Weekly Ingest Newsletter: Seventeenth Edition
Each week I curate a newsletter for all my listeners that are 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 that may often get overlooked, forgotten about, or is unheard of to the community I serve.
Local Environmental News
Lead contamination around the Exide Technologies site in Muhlenberg Township at points runs well into dangerous levels by federal standards. However, those standards are lower now than when a cleanup plan was approved, and Berks County wants the cleanup to adhere to the newer rules. Ben Hasty — Reading Eagle
Bankruptcy court allows Exide to back away from polluted properties
Reading Eagle: Lisa Scheid
A Delaware bankruptcy court has approved a plan in which money to clean up Exide’s lead-polluted Berks County properties would be put in a trust fund.
The Environmental Response Trust would designate $10 million for "ongoing containment and safety efforts" at 16 of Exide’s former sites in Pennsylvania and nine other states. The Environmental Protection Agency, which agreed to the trust fund, said in an Oct. 14 filing it would not be enough for full cleanup.
What that means for the Berks County properties, including its facility at 3000 Montrose Ave. in Muhlenberg Township, is not clear.
The Steel Stacks can be seen in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 6, 2020. These were part of the old Bethlehem Steel factory and is now part of a large development site called Bethlehem Works. Photo: Hannah Yoon for The Intercept
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party Isn’t Ready For This Fight, but Its People Might
The Intercept: Akela Lacy, Ryan Grim
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, President Barack Obama’s political advisers had urged him to keep the federal rescue package to well under $1 trillion, lest the American people suffer from “sticker shock.” He did, and unemployment continued climbing throughout 2009 and a foreclosure crisis ripped through middle- and working-class neighborhoods. By the next winter, it was clear that a different type of suffering was underway and that the intervention had been woefully insufficient.
In December 2009, Obama was back before Congress, urging another round of stimulus. Days before, to beat the drums for more money for jobs, Obama headed for a city of maximal symbolism: Allentown, Pennsylvania.
As much or more than any other city, Allentown and the surrounding Lehigh Valley had become a cultural stand-in for America itself. The story of the small, eastern Pennsylvania town and its hard-working, resilient people was the story of America. The great Bethlehem Steel had helped build the country and win World War II. Mack Trucks, centered in Allentown, stood for the rugged, anonymous working man, who gave everything, asked for nothing in return, and quietly kept the country running. Alpo, an abbreviation for Allen Products, the pet food brand founded in Allentown in 1936, represented the nation’s bounding spirit, the promise that a hard day’s work would be rewarded with a home, a garage, a fenced-in yard for the family dog, and a better life for the children.
Climate Crisis and Grief
Image: Wolfgang Kaehler/Getty Images
Arctic Sea Ice Isn't Freezing In October for the First Time on Record
Vice: Becky Ferreira
The Laptev Sea in Siberia is normally an "ice factory," but hasn't frozen yet in October for the first time on record—a dire warning of the effects of climate change.
When autumn falls on the Laptev Sea, which borders the northwest coast of Siberia, sea ice typically starts to form in vast quantities that flow into the Arctic Ocean over the winter.
But this year, for the first time on record, the Laptev Sea’s seasonal ice pack has not started to freeze by late October, reports The Guardian. The delayed production of sea ice in such a critical region is yet another dire omen of the climate crisis, and its disproportionate disruption of the Arctic.
“It is quite unusual how slowly the ice is forming this winter in the Eurasian sector,” said Julienne Stroeve, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, in an email. “Looking at the sea surface temperatures we can see that ocean temperatures are still several degrees above freezing and also that means the near surface air temperatures are also elevated.”
Grist / CSA Images / Getty Images
New poll on climate change: Denial is out, alarm is in.
Grist: Joseph Winters
Americans are now nearly four times more likely to say they’re alarmed about the climate crisis than to be dismissive of it.
That’s the highest ratio ever since the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) first began gathering data on American attitudes about climate change back in 2008. According to survey data collected in April and released last Friday, more than a quarter of the U.S. adult population — 26 percent — now thinks global warming and its attendant consequences are alarming. That’s more than double the 11 percent who were alarmed back in 2015, and almost four times the 7 percent who currently say the climate isn’t changing.
The data comes from a YPCCC project called Global Warming’s Six Americas, which categorizes Americans into six groups based on what they think about climate change. Using data from a YPCCC survey called Climate Change in the American Mind, the researchers identify where respondents stand on a continuum of climate worry. People fall into the “alarmed” category if their survey responses show that they’re very worried about climate change — these people are fully convinced of global warming’s reality and of the need for far-reaching political and individual action to address it. Those who land in the “concerned” think climate change is bad news but are less likely to prioritize action, and those in the “cautious” category recognize that the Earth is warming but aren’t convinced of its causes or of the need to take any action.
“Disengaged” folks never got the memo that the climate is changing, while the “doubtful” suspect it’s not really happening. The “dismissive” category refers to your stubborn uncle who denies the science of human-caused climate change. He is against most climate policies.
