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Hey it’s Steve - this is our weekly newsletter about Cues’ sliver of Bed-Stuy and its stuff.

• Saturday 3/14 2pm - Book Swap @ Cues HQ. rsvp
• Wednesday 3/18 8am - Block-wide Collection @ 706 Jefferson Ave. rsvp

SINCE YOU ASKED: What inspired Cues?

If the best books are those that tell you what you know already, then Sustainability Without the Hot Air hammers home: there’s just too much stuff.

Dr. David MacKay, a professor at Cambridge University, wrote Sustainability Without the Hot Air. It’s a textbook. Which means it’s Infinite Jest long, has more pictures than a a comic strip, and fifty percent of it is written in equation. The website is difficult to navigate. All the data is ascribed to the United Kingdom. It’s in the metric system. And they spell gray “grey.”

Still, the book cuts to the chase: “We have an addiction to fossil fuels, and it’s not sustainable,” writes Dr. MacKay. We’re addicted to comfort: driving, in our homes, our food, and of course, our stuff. MacKay does the arithmetic of our consumption and the needed green energy to balance out our gluttony. Lowering the thermostat improves our carbon footprint. Paper straws and feeling conflicted about torn pant cuffs do not. Public transportation helps. Unplugging a phone charger for a day does not.

Now if you open your textbook and turn to page 88, you’ll see the bit part about stuff. Creating new stuff is tied to one-fourth of all energy consumed. To offset a day’s worth of our consumption, Dr. MacKay guesses we would need to cover the equivalent of five percent of the land mass of Oregon with solar panels. That’s 12,431,942,930 square meters. Even an American like me can learn the metric system.

Cues won’t build any solar (yet?). Thanks to this book, we’ll make second hand very easy and very local.

A MATERIAL WORLD: Metal Water Bottles

Making a metal tube that holds water isn’t all that difficult once you have the mined nickel and iron, the processed chromium, a readied electric arc furnace, the three-hundred thousand tons of recycled metal to kindle a fire of three-thousand degrees, and a few fabrication plants based in Yongkang, China.

From there it’s just a matter of which American company wants to provide their new class of junior associates a few of the six-hundred million metal tubes made each year. High finance is a blood sport. Tech never seems to leave the trenches. We need to stay hydrated. And to floss.

One of these days, one of the four metal water bottles we, on average, own will need to be replaced by whatever trend Stanley conjures. Know that you can recycle the bottle’s stainless steel into infinity, or whenever they release all the Epstein files. Whatever comes first.