Arctic wave microgrids
Point-absorber wave farm design for off-grid coastal communities, engineered to displace barged diesel.
The Keeling Pledge unites atmospheric science, economic architecture, and geopolitical analysis into policy frameworks that advance national security across America, Europe, and Latin America.
"An attempt to flatten the Keeling curve (post-industrial GHG emissions) while embedding climate resilience within future national security frameworks."The Keeling Pledge, founding mandate
CO₂ gets the headlines, but other gases trap heat thousands of times more effectively per molecule. Fluorinated gases like SF₆ sit at the far extreme.
Lewis structures show valence electrons as bonding pairs (lines) and lone pairs (gold dots), with formal charges marked in red. N₂O and O₃ are drawn in their dominant resonance form; the true bonding is delocalized across equivalent structures. 100-year global-warming-potential (GWP) figures are approximate.
Real atmospheric molecules are never still. They translate, tumble, and their bonds stretch and bend, the very vibrational modes that let them absorb outgoing infrared and trap heat. Atoms are coloured by the CPK convention used in chemistry.
Schematic 2-D motion for illustration. CPK colours: carbon (dark), oxygen (red), nitrogen (blue), hydrogen (white). Bond orders shown as single, double, and triple lines.
Our advocacy centers on biomaterials, national security, education policy, and renewable energy. We designed a point-absorber wave farm for off-grid Arctic communities to displace barged diesel.
Point-absorber wave farm design for off-grid coastal communities, engineered to displace barged diesel.
Carbon-negative circular materials piloted at our Biomaterials Research Center, with replication guides published openly.
Briefings and conflict workshops connecting resource stress to national-security planning across partner regions.
Curriculum-to-workforce advocacy linking climate education with durable regional employment.
Rather than routing money through institutions, we award discretionary grants directly to Gen Z activists, between $3,500 and $8,500 each, for self-directed climate-action projects. The amount flexes with project scope, fieldwork costs, and the partners involved. Here is where some of it has gone.
Our advocacy reaches beyond renewable energy, spanning education, national security, water, and land policy across universities, resource agencies, and legislatures.
Grounded in atmospheric data and carbon cycle science, we back the durable low-carbon solutions the evidence supports.
Scarcity and displacement already reshape conflict. We propose land and conservation reforms that protect food and water before stress turns to violence.
From research funding to rare-earth policy, we design the economics that make climate resilience a national security asset.
Born as grassroots action, this work stays decentralized, youth-forward, and driven by those who inherit the consequences.
In 2024, The Keeling Pledge led a 13-county environmental law campaign across eastern Washington, a region acutely exposed to aquifer depletion and drought.
It combined legal research, organizing, and voter registration to defend groundwater protections for over 340,000 residents: science-grounded, legally rigorous, and measurably effective.
Center founded to show climate solutions and economic development align. First mycelium textile cycle begins.
Field teams reach 13 counties, using data targeting to engage climate-vulnerable communities.
Groundwater protections defended and cited by legislators as a model for community-driven advocacy.
Conservation rules governing aquifer draw-down rates for the Columbia Plateau and Palouse aquifer systems successfully defended for 340,000+ residents.
Mycelium textile production demonstrates viable circular economy alternatives to petroleum-based packaging at community scale, with replication guides published openly.
From policy research and public journalism to studio-based civic education and student pipeline programs, our output is designed to travel across institutions and generations.
Translating atmospheric and geopolitical data into actionable national security doctrine.
A Substack newsletter on climate, geopolitics, rare earth minerals, and resource-driven conflict.
Read on Substack →Workforce programs connecting Gen Z activists to the green energy sector, with hundreds placed to date.
Embedding our climate and civic framework into design challenges for high school students, with a public symposium.
Whether you represent a university, agency, parliament, or are a student ready to engage, we want to hear from you.
thorntondarelle@gmail.comThe link between climate stress and violence is measurable: a pathway from degradation through resource competition, state failure, and displacement into conflict. It is central to national security.
Climate stress does not pull triggers; it compounds existing fragilities. When drought cuts yields 30 to 40% in already-stressed regions, the resulting food insecurity, migration, and revenue collapse turn old grievances into violence.
The Sahel has lost over 48% of its arable land to desertification since 1960, alongside a 600% rise in organized violence. That is not coincidence.
In Syria, the 2007 to 2010 drought pushed 1.5 million farmers into cities, straining labor markets and sharpening tensions ahead of the 2011 uprising that displaced over 13 million.