The events of the next several millennia hinge on actions that will be taken by the time today’s toddlers reach adulthood. Photograph by Raphael Neal / Agence VU / Redux
Three Scenarios for the Future of Climate Change
The New Yorker: Elizabeth Kolbert
Like millions of other Americans, I first learned about climate change in the summer of 1988. For its day, it was a scorcher: Yellowstone National Park burst into flames; the Mississippi River ran so low that almost four thousand barges got backed up at Memphis; and, for the first time in its history, Harvard University shut down owing to heat. It was on an afternoon when the mercury in Washington, D.C., hit ninety-eight degrees that James Hansen, then the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Hansen went a step further: “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”
Hansen’s warning was certainly not the first. A report to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 noted that the effect of burning fossil fuels was likely to be “deleterious from the point of view of human beings.” Another report, prepared for the Department of Energy in 1979, predicted that even a relatively small increase in temperature could lead to the ultimate “disintegration” of the West Antarctic ice sheet, a process that would raise global sea levels by sixteen feet. A third report, also from 1979, found that, as carbon accumulated in the atmosphere, there was no doubt that the climate would change and “no reason to believe” that the change “will be negligible.” But, for some reason, when Hansen spoke up, on that sweltering afternoon in June, the story of climate change shifted. The Times ran its article at the top of page 1, under a three-column headline: “global warming has begun, expert tells senate.” The following year, Bill McKibben published “The End of Nature,” first as a New Yorker piece under the rubric “Reflections,” and then, in longer form, as a book.
Getty Images
Our young are terrified by climate change; Trump doesn't care
The Hill: Mike Hoffmann
I often ask people to describe how they feel about their future given the specter of climate change, using just one word. The words I hear are painful — “fearful,” “concerned,” “terrified,” “frightened,” “hopeless” and — the most painful — “black”, from a 20-something. The words I hear are not unusual — over half of U.S. teens feel afraid or angry. And I have also heard apathy — no one cares. Most of those I ask are college students with their life ahead. Ask someone younger for their one word. Start with your children or grandchildren. Their word may frighten you.
The evidence to justify their words is all around us. The inferno in the west, increasing extreme weather, the now unstoppable melting of the Greenland ice mass, and Antarctica melting six times faster than in 1990. And the lower half of the U.S. becoming far less suitable to live in and grow food over the next 50 years. The science is solid, the evidence is blatantly obvious unless you are blinded by an unwillingness to see — to accept the truth.
The Trump administration is utterly failing our young — our daughters, our sons, our grandchildren. Trump and his Republican allies don’t even recognize climate change as something critically important to their future. Shamefully, on Nov. 4 the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. And how does a young person react to the president of the United States saying “I don't think science knows” when challenged about his views of the cause of the fires in California? Not exactly words of hope for our youth.
Photograph by Balas Gardi
Earth’s New Gilded Era
The Atlantic: Van R. Newkik II
The world is getting hotter, and the divide between rich and poor is getting bigger.
Consider the cantaloupe. It’s a decent melon. If you, like me, are the sort who constantly mixes them up, cantaloupes are the orange ones, and honeydews are green. If you, like me, are old enough to remember vacations, you might have had them along with their cousin, watermelon, at a hotel’s breakfast buffet. Those spreads are not as bad as you remember, especially when it’s hot out; add a couple of cold bagels and a pat of unmelted butter and it’s a party.
Maybe you want the cool, refreshing mildness of a melon cup at home. Unless there’s a good fruit stand nearby and cantaloupe is in season, that means taking a trip to the grocery store. Maybe you’ll stroll down aisles kept just cool enough to make the skin on your arms prickle. You’ll browse refrigerated produce shelves doused in cold water every so often. Then you’ll find it: the perfect cantaloupe. It’s round and rough, with no dimples or spots. When you thump it, there’s a satisfying, muffled thud. It’s a sweet one.
Consider how the cantaloupe got there. It likely took a long ride to the supermarketor the hotel kitchen in a truck cooled to just above freezing. Maybe, like many melons, it was planted, picked, and packed on a plantation in the town of Choluteca, in southern Honduras, before it began its careful ballet of climate control.
Climate Policy
Source: The Guardian
75 ways Trump made America dirtier and the planet warmer
The Guardian: Alvin Chang, Emily Holden, Oliver Milman and Noa Yachot
"I want crystal clean water and air."
That's what Donald Trump said in the first chaotic presidential debate with Joe Biden. But there is scant evidence of that desire in the actions of his administration, which has spent nearly four years systematically dismantling core environmental protections, some of which stretch back decades.
Experts agree that the climate crisis's most destructive manifestations, on display in a particularly difficult year for the US, barely scratch the surface of the catastrophes to come. Yet the president appears unmoved by the enormous wildfires, devastating hurricanes, widespread water problems and persistent air pollution that disproportionately blights black and Latino communities. His administration has scrapped climate regulations, rolled back clean water rules and loosened pollution standards. Protections for public land and threatened species have been shrunk while new oil pipelines and coal mining have been encouraged.
The legacy of these changes will stretch well beyond Trump’s presidency. Here is a list of some of the key rollbacks of the Trump era.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga will soon pledge to reduce Japan's greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2050, as the European Union has already done. (Source photo by Uichiro Kasai)
Japan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2050
NikkeiAsia: Staff Writers
TOKYO -- The Japanese government will soon pledge to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2050, Nikkei has learned.
