Weekly Ingest Newsletter: Sixteenth 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.
In the coming weeks, the newsletter will be getting a big facelift. We will be offering more diverse and original content as well as important information related to the podcast!!
Climate Change and Mental Health
Illustration: Guardian Design
'Hijacked by anxiety': how climate dread is hindering climate action
The Guardian: Jillian Ambrose
A growing school of psychologists believe the trauma of the climate crisis is a key barrier to change
You’re browsing in a supermarket and fretting mildly about the air miles of some green beans. Or you’re daydreaming of that island holiday you deserve once the pandemic has died down but worrying about whether you should be flying.
How about the amount of meat you eat and all that plastic it’s wrapped in? Maybe you should be vegan. Maybe you shouldn’t have children: they will only increase your carbon footprint. Maybe nothing you do will matter anyway.
They call it climate anxiety – a sense of dread, gloom and almost paralysing helplessness that is rising as we come to terms with the greatest existential challenge of our generation, or any generation.
Illustration: Kerry Hyndman
Nature got us through lockdown. Here's how it can get us through the next one
The Guardian: Michael McCarthy
The natural world thrived in this year of chaos - and its healing powers remain, if we know where to look
If there was one mitigating circumstance about the coronavirus pandemic that first hit Britain in January 2020 it was that the virus struck in the early part of the year, when the northern hemisphere was entering into springtime. The coronavirus spring that followed turned out, in fact, to be a remarkable event, not only because it unfolded against the background of the calamitous disease, but also because it was in Britain the loveliest spring in living memory. It had more hours of sunshine, by a very substantial margin, than any previous recorded spring; indeed, it was sunnier than any previously recorded British summer, except for three. It meant that life in the natural world flourished as never before, just as life in the human world was hitting the buffers.
Now, as we head into the pandemic’s autumn, and with it a second wave of infection and fresh curbs on our lives, there are lessons to be learned from looking back at our initial confinement in March, April and May, and in particular, at the springtime in which it occurred.
US General Election and Climate Change
Source Photos: Win McNamee/Getty Images
The 2020 presidential election will decide the fate of the climate
Fast Company: Adele Peters
As we approach planetary tipping points, it’s vital to understand the two candidates’ plans—or lack thereof (Trump doesn’t have one)—for combatting climate change.
Whether the world succeeds in avoiding the worst impacts of climate change is likely to hinge in part on the results of the upcoming U.S. election. Climate scientist Michael Mann has said that a second Trump term would be “game over” for the climate, making it virtually impossible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Biden, by contrast, is proposing the most ambitious climate policy of any major party nominee in U.S. history. Here’s a closer look at the differences.
Illustration by Señor Salme
How Trump damaged science — and why it could take decades to recover
Nature Journal: Jeff Tollefson
The US president’s actions have exacerbated the pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 people in the United States, rolled back environmental and public-health regulations and undermined science and scientific institutions. Some of the harm could be permanent.
“Trump’s assault on science started even before he took office. In his 2016 presidential campaign, he called global warming a hoax and vowed to pull the nation out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, signed by more than 190 countries. Less than five months after he moved into the White House, he announced he would fulfil that promise.
“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump said, arguing that the agreement imposed energy restrictions, cost jobs and hampered the economy in order to “win praise” from foreign leaders and global activists.
What Trump did not acknowledge is that the Paris agreement was in many ways designed by — and for — the United States. It is a voluntary pact that sought to build momentum by allowing countries to design their own commitments, and the only power it has comes in the form of transparency: laggards will be exposed. By pulling the United States out of the agreement and backtracking on climate commitments, Trump has also reduced pressure on other countries to act, says David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “Countries that needed to participate in the Paris process — because that was part of being a member in good standing of the global community — no longer feel that pressure.”
Climate change protesters disrupt Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden during a campaign event on October 9, 2019 in Manchester, New Hampshire. SCOTT EISEN/GETTY IMAGES
How to Win a Green New Deal Under Biden
In These Times: Nikayla Jefferson
With effective organizing and consistent pressure, young climate activists proved that Biden can be pushed to adopt more progressive policies.
If we have a President-elect Joe Biden on November 3, then consider November 4 Day Zero of the decade of the Green New Deal.
