The Sunday Review
Another week of 2021 has begun. The cherry blossoms should be coming into their full bloom in the District of Columbia. I used to look forward to seeing them every spring when I was at the University of Maryland or living in Bethesda. New England is warming up and people are starting to row and sail on the Charles River. We have escaped the frozen grip of winter. This time of year reminds of a poem by A.E. Housman (introduced to me via Mike Olmert):
Loveliest of Trees
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
This poem is a great reminder that our time here is finite. For me it’s a useful way to think about what is most important to me. A way to focus my attention. The last six months I’ve been writing this newsletter have felt very important.
What I Wrote Last Week
Externalizing The Costs Of Our Modern Lives
These thoughts have been lurking in the back of my mind for a long time. Writing this newsletter has helped focus them and interacting with readers and people I’ve interviewed have helped hone them. This Tuesday issue of the newsletter is what came out as a result and from what I can tell has resonated with my fellow chemists and non-chemists.
DuPont Acquires Laird and Danimer Partners with Mars Wrigley
Some of you might wonder why I focus on the financial aspects of the chemical industry and I always think back to a conversation with one of my roommates when I was living in Bethesda. We were discussing our jobs and their importance to the economy during the start of the Great Recession recovery. I viewed myself as a creator of goods while he saw himself as an allocator of capital. I considered myself at the time to be “adding more value” than he was or that is how I remembered my argument. He retorted something to the effect of, “You might invent something in the lab, but I allocate the money to enable you to have a lab where you can invent something.”
The spirit of that statement has stuck with me ever since. The finance of the chemical industry is just as important or maybe even more important in some ways than the actual invention and production of the goods and services. If there is no economic model for the business then it might as well be an academic exercise.
What I Read Last Week That Stuck With Me
Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern Agree to Combine to Create the First U.S.-Mexico-Canada Rail Network
It was a surprise to me that there was no rail network that connected Canada, the US, and Mexico. I thought this was a really cool read. Infrastructure is going to be the topic of the next decade.
A Global Green Deal
By URSULA VON DER LEYEN, WERNER HOYER
Ursula von der Leyen is President of the European Commission and Werner Hoyer is President of the European Investment Bank. This ties in nicely with my own writing for the week. If we want avert climate change it has to be deep and systemic. It will require money, but it will also require chemical technology.
Coffee capsules put to use for coronavirus tests
by Laura Howes for Chemical and Engineering News
I just thought this was a really cool story. Sometimes a lot of knowledge combined with constrained resources leads to really cool innovation. It gave me a whole new appreciation for the classic Nespresso capsule.
What I Listened To Last Week
I listen to a lot of podcasts while I walk. I listened to a Masters in Business episode recently where Barry Ritzholtz interviewed Ron Baron. What I always find inspiring about Ron Baron is that he started off as a chemist working at the patent office as an examiner and now he is a billionaire investor. To listen to or read the whole thing go here. Here is an excerpt I found on YouTube:
Talk to you Tuesday,