The new target, set to be unveiled in a speech to lawmakers next week by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, means Japan will finally catch up to the European Union, which set the same goal last year. Companies in industries like electric power, automobiles, and steel will be expected to take strict measures to meet the international promise.
The government plans to put together concrete measures such as promoting renewable energy when Suga on Monday is set to announce the net zero emission target in his first general policy address to the Diet, Japan's parliament, since taking office last month. Japan will reduce overall emissions to zero and realize a carbon-free society in 2050, he plans to say.
In 2050, the total amount of emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and the amount absorbed in forests and by other natural processes will be reduced to zero.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Next week, the US leaves the Paris Agreement. How do we get back in?
Grist: Shannon Osaka
When Americans wake up on November 4, they may not know who the next president of the United States will be — unless Democratic nominee Joe Biden or President Donald Trump wins in a landslide, the country could be in a state of uncertainty for weeks. But there’s at least one thing Americans can count on to happen next Wednesday: The U.S. will complete the years-long process, started by President Trump in 2017, to drop out of the Paris climate agreement.
There will be no ceremonial exit with the other 189 countries remaining in Paris waving a sorrowful goodbye to the American delegation. Still, that doesn’t mean the departure won’t be momentous. By next week, the United States will be virtually alone on the world stage, the only big country besides Iran and Turkey not signed on to the landmark agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s been heartbreaking,” said Andrew Light, a former senior climate official in the Obama Administration who helped negotiate U.S. involvement in the agreement.
If President Trump wins the election, he’ll almost certainly keep the U.S. out of the agreement for another four years, leaving approximately 15 percent of the planet’s emissions out of the purview of the climate pact.
US General Election
2020 Election Will Be Crucial in Determining Whether We Avoid a Climate Catastrophe
State of the Planet, Earth Institute | Columbia University: Renee Cho
The ability of humans to live safely and comfortably as we have for centuries is on the November ballot. We are already experiencing increased flooding; sea level rise as the ice caps continue to melt; slower and stronger hurricanes; more intense wildfires, including in the Amazon and the Arctic; drought and water scarcity; and the dying of coral reefs. The World Bank predicted these climate impacts could force 100 million more people into extreme poverty by 2030.
The next 10 years are critical because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that the planet could warm 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels by 2030. Overshooting 1.5˚C could precipitate disastrous climate impacts, potentially sending us over tipping points that would hasten more warming and send Earth into an irreversible “hothouse” state.
To avert this catastrophic future and keep the global temperature rise to 1.5˚C, we must cut CO2 emissions 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050. What happens in the next few years will determine our fate, which makes the outcome of the U.S.’s November 3 presidential election critically important.
Source: Getty Images
US election 2020: What the results will mean for climate change
BBC: Matt McGrath
Scientists studying climate change say that the re-election of Donald Trump could make it "impossible" to keep global temperatures in check.They're worried another four years of Trump would "lock in" the use of fossil fuels for decades to come - securing and enhancing the infrastructure for oil and gas production rather than phasing them out as environmentalists want.
Joe Biden's climate plan, the scientists argue, would give the world a fighting chance.
In addition to withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement - the international pact designed to avoid dangerous warming of the Earth - President Trump's team has worked hard to remove what they see as obstacles to efficient energy production.
Over the past three years, researchers at Columbia University in New York have tracked more than 160 significant rollbacks of environmental regulations. These cover everything from car fuel standards, to methane emissions, to light bulbs.
This bonfire of red tape has occurred at the same time that the US is reeling from several years' worth of severe wildfires in western states. Many scientists have linked these fires to climate change.
Grist / Amelia Bates
Make America Green Again
Grist: Staff Writers
How the U.S. could go from climate laggard to climate leader — in 8 simple steps
Imagine a green future for a hot second (no pun intended). The United States and the rest of the world have taken substantive action to slow (and even reverse) climate change. Crisis averted! You’re probably envisioning a lot of the following: snazzy yet affordable electric cars, smog-free city skylines, and an electrical grid powered by sweet, sweet, renewable energy.
Well, you likely don’t need the staff of Grist to tell you that the nation is nowhere near approaching that eco-friendly dreamscape.
In fact, the U.S. is currently on a path away from that green dream. Bigly. The Trump Administration is in the process of finalizing the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. (It will shortly become the only one in the world that contributes more than 2 percent of global emissions without being a member of the landmark climate pact). Emissions have been on the rise again after years of incremental dips — slowed this year only because of a deadly pandemic. And the nation’s most vulnerable communities are routinely forced to reckon with environmental contaminants, extreme weather, and industrial pollution.
Climate change could tip the scales in these 6 toss-up House races. The issue — and, frankly, the world — is hotter than in any previous election cycle.
If a couple of intrepid aliens dropped by to observe a Congressional hearing on climate change, knowing that humanity’s survival hinged on finding a solution to rising temperatures, they would hurry back to their home planet under the impression that Earth was doomed.
