Category: Activists

To protect our local environment, people must understand the issues and get involved.

Yale Climate Connection, June 4, 2021

Articles include: A climate-change-inspired video road-trip across the U.S.; Key readings on IEA’s ‘Net Zero by 2050’ report; Tips: How to weatherize your home; Talking climate with those holding different worldviews; New Mexico imposes strict rule to prevent venting, flaring of natural gas; Can fossil-fuel-dependent Wyoming build a more diverse economy?; Swiss utilities used a simple tactic to get customers to buy renewable energy; Foresters use fire and goats to care for Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest; Youth-led Sunrise Movement calls for national job guarantee

Yale Climate Connection, May 21, 2021

Articles include: Greens: Divided on ‘clean’ energy? Or closer than they appear?; Check these pieces on the diseases of summer; Tropical Cyclone Tauktae is fifth-strongest cyclone on record in the Arabian Sea; What is a ‘just transition,’ and why do we need one?; California’s volunteer ‘Climate Action Corps’ helps fight climate change; Increases in extreme precipitation cost the U.S. $73 billion over three decades; Bladeless wind turbine generates electricity by vibrating with air movements; The moral imperative behind the ‘Big Bold Jewish Climate Fest’;
Renovations put Seattle hockey arena closer to its goal of zero carbon emissions.

This Could Be the Start of a Rural Anti-Fracking Coalition

New Republic: This Could Be the Start of a Rural Anti-Fracking Coalition. Landowners who lease their land to gas companies aren’t always pleased with the results.

When I first met George Hagemeyer in 2013, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation was in the process of drilling six natural gas wells in his backyard. America is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend almost limitlessly beneath the surface, and George had leased his subsurface estate in the hopes of striking it rich in the fracking lottery. As a 150-foot-tall rig pounded segments of steel pipe into the earth, I asked George if he thought that anyone else should have any say over his decision to lease his mineral estate. The gas wells, after all, could degrade local air quality and harm his neighbors’ drinking water, and they were contributing to global warming. “Nope,” George responded. “It’s my land. I’ll do as I damn well please.”

George, like many other residents of Trout Run, Pennsylvania, in the Appalachian foothills, resides on a farm his father once owned. Locals with roads bearing their ancestors’ surnames can feel a sense of entitlement over their domain, and resentment toward government bureaucracies and environmentalists conspiring to regulate away their livelihoods and freedom to dispose of their land as they see fit. Leasing the land to the petroleum industry, in George’s view, is an affirmation of his sovereignty over his estate. It’s more than a little ironic that, a few years on from his decision to invite a petroleum company into his backyard, George’s complaints about the industry now echo those of Native American activists who’ve had pipelines foisted on them without so much as a by-your-leave.

Yale Climate Connections, May 7, 2021

Articles include: ‘Which climate change jobs will be in high demand in the future?’;  Most newspaper editorials mum on Biden 50% by 2030 pledge; Revitalized U.S. urgency on climate change and national security;  Empire State Realty Trust agrees to buy 300 million kilowatt hours of wind energy;  Affordable housing could be hit hard as sea levels rise;  Environmental engineer launches group for Latinos in sustainability;  New tool called ‘Vulcan’ could help cities better estimate their carbon dioxide emissions; Women scientists launch ‘Science Moms,’ a climate campaign aimed at mothers.

Studies: Plastics and oceans – 4 articles

Futurity: DISCARDED COVID MASKS AND GLOVES ARE REALLY BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. When it comes to COVID-19 masks, gloves, and disinfectants, the transformation from protection to pollution happens quickly, but the damage can last for centuries.

Vox: Why 99% of ocean plastic pollution is “missing”. A lot of it is probably hiding in plain sight. All of this plastic consumption — and the world’s inadequacy at containing it — means an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year. It is remarkably difficult to track all of this plastic, but in 2019, a group of researchers affiliated with the Ocean Cleanup published a study about plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They excavated plastic from it and, using what they found, made a model showing what is likely floating in each of the five (at least) ocean garbage patches around the world. They also estimated that what’s floating on the surface of the water accounts for only 1 percent of what we put into the ocean.

