Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Lego ditches oil-free brick in sustainability setback

Summary: The largest toy company in the world, Lego, has announced that it will be abandoning a previously touted effort to remove all oil-based plastics from its product line by 2030, citing years of research that indicates transitioning to recycled plastic would actually produce more carbon emissions than if they changed nothing.

Context: This is being seen as one more example of how complex and circuitous the process of decarbonizing can be, as while replacing their oil-based bricks with plastic made from recycled bottles would dramatically reduce the amount of emissions on the company’s ledger, replacing all their existing equipment to perform this changeover would have produced more total emissions, overall, not less, so taking the totality of the consequences of this shift into account has resulted in a counterintuitive finding, and that, in turn, means the company will instead focus on attempting to reduce the carbon footprint of the plastic it currently uses, while also expanding efforts it began in 2018 to swap-in plant-based plastics for some products, and to remove single-use plastic from all of its packaging by 2025.

—Financial Times

One Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

SAG-AFTRA members vote in favor of video game strike authorization

Summary: The SAG-AFTRA actor’s union has voted to authorize a strike against 10 major video game companies, with 98.32% of the union’s voting members casting ballots in favor of the authorization.

Context: This authorization was announced the day after it was announced that the WGA writer’s guild has reached a tentative deal with Hollywood studios, though most film- and TV-making activity won’t be able to continue at its usual clip until those same studios reach a deal with the actors (and recent reports indicate they haven’t even met up with each other, recently); this new strike authorization is focused on similar concerns held by actors in the film and TV space, specifically that actors in the video game industry aren’t getting their fair share of profits, that higher-ups are doing a lot of firing, which results in more profits for industry higher-ups, but less power and more work for the workers, and that AI may be used exploitatively against said workers, further reinforcing this power and compensation imbalance; the video game industry has expanded by leaps and bounds over the past decade, and is now substantially larger than the film and music industries, combined.

—Variety

Libya’s top prosecutor orders eight officials arrested after flood disaster

Summary: The chief prosecutor of Libya has ordered the arrest and detention of eight officials who have been deemed potentially responsible for the recent flood that killed thousands of people in the eastern portion of the country.

Context: The core of this disaster is attributable to the collapse of two dams outside the city of Derna, and though the rainfall was torrential, the resulting inland tsunami from those dams collapsing is what washed several neighborhoods full of people out to sea; the latest official death toll is at 3,800 people, with 10,000 or more still missing, and seven current and former officials from the agencies responsible for managing these dams, and the city’s mayor, have been apprehended and are being questioned by Libyan law enforcement.

—Al Jazeera

In the US, women (at every age) pay more out-of-pocket than men, even when they have the same health insurance—and that’s true even when you exclude maternity-related expenses from the numbers; this is thought to be the consequence of women requiring relatively more expensive treatments and screenings compared to men, and the fact that women tend to use health care more often (in part because of additional gynecological checkups and exams).

—Axios

$82.60

Cost of NCM811 battery cells per kWh, at the moment.

This is important because these are the sorts of battery cells typically used in electric vehicles, and that’s around the price necessary to assemble $100-per-kWh EV battery packs—a tipping-point figure for reaching EV price-parity with gas-guzzling vehicles.

For context, when the original Nissan Leaf EV was released in 2011, the typical price for a kWh was around $1000, so a lot of price-relevant progress has been made in this space in a relatively short period of time.

—Jalopnik

Trust Click

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit onesentencenews.substack.com