Weekly Ingest: Newsletter
Each week I curate a newsletter for all my listeners that is comprised of articles that are of interest to the topics I talk about the podcast. This newsletter also brings national and international news about sustainability and climate change they may often get overlooked, forgotten about, or is unheard of to the community I serve.
Climate Change and Energy
The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is nearing a level possibly never experienced by a hominoid. Photograph: Dmitry Rukhlenko - Travel Photos/Alamy Stock Photo
CO2 in Earth's atmosphere nearing levels of 15m years ago
From The Guardian: Jonathan Watts
Last time CO2 was at similar level temperatures were 3C to 4C hotter and sea levels were 20 metres higher
The amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is approaching a level not seen in 15m years and perhaps never previously experienced by a hominoid, according to the authors of a study.
At pre-lockdown rates of increase, within five years atmospheric CO2 will pass 427 parts per million, which was the probable peak of the mid-Pliocene warming period 3.3m years ago, when temperatures were 3C to 4C hotter and sea levels were 20 metres higher than today.
But it seems we must now go much further back to see what’s ahead.
Some time around 2025, the Earth is likely to have CO2 conditions not experienced since the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum 15m years ago, around the time our ancestors are thought to have diverged from orangutans and become recognisably hominoid.
MARK SCOLFORO / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Damning report on Pa.’s failure to protect residents from fracking unlikely to result in major reform
From Spotlight PA: Rebecca Moss
The recent findings of a massive grand jury investigation into the state’s failure to protect communities from unconventional oil and gas development, known as fracking, were damning, and lent official credence to problems many residents have decried for years.
The long-anticipated report outlined explicit ways in which the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Health turned a blind eye to the snowballing effects of fracking on Pennsylvania’s residents and skirted constitutional obligations to protect the environment.
State officials testified about directives to ignore health concerns and practices that glossed over the harm the public experienced, effectively gaslighting residents whose tap water appeared brown or experienced rashes when they showered, but were told nothing was wrong.
In this Feb. 23, 2017, file photo, an elderly woman is escorted to a transport van after being arrested by law enforcement at the Oceti Sakowin camp as part of the final sweep of the Dakota Access pipeline protesters in Morton County near Cannon Ball, N.D. Protests and lawsuits against major oil and gas pipeline projects have slowed or stalled projects across the U.S. (Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune via AP, Pool, File)
Judge rejects Dakota Access pipeline request to stop closure
From ABC News via the Associated Press
A federal judge has rejected a request from the operator of the Dakota Access Pipeline to halt an order to shut down the oil pipeline during a lengthy environmental review
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg denied the company’s request Thursday, effectively sending the case to a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Boasberg on Monday ordered the pipeline shut down by Aug. 5 for an additional environmental assessment more than three years after it began pumping oil. The move was a victory for the Standing Rock Sioux and a blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to weaken public health and environmental protections his administration views as obstacles to businesses.
In arguing against the closure, pipeline operator Energy Transfer estimated it would take three months to empty the pipe of oil and complete steps to preserve it for future use, the Bismarck Tribune reported.
The Texas-based company says that to keep the line from corroding without the flow of oil, it must be filled with an inert gas, such as nitrogen.
Intersectional Environmentalism
Illustration by Alex Fine for TIME
To Solve the Twin Problems of Racial Injustice and Climate Change, We Need to Stop Parachuting in ‘Experts’
From TIME Magazine: Mark Ruffalo and Rahwa Ghirmatzion
As the COVID-19 pandemic and police-brutality protests heat up metaphorically, we can’t forget that the Earth is still heating up literally. Because of systemic racism, these crises are hitting communities of color especially hard, with each aggravating the effects of the others. At the same time, Black and Brown communities are developing concrete, homegrown solutions to transform their own lives.
Too often, the money and decision-making power needed to address a crisis rest in faraway offices that deploy far-flung consultants and contractors to affected areas. It’s no surprise when these responses without community leadership—from prospecting in post-industrial cities to disaster capitalism’s response to hurricanes—only make matters worse.
When communities have the resources to build on local strengths and buy-in, they come up with effective, durable, and creative solutions to address short-term crises and long-term inequities alike.
