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Last week, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington shocked the internet by announcing they’ve discovered a new color that can be experienced only when firing a laser into your retinas. Only five people have seen this color, a blue-green shade called olo. But over the weekend, artist-provocateur Stuart Semple decided to widen the pool by synthesizing olo into an acrylic paint color he named Yolo. Ironically, Yolo is a color you cannot seeat least not accuratelyunless you buy a bottle of the acrylic paint and see it with your own eyes. A 150-milliliter bottle costs $10,000 ($35 if you’re an artist) and is decidedly more accessible than olo. But can it ever be the same? [Photo: courtesy Culture Hustle] Liberating color This isn’t Semple’s first foray into the superlative world of colors. Over the past few years (fueled by various feuds with the artist Anish Kapoor) Semple has created the world’s pinkest pink, followed by the world’s blackest black. In 2021, he hacked Tiffany’s trademarked blue and made his own version, Tiff Blue, which everyone could buy. [Photo: courtesy CultureHustle] A self-described color nerd, Semple has been on a mission to liberate color, as he puts it. If olo really is a new colora claim that’s been contestedhe believes more than five people should be able to experience it. Can’t everyone have a go? Apparently, theyd like to. Within minutes, my DMs were crazy, he says of the requests that poured in from artists and friends alike. Semple spent all night developing Yolo and put it up on his website on Saturday. My sister messaged me about it the following day, and I was like, already done it, he says with a laugh. Within 48 hours of launching Yolo, Semple had sold close to 500 bottles. [Photo: courtesy Culture Hustle] From lasers to pigments The human eye can perceive about 10 million colors known as the visible light spectrum. We see these colors thanks to three kinds of cone cells in our retinas that respond to three specific bands of light: long (red), medium (green), and short (blue). But we dont just see the world in RGB. Our brains blend signals from these cones to fill in the gaps, conjuring colors like oranges, teals, and purples. To re-create olo, Stuart pored over the recent study, which was published in the scientific journal Science Advances, and pulled the color’s chromatic coordinates. These told him where on the visible light spectrum his own color should sit. Then, he set out on a surprisingly low-tech journey of mixing bases and pigments until he landed on the right formula. It’s like baking a cake and tasting it, he says, except instead of his taste buds, he used a spectrometer to see how close each swatch came to olo’s coordinates. But Semple didnt focus only on pigmentshe also looked at texture. In the world of paint, a glossy finish reflects more light than a matte finish, which scatters light in all directions. If you shine a light on a smooth snooker ball, it will bounce off a very small point; but if you shine that same light on a fuzzy tennis ball, the light will get diffused, flattened. Semple’s Black 3.0 paintthe blackest, flattest acrylic paint available on the planetabsorbs 99% of all the visible spectrum. Yolo does the opposite. It reflects 96% of light, but only in the narrow green-blue slice of the spectrum. The other wavelengths are absorbed by the paint. Thats why it looks like its glowing, Semple says. [Photo: courtesy Culture Hustle] You have to see it to believe it The color you see on this screen comes close, but you can’t fully experience it here, or even in a book, because neither can reproduce the exact wavelength the paint captures: Screens use red, green, and blue pixels; printers use cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. To truly experience Yolo, you have to see it in person, which suits Semple just fine: I make things for people with eyes, not computers, he says. Still, the artist claims Yolo is the closest we can get to olo without having a laser fired into our eyeballs. He acknowledges that the litmus test would be to show Yolo to one of those five people, but the scientists did not respond to our requests for comment. If a screen cant fully capture Yolo, then what kind of color can we expect? Over the course of a 30-minute phone call, Semple used the word weird four times until, finally, he landed on a weird luminous teal.
