.jpg)
“It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.”---Agatha Christie
“Don’t look at me—I have a doctor’s appointment.”---Clark Kent
It’s murky business, this saving the world. Superman is getting old, Mighty Mouse is on oxygen and Bernie Sanders is looking for a condo on Fantasy Island. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill” is taking on water. Ragamuffins are storming the Capitol, nonecks are passing diseases around like party favors and brain-dead voters are electing presidents made of silly putty. The streets are full of imbeciles waving misspelled signs and demanding societal regression to the days when people lived in caves and ate dirt. Be careful what you wish for, bohunks.
We’re looking for a hero. “He’s gotta be sure, and it’s gotta be soon and he’s gotta be larger than life.” Could we see a show of hands, please? Somebody…anybody? We haven’t got all day. You see that guy over there? The one we used to laugh at, carrying “The End of the World Is Near!” sign? Well, nobody’s laughing any more.
Signs Of Life
The handwriting on the wall is readable in every language and many countries are taking heed. South Korea’s government has promised a $10 billion Green New Deal to invest in renewable energy and make public buildings energy efficient. Costa Rica has committed to completely eliminating their carbon footprint by 2050 and has created a new fee on gasoline to fund social-welfare programs. The government is also planning to issue green bonds to fund the next stage of climate adaptation programs. Rwanda, which has a GDP of roughly $9 billion, has adapted an $11 billion plan to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change, pushing for all buses, cars and motorcycles to go electric.
Nowhere will there be as large an impact as that of the European Union, which is the world’s second largest economy and third largest emitter. The EU intends to halve its emissions within 10 years by spending $100 billion annually to make homes energy-efficient, using $28 billion to build renewable energy capacity and up to $67 billion for zero-emission trains. The European investment will hurt coal-mining jobs in Poland and the Czech Republic but the European recovery program will pay billions to retrain the workers and transition them to other industries.
In China, which combines with the United States as the world’s largest climate criminal (the two countries are responsible for nearly half of global emissions), the government has endorsed a proposal to expedite a $1.4 trillion spending package on its so-called “new infrastructure,” That includes exploding numbers of new electric-vehicle charging stations, high-speed rail and 5G technology to help advance the country’s tech sector to stimulate economic growth with lower emissions. To speed China’s stodgy, slow-moving leaders along, the EU is crafting new taxes on imports from countries which are not reducing emissions. Europe is, of course, a critically important market for Chinese goods.
What the United States will do is anybody’s guess. For every two drivers pushing the accelerator for serious climate control, there is a Neanderthal slamming on the brakes. The U.S. has a brief interval during which the Democratic Party controls the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives. If not now, when? If not now, probably never.
Baby Steps
Cambridge University researchers have discovered that moth larvae can chew through plastic. a breakthrough revelation since plastic waste makes up about 40% of the world’s ocean surfaces. It also endangers marine life, including fish, sea birds, turtles, whales, dolphins and seals who are injured or killed after accidentally consuming or being trapped in plastic. The tiny caterpillars are equipped with bio-degrading powers that could be the key to helping reduce plastic waste and regenerate our oceans. And all they’re asking is minimum wage.
Of course there is bad plastic and good plastic. Why send the stuff to the landfills when you can pave new roads with it? That’s exactly what the UK-based company MacRebur is doing. Their renewable asphalt---a mix of industrial and consumer plastic waste---is already replacing oil-based sealing material that holds highway asphalt together. The newly improved asphalt is 60% stronger, much more durable and eco-friendly.
Oregon has become the eighth state to commit to 100% clean electricity. A new Beaver State law requires energy companies to provide 100% clean electricity to its customers by 2040, tying the state of New York for the fastest clean energy timeline in the country. A dozen more states are on the verge of joining the elite eight.
Electrify America will operate 10,000 charging stations across the country following a newly announced expansion. The organization is funded by Volkswagen as part of a legal settlement following revelations that the company misled consumers about its vehicles’ emission performance. Both Environment America and Public Interest Research Groups have worked for years to ensure that VW is held accountable for its emissions cheating and that the money from the settlement is used to further the public interest by reducing transportation emissions.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis has signed the Plastic Pollution Reduction Act, banning single-use plastic bags and foam in Colorado and removing restrictions on local municipalities. This change allows local leaders to enact even stricter policies to reduce plastic waste. In several states, including Florida, brain-dead governors have overruled local communities which sought to impose their own regulations.
