Weekly Ingest Newsletter: Eighth Edition
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 Politics and the Economy
Source: Bloomberg News
EU Approves Biggest Green Stimulus in History With $572 Billion Plan
From Bloomberg: Ewa Krukowska and Laura Millan Lombrana
The measure pushes the continent ahead in the global fight against climate change.
European governments approved the most ambitious climate change plan to date, agreeing to pour more than 500 billion euros ($572 billion) into everything from electric cars to renewable energy and agriculture.
At a marathon five-day summit in Brussels, heads of government reached a deal on an unprecedented economic rescue plan and seven-year budget for the region worth 1.8 trillion euros ($2 trillion). Almost a third of that is earmarked for climate action, offering the bloc’s 27 nations a chance to develop clean energy resources, stimulate the market for emissions-free cars, invest in budding technologies, and promote energy efficiency.
“Never before, has so much of an EU budget been allocated to combating climate change,” said German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze. “The commitments to climate action and environmental protection are important and necessary, but the distribution of funds must reflect that.”
Source: Huffpost
‘It’s Past Time’: Rep. Ilhan Omar, Sen. Bernie Sanders Unveil Bill To Strip Fossil Fuel Funding
From Huffpost: Alexander C. Kaufman
The legislation aims to cut off oil, gas and coal companies reaping billions from federal COVID-19 relief and annual subsidies.
In the richest and most powerful nation in history, doctors beg for basic protective gear amid a deadly pandemic, 21% of children live in poverty and 84-year-olds take jobs scrubbing motel toilets to survive.
Yet, as fossil fuel emissions cook the planet and wreak a mounting toll of destruction, the federal government gives oil, gas and coal companies nearly $15 billion per year in direct federal subsidies and already directed billions more in support through coronavirus relief programs this year.
New legislation from five of the country’s top progressive lawmakers, including Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), aims to cut the fossil fuel industry off, HuffPost has learned.
FT montage; Bloomberg; Getty Images | Pressure from protesters on climate change policies has led to shareholder pressure for change
Climate change: asset managers join forces with the eco-warriors
From Financial Times: Attracta Mooney in London and Patrick Temple-West
Source: The Independent
'Everybody’s entitled to their opinion - but not their own facts': The spread of climate denial on Facebook
From The Independent: Lousie Boyle
'The arguments are that people can't trust scientists, models, climate data. It's all about building doubt and undermining public trust in climate science'
An article linking climate change to Earth’s solar orbit went viral last year, racking up 4.2million views on social media and widely shared on Facebook. It was the most-engaged with climate story in 2019, according to Brandwatch.
There was just one problem. It wasn’t true.
Facebook removed the article from Natural News, a far-right conspiracy outlet with 3 million followers, after it was reported.
But the spread of misinformation on the climate crisis by groups who reject climate science continues on Facebook and other social media platforms.
Nearly 250 U.S. oil and gas companies are expected to file for bankruptcy by the end of next year. Joshua Doubek
Bankrupt Fracking Companies Are Harming the Climate and Taxpayers
From EcoWatch: Climate Nexus
Fracking companies are going bankrupt at a rapid pace, often with taxpayer-funded bonuses for executives, leaving harm for communities, taxpayers, and workers, the New York Time reports.
Nearly 250 U.S. oil and gas companies are expected to file for bankruptcy by the end of next year — more than went under in the last five years combined — as demand craters due to the pandemic, a global price war, and falling renewable energy prices. These failing companies often neglect well maintenance and plugged well repairs to save money, causing tons of ultra-heat-trapping methane to continue gushing into the atmosphere.
Shale wells typically cost $300,000 to close — far more than the estimates used by companies, regulators and financial analysts — and an analysis prepared for the Times found companies have failed to reserve sufficient funds, as required by law, to remediate their well sites, leaving taxpayers to foot the cleanup bill.
Intersectional Environmentalism
Faith and Skye Palay of Houston are forbidden to play in their front yard, where water pools and mosquitos breed. Their mother advocates for flood protection in minority areas. Sergio Flores for The New York Times
A Climate Plan in Texas Focuses on Minorities. Not Everyone Likes It.
From The New York Times: Christopher Flavelle
For years, money for flood protection in the Houston area went mostly to richer neighborhoods. A new approach prioritizes minority communities, and it’s stirring up resentments.
Pleasantville, a few square miles of bungalows and industrial sites stuck between Houston’s railways and freeways, resembles a shallow bowl — quick to flood, like much of the city. But like other neighborhoods with large Black and Hispanic populations and low property values, it never qualified for the pricey flood-control projects that protect wealthier parts of Houston.
Projects here “would be put on a list, and that’s where they would go to die,” said Bridgette Murray, who is president of the Pleasantville neighborhood association and whose house got five feet of water during Hurricane Harvey.