Erin Lucas and Mateo Mackbee on a farm they’re building in central Minnesota, where they also run a restaurant, bakery and nonprofit. Credit...Andrea Ellen Reed for The New York Times
Two Chefs Moved to Rural Minnesota to Expand on Their Mission of Racial Justice
From The New York Times: Brett Anderson
Mateo Mackbee and Erin Lucas left Minneapolis for a small central Minnesota community, where they are using their restaurant, bakery and farm to promote diversity and teach children about food.
ST. JOSEPH, Minn. — Krewe, a restaurant in this small central-Minnesota city, is a tribute to Mary Mackbee, a former high school principal who raised four children in a Twin Cities suburb on the cooking of her native New Orleans.
“More than anything, gumbo is the smell I remember,” said Mateo Mackbee, one of those children and the chef and co-owner of Krewe. “That’s one you would get outside the front door.”
Mr. Mackbee was in the dining room of Krewe, a window-lined restaurant in a new low-rise building in downtown St. Joseph, a community of 7,000 about 70 miles northwest of Minneapolis. His mother was there, too, sharing stories about her life and overseeing the jambalaya that Mr. Mackbee’s 21-year-old son, Makel, was cooking for takeout service later that day.
Krewe’s sign reads “est. 1944,” Ms. Mackbee’s birth year, even though it opened in late May, four days after George Floyd was killed while in the custody of the Minneapolis police.
Author Ashley Gripper (right) with fellow farmers Errol Chichester (left) and Tahirah Chichester (center). Photograph By Khaliah D. Pitts
We Don’t Farm Because It’s Trendy. Farming is not new to Black people. We farm as resistance, for healing and sovereignty
From Grid Magazine: Ashley Gripper
For more than 150 years, from the rural South to northern cities, Black people have used farming to build self-determined communities and resist oppressive structures that tear them down.
My journey in food-and-land work began long before I was born. My ancestors were enslaved Africans forced to farm under abhorrent conditions in South Carolina, Texas and Georgia. In 2012, I started my first professional job working at a food justice and nutrition education non-profit in Philadelphia, but I first developed a passion for food sovereignty and agriculture at the Black Farmers Conference in 2013.
There, I learned that farming is not new to Black people. While some dominant modern narratives talk about urban agriculture as an innovative way to fight food insecurity, Black folks in this country have been growing food in cities for as long as they have lived in cities. Before that, our ancestors lived in deep relationship with the land. For the first time, I understood growing food as a tool for dismantling systemic oppression. I also realized that Black academics have a critical role to play in agricultural resistance and freedom movements.
As a PhD candidate, I am exploring and understanding the ways that urban agriculture impacts the mental health, spirituality and collective agency of Black communities. Before we even begin to do this type of research, it is important for us to understand the roots of Black farming.
Climate Change and COVID-19
Matthias Nareyek / Getty Images for Paramount Pictures
Global warming. Inequality. COVID-19. And Al Gore is … optimistic?
From Grist: Lauren Goode and Adam Rogers
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Before he was the guy with the climate change PowerPoint presentation, before he lost the U.S. presidency by a nose (and a Supreme Court decision), Al Gore had a reputation for pitching ambitious policy solutions to the knottiest societal problems. From the Senate to the vice presidency, while most politicians were yelling about oil prices, Gore was talking about connecting information superhighways to public schools and taxing British Thermal Units to fight global warming.
For the past decade and a half, Gore, a self-described “recovering politician,” has been a capitalist. He’s chair of Generation Investment Management, a $20 billion equity firm focusing on environmentally sustainable companies. It might seem like a tough time to put on that specific happy face — a pandemic and resurgent fights over racial and economic inequality might take cuts in the queue ahead of a global economic meltdown and planetary ecosystem collapse. Even Generation’s annual sustainability report shows that public attention toward climate change has taken a backseat to concerns about the novel coronavirus. Yet somehow now, as the firm releases this fourth annual Sustainability Trends Report, Gore seems almost … optimistic. Which — well, how could that be?
