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30 Sep 2024
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Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a Seventh of Nine ‘Planetary Boundaries’ That Support Life

Our planet has not passed its latest health check-up. A new assessment of Earth’s life-support systems shows that six out of nine of these crucial processes have crossed their “planetary boundary.” These boundaries are not tipping points—it’s possible to recover from passing them—but they are thresholds signifying we’ve entered higher-risk territory.

On another worrying note, scientists found the planet is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary: ocean acidification.

In its first edition, a report from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) used years of data and assessments to evaluate the nine planetary boundaries. These life-support systems make Earth resilient and stable. Alarmingly, six of those boundaries have already been crossed, as a similar assessment last year also concluded. The new report adds to that finding, suggesting these six metrics are now moving further into the “red zone,” or what the researchers consider a high-risk zone.

“The overall diagnostic is that the patient, Planet Earth, is in critical condition,” says Johan Rockström, PIK director and pioneer of the Planetary Boundaries Framework, in a statement.

Boundaries that have already been exceeded have to do with climate change, freshwater availability, biodiversity, land use, nutrient pollution (such as phosphorus and nitrogen) and the introduction of synthetic chemicals and plastics to the environment.

Ocean acidification is one of the systems that has not yet crossed its planetary boundary, along with ozone depletion and aerosols in the atmosphere. But while ocean acidification is still in the “green zone,” the new report finds it’s trending in the wrong direction. Scientists now say this metric is on the brink and may cross out of the safe zone in the next few years.

Earth’s oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, providing a valuable carbon sink as humans burn fossil fuels. But this process also makes the oceans more acidic, which can disturb the formation of shells and coral skeletons and affect fish life cycles, per the report.

As ocean acidification approaches the boundary, scientists are particularly concerned about certain regions, like the Arctic and Southern oceans. These areas are vital for carbon and global nutrient cycles, “which support marine productivity, biodiversity and global fisheries,” the report says.

“Looking at the current evolution, I’d say it’s really, really difficult to prevent that [boundary] crossing,” says Levke Caesar, a climate physicist at PIK and an author of the report, to Mongabay’s Sean Mowbray.

Other recent studies indicate the current conditions are already affecting some marine organisms, Caesar said in a press briefing, per the Guardian’s Damien Gayle. As a result, it might be necessary to re-evaluate “which levels can actually be called safe,” she added.

Levels of acidification are different across the world’s oceans. Colder waters, like those in the polar regions, may become more acidic more quickly, because they absorb more carbon dioxide. For some scientists, this suggests that perhaps the boundary has already been breached.

“When you start to think of the nuances of how the ocean works and the importance of some regions over others, I don’t necessarily agree that we’re still in a safe place,” says Helen Findlay, a biological oceanographer at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England who was not involved in the report, to Mongabay.

The Planetary Health Check is the first in a series of annual reports led by PIK and organized by the Planetary Boundaries Science initiative. It builds on years of research to inform solutions on how to improve the planet’s health. The health check will also serve as a “mission-control center” for decision-making, per the statement, by using satellite data, A.I. and multiple scientific disciplines—as well as the wisdom of Indigenous peoples, which is something the researchers hope to incorporate more of in following editions.

Even if it is close to its tipping point, ocean acidification is only one of the nine boundaries necessary for regulating the planet. Each process is woven together with the others. To protect the planet, it will take a holistic approach—and according to the team, considering the boundaries all together is the best way to identify the most effective actions to lessen humanity’s impact on the Earth and urgently restore it to a safe state.

“Indeed, one of the main messages of our report is that all nine planetary boundaries are highly interconnected,” Caesar said, according to the Guardian.

Original article here

03 Aug 2024
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Can Humanity Address Climate Change Without Believing It? Medical History Suggests It Is Possible

Strange as it may seem, early germ theorists could tell us a lot about today’s attitudes toward climate change.

While researching for a new book about the history of emerging infections, I found many similarities between early debates over the existence of microbes and current debates over the existence of global warming.

Both controversies reveal the struggles of perceiving an unseen threat. Both reveal the influence of economic interests that benefit from the status quo. But most importantly, both reveal how people with different beliefs and interests can still agree on key policies and practices for tackling a global problem.

What You Can’t See Might Hurt You

Seeing is believing, and until the mid-19th century, it was very difficult to see the tiny organisms responsible for our so-called “fever” diseases.

Although the indirect evidence was compelling, many people remained skeptical of “animalcules” – as microorganisms were once called – until the microscope was sufficiently developed. Even then, acceptance was gradual. The once-dominant ideas about disease-causing gases, called miasmsas, persisted for several decades before most people acknowledged that the fevers had a living cause.

Climate change presents similar challenges of visibility. Although everyone can see and feel the weather, it is often difficult to observe its larger patterns and longer trends without the aid of technical charts.

Even when people acknowledge the bigger picture, the case for human responsibility is complicated by the fact that the carbon emissions from our engines, like the germ infections within our bodies, are unseen by the naked eye. It is hard to achieve human solutions when the evidence of human cause is invisible.

Economics Can Outweigh Evidence

Adding to these challenges, economic interests often confound scientific recommendations.

In the case of germ theory, early recommendations to prevent the spread of infection included reinstating quarantines at shipping ports and border crossings, thus impeding the international flow of trade.

In the case of climate theory, recommendations to slow global warming include reducing the consumption of carbon-based fuels, thus reducing the flow of oil. These strategies can threaten livelihoods as well as profits, so it is not surprising to find labor unions divided over green initiatives and energy executives spreading misinformation about climate science.

Beliefs And Interests Need Not Coincide

But people’s beliefs and interests need not align if everyone finds some benefit in the recommendations.

This was the case in the latter decades of the 19th century, when germ-denying surgeons nevertheless adopted the antiseptic techniques of Joseph Lister.

They did so mainly for the practical reason that their patients fared better under the new methods. But if an explanation was needed, many of these die-hard skeptics claimed Lister’s methods prevented the transmission of miasmas rather than living organisms.

Responding to these claims, Lister stated:

If anyone chooses to assume that the septic material is not of the nature of the living organisms, but a so-called chemical ferment destitute of vitality … such a notion, unwarranted though I believe it to be by any scientific evidence, will in a practical point of view be equivalent to a germ theory, since it will inculcate precisely the same methods of antiseptic management.”

Lister was more concerned with saving lives than winning arguments. As long as the surgeons adopted his methods, Lister cared little about their justifications. When it came to preventing infection, it was the behaviors rather than the beliefs that counted.

Changing Behaviors Through Complementary Interests

The same could be said for global warming: Changing behaviors is more important than changing beliefs.

Case in point, there is a large and growing environmentalist movement among evangelical Christians. Organizations such as Green Faith and the Creation Care Task Force cite Biblical scripture to promote environmental stewardship as a sacred duty.

While many of these groups acknowledge human-based climate change, some of their core beliefs contradict the evolutionary theories that my colleagues and I employ as scientists. But we need not agree about fossils to wean the world off fossil fuels.

The same goes for priorities and economic interests.

A recent national Pew survey found that a large majority of Americans support the development and use of renewable energy. This includes a slight majority of Republicans, though their motives tend to differ from those of Democrats.

Republicans are more likely to prioritize the economic benefits of renewable energy than Democrats, who tend to list global warming as their driving concern.

The economic benefits could explain why red states produce the largest share of America’s wind energy and why three of these states are among the nation’s top five producers of solar energy. Their adoption correlates with the geography of the wind and sun belts, where farmers see favorable returns for producing power and a stable source of income to buffer the price fluctuations of weather-sensitive crops. Livelihood is a powerful motivator.

Finding Common Ground Could Change The World

None of these examples address climate change on all its fronts. And among Democrats as well as Republicans, there are different opinions about how fast and how far the transition to renewable energy should go.

But we can take another hopeful lesson from the 19th century: Although people did not agree on all disease-preventing actions, they nevertheless found enough common ground to achieve the greatest mortality decline in recorded history.

Original article here

12 Nov 2023
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Who Controls Your Thermostat?

People have been fighting over who controls the temperature at home since we lived in caves. Who controls the fire? Who gets to sleep comfortably next to its burning embers on cold nights? Now we call it thermostat wars. One family member likes to crank up the AC in the summer heat, while another is putting on a sweater to be comfortable.

Smart home technology may be the way to end the thermostat wars. Smart thermostats can adjust the temperature room by room, and when someone is in the room or not, lower it temporarily in winter and raise it in summer, making everyone happy while keeping utility bills low.

Smart thermostats can play a role in climate change, too, by responding to peak demand — adjusting to avoid rolling blackouts and overloaded power lines that can start forest fires that take lives and property. Individual choices, house by house, make all the difference.

Our solutions to heating and cooling our homes have evolved with technology. It’s been a bumpy ride. In 2007, the Department of Energy’s extremely successful Energy Star program stopped certifying programmable thermostats—because almost no one used them consistently, and, therefore, they weren’t saving energy. Besides the energy nerds, homeowners found the thermostats too complicated to manage. It was easier to do things the old fashioned way—by changing thermostat settings during the day as needed for comfort.

In that same year, a whole new generation of smart thermostats appeared on the scene when Ecobee debuted what they called the “first smart Wi-Fi thermostat.” Nest soon followed with their own entry into the smart thermostat market. Unlike programmable thermostats, which simply allow you to schedule temperature settings throughout the days, Ecobee and Nest use artificial intelligence to figure out how to keep your home comfortable while reducing your electricity bill.

Smart thermostats can learn your day-to-day patterns and adjust the temperature for both comfort and efficiency. For example, you could set the old programmable thermostats to turn the air conditioning on and off based on time of day, such as when you are at work or late at night. The new ones add occupancy sensors to the toolbox. If you work from home one day a week or someone is staying home from school, you needn’t change all the programming, or override the system. It will happen automatically to keep you comfortable and your home efficient. Smart systems also allow slow or fast ramping up or ramping down temperatures, so that in an emergency your utility can raise your air conditioning setting in a way you won’t notice.

Beyond the Thermostat Wars

We’ve come a long way and now have programmable, communicating thermostats that connect wirelessly to phones and computers and utilities and allow remote access and control.

Some utilities now offer incentives to customers in exchange for the ability to control the smart thermostat when power demand is high. The utility’s control is often minimal and customers can typically override the utility setting, but a utility in Colorado recently locked thousands of customer thermostats during an “energy emergency.” If you enroll in this kind of program, be sure you understand what you may give up as a participant.

There are a few ways that working with the utility can be a win for consumers. Many utilities offer time-of-use pricing, so that electricity is cheaper at night when there is lower demand and more expensive during peak demand periods in the late afternoon and early evening. A smart thermostat can minimize your electricity use during peak demand times automatically. The rewards are lower energy bills for you, the customer, without much sacrifice of comfort.

Another way to save money during peak events is by enrolling in programs through companies that partner with utilities, like EnergyHub or OhmConnect.

So what does the utility get out of this arrangement? Quite a bit. Here are a few benefits for utilities:

The utility’s service area will not experience as many blackouts. This goes a long way in keeping customers happy and perhaps avoiding some litigation over spoiled food and such.
If the utility is better able to handle peak load, it will minimize the use of expensive, dirty, coal fired “peaker plants.” These are power plants that are in reserve for emergencies. They are expensive to start up and operate, and they put out a lot of CO2, NO2 and other harmful pollutants.
By automatically shifting energy use in consumer’s homes, utilities may be able to help homeowners avoid costly upgrades to their electrical systems.

But all of these changes bring up another problem. Now that your thermostat can connect to your utility, who can see your home data? In our new connected lifestyles, can you trust your thermostat to utility program staff?

To address these issues, some states have taken steps to protect consumer privacy in the smart grid era. California, Colorado and Virginia guard against improper third party acquisition of your data for commercial purposes, such as targeted advertising. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) grants strong privacy rights, including allowing a consumer to opt out of the sale of her information to third parties, and to request that a business delete her information from its records.

Trust between utilities and their customers must be based on transparency about how energy use data is collected and stored. As the smart grid evolves, the utility industry will need to update their privacy rules to keep pace, making sure that customers always maintain control over their own data.

About the Author

Jim Gunshinan is a versatile and experienced writer and editor of nonfiction and creative nonfiction works. He writes in a conversational tone and, as a published poet, can paint pictures with words that connect and inspire. Jim blogs about, and has published articles about green homebuilding and renovation, energy, the environment, and climate change. He has also published articles on science and spirituality, personal essays, and poetry.

04 Sep 2022
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Diet for a Hotter Climate: Five Plants That Could Help Feed the World

Over the course of human history, scientists believe that humans have cultivated more than 6,000 different plant species. But over time, farmers gravitated toward planting those with the largest yields. Today, just three crops – rice, wheat and corn – provide nearly half of the world’s calories.

That reliance on a small number of crops has made agriculture vulnerable to pests, plant-borne diseases and soil erosion, which thrive on monoculture – the practice of growing only one crop at a time. It has also meant losing out on the resilience other crops show in surviving drought and other natural disasters.

As the impacts of the climate crisis become starker, farmers across the world are rediscovering ancient crops and developing new hybrids that might prove more hardy in the face of drought or epidemics, while also offering important nutrients.

“You hear all the statistics like, ‘We’ve lost 90% of our varieties’. It’s only recently that I realized the greatest sadness isn’t that we’ve lost that diversity. It’s that we don’t even know that we’ve lost that diversity,” says Chris Smith, founder of the Utopian Seed Project.

Here’s a look at five crops, beyond rice, wheat and corn, that farmers across the world are now growing in hopes of feeding the planet as it warms:

Amaranth: the plant that survived colonization

From leaf to seed, the entirety of the amaranth plant is edible. Standing up to eight feet tall, amaranth stalks are topped off with red, orange or green seed-filled plumes. Across Africa and Asia, amaranth has long been eaten as a vegetable – whereas Indigenous Americans also ate the plant’s seed: a pseudo-cereal like buckwheat or quinoa.

While amaranth leaves can be sautéed or cooked into a stir-fry, the seed is commonly toasted and then eaten with honey or milk. A complete protein with all nine essential amino acids, amaranth is a good source of vitamins and antioxidants.

In the Americas, Spanish colonizers banned the Aztecs and Maya from growing amaranth when they arrived on the continent. However, the plant continued to grow as a weed and many farmers saved amaranth seeds, passing them down for generations, until their descendants were allowed to grow it again.

Today, Indigenous farmers in Guatemala, Mexico and the US are collaborating to grow this drought-resistant crop. Like fonio, an African grain, amaranth is not a new crop, but one that is experiencing a resurgence as communities adapt to the climate crisis. “Everything that’s new was old once,” said Matthew Blair, a professor at Tennessee State University and co-president of the Amaranth Institute.

Amaranth has found its way into European kitchens, with Ukraine coming in as the crop’s largest producer on the continent.

Fonio: the drought-resistant traditional grain

For thousands of years, farmers across West Africa have cultivated fonio – a kind of millet that tastes like a slightly nuttier couscous or quinoa. Historically, fonio is considered to be Africa’s oldest cultivated cereal and was regarded by some as the food of chiefs and kings. In countries such as Senegal, Burkina Faso and Mali, fonio would be served on holy days, like at weddings and during the month of Ramadan.

Today, attention is increasingly focused on fonio for its resilience and health benefits. As the climate continues to change, fonio’s drought resistance and ability to grow in poor soil has made it a standout crop in water-scarce regions. It also has important nutritional value as a low glycemic, gluten-free grain – making it a good source of amino acids for people with diabetes or gluten intolerance.

While Europeans once called fonio “hungry rice”, European companies are now manufacturing their own fonio. The Italian company Obà Food helped introduce fonio to the EU in December 2018. And in the US, the Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam sources fonio from the aid organization SOS Sahel for his brand Yolélé, also the name of his cookbook celebrating West African cuisine.

Cowpeas: the fully edible plant

In the 1940s, more than 5m acres of cowpeas were grown in the US – the majority, as their name suggests, for hay to feed livestock. But long before cowpeas – also called southern peas or black-eyed peas – came to the Americas, they were grown for human consumption in West Africa. Although cowpea production has declined in the US in recent decades, the crop is hugely important in much of Africa. Nigeria is the world’s largest cowpea producer.

As scientists look for alternative crops, Blair said it was important to identify ones where the entire plant is edible. Although historically people have mostly eaten cowpeas’ seeds, the leaves and pods are also a good source of protein.

Because cowpeas are highly drought tolerant, they’re also a good candidate as the climate changes. At Tennessee State University, Blair is part of a team studying the introduction of cowpeas to Latin America, as an alternative to beans, like pinto and black beans, with similar flavor profiles that may soon become more difficult to grow.

Taro: adapting the tropical crop for colder climes

In the tropics of Southeast Asia and Polynesia, taro has long been grown as a root vegetable, not unlike the potato. But as rising temperatures threaten cultivation of the crop in its natural habitat, farmers in the continental US are trying to adapt the tropical perennial to grow as a temperate annual, because it cannot survive the cold of US winters.

At the Utopian Seed Project in North Carolina, founder Chris Smith and his team have been experimenting with tropical crops, looking for ways to help the plants survive the winter. Today, they’re growing eight varieties of taro, including ones sourced from Korea, the Philippines, Hawaii, China and Puerto Rico.

“We want to introduce taro because we truly believe that that will give us a more secure food system,” Smith says. “But the beautiful byproduct is that that also allows us to engage with foods that are traditionally from either Indigenous or peasant farming communities. And I think it really gives those traditionally underserved populations an opportunity to engage with the food system that they don’t usually get.”

Like fonio, amaranth and cowpeas, taro isn’t a new crop – it’s just new to the US food system. Which is why the Utopian Seed Project isn’t just learning how to grow taro, but also teaching people how to cook it. “These crops are just foods that are embedded in cultures around the world in a way that they’re not embedded here,” Smith said. “It takes work to build that community and desire for that crop.”

Kernza: the crop bred for the climate crisis

While many alternative crops are just plants that were grown somewhere else in the world generations ago, others have been cultivated specifically to withstand climate change.

In the 1980s, researchers at the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute identified a wheat-like grass called intermediate wheatgrass as a perennial cereal crop that could be developed as a substitute for annual grains like wheat. The goal was to minimize the environmental impacts of grain production.

In 2019, the Kansas-based Land Institute, a non-profit research organization focused on sustainable agriculture, introduced Kernza, a cereal crop developed from intermediate wheatgrass and trademarked to ensure farmers know they’ve bought seeds from the official breeding program. Although researchers are still working to improve the grain’s yield, farmers in Minnesota, Kansas and Montana are today growing nearly 4,000 acres of Kernza.

“Growers immediately understand the benefits of perennials on their landscapes,” said Tessa Peters, director of crop stewardship at the Land Institute, “and for those working in grain-producing areas, Kernza is very appealing.”

Original article here

09 Jul 2021
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The Fallacy of Our Carbon Footprint

In 1992, a Canadian ecologist named William Rees coined the term “ecological footprint,” a measurement of how much any entity was impacting the planet’s ecology. A decade later, British Petroleum started promoting a new term: “carbon footprint.” In a splashy ad campaign, the company unveiled the first of its many carbon footprint calculators as a way for individuals to measure how their daily actions—what they eat, where they work, how they heat their home—impact global warming.

BP did not adopt the footprint imagery by accident. In the 30 years prior to the carbon footprint campaign, polluting companies had been using advertising to link pollution and climate change to personal choices. These campaigns, most notably the long-running Keep America Beautiful campaign, imply that individuals, rather than corporations, bear the responsibility for change.

“It was done so intentionally,” says Susan Hassol, director of the nonprofit science outreach group Climate Communication. “It’s a deflection.”

The universal adoption of the term “carbon footprint” hasn’t just changed how we speak about climate change. It’s changed how we think about it. Climate change has become an individual problem, caused by our insatiable appetite for consumption, and therefore a war that must be waged on our dinner plates and gas tanks, a hero’s journey from consumer to conservationist.

The reality is that the future of civilization is being decided at a political and corporate level that no individual can impact.

Yet the reality is that the future of civilization is being decided at a political and corporate level that no individual can impact. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. Fossil fuel giants are funding climate change skepticism while simultaneously lobbying for tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Big corporate names like Costco and Netflix are loudly committing to reduce emissions but unable to set meaningful targets or put plans in place. The Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules and regulations.

The same way that you give your child a toy to play with so you can finish your task uninterrupted, everyday citizens are busy changing out lightbulbs and buying electric cars while the true cause of global warming continues uninterrupted: a civilization dependent on fossil fuels. As Mike Tidwell, the executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, wrote in a 2007 op-ed, “every time an activist or politician hectors the public to voluntarily reach for a new bulb or spend extra on a Prius, ExxonMobil heaves a big sigh of relief.” A complete paradigm shift is needed—both in the way we conceptualize our individual climate impact and in the ways we calculate the emission impacts of those ultimately responsible: corporations and governmental systems.

One of the challenges with the carbon footprint measurement is how few of the factors an individual controls. Most of us have limited options for where we live, how far we have to commute to get to work, what kind of energy is available to heat our homes, etc. If we don’t own our home (and more than 30% of Americans don’t), we may not be able to properly insulate or install high-efficiency appliances. One research report from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that roughly one third of a city dweller’s carbon footprint is determined by public transportation options and building infrastructure. “We build our cities this way,” Hassol says. “It’s system change that’s really needed so that people have better choices.”

The inadequacy of our carbon footprint as a driver of change is painfully highlighted when you look at single-use plastics. Much attention has been given to how much plastic Americans consume (35.3 million tons per year, enough to fill the 104 million-cubic-foot AT&T Stadium in Dallas every 16 hours) and how each individual should be changing their behavior to help combat this waste. Everywhere you look, there’s a campaign to recycle more, or use metal straws, or bring your own bag to the grocery store.

In contrast, there are no public campaigns about the fact that packaging, an area where consumer control is limited, is the top driver of plastic production by a significant margin. The emissions impact of plastic manufacturing itself is rarely mentioned, along with the fact that much of our recycling still ends up in landfills. Some of the poorest nations are left to deal with hundreds of thousands of tons of soft drink bottles. The plastics are often just incinerated, creating serious environmental and health consequences. It’s a question as to whose carbon footprint is making a deeper impact on the environment: the family whose lettuce comes sealed in plastic (and who pays, not only for the product, but also for the waste collection and management services), or the company that is continuing to package food products in plastic materials, and then opting out of responsibility for their disposal.

Even if we just wanted to measure individual impact on climate change, the carbon footprint falls painfully short: “The current concept of a carbon footprint is too narrowly drawn,” Hassol explains. “It’s only the things I’m actively using and doing in my personal life and it doesn’t draw on other actions that are perhaps more important in the big picture as far as addressing climate change.”

For example, the average American has a carbon footprint of 16 tons. The average individual footprint globally is 4 tons. But that calculation doesn’t include who you vote for, how you invest your money, who you work for (and how much you travel for work, versus for leisure), or how you talk about climate change and influence others to get involved. “All of that should be part of the way we conceptualize our impact,” Hassol says.

Instead of obsessing over a single metric, Cameron Brick, a social psychologist from the University of Amsterdam, says he urges people to have an ongoing and evolving conversation between themselves and their chosen lifestyle. “It’s not a single number, because anytime you pick a metric, then we will begin to game it,” he says. Instead, a minimal-carbon lifestyle is a process—one that involves community-building and continuing to make improvements over time, he says. “My lifestyle is not perfect either, but probably better each year.”

Hassol points out that one of the most important ways that an individual can impact emissions on a wider scale is also the hardest to calculate: social contagion. “When people do something, it affects others around them and their emissions,” she says.

Studies have shown that energy-related behaviors are heavily influenced by peer groups, even more than cost or convenience. A study in California showed that every time a solar panel was installed within a certain ZIP code, the probability of another installation in that area increased by 0.78%. Similarly, if you know somebody who has given up flying because of climate change, you are 50% more likely to also reduce your own air travel.

“Your individual footprint is not the full measure of your contribution because you’re encouraging other people through your personal actions,” explains Hassol. She recommends that people who want to do more should research community solar options and ways to buy into clean energy in their communities, and then publicize those options among their families, friends and social networks, in order to create that initial momentum for change.

But what could system change look like? For starters, using measurements that actually hold the decision makers responsible for their emissions impacts, for the entire lifecycle of their product or service. That might look like Big Soda being held accountable not only for the manufacturing and transportation of their single-use plastics, but also for each and every bottle that ends up in somebody’s recycling bin (Coca-Cola is the top producer of plastic waste in the world). The shift also might look like emissions information being printed on product labels and unbiased regulatory bodies certifying the accuracy of corporate emissions reports.

On the policy level, interest in a carbon tax is growing. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act was reintroduced in Congress this year (as Senate bill 984 and House Resolution 2238), and would force a temporary moratorium on virgin plastic production, require minimum recycled content, and ban some single-use plastic food service items. Many states already have some form of a producer responsibility program, where the producer of hard-to-dispose products such as paints, batteries, and other hazardous materials, must finance proper disposal. This creates an incentive to design reusable or less-toxic products.

When we shift the focus from changing consumer behavior to changing producer behavior, we see where true change happens: in corporate boardrooms and among political leaders. The irony of the carbon footprint is that individual action does have the power to change the world, just not on the lightbulb and recycling level.

“This problem is too big to solve voluntarily one person at a time,” Hassol says. “We need to change the system and you have a role in changing that system.”

About the Author

Emma Pattee covers topics related to climate change and feminism. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Cut, WIRED, and others.

Original article here

25 Mar 2021
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Project Drawdown: 100 Climate Solutions in Real Time

It’s easy to get depressed and feel helpless in the face of the cascading effects of climate change we’re experiencing today: mega-wildfires, extreme heat and drought, flooding, hurricanes on steroids, and melting ice caps, to name a few. However, it’s not hopeless; we can change the trajectory of our future if we make the right choices individually and together — beginning today.

Back in 2017, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming was published. Edited by environmentalist and best-selling author Paul Hawken, the book presents 100 different ecologically sound ways to “draw down” carbon from the atmosphere by working in cooperation with natural systems. This was the first product of Project Drawdown, which was co-founded in 2014 by Hawken and fellow environmentalist Amanda Joy Ravenhill to uncover the most substantive climate solutions and communicate them to the world.

Drawdown refers to the to the time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline, thereby stopping catastrophic climate change. Before Project Drawdown, the most widely stated climate goals were to slow down or stop greenhouse gas emissions, but to Hawken these were necessary but insufficient goals. “If you’re traveling down the wrong road, you are still on the wrong road if you slow down,” he opined. The only goal that makes sense is to reverse global warming, he believed — and there was no roadmap for that. Project Drawdown was the answer.

The solutions presented in the book and on the website were sourced from individual farms, communities, cities, companies and governments. A coalition of researchers and scientists selected those with the greatest potential to either reduce emissions or draw down and store carbon from the atmosphere, reviewed the literature on each solution, and devised climate and financial models for each. Then outside experts evaluated their work.

Both book and website are organized into eight sections: Energy, Food, Women and Girls, Buildings and Cities, Land Use, Transport, Materials, and Coming Attractions; and every solution contains information on its history and science, examples, a ranking in terms of its global emissions-reduction potential, an estimate of how many gigatons of greenhouse gases it avoids or removes from the atmosphere, and its costs.

Who would have guessed that refrigerant management would be in the top ten? Or that educating girls and family planning would be the second most important things we could do to reduce carbon emissions? It turns out that hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs, the primary current refrigerant) have 1,000 to 9,000 times greater capacity to warm the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. As for making the means of family planning more accessible and educating girls, these two rights-based solutions are projected to reduce the future global population by about a billion people, with commensurate savings in greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s hopeful to see so many natural solutions already in practice, but even more hopeful to see how many of them we can individually affect. For instance, we can all reduce the amount of food we waste (the #1 emissions saver), we can add more plant-based food to our diets and reduce our intake of meat (#3), and we can see that our old refrigerators and air conditioners are recycled properly (#4). And those SUVs? Last year the International Energy Agency found that SUVs were the second largest cause of the global rise in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade! An analysis commissioned by The Guardian found that all the SUVs sold in the U.S. just in 2018 will in one year emit 3.5 million tons more in CO2 than if they were smaller cars. Over a 15-year lifetime of the vehicles, the extra pollution is on par with the entire annual emissions of Norway — a huge hit to the climate.

This year Project Drawdown published their latest update — the Drawdown 2020 Review — available for free download from their website. Their bottom line: the world can still reach Drawdown by mid-century, if we make the best use of all existing climate solutions. Ultimately, we can build a completely regenerative society, because when we implement natural solutions to solve the climate emergency, we produce a plethora of added benefits to human and planetary well-being — such as clean air and water, more nutritious food, less disease, and more productive and meaningful jobs.

The main challenge with the Drawdown solutions is that scaling them up will require international cooperation and coordination at unprecedented levels — and that depends on our leaders seeing global warming as the existential threat it is and acting with the requisite speed and determination. Achieving the needed global transformation will require a new paradigm of cooperation, a vision of possibility, and the collective will to address the issue.

Project Drawdown has produced a framework to guide us on a new pathway of ecological recovery and sustainability, but to act, we need to be able to touch, see, and feel the existing solutions at hand. In “Drawdown 2020 — The Time is Now,” the virtual event that introduced Climate Week in New York City in September, 2020, we experience the sight, sound, and feel of just a few of those solutions, and watching it for free on the website is electrifying.

There is so much in this inspiring presentation that one can get overwhelmed with possibility! At the end, clips of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Louis Psihoyos’ film “Racing Extinction” were shown as they were being projected onto the Empire State Building and then on the Vatican during the COP 21 international climate conference, creating 4.4 billion media impressions worldwide. Psihoyos says that, “Once you get 10 percent of the population 100% committed to a cause, it’s unstoppable.” With his films he aims to get 10 percent of the planet aware of the extinction crisis, and he’ll be doing similar projections of his film on iconic buildings worldwide in 2021.

Project Drawdown ultimately is a response to environmentalist Rachel Carson’s pioneering work beginning in the 1960s: “The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery — not over nature but of ourselves.” Rather than feeling climate change is something that’s happening to us, Paul Hawken asks us to consider that “global warming is happening for us — an atmospheric transformation that inspires us to change and re-imagine everything we make and do.” If we do that, he says, we begin to live in a different world.

About the Author:

Cher Gilmore is a community organizer, writer, and editor living in Southern California.

Original article here

16 Jan 2021
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Get a Dog, Save the Planet

Dogs add a lot to our lives as companions, guards, playmates, and helpers in our fight against Global Climate Change!

My cousin Mark is a pretty smart guy who reads widely. (All my cousins are above average.) Here is what Mark sent to me in an e-mail about dogs:

“Professor Temple Grandin says that dogs are genetic wolves that have co-evolved with humans for 100,000 years, maybe more. Hence dogs and humans have complementary advantages and deficits. Humans used to have a better sense of hearing and smell, now dogs are better than us at those. Humans walk upright and have better vision and organizational skills, so dogs depend on us to see things and try to find them. Both are social creatures. So the lesson is that Nature has bundled the hardware and software for these skills and abilities between the two species. Unbundling them carries certain risks, so you should try to live with a dog if you can.”

I agree that dogs and humans are a pretty good combination. We’ve had a dog for about a year now. Cooper is a medium-sized Labradoodle, which is a Labrador Retriever and Poodle mix. He’s a great dog and we love him a lot. He’s heartbreakingly cute and cuddly. He has a Lab’s great disposition and a Poodle’s smarts. We think he’s the best dog ever.

But, along with being a good partner, is Cooper an energy efficient addition to our household? Are pets, and dogs in particular, a step in the right direction in the battle against global warming and the fight for energy security? Is Underdog more than a cartoon?

I think “bundling” ourselves with animals is a good idea for lots of reasons, but here is why I think dogs are energy efficient:

Dogs add warmth in the winter and stay outside most of the time in the summer, so they don’t add much to a house’s cooling load.
Dogs add fur in the winter and cool themselves using their tongues. Try that, humans!
When he has nothing to do, Cooper lays down flat as a pancake and barely moves, thereby conserving energy.
Dogs are great alarm systems and don’t even need batteries.
Dogs eat stuff that humans throw away. They will clean your plates if you let them, saving water and energy.
Because dogs need to be walked, they cause their owners to exercise, reducing their owners’ appetite and therefore their food intake (that’s how it’s supposed to work).
Dogs give you unconditional love and so you don’t have to drive your car to visit family and friends.

What’s your dog’s energy pawprint?

About the Author:

Jim Gunshinan was in turn Assistant Editor, Managing Editor, Editor, and Senior Editor at Home Energy Magazine/Building Performance Journal for 20 years. He is the editor of No Regrets Remodeling and was inducted in 2015 into the Building Performance Institute’s Building Performance Hall of Fame. He now writes on energy, the environment, and spirituality.

12 Oct 2020
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Vote Like the Planet Depends on It — Because It Does

by Bill McKibben

To understand the planetary importance of this autumn’s presidential election, check the calendar. Voting ends on Nov. 3—and by a fluke of timing, on the morning of Nov. 4, the United States is scheduled to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

President Trump announced during a Rose Garden speech in 2017 that we would abrogate our Paris commitments. But under the terms of the accords, it takes three years to formalize the withdrawal. So on Election Day it won’t be just Americans watching: The people of the world will see whether the country that has poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other over the course of history will become the only country that refuses to cooperate in the one international effort to do something about the climate crisis.

Trump’s withdrawal benefited oil executives, who have donated millions of dollars to his reelection campaign, and the small, strange fringe of climate deniers who continue to insist that the planet is cooling. But most people living in the rational world were appalled. Polling showed widespread opposition, and by some measures, Trump is more out of line with the American populace on environmental issues than any other.

In his withdrawal announcement he said he’d been elected “to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”; before the day was out, Pittsburgh’s mayor had pledged that his city would follow the guidelines set in the French capital. Young people, above all, have despised the president’s climate moves: Poll after poll shows that climate change is a top-tier issue with them and often the most important one—mostly, I think, because they’ve come to understand how tightly linked it is not just to their future but to questions of justice, equity, and race.

Here’s the truth: At this late date, meeting the promises set in Paris will be nowhere near enough. If you add up the various pledges that nations made at that conference, they plan on moving so timidly that the planet’s temperature will still rise more than 3 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels. So far, we’ve raised the mercury 1 degree Celsius, and that’s been enough to melt millions of square miles of ice in the Arctic, extend fire seasons for months, and dramatically alter the planet’s rainfall patterns. Settling for 3 degrees is kind of like writing a global suicide note.

Happily, we could go much faster if we wanted. The price of solar and wind power has fallen so fast and so far in the past few years that they are now the cheapest power on earth. Plenty of calculations show it will soon be cheaper to build solar and wind farms than to operate the fossil fuel power stations we’ve already built. Climate-smart investments are also better for workers and economic equality.

We need to have climate justice

“We need to have climate justice, which means to invest in green energy, [which] creates three times more jobs than to invest in fossil fuel energy,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in an interview with Covering Climate Now in September. If we wanted to make it happen, in other words, an energy revolution is entirely possible. The best new study shows that the United States could cut its current power sector emissions 80% by 2035 and create 20 million jobs along the way.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris haven’t pledged to move that quickly, but their climate plan is the farthest-reaching of any presidential ticket in history. More to the point, we can pressure them to go farther and faster. Already, seeing the polling on the wall, they’ve adopted many of the proposals of climate stalwarts such as Washington’s Gov. Jay Inslee. A team of Biden and Bernie Sanders representatives worked out a pragmatic but powerful compromise in talks before the Democratic National Convention; the Biden-Harris ticket seems primed to use a transition to green energy as a crucial part of a push to rebuild the pandemic-devastated economy.

Perhaps most important, they’ve pledged to try to lead the rest of the world in the climate fight. The United States has never really done this. Our role as the single biggest producer of hydrocarbons has meant that our response to global warming has always been crippled by the political power of Big Oil. But that power has begun to slip. Once the biggest economic force on the planet, the oil industry is a shadow of its former self. (You could buy all the oil companies in America for less than the cost of Apple; Tesla is worth more than any other auto company on earth.) And so it’s possible that the hammerlock on policy exercised by this reckless industry will loosen if Trump is beaten.

But only if he’s beaten. Four more years will be enough to cement in place his anti-environmental policies and to make sure it’s too late to really change course. The world’s climate scientists declared in 2018 that if we had any chance of meeting sane climate targets, we had to cut emissions almost in half by 2030. That’s less than 10 years away. We’re at the last possible moment to turn the wheel of the supertanker that is our government. Captain Trump wants to steer us straight onto the rocks, mumbling all the while about hoaxes. If we let him do it, history won’t forgive us. Nor will the rest of the world.

This article originally appeared in YES! magazine

About the Author:

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, the founder of 350.org, and the winner of the 2014 Right Livelihood Award. He is a YES! contributing editor.

08 Oct 2020
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An Economy With Heart

What would a healthy world economy look like?

With me, it all comes down to biology. I took a lot of courses in physiology while I was in grad school studying for a Masters in Bioengineering. As a former Catholic priest, I also have a Master of Divinity degree. But for me, when I understand something on a physical/biological level, I really get it.

My plum research assignment when I was studying bioengineering was to work in Penn State’s artificial heart lab. We tested our heart pumps in the earliest stages of development using a “mock circulatory system” developed by a genius member of the faculty named Gus Rosenberg. I won’t get into the nitty gritty details (or the sticky, viscous, messiness of the blood substitute glycerin when the system sprung a leak).

There are four key aspects to the system that delivers blood to the human body: A pumping mechanism, capacitance, resistance, and the blood vessels themselves (rubber tubing in the mockup).

The pump in the circulatory system is obvious—it’s the heart. It provides the energy needed to push the blood to all parts of the body, delivering oxygen to tissues, from the brain to the toes; then the return journey from all part of the body back to the lungs where the blood picks up oxygen and returns to the heart to start the routine again.

In order to get blood get back and forth though the smallest capillaries, the heart has to fight against resistance. In this world we live in, there is always resistance. Think of gravity. In the mock system, resistance is provided by a junction where a one-inch tube becomes several quarter-inch tubes. (I don’t remember the exact dimensions. Gus forgive me.) The capillary tubes are located between two metal plates with turnscrews that can increase or decrease the resistance.

The heart pumps blood in a rhythmic pattern. That is the reason why our blood pressure is measured in systolic pressure and diastolic pressure. In order for the flow to be manageable in the body, the up and down pressure has to be smoothed out in some way. It is like chugging a drink instead of slowly drinking it. At the very least, chugging will make you take in a lot of air leading to belching, stomach aches, and possibly passing beer through your nostrils. The blood vessel’s capacity to absorb and smooth out blood flow is crucial. They do this by expanding and contracting.

In the mock circulatory system, capacitance is provided by a cylinder with an inlet and an outlet, on both the supply and return sides of the system. When the heart pumps, the reservoir fills quickly but drains out more slowly. It’s like taking in a big breath and then letting it our more smoothly. Or think of an airplane cycling between high speed and low speed. It wouldn’t stay in the air for long.

The Heart of the Global Economy

So what can the dynamics of a circulatory system say about the world economy?

Think of the heart as the energy of the economy, the creating and distribution of goods and services. Think of the capacitors as banks that take the swings of the market forces and pass it on, through loans and investments, in a controlled and predicable manner. Like a body, the economic system does not like sudden increases and decreases in capitol. Banks, like capacitors, offer securities as a way for investors to guard against the sudden rising and falling of the market.

In today’s global economy, the vessels are all the ways capital flows around the system—mostly now through the internet and trading floors. And finally, the resistance is provided, in a healthy system, by the gradual movement of capitol from banks to investors, and corporations, down to small businesses and individual mortgages and savings accounts. So the whole body is able to benefit from the energy of the heart.

A healthy global economy, like a healthy body, efficiently directs the flow of capital to nourish the whole body. In this case the body includes the heart, which gets the first freshly oxygenated blood through the coronary arteries. The heart of the economic system is the energy of those creating and selling goods and services.

In an unhealthy body, blood flow does not get to the heart because of blocked coronaries and high blood pressure. So too in the global economy. When money remains largely in the financial markets, in the banks and the big investment houses, the dynamics of the system slow and the people who make goods and offer services are not fed with the capitol they need to thrive. And like in the far-flung parts of the body, the fingers and the toes, when the flow of capitol doesn’t reach the farmer in Kenya or the small businesswoman in Egypt, or in Iowa, the whole system begins to die. People with uncontrolled diabetes resulting in a lack of blood flow into their extremities die in parts. (I’ve known people who lost toes, then feet, then legs, then they died.)

An economy cannot ultimately flourish when segments of the economy are left to wither and die. This leads to famine, a lack of meaningful work, homelessness, and poverty; millions of refugees fleeing dangerous areas looking for safety for themselves and their families. Like a body, a global economy, if not serving all parts of the system, will die in parts too. And an unhealthy global economy is in no position to handle crisis such as Global Climate Change and pandemics such as COVID-19.

The Distribution Resolution

For example, in an efficient global economy, personal protective equipment (PPE) would be distributed efficiently all over the globe to health care workers, food handlers, schools and other crucial service providers. Instead, in the United States, the states are bidding against other states for the equipment they need. And profiteers, as during wartime, suck capitol from the system without contributing to solving the problems many of them have produced. Storehouses all over the world are full of weapons systems that are paid for but should never be used. Ordinary people hoard toilet paper, creating a crisis in bathrooms all over the world!

We don’t have a supply problem in this world. We have a distribution problem.

Another example of the importance of a healthy global economy is the worldwide response to Global Climate Change. The increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the last century or so acts like a layer of insulation, keeping too much energy in the weather system, leading to floods and droughts, fires, and famine. A functioning, global carbon trading system would gradually reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. And a carbon tax could do the same.

The way I’ve presented both the human circulatory system and the global economy is simplistic and does not go into great detail. That’s why the world needs wise cardiologists and smart and compassionate economists. We need responsible political leaders that are able to cooperate with other leaders to bring the best minds to the biggest challenges. I think we have the first two covered. In the United States and around the world, universities and medical schools train the best and the brightest, who provide crucial advice to governments and business and offer high quality care to patients with cardiac and other diseases. (The availability of quality education and training for everyone is another story.)

Political leadership, at least in this country and notable others, is not so great; in fact, right now it’s abysmal, corrupt and dysfunctional. Look at the dismantling of the Post Office, it’s own kind of distribution system for a functioning economy. So vote!

About the Author:

Ascension Lifestyle Contributor Jim Gunshinan was in turn Assistant Editor, Managing Editor, Editor, and Senior Editor at Home Energy Magazine/Building Performance Journal for 20 years. He is now a freelance writer and editor who explores life through personal essays, poetry, and other things that pay the bills.