Faced with countless complaints like these, officials in Harris County, which manages flood control in and around Houston, threw out their old approach for spending billions of dollars on flood defenses after Harvey. Instead of prioritizing spending to protect the most valuable property, which benefited wealthier and whiter areas, they decided to instead prioritize disadvantaged neighborhoods that would have the hardest time recovering, including communities of color.
Source: Native Renewables, Instagram
Navajo Women Are Bringing Sustainable Solar Power to the Navajo Nation
From Global Citizen: Joe McCarthy
“The sun plays a significant role in our teachings as Navajo people."
With the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, the United States federal government tried to erase disparities in energy access between rural and urban areas. Suddenly, hard-to-reach communities were electrified, folded into the broader US economy.
But many Native American tribes were left out of this effort. On the Navajo Nation, that exclusion still reverberates today. More than 15,000 homes on the reservation lack electricity, accounting for 75% of the unelectrified homes in the US, according to the American Public Power Association.
“There are tribes that don’t have access to the grid because they weren’t in the planning process and weren’t considered,” Wahleah Johns, cofounder of Native Renewables, told Global Citizen. “That’s environmental racism: when planning is only for certain populations and not for First Nations and tribal nations.”
Small farmer Chaparitta (who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used because of her immigration status) tends her celery field in Salinas, Calif., on July 15. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Young farmers and farmers of color have been shut out of federal assistance during the pandemic
From The Washington Post: Laura Reiley
The federal government’s PPP and CFAP relief programs leave out beginning farmers even as the coronavirus decimates their primary sales outlets
Talk to young farmers and one verb comes up repeatedly. Pivot.
They have all had to pivot and then do it again as the coronavirus pandemic has decimated their customer bases and traditional supply chains.
Kate Edwards, 33, is entering her 10th year of farming in Solon, Iowa, north of Iowa City. She started with one acre and 11 customers for her community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm. Now, after retrofitting a 100-year-old farm to accommodate 30 varieties of vegetables, she has 250 customers and works 10 acres.
Farmworkers in Florida at risk in coronavirus hot spot
She says she has incurred at least $15,000 in additional expenses due to the pandemic, including laying a new $10,000 driveway to allow customers to drive up to her farm. She has spent an extra $1,000 for single-use paper bags, something in short supply these days. She has hired extra people to help pack bags: Where she used to spread her produce out buffet-style so customers could pick their own zucchinis and leafy greens, she now must box it all up for them to maintain social distancing. And she has had to rethink family finances after her husband lost his engineering job because of the economic downturn.
The pandemic has changed nearly everything about her business, and she says there has been little help from the federal government.
Climate Crisis
The New York Times Magazine, Meridith Kohut
The Great Climate Mitigation
From The New York Times Magazine: Abrahm Lustgarten
This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Read more about the data project that underlies the reporting.
Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope” until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.
Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region” a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys.” the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge.
Flood-affected people get on a boat to cross a stream in Jamalpur, Bangladesh, July 18, 2020. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain Photograph: Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters
A critical situation: Bangladesh in crisis as monsoon floods follow super-cyclone
From The Guardian: Kaamil Ahmed
Despite flood planning efforts hundreds have been killed and millions hit as third of land is submerged by non-stop rain
Bangladesh could be plunged into a humanitarian crisis as it undergoes the most prolonged monsoon flooding in decades while it is still recovering from the effects of super-cyclone Amphan.
Despite the UN has lauding its new initiatives for early intervention aimed at preparing communities for crisis, 550 people have been killed and 9.6 million affected by the disaster in Bangladesh, Nepal and north-eastern India, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.
Bangladesh’s ministry for natural disasters has estimated that a third of the country is already underwater, with heavy rains set to continue until the end of July. The UN has estimated that this flooding could be the most protracted since 1988.
Art History and Climate Change
Lower Grindelwald Glacier, with the Lütschine River and Mettenberg, 1774. Found in the Collection of Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Winterthur. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
The climate change clues hidden in art history
From The BBC: Diego Arguedas Ortiz
Art historians are exploring their collections through a climate lens, revealing overlooked connections between our past and present, writes Diego Arguedas Ortiz.
As the 1850s were drawing to a close, the artist Frederic Edwin Church was navigating off the Canadian coast of Newfoundland in preparation for his next painting. The search for the Northwest Passage had captured the public’s imagination for much of that decade and Church – America’s best-known landscape painter – was also lured. He chartered a schooner to approach the sea ice and spent weeks among the frozen blocks before returning to his studio in New York with about 100 sketches.
Church’s monumental painting The Icebergs was presented in an exhibition in New York in 1861, just 12 days after the start of the American Civil War. Its original and more politically-charged name (The North) reflected the time’s views on the Arctic and on ice itself.
It was sublime, untamable. The icebergs’ sharp features offered no resistance. A book published to coincide with the exhibition, by a friend who went North with Church hammered that point home: “After all, how feeble is man in the presence of these Arctic wonders.” Before the painting was exhibited in London two years later, the artist added a broken mast that dominated the centre of the scene, a reminder of humanity’s fragility.