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E-Commerce
To help a North Carolina community recovering from Tropical Storm Helene, a tulip farm in the Netherlands gave the gift of flowers. Dutch Grown runs a tulip farm in Voorhout, South Holland, and a warehouse in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where it ships out its flower bulbs to customers across the U.S. After Helene devastated western North Carolina last September, Marco Rosenbruck, a Dutch immigrant who moved to the region, reached out to the company with photos of the devastation asking for a few boxes of bulbs. Dutch Grown ended up sending 31 boxes filled with 10,000 bulbs for tulips, daffodils, and peonies. [Photo: ExploreAsheville.com] “At Dutch Grown, our motto is: ‘To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.’ When tulips bloom in spring, they bring hope and joy to the entire community. Dutch Grown co-owner Ben Rotteveel tells Fast Company. The company’s generosity has now helped Rosenbruck’s new home of Swannanoa, North Carolina, beautify a local park. Rozenbroek engaged the help of a local student for some landscape design to plant the bulbs, and they’re expected to bloom for the first time this spring. “Flowers give hope,” Rozenbroek told Blue Ridge Public Radio. [Photo: ExploreAsheville.com] North Carolina officials estimate Helene did $59.6 billion worth of damage in the state, and Swannanoa, a community of more than 5,000 people about a hour north of the South Carolina border, was especially devastated. The storm took out a bridge and damaged homes, but in the aftermath of the storm, Grovemont Park, where the flowers were planted, became a hub for the community where meals were distributed. [Photo: ExploreAsheville.com] Gardening can have unexpected benefits for communities recovering from disasters. Research into community gardens in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and New York City after Hurricane Sandy found these spaces help build resilience because they empowered residents and helped connect them with each other, strengthening the social bonds needed to rebuild together. Grovemont Park has already done that for Swannanoa, and now the flowers will serve as a reminder. Landscape design can make our public areas more welcoming. By beautifying and intentionally designing outdoor spaces that people are meant to spend time in and enjoy, landscape design gives a physical dimension to community. Through this massive planting endeavor in North Carolina, Rozenbroek created an inviting, functional, and visually harmonious space as the community continues to rebuild from Helene. “After the storm, we figured out that community is the basics of everything,” says Rozenbroek. “People are willing to help each other and to make beauty. Isn’t that where humanity is meant to be?” [Photo: ExploreAsheville.com] Tulips don’t help build bridges or homes, but that doesn’t mean Dutch Grown’s gift won’t have an impact. The tulip garden shows the practical benefits of beautification; creating a relatively low-lift project that allows those recovering from disaster to grow closer and rebuild together; and allowing community members to rest their eyes on the perennial joys and habits of spring.
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E-Commerce
Less than a year after announcing plans to establish a hydrogen-based aviation fuel hub at Pittsburgh International Airport, Pennsylvania-based natural gas producer CNX has quietly taken down the website on which it advertised the hub. The move comes as the fate of the much-vaunted hydrogen industryseen by the Biden administration as a way to power America while reducing climate-altering emissionsis in upheaval. While a Biden-era rule dealt a blow to those in the gas and oil industry hoping to invest in hydrogen technology and offered greater financial incentives to the renewable energy sector, President Donald Trump is showing preference for fossil fuel-powered hydrogen. Meanwhile, the fate of those Biden-era tax creditswhether for renewable energy or fossil fuelis up in the air as Congress wades through the budget reconciliation process. Under Trumps guidance, the Department of Energy has indicated it plans to kill Biden-era funding for four renewable-powered hydrogen hubs in primarily Democratic regions while retaining funds for fossil fuel-powered hubs in mostly red states, such as South Dakota, Ohio, and Kentucky. California, along with Oregon, Washington and other regions, are on the Department of Energys cut list, according to Politico, which said it obtained a spreadsheet of the projects. If the recommendations are ultimately adopted by the Trump administration, Pennsylvania would very much become a state divided. While a proposed hub in the Appalachian region that would run on fossil fuels is marked for approval, a hub mostly reliant on renewable energy near Philadelphia is marked for denial. The seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs were a