National Geographic: Plastic gets to the oceans through over 1,000 rivers. Scientists used to think 20 rivers at most carried most plastic into the oceans, but now they know it’s far more, complicating potential solutions. New research published today in Science Advances has turned that thinking on its head. Scientists found that 80 percent of plastic waste is distributed by more than 1,000 rivers, not simply 10 or 20. They also found that most of that waste is carried by small rivers that flow through densely populated urban areas, not the largest rivers.

CNN: ‘The ocean is our life-support system’: Kerstin Forsberg on why we must protect our seas. After finishing her degree, the Peruvian biologist began working on a sea turtle protection project in the north of the country. Two years later, in 2009, Forsberg founded “Planeta Océano,” an organization that aims to empower local communities to look after the ocean. Its work with giant manta rays led to Peru’s government granting the species legal protection.

‘Survival and science’—our fight against climate silence

Columbia Journalism Review: ‘Survival and science’—our fight against climate silence.

IN 2019, in an effort to combat climate silence, CJR and The Nation, in partnership with The Guardian, founded Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaborative aimed at strengthening coverage of the climate emergency. Two years later, Covering Climate Now partners publish coverage of the climate crisis to two billion readers.

On this week’s Kicker, Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director of Covering Climate Now and the environment correspondent for The Nation, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss what they’ve learned about how to tell climate crisis stories that land with impact; how the scientific weight of covid-19 coverage can further climate coverage; and why covering the climate crisis is journalism, not advocacy.

What’s Your Sustainability Strategy?

Forbes: What’s Your Sustainability Strategy? Just over a year after the global pandemic began, Earth Day is upon us again. The reason this year feels different is because it is. Empowered consumers demand sustainability transformation, and a record number of brands have responded in a big way by announcing net-zero or carbon-neutral commitments, establishing targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and investing in climate action. Today, environmental sustainability strategy is about much more than corporate social responsibility (CSR); it’s about technology and business innovation, systemic risk mitigation and sustainable growth. It is about transformation. Why is this year different?

Three Young Environmental Activists You Need to Know

InStyle: Three Young Environmental Activists You Need to Know. The planet’s boldest allies are its youngest residents. Listen to what they have to say about protecting the future.

When Greta Thunberg took the podium at the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit in 2019 at just 16 years old and declared, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” it became clear that the planet’s most necessary allies are its youngest residents. And that until that moment (and for a while after it) some of the strongest voices in the fight for equitable, sustainable environmental change had been silenced.

In the two years since, the climate crisis has gone from bad to worse, and awareness of it has continued to grow, especially among younger generations who are motivated and devoted to clean beauty, sustainable fashion, and the cause of a greener future. And we have a new generation of activists to thank for the continued drumbeat of do more, do better — we are out of time.

Study: Forests – 2 articles

Apple News: Where have our forests gone? 15-year-old Indian student Vanya Sayimane writes about how climate change has affected her home in the Western Ghats. I was born in the middle of dense forests in the Western Ghats, a chain of mountains that runs along the western coast of India. The lives of my community here are woven between the valleys, forests and mountains. The Western Ghats protect our people from floods and other natural calamities that affect coastal areas. I love the greenery and liveliness of Western Ghats. They are very special to me. But over the past few years, I’ve seen climate change threaten everything I love. The Western Ghats and the futures of the people who live there are now at stake due to flooding, drought, deforestation and the building of dams and nuclear power plants.

Phys.org: Why forests in the Andes are crucial to fighting climate change. Andean forests sequester a significant amount of carbon from the atmosphere. Trees and forests play a huge role in the carbon cycle, or the movement of carbon dioxide through the atmosphere. Thanks to activities like deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, there is now 2.5 times the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere than there was before industrialization. Without forests, says Francisco Cuesta, an ecologist at La Universidad de las Américas in Ecuador, we would be dealing with even more CO2. A study out this month in the journal Nature Communications, authored by a team of 28 scientists including Cuesta, looks at how the carbon cycling process is playing out in the tropical and subtropical forests of the Andes.