While standing in the midst of a grove of aspens in Utah, you’re actually in the presence of a single organism that’s 14,000 years old. Travel west to Oregon and hike on top of a 2,400-year-old fungus growing beneath the ground. Cross the Atlantic, and meet a rose bush that’s been blooming for over 1,000 years in Germany. These are the world’s presumed oldest plants and what we know about them.
Pando in Sevier, Utah (9,000 to 14,000 years)
The Pando clone spreads over 106 acres, consisting of over 40,000 individual trees. USDA / Forest Service
In Fishlake National Forest stands a grove of quaking aspens — trees known for their small leaves that shimmer and quake in the wind. This particular aspen grove, however, is actually one single organism. Its 47,000 individual trees — some of which are over 130 years old themselves — all grow from a single root system, meaning all of the trees in the grove are genetically identical. It’s technically the world’s largest tree, as determined by the U.S. Forest Service through genetic testing in the early 2000s. Named Pando — which is latin for “I spread” — the tree spans over 106 acres and is the densest organism ever found, weighing nearly 13 million pounds. While its specific age is debated, Pando is somewhere between 9,000 and 14,000 years old, initially sprouting some time after the last ice age. Sadly, according to scientists, Pando is showing signs of decline due to insects, disease and lack of regeneration from the overgrazing of deer and other animals.
King Clone in Lucerne Valley, California (11,700 years)
King Clone, the 11,700-year-old creosote bush ring in the Mojave Desert. Klokeid / public domain
Like the quaking aspens — and as the name suggests — King Clone is a clonal colony of genetically identical creosote bushes growing from one original plant. This ancient Larrea tridentata is located in the Mojave Desert, and radiocarbon dating puts it at 11,700 years old. The bushes grow and multiply in a slow, unique process. The oldest branches die over time, and their central stem crown (the top part of the plant) begins to split into different segments. The original stem and branches decompose, and those other stems that formed thus become independent, genetically identical plants. This process continues, often in a circular shape that creates the characteristic rings associated with creosote bush colonies. They also produce small, beautiful yellow flowers. The ring that’s known as King Clone has an average diameter of 45 feet, and continues to (slowly) grow.
Honey Mushroom in Grant, Oregon (2,400 years)
Honey mushrooms at the base of an infected grand fir in the Malheur National Forest, Oregon. Craig L. Schmitt and Michael L. Tatum / USDA Forest Service
Or, as locals call it, the “Humongous Fungus.” This Armillaria ostoyae may not be the oldest organism on Earth, but is the largest, stretching 2,200 acres in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest and weighing 35,000 tons. It’s not a massive, capped mushroom growing aboveground, but rather a huge network of hyphae underground, almost entirely hidden from sight — except during rainy periods in the autumn, when small honey mushrooms do sprout from the soil. Armillaria ostoyae is a parasitic fungus that consumes the roots of conifer trees. In the case of the Humongous Fungus, its size has been determined by the dead trees that grow above it. The mushroom was actually found because stands of trees were dying off — a Forest Service scientist suspected the fungus, and DNA tests proved that many trees in the area shared DNA, confirming his hypothesis. It grows and consumes roots slowly, expanding about 1-3 feet every year.
Thousand-Year Rose in Hildesheim, Germany (1,200 years)
Also called the Rose of Hildesheim, this 30-foot plant is believed to be the world’s oldest-living rose. The Rosa canina was probably planted in the early 800s when the church it grows on — Hildesheim Cathedral — was built, possibly by King Louis the Pious. The bush is extremely resilient, and was almost entirely destroyed when the church was bombed during World War II. The roots survived, however, and new branches grew from the ground that still sprout pink flowers every year in May.
