Month: July 2018

If you are a climate denier, polling shows you are likely to be old, poorly educated, and male. That checks out.

ThinkProgress:

A record number of Americans — nearly three quarters — understand there is “solid evidence” that global warming is happening, according to a new poll.

And a record number (60 percent) said they know “humans are either primarily (34 percent) or partially responsible (26 percent) for the warming,” according to the long-running National Surveys on Energy and the Environment (NSEE) by Muhlenberg College and University of Michigan, which interviewed 751 adults.

At the same time, however, the pollsters note, the “divide between Democrats and Republicans on the existence of [human-caused] global warming is also at record levels.”

The pollsters (and the media) make a great deal of this growing partisan divide, but that growth appears to be at least partly driven by a drop in the percentage of people self-identifying as Republican.

As Trump chases moderates out of the party, those left are more conservative, more extreme in their views, and more prone to climate science denial.

As a June analysis by Brookings pointed out, “Trump owns a shrinking Republican party.” The authors explain that GOP party identification “took a sharp drop at the end of George W. Bush’s second term and never really recovered. The trend seems to have taken another drop after Trump’s election.”

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of conservatives are waking up to the importance of renewable energy, climate change or no.

WCMU (Michigan) Radio:

An increasing number of organizations, including the Christian Coalition and Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, are shifting the conversation about alternative energy. Instead of presenting the issue as one tied to climate change, they are instead discussing it in terms of national security, families and communities. Continue reading “As GOP Repels the Young, Climate and Renewable Energy Awareness Grows”

Christian Science Monitor:

When Kimbal Musk and some fellow business associates hosted a conference on global food waste in 2011, seven people showed up.
So it was noteworthy when, in September, Mr. Musk, a community-focused restaurateur, shared that anecdote at Food Tank’s sold-out summit on food loss and waste in New York City.

“Now we have this extraordinary community that’s listening and working hard on this problem,” Musk told the audience and the more than 70,000 people watching via livestream.

He’s right. The “farm-to-fork” community has ballooned in recent years as the world begins to awaken to the magnitude of the food waste problem. It includes US and international government agencies, corporate producers, sustainability-focused food businesses, college start-ups, data-tracking organizations measuring progress on the issue, and households.

“We are definitely becoming more aware of the pitfalls in our general ‘culture of abundance’ and the tendency of our food system to overproduce,” says Melissa Goodall, associate director of Yale University’s office of sustainability in Connecticut. “That these programs exist and are thriving is an indication that awareness about food waste is rising.”

Annually, the world loses or wastes one-third of all food produced – $3 trillion worth, according to the United Nations. If such waste were a nation, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China and the United States.

 

Al Jazeera:

If you have ever thrown out food because it’s started to spoil, or left food on your plate uneaten because you were too full or didn’t like the taste of it, then you – like many others, myself included – have been guilty of food waste.

Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world is lost or wasted before it ends up on the table.

Food loss is food that’s spoilt before it reaches the retail stage. Food waste is food that’s fit for consumption but not consumed and discarded.

In a world where one out of nine people goes hungry, reducing the amount of food waste can be said to be a moral imperative.

And when you factor in the greenhouse gases emitted by food that ends up in the landfill, then it becomes an issue of sustainability as well.

Continue reading “Food Waste is Huge Carbon Source”

A song well ahead of its time? I think so.

Dynamite contemporary cover below.

Continue reading “Music Break: Nat King Cole – Nature Boy”

I’m creating a series of short videos on renewable energy’s inroads in the American Heartland.

These are based on my interview with University of Michigan researcher Sara Mills – who has studied impacts of wind energy in Michigan’s rural counties and villages.

 

More below. Continue reading “How Wind Turbines Bolster Rural America”

CBC:

All was quiet on June 22 as Canadian husband-and-wife scientists David and Denise Holland settled in for the night off Greenland’s Helheim Glacier.