main plank of former President Joe Bidens climate agenda, a $7 billion effort to establish a national network of hydrogen producers to slow the use of the fossil fuels largely blamed for global warming. But with four of the hubs eliminated, the envisioned national hydrogen grid would become a patchwork, seemingly drawn along political lines and primarily powered by polluting sources of energy. The hydrogen hubs program was intended to spur innovations and demonstrations on how best to advance hydrogen as a tool in the clean energy economy, said Julie McNamara, associate policy director for the Climate & Energy program at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. Blatantly co-opting these funds for use as handouts to political supporters and favored polluters would be shameful, and fully undermine the programs ability to achieve those aims. While the Pennsylvania hub fueled by natural gas would use methane to provide energy for the production of so-called blue hydrogen, the other hub would use renewable energy such as wind and solar to produce whats known as green hydrogen. By itself, the burning of hydrogen doesn’t produce carbon dioxide emissions. CNX was originally involved in the former hub, known as ARCH2, but told the Pittsburgh Business Times in March that it had paused involvement in the project because of the uncertainty surrounding federal funding. CNXs name was also deleted from the ARCH2 website. CNX did not respond to requests for comment on the status of the hydrogen hub and the sustainable aviation fuel site in Pittsburgh. A spokesperson for the airport said it is continuing to move forward with its plans to become one of the first airports to have sustainable fuel production on-site. CNX was initially one of 15 companies enlisted in the hub, with plans to contribute low carbon natural gas to power hydrogen production, which entails using steam to draw off the hydrogen atoms from methane molecules, an expensive and energy intensive process. But the companys evolving relationship with the hydrogen industry appears to have soured when the Biden administration finalized a long-awaited federal rule on a tax credit for hydrogen production called 45V. That final rule, CNX argued, was overly restrictive, and failed to create sufficient economic incentives for the company to expand its production of methane released from abandoned coal mines, which it said was key to the growing hydrogen economy. CNX pitched its involvement in the Sustainable Aviation Fuel project in Pittsburgh as being dependent upon the outcome of the 45V rule. We saw the fossil fuel industry view 45V as a lucrative chance for profit, McNamara said. Not by truly reducing emissions, but by introducing loopholes that made it easier to qualify. CNX had previously lobbied for the intricacies of 45V to work out in its favor. A little more than a year ago, a CNX lobbyist pushed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiros office to lobby the federal government to ensure the Treasury Departments hydrogen rule was lucrative for coal mine methanea request to which the Shapiro administration agreed, Capital & Main reported at the time. The value the rule gave to coal mine-derived natural gas came down to a series of arcane specifics in a formula that measures life-cycle emissions from beginning to end of the creation of a single kilogram of hydrogen. CNX urged the Treasury Department to treat coal mine methane as carbon-negative with the assumption that it would otherwise leak into the atmosphere from inactive coal mines, releasing a more potent greenhouse gas than if it were captured and burned, which would release carbon dioxide. (Both are greenhouse gases, but methane is well understood to be around 80 times more potent in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 20-year timeframe.) By ascribing to this captured methane a negative value, a tinyportion of it could be blended into a natural gas hydrogen feedstock and qualify for the highest tier of the 45V tax incentive, the same level as hydrogen produced with renewable energy. But the final rule went against the pleas of CNX and companies like it, including the ARCH2 hub itself, which urged the Treasury Department to pass a methane-friendly rule in 2024, arguing it could lead to a loss of $6 billion in private investments otherwise and have far-reaching consequences for the hydrogen industry. Its like the Treasury Department went out of its way to say, We hear what youre saying. And the answer is no, said Sean OLeary, senior researcher at the nonprofit think tank Ohio River Valley Institute. The ruling was seen as a win for environmentalists, who urged the Treasury Department to ensure that any projects receiving subsidies under the guise of being clean were in fact clean. They feared CNXs proposal, and that of other fossil fuel producers, wouldve given natural-gas based hydrogen a tax boost equal to that for renewable, emissions-free sources of hydrogen. How and whether the