Willa Rubin
Appearances
Planet Money
ZIP Codes!
The J.W. Westcott II, that is the boat that is, I guess you might say, the iconic piece that's known worldwide. It's a great handling boat. It's a single screw, diesel driven, and made for the trade.
Planet Money
ZIP Codes!
A lot of the first class letters, if they were going to guys aboard the boats, would certainly have some of them be scented with perfume and things of this nature.
Planet Money
ZIP Codes!
Yeah, we don't see so much of that anymore, you know, with iPhones and Android and this and the other thing with email.
Planet Money
ZIP Codes!
As the population grew, there needed to be a more streamlined system. And I'm basically surmising here because I've never thought about really looking into it.
Planet Money
Tariffs, grocery prices and other listener questions
Why are groceries still so expensive? Why has inflation decreased but food is still 25% more?
Search Engine
Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
Hi, Alexi. Hey, PJ. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm enjoying the very beginning of spring.
Search Engine
Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
We are now entering, once again, a moment in which the economy is both confusing and somewhat terrifying. And it's like, I'm very glad PlanetMoney is here.
Search Engine
Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
I really had not understood how much meme coins had evolved since I was last seriously covering crypto. But that world has gotten much stranger and wilder, even compared to just 2022, for a very specific reason. This is a story about why that happened. I first heard it on Planet Money, but I liked it so much, I wanted to share it with you here. I'm going to let Alexi take it away.
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Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
So that was Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi with Nick Nevis. If you enjoyed the story, there's a second part. It's called The Parable of Peanut the Meme Coin. You can find it now on the Planet Money feed. We'll also just have a link in our show notes. Also, if you haven't just tried Planet Money as a podcast,
Search Engine
Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
I really think if you enjoy our show, which tries to make sense of a confusing world, you'll probably enjoy theirs, which is on a similar mission with a similar bent towards curiosity and fun. That Planet Money episode you just heard was produced by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jang with help from Keith Romer. Fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Neil Rausch.
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Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. And we will have a new episode of Search Engine hosted by me next week. We'll see you then.
Search Engine
Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
Everyone should have at least one season they enjoy. It's true. I'm still in search. This is Alexey Horowitz-Gazy. He's a reporter whose work I very much enjoy. He's also one of the hosts at Planet Money. Does that show need an introduction? They're a long-running, very smart NPR show that explains, week by week, the world of things driven by markets.
Search Engine
Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
So, just a couple weeks ago, we actually did a story with one of your NPR colleagues, Bobby Allen, that was about Doge, the government commission. Yes, the legend. The legend. Today, we're doing a story with you that actually, weirdly, a little bit is like almost lore or backstory to Doge. Like, it's in part about Doge the meme coin.
Search Engine
Planet Money: The Memecoin Casino
Yeah, it's funny. I mean, Planet Money, your show, which when we were beginning to pilot Search Engine, we talked a lot about Planet Money and how at its genesis, we were like in the mortgage crisis and everybody was looking for explanation. And Planet Money kind of like arose to make sense of something that needed sense making. I feel like...
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
At the train station, I met up with Stefan Simonidis-Noak.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Stefan has lived in Cottbus for a long time. He works for the city council, and he's an urban planner working here.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Wait, did he just say lake? Uh-huh. Because, Emily, Stefan and his colleagues are turning this giant former mining pit into a huge lake. It'll be the biggest mining pit turned lake in... in all of Germany. It's even in the lake's name, Cottbusser Ostsee. In German, that literally means Cottbus East Lake, okay? But it's also a play on words that means Cottbus Baltic Sea.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Hey, Shortwave. I come to you with a story. All right, let's hear it. So about two hours southeast of Berlin, there's a city called Cottbus. It's pretty small. About 100,000 people live there. For context, this is in eastern Germany, near the Polish border. And so historically, this part of Germany had a lot of lignite mining. This is a fossil fuel that is dark brown. It's soft.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
And that is like the dream that Stefan and his colleagues are chasing. A mini Baltic Sea right near the city center. Yes.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Willa Rubin. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
What does it look like? Emily, this lake is huge. That was my first impression. But honestly, what really took me aback were all the birds.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Another thing that I noticed is that the sides of the lake were all boarded up. The lake itself is not open to the public yet.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
When it is done, this is going to be the largest human-made lake in Germany with a shoreline of 26 kilometers or about 16 miles all around where people can go and swim and be in nature. There's also a little tourism boost as well. And it takes lots of research to get that science right. And one scientist, who has done so much work on pit lakes in Eastern Germany, is Martin Schulze.
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This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
When you see lakes in your mind, do you see all of the different chemical calculations and so forth? Are you thinking about what's really happening beneath the surface?