Methuselah in Big Pine, California (4,800 years)
The Methuselah tree in Big Pine, California on June 29, 2013. Yen Chao / Flickr
Although the title of “oldest trees in the world” is hotly contested, the Methuselah tree is a top contender. This ancient bristlecone pine — or Pinus longaeva — is set apart from the aspens and other ancient trees given that it’s not a clonal organism. Methuselah is named after the biblical figure from the Old Testament who lived 969 years, but this tree is even older. It’s estimated that Methuselah the tree was germinated in 2832 BCE, meaning it is older than the Egyptian pyramids. It grows in the White Mountains of eastern California — specifically in the Methuselah Grove within Inyo National Forest — as a part of the Forest of Ancients within the National Forest, home to many ancient trees. At 135 feet tall, its massive size is even more impressive given its elevation. Its wood is resistant to rot and drought, and its beautifully twisted branches — which are shaped by the fast winds of the mountains — help the tree remain standing and resist breakages during storms. Don’t expect to easily find it, however, as Methuselah’s exact location is kept secret to protect it from damage by visitors.
Old Tjikko in Älvdalen S, Sweden (9,550 years)
This Norway spruce doesn’t look particularly impressive — in fact, it looks like any other old tree, growing on top of Fulufjället Mountain in Sweden’s Fulufjället National Park. However, it’s the oldest known individual clonal tree in the world, meaning the tree itself has regenerated from its roots many times. This specific trunk itself is several centuries old. This type of spruce can regenerate from its own branches that are pushed to the ground during snowstorms, which then take root themselves through a process called “layering.” Coast redwoods and western red cedars also reproduce this way. Old Tjikko’s old age indicates that it started growing soon after the retreat of the glaciers from the region during the last ice age.
Olive Tree of Vouves in Vouves, Greece (2,000 to 3,000 years)
On the Island of Crete stands the oldest olive tree in Greece. No one is sure whether it was planted by humans or by natural forces, but either way, it began growing before the rise of classical Greece. Miraculously, it still grows olives, and has for 2,000 years. The famous olive tree is at least that old, but scientists have been unable to determine its exact age while the tree is still standing, as its heartwood has decayed. A museum was built next to the 15-foot-wide, 27-foot-high tree to honor the olive harvesting techniques in Crete and the olives of the Mediterranean. Even if you haven’t visited the tree itself, you might have seen its boughs, which were placed on the heads of the winners of the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
The post 7 of the Oldest Living Plants on Earth appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/oldest-living-plants-facts-ecowatch.html
Last winter, we kept our house at 60 degrees and our electric bill was STILL $280. I’ve been interested in solar for a long time, but on the long list of house projects (especially when you’re restoring a 200 year old house on the historic registry) some are more pressing than others.
But with a few of those major projects wrapping up, and a daunting bill before me, I figured now was the time for a quick google search on solar panels, and let me tell you….. It can be very overwhelming.
Figuring out the rules (cough, cough, historic society), incentives or rebates if applicable, how much it would cost, how much we could save, etc. felt a little like a part-time job. But, one website made it really easy to compare things, and I am happy to be partnering with Aurora Solar to share that site with you.
Because I think you should be able to easily run the numbers on your house without a lot of hassle!
This post is sponsored by Aurora Solar, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
If you’ve ever gotten a solar quote, there’s a good chance that Aurora Solar was involved. Aurora was founded in 2013 after its co-founders spent seven months trying to design a solar energy system using a patchwork of different tools.
Afterall, designing a solar system shouldn’t be harder than actually installing one. So they built software specifically for solar professionals. Today, more than 7,000 solar organizations use Aurora, and more than 20 million solar projects have been designed using the platform. They are also the largest solar software provider in the world. Their software is used by roughly 80% of the top 75 residential solar companies in the U.S.
All of this tech has been primarily used by professional installers to map your roof and then create a proposal, but now Aurora is offering this tech to us to help compare quotes.
So instead of having to call a bunch of different installers, I could use the Aurora Solar Marketplace to understand my solar potential, compare estimates, understand my possible savings, look into battery storage and other home electrification incentives, and map out different financing options.
1. know how much electricity the system will actually produce
Before you even get into the price, make sure you understand what you’re actually being quoted.
Two solar systems can have very different prices because they may not be the same size or produce the same amount of electricity. A cheaper system might simply have fewer panels and offset less of your electric bill.