Our position: Climate is a security issue deserving the same seriousness as nuclear proliferation or great-power competition. We build the policy infrastructure to treat it that way.
Drought, flood, sea-level rise, extreme heat reduce agricultural yields, freshwater access, and habitability.
Scarcity drives competition over land, water, and fisheries between communities, ethnic groups, and states.
Populations move. Receiving areas face rapid demographic change, labor market stress, and political backlash.
Revenue collapse, institutional overload, and legitimacy crises weaken governments' ability to manage grievances.
Pre-existing ethnic, political, and territorial disputes escalate under compounded stress into organized violence.
Qatar draws ~99% of its drinking water from desalination, with only days of reserve. A single strike on a Gulf plant can cut most of a city’s supply within hours, making total dependence a first-order vulnerability that warming deepens.
Illustrative scenario. Desalination dependence: Qatar General Electricity & Water Corp.; Gulf vulnerability: FAO / regional water-security analyses.
A climate-security simulation and strategic negotiation exercise on transboundary water governance. Halcyon tests how institutional design, verification, and structured diplomacy change the outcome when water scarcity meets fragile politics.
More than 270 river basins cross international borders. Under mounting drought and demand, mismanaged shared water can sharpen grievances and instability, yet the same systems open real room for cooperation. Halcyon places participants in the seats of national decision-makers during a fast-escalating water emergency to see which governance choices defuse a crisis and which inflame it.
Explore the simulation →A strategic negotiation exercise on transboundary water governance, built to reveal how institutions, verification, and timing decide whether scarcity ends in cooperation or conflict.
More than 270 river basins and countless aquifers cross international borders, supplying billions of people. Climate change is making those flows less predictable just as demand for food and energy climbs. Scarcity acts as a force multiplier: it amplifies the political, economic, and institutional weaknesses already present rather than creating conflict from nothing. Whether a basin tips toward contestation or cooperation depends far less on rainfall than on the systems built to manage it.
Failing harvests and lost income erode trust in governments seen as unfair or ineffective, hardening domestic politics.
Water shocks drive internal and cross-border movement, straining receiving areas and fragile settlements.
Without shared data, a sudden change in flows reads as a hostile act, inviting preemptive or retaliatory moves.
How does resource scarcity shape interstate decisions under uncertainty and time pressure?
Are mediated plenaries, issue-specific working groups, or backchannels most effective when tension is high?
How do monitoring and transparency mechanisms move trust, compliance, and perceived fairness?
What makes agreements hold across repeated crises, including shocks that arrive before old disputes settle?
Which interventions cut escalation while preserving domestic legitimacy and strategic flexibility?
Twelve cycles compress a 72-hour emergency. New shocks arrive mid-stream, so institutions and strategies are tested as conditions keep shifting.
A reservoir failure, leaked imagery, or migration spike resets the risk picture and forces fast reassessment.
Delegations set objectives and red lines, weighing domestic pressure against regional stability.
Structured diplomacy moves from problem definition to options, package design, and sequencing.
Facilitators update the eight indicators and feed results back so consequences are visible.
Significant storage and hydropower-export ambitions.
Depends on predictable flows for irrigation.
Balances domestic needs against outside pressure.
Limited but pivotal convening authority.
Offers mediation and financial incentives.
Supplies neutral data, assessments, and verification.
Probability of confrontation from posture, breakdowns, and rhetoric. Scale 0–100.
Regional instability from signaling and compliance. Scale 0–100.
How credible commitments stay over time.
Whether deals survive later shocks.
Displacement, food insecurity, and water access combined.
Adherence to monitoring and data-sharing.
Speed from confrontation to workable deals.
Governance strength and cooperative behavior overall.
Deals built on independent monitoring proved far more resilient than political assurances. States accepted bigger concessions once breaches were detectable through agreed procedures rather than answered by retaliation.
Talks opened in the early stage of a crisis produced steadier outcomes. Preventive engagement managed misperception before narratives hardened into zero-sum positions.
When parties jointly validated reservoir levels and planned releases, sudden changes stopped reading as hostile. Restricted information drove more escalatory responses to ambiguous events.
Phased formats, joint problem definition, then options, then sequencing, yielded clearer priorities and more creative packages than open-ended bargaining.
These figures are internal to one run of the simulation, not field data. They show the scale of improvement that stronger institutions, robust verification, and early structured engagement can produce.
For Escalation Risk and Tension a shorter green bar is the better result, since lower scores mean less risk.