Heroes
In the midst of a landscape devastated by erosion, Jadav Payeng decided to take action. The Indian man planted a tree every single day for 40 years and has now created a 1,360-acre forest bigger than Central Park. The place is home to hundreds of elephants, rhinos, boars, reptiles and birds, and Jadav isn’t quitting yet. “Nature is God,” he philosophizes, “It gives me inspiration. It gives me power. As long as it survives, I survive. I will continue planting trees until my last breath.”
Philanthropist/conservationist Hansjong Wyss is donating $1 billion to protect the Earth. In his article entitled “We Have to Save the Planet. So I’m Donating $1 Billion,” Wyss calls out the world’s wealthiest people to spread the message (and the wealth) to combat the environmental problems we’re facing.
Bachendi Pal, the first Indian woman to climb Mount Everest, recently organized a volunteer initiative which resulted in 55 tons of waste being removed from the Ganges River. A forty member team, including Premlata Agarwal—the first Indian woman to climb all seven major world summits---managed to clean this massive amount of trash in only one month. The supposedly sacred Ganjes stores tons of human and industrial waste, but not as much as it did a few weeks ago.
Addison Barrett of Maryland, a girl of 12 and recipient of the Gloria Barron Prize for young heroes, founded Gorilla Hero to raise awareness and funds to protect endangered mountain gorillas. She was able to garner more than $7000 for the Dian Fosse Gorilla Fund and the Ellen Fund by selling homemade cookies and lemonade and hosting her annual Gorilla Gala. And that was before she started putting pot in the cookies.
U. S. Cities Take Up The Gauntlet
In the face of the Repugnant Party’s bought-and-paid-for resistance to climate control measures, the United States lingers in the eco-abyss, fiddling while South Beach churns. Among other dilemmas, seawater is creeping into the streets of more and more coastal cities, tornadoes are stronger and more frequent and massive wildfires are torching the American West like never before. And those are just the problems we know about. With little federal help, U.S. states and cities have picked up the ball and headed downfield. Sometimes, they stumbled.
Over the past three decades, more than 600 local governments across the land have adopted their own climate action plans for setting greenhouse gas reduction targets. These pledges were in addition to the America’s off-again, on-again commitment to the 2015 Paris Agreement, an international treaty signed by nearly 200 nations to limit the impact of climate change. In many of these cities, it’s a mixed bag---two steps forward, one step back.
Austin, Texas has successfully decreased its building emissions by 20% despite a booming population, but experienced an increase in transportation emissions between 2010 and 2018. Phoenix, on the other hand, reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 0.5% between 2012 and 2018 despite a population increase of 12%. Palm Beach, California met one of its climate goals by reducing its 2020 emissions to 16% below 2010 levels. Even Indianapolis, often late to the party, established its inaugural sustainability plan in 2019, aiming to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050, assuming anybody is still there by then.
The Brookings Institution found that 45 of the 100 largest U.S. cities have adopted a serious climate pledge, but two-thirds have already fallen short of their targets and more than a dozen have no emissions tracking at all. The good news is that those 45 communities have made a small difference. Together, they will eliminate about 6% of the total annual U.S. emissions compared with 2017 levels, or about 365 million metric tons of carbon pollution, the equivalent of taking 79 million vehicles off the road.
The Brookings Institute maintains that top U.S. cities must reduce their annual emissions by 64% by 2050. If this doesn’t happen, heat, droughts and extreme rain events will increase with every additional increment of global warming. In Arizona, the number of days which reach a temperature of 110 or higher is expected to double by 2060. In Phoenix, there were 28 days in 2020 when the temperature never dropped below 90 degrees.
The climate crisis isn’t just coming, it’s here. With a politically deranged Washington, D.C. virtually immobilized, the climate fate of the nation lies increasingly on its states and cities. So far, many of them have taken baby steps to turn back the tide. The baby better grow up fast, however. So far, the tide is winning.
That could be all, folks….
