came from his mother’s breast-milk, and one third mainly from the meat of large mammals like mammoths. They could also infer that the mother had a diet high in mammoth meat. Summarizing the academic article in The New York Times, columnist Carl Zimmer says: “a study analyzing the ancient bones of a young child who lived in Montana suggests that early Americans hunted mammoths and other giant mammals to oblivion” (p. D3).

I am not criticizing the early American Indians. If I had been alive back then and I could obtain nutrition for me and my family by slaughtering a few mammoths, I would have tried to do so. But we are making a mistake if we reject American exceptionalism in part on the basis of a false and sanctimonious claim that the indigenous American Indians acted on morally superior environmental values.

My musings above are based partly on the commentary:

Carl Zimmer. “Mammoth: It’s What Was for Dinner.” The New York Times (Tuesday, December 10, 2024): D3.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 4, 2024, and has the title “Mammoth: It’s What Was Once for Dinner.”)

The academic article that is the basis for Zimmer’s commentary is:

Chatters, James C., Ben A. Potter, Stuart J. Fiedel, Juliet E. Morrow, Christopher N. Jass, and Matthew J. Wooller. “Mammoth Featured Heavily in Western Clovis Diet.” Science Advances 10, no. 49 (2024): eadr3814.

Will Cancer Die from a Magic Rifle Bullet or From Magic Shotgun Pellets?

We dream of a magic bullet that can cure all cancer. But will all “cancer” continue to be seen as one unified disease, with potentially one common cure? Or will we see many diseases, many causes, and many cures? [The idea of a “magic bullet” against a disease was born from the great Paul Ehrlich who found one of the first effective antibiotics (not to be confused with the the more recent environmentalist Paul Ehrlich who is famous for losing his bet with the great Julian Simon).]

(p. D3) A new study, published [online on] Wednesday [Oct. 2, 2019] in the journal Nature, found that fungi can make their way deep into the pancreas, which sits behind your stomach and secretes digestive enzymes into your small intestine.

. . .

One particular fungus was the most abundant in the pancreas: a genus of Basidiomycota called Malassezia, which is typically found on the skin and scalp of animals and humans, and can cause skin irritation and dandruff.  . . .

The results show that Malassezia was not only abundant in mice that got pancreatic tumors, it was also present in extremely high numbers in samples from pancreatic cancer patients, said Dr. Berk Aykut, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Miller’s lab.

. . .

Administering an antifungal drug got rid of the fungi in mice and kept tumors from developing. And when the treated mice again received the yeast, their tumors started growing once more — an indication, Dr. Aykut said, that the fungal cells were driving the tumors’ growth.

. . .

The new study also sheds light on how fungi in the pancreas may drive the growth of tumors. The fungi activate an immune system protein called mannose-binding lectin, which then triggers a cascade of signals known to cause inflammation. When the researchers compromised the ability of the lectin protein to do its job, the cancer stopped progressing and the mice survived for longer.

For the full story see:

Knvul Sheikh. “Fungi May Have a Role In Pancreatic Cancer.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 8, 2019 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed words and date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 3, 2019 [sic], and has the title “In the Pancreas, Common Fungi May Drive Cancer.” Where the wording of the versions differs, the passages quoted above follow the more detailed online version.)

The study in Nature mentioned above is:

Aykut, Berk, Smruti Pushalkar, Ruonan Chen, Qianhao Li, Raquel Abengozar, Jacqueline I. Kim, Sorin A. Shadaloey, Dongling Wu, Pamela Preiss, Narendra Verma, Yuqi Guo, Anjana Saxena, Mridula Vardhan, Brian Diskin, Wei Wang, Joshua Leinwand, Emma Kurz, Juan A. Kochen Rossi, Mautin Hundeyin, Constantinos Zambrinis, Xin Li, Deepak Saxena, and George Miller. “The Fungal Mycobiome Promotes Pancreatic Oncogenesis Via Activation of MBL.” Nature 574, no. 7777 (Oct. 10, 2019): 264-67.

“Sunlight Can Degrade Polystyrene in Centuries or Even Decades”

Oregon, New York, Colorado, and Washington D.C. forbid restaurants from giving plastic straws to patrons. When I drink from a paper straw in those locales, the straw routinely collapses before I finish the drink, causing me to curse intrusive regulators. The anti-plastic-straw regulations are one example of the environmentalist fear of the effects of plastic. On Thurs., Oct. 10, 2019, Collin P. Ward, the lead author of a 2019 study, said: “Policymakers generally assume that polystyrene lasts forever. That’s part of the justification for writing policy that bans it” (as quoted in Broad 2019, p. D4). We often hear, for instance from the United Nations Environment Program, that the most common plastic in the environment, polystyrene (used for instance in Styrofoam), will likely take thousands of years to degrade. But is what we hear true?