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Martin is a research professor at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research. He has written a lot about post-mining lakes in Eastern Germany and around the world.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
He is super passionate about it, and he is one of the people who kind of wrote this playbook about how to turn a mining pit into a lake.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Okay, so first, when you stop mining, groundwater starts to creep back up to the surface. And what do you mean by groundwater? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when mines are operating, mines are kept super, super dry, and And all that groundwater, this is water that is normally below the surface of, in this case, lignite.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
That groundwater is normally, when mines are operating, getting pumped out into local rivers. And it's being really closely monitored because, you know, no one wants mines to flood, especially when people are working in those mines. Absolutely not. Then when mining stops, that dewatering process also stops.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Basically, they switch off some pumps, and then groundwater starts coming back into these pits.
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This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Like, kinda, sorta, not really. Oh. You start to get water filling up the pit, which is great, but a couple of problems. The first is that it can take many, many decades for all of the groundwater to come back on its own. That's problem number one. And problem number two is that the groundwater that is lying beneath the lignite, once it reaches the air, it is often incredibly acidic.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
It's kind of like an intermediate between hard coal and petroleum coke.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Because when that groundwater comes back up to the surface, it often comes into contact with oxidation products of pyrite. This is a shimmery, golden-looking mineral. Sometimes it's called fool's gold. And it can cause a lot of problems.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Mm-hmm. This groundwater can be, like, less than three on the pH scale, like lemon juice. We should be swimming in water that is close to, like, seven or eight on a pH scale. Oh, gosh. Okay, so—
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Yeah, lignite. Then after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Germany reunified East and West in the early 90s, a lot of mines in the former East shut down, mostly for economic reasons or they ran out of coal. Then there was this pressing problem.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
So there's a couple methods. One is a sort of like break glass in case of emergency method. And that is to add limestone powder. So thinking about pH, limestone, lime is a base. So then that helps to balance out the acidity. But this treatment also tends to be pretty expensive. And it also isn't like the most natural method to treat acidity.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Add water from rivers. You know, get some fresh water in the mix.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Yes. So, okay, so part one of this playbook, which is, you know, neutralizing the groundwater's acidity, so far in Cottbus, they have managed to do this without limestone powder and Since 2019, lake designers have been flooding the pit with water from the Spree River, which goes up to Berlin. And now the pH is about 8. We love it.
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This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
And Stefan, the urban planner for the lake, says that the flooding is even on track to finish next year. Very cool. Okay, so the lake is almost to the level they would like. But Emily, they are not the only ones who also want spray water. Because there are other pit lakes, smaller ones, but they also get water from the spray. Even nature preserves, like the Spray Forest outside of Berlin.
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This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Environmental groups have expressed concerns about this. Because the Spray River is drying up anyway. And then with Germany going renewable and phasing out mines over the course of the next decade... All that means that the Spree River isn't getting as much water as it used to, like from mines that were once pumping a lot of water into the Spree.
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This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
So now everyone is sort of taking turns, making agreements, essentially competing for an increasingly limited resource. On the other hand, without water from the spray, there would be that Swiss cheese landscape. So that's kind of the balancing act when trying to restore nature, but with limited natural resources. That is sort of a cash 22 to all of this, huh? Yeah, exactly.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
And for the Cottbusser OSE, this has contributed to why the flooding has taken a while, which has also contributed to another problem. the shoreline. Because ideally, you'd have to fill a pit with water very quickly. Why is that? Like, picture this. You have groundwater seeping into the lake from the bottom and sides of the pit, and then pipes and channels, they bring river water into the pit.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
And together, these put pressure on the pit, which then stabilizes the shoreline around it.
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This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
There were a bunch of holes in the ground that used to be mines, but now looked like a landscape of Swiss cheese, which is not awesome aesthetically or safety-wise. And so the city of Cottbus has a really interesting plan. And One sweltering day in September, I went to go see one of these pits, 20 minutes east of the city.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
And shorelines can also be unstable because of the materials on the sidewalls or of how the waves work once there is water in the pit lake. There is a lot to monitor. And the shoreline has been this ongoing challenge. And the stakes of figuring that out are high.
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This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
The city of Cottbus, also the German state that it's in, Brandenburg, even private businesses, they have invested a lot of money into making this lake accessible to the public. There are plans for houses and businesses by the shoreline. Millions of euros have already been spent on a bike path around the lake. So they are determined to figure this out with more time.
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This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
And that's what I was struck by as we drove around the lake. Even though the lake is still in progress, there were already people there just sitting by their cars, beers in hand, enjoying the view. They're already part of the way there.
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This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Translation help from Alex Passeltiener, my boyfriend, who speaks German.