The glacier researchers from New York University had spent four nights on the south side of Helheim but had just set up camp on the north side. Denise had positioned her video camera — just in case — when she heard a noise that seemed to carry on “for an extended period of time.”

That noise was a major breakup of the glacier that lasted more than 30 minutes.

Massive pieces of ice half a kilometre high broke off. The water roiled as the new icebergs rolled and crashed. Then the larger chunk of ice, estimated to be roughly half the size of New York’s Manhattan Island, began its journey to the sea.

In the end, a piece of ice almost seven kilometres long and one kilometre thick broke off. Five to eight billion tons of ice was lost. It is one of the biggest glacier calving events captured on video.

“It’s a very loud booming sound that echoes across the fjord from one side to the other as different pieces of ice start to break off. It’s just this incredible loud sound,” says Denise Holland, logistics coordinator for NYU’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and NYU Abu Dhabi’s Center for Global Sea Level Change.

“It’s like a billion ice cubes at once,” David Holland says. “It’s that kind of cracking sound.”

It’s events like this — considered a significant glacier loss — that deeply concern glaciologists and climatologists about the consequences to global sea levels. This video may assist scientists in making predictions.

USAToday:

JACKSON, Miss. – The FBI is once again investigating the grisly murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy whose abduction lit a fire under the civil rights movement in 1955. And even after 63 years, the news couldn’t come soon enough for Emmett’s relatives.

“We want the process to work, and we want justice to prevail for Emmett,” Deborah Watts, Emmett’s cousin, told USA TODAY. “This cannot just be forgotten.”

Till, who was black, was abducted Aug. 28, 1955, three days after Carolyn Donham, a white 21-year-old shopkeeper in the town of Money, said the 14-year-old grabbed and wolf-whistled at her.

The battered body of Till, nicknamed “Bobo,” was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River. The viciousness of the killing rocked the nation, and the woman’s then-husband and another man were charged with murder. Both were acquitted by an all-white jury that year.

The Justice Department said in a statement Thursday that it was reopening the investigation “after receiving new information” it did not detail. The decision was revealed to Congress in a February report and was first reported by the Associated Press.

_

Four months after the widely publicized trial, Look magazine published an account of the killing  it said it obtained from Donham’s then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his brother, J.W. Milam. In the article, the men admit beating Till and tossing him in the river, weighed down with a 74-pound cotton gin fan.

Milam told the magazine the men wanted to beat and scare Till, not kill him. But when he could not be frightened, they decided to kill him, Milam said.

“What else could we do?” Milam told the magazine.  “… He’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him.”

Below, Till’s Mother insisted that his funeral be open casket, to bear testimony to the brutality of his murder. Continue reading “Music Break: Bob Dylan – The Death of Emmett Til”

Baltimore Sun:

Research connects flooding and sea level rises to a warming climate. What we need now is action — policies to strengthen climate adaptation plans, making communities more resilient in the face of natural disasters; and policies that enhance climate mitigation, decrease our greenhouse gas emissions and keep our planet’s temperature under check. Such policies will require an enormous shift of attention and funding, transferring the $20.5 billion in subsidies that the American government gives to outdated fossil fuel infrastructure to clean, renewable energy and to adaptation mechanisms like raised housing or living shorelines. Imagine: What if the billions of dollars that our government currently pays to polluters to pollute were redirected to industries that reduce carbon footprints and put people first?

That is why we and thousands of other youth from around the country will be marching for climate justice in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, July 21, with Zero Hour, a completely youth-led movement. In addition to the march, the day will include speeches from young climate leaders and a showcase of artwork made by students from around the world. We will also be hosting a lobby day on Capitol Hill on July 19 in partnership with the march to campaign for feasible policy solutions to the climate crisis. To protect Baltimore County, Ellicott City and the dozens of other Maryland localities recently affected by the flooding, we need this second flood. We need a flood of people marching for climate policy, and we need a flood of policies that address the effects of climate change in an equitable and effective manner. Our government needs to shift the narrative by putting our dollars where they are needed.

