Three professional “burners” share their experience of Nevada’s ephemeral Black Rock City. Listeners learn what flux measurements from the Burning Man Festival reveal about urban climates.
Transcript
Robert: To Chef Juke, how can you tell us in a few words or a few sentences, what is the Burning Man Project?
Chef: <a href=“https://participedia.net/case/the-burning-man-festival-art-participation-and-collective-organization”>Burning Man</a> in Black Rock City specifically is a temporary community. It's a temporary city that grows out of the desert each year that is full of artists and dreamers and folks who bring any number of multidisciplinary things out to the desert to share with each other. It started in San Francisco in 1986, so this should be its 40th anniversary, then moved out to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada in 1990. I first attended in 1994, so I am definitely what they call an old school burner. Burning Man is notoriously difficult to describe because at this point it is now a city of 80,000 people in the middle of the desert. It is a place where people bring art and engagement and any number of different aspects to a decommodified space - meaning we don't exchange money for things. For a lot of people, it's a very interesting, awe-inspiring, cathartic event that has changed a lot of people's lives in a lot of different ways.
Robert: Describe the experience of being a burner both at Burning Man and outside of Burning Man.
George: My first burn as a participant was in 2011. It's been a dramatic shift working for the organization in terms of the freedom versus responsibilities that are on playa are dramatic. I'm one of those people that when I first went, I didn't even know there was a Burning Man organization. I was there with my friends and we were creating whatever we were creating, and the organization was invisible to me. When I joined, it was right after covid, so we were really just getting our feet back underneath us. I'm the Director of Regeneration, so I essentially help facilitate a lot of our initiatives around sustainability, both in Black Rock City and then through the development of our properties in Northern Nevada, as well as some of the global initiatives where we seek to have some sort of voice or impact. We started our sustainability roadmap in 2019, so it was really the first year that we were kicking off in earnest. Even though we've had a very strong cultural energy around sustainability and environmental responsibility, “leaving no trace” being one of our core principles, it was the first time it was really institutionalized in our operations. I'm a lawyer by background. I'm a recovering lawyer in finance and renewable energy developer. To be so closely associated with the culture has been a dramatic personal shift.
Maoya: What does Burning Man represent for a sustainability thinker?
George: It's really about an opportunity to innovate and create and test and play. It's a temporary city. That's really what's most unique about it. We build it, and then we burn it down. We learn lessons. The playa has an opportunity to be a testing ground for a new future that we may only envision in our heads, or we may try to implement in other cities that have a lot more bureaucracy or other difficulties. We have a lot more flexibility and freedom, and our community is so creative and ambitious. It's really the testing ground for the future. Some things work, some things don't. And then we build off that.
Andrew: My original reason for going to Burning Man was specifically as an urban climate experiment. I had lived in San Francisco for about 10 years, and I had a lot of friends that went to Burning Man and tried to encourage me to go. They were describing the city exactly as Chef Duke did - that grows out of the desert playa and becomes a city of 70-80,000 people and then <a href=“https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212095517300202”>disappears again</a> in a fairly short space of time. I thought, what a fantastic opportunity to study a city through its full evolution. I knew a lot of people that had flux towers in cities, but they never could tell me exactly what it was like before the city was there. On the creative front, I had always wanted to create music from turbulence, from three-dimensional motions of the air. So, I took this opportunity to do that. I provided turbulence data to a good friend and musician and sound engineer who created music from three-dimensional turbulence data measured at 10 Hz. I then had the kind of unintentional opportunity of having the chance to explore Burning Man and also find out what everybody else was offering.
Robert: To go back to Andrew really quickly, if you could just explain to us some of the realities of doing flux-based fieldwork in a place like Black Rock Desert, maybe even share some of your results?
Andrew: The original experiment was 2013 and then we decided to do a repeat in 2023, 10 years later. Burning Man keeps very good census records, so we have very good data on numbers of people in camps - pertinent data for driving inventory-based models for carbon emissions or CO2 emissions. First of all, we were <a href =“https://news.sfsu.edu/news/sf-state-researchers-return-burning-man-new-look-festivals-environmental-impact”>measuring CO2 fluxes</a>. So, we just wanted to try and measure for as long as possible throughout the full evolution of the city. Secondly, we wanted to look at energy balance components. We had a little station on the outside of the city, and we also had a bicycle system, not with eddy covariance on it, but with fine wire thermocouples to try and get at whether there was an urban heat island. Finally, I had a graduate student at the time who was very interested in roughness length, a micrometeorological property.
