Welcome back to Greenwashed! π
In today's issue, we're covering a very important topic: the rise in attacks on the U.S. power grid.
But first, we wanted to share something. β¬οΈ
Our team is a group of students and recent graduates with a diverse set of skills, united only by the fact that we care about the environment. We embraced this diversity, creating Greenwashed to help the fight against disinformation and Carbonisbad to give individuals easy access to climate action.
Missing from that list was a solution for institutions. Since companies commit the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions, we knew we needed to build something to help them in order to maximize our impact. Recently, we completed this mission with the launch of Carbonlink, our institutional offsetting platform.
Carbonlink is a full-stack offsetting solution that can take companies from the estimation stage all the way through to the compliance process. It leverages blockchain technology to ensure lower prices and higher credit quality, but since part of our mission to scale climate action is accessibility, we built Carbonlink with the unique perk of wallets that eliminate the need for any technical knowledge or alternative payment systems. β
This has been the culmination of many late nights, and we're over the moon that it's finally available to the public. If you're interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to admin@carbonlink.io. π€
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Grid Danger β‘οΈ
Stories of American power grid collapse have been on the rise in recent years thanks to famous events like the Texas snowstorm (a phrase that should be able to combat climate disinformation by itself), but adverse weather effects aren't the only issue at play.
Over the long-term, our grids need to get better as increased extreme weather becomes more common. However, the more immediate concern (one that is being extremely under-reported, in our opinion) is the rise in calculated attacks on the grid from human bad actors. β¬οΈ
Grid attacks have been rising every year, with 2022 representing a whopping 74% increase over the previous year. They're getting more ambitious too; last December, someone in North Carolina took out the power of 45,000 people by firing long-range gunshots at specific parts of the infrastructure that were critical failure points--a clear sign of sophisticated, intentional harm. Or, as local police put it:
"They knew exactly what they were doing".
As you can imagine, this is a massive issue. Power outages cause severe problems to pretty much every aspect of modern life, and prolonged ones almost always end in deaths. The book One Second After, which imagined in detail what would happen in the event of the US grid collapsing, was taken so seriously that Congress commissioned a panel on it even before it was published.
In the book, a foreign power conducts the grid attack. We may not be so lucky--in fact, it's more likely that the rise in attacks is due to domestic demand to create civil unrest, a trend that has only increased over the past decade. π¬
Thanks for reading! If you've been inspired to help out in the fight against the climate crisis, start by offsetting your emissions here or by subscribing below to stay up-to-date on all of the need-to-know climate problems and solutions.