With Aurora, you can compare solar estimates and see the system size, energy production, and how much electricity the system should offset.
You can also upload your utility bill to get a solar estimate based more closely on your actual energy usage, to make the quote accurate for you instead of a ‘generic household’.
2. understand the solar payback period
Aurora calculates things like payback period and lifetime savings, which makes it much easier to understand the long-term finances.
The solar payback period is basically how long it takes for your estimated savings to make up for what you spent on the system, and this is the number that surprised me most!
One estimate had a payback period of around 7 years, and another was closer to 11 years! Over 25 years, two of the estimates I looked at had almost a $13,000 difference in projected savings.
Of course, these are still projections as electricity rates can change (HELLO 2026) but when you’re trying to compare two options for the same house, knowing that one is projected to pay for itself four years sooner is pretty useful information.
3. look beyond the monthly payment
Depending on the installer, you may be looking at a cash purchase, solar loan, lease, or power purchase agreement.
But thankfully with Aurora you can compare the different financing options side-by-side which makes it a lot easier to see the trade-offs. One option may have a lower upfront cost, another may have a lower monthly payment, and another may give you better long-term savings.
4. find out which solar incentives actually apply to you
The minute you start Googling solar, you can find federal incentives, state incentives, utility programs, rebates, net metering, and a whole bunch of information that may or may not even apply to where you live.
And some of the articles ranking at the top of Google are several years old! (RIP to the federal incentives canceled at the end of 2025.) But, Aurora can account for solar incentives when calculating the cost and savings of a system, including state, local, and utility-specific programs.
I would still double check any incentive or tax benefit you’re planning to use before signing a contract, especially because programs and eligibility can change, but having all the relevant information in the same place makes the research process much less overwhelming.
5. research the installer, equipment, and warranties
Aurora lets you compare solar installers based on things like reviews, reputation, pricing, and financing options, which I think is just as important as the actual quote.
I’d also look closely at what equipment is included. What panels are they using? What kind of inverter? How long are the equipment warranties? Is there also a workmanship warranty from the installer? Who handles repairs if something goes wrong five or ten years from now?
And, I know I’ve said it a million times, but it’s nice to see it side-by-side without having to fill out a bunch of forms and be hounded on the phone just to get an idea of what solar may look like.
The post How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
How to Compare Solar Quotes: What to Look For Before You Choose
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: XPRIZE’s David Babson on Why Climate Grand Challenges Need Buyers, Too
Buyers contracted nearly 30 million tons of durable carbon removal in 2025, more than triple the 2024 total, according to CDR.fyi data reported by Heatmap. About 90% of those purchases came from a single company, Microsoft, and suppliers delivered only about 450,000 tons during the year. That is a sliver of the six to 10 billion tons of removal a year that climate scenarios suggest the world will need by 2050. The technology to pull carbon out of the air works, but the customers needed to scale it remain scarce.
Our guest today, David Babson, is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. He calls the slow progress a market failure, because the technology is progressing faster than it is being adopted. Babson previously led MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and was a program director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E. His portfolio includes XPRIZE Carbon Removal, which drew 1,334 teams and whose participants have raised more than $3.3 billion. In April 2025, Mati Carbon won its $50 million grand prize for spreading crushed basalt on smallholder farms in India, where the rock locks away carbon dioxide. “If people could make money taking carbon out of the air and putting it underground, as opposed to only being able to make money taking it from underground and putting it in the air, we would be in a better place,” Babson says. Mati is weathering the slump in part because its rock dust also improves soil health and crop yields, giving farmers a reason to participate that doesn’t depend on carbon credit prices.