We had a 30-meter tower and six levels. We were exploring the nature of the city in altering the roughness of the surface and the turbulence characteristics. All three things worked out quite well from an experimental point of view. It is a windy place and it's often windy at night as well. It's very flat. We were well placed within the city. It's not a massive city. We had to be very, very proactive about asking permission to get a certain location. But then it was great. We had a couple of kilometers fetch and that was plenty for our measurements at about 10 meters. We found in terms of carbon emissions, the city has emissions similar to places like central Mexico City and also central London - very high on a per square meter basis.
Most of what we're measuring there is the generation of electricity through generators that wouldn't be being measured in those locations because power is coming in on transmission line from elsewhere. It's not a direct comparison because of the differences in the cities, but it does show that the emissions get very high there. That almost all is based on camp generators. The transportation sector is incredibly low because everybody gets around on bicycles or on foot for the most part from emergency vehicles and art cars, and they're all traveling extremely slowly and at very, very low density. One of my favorite findings from that was that the transportation sector was the lowest overall sector of emissions in the city, and also slightly lower than the emissions from respiration from the humans themselves.
The urban heat island impact was fascinating. We basically found zero. We found almost no evidence of a change in energy balance before and after the people arrived, a slight increase in evaporation after the city formed. No average differences between temperatures inside and outside the city. And yet outside of the city, the average temperature was the same, but the temperature was much more stratified - thermally stratified, decreasing in temperature with height during the day or reversal at night. Inside the city was much more homogenous. We were really seeing the mixing effect of the city. The roughness length was around 0.2 meters, similar to suburban. We went back out 10 years later and found that the emissions on average had risen by around 20%. The population itself hadn't increased by that much over that 10-year period. The biggest changes that we could see over that 10-year period were an increase in the use of camp generators, even though there was a similar increase in the use of solar power.
Robert: So, more energy overall.
Andrew: More energy being used. The other compelling change to me over the 10-year period was the income levels of the people attending the categories of over $100,000. It's gone up from around 20% to around a third of the population over that. Above $300,000 is up, getting close to 10%. Meanwhile, the two lowest income categories both declined down around 15% from like 25%.
Chef: In addition to my day job in the tech team, I also have a volunteer job with the Department of Mutant Vehicles. That's the team that oversees the art cars that come to Burning Man. And we invite about 800 art cars to the event each year. And we also license accessibility vehicles for persons with disabilities to be able to drive. When you were talking about “emissions for transportation emissions were lower than that of people” - what type of emissions are we talking about in that case?
Andrew: We're measuring on a tower above the city. You could think of it as a footprint the size of several football fields. And it's changing constantly as the wind direction, the wind speed, changes. It's a very dynamic footprint. Each 30-minute flux estimate we make has a slightly different footprint than the last. It was only through the inventory data that we're able to partition out how much of it is caused by vehicles and how much of it is generators.
Chef: I've worked with George and his team and the folks who are doing sustainability, and one of the biggest challenges - there's so many ways that you can slice and dice the data. How many vehicles come that are powered by gasoline, by diesel, by electric that is recharged by generators, by renewables, by solar and wind. I'm curious if there are any other environments that you have studied that have come close to Black Rock City? And maybe there isn't.
Andrew: One of the interesting outcomes of presenting some of these results places were people who were interested in climate associated with refugee camps. You have this semi-structured city. Even that just alters the roughness. The surface roughness length is a fairly esoteric micrometeorological property, but it's deeply embedded in all air pollution models, for example.
George: A lot of our partners that come to work with us are actually other non-profits that come and test, take that equipment, and then redeploy it in disaster relief zones, off-grid military applications that require resiliency, and then even just emerging communities around the world in developing nations. As technology becomes more and more efficient and cheaper, folks are able to start to really develop their grid systems and their infrastructure.