Under this more ideal scenario the real work continues, to demonstrate the power of our movement. We clog city streets, we take over political offices, we raise our voices from coast to coast until Biden hears us. We do not stop — not until Trump vacates the office, Biden takes his oath and we raise our country from the brink of collapse.
Biden did not start off the 2020 presidential race with a stellar climate plan. In fact, we stamped his plan with a red F in 2019. (Trump, were he rated, would have received a zero.) It is a testament to the power of the youth movement that, since the end of the primary season, Biden has released his climate plan as a Green New Deal in all but name. He is now calling for 100% clean electricity by 2035 — to create 10 million green jobs, mobilize the country and raise us back from the Covid-19 recession. Biden calls for energy-efficient infrastructure and vehicles, more solar and wind energy, and development of new climate technologies. His ambition is one of the most progressive climate plans of any Democratic nominee in party history.
The Climate Crisis
A climate scientist who has studied the Exxon Valdez oil spill earned the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Wyoming, a state that has a lot of coal. Photograph from National Park Service / NYT / Redux
What Have We Learned in Thirty Years of Covering Climate Change?
The New Yorker: Bill McKibben
About a year ago, the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, called to ask if I thought it might make sense to publish an anthology of the reporting on climate change that has appeared in the magazine’s pages. Since he works at a breakneck pace, that volume appears in print this week, under the title “The Fragile Earth.” It’s a wonderful book, demonstrating not only the depth of The New Yorker’s commitment to this planet but also the ever-growing sophistication with which writers have taken on this most important of topics. The dark splendor of Elizabeth Kolbert’s pieces alone is worth the thirty dollars.
The book opens with a piece of mine called “The End of Nature,” an excerpt from a book of the same title that appeared in 1989. It’s been a while since I read the words I wrote as a twenty-eight-year-old, and it made me nostalgic to climb back inside that young and perhaps overly earnest mind. The essay is a combination of reflection on the sadness of living in a world where the human imprint could be measured in every cubic metre of the atmosphere, and of straightforward reporting about what we then knew about climatic disruption. In the late nineteen-eighties, I could fit every scientific report on global warming on my desk. The articles and monographs published since then would fill an airplane hangar, but what’s amazing is how little has changed. Even then, we knew that the rivers of the West would be drying up, the oceans starting to rise dramatically, the ice at the top and bottom of the planet beginning a catastrophic melt.
Smoke rises from an illegally lit fire in the Amazon rainforest reserve, south of Novo Progresso in Pará State, Brazil. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty
Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study
The Guardian: Fiona Harvey
Much of the Amazon could be on the verge of losing its distinct nature and switching from a closed canopy rainforest to an open savannah with far fewer trees as a result of the climate crisis, researchers have warned.
Rainforests are highly sensitive to changes in rainfall and moisture levels, and fires and prolonged droughts can result in areas losing trees and shifting to a savannah-like mix of woodland and grassland. In the Amazon, such changes were known to be possible but thought to be many decades away.
New research shows that this tipping point could be much closer than previously thought. As much as 40% of the existing Amazon rainforest is now at a point where it could exist as a savannah instead of as rainforest, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.
Pollinators perceive the higher levels of UV-absorbing pigments as a darker hue, which could be confusing when they try to scope out colorful flowers to land on. (Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay under free for commercial use license)
Flowers Are Changing Color in Response to Climate Change
Smithsonian Magazine: Rasha Aridi
As temperatures and ozone levels rise, blossoms are adjusting their UV pigmentation
To adapt to climate change, some flowers are darkening their hue to protect themselves from the sun’s radiation, new research shows.
Around the globe, plant and animal species have tweaked their reproductive strategies, shifted their home ranges, and altered their appearance as they quickly adapt to the effects of climate change—and flowers are no exception.
A new study published in the journal Current Biology suggests that over the past 75 years, the ultraviolet (UV) pigments in flowers have increased in response to rising temperatures and a thinning ozone layer, reports Lucy Hicks for Science. Their analysis revealed that UV pigmentation went up by an average of 2 percent per year from 1941 to 2017. The flowers won’t look any different to humans, since we can’t see UV radiation, but pollinators perceive the higher levels of pigment as a darker hue, which could be confusing when they try to scope out colorful flowers to land on.