Kallan Benson is a high school freshman from the Annapolis area. Claire Wayner is a recent high school graduate from Baltimore. They are spending their summer working with Zero Hour (Twitter: @ThisIsZeroHour), a youth-led climate justice organization leading a march in D.C. on Saturday, July 21. To join a bus from Baltimore, visit tinyurl.com/bmorezerohour. To learn more about the Zero Hour movement, visit thisiszerohour.org .)

 

Rolling Stone:

Generation Z – millennials’ younger brothers and sisters – are increasingly finding their voices in the Trump era, expanding media-savvy campaigns for racial equality and gun control to encompass climate change. A group of high school students are now planning a nationwide series of climate marches on July 21st, when they will confront lawmakers in Washington, D.C. with a list of their demands for a livable climate.

“I’d say I do about three hours of conference calls every single day,” says Jamie Margolin, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Seattle who is the lead organizer of the march. “I’m not new to the climate activism world.”

Continue reading “Zero Hour: Youth Climate March Coming to DC July 21”

Above, after months of running NASA, former climate denier Jim Bridenstine, to his credit, “got it” about climate science.

Says he did some reading and study. Huh.

Me too.

Earther:

Most of us (understandably) associate NASA with rockets and space exploration, but the space agency also keeps an eye on our home planet. And it turns out the public is more supportive of NASA’s efforts to monitor Earth’s ever-warming climate than you might expect.

A new Pew survey released on Wednesday looked at how Americans view their beloved space agency six decades after its founding. The main takeaways are about what you’d expect: Most Americans think the U.S. should keep leading the world in space exploration, and most view the International Space Station (which the Trump administration is interested in turning over to the private sector) as a good investment.

But when asked to rate the importance of nine key space agency priorities, the survey gets more interesting. Sixty three percent of the 2,500 Americans polled said monitoring the Earth’s climate system should be a top priority for NASA, which gives this mission…drumroll…higher public priority than any other. In comparison, a scant 13 percent of Americans think going back to the Moon (a much-touted goal of the Trump administration) should be NASA’s top priority, and just 18 percent said getting boots on Mars (a key Obama-era aspiration) ought to be.

Climate monitoring even beat out monitoring dangerous asteroids as a top priority, albeit by a single percentage point. That’s right: NASA’s work on the notoriously hard-to-care-about subject of climate science is on par with asteroids in the public eye, despite the seemingly endless torrent of viral content broadcasting our impending doom from outer space

Partisan politics do play a role here. Only 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said monitoring Earth’s climate system should be NASA’s top priority (which ain’t nothing) compared with 78 percent of Democrats. This is no surprise: There’s a longstanding and deeply partisan divide on climate, and it shapes our thinking on just about everything related to it (well, except maybe clean energy).

Still, in an era where spewing climate denial is basically toeing party line for Republicans, the findings should offer some hope.

Continue reading “Poll Reaffirms support for NASA’s Mission: Study Climate. Meanwhile, Former Denier Comes around..”

More from the remarkable series of interviews I conducted in Traverse City, MI a few weeks ago, at a the Michigan Clean Energy Conference & Expo.

Remarkable because of the things I was hearing from Michigan’s major utilities, about a commitment to efficiency and renewable energy in coming decades. This is language that we were not hearing just a few years ago. It’s not because these companies have become any less conservative in their culture – it’s because the energy landscape has changed so rapidly that no company can fail to respond – and still expect to survive.

Dave Harwood, Director of Renewable Energy for DTE, cited the findings of climate science as the main reason for sharp reductions planned in fossil fuel use – in addition to greater efficiency efforts, and increasingly ambitious plans for wind and solar energy.

There’s more work to do, neither DTE, or Consumer’s Energy, Michigan’s other large utility, are where I believe they will be 5 or 10 years from now – but the accelerating pace of change is breathtaking.