Andrew, I think you nailed it. Right now, the biggest problem we're seeing is generators in camps. Over that 10-year period, we've had a lot of larger camps, a lot more interactivity, bigger art cars. And what we've learned as we've worked with some of our partners who've gotten on board with us to really help support looking at power use specifically more is they're finding that people are oversizing their generators by three, four, five times. What that really means is 50 to 80% of the power that's being generated on playa is literally being wasted - burning just to keep that power going so that if everybody comes on, it doesn't trip the generator and then everybody loses power.
We're looking at a lot of innovative solutions. We've deployed over 11 megawatt hours of batteries in our operations each year for the last two years, and [we’re] getting more efficient with that deployment. Once that battery charges up, we could just shut the generators off. That was probably the most impactful solution that we implemented so far. [The] second most impactful thing has been deployment of solar and other renewables. That's had around a 13 to 15% overall reduction in our grid emissions. The last was deployment and testing of renewable fuels, primarily renewable diesel. What I think is really cool about Burning Man, or what's unique about it, is it's a pretty big event. We can provide a financial baseline for some of these companies by testing it here and bringing it here to make investment in that equipment. We know we can at least have this size of a market for five years. It kind of pays that off, which then allows those event management companies to make those investments and then redeploy them out in the world.
Robert: Chef Juke, quickly describe what a mutant vehicle actually is.
Chef: In the early days of Burning Man, some people started bringing interesting decorated cars, and some were more decorated than others. That became a trend. Some of these folks originally were just people who liked driving around their daily driver with thousands of dolls. That inspired more people to come and bring their art cars. We had a few safety issues that started coming up, and we realized for the event to keep going, we were going to have to limit driving. We made an exception because there was now art cars that kept coming, and we wanted them to keep coming because they were part of the backdrop.
The DMV, the Department of Mutant Vehicles, was created in order to license those vehicles that came out that were decorated. We decided again, because we had to limit the number of vehicles that we're driving, that they had to meet a certain threshold. A mutant vehicle should be a unique vehicle that doesn't resemble any stock or street vehicle. Ideally, it is something that does not look like you're going to see it driving down the street. Because there's many venues for that. A mutant vehicle might look like a rocket ship or an animal. We license about 650 of them each year. These range in size from a golf cart or even smaller to semis, you know, large buses. But the end vehicle shouldn't look like a bus or a car or a truck. It should look like something other. We have boats, we have planes, we have any number of different styles. Often, they will either carry a lot of people, or they will be interactive in some way. Or they will have a music platform or have big speakers on them.
Maoya: I was wondering if one of you could comment on the evolution of people's awareness for environmental change? Maybe from a story you've heard from people on site or your own story of that awareness. I'm really interested in this question related to Andrew's comment of the socioeconomic shift, sort of, the collective consciousness.
Chef: In the early days, perceptions of sustainability were nonexistent for the most part, other than, clean up after yourself. It wasn't organized to the degree that it has become organized. It was mostly a gathering of people who were mostly doing exactly what they wanted with very little framework around it. One of the most common things that I hear people say every year at Burning Man is, “next year I'm going to...” They then talk about what they're going to do that's going to somehow be better or bigger or more involved. We got to the early 2000s, and we start seeing - we're really a city now. Maybe it's not great to burn as many things as we're burning. Maybe we need to be a little more responsible in how we're doing things now that we're doing it at such a huge scale.
The idea of Burning Man is a place where people can radically express themselves and a place where people can go be free within a container. We don't want to dictate to people all the details of how they should do things. And it's a constant struggle of, where do you draw the lines for rules for what you, quote, “mandate”? Trying to keep that as little as possible while letting people play within that framework. That's what we're in the middle of the journey of.
George: I do need to caveat this- these have not been publicly released, so I'm going to use rough numbers. Where we do have control is our own operations; our pre-event support, ramp up, Blackrock City itself, all the way down to playa restoration, which is our primary event cycle. We either reduced or transitioned to renewables 70% last year of our fossil diesel needs, to either solar renewables or some other alternative. The year before it was 50. On our own operations, particularly on our power side, we're doing really good and we're actually demonstrating that it's possible. We can layer in one or two more big solutions with green hydrogen or portable nuclear - that may be a little bit more of a permitting issue. But there's other things that we can be testing here that, I think from an operational standpoint, we can control, even <a href=“https://medium.com/@steventjones/can-burning-man-ever-be-carbon-neutral-6fa6affc8c97”>get there before 2030</a> if we really push. The participant side is different - is a challenge. Our normal thing is to let people play, but we really are seeing an adoption of this culturally from our participants.