XPRIZE’s answer is to change what winners receive. Babson describes “mixed purses” that pair a cash award with a guaranteed buyer through an advance market commitment, a power purchase agreement, or an offtake contract. In one thought experiment, a carbon removal prize would come with a separate $1 billion fund raised from credit buyers, which qualified teams could draw on as they deliver verified tons. XPRIZE is applying the same thinking to a planned series of fusion energy prizes, pairing technical milestones with market mechanisms to build the supply chain that commercial fusion will require. The same gap between invention and adoption shows up in other XPRIZE competitions. On September 23, XPRIZE Wildfire awarded about $4.55 million from its $11 million purse, with defense contractor Anduril Industries taking first place in autonomous fire response along with a $1 million Lockheed Martin bonus. Babson expects costs to fall as fire agencies adopt the tools and as startups license individual components into cheaper platforms, though underfunded agencies will need a way to buy the first systems. He also notes that the competition left fuel management and ground-based autonomy for future prizes. Earlier this year, program director Andrea Santy told us that field testing had moved ahead of drone regulations. In biodiversity, Limelight Rainforest won $5 million for surveying 100 hectares of tropical forest in under 24 hours and identifying more than 250 species. Biodiversity still lacks a price, but Babson argues that once ecosystems can be measured, slow-walking policy becomes “a dereliction of what they should be doing.”
We also discuss the tension inside XPRIZE’s vision of “equitable abundance,” including a $101 million Healthspan prize that could add years of consumption to longer lives. Babson argues that abundant, cheap clean energy would let society move beyond efficiency as its organizing principle, powering uses such as indoor vertical farms that could return millions of acres of farmland to nature. You can follow XPRIZE’s new competitions and get involved in its prize ideation workshops at xprize.org.
- Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
- Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 00:36
Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s talk about the power and the uses of grand challenge programs to kickstart low-carbon industries and respond to the changing environment. Over the past several years, we’ve talked on the show with leaders of grand challenge programs designed to accelerate progress on humanity’s most difficult challenges, from pulling carbon out of the atmosphere to fighting rapidly growing wildfire threats in cities and rural communities. Many of these competitions have been launched by XPRIZE, whose leaders have shared on the show the stories of these competitions as they launched and unfolded.
Today is a chance to take stock, to look back and think about how climate markets, technology, and politics are changing fast, and how that makes this a good moment to ask the question: Are these programs designed to accelerate progress actually delivering that progress?
Our guest today designs XPRIZE’s climate bets. David Babson is executive vice president of the Energy, Climate, and Nature domain at the XPRIZE Foundation. Before XPRIZE, he was the executive director of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative and a program director at the U.S. Energy Department’s ARPA-E energy technology research agency.
His portfolio includes the largest incentive in prize history. In 2025, Mati Carbon received a $50 million grand prize for their enhanced rock weathering solution for capturing and drawing down carbon, and XPRIZE now reports that companies participating in its programs have raised $3.3 billion. That carbon removal win arrived just as the removal market hit serious turbulence, and as XPRIZE’s wildfire competition wrapped up with its top prize still unclaimed.
So we’re going to discuss what grand challenges can really accomplish, which winners continue to build and which stall, and what the reasons are, as well as the tensions inside a portfolio that funds both climate solutions and longer human lifespans. We’ll get to the conversation right after this brief commercial break. Stay tuned.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear, and welcome, David Babson, to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?
David Babson 03:10
I’m doing well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 03:11
I’m glad to have you here. You’ve run research portfolios at ARPA-E and MIT. What can a prize purse accomplish that a well-funded grant program can’t, or are they complementary?
David Babson 03:22
They’re absolutely complementary. The way that I think about it is that the value of these different mechanisms for promoting innovation is at different parts of the innovation supply chain, if you will. A prize is not a substitute for the very necessary investments that places like governments make into basic, applied, and advanced research. In fact, those types of investments are really valuable for establishing the innovation ecosystems and the technical capacities to eventually win prizes.
Where the prize is very valuable is somewhat downstream: translating technologies, ideas, and innovations that are coming out of academia and labs to market for scale. It challenges the innovators to imagine those technical capacities as solutions to global challenges, and then the visibility that the prize brings to those translations of technologies de-risks funding to flow to those innovators so they can imagine their uses in practice.