Ward’s 2019 paper answered the question. It turns out that instead of lasting almost forever, “sunlight can degrade polystyrene in centuries or even decades” (Broad 2019, p. D4). Previous claims that polystyrene lasts almost forever were based on the finding that bacteria cannot consume polystyrene. But previous claimants did not let the sun shine in!

The article discussed and quoted above is:

William J. Broad. “Sun Breaks Down Common Ocean Pollutant, Study Says.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 22, 2019 [sic]): D4.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 11, 2019 [sic], and has the title “In the Sea, Not All Plastic Lasts Forever.”)

Ward’s co-authored 2019 academic article discussed above is:

Ward, Collin P., Cassia J. Armstrong, Anna N. Walsh, Julia H. Jackson, and Christopher M. Reddy. “Sunlight Converts Polystyrene to Carbon Dioxide and Dissolved Organic Carbon.” Environmental Science & Technology Letters 6, no. 11 (2019): 669-74.

Government Gave “40 Years of Seriously Incorrect Advice” on Trans Fats

The government’s advice often turns out to be wrong. That is an added argument for not giving the government the power to enforce its advice through mandatory regulations. (“Added” to the fundamental argument based the right to free choice.)

[In May 2021 Nicholas Wade, the author of the review quoted below, showed enormous courage in being one of the first few to risk cancelation by presenting a cogent case that Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab.]

(p. C9) Rachel Carson rightly complained in “Silent Spring” that farmers were sloshing far too many harmful pesticides into the environment. But she took aim at the wrong one. DDT, a mild and enormously effective pesticide, helped rid the United States of malaria and its benefits, if more discriminately pursued, could have outweighed its costs.

The overstrict verdict against DDT is an instance of the harms that can ensue when scientific evidence is ignored. This and other cases described by Paul A. Offit in “Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong” raise provocative questions about the reasons that science is misused in modern society.

. . .

Another case of medical advice based on insufficient data is that of dietary fat. As Dr. Offit tells the story, in the 1970s the government advised cutting down on fat consumption. In the 1980s the message changed. Unsaturated fats were good; only saturated fats were bad: Eat margarine, not butter. But then it turned out that unsaturated fats came in two forms, known to chemists as “cis” and “trans,” and that “trans fats” were appallingly active promoters of heart disease. Margarine and hydrogenated vegetable cooking oils, whose use had been encouraged, were rich in trans fats. After 40 years of seriously incorrect advice, trans fats were mostly eliminated from the American diet only in 2012.

. . .

Besides his overconfidence in the checking mechanisms of science, Dr. Offit goes too easy on the motives of those who abuse science. Environmentalists, for instance, are interested in achieving political results, not in distracting scientific caveats and uncertainties, which they do their best to suppress. It is their propensity to take everything to excess that leads to obscurantist positions, such as irrational fear of genetically modified crops.

For the full review see:

Nicholas Wade. “A Little Knowledge.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 8, 2017 [sic]): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated April 7, 2017 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The book under review is:

Offit, Paul A. Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2017.

Potential Malaria Breakthrough Drug Forgotten and Now Ignored Due to Its Chemical Relative and Its Venue of Invention

Progress in science, like progress everywhere, is not inevitable. Progress often requires champions or entrepreneurs to persist in overcoming obstacles. In the case of DFDT, the obstacles arise due to the drug’s association with the chemical DDT and with Nazi Germany, the first of which is unjustly reviled and the second of which is justly reviled. But DFDT should not be judged by either its relatives or its venue of origins It should be judged by its efficacy against malaria, and by its effects, if any, on the environment.

(p. D1) In postwar Allied intelligence reports examined by Dr. Ward and his colleagues, German scientists claimed their insecticide, now called DFDT, was more effective than DDT. Allied officials dismissed those assertions as fanciful, especially given the deplorable behavior of Hoechst, the German chemical manufacturer that developed the insecticide, during the war. The company had forced residents of countries occupied by Germany to work in its factories, and it tested drugs on concentration camp prisoners.

The insecticide was forgotten for decades.

Now, work by Dr. Ward and his colleagues, reported this month [Oct. 2019] in an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, appears to corroborate the German claims. The forgotten compound killed mosquitoes in as little as one-fourth the time as DDT.

. . .