I'll give a couple stats on our placed camp data because that's where we are able to get more information. We had a sustainability survey. We look at our petrol records for who buys fuel from us. Camps. There's three categories: one we would say “generator only”, one we would call “hybrid”, which is a generator with some sort of hybrid either energy storage or hybrid solar, wind, and other technologies. And then we have “no generators”. For the first year ,the hybrid camps were 48% of the placed camp population. So, almost half of camps deployed some sort of non-generator solution. 34% still remain “generator only” and around 18% were generator free completely. We've really seen this uptick of, not people going all the way, but slowly taking incremental changes to wean themselves off of the generators.
If you look at a generator-only camp and a hybrid, on average it's a 66% reduction per capita in the emission profiles. It's challenging for people to take on big projects. It's challenging from a space perspective. If you want to use a lot of solar, we have these working groups to sort of say, “what are the levers that we can pull to facilitate people that want to do a big project?” These are all new things that we've never really done before, and we've been piloting a couple of them. So, we had a group called SolarPunks, a non-profit that does disaster relief. They created a solar station. I think it was 300 kilowatts, which is a significant amount of solar, which was almost 50% of the battery that we deployed operationally. They gifted free renewable charging to the entire playa. They had an excess of power. It was three years in the making, and we didn't even know if they were going to pull it off. It was hard to market something to tell people to bring out your electric vehicles and then we don't know until weeks before the event.
Maoya: How do people access these types of statistics and information? Where do burners hear about this information?
George: A lot of this stuff is being piloted and announced for the first time. This is one of the first times that a lot of this stuff has even been really talked about publicly. We intend to release, either this spring or early summer, a pretty detailed emissions report that will give clarity and details around some of the high-level numbers as well as the emission reduction impact calculations. So, the missing link has really been us having this larger emissions profile. We're interviewing a couple third party carbon accounting firms. We want to have another set of eyes to really verify the assumptions and the calculations. We're looking at implementing, like, a microgrant program for smaller camps where 500 or 1,000 dollars might help people test out a small battery. We're working with groups like [the] Renewables for Artists team to collaborate on programs where we're hosting a solar donation station so they don't have to lug them in. There's transportation emissions. We don't want people bringing a bunch of equipment to the playa and then throwing [it] in a storage container and then shipp them to LA and sit in a warehouse in LA all year. So, we want to look at the full life cycle of how we can support these resources being used.
Chef: There's an annual sustainability update report that comes out, and we have a town hall meeting regarding it. Twelve years ago, I believe we had two mutant vehicles that were electric based. Last year we had 127. 17% were electric, and I think it was about half and half that were charged by renewables versus generators. Years ago, it was considered harder to deal with out on the playa. That's really changed.
Maoya: I want to get [a] perspective from Andrew. What were, sort of, real time impressions of people to the installation on the ground?
Andrew: People come and find you who really want to find you. In a city of 70,000 people, when we're giving a science talk, there'd be 50 people, but they would all be onto it. It was people from sustainability, from the organization themselves, anybody who was just interested in the topic. It had helped that a friend of mine was a journalist and wrote a fairly provocative article on my earlier findings. It's also just a normal city. And so, you have people who are also quite unaware of their own footprint, for example, might roll in and say, “well look, I'm on an e-bike. Zero emissions!” Cool. How are you charging your e-bike? “Oh, I'm just plugging it into the camp generator”. You know?
We also had turbulence music and that brought out musicians, to people who were trying to create music from other natural environmental data, and so on. One thing - we're not measuring downwind of “the man”. We do not measure the emissions from the burning of the man. But what we do, of course, measure, is the city around us. Both years, exactly the same - over about a three-hour period, the emissions went from pretty high on a global standard to almost zero while the man burned. That's because everybody leaves their camp, turns off all their generators and so on, and goes in and watches the man burn. When you're estimating your emissions from the man burn, don't forget to subtract the massive reduction across the city over that period as well.