So I actually see them as very complementary, particularly when it comes to solutions in the energy and climate space that require rapid adoption of technologies in markets to have impact. Just having an energy solution or a climate solution is not valuable unless it can be de-risked and connected to markets to scale for impact. And that’s what the prize is actually very good at doing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 05:22
That comes through in the impact report that you all published recently. About 1,300 different organizations were catalyzed. The groups came together, apparently, because of their desire to compete in the competition.
What I’ve found in my work with public-private partnerships, in particular, is that impact investors are looking for that initial traction, and to a degree, the prize and the distribution of money within the prize group is that catalyst that says there’s a real opportunity for an impact profit, something that both does good and is profitable. How does the organization consult with the financial communities that are going to back these companies once your prize has been awarded? Is there a backroom conversation about that, for lack of a better way of putting it?
David Babson 06:10
Not an explicit backroom conversation about it, but the prize itself brings attention to the innovations that are coming out to win the competition. Oftentimes, as you’re noting, these impact investing communities exist, and they are looking for technologies to invest in to have impact.
What the prize is effective at doing is casting a wider net and surfacing the best solutions across the board, where there may have been silos in the past, or there may not have been transparency to individual investors about where to put their money. The prize is capable of elevating all of them, creating better visibility, and therefore, just by its inherent operation, creates better opportunities for investment capital to flow to the right types of teams to have greater impact more quickly.
So we don’t have explicit discussions with those types of investor communities to have them directly connected to individual prizes. But we often consult with investors and experts in industry to inform the metrics that we would want to have demonstrated, so that we know that when teams are winning our competitions, the demonstrations that they do are de-risking capital to flow to those innovators so that they can be translated to market.
Mitch Ratcliffe 07:47
We’re talking about growing industries, which of course means diversifying into a lot of specializations. Once you’ve got this kind of anchor winning team or teams, how does XPRIZE think about propagating the information that’s necessary for the rest of the industry to grow and fill in around them, in order to provide the kind of comprehensive geographic coverage and range of functions that are necessary for the industry to thrive? Is that something that you think about cultivating, like you would in agriculture?
David Babson 08:22
It is something that we think a lot about. With a few of the more recent prize competitions that we’ve run, we have also paired those competitions with a subsequent impact phase, which is designed to further build the community that has been established through the operation of the prize and connect the technologies that came out of the competition to the right types of markets and investors so that they can scale.
So that is one of the things that we’re thinking about in future competitions as well: not just running an innovation competition to surface new innovations, but how do we augment the community building that the prize provides as a way to also promote the back-end business models and industries that can scale those solutions for impact?
Mitch Ratcliffe 09:19
How would you describe the patterns you’re looking for that indicate that an organization can become that durable enterprise? What separates them from the rest? Have you got thoughts about that?
David Babson 09:29
I do have thoughts about it. In a lot of ways, the rigorous metrics that we set up when we’re designing the competition are informed by what experts believe would be the necessary demonstrations to actually generate a solution that is market viable. So a lot of it is very quantitative in terms of how we architect the competition.
But what we’ve also seen is that there are elements of winning teams that can’t always be controlled by just the scientific metrics. A lot of times, it’s the composition of the team, how diverse they are, and the unique mentality that the leaders of the team have in terms of their vision and their ambition. Those are parts that you can’t control for, but the prize model is very effective at also attracting the type of entrepreneurial, big-thinking individuals that actually tend to be behind some of the most successful companies.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:40
Those big-thinking individuals often struggle with the transition from inventor. And to your point about the academic community often being the source of many of the teams that are competing, that’s not something that academics are necessarily good at. As part of the prize process, do you also begin to coach them on how to staff for the operators who are going to be able to translate the invention into a market success?
David Babson 11:04
Absolutely. On the front end, the prize itself sets a target that is typically beyond what researchers in an academic setting are imagining for what they’re doing. It gives them a way to imagine their technical innovations as scalable solutions to big problems, so that gets them excited to be in the competition. But you’re right: they’re not necessarily all business