Build integrated hydrological networks and shared data platforms so every riparian sees the same timely picture.
Give basin organizations clear mandates, decision rules, and dispute resolution, with real community participation.
Fold water and climate risk into national security strategy and coordinate water, energy, and defense agencies.
Pre-negotiate crisis channels and emergency consultations so parties convene fast when stress spikes.
Make joint monitoring a core pillar of agreements and tie support to transparency and compliance.
Use exercises like Halcyon to stress-test policy and institutions before a real crisis arrives.
Halcyon is built to extend. Future iterations open up new stressors and linkages.
Undergraduate at Berea College reading Economics and Political Science, headed toward law with a concentration in national security. A multidisciplinary researcher and policy practitioner working across nanotechnology, nuclear engineering, environmental jurisprudence, and security strategy.
Work united by one commitment: bridging science, law, and policy for equitable civic and climate action.
As a Research Fellow, advanced materials for seawater uranium extraction to strengthen domestic nuclear energy, alongside closed-loop nuclear fission reengineering. Recognized with the NASA Earth System Design Award.
Worked with AI startups and German institutions on an autonomous Multi-Domain Command and Control architecture for drone swarm coordination and maritime ISR, plus analytical research on Middle Eastern intrastate conflicts and U.S. defense posturing.
Connected more than 450 students to the green energy sector, led international environmental campaigns, and restored and protected 70 acres of coral reef, on the conviction that climate action and national security are one table, not two.
For contributions to civilian nuclear fission innovation, including seawater uranium extraction and closed-loop fission reengineering.
For the carbon-negative polymer developed during earlier research at the University of Akron, now used in automotive and aerospace manufacturing.
Seawater holds the largest known reserve of uranium on Earth, yet at roughly three parts per billion it hides among far more concentrated competing ions. This project built porous "nano-traps" that capture it anyway.
The central idea was borrowed from biology. Natural protein scaffolds bind metals not through a single chemical bond alone, but through supporting second-sphere interactions that reinforce that bond. The team recreated this effect synthetically, building chelating sites into porous organic polymers and adding a helper group beside the binding site.
That binding site was an amidoxime group, long known to grip uranyl ions. The innovation was placing an amino group right next to it. In the strongest material, with the amino group in the ortho position, that neighbor lowers the charge on the captured uranyl and acts as a hydrogen-bond acceptor, tightening the overall hold. The relative position mattered: the ortho design clearly outperformed the para version.
The numbers bore this out. Capacities reached around 530 mg of uranium per gram of adsorbent across the 36–356 ppm range, with more than 99.99 percent of uranium removed from contaminated water within ten minutes, and the material stayed selective even against a 500-fold excess of competing ions.
The decisive test was real seawater. After 56 days submerged, the ortho material had taken up 4.36 mg per gram, roughly triple a benchmark adsorbent, while losing less than 5 percent of its capacity compared with clean conditions. Crystallographic and density-functional studies then confirmed why, pinning down the binding geometry and the hydrogen bonding behind the gain.
Taken together, the work points toward an economically realistic route to mining nuclear fuel from the ocean, and to remediating uranium-contaminated water, both of which feed directly into the case for durable, low-carbon nuclear energy.
Gene editing can target the root cause of disease. The bottleneck has always been delivery: getting the editing machinery safely into the right cells. This work maps how lipid nanoparticles became the leading non-viral way to do it.
Lipid nanoparticles are the same delivery technology behind the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. This review lays out how that platform now carries CRISPR/Cas9 into the body, and why each format involves a different trade-off.
CRISPR can be packaged three ways: as plasmid DNA, as Cas9 messenger RNA paired with a guide RNA, or as a preassembled ribonucleoprotein complex. They differ in editing efficiency, off-target risk, and how long the editor lingers in the cell, which is why no single format wins for every application.
The chemistry turns on four lipid ingredients working in concert, with ionizable lipids doing the heaviest lifting. They stay neutral in the bloodstream to slip past the immune system, then gain a positive charge inside the acidic endosome, rupturing it to release their cargo into the cell. Particle size, surface charge, and added targeting ligands then steer where the particles accumulate, with the liver as the natural default.
The review connects this to the clinic, including the first in-vivo CRISPR therapies to reach human trials, for transthyretin amyloidosis and hereditary angioedema, where a single dose drove deep, durable reductions in the disease-causing protein. It closes on the open frontier: delivering the extra DNA template needed for precise gene correction, not just gene knockout.