The All Brighter-Side Issue

Some mostly positive climate news for your midsummer reading pleasure.

Dear friends,

Last Monday was the hottest day on record in the last 1,000 years, and there is no shortage of very bad climate news. But we have hit the dog days of summer, and I declare it time for a short reprieve. I offer you The Window’s first annual all-brighter-side issue.

In sharing this list, I want to emphasis the last part of that word: brighter. This is no parade of simple solutions, and I hope you know better than to expect that from me at this point. Here goes.

Indochinese tigers (like the one above) are making a comeback in protected parts of Thailand. Photo by Josh More.

1.  It only makes sense to start this list with Kamala Harris’ quick ascent to the role of presumptive presidential nominee. Amidst last week’s wave of optimism, and copious comparisons to the early days of the Obama campaign, quite a few people took stock of Harris’s track record on climate. Here’s a brief overview:

While she was California’s attorney general, Harris sued the Obama Administration to prevent fracking for oil along the West Coast. Numerous pundits also believe that she has the potential to be tougher on Big Oil, as she spoke about the potential for investigating the industry through the Department of Justice while running for president in 2020.

Harris’s climate adviser, Ike Irby, told the New York Times that if elected she will continue the “focus on implementing the Inflation Reduction Act,” one of several pools of funding that has only just begun to be distributed. This is hugely important and a far cry from the MAGA’s Project 2025, which would slash funding for or simply do away with many federal programs and agencies, including the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service.

Do I feel optimism? Not quite. But the sense of foreboding I was feeling whenever I thought about November has been reduced by around 20 percent. So that’s something! And I wholeheartedly agree with Bill McKibben, who said, “[Harris] may be the last president able to truly help stem the tide [of the climate crisis].” And the Green New Deal Network—a coalition of about 20 groups including the Sunrise Movement, Greenpeace and the Climate Justice Alliance—agrees. According to Inside Climate News, the network has endorsed Kamala in a way they didn’t endorse Biden and they’re planning to help give her an edge with young, climate-aware voters in November.

2. Arizona’s Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and Southern Paiute Tribe are moving closer to accessing their water rights in a way that could bring running water to communities that have gone without it for years. The three tribes signed a landmark $5 billion agreement in mid-July, and now their members are waiting on Congressional approval alongside a handful of tribes that have all until now been historically denied access to surface water and the infrastructure that carries and stores it. The agreement would come at a time when the Colorado River’s storage system is at an estimated 41 percent due in part to the warming climate. In Navajo Nation, for instance, an estimated 25 percent of rural communities lack access to running water.

3. I enjoyed this interview with Roishetta Ozane, who is organizing communities in Louisiana to block construction of a liquid natural gas (LNG) export terminal. Ozane created a mutual aid organization to support people impacted by back-to-back hurricanes along the Gulf Coast in 2020 and has used her grassroots relationships to build a formidable movement in the region since then.

“I assist people with food, shelter, water, clothing, paying their utility bills, paying their rent,” she told Yale Environment 360. “But then they come to our community outreach meetings, they protest. [In late June] I was able to organize over 200 people from Texas and Louisiana to march with over 1,000 people down Wall Street to tell banks to stop funding environmental racism in our communities. I can’t talk to a person in my community about CP2 coming when they can’t feed their families, when they can’t pay their rent. We’re building community from the ground up, making sure that our community is strong enough to withstand whatever comes at it.”

4. Over in the UK, new Energy Secretary Ed Milibrand is calling for a “solar rooftop revolution.” This is one of several policies that experts expect to put the country back on a path toward net zero after former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak walked back multiple climate-focused targets and proposed the construction of new gas power plants.

5. A court in Ecuador ruled that industrial pollution has violated the rights of the Machángara River, which runs through the capital, Quito. Ecuador is one of a handful of nations that recognizes the Right of Nature — or the legal rights of ecosystems not to be degraded or polluted. Lawmakers in Quito appealed the verdict but the court ruled that even during the appeal process, the city still must move forward with a plan to clean up the river.

6. Electric ferries are showing up in several different parts of the world, and they may slowly start to replace diesel powered ones. There’s a new hydrogen fuel cell-powered ferry making its debut this year in San Francisco, an electric “flying ferry” in Stockholm, and another being planned to run to the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England beginning next year.

7.  Renderings of canals covered in solar panels have been going around the internet for a while, so it was exciting to hear that the Turlock Irrigation District in the California’s Central Valley is working with UC Merced on a pilot project that will cover two sections of canal. The first section, which is only 20-feet wide and 1,400 feet long, will be operable in November.  According to Daniel Rothberg from Western Water Notes, “The researchers estimated that reducing evaporation loss alone — if about 4,000 miles of canals in California were covered — could save about 63 billion gallons of water, enough for 2 million people or 50,000 acres of farmland.”

8.  The photo of frogs sitting in cement “saunas” was one of the most popular images in my online orbit this month. The research project it depicted looked at the effect of hot, sauna-like habitats for endangered Australian green and golden bell frogs and found that they helped their bodies fight off the deadly, rapidly spreading Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis fungus.

9.  I enjoyed reading about how city planners spent the last few years expanding the network of bike lanes in Paris in the lead up to the 2024 Olympic Games. The city built 34 miles of new bike paths in just two years, and the lanes will live on as an incentive for low-carbon transport long after the games are over.

10.  This roundtable discussion between Laura Thomas-Walters of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and three Yale Climate Connection editors made me feel like I was listening in on a conversation—in a good way! In it they discuss how talking about the weather has gone from a neutral topic to a potentially charged one in recent years and share their tactics for working their thoughts on climate into conversations with friends and family in subtle and organic ways. I could relate to this comment from Sarah Peach: “I find the easiest way to talk about it is to do something about climate change and then talk about it. Everybody in my life knows that I got a heat pump. And two other people already have gotten a heat pump because I was talking about it.”

11.  In 2022, when Senator Joe Manchin held up the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for weeks and ultimately managed to get Democrats to agree to sell multiple new oil and gas leases for development, one of the largest was a nearly-a-million-acre tract of offshore land in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. Then, last week, a federal judge ruled that the Interior Department had not adequately weighed the impact that drilling in the area would have on a critically endangered population of Beluga whales and reversed the sale of the leases.

12. A coal-fired power plant in Painesville, Ohio will soon be replaced by a solar farm. The land, which was once home to a chemical plant and is now considered a brown field will also be home to a bