Danny Choo / CC BY-SA 2.0
By Olivia Sullivan
One of the many unfortunate outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic has been the quick and obvious increase in single-use plastic products. After COVID-19 arrived in the United States, many grocery stores prohibited customers from using reusable bags, coffee shops banned reusable mugs, and takeout food with plastic forks and knives became the new normal.
<p>Despite recent scientific evidence that <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/planet4-international-stateless/2020/06/26618dd6-health-expert-statement-reusables-safety.pdf" target="_blank">reusables don't transmit the virus</a>, the plastic industry has <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-06-08/is-plastic-the-coronavirus-hero-the-plastics-industry-thinks-so" target="_blank">lobbied hard</a> for a return to all things disposable plastic. Inevitably, a lot of that plastic will continue to flow into our environment.</p><p>While COVID-19 has certainly thrown a wrench into the hard-earned progress we'd been making in reducing waste, eliminating plastic pollution entirely was always going to be challenging — with or without a pandemic. The jarring rise of single-use plastics is an expedited version of a familiar trend. Plastic production has been <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/plastic-age/533955/" target="_blank">steadily increasing</a> for quite some time.</p><p>As a zero-waste advocate, I've seen how the tsunami of plastic continuously being produced and flooding our planet has made achieving zero-waste goals incredibly difficult. The sheer amount makes it hard to safely and efficiently dispose of plastic, no matter how hard we try.</p>
<p>But as I examine the problem, and search for solutions, I keep coming back to one noteworthy example.</p><p>In 2003 the small Japanese town of Kamikatsu set an ambitious zero-waste declaration, aiming to be 100% waste-free by 2020. The goal was to produce no trash, meaning everything from food packaging to unwanted clothing to yesterday's newspaper should be reused, repurposed into new goods, or recycled.</p>
<div id="b7811" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="909a9d9b34be97cbd835be64fb59c05c"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1181178899704639489" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">#DYK decorative leaves adorning Japanese dishes create jobs? Seniors in #Kamikatsu, Tokushima, grow & collect them,… https://t.co/XP1d96tG47</div> — The Gov't of Japan (@The Gov't of Japan)<a href="https://twitter.com/JapanGov/statuses/1181178899704639489">1570449969.0</a></blockquote></div><p>Now that 2020 has arrived, we can see the result: In the 17 years since establishing its goal, Kamikatsu transitioned from openly incinerating all its trash to reusing and recycling 80% of its waste.</p><p>While the town made incredible progress, it ultimately fell short of its 100% goal. Its main issue? Unrecyclable plastic packaging and mixed materials still end up in the trash.</p><p>As <a href="https://phys.org/news/2019-06-japan-town-recycle.html" target="_blank">one resident explained</a> to the AFP news agency last year, "Our lifestyle depends mainly on plastic. Consumers can reduce plastic waste to a certain extent, but we'll still have waste if producers keep making plastic products."</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzU0MjYzOC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1OTUyNDMxM30.n_UVlEF30a9o3Q-BOJj3vViY7YVKv7d-I3EeulDxWnQ/img.jpg?width=980" id="4df79" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e10cd8a3bc3c98e43ec7b68464d35cc1" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Kamikatsu, Japan. Yuki Shimazu / CC BY-SA 2.0
<p>This reveals a worldwide truth: Even products made mostly from easily recyclable materials like paper, aluminum or cardboard can't be sorted and recycled if they contain plastic components that can't be separated.</p><p>The truth is, some materials simply aren't recyclable, and <a href="https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782" target="_blank">only 9%</a> of all the plastic ever created has <em>been </em>recycled. As Kamikatsu's residents have painstakingly proven, no matter how many categories consumers sort their waste into or how diligently they scrub down their plastic food containers, most plastics <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Greenpeace-Report-Circular-Claims-Fall-Flat.pdf" target="_blank">cannot be recycled</a>.</p><p>Meanwhile we keep hearing the <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/504091-the-insanity-of-plastic-recycling" target="_blank">industry-driven narrative</a> that recycling can stop plastic from choking our marine life or littering our natural places. That's intentionally misleading.</p><p>Around the world, as in Kamikatsu, plastic is everywhere. With excessive amounts of plastic products and packaging stocked on store shelves, it's clear that zero-waste goals cannot be achieved by consumers alone. Plastic is not a "zero waste" material, so in order to achieve zero waste, companies must stop making so much plastic.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzU0MjY0MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxOTExMDAxNX0.YpMVEj2xK5D4TDypbZJGuJXnjMa17zprUVWxexuy5mk/img.jpg?width=980" id="a5cff" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2db1e7aa34db8c561ecab63c8ee06ff2" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Marine debris collected at Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. NOAA
<p>We can achieve that. The first steps include banning some of the worst and most polluting single-use plastics, placing a pause on the development of new plastics facilities, and protecting state and local governments' ability to enact more stringent regulations.</p><p>We must also shift the paradigm by holding producers responsible for the waste they create. By requiring new plastic products to contain recycled plastic and making producers fund the collection and recycling of plastic products, producers would be incentivized to design longer lasting products that can <em>actually</em> be reused and recycled.</p><p>These goals — outlined in numerous scientific studies and advocacy reports — have some forward motion. In the United States, a federal bill was recently introduced in both the House and the Senate, the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5845" target="_blank">Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act</a>. If passed this bill — or others like it on the local, state or national levels — could help move the world beyond single-use plastics and make that needed systemic change a reality.</p><p>The bill hasn't moved forward since it was introduced this past February, but the world is still on a deadline. A recent study published in the journal <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/07/22/science.aba9475" target="_blank"><em>Science</em></a> looked at rising levels of plastic production and said "coordinated global action is urgently needed to reduce plastic consumption, increase rates of reuse, waste collection and recycling, expand safe disposal systems and accelerate innovation in the plastic value chain."</p><p>Requiring producers to stop making nonrecyclable products designed to be thrown out is the first step toward achieving that goal. Only then will Kamikatsu and other towns, cities and countries around the world finally be able to eliminate plastic pollution and reach 100% zero waste.</p><p><em>The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of </em>The Revelator<em>, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.</em></p><p><a href="https://therevelator.org/author/oliviasullivan/" target="_blank">Olivia Sullivan</a> <em><em>is a zero waste associate with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) working on a campaign to move the United States beyond plastic.</em></em></p><p><em><em><span></span>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://therevelator.org/cities-zero-waste/" target="_blank">The Revelator</a>. </em></em></p>From Your Site Articles
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By Tara Lohan
Would you like to take a crack at solving climate change? Or at least creating a road map of how we could do it?
<p>That's possible now thanks to a new computer modeling tool called <a href="https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/en-roads/" target="_blank">En-ROADS</a>.</p><p>Created by the nonprofit think tank <a href="https://www.climateinteractive.org/" target="_blank">Climate Interactive</a> and MIT's Sloan's Sustainability Initiative, the scientifically rigorous online tool lets you put your hand on the lever to figure out what mix of energy, economic and technological changes can get us to a livable future.</p><p>For example, what if we stop burning coal now and move to clean energy in the next 10 years? What if we curb deforestation? Or demand increased energy efficiency and the electrification of our vehicles? Put a tax on carbon? There are too many variables to wrap our heads around. That's where computer modeling comes in: It can help us visualize the possibilities.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://therevelator.org/author/taralohan/" target="_blank">Tara Lohan</a> is deputy editor of The Revelator and has worked for more than a decade as a digital editor and environmental journalist focused on the intersections of energy, water and climate. Her work has been published by The Nation, American Prospect, High Country News, Grist, Pacific Standard</em><em> and others. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis.</em></p><p><em></em><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://therevelator.org/climate-interactive/" target="_blank">The Revelator</a>.</em><em></em></p>
<p>"We use computers to keep track of all of the feedback loops and interconnections and tipping points that exist either in the atmospheric or biological or economic or political parts of the system," said Climate Interactive cofounder <a href="https://www.climateinteractive.org/about/staff/elizabeth-sawin/" target="_blank">Elizabeth Sawin</a>.</p><p>These kinds of high-level tools are usually reserved for scientists and other experts, but En-ROADS is available to everyone. Launched in 2019, it's already been used by government officials, business leaders and educators, and local activists in dozens of countries. It helps people visualize that climate solutions are in reach, says Sawin.</p><p>Climate Interactive's work extends beyond computer modeling. We talked to Sawin about the potential of En-ROADS to change communities and the organization's practice of "multisolving" — employing collaborative solutions that work for climate change, health, equity and well-being — and how improving the social safety net can also help address the climate crisis.</p>
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When you build a tool like En-ROADS, who are you hoping uses it?
<p>The tools that we build are used by quite a range of people, which is one of the exciting things about them.</p><p>Before En-ROADS we had a tool called C-ROADS, which was used in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. During the negotiations in Copenhagen it allowed people to add up what each country was offering to do in terms of emissions cuts and calculate what that would mean for the global temperature at the end of the century. That was of interest to the U.S. State Department under President Obama and negotiating parties from other countries.</p><p>As a young bunch of scientists, it was fairly thrilling to hand our results to a colleague who took them to [science advisor] John Holdren, who took them to the president.</p><p>Today we find En-ROADS having quite a lot of traction in the upper levels of companies and governments, but one thing we've learned over the years is that those high-level leaders really can't move further or faster than the civil society is ready to.</p><p>So we invest quite a lot in supporting teachers — university and high school — and advocates. We're in the middle of a second round of webinars training around 1,000 people to use En-ROADS so they can teach others.</p><p>These are people all around the world. One is interested in going to her members of Congress with her laptop and using the simulation to advocate for a better future for her kids.</p>What does En-ROADS do differently from other computer simulations?
<p>One thing we talk about is the democratization of this information. En-ROADS isn't breaking new scientific ground that other computer simulations of climate change don't do. In fact, often we're relying on that cutting-edge research of other groups.</p><p>But we have paid attention to making it run fast and making it freely available online, where most of these other tools aren't designed for those purposes. They're doing scientific research for other scientists. Top leaders can often get the input of those academics if they have a question or a scenario, but it's unlikely that a politically active mom who's trying to influence her member of Congress would have access to those kinds of tools. Whereas if she puts in the time to learn, she can use En-ROADS.</p><p>I think more and more, and especially in the last few years, we come across people who have the impression that [the climate crisis is] pretty much hopeless. "It's too late. We've left it too long." And En-ROADS, for those people, is motivating because it shows that the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement to keep temperature increase well below 2 degrees [Celsius] is still physically possible. There's a huge amount of social and political will needed to do it, but it's within reach.</p>Your organization is guided by a practice you call “multisolving.” What is that?
<p>In the early years of working with models like C-ROADS and En-ROADS, we were really focused on tons of greenhouse gases and how to limit those. And clearly that's the core of the problem. But what we found in Copenhagen was that, despite our group and a few others who were doing this analysis actually being heard, and being on the front page of top newspapers, it didn't lead to more ambitious pledges from countries.</p><p>There was a soul-searching moment for me and for Climate Interactive in realizing that just being good scientists within this narrow bound of counting tons of carbon isn't getting us onto the path we need to be on.</p><p>That got me interested in this question of what else would be different in a world that has gotten off of fossil fuels. This was around 2009-2010. I hired the best researcher I knew, and she went away and came back and handed me this report.</p><p>It said that the benefits of being off fossil fuels, when monetized — when you took all the lives saved, all the healthcare costs saved, all the jobs created — the savings were of the same order of magnitude as the cost.</p><p>I thought she had made a mistake. Because I had worked my whole career trying to convince people that it's going to be <em>hard</em>, it's going to be <em>expensive</em>, but we <em>need</em> to get off fossil fuels. And she was saying that if you just widened your scope and looked not just on the carbon side, but you looked at the lives and health and community well-being, we were going to reap all these benefits.</p><p>I felt like I had been spending my life on a problem that was framed in a way where we would never be able to solve it. But by expanding our view, the things we were missing — basically political will, political power and budgetary power — seemed like maybe they could be aligned.</p><p>After that, for a long time we talked about the "co-benefits," and that that was kind of the word at the time. And many people still use it. We ended up dissatisfied with that word because it sounds like climate change is the main benefit, and then there are these other nice co-benefits.</p><p>That's still putting CO2 at the center of the world.</p><p>To a parent who's been in the emergency room all night with a child with asthma, is protecting the climate 100 years from now the main benefit of closing the neighborhood coal-fired power plant? Or is ending asthma the main benefit and climate is a nice co-benefit?</p><p>So we made up the word "<a href="https://www.climateinteractive.org/programs/multisolving/" target="_blank">multisolving</a>" to talk about how all these problems matter.</p>What does this look like in action?
<p>We learned that by and large our systems are not set up to allow people to take advantage of these synergies. And just to give you one example, if a country is going to go on a low-carbon transportation plan, those are going to be costs that are felt by the ministry of transportation. But the savings are largely going to be felt by the ministry of health. There'll be less hospitalization, fewer premature deaths, less cardiovascular and respiratory illness, less premature birth. But the way current governments are set up, no transportation minister is going to get much political appreciation or an incentive by saving money for the health ministry.</p><p>So for the last few years we've been working more and more on how to bring people together, to build the relationships that are needed to take advantage of these synergies because — until people can shift their systems around in a way where they can act together across these different silos and boundaries and jurisdictions — this will all just stay theoretical.</p><p>One place we have been doing this is in Atlanta with a group called Partnership for Southern Equity. We're creating a community network, the <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/justgrowth/just-growth-circle?authuser=0" target="_blank">Just Growth Circle</a>, that can be mobilized to have influence, decision-by-decision, on the kind of pattern of growth and development that will eventually change a whole city.</p>That kind of deep-relationship building isn’t something that can be done quickly. How do you balance that kind of work to establish these interconnections with the urgency of the climate crisis?
<p>Wendell Berry said, "To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial." But we're in the kind of emergency that calls for patience. Time is very short and yet to make the kind of changes we need to make requires trust and relationships that can't be rushed and can only be cultivated. All you can do is create the conditions for them.</p><p>If you have urgency — if you need to bring things to scale, if you're looking for transformation and not incremental change — then actually this very slow and patient work of building trust and relationships is the way that you get to a very fast and transformative change.</p>Has anything shifted in your thinking in the last few months during this global pandemic?
<p>There's been a lot of talk about opportunities for transformation within the pandemic, especially about the need for low-carbon solutions. The other side is the social safety net. A lot of what we need to do to help people through the pandemic is also what the smart people behind the Green New Deal have said from the beginning needs to be part of the plan.</p><p>When they talked about universal healthcare, childcare, gender equity programs and the job training side of it, lots of people responded that they were way outside their lane. "What does this have to do with carbon?" But the pandemic is showing us that if you want a society to be able to pivot rapidly, you need a social safety net to support people.</p><p>If you want to pivot to green infrastructure, if you want low carbon infrastructure, you're changing a whole workforce in a generation. The social safety net is the lubrication that allows that to happen with less friction.</p><p>The social safety net we need to build to get through the pandemic could be built to also carry us through the transition to a climate-safe economy. It's not the technical side of this transition, but it is the taking care of each other through the transition. That may sound selfless, but it's also highly practical because the transition isn't going to happen if we can't move a whole society very quickly.</p>From Your Site Articles
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An aerial view of Miami, Florida. Ann Baekken / CC BY 2.0
By Tara Lohan
With its white-sand beaches and glittery high-rises, Miami is still a vacation hotspot. But lapping at those shores is another reality. The city is also a "possible future Atlantis, and a metonymic stand-in for how the rest of the developed world might fail — or succeed — in the climate-changed future," wrote Miami journalist Mario Alejandro Ariza in his forthcoming book, Disposable City: Miami's Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe.
<p>This may not be news to some. The city's plight has been the subject of <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/miami-how-rising-sea-levels-endanger-south-florida-200956/" target="_blank">investigative reporting</a> and even viral news stories after an <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/11/supermoon-tide-miami-sea-level-octopus-garage/#:~:text=The%20recent%20supermoon%20created%20difficult,along%20the%20South%20Florida%20coast." target="_blank">octopus showed up in a parking garage</a> following an especially high tide.</p>
<p>But Ariza takes a much deeper, more personal dive into the slowly unfolding disaster. Along the way he finds that the central question is whether South Florida — home to 6.5 million people — can <em>equitably</em> withstand what's coming. To do so it will need to reckon with its past sins. "Miami is a damn beautiful city, and it rests on a sodden foundation of merciless racial and environmental exploitation," he wrote.</p><p>The first step is figuring out how much sea-level rise there may be and when it's coming — but even that isn't easy, and there's no one definitive number. The regional climate change compact predicts two to six feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century; a NASA scientist has said eight to 10 feet.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQwNjkxNy9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMzg4Mzk1NH0.7OV9mAqMYmMFtuXovCirxAic2DnEvGjzKu03NdxZMMY/img.jpg?width=980" id="c0b56" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f92297ec36700237885d6b9112edfd96" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" /><p>One thing is certain, though: 20 percent of Miami-Dade County sits less than two feet above the sea. And by some estimates, the water could get that high in just 40 years.</p><p>The time to determine what future Miami may have is now.</p><p>After detailing that grim if uncertain reality, Ariza takes a detailed journey through South Florida's vulnerabilities, what actions the region is taking, and those it isn't. The first-person narrative follows Ariza through smelly, flooded city streets; a rigorous paddle to assess the risks to local infrastructure by kayak; and a day traipsing through thick swamps with two veterans to capture invasive Burmese pythons slithering amok.</p><p>This drives home a few points: South Florida's environmental problems aren't limited to sea-level rise — although the rising water could make much of it worse.</p><p>The draining of swamps, altering of water courses and brazen development have taken a mighty ecological toll. The Everglades are dying, and restoration efforts are painfully slow. The Miami River is choked by nutrient pollution — from leaking septic systems and fertilizer runoff — that's killing seagrasses, a keystone species of shallow marine ecosystems, and an important buffer against storms.</p><p>Environmental collapse is just part of the problem, though. There's also economic distress.</p>
<p>"If you expect to survive into the middle of the 21st century, you might just get to watch Miami die," Ariza wrote. "But not before the changing climate stretches the city's already yawning gap between rich and poor past its breaking point."</p><p>Miami-Dade is a majority-minority county with half its residents foreign-born. It also has an enormous wealth gap, with 6 in 10 residents spending more than one-third of their income on housing. And most of those who are struggling to make ends meet are black and Hispanic service-sector workers, Ariza explains.</p><p>It's precisely those communities with the fewest resources that will be hardest hit by stronger storms, hotter temperatures and rising tides. These inequities "are as dangerous as the city's low-lying topography and porous geology," he wrote.</p><p>Already a kind of climate gentrification is underway.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQwNjkxOC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwMTM2NjQ2N30.prNLB71aP9lmgef6N0nfm4tb6CV-SuwU26pAc0w3FXE/img.jpg?width=980" id="50ce2" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="84b419fd9ff9294df51b00f3551c89cc" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://therevelator.org/miami-climate-ariza/" target="_blank">The Revelator</a>. </em><em></em></p><a href="https://therevelator.org/" target="_blank"></a>Flooding in Miami's Brickell neighborhood in 2017. Phillip Pessar / CC BY 2.0
<p>Ariza explains how decades of racist policies and real-estate practices have pushed communities of color away from the beach and the newly emerging suburbs. They ended up sandwiched in between, in an area of high ground that now looks enticing to developers.</p><p>This new pressure is increasing gentrification in communities already barely surviving. It's liable to get worse, too, Ariza explains. Between $15-$23 billion worth of property may be underwater in 30 years. The market has yet to broadly reflect that, but developers are building on borrowed time, even as the lower-income communities are already feeling the pinch.</p><p>"Everything we know about climate change indicates that it pulls at society's loose ends," said Ariza. These cracks in vulnerability could become chasms if the right policies aren't enacted as the city works to mitigate and adapt.</p><p>By the end of <em>Disposable City, </em>it's likely readers won't be wildly optimistic about Miami's chances. But they will be armed with a deeper view of what's at stake and the complexities of trying to solve an environmental and social challenge of this magnitude. Even if the city itself does everything right, it still needs the state of Florida to embrace climate reality and the rest of the world to meet science-based targets for greenhouse gas reductions. Efforts are underway, including a <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/article243276326.html" target="_blank">newly released draft plan</a> from the Army Corps of Engineers to spend $4.6 billion on sea walls and other projects to protect businesses and homes from storm surges. But much more will be needed.</p><p>In Miami these next decades will be fight or flight. Or a combination of both. And he muses on what that would look like. And feel like. Ariza himself is an immigrant, having come to Miami from the Dominican Republic as a kid. He already carries the grief of having left a homeland — a feeling that half the city's population also knows intimately.</p><p>"Now we have to face the fact that climate change may well force us to scatter again," he wrote.</p><p>The end of the book turns from this hard reality to a future vision as Ariza shifts to a fictional envisioning. No spoilers, but it's safe to say Miami in 2100 will be a changed place. And that's at least one thing we know for sure about this warming world — it is a changing one.</p><p>Ariza's deep dive into Miami is an intricate look at <em>his</em> vulnerable city, but it's likely to get readers thinking about their own. What will your hometown look like in 80 years? What do you want it to look like? What will you do to make that hope a reality?</p>From Your Site Articles
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Meadow Lake wind farm in Indiana. Anthony / CC BY-ND 2.0
By Tara Lohan
The first official tallies are in: Coronavirus-related shutdowns helped slash daily global emissions of carbon dioxide by 14 percent in April. But the drop won't last, and experts estimate that annual emissions of the greenhouse gas are likely to fall only about 7 percent this year.
<p>After that, unless we make substantial changes to global economies, it will be back to business as usual — and a path that leads directly to runaway climate change. If we want to reverse course, say the world's leading scientists, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/10/08/world-has-only-years-get-climate-change-under-control-un-scientists-say/" target="_blank">we have about a decade</a> to right the ship.</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://therevelator.org/stokes-clean-energy/" target="_blank">The Revelator</a>. </em><em></em></p>
<p>That's because we've squandered a lot of time. "The 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s were lost decades for preventing global climate disaster," political scientist <a href="https://www.leahstokes.com/" target="_blank">Leah Stokes</a> writes in her new book <em><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/short-circuiting-policy-9780190074265?cc=us&lang=en" target="_blank">Short Circuiting Policy</a></em><em>, </em>which looks at the history of clean energy policy in the U.S.</p><p>But we don't all bear equal responsibility for the tragic delay.</p><p>"Some actors in society have more power than others to shape how our economy is fueled," writes Stokes, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "We are not all equally to blame."</p><p><em>Short Circuiting</em> <em>Policy</em> focuses on the role of one particularly bad actor: electric utilities. Their history of obstructing a clean-energy transition in the U.S. has been largely overlooked, with most of the finger-pointing aimed at fossil fuel companies (and for good reason).</p><p>We spoke with Stokes about this history of delay and denial from the utility industry, how to accelerate the speed and scale of clean-energy growth, and whether we can get past the polarizing rhetoric and politics around clean energy.</p>
What lessons can we learn from your research to guide us right now, in what seems like a really critical time in the fight to halt climate change?
<p>What a lot of people don't understand is that to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we actually have to reduce emissions by around 7-8 percent <em>every single year</em> from now until 2030, which is what the emissions drop is likely to be this year because of the COVID-19 crisis.</p><p>So think about what it took to reduce emissions by that much and think about how we have to do that <em>every single year</em>.</p><p>It doesn't mean that it's going to be some big sacrifice, but it does mean that we need government policy, particularly at the federal level, because state policy can only go so far. We've been living off state policy for more than three decades now and we need our federal government to act.</p>Where are we now, in terms of our progress on renewable energy and how far we need to go?
<p>A lot of people think renewable energy is growing "so fast" and it's "so amazing." But first of all, during the coronavirus pandemic, the renewable energy industry is actually doing very poorly. It's losing a lot of jobs. And secondly, we were not moving fast enough even before the coronavirus crisis, because renewable energy in the<em> best </em>year grew by only 1.3 percent.</p><p>Right now we're at around 36-37 percent clean energy. That includes nuclear, hydropower and new renewables like wind, solar and geothermal. But hydropower and nuclear aren't growing. Nuclear supplies about 20 percent of the grid and hydro about 5 percent depending on the year. And then the rest is renewable. So we're at about 10 percent renewables, and in the best year, we're only adding 1 percent to that.</p><p>Generally, we need to be moving about eight times faster than we've been moving in our best years. (To visualize this idea, I came up with the <a href="https://grist.org/fix/how-quickly-do-we-need-to-ramp-up-renewables-look-to-the-narwhal/" target="_blank">narwhal curve</a>.)</p>How do we overcome these fundamental issues of speed and scale?
<p>We need actual government policy that supports it. We have never had a clean electricity standard or renewable portfolio standard at the federal level. That's the main law that I write all about at the state level. Where those policies are in place, a lot of progress has been made — places like California and even, to a limited extent, Texas.</p><p>We need our federal government to be focusing on this crisis. Even the really small, piecemeal clean-energy policies we have at the federal level are going away. In December Congress didn't extend the investment tax credit and the production tax credit, just like they didn't extend or improve the electric vehicle tax credit.</p><p>And now during the COVID-19 crisis, a lot of the money going toward the energy sector in the CARES Act is going toward propping up <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-15/-stealth-bailout-shovels-millions-of-dollars-to-oil-companies" target="_blank">dying fossil fuel companies</a> and not toward supporting the renewable energy industry.</p><p>So we are moving in the wrong direction.</p>Clean energy hasn’t always been such a partisan issue. Why did it become so polarizing?
<p>What I argue in my book, with evidence, is that electric utilities and fossil fuel companies have been intentionally driving polarization. And they've done this in part by running challengers in primary elections against Republicans who don't agree with them.</p><p>Basically, fossil fuel companies and electric utilities are telling Republicans that you can't hold office and support climate action. That has really shifted the incentives within the party in a very short time period.</p><p>It's not like the Democrats have moved so far left on climate. The Democrats have stayed in pretty much the same place and the Republicans have moved to the right. And I argue that that's because of electric utilities and fossil fuel companies trying to delay action.</p>And their reason for doing that is simply about their bottom line and keeping their share of the market?
<p>Exactly. You have to remember that delay and denial on climate change is a profitable enterprise for fossil fuel companies and electric utilities. The longer we wait to act on the crisis, the more money they can make because they can extract more fossil fuels from their reserves <em>and</em> they can pay more of their debt at their coal plants and natural gas plants. So delay and denial is a money-making business for fossil fuel companies and electric utilities.</p>There’s been a lot of research, reporting and even legal action in recent years about the role of fossil fuel companies in discrediting climate science. From reading your book, it seems that electric utilities are just as guilty. Is that right?
<p>Yes, far less attention has been paid to electric utilities, which play a really critical role. They preside over legacy investments into coal and natural gas, and some of them continue to propose building new natural gas.</p><p>They were just as involved in promoting climate denial in the 1980s and 90s as fossil fuel companies, as I document in my book. And some of them, like Southern Company, have continued to promote climate denial to basically the present day.</p><p>But that's not the only dark part of their history.</p><p>Electric utilities promoted energy systems that are pretty wasteful. They built these centralized fossil fuel power plants rather than having co-generation plants that were onsite at industrial locations where manufacturing is happening, and where you need both steam heat — which is a waste product from electricity — and the electricity itself. That actually created a lot of waste in the system and we burned a lot more fossil fuels than if we had a decentralized system.</p><p><span></span>The other thing they've done in the more modern period is really resisted the energy transition. They've resisted renewable portfolio standards and net metering laws that allow for more clean energy to come onto the grid. They've tried to roll them back. They've been successful in some cases, and they've blocked new laws from passing when targets were met.</p>You wrote that, “Partisan polarization on climate is not inevitable — support could shift back to the bipartisanship we saw before 2008.” What would it take to actually make that happen?
<p>Well, on the one hand, you need to get the Democratic Party to care more about climate change and to really understand the stakes. And if you want to do that, I think the work of the <a href="https://www.justicedemocrats.com/" target="_blank">Justice Democrats</a> is important. They have primary-challenged incumbent Democrats who don't care enough about climate change. That is how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected. She was a primary challenger and she has really championed climate action in the Green New Deal.</p><p>The other thing is that the public supports climate action. Democrats do in huge numbers. Independents do. And to some extent Republicans do, particularly young Republicans.</p><p>So communicating the extent of public concern on these issues is really important because, as I've shown in other research, politicians don't know how much public concern there is on climate change. They dramatically underestimate support for climate action.</p><p>I think the media has a really important role to play because it's very rare that a climate event, like a disaster that is caused by climate change, is actually linked to climate change in media reporting.</p><p>But people might live through a wildfire or a hurricane or a heat wave, but nobody's going to tell them through the media that this is climate change. So we really need our reporters to be doing a better job linking people's lived experiences to climate change.</p>With economic stimulus efforts ramping up because of the COVD-19 pandemic, are we in danger of missing a chance to help boost a clean energy economy?
<p>I think so many people understand that stimulus spending is an opportunity to rebuild our economy in a way that creates good-paying jobs in the clean-energy sector that protects Americans' health.</p><p>We know that <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200427-how-air-pollution-exacerbates-covid-19" target="_blank">breathing dirty air</a> makes people more likely to die from COVID-19. So this is a big opportunity to create an economy that's more just for all Americans.</p><p>But unfortunately, we really are not pivoting toward creating a clean economy, which is what we need to be doing. This is an opportunity to really focus on the climate crisis because we have delayed for more than 30 years. There is not another decade to waste.</p>From Your Site Articles
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Working From Home During the Pandemic Has Environmental Benefits — But We Can Do Even Better
24 May
Insights + Opinion
Junjira Konsang / Pixabay
By Matt Casale
For many Americans across the country, staying home to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) means adapting to long-term telework for the first time. We're doing a lot more video conferencing and working out all the kinks that come along with it.
<p>While this particular situation is not ideal for many — for example, I'm currently writing this with an infant in a baby carrier on my chest and our almost-three-year-old belting "Let It Go" in the background — in many ways we're playing out a real-time experiment on whether telecommuting is possible on a large scale.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMxMzY4My9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNDc5NTEzOH0.UPtJT4Pjinn-wiHkF4vbFGF_2M2R3DrqPh_VGN_mPxQ/img.jpg?width=980" id="61bc2" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4aeee8da3400abc67c12130a6bbe03ae" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
The author (above) wrote this while working from home, baby in tow. Emily Anderson (author's wife/home office mate)
<p>The coronavirus will pass, but it's looking more and more like remote work will stick around. This time has demonstrated that, despite the ups and downs many of us have experienced, <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/04/06/telecommuting-will-likely-continue-long-after-the-pandemic/" target="_blank">telework works</a> for way more of us than we knew.</p><p>Even before this we knew that there were several benefits for both employers and employees to sidestepping the office. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrealoubier/2017/07/20/benefits-of-telecommuting-for-the-future-of-work/#3f278e0916c6" target="_blank">Studies have shown</a> that it can lead to increased productivity, higher morale and lower employee turnover. It can also reduce real estate and office operation costs for employers.</p><p>We may now also be seeing some larger societal benefits that make the case for taking telework even further. Our current situation has provided a window into how a reduction in driving, buoyed, in part, by a greater adoption of telework, could relieve some of the stress on our overburdened transportation system and help heal at least a portion of the environmental damage it causes.</p><p>Today, roads that would normally clogged at all hours of the day are <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-empty-airports-trains-roads-during-coronavirus" target="_blank">virtually empty</a>, even during rush hour. And the reduced car travel leads to fewer crashes and less air pollution, which harms human health and contributes to global warming. Air that's usually cloudy with smog has cleared. Los Angeles, which has notoriously pollution-choked skies, could recently boast having the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/us/los-angeles-pollution-clean-air-coronavirus-trnd/index.html" target="_blank">cleanest air in the world</a>. And this year, experts predict, the transportation transformation will contribute to the <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coronavirus-set-to-cause-largest-ever-annual-fall-in-co2-emissions" target="_blank">largest-ever annual decline in global carbon emissions</a>.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMxMzY4NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxODAzNTcyNX0.2WzQzdHTSN6ob08B_hb9WcYdlBeUtg53i1RoYGIO1Do/img.jpg?width=980" id="44ac4" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ea0ed6763606e660a909d62f41f9d54f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Virtually empty Los Angeles streets on May 7. Chris Yarzab / CC BY 2.0
<p>Clearly not every job can be done from home, and it's not just commuting for work that has come to a halt during coronavirus lockdowns. In 2017 only around <a href="https://nhts.ornl.gov/assets/2017_nhts_summary_travel_trends.pdf" target="_blank">28 percent</a> of total miles driven were work-related. Even if telework continues or expands on a much larger scale, non-work-related car trips — shopping, recreation, visits to doctors and the like — can be expected to go back to normal.</p><p>Still, telework's potential for taking cars off the road can clearly have an impact on global warming emissions and air pollution. Just how much of an impact could telework have? As it turns out, the answer is a significant one — and with a few important steps, the benefits can be even greater and more sustainable.</p>How Much of the Workforce Could Reasonably and Permanently Transition to Telework?
<p>According to the U.S. Census Bureau, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/13/people-who-work-from-home-earn-more-than-those-who-commuteheres-why.html" target="_blank">5.2 percent of U.S. workers</a> — around 8 million people — worked from home in 2017. But that's still just a fraction of potential teleworkers. Earlier this month researchers at the University of Chicago found that <a href="https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_White-Paper_Dingel_Neiman_3.2020.pdf" target="_blank">37 percent of U.S. jobs can plausibly be performed at home</a>. The U.S. workforce reached <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV" target="_blank">164.5 million</a> in February 2020, before the pandemic, meaning approximately 61 million of those workers could plausibly telework permanently once the economy starts up again.</p><p>Of course, the full economic consequences of this public health crisis are still unknown. It's possible that coronavirus-related job losses will impact the overall number of those employed for some time. But for these purposes, this assumption of 53 million new remote workers will be useful to illustrate the potential impacts of telework.</p>How Much Driving Would Full-Capacity Telework Avoid?
<p>In 2019 Americans drove a total <a href="https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315" target="_blank">3.23 trillion miles</a>, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The DoE doesn't break that down by reasons driving, but we know that in 2017 there were <a href="https://nhts.ornl.gov/assets/2017_nhts_summary_travel_trends.pdf" target="_blank">683 billion total commute miles</a> driven. Reducing the commuting workforce by about 32 percent (37 percent of total workers who could telecommute minus the 5.2 percent of them who already do) would theoretically decrease commuting totals by about 219 billion miles.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMxMzY4Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MDE5NzkwNn0.NsQ8r0Opjbst4FFYG9IGfKIkekxBMPGG8viKKCB9Afc/img.jpg?width=980" id="f3198" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="bbf1191abdd0b796a70fbb2a36b827e2" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
A traffic jam on January 17. Raphael Labaca Castro / CC BY-SA 2.0
<p>Of course telecommuting won't let us avoid logging <em>all</em> of those miles, since people may occasionally still need to travel to an office for meetings and may need to make new trips they wouldn't otherwise have taken (you can't stop at the grocery store on the way home from work when you work at home). Various studies have found that telecommuting actually reduces driving somewhere between <a href="https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/sb375/policies/telecommuting/telecommuting_brief120313.pdf" target="_blank">60 and 90</a> percent of commute vehicle miles traveled (VMT). We'll split the difference and calculate that telework reduces commute miles by about 75%, meaning the new teleworkers could avoid around 164 billion miles driven.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMxMzY4OC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzODE3NzE2NH0.x6snYt1idN9K7pPfL-rp11ITuPasCu09GYlTXCmZqH0/img.jpg?width=980" id="7175e" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a2862401e39968c61d3a00f932157acd" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
U.S. Department of Energy, Alternative Fuels Data Center
<p>Still, that much of a transformation may not work for everyone, as people will still need to do face-to-face work — and, let's be honest, the other thing the lockdowns have taught us is to appreciate the value of regular social contact. That said, even if most people worked from home two to three days a week and the actual VMT reduction were closer to 2 or 3 percent, the difference would still be significant — especially considering that VMT has been <a href="https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315" target="_blank">steadily rising</a> since the 1970s, except for a few years during economic downturns. Even if just a quarter of American workers started working from home one day a week, total vehicle miles traveled would fall by <a href="https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063006473" target="_blank">1</a> percent — not a huge amount, but enough to make a difference on a grander scale.</p>Impact on Global Warming Emissions
<p>The cars and trucks we drive every day are major sources of air pollution and global warming emissions. Transportation as a whole accounts for <a href="https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks" target="_blank">28</a> percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., more than any other source. Light-duty vehicles and medium- and heavy-duty trucks are responsible for<a href="https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-greenhouse-gas-emissions" target="_blank"> 82</a> percent of the transportation sector's emissions.</p><p>The average American car or SUV emits <a href="https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle" target="_blank">404 grams</a> of carbon dioxide (CO2) per mile traveled. So reducing commuting by 164 billion miles would avoid 66 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually. These are significant emissions reductions, but they'd only make a small dent in total transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, which reached nearly <a href="https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks" target="_blank">1.9 billion metric tons</a> in 2018.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMxMzY4OS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwOTEzMDQ2N30.kNeCqEqhHQcOV8p2HMENkbOtLoShEGEsXOycpTdlxco/img.jpg?width=980" id="e7f7b" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ce9e7ab7f9c21489e7487b820813367e" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" /><p>Nevertheless, it would help us move in the right direction. And while it only represents a small percentage of total emissions, it would still be the <a href="https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator" target="_blank">equivalent</a> of more eliminating emissions from than 7 million homes' total energy use for one year, or the same as shutting down more than 16 coal-fired power plants.</p>
Impact on Health-harming Air Pollution
<p>People across America regularly breathe polluted air, which increases their risk of attacks and other adverse health impacts, and even premature death. In fact, in 2018 <a href="https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/EnvironmentAmerica_TroubleintheAir_scrn.pdf" target="_blank">108 million Americans</a> lived in areas that experienced more than 100 days of degraded air quality. Our cars and trucks are a major source of this pollution, which includes ozone, particulate matter and other smog-forming emissions.</p><p>There's a reason the air has cleared over many of our major cities during the coronavirus lockdowns. When you remove cars from the road, you also remove smog. The lockdowns have resulted in an extreme reduction of VMT — between <a href="https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/america-pause-vehicle-travel-during-covid-19-and-what-comes-next" target="_blank">68 and 72</a> percent across the country (and in some places closer to 90 percent). Assuming that telework has contributed something close to its peak potential reduction of 7 percent, it seems likely that it has played at least a supporting role in helping to clear our skies.</p>Additional Emissions Reductions From Reduced Traffic
<p>The average American commuter wastes <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlock-transportation-study-trnd/index.html" target="_blank">54 hours</a> a year stuck in traffic. That's lost time with friends and families, lost productivity at work, wasted money, tons of unnecessary stress, and a lot more pollution from idling cars.</p><p>Traffic patterns are complicated because traffic is <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2014/12/4-steps-to-tackling-traffic-congestion/" target="_blank">non-linear</a>, meaning there isn't a one-to-one ratio of percentage of cars removed to percentage of traffic alleviated. As such, just a <a href="https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2017/the-access-almanac-traffic-congestion-is-counter-intuitive-and-fixable/" target="_blank">few extra cars</a> on or off the road can have an outsize impact on traffic. Reducing commute VMT by up to 7 percent would have a huge impact on rush hour traffic (when bottlenecks are at their worst and most of that driving occurs). A greater adoption of telework could give people back some of those 54 hours so they can spend it doing the things that matter to them. And slow moving or stop and go traffic results in <a href="https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-2009/traffic-congestion-greenhouse-gases/" target="_blank">greater emissions</a> than free-flowing traffic. So freeing up the roads and alleviating traffic for the remaining will result in even greater emissions reductions.</p>What Needs to Happen for Telework to Live Up to Its Potential?
<p>It's clear that telework can have significant societal benefits, including less global warming pollution and cleaner skies. But significant benefits are only possible if everyone whose job could plausibly be done from home has that opportunity.</p><p>To reach that goal, several barriers must be overcome:</p><p><em>Technology: </em>We've all had technical mix-ups when using Zoom or Google Hangouts or one of the other conferencing platforms. But the real technological barrier is access to broadband. <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/#who-has-home-broadband" target="_blank">Roughly three-quarters</a> of American adults have broadband internet service at home, but the rate of access is much lower in rural parts of the country, according to a report by Pew Research Center. Those locations often don't have broadband infrastructure and even <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/04/06/telecommuting-will-likely-continue-long-after-the-pandemic/" target="_blank">14</a> percent of households in urban areas lack access, usually because they are not able to afford it. States should make funding available to develop broadband capacity in underserved areas.</p><p><em>Employer policies and managerial reluctance</em>: Coronavirus lockdowns across the country have forced employers and managers to adapt to large-scale telework quickly on an emergency basis, meaning these barriers are less likely relevant now than before. But general employer and manager <a href="https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683455.pdf" target="_blank">reluctance</a> to embrace working from home has slowed this transition. Cities and states can encourage employer acceptance of telework by providing <a href="https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2019/07/25/gov-baker-proposes-telecommuting-tax-break-for-companies" target="_blank">tax benefits</a> or other incentives for greater adoption.</p><p><em>Car-centered transportation policies: </em>Our current transportation policies often incentivize driving or parking. From commuter and parking benefits to decades of outsized spending on <a href="https://uspirg.org/reports/usp/highway-boondoggles-5" target="_blank">highway infrastructure</a>, we tip the scales toward getting behind an automobile's wheel. In other words, our transportation policies are meant to move cars rather than incentivize things, such as telework, that would take cars off the road.</p><p>We need to rethink this approach and shift toward better "<a href="https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/plan4ops/trans_demand.htm" target="_blank">Transportation Demand Management</a>." This requires the implementation of a set of strategies aimed at maximizing traveler choices. Those strategies should include greater employer and employee incentives for telework, as well as policies designed to facilitate more walking, biking, ridesharing, vanpooling and public transportation use.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMxMzY5MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwNzUwNTM5OX0.9ePNI--qrX2Z32AA7sgDeU5lwKBZtReALXYY8Y9b_Sc/img.jpg?width=980" id="a9e3d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="d41b19fddabdda0afee848bbc5b6c005" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://therevelator.org/telework-environmental-benefits/" target="_blank">The Revelator</a>. </em><em></em></p>Bikeshare in Milan, October 2019. Guilhem Vellut / CC BY 2.0
<p>That's important, because the potential gains we'd see from telework would only be sustained if that shift were paired with other policies to ensure those commuter miles aren't just replaced with other trips. We usually talk about this in relation to widening or building new highways, but when you open up highway capacity, it usually fills quickly. This is what the wonks call "<a href="https://uspirg.org/reports/usp/highway-boondoggles-5" target="_blank">induced demand</a>." People who otherwise would have driven at a different time of day, taken a different route, taken public transportation or would have avoided traffic on the highway some other way, come back to the road. The same could happen here if additional measures aren't taken.</p><p>It's likely that, even after the coronavirus lockdowns are over, telework is going to become more and more common in the American workforce. As it does, the environmental benefits will be significant. In a time when climate change presents an existential threat to life as we know it and millions of people across the world are subjected to unhealthy levels of air pollution, we need to be taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to solving these problems. Telework can clearly be a significant part of the long-term solution — especially if we take further steps to maximize its potential.</p>From Your Site Articles
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The green sea turtle's range extends throughout tropical and subtropical seas around the world. Constanza S. Mora / CC BY 2.0
By Tara Lohan
Most of us have never been to the world's immense last wilderness and never will. It's beyond the horizon and often past the limits of our imaginations. It contains towering underwater mountain ranges, ancient corals, mysterious, unknown forms of life and the largest seagrass meadow in the world.
<p>Yet it begins just 200 nautical miles off our shores. Technically referred to as "areas beyond national jurisdiction," these remote expanses are known to most people simply as "the high seas."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://therevelator.org/high-seas-treaty/" target="_blank">The Revelator</a>. </em><em></em></p>
<p>Their vast, dark waters encompass roughly two-thirds of the ocean and half the planet and are the last great global commons. Yet just 1 percent are protected, leaving these <a href="https://therevelator.org/ocean-outlaw-book-urbina/" target="_blank">vital but relatively lawless expanses</a> open to overfishing, pollution, piracy and other threats.</p><p>That could change soon.</p><p>In 2018, after more than a decade of groundwork at the United Nations, negotiations officially began for a new treaty focused on conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in the waters beyond national jurisdiction.</p><p>The proposed treaty is being developed under the <a href="https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/convention_overview_convention.htm" target="_blank">U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea</a>, which was signed in 1982 and defined nations' rights and responsibilities for use of the world's oceans. The Convention itself is a landmark agreement that established many key environmental protections and policies, but over the years it's become obvious that some gaps in its governance policy have left the ocean's ecosystems open to ongoing and emerging threats.</p>
<p>The new treaty is intended to help fill those gaps, although, as with any international agreement, that presents challenges. Representatives of world governments gathered in 2018 and 2019 for three rounds of negotiations, but many parts of the key issues remained unresolved. Among them are plans to establish a framework for evaluating and implementing area-based management tools, which include marine protected areas, since no such systems exist now for the high seas.</p><p>Other items requiring agreement include establishing uniform requirements for conducting environmental impact assessments; how benefits from marine genetic resources may be shared among nations; and capacity building for management and conservation.</p><p>Many experts hoped the fourth negotiation session, originally scheduled to begin March 23 at the U.N. headquarters in New York, would lead to the finalization of the treaty's text, but the meetings were postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.</p><p>That pause gives us an opportunity to understand what's at stake a bit better.</p><p>"This is the first time that there's been a treaty process devoted to marine biodiversity in the high seas and the first ocean treaty really to be negotiated in over 30 years," said Peggy Kalas, director of the <a href="http://www.highseasalliance.org/" target="_blank">High Seas Alliance</a>, a coalition of more than 40 environmental nonprofits and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. "It's a big deal, and it's been a long time coming."</p>
<p>But this historic opportunity is also one that could be squandered if the treaty fails to enact protections strong enough to actually safeguard ocean life.</p><p>"It has the potential to be a gamechanger for the oceans," said Douglas McCauley, a professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology at U.C. Santa Barbara and director of the <a href="https://boi.ucsb.edu/" target="_blank">Benioff Ocean Initiative</a>. "But it's still to be determined whether it will be just the treaty version of lip service."</p>
The Need for Protection
<p>We're all connected to the high seas, even if we never actually see them, says Morgan Visalli, a project scientist at Benioff Ocean Initiative at U.C. Santa Barbara. "It's incredibly important for helping to regulate the climate, for providing oxygen, food and jobs."</p><p>Even on land we depend on a healthy ocean. Phytoplankton in the ocean <a href="https://therevelator.org/phytoplankton-climate-change/" target="_blank">generate half our oxygen</a>, and the ocean plays a key role in mitigating climate change — absorbing 25 percent of our CO2 emissions and 90 percent of heat related to those emissions. It's also home to a rich diversity of species, some of which we're still discovering.</p><p>But marine ecosystems face grave threats from an onslaught of abuses: chemical, plastic and noise pollution; deep seabed mining and other kinds of resource extraction; increased shipping; overfishing and illegal fishing; and <a href="https://therevelator.org/ocean-climate-change/" target="_blank">climate change</a>, which is altering both the temperature and chemistry of the waters.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzI2ODY4NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwNDA2MDM1N30.-ljbryulwGu6Xug0ADHXyDtXz747eqw65fTq7fTy4uY/img.jpg?width=980" id="26d57" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4db6779cc8a42ec188116ac51f7968a9" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Cargo ship at sea. Bernard Spragg / public domain
<p>Numerous strategies are needed to tackle these problems, including the bedrock component of reducing greenhouse gases.</p><p>But a key tool that scientists have identified to help restore biodiversity is establishing reserves, often referred to as ocean parks or marine protected areas.</p><p>We know pretty well how to do this in national waters — there are <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2018/02/22/how-much-of-the-ocean-is-really-protected" target="_blank">more than 15,000</a> of them already in places like Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the Florida Keys. But few such protected areas exist in the high seas because there is no international framework to guide the process. One such effort to establish a marine protected area in Antarctica's Ross Sea took years of research and diplomacy to implement.</p><p>It's simply not feasible to scale the process — especially in the time we'd need to do it. That's why creating such a framework for marine protected areas in waters outside of national waters is a key part of the new high-seas treaty negotiations.</p><p>And that fits into a larger global vision.</p><p>The participant nations in another international treaty, the Convention on Biological Diversity, are set to convene this fall. The agenda includes a goal of enacting an international framework to protect 30% of the oceans by 2030.</p><p>It's a goal that scientists call a bare minimum. And it's one that may be impossible to meet without the high-seas treaty.</p><p>"The science is clear, if we're going to sustain a healthy, functioning ocean ecosystem, we need to be protecting at least 30% of the world's oceans," said Liz Karan, who leads <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/projects/protecting-ocean-life-on-the-high-seas" target="_blank">efforts to protect the high seas</a> for Pew Charitable Trusts, a member of the High Seas Alliance.</p><p>In anticipation of the treaty's passage, scientists like Visalli and McCauley have already started modeling how new <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X19309194#!" target="_blank">priority areas could be identified</a>.</p><div id="77542" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2be6714cacbdb1a5a33ef1e44e7b6e2d"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1247637692298309632" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">The high seas are our last global commons & essential to life on earth. As the UN weighs a groundbreaking #HighSeas… https://t.co/RZM4DToxhU</div> — Benioff Ocean Initiative (@Benioff Ocean Initiative)<a href="https://twitter.com/UCSBenioffOcean/statuses/1247637692298309632">1586294980.0</a></blockquote></div><p>The other parts of the treaty, including environmental impact assessments and genetic resources, remain vital areas of discussion, but conservation groups have stressed the importance of protected ocean reserves for protecting the planet.</p><p>"If we want the ocean to continue its role in climate adaptation and being able to absorb the excess heat that it does, we need to create areas of resilience for the ocean," said Kalas. "And the best way to do that is marine protected areas."</p>
The Challenges
<p>Of course the devil is in the details.</p><p>While thousands of marine protected areas already exist, they come with varying levels of protections — much like we see with public lands. Some can be very restrictive, like national parks, or continue to allow extractive activities, such as in national forests.</p><p>Current marine protected areas range from no-take reserves that ban all extraction to areas allowing multiple uses — the latter are more common. Not surprisingly, though, <a href="https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/75/3/1166/4098821" target="_blank">scientific studies</a> have shown that the no-take reserves do a much better job at protecting and restoring biodiversity.</p><p>Whether the treaty will be a landmark conservation effort or enshrine the status quo has yet to be determined, said Karan. "Both potential pathways are currently reflected in the draft treaty text" at this time.</p><p>From a scientific standpoint, McCauley says, marine protected areas should actually protect the wild character of the area and that means no activities — like mining or bottom trawling — that would disturb habitat. And the protections need to extend down from the ocean's surface, through the water column, to the seafloor.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzI2ODY4Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNzg3OTEzMH0.44V4UQHFCCVNqSVetbbgJ9SxA6Ahs1MizLc4PQmJqlw/img.jpg?width=980" id="c7ad5" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="147defbdf27fe8adf69b6db35a7d1d04" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
A kelp forest in a marine protected area off the coast of California. Camille Pagniello / CC BY 2.0
<p>To do that means figuring out how the new treaty would fit with a tangle of more than 20 existing governance organizations that regulate seabed mining, fisheries management and shipping regulations.</p><p>"One of our hopes is that this treaty would knit those pieces together and provide a little bit more coherence and compatibility with those issues, particularly with regards to conservation and sustainable use," said Karan.</p><p>There would also need to be a process for scientifically evaluating areas proposed for protections, and how the established reserves would be managed, and the restrictions enforced.</p><p>"The whole process, the whole vision and opportunity to think about doing something smarter and better — for the ocean, for biodiversity, for us — ends if we don't get strong language in the treaty and get that treaty to pass," said McCauley. "There's historical potential for the oceans, but we need to make sure people on the outside are watching the people on the inside [at the United Nations] in New York."</p>Road Ahead
<p>Even though official treaty negotiations are on hold awaiting a decision on rescheduling the talks, work continues among governments as they review and refine their positions on numerous proposals submitted by states and NGOs.</p><p>The United States has been a participant in the talks, but the treaty process has largely flown under the radar among the general public so far. Given President Trump's position on <a href="https://therevelator.org/environment-deregulation-trump-two-years/" target="_blank">environmental protections</a> and distain for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/climate/trump-paris-agreement-climate.html" target="_blank">multilateralism</a> (like the Paris climate agreement), that's been pretty intentional on the part of environmental NGOs.</p><p>But as efforts may be nearing the finish line, this is starting to shift. Karan says there's more interest from legislators about high seas governance and more need to have an engaged public who can advocate for strong conservation protections.</p><p>Things are complicated, though, by the fact that the United States never ratified the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, widely considered a "Constitution" for the ocean.</p><p>There is hope from some of the participants that the United States could ratify the high seas treaty if it comes to fruition, say Karan. But no one is holding their breath for that. Kalas says the goal is that the treaty, once completed, would be widely supported, although it remains to be seen how many countries will sign on. "If only 40 countries ratify it, that wouldn't make it as strong of an agreement as if all the United Nation's 193 nations ratified the agreement," she said.</p><p>But there's a fine line between having an agreement that's universally supported and one that establishes concrete conservation actions and protections.</p><p>"Our concern is that in trying to get everyone in the tent as it were, we're going to wind up with a status-quo agreement," said Karan. "As much as we want a treaty, we want one that will make concrete change on the water."</p><p>And it's worth remembering, we're talking about a lot of water. When the next session convenes, she said, "states will decide the ocean's fate."</p>
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By Robert Reich
Both our economy and the environment are in crisis. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few while the majority of Americans struggle to get by. The climate crisis is worsening inequality, as those who are most economically vulnerable bear the brunt of flooding, fires and disruptions of supplies of food, water and power.
<p>At the same time, environmental degradation and climate change are themselves byproducts of widening inequality. The political power of wealthy fossil fuel corporations has stymied action on climate change for decades. Focused only on maximizing their short-term interests, those corporations are becoming even richer and more powerful — while sidelining workers, limiting green innovation, preventing sustainable development and blocking direct action on our dire climate crisis.</p>
<p>Make no mistake: the simultaneous crisis of inequality and climate is no fluke. Both are the result of decades of deliberate choices made and policies enacted, by ultra-wealthy and powerful corporations.</p>
<p><strong>We can address both crises by doing four things:</strong></p><p><strong>First, create green jobs. </strong>Investing in renewable energy could create millions of family sustaining, union jobs and build the infrastructure we need for marginalized communities to access clean water and air. The transition to a renewable energy-powered economy can add 550,000 jobs each year while saving the U.S. economy $78 billion through 2050. In other words, a Green New Deal could turn the climate crisis into an opportunity — one that both addresses the climate emergency and creates a fairer and more equitable society.</p>
<p><strong></strong><strong>Second, stop dirty energy.</strong> A massive investment in renewable energy jobs isn't enough to combat the climate crisis. If we are going to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we must tackle the problem at its source: Stop digging up and burning more oil, gas and coal.</p><p>The potential carbon emissions from these fossil fuels in the world's currently developed fields and mines would take us well beyond the 1.5°C increased warming that Nobel Prize winning global scientists tell us the planet can afford. Given this, it's absurd to allow fossil fuel corporations to start new dirty energy projects.</p><p>Even as fossil fuel companies claim to be pivoting toward clean energy, they are planning to invest trillions of dollars in new oil and gas projects that are inconsistent with global commitments to limit climate change. And over half of the industry's expansion is projected to happen in the United States. Allowing these projects means locking ourselves into carbon emissions we can't afford now, let alone in the decades to come.</p><p>Even if the U.S. were to transition to 100 percent renewable energy today, continuing to dig fossil fuels out of the ground will lead us further into climate crisis. If the U.S. doesn't stop now, whatever we extract will simply be exported and burned overseas. We will all be affected, but the poorest and most vulnerable among us will bear the brunt of the devastating impacts of climate change.</p>
<p><strong>Third, kick fossil fuel companies out of our politics.</strong> For decades, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP have been polluting our democracy by pouring billions of dollars into our politics and bankrolling elected officials to enact policies that protect their profits. The oil and gas industry spent over $103 million on the 2016 federal elections alone. And that's just what they were required to report: that number doesn't include the untold amounts of "dark money" they've been using to buy-off politicians and corrupt our democracy. The most conservative estimates still put their spending at 10 times that of environmental groups and the renewable energy industry.</p><p>As a result, American taxpayers are shelling out $20 billion a year to bankroll oil and gas projects — a huge transfer of wealth to the top. And that doesn't even include hundreds of billions of dollars of indirect subsidies that cost every U.S. citizen roughly $2,000 a year. This has to stop.</p><p>And we've got to stop giving away public lands for oil and gas drilling. In 2018, under Trump, the Interior Department made $1.1 billion selling public land leases to oil and gas companies, an all-time record — triple the previous 2008 record, totaling more than 1.5 million acres for drilling alone, threatening multiple cultural sites and countless wildlife. As recently as last September, the Trump administration opened 1.56 million acres of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, threatening Indigenous cultural heritage and hundreds of species that call it home.</p><p>That's not all. The ban on exporting crude oil should be reintroduced and extended to other fossil fuels. The ban, in place for 40 years, was lifted in 2015, just days after the signing of the Paris climate agreement. After years of campaigning by oil executives, industry heads and their army of lobbyists, the fossil fuel industry finally got its way.</p><p>We can't wait for these changes to be introduced in 5 or 10 years time — we need them now.</p>
<p><strong></strong><strong>Fourth, require the fossil fuel companies that have profited from environmental injustice compensate the communities they've harmed.</strong></p><p>As if buying-off our democracy wasn't enough, these corporations have also deliberately misled the public for years on the amount of damage their products have been causing.</p><p>For instance, as early as 1977, Exxon's own scientists were warning managers that fossil fuel use would warm the planet and cause irreparable damage. In the 1980s, Exxon shut down its internal climate research program and shifted to funding a network of advocacy groups, lobbying arms and think tanks whose sole purpose was to cloud public discourse and block action on the climate crisis. The five largest oil companies now spend about $197 million a year on ad campaigns claiming they care about the climate — all the while massively increasing their spending on oil and gas extraction.</p><p>Meanwhile, millions of Americans, especially poor, Black, Brown and Indigenous communities, already have to fight to drink clean water and breathe clean air as their communities are devastated by climate-fueled hurricanes, floods and fires. As of 2015, nearly 21 million people relied on community water systems that violated health-based quality standards.</p><p>Going by population, that's essentially 200 Flint, Michigans, happening all at once. If we continue on our current path, many more communities run the risk of becoming "sacrifice zones," where citizens are left to survive the toxic aftermath of industrial activity with little, if any, help from the entities responsible for creating it.</p><p>Climate denial and rampant pollution are not victimless crimes. Fossil fuel corporations must be held accountable and be forced to pay for the damage they've wrought.</p>
<p><strong>If these solutions sound drastic to you, it's because they are. They have to be if we have any hope of keeping our planet habitable. The climate crisis is not a far-off apocalyptic nightmare — it is our present day.</strong></p><p>Australia's bushfires wiped out a billion animals, California's fire season wreaks more havoc every year, and record-setting storms are tearing through our communities like never before. </p><p>Scientists tell us we have 10 years left to dramatically reduce emissions. We have no room for meek half-measures wrapped up inside giant handouts to the fossil fuel industry. </p><p>We deserve a world without fossil fuels. A world in which workers and communities thrive and our shared climate comes before industry profits. Working together, I know we can make it happen. We have no time to waste.</p><p><em><a href="http://www.commondreams.org/author/robert-reich" target="_blank">Robert Reich</a>, is the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the the twentieth century. The author of many books, including the best-sellers <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307476332" target="_blank">Aftershock</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679736158" target="_blank">The Work of Nations</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345804376" target="_blank">Beyond Outrage</a> and, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Saving-Capitalism-Many-Not-Few/dp/0345806220" target="_blank">Saving Capitalism</a>. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." Reich's newest book is "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Common-Good-Robert-B-Reich/dp/052552049X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521457674&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Common+Good" target="_blank">The Common Good</a>." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.</em></p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/25/solutions-climate-crisis-no-one-talking-about" target="_blank">Common Dreams</a>. </em><em></em></p>From Your Site Articles
- 7 Solutions to the Climate Crisis - EcoWatch ›
- 5 Ways to Fight the Climate Crisis in 2020 - EcoWatch ›
- The Climate Emergency Won’t Wait for the Press to Play Catch-Up - EcoWatch ›
- The Climate Emergency Won’t Wait for the Press to Play Catch-Up - EcoWatch ›
- We Can Solve Water Scarcity in the U.S., New Study Says - EcoWatch ›
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Environmental activists holding cilantro attend a protest in Zucotti Park on Earth Day on April 22, 2014 in New York City. John Moore / Getty Images
The devastating reality of the coronavirus pandemic has increased people's hunger for good news, as The New York Times reported April 14, leading to significant increases in Google searches and follower counts for good news accounts. Just in time, Covering Climate Now (CCNow) is here to meet that need with a week of coverage devoted to climate solutions.
<p><br/></p><p><br/></p>
<p>The week of coverage, timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/earth-day" target="_self">Earth Day</a>, will run from April 19 to 26. It will amass stories from CCNow's more than 400 partner news organizations—with a total audience of nearly two billion people—to shine a light on how we can collectively address the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change/" target="_self">climate crisis</a>, from technological innovations like solar panels to policy moves like carbon pricing to activism and local and corporate initiatives.</p><p>"Whatever stories your newsroom decides to tell, our collective effort will constitute a solution in its own right," <a href="https://www.coveringclimatenow.org/climate-beat/announcing-our-april-week-of-coverage" target="_blank">the organization wrote</a>. "As the Canadian climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says, the most important thing to do about climate change is to talk about it."</p>
<div id="d982b" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="95ab909bbce0c99db59b8b735b4b4ee6"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1235535143114137603" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">#Journalists & @CoveringClimate partners! Join
our next joint coverage week (April 19-26) focused on Climate Solut… https://t.co/kONfvP8f6s</div> — Covering Climate Now (@Covering Climate Now)<a href="https://twitter.com/CoveringClimate/statuses/1235535143114137603">1583409507.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>CCNow <a href="https://www.coveringclimatenow.org/about" target="_blank">was founded</a> in April 2019 by the <a href="https://www.cjr.org/" target="_blank">Columbia Journalism Review</a> and <a href="https://www.thenation.com/" target="_blank">The Nation</a>, in association with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/" target="_blank">The Guardian</a>, in an effort to improve the quantity and quality of climate coverage. It helps its partner news organizations do this by providing best practices and story ideas, hosting conferences, sharing climate stories that partners can republish for free, publicizing its partners' best climate content and organizing coverage weeks like this one.</p><p>Its first coverage week was held during the lead-up to the UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019 and generated at least 3,640 stories, according to the <a href="https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/climate-journalism-collaboration.php" target="_blank">Columbia Journalism Review</a>. News outlets said the week succeeded in encouraging them to run more climate stories than they otherwise would have.</p><p>"We ended up doing more than two dozen stories that wouldn't have run except for this initiative," a senior editor at Bloomberg told the Columbia Journalism Review.</p>
<p>CCNow's <a href="https://www.coveringclimatenow.org/partners" target="_blank">partners</a> range from major wire services like Bloomberg and Reuters to local newspapers and magazines, plus websites like BirdWatching and Literary Hub. EcoWatch is also a partner.</p><p>There are <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e3c75266def8a6d2dd23159/t/5e98806ae098a07bd78e5f38/1587052652029/CCNow+April+WoC+Preview_FINAL+%28Apr+16%29.pdf" target="_blank">lots of solutions stories</a> planned for the coming coverage week. Some examples include:</p><ul><li>A Guardian story about Microsoft's plan to go "carbon negative" by 2030.</li><li>A Nation interview with Michael Pollan about whether psychedelics can treat climate grief.</li><li>A Reuters profile of a Hong Kong restaurant that runs without food waste.</li><li>A Times of India piece about how the coronavirus lockdown is leading to cleaner air.</li></ul>
<p>"In the coming days, the Covering Climate Now partners will collectively publish hundreds of stories on climate solutions to create a groundswell of hope at a moment when the world feels bleak," <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/19/the-guardian-joins-forces-with-hundreds-of-newsrooms-to-promote-climate-solutions" target="_blank">The Guardian wrote in its coverage announcement</a>.<br></p><p>But the coverage will still be rigorous.</p><p>"To be clear, highlighting solutions does not mean cheerleading or drifting into activism," CCNow wrote. "Our role as journalists is to report, to explain, to analyze, and to hold the powerful to account. But it is high time the media framing of the climate story shifts from a paralyzing gloom and doom to a clear-headed focus on how to get out of this mess."</p>
<p class=""><em>This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story</em>.</p>From Your Site Articles
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Trending
A campaign to plant one trillion trees made headlines. Experts say it's not a panacea. sarayut Thaneerat / Moment / Getty Images
It seems like such a simple, straightforward, empowering idea: plant trees — a lot of trees — all over the world, and watch the planet's temperature fall.
<p>Who doesn't love a tree or two, even far more — the right tree in the right place?</p>
<p>Along with the refreshing shade they provide on hot days, trees of course also store carbon, and they'll suck it right out of our fragile atmosphere as they grow. Who could argue with more trees, more forests — more shade! — in a warming world? Nary a soul, one suspects, whether of conventional "tree hugger" category or rabid climate science detractor.</p><p>Earlier this year, the one-trillion tree campaign was big news at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Salesforce founder Businessman Marc Benioff announced at the meeting that his company will "support and mobilize the conservation and restoration of 100 million trees over the next decade."</p><p>Back in Washington, D.C., <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/climate/trump-trees-climate-change.html" target="_blank">President Trump</a> and <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/482772-house-republicans-propose-carbon-capture-and-sequestration" target="_blank">Republican lawmakers</a> said they too support the international campaign — although Arkansas Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman came under fire for proposing a "Trillion Trees Act" that would pair a commitment to planting trees with <a href="https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/more-95-conservation-groups-oppose-trillion-trees-act-2020-02-25/" target="_blank">a plan</a> to increase logging on public lands. Numerous other Republican representatives are endorsing the trees effort.</p>
Cautions Against Just Randomly Digging and Planting
<p>Over the past few weeks, chatter has picked up that planting trees is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to combating climate change. Trees are a good thing, but:</p><ul><li>We also need to protect existing forests — the Amazon, for example.</li><li>We need to ramp up wind, solar, and geothermal energy.</li><li>We need to burn less fossil fuel.</li><li>We need to eat more of the right foods and less of the wrong ones and, above all else, eat sustainably.</li><li>We need higher vehicle-mileage standards and more electric cars.</li><li>We need to get our act together so we can better adapt to rising seas, more droughts and wildfires, and unpredictable swings in weather.</li></ul><p>Like other initiatives to tackle climate change, planting trees requires some forethought. Recent news coverage of the trillion tree campaign points to several things people should be thinking about before digging and planting.</p><p>Authors of a <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76" target="_blank">2019 study</a> from the Swiss research university, ETH Zurich, estimated that the planet can support about 2.5 billion more acres of newly planted trees — without tearing down cities and doing away with farms. And they say those trees could store about 200 gigatons of carbon (GtC) once they mature. That's equal to one-third of all the carbon that humans have emitted into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide pollution, the authors claimed. The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/climate/trees-forests-climate-change.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article" target="_blank">summarized</a> the study last year.</p><p>Scientist Zeke Hausfather, long a regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections, suggested in a <a href="https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1147190444838674433" target="_blank">series of tweets</a> at the time that the study was misleading on a few counts. For one thing, cumulative emissions from land use and burning fossil fuels were closer to 640 GtC, "so removing 200 GtC would represent one-third of historic emissions." Hausfather also pointed to the practical and economic challenges of planting trees on every acre of available land.</p><p>India is intimately familiar with this challenge. Last summer the country planted hundreds of millions of trees as part of <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/india-plant-trees-220-million_n_5d501f43e4b0fc06ace91e2a" target="_blank">an initiative</a> to keep one-third of its land area covered in trees. But the nation's high population and rapid industrialization pose challenges to sustained reforestation. Only about 60% of the saplings are expected to survive — the rest succumbing to disease and a lack of water.</p><p>A Skeptical Science <a href="https://skepticalscience.com/1-trillion-trees-impact.html" target="_blank">article</a> by Dana Nuccitelli, a regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections and an environmental scientist, cites additional studies that have raised several other key points. Among them:</p><ul><li>Tundra and boreal regions unpopulated by trees play an important global role in reflecting energy from the sun back into space. Planting trees in these regions would darken landscapes at these high latitudes, causing them to absorb energy from the sun rather than reflect it — ultimately contributing to higher global temperatures and offsetting cooling created by planting trees.</li><li>The ETH Zurich researchers mistakenly considered natural savannas, grasslands, and shrublands as places where forests could be restored.</li><li>And in their ETH Zurich study, they estimated a carbon sequestration rate of 0.22 GtC per million hectares (i.e., for every 2.47 million acres). But 0.22 GtC is twice the amount cited by previously published estimates.</li></ul>
Trees Deserve a ‘Moment’ of Fame, but Keep Reality in Mind
<p>So while the right kinds and numbers of tree species in the right places have lots of appeal, big questions remain over exactly what can be accomplished by planting one trillion trees — and whether it may cause more harm than good.</p><p>James Temple, senior editor for energy at MIT Technology Review, summed up the view of many experts in <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615102/tree-planting-is-a-great-idea-that-could-become-a-dangerous-climate-distraction/" target="_blank">a January 28 piece</a> when he wrote:</p><blockquote>It's great that trees are having a moment. Nations absolutely should plant and protect as many as possible. … But it's also a limited and unreliable way of addressing climate change.</blockquote><p>Temple raised a few more important points, some of which have been echoed elsewhere. Among them: trees take time to grow and reach maturity — decades and even centuries for redwoods and other behemoths that can store massive amounts of carbon. If you think you're going to immediately offset your carbon footprint from flying across the country by planting a tree … think again.</p><p>Another point Temple made: You really have to work the numbers to get a true sense of the challenge. For example, he wrote, the U.S. produced 5.8 billion gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2019. To offset that much CO2 pollution, you'd have to plant a forest — and wait for it to fully mature — that is more than twice the size of Texas.</p><p>The one-trillion tree campaign raises still more questions for forest ecologists — one of them having to do with biodiversity. If the campaign results in what are essentially tree plantations lacking biodiversity and genetic variation, often referred to as monoculture, those artificial forests won't get very far.</p><p>"People are getting caught up in the wrong solution," <a href="https://www.forestry.umn.edu/forrest-d-fleischman" target="_blank">Forrest Fleischman</a> of the University of Minnesota told The Verge <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21115862/davos-1-trillion-trees-controversy-world-economic-forum-campaign" target="_blank">in late January</a>. "Instead of that guy from Salesforce saying, 'I'm going to put money into planting a trillion trees,' I'd like him to go and say, 'I'm going to put my money into helping indigenous people in the Amazon defend their lands.' That's going to have a bigger impact."</p><p>A campaign to plant "one trillion trees" sounds ambitious, it sounds daring, and it sounds exciting. And in many ways it could be all of those. But keep in mind that since 2015 and just in the Sierra Nevada — that sliver of mountain habitat that runs along the spine of California — <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-californias-drought-killed-almost-150-million-trees-180972591" target="_blank">nearly 150 million trees have died</a>, victims of drought, disease, and invasion by beetles. Warmer winters have contributed to a population explosion of these destructive insects, and it's a story being played out across the American West where forest fires are growing in frequency and intensity.</p><p>So maybe we can plant a trillion trees around the globe. But if we don't do much else about climate change, will we just be fueling the fire?</p><p>So maybe we can and should plant a trillion trees around the globe. Go for it. But a wide array of experts insist that if we don't also take numerous other actions to address climate change — specifically including major cuts in fossil fuel emissions and in particular carbon dioxide — we may just be fueling the fire.</p><p>In the end, it comes down to more trees <em>and</em> lots of other actions, not to more trees or.</p>
<p class=""><em>Reposted with permissions from <a href="https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/03/the-pros-and-cons-of-planting-trees-to-address-global-warming/" target="_blank">Yale Climate Connections</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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The Ocean Cleanup's 'Interceptor' Aims to Clean 1,000 Rivers in 5 Years. Will It Work?
17 March
Oceans
The Ocean Cleanup
By Rachael Meyer, Basten Gokkon
It had rained all morning across Jakarta on the first Tuesday in February. The rivers in the Indonesian capital quickly filled up, carrying all kinds of debris toward the Java Sea. In one of the city's largest waterways, a Dutch-made device was trapping some of the trash to prevent it from washing out into the ocean.
<p>The Interceptor 001 had been shipped to Jakarta in early 2019 by its inventor, the Rotterdam, Netherlands-based nonprofit organization <a href="https://theoceancleanup.com/" target="_blank">The Ocean Cleanup</a> (TOC). The prototype has been on a trial run since May 2019 near the mouth of the Cengkareng drain, which connects the city's notoriously garbage-laden Angke River to the Java Sea.</p><p>Jakarta's prototype is the first generation of a device that TOC aims to deploy in 1,000 of the world's most polluted rivers in just five years. The organization estimates these waterways are responsible for carrying 80 percent of ocean trash out to sea, with the remaining 20 percent of marine trash coming from around 30,000 other rivers.</p><p>There are two Interceptors currently installed, the second on the Klang River in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. According to Chris Worp, TOC's managing director, the group plans to deploy another Interceptor to the Rio Ozama in the Dominican Republic this month, and a fourth to southern Vietnam.</p><p>Donors from all over the world have invested millions of dollars in TOC to help the organization accomplish what it says are "ambitious" and "novel" solutions to the scourge of oceangoing trash. But the process has not been smooth. Mongabay visited the prototype in Jakarta in February and found issues with the device. Now, TOC is facing allegations that it copied the design of another successful river cleanup device patented more than a decade ago.</p>
Competing Designs?
<p>The river-cleaning project is part of The Ocean Cleanup's overall goal to reduce the amount of trash in the ocean. CEO Boyan Slat founded the organization in 2013 to create an open-ocean device that would remove all plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years. After many iterations and much media attention and criticism from scientists, a 160-meter (525-foot) test design <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2019/10/the-ocean-cleanup-successfully-collects-ocean-plastic-aims-to-scale-design/" target="_blank">collected and retained ocean plastic for the first time</a> in October last year.</p><p>Over the course of the project, many scientists encouraged the organization to focus its efforts on rivers, where they said a cleanup device would be more effective. TOC took heed in 2015, when it began developing the Interceptor.</p><p>The Interceptor is powered by solar panels atop its white exterior shell. Each device's unique number is painted on one of its long sleek sides, facing to the banks of the river. At water level, a long waste barrier protrudes upstream, allowing the force of the current to push trash toward the device's mouth. There, a conveyor belt lifts debris out of the water and deposits it onto a platform inside the device that shuttles trash to one of six dumpsters. Once the containers are full, a local team takes them to shore to be emptied.</p><p>The latest Interceptor design can extract 50,000 kilograms (110,000 pounds) of plastic per day — double that under "optimal conditions" — and can hold 50 cubic meters (1,770 cubic feet) of garbage, according to TOC's website. The prototype in Jakarta has about one-fourth to one-fifth that capacity, and holds the trash in small crates instead of dumpsters. As a result, it needs to be maintained and emptied more frequently.</p><span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="fcaa5641b23d607c4af21ab8a99ec5ec"><iframe lazy-loadable="true" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4Mi0AMW54Cw?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>During the Interceptor's splashy unveiling <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=KyZArQMFhQ4&feature=emb_logo" target="_blank">event</a> last October in Rotterdam, Slat called it the first "integrated system that you can bring anywhere in the world and install within days."</p><p>That's just not so, according to John Kellett, founder and president of Clearwater Mills LLC. In 2014, Kellett installed a device called the Waterwheel Powered Trash Interceptor in the Jones River in Baltimore, Maryland. This device, dubbed "Mr. Trash Wheel," uses booms to funnel trash to its mouth and a conveyor belt to lift trash out of the water. A key difference from TOC's Interceptor is that a water wheel powers the conveyor belt and solar-powered water pumps keep the wheel going when the current is weak. Due to its success, Baltimore now has three trash wheels, and Clearwater Mills is working in California, Texas and Panama to bring its design worldwide.</p><p>"They were aware of our efforts, experience and success when they developed their river device in secret and publicly dismissed it while borrowing heavily from our technology," Kellett told Mongabay of TOC.</p>
<p>In an email addressing these claims that Kellett shared with Mongabay, he informed TOC that Clearwater Mills had patented its device's design more than a decade ago. Kellett also told TOC that he thought their changes "make it more expensive, less effective and harder to maintain."</p><p>"We would love to see that the resources and efforts allocated to this global crisis are used effectively and that we are not duplicating efforts or working at cross purposes," he told Mongabay.</p><p>Worp acknowledged that the two devices share similar elements, but said TOC started its design from scratch. "It would be like saying one car is the same as all the others," he said. "We obviously know about the other systems that are out there, but we've really taken this from a different angle to find a scalable, high capacity, high efficiency solution."</p><p>According to Kellett, TOC has approached some of the organizations that Clearwater Mills is working with outside Baltimore to offer them an Interceptor instead. Worp denied this, and told Mongabay that his team doesn't see any other solutions as competitive.</p>
Getting the Public Involved in Trash
<p>For both organizations, finding a solution to river pollution goes beyond the cleanup devices.</p><p>"They're providing an opportunity to educate the public and inspire people to become part of the solution," Kellett said of the three devices his company deployed in Baltimore, which have spurred countless local environmental activities and educational programs.</p><p>According to Worp, several school groups have visited the Interceptor prototype in Jakarta. Community engagement is important to The Ocean Cleanup because it ultimately relies on local organizations to operate and maintain the devices.</p><p>Some scientists are skeptical about TOC's goal of targeting so many rivers in vastly different parts of the world. Andrew Gray, a hydrologist at the University of California, Riverside, studies small mountainous watersheds that expel a large amount of sediment to the ocean during strong storms. These storms can be destructive to any man-made device, he said.</p><p>"[These storms] that are probably discharging most of the plastics, are the kinds of events that you're not going to have a trash boom up because the hydrodynamics are far too aggressive," he said.</p><p>Gray also said the Interceptor would need to be incredibly versatile to accommodate a variety of river sizes.</p><p>Win Cowger, a graduate student in Gray's lab, pointed out the unpredictability of natural systems.</p><p>"Whenever you apply one solution — one device — to a broad range of ecosystems and a broad range of circumstances, it tends to have some implications that you might not have expected," he said.</p>Rainy Days in Jakarta
<p>Early this year, Jakarta experienced one of its worst flooding disasters in recent years. Torrential rain, with a record-breaking intensity, showered Greater Jakarta for almost 16 hours through New Year's Eve and into New Year's Day. Most of the city's rivers flooded their surroundings. The Interceptor was found damaged after its waste barrier broke loose.</p><p>The water volume in the Cengkareng drain increased significantly, but never overflowed its banks, according to Muhammad Khusen, the leader of a waste-collecting worker group in the subdistrict where the Interceptor is located. He said it was the river's strong current that damaged the device's waste barrier, but TOC engineers were able to repair it the following day.</p><p>When Mongabay visited the device a few weeks later, in February, the rains were constant, albeit less intense than at the start of the year. While the Interceptor was undamaged, waste had piled up on the barrier and clogged up the device's opening.</p><p>Workers were using long poles to try to break up the clog, which included a lot of large organic material like branches, bamboo and banana tree trunks, and feed the debris bit by bit into the Interceptor.</p><p>A team of three workers has been assigned to collect the trash and maintain the device every day, Khusen said. But on the day of Mongabay's visit, he had to call in reinforcements. As many as 10 workers were on hand throughout the afternoon to help clean up the collected debris after an earlier attempt failed to get much done. When the workers went home at 3 p.m., only about 20 percent of the trapped debris had been taken out.</p><p>Workers and officials told Mongabay it was impractical to collect all of the trapped debris, largely because of the configuration of the device. For instance, Khusen said the waste-trapping barrier was so thin that his crew couldn't stand on it to push or pull the debris into the device's mouth. He said he preferred pontoon-style barriers they can stand on.</p><p>Another challenge is the 2-meter (6.6-foot) opening of the processor, which Khusen said is too small for large waste to freely pass. Sometimes, he said, he has to call in additional human resources to handle big items, like a sofa, spring bed, and even a dead cow that turned up.</p><p>"I thought this device was sophisticated," Khusen told Mongabay. "Apparently, there's still so much manual work needed. I'd say it still has a lot of shortfalls."</p><p>Lambas Sigalingging, head of operations at the North Jakarta water department, shared similar sentiments. Lambas said the device's lack of movement made it unsuitable for rivers in Jakarta that rarely have much current unless it rains.</p><p>"So, if we don't [actively] catch the debris, how is it going to clean itself? Meanwhile, the Interceptor is standing still," he told Mongabay in a phone interview. "This device would be effective, I think, if the current was strong."</p><p>Lambas said Jakarta's environment agency owns three waste-trapping barriers installed upstream from the Interceptor in the Cengkareng drain. His own team operates other devices in the city's rivers, including garbage-collecting boats made by the German company <a href="https://www.berky.de/garbage" target="_blank">BERKY</a>, excavators, and floating polyethylene barriers. Some of these needed less labor to operate than the Interceptor, he said.</p>
<p>Lambas said he has shared the challenges his team faces operating the Interceptor with The Ocean Cleanup team at meetings. But he said he hasn't seen much improvement to the device yet. According to Lambas, the device's trial run has been extended twice — first until December and then until this April.</p><p>"But I must stress this with you: I'm not the one to say whether the Interceptor is effective or efficient," Lambas said. "I can't answer that because there's the [TOC] research team that assesses its efficiency and effectiveness."</p><p>Worp said the Interceptor is effective in the Cengkareng drain and has removed a large amount of trash that the booms upstream could not. He also told Mongabay that TOC is talking with operators in Jakarta to assess what happened during the heavy rains earlier this year, and that his team does respond to feedback from workers. For example, he said, TOC replaced labor-intensive collection bags with crates last year.</p><p>He also reiterated that the device in Jakarta is a prototype, and the lessons learned from it have led to adjustments to the second generation of Interceptors, such as the ability to accommodate larger debris loads.</p><p>However, he admitted the Interceptor will not suit every river. "It is definitely not the solution for all, and we will be looking at further solutions as we tackle more and more rivers going forward," he said.</p><p>According to TOC's website, the group is now coordinating with governments around the world to begin deploying Interceptors on a large scale.</p>
<p><em>Rachael Meyer is a freelance writer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work focuses on technological solutions to environmental issues.</em></p><p><em><em>Basten Gokkon is a full-time staff writer with Mongabay based in Jakarta. His works have focused on issues pertaining to sustainable fisheries, marine conservation and indigenous people's rights.</em></em></p><p><em><em></em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2020/03/this-solar-powered-device-aims-to-clean-1000-rivers-will-it-work/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Mongabay</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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A grumpy burrowing owl. Andy Morffew / CC BY 2.0
By John R. Platt
What do we lose when natural spaces and species disappear?
Increasingly, research has shown that as species and ecosystems vanish, it also chips away at our ability to preserve what remains — because we no longer understand what we're losing.
<p>You probably see it all the time. The neighbor who puts pesticides on his lawn rather than deal with pesky bees. The kid who squirms and runs at the sight of a harmless garter snake slithering through the grass. The politician who votes against wildlife protection because she's never seen a wolf in the wild. The corporation that wants to bulldoze the habitat of a rare frog, but frogs are gross, so who cares, right?</p><p>At best this can be termed "the extinction of experience," where our cultural and natural histories fade from our memories and therefore our reality.</p><p>At its worst it becomes something even more concerning: "biophobia," the fear of living things and a complete aversion to nature.</p><p>This isn't the fiction of living in a cold, empty dystopia. Sadly it's becoming a way of life for too many people — especially children.</p><p>A recent study in Japan paints a striking portrait of this problem. A survey of more than 5,300 school children in the Tochigi Prefecture examined their perception of local invertebrates — 14 insect species and one spider. The results? A collective <em>"ew."</em> Most of the students saw the species as things to dislike, fear or abhor, or even as sources of danger. The less experience the students had with nature, the more negative their feelings.</p><p>The results were published earlier this year in the in the journal <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320719309577?dgcid=rss_sd_all#!" target="_blank">Biological Conservation</a>.</p><p>Lead researcher Masashi Soga with the University of Tokyo says the study stemmed from observations about today's nature-deficient children.</p><p>"Humans inherently avoid dangerous organisms such as bees, but children these days avoid even harmless animals such as butterflies and dragonflies," he said. "I have long wondered why so many of today's children react like this."</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjg3NjgzOS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNTkwODQzNn0.uRiHH2LXETLg3XI2NqioU_GRipQ3lNeIfQySIFtWRNQ/img.jpg?width=980" id="75998" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a7a9a1f7040029863a413bd7e850aa88" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
A butterfly photographed in the greenhouse at Igashira Park, Tochigi Prefecture. Takashi Hososhima / CC BY-SA 2.0
<p>Soga said their survey echoed findings from around the world. For example, a 2014 study of 1,100 students in China elicited <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320714002389" target="_blank">similar emotional reactions</a> — and, like the Japanese study, found that direct contact with nature helped to turn biophobia into <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674074422&content=reviews" target="_blank"><em>biophilia</em></a>, the term popularized by biologist E.O. Wilson to refer to human connection with other forms of life.</p><p>Although the children's reactions were somewhat expected, the new study did contain an unexpected finding: Many of the surveyed children revealed that their <em>parents</em> also expressed fear or disgust of the same invertebrates. In fact these parental emotions were strong enough to overwhelm any positive experiences the children might have gained from direct experiences in nature.</p><p>As Soga and his coauthors wrote in their paper, "Our results suggest that there is likely a feedback loop in which an increase in people who have negative attitudes towards nature in one generation will lead to a further increase in people with similar attitudes in the next generation — a cycle of disaffection towards nature."</p><p>And that's possibly the greater threat posed by extinction of experience. Soga suggests the generational loss — a condition previously dubbed <a href="https://depts.washington.edu/hints/publications/Childrens_Affiliation_Nature.pdf" target="_blank">environmental generational amnesia</a> — could chip away at our societal ability to preserve what we're losing.</p><p>"I believe that increased biophobia is a major, but invisible, threat to global biodiversity," Soga said. "As the number of children who have biophobia increases, public interest and support for biodiversity conservation will gradually decline. Although many conservation biologists still consider that preventing the loss of wildlife habitat is the most important way to conserve biodiversity, I think preventing increased biophobia is also important for conservation."</p><p>What's to be done about this? The paper makes several recommendations, the most obvious of which is that children should experience nature more often. The authors also suggest establishing policies to guide these natural experiences and increasing educational programs about the natural world.</p><p>Helping parents to see species around them in a new light would make a difference, too.</p><p>And, of course, maintaining support for preserving the wild spaces where these "scary" and "icky" creatures live is the most important thing of all.</p><p>That's a point reinforced by another recent study, which found that wild spaces located within urban areas — and the plants and animals that thrive in them — are particularly important for human health and well-being.</p><p>Published in the journal <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2020.00002/full" target="_blank">Frontiers in Sustainable Cities</a>, the study examined attitudes toward Discovery Park, the heavily forested 534-acre public park in Seattle, Washington. It found that the public had the most appreciation for — and gained the most value from — the wildest parts of the park.</p><p>"I have seen orca whales, seals, fish, eagles, herons, shorebirds and many other sea creatures in their natural habitat," one survey participant wrote. "Going here with people has allowed me to connect and talk with them about conversation that simply does not happen in everyday life," wrote another.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjg3Njg0MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1NDgwNDEyNX0.oTEhUf0WJGgKKwMTLtvl8Gnb1-TRiiHChsmmOgffcfo/img.jpg?width=980" id="c175b" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f458e0cbbd25b9a65177aac5bff2491d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
An orca dorsal fin seen from Discovery Park with West Point lighthouse in background. Seattle Parks / Discovery Park Staff / CC BY 2.0
<p>The participants reported that their most valuable experiences in the park included encountering wildlife, walking through open spaces, exploring the beach and finding beautiful views.</p><p>"We saw that a large majority of participants' interactions, especially their <em>most</em> meaningful interactions, depended on Discovery Park's relative wildness," said lead author Elizabeth Lev, a master's student in the University of Washington's <a href="https://depts.washington.edu/hints/index.shtml" target="_blank">Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab</a>.</p><p>This is only possible because the park <em>is</em> relatively wild. After all, you can't enjoy watching birds if there are no birds to follow; gaze at the sunset if it's obscured by skyscrapers; or stop and smell the flowers if they don't have room to grow.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjg3Njg0MS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1NDU4NDA1MH0.7Yt8craVganvhMJLIySlhA8R3AUyO3LXKoBoqmfYU0I/img.jpg?width=980" id="bcf91" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="1da23e3023a829b2e0f2655b7e669a32" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://therevelator.org/biophobia-fear-nature/" target="_blank">The Revelator</a>.<a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/r/entryeditor/2645487848#/" target="_self"></a></em><em></em></p>Bald eagle at Discovery Park. Brandon Trentler / CC BY 2.0
<p>And yet even this long-protected space could someday become less hospitable to nature. Over the past few years a lot of people and organizations have suggested developing parts of Discovery Park or the neighboring area. Most recently a plan proposed building <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/yes-to-affordable-housing-but-not-in-discovery-parks-backyard/" target="_blank">34 acres of much-needed affordable housing</a> and parking spaces adjacent to the park, bringing with them noise, traffic and pollution.</p><p>If anything like that happened, both the park and the people of Seattle could lose something vital. And that would continue the trend of chipping away at Seattle's — and the world's — natural spaces, leaving just tiny pocket parks and green-but-empty spaces that offer little <em>real</em> value to wildlife, plants or people.</p><p>"It is true that any interaction with nature is better than none, but I don't want people to be satisfied with any small bit of grass and trees," Lev said. "We have been in this cycle of environmental generational amnesia for a long time, where the baseline keeps shifting and we don't even realize what we're losing until it's gone. If we can get people to understand how much meaning and value can come from having more experiences with more wild forms of nature, then maybe we can stop this cycle and move toward conserving and restoring what we have left."</p><p>Building this understanding in an ever-more fearful and disconnected world may be the biggest challenge. Peter Kahn, the senior author of Lev's paper and the director of the Human Interaction with Nature lab, made several suggestions for bridging this gap in this 2011 book, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/technological-nature" target="_blank"><em>Technological Nature</em></a>. They echo the recommendation about getting children into nature, but also include telling stories of how things used to be, imagining what things might be like in the future, and developing a common language about nature, "a way of speaking about wild and domestic interaction patterns, and their wide range of instantiations, and the meaningful, deep and often joyful feelings that they engender."</p><p>No matter what techniques we use, this growing field of research illustrates that saving nature requires encouraging people to experience it more often and more deeply. That calls for additional research — Lev and her coauthors have published a <a href="https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/43788" target="_blank">toolkit</a> that other municipalities can follow to study the value of their own wild spaces — and clear communication of the results.</p><p>"If we can continue to characterize and show people the benefits of these wild spaces," Lev said, "maybe people will begin to see more value in keeping these areas undeveloped — for the sake of our mutual benefit."</p>Related Articles Around the Web
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Pekic / E+ / Getty Images
Whether reporting on sea level rise, crop failures, or natural disasters, journalists are often the bearers of bleak news about global warming.
<p>But Liza Gross of the <a href="https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/" target="_blank">Solutions Journalism Network</a> says that the bad news on <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change/" rel="noopener noreferrer">climate</a> is not the only news. And she says that unrelenting negative coverage can turn viewers and readers off from engaging with the issue.</p><p>Listen here:</p>
<iframe style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/13185005/height/45/theme/standard/thumbnail/yes/direction/backward/" height="45" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe><p>"If there is no hope, then why would I even read about it or listen to a broadcast or watch a video about it?" she says.</p><p>So the Solutions Journalism Network trains journalists to cover what Gross calls the whole story.</p><p>"In addition to covering societal challenges with journalistic rigor, we also cover solutions and responses to these challenges with equal journalistic rigor," she says.</p><p>For example, that means reporting on <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/renewable-energy/" rel="noopener noreferrer">renewable energy</a> projects, <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/coral-reefs" rel="noopener noreferrer">coral reef</a> restoration efforts, or stories of how communities come together after natural disasters.</p>
<p>The goal is not to comfort people or distract them from the seriousness of problems like climate change.</p><p>Rather, Gross says by providing evidence-based, in-depth stories on effective solutions to these problems, journalists can help enrich people's understanding of the issue.</p>
<p class=""><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/03/with-solutions-journalism-reporters-cover-more-than-just-bad-news/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Yale Climate Connections</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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A group of schoolchildren gathers under a tree in Ganta, Liberia. Edwin Remsberg / VWPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
By Alex Kirby
If you really want to tackle the climate emergency, there's one simple but often forgotten essential: throw your weight behind schools for girls, and ensure adult women can rely on the chance of an education.
<p>Obviously, in a world of differences, some people can do more to tackle the <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-crisis" target="_self">climate crisis</a> than others. So it's essential to recognize how much neglected potential exists among nearly half the human race.</p><p>But there's a snag, and it's a massive one: the women and girls who can do so much to avert global heating reaching disastrous levels need to be able to exercise their right to education.</p><p>Bold claims? <a href="https://www.drawdown.org/" target="_blank">Project Drawdown</a> is a group of researchers who believe that stopping global heating is possible, with solutions that exist today. To do this, they say, we must work together to achieve drawdown, the point when greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere start to decline.</p><p>The project's conclusions are startling − and positive. One is that educating girls works better to protect the climate than many technological solutions, vital though they are, and including several variants of <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/renewable-energy/" target="_self">renewable energy</a>.</p><p>Yet, the group finds, girls and women suffer disproportionately from climate breakdown, and failures in access to education worsen this problem. After the horrendous 2004 tsunami, for example, an Oxfam report found that <a href="https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/oxfam-international-tsunami-evaluation-summary_3.pdf" target="_blank">male survivors outnumbered women by almost 3:1</a> in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India. Men were more likely to be able to swim, and women lost precious evacuation time trying to look after children and other relatives.</p><p>But given more power and say in how we adapt to and try to prevent global heating, the female half of humankind could make disproportionally positive contributions, the project says.</p><p>Using UN data, it suggests that educating girls could result in a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 51.48 gigatonnes by 2050. The UN Environment Programme says that total greenhouse gas emissions had reached <a href="https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/30798/EGR19ESEN.pdf?sequence=13" target="_blank">a record high of 55.3 gigatonnes in 2018</a>.</p>
<h3>Multiple Barriers</h3><p>The <a href="https://www.rapidtransition.org/" target="_blank">Rapid Transition Alliance</a> (RTA) is a UK-based organization which argues that humankind must undertake "widespread behaviour change to sustainable lifestyles … to live within planetary ecological boundaries and to limit global warming to below 1.5°C".</p><p>It says that although access to education is a basic human right, across the world girls continue to face multiple barriers based on their gender and its links to other factors such as age, ethnicity, poverty and disability.</p><p>But the RTA adds: "Research shows that for each intake of students, educating girls has multiple benefits that go far beyond the individual and any particular society. It can also result in rapid and transformative change that affects the planet itself."</p><p>One example it cites is from Mali, in West Africa, where women with secondary education or higher have an average of three children, while those with no education have an average of seven children.</p>
<h3>Environmentalists' Failure</h3><p>It says that while the UN currently thinks the world's population will grow from 7.3 billion today to 9.7 billion by 2050, with most of the growth happening in developing countries, recent research shows that if girls' education continues to expand, that number would total 2 billion fewer people by 2045.</p><p>It argues that it is not just politicians and the media who fail to focus on this grossly slewed access to education. The RTA says the environmental movement itself rarely makes connections between the education of girls and success in tackling climate change.</p><p>One example of <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/conservation">conservation</a> work being tied successfully to educating and empowering women it cites is the Andavadoaka clinic in Madagascar, which is funded by a British charity, <a href="https://blueventures.org/conservation/" target="_blank">Blue Ventures Conservation</a> (BVC).</p><p>The link between population growth, the lack of family planning facilities and the increasing pressure on fragile natural resources prompted BVC to establish the clinic, which has been running for over a decade and is part of a wider programme serving 45,000 people. As well as the original clinic other projects have grown up that concentrate on specific economic and participation opportunities for women and girls.</p>
<h3>Making a Difference</h3><p>In the least developed countries women make up almost half of the agricultural labour force, giving them a huge role in feeding the future population. But there is a massive gap between men and women in their control over land, their ability to obtain inputs and the pay they can expect.</p><p>Individual girls and women continue to make a massive difference, whether it's <a href="https://www.facebook.com/gretathunbergsweden/" target="_blank">Greta Thunberg</a> spurring action on climate change or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/malala-yousafzai" target="_blank">Malala Yousafzai</a>, shot for trying to attend school in Afghanistan, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her campaign for girls' education.</p><p>Women who have climbed high up the political ladder have sometimes used their success to ensure that girls are taken seriously. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of an African country − Liberia − used her power to expand the quality of provision in pre-school and primary education by joining the <a href="https://www.globalpartnership.org/" target="_blank">Global Partnership for Education</a>, and the former U.S. first lady Michele Obama spearheaded the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/let-girls-learn" target="_blank">Let Girls Learn</a> organization.</p><p>The Rapid Transition Alliance's conclusion is short and simple: "Educating girls brings broad benefits to wider society as well as improving efforts to tackle the climate emergency."</p>
<p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://climatenewsnetwork.net/schools-for-girls-can-help-to-answer-climate-crisis/" target="_blank">Climate News Network</a>.</em></p>From Your Site Articles
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