rule will be upheld by the Trump administrationwhich has shown strong support for fossil fuels and a general disdain for renewable energyremains an open question, and one of concern to environmentalists. According to Bloomberg, the American Petroleum Institute, a national oil and gas trade group, has lobbied the White House to ensure fossil fuels can qualify for the highest tier of the hydrogen tax credit. OLeary sees CNXs apparent exit from ARCH2 as a sign of the hubs strained economics. In October, OLeary authored a paper in which he noted that the hub had lost four of its development partners, while a handful of others were showing signs of financial stress. This is not a resume that inspires confidence among prospective investors, OLeary wrote. CNXs reluctance to move forward signals a broader trend within the industry, OLeary said in an interview with Capital & Main. The wheels are coming off, OLeary said. Even after subsidies are taken into account, the economics still arent there to make many of these projects work. Another project development partner for ARCH2, KeyState Energy, is also showing signs of uncertainty. In February, a primary customer for its blue hydrogen, Nikola Corporation, a transportation company that had planned to use the hydrogen for a zero-emission truck fleet, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company plans to sell its assets. KeyState CEO Perry Babb told Capital & Main the company had pivoted from its energy production project with Nikola to a new ammonia fertilizer project that has a committed customer, and will still rely on hydrogen and receive funds from ARCH2. The first payment from the hubs program has been doled out and KeyState will invoice for reimbursement soon, he said. Babb said he still meets regularly with the remaining ARCH2 project partners, who are all positive in expressing a way forward. But he noted that, for years, hes weathered regulatory uncertainty; the final 45V rule was the nail in the coffin for Keystates original plans to produce blue hydrogen under ARCH2. He said the company has also put its participation in the Pittsburgh Sustainable Aviation Fuel hub on pause. Last May, I began to notice dozens of hydrogen projects being canceled, he said. I had thought that it was essentially because the business case wasnt sound. With the continued uncertainty around tax credits through the end of the Biden administration . . . we said, Thats it. Were done. Were going to go where theres a market thats predictable. While failing to find a partner in the Biden-era Treasury Department, CNX could soon turn to the state, where Gov. Shapiro is reupping a $49 million tax credit for hydrogen production as part of his Lightning Plan, a six-pronged portfolio of legislation designed to speed up the commonwealths clean energy economy. Though supported by some state environmental groups, the plan caught the ire of others, like Karen Feridun, cofounder of the grassroots Better Path Coalition, who said in a statement that the Lightning Plan would continue and even expand fossil fuel production. On March 11, a group of Democratic senators and representatives introduced 12 cosponsorship memos, six in each chamber, carrying out Shapiros plan. Hes going to do whatever he needs to do to try to keep [hydrogen] going, Feridun said of Shapiro in an interview with Capital & Main. Its a nice way to kind of provide cover for having a continued fossil fuel plan, one that sounds really good to voters. Should ARCH2 unravel, Feridun fears grassroots environmentalists would be tasked with tracking individual projects, without the cohesion of a hub offering guidance. Even so, she said there never was a clear map that defined what the footprint of all of this was, which left frontline communities in the dark. Like OLeary, Danny Cullenward, senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said he now sees the hydrogen hype bubble beginning to burst. Though he believes hydrogen has an important, if niche, place in the clean energy transition, its economics dont make sense in all uses unless heavily subsidized. We basically set up a structure that said, at the end of this rainbow is a giant pot of gold. And everybody said, Wed all like to do that. That all sounds great to us, he said. I think now the cold, hard reality of, Does hydrogen make sense? And in what applications would it make sense? is becoming a little bit more real. The whiplash of all this impacts Pennsylvania communities, many that are former oil, gas, and coal towns learning that major projects theyd once planned for are no longer. Its immensely damaging, OLeary said. State or even county and municipal level governments, theyre making economic development choices based on these expectations. The distraction impact of whats going on is just staggering. This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
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E-Commerce
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