(p. D4) Conceivably the more lethal DFDT could be used in even smaller, possibly safer doses. A new option could allow public health officials to rotate insecticides and thwart the resistance to DDT in many mosquitoes today.

“It’s exciting and desperately needed,” said Duane J. Gubler, an emeritus professor in the emerging infectious diseases program at Duke University and the National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School. He was not involved in the study.

But will anyone today risk the time and money needed to determine whether DFDT could be a safe and effective tool against malaria as well as other mosquito-borne diseases like Zika, dengue and yellow fever?

“Donors, governments, they just don’t want the backlash, even if it’s not wholly justified,” said Bart Kahr, Dr. Ward’s colleague at N.Y.U. and an author of the paper.

. . .

The N.Y.U. chemists started the research with no interest in insecticides whatsoever.

They were studying materials that crystallize in a twisted helical pattern. One of the ways to identify such molecules is to scan the internet for images of crystals made by hobbyists. DDT, they found, exhibited the characteristic pinwheel gradients of a helical crystal when illuminated with polarized light.

Jingxiang Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at N.Y.U., started growing DDT crystals and found not only the expected crystals but also more jumbled, chaotic patterns.

“There was some organized and some crazy,” Dr. Kahr said. “We didn’t expect the other stuff, and that other stuff turned out to be a different arrangement of molecules in the crystal. That form wasn’t known to science.”

That led to the next set of experiments. “Since we have two forms,” Dr. Kahr said, “it was natural to ask, which of these forms was the historical killer of insects?”

It turned out that the chaotic form of DDT is deadlier.

As they were going through early scientific data on DDT, the N.Y.U. chemists found mentions of DFDT.

The compound, difluoro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane is the same molecule as DDT, except with fluorine atoms replacing two of the chlorines.

The Germans developed DFDT at least in part to avoid paying the licensing fees for DDT to the Swiss. It is also possible that the chemical ingredients for DFDT, although considerably more expensive at the time than those for DDT, may have been more readily available in wartime Germany.

. . .

Dr. Kahr wonders: If DFDT had displaced DDT, would the 1955 push have succeeded in bringing malaria under control before resistance set in? “What if this compound wasn’t forgotten,” he said. “What would the world be like? Science doesn’t go as linearly as the general public thinks it does.”

For the full story see:

Kenneth Chang. “Old Mix To Fight Malaria?” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 22, 2019 [sic]): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed month, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 22, 2019 [sic], and has the title “A Nazi Version of DDT Was Forgotten. Could It Help Fight Malaria?” Where the more detailed online version differs from the print version, the passages quoted above follow the print [sic] version.)

The academic article co-authored by Ward, Kahr, and others, and mentioned above, is:

Zhu, Xiaolong, Chunhua T. Hu, Jingxiang Yang, Leo A. Joyce, Mengdi Qiu, Michael D. Ward, and Bart Kahr. “Manipulating Solid Forms of Contact Insecticides for Infectious Disease Prevention.” Journal of the American Chemical Society 141, no. 42 (2019): 16858-64.

The Ingenuity of Scientists and Entrepreneurs Can Find New Uses for the Previously Useless or Underutilitized

(p. D2) It may be unpleasant to contemplate the ultimate fate of all the material from your own body that you flush down the pipes. But it’s time we talk about biosolids — the disinfected leftovers from the water treatment process.

This sandy material contains nutrient-rich organic content that’s good for agriculture. But it also makes nice bricks, according to Abbas Mohajerani, a civil engineer at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia. He’s talking about the kind we use for building.

“Biosolids bricks look the same, smell the same and have similar physical and mechanical properties as normal fired clay bricks,” he said.

For the full story see:

JoAnna Klein. “Ultimate Recycling: When You Flushed The Toilet, They Made A Few Bricks.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 5, 2019 [sic]): D2.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 31, 2019 [sic], and has the title “You Flushed the Toilet. They Made Some Bricks.” Where the versions differ, the passages quoted above are from the more detailed online version.)

Mohajerani’s co-authored academic article proposing that human manure can usefully be turned into bricks for buildings is:

Mohajerani, Abbas, Aruna Ukwatta, Tristan Jeffrey-Bailey, Michael Swaney, Mohtashim Ahmed, Glen Rodwell, Simon Bartolo, Nicky Eshtiaghi, and Sujeeva Setunge. “A Proposal for Recycling the World’s Unused Stockpiles of Treated Wastewater Sludge (Biosolids) in Fired-Clay Bricks.” Buildings 9, no. 1 (2019): article #14.