‘Acceptance should not be the last stage for environmental losses that can and must be avoided, and that can often be reversed.’ Photograph: Alamy
Don't despair: use the pandemic as a springboard to environmental action
From The Guardian: Carlos M Durate
This is the moment for the equivalent, in conservation terms, of the #MeToo or Black Lives Matter movements
We are living in a time of environmental anger and despair, and not without cause. Exponential growth of human consumption has led to catastrophic losses of habitats and the decimation and extinction of species. Covid-19, itself a symptom of a world out of ecological balance, has brought not only human tragedy, but also the loss of 2020 as a biodiversity and climate “super year” for planetary assessments and action. The fleeting good environmental news from the shutdown, of wildlife emerging from hiding places and an early precipitous drop in greenhouse gas emissions, has been replaced by a flood of single-use plastics, an outbreak of poaching and deforestation, and attacks on environmental regulations.
It is no wonder, then, that grief is so prevalent among people such as ourselves, who work to protect wildlife and habitats. In one popular, albeit simplified, representation of the stages of grieving, initial denial is replaced by anger, bargaining, depression, and ultimately acceptance. Most environmentalists are well past the denial stage, but expressions of anger and depression abound, which nurtures a culture of negativity. This is often expressed as scepticism, criticism or rejection of research reporting positive outcomes for the environment whenever recovery is partial, pressures remain, or data is incomplete (which is almost always the case). In other words, as Voltaire argued against 250 years ago, we make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Zero Waste
Photograph Courtesy of Nic Esposito
In response to Grid’s June cover story, Philly’s former Zero Waste and Litter Director says the Plastic Bag Ban was delayed because of anticipated systemic issues with enforcement.
From Grid Magazine: Nic Esposito
A lot has changed since last month’s issue of Grid was released. Most importantly, the long-overdue national reckoning of how laws are enforced and how they disproportionately affect communities of color is finally taking hold. Also notably, I am no longer a part of the Kenney Administration.
My last media quotes as its Zero Waste and Litter Director, a department that has now been disbanded due to budget cuts, were taken in the context of Grid’s cover story last month on the delay of the plastic bag ban.
As Grid publisher Alex Mulcahy revealed in his editor’s notes that issue, he and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye when it came to how City government policy has been covered in Grid and other publications, so I am thankful to him and to Grid Magazine for the opportunity to examine why public policies, like the bag ban, so often fail to achieve their lofty goals.
In the context of Grid’s piece, I was pleased that the article reported on the manipulative disinformation campaign being waged by the plastics industry to manufacture doubts on the safety of reusable items—this is real and a major threat toward the progression to curb single-use plastic pollution.
PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES
You Don't Need Single-Use Plastic Bags. You Need a Mask
From Wired: Matt Simon
Honestly, you should just be disinfecting your reusable bags—the real issue is airborne virus, not infected shopping totes, experts say.
Even before the pandemic hit, the recycling industry wasn’t so much an industry as it was a perpetual crisis. Its economics are supposedly simple: A company has to make more money on the resulting recycled material than what it costs to gather plastic waste and process it. But the economics grow tangled when you consider that producing virgin plastic remains super cheap because it's made of oil, which has also been super cheap. So it’s more tempting than ever to just pump out more virgin plastic and let the recycling industry languish. To try to fudge the broken economics of recycling, the US used to sell oodles of plastic waste to China to process, but China nixed that deal in 2018 to boost its own domestic garbage collection.
Then came Covid-19 to kneecap the recycling business. The price of oil has tanked, so oil producers have doubled down on the production of plastics as a revenue stream. Then social distancing led to the closure of 146 recycling programs across 35 states, disrupting the recycling of 88,000 tons of material by mid-June. Over in Europe, recyclers are pleading with the European Union to include their industry in recovery plans to ensure its survival.
All the while, single-use plastics are hotter than ever, as worried people try to limit their exposure to the virus. The plastics industry has egged on that fear to push for the resurrection of the maligned single-use plastic bag—eight states, including California, New York, and Hawaii, have banned the things in recent years. And it’s worked: Municipalities have rolled back bans while instead banning reusable bags because of fears they could bring the virus from people’s homes into grocery stores.
“If you're in the plastic industry, it's been pretty tough. You've been like the evil child,” says Tom Szaky, the founder and CEO of the recycling company TerraCycle. “So it's no surprise that when suddenly you can highlight the benefit of plastic, you want to scream it from the mountaintops. So I think a part of that is the plastic industry saying, ‘See, we do have value, we're not just evil.’”