Chef: When 80,000 people are at the event, they're not traveling the same amount that they would if they were back home. They're not commuting to work. They're not using resources or putting out emissions in the same way.
Andrew: I was always very quick in those conversations to point out to people, because people did simply equate what we were doing with some kind of a carbon analysis of the city. You would design a completely different project if that was your goal. But I do think the measurements provide a very nice complement to those budget-based estimates.
George: Can I ask a question, Andrew?
Andrew: Yeah.
George: You were indicating that there was an absorption, a much higher absorption of carbon dioxide on the playa than you had originally anticipated that indicated other, like, life?
Andrew: A release, yeah. The second time I went out, I took some chamber systems. Instead of sticking your instruments at the top of a tower and measuring everything and having to work out what different components are making a contribution to that, a chamber system allows you to separate a little patch of bare playa and see what's coming in and out of that playa. We expected something of an emission because there would be microbial life. It is actually fairly moist not far below the surface. People have often observed the little shrimplike critters that come to the surface there sometimes. It was a little bit more than I thought, but it was also negligible compared to the total. It was nice to get a handle on that because that was a piece that we didn't have that first year the first time we went out.
Robert: I'm also really interested to talk about how weather and climate has changed at the event; 2022 it was extremely hot, 2023 was rainstorms, 2025, I heard the term “lather, rinse, repeat”, where it was both very windy and very rainy.
Chef: I don't know if I can tell you what “normal” is out on the playa, mainly because the event itself is one week long. I'm good friends with Ted the Weather Pimp, the official weatherman for Burning Man. He's explained to me the volatility of the weather on the Black Rock Desert. We can have a significant amount of rain on a day. Sometimes it happens two weeks before the event, and sometimes it happens two weeks after the event. Sometimes it happens right in the middle. We have had a few specifically unusual events, including the northern tip of a hurricane where it rained so much, the normal drying process didn't happen, and that was the Mudpocalypse year. I mean, it definitely seems like it's changed, but it's so anecdotal.
Andrew: Normally, we would measure things by seasons or at least months. For most people's experience, it's one week. And that week, the normal ebbs and flows of weather out there are shifting.
Chef: There are times when there are huge dust storms that have come through and missed Black Rock City by a mile. But if you were a mile south, you would have been in dust all day. It can vary that much in a very small area.
Maoya: We talked about flux towers and turbulence and roughness and mixing. It's this really complex, creative process. Turbulence dissipates energy. I was curious if you had a reflection or something to share about the point of overlap in that environmental process and the process of people mixing and creating at Burning Man?
Andrew: Absolutely, in the sense of turbulent transport. If you just kind of replace heat CO2, water vapor, whatever we're talking about being transported with creativity, energy, innovation - that's happening through connections between people there. You venture out on your bicycle for a day, you just meet different people that are going to influence you in a lot of different ways, no matter how profound those influences are on you. It is a little bit like dispersion of heat energy or something like that. It's bouncing from turbulent eddy to turbulent eddy, from person to person. There's something moving through the community.
Chef: That's what keeps me going after 31 years: an exchange of energy, of inspiration. People go out there, some turbulence happens, something happens, and they go to make a ripple somewhere else. As long as I see people being inspired and then going back and making community, it's absolutely worthwhile. It's not always easy, just like almost anything that's worthwhile. You kind of got to stir that pot. You got to put some effort into it. It's not always going to be comfortable. But I think that's also why people go and have such profound experiences. That communal effort under...not necessarily in the bad way, but stress creates connection and meaningful experiences that people take back with them.
George: There's a saying...it's, you know, the world's largest experience in trauma bonding. I want to thank Andrew for coming and bringing his work to our playa and for sharing the information that you've learned. We would love to continue to collaborate with you and we would love to invite others who are listening to this. We're kind of nerds. The more information we have, the more we can start to share, the more we can start to learn, the more we can start to take actions that we know that have impact. And I guess, Robert, you were out there too, as part of the flux team as well. This is an open invitation for people that are interested in this work to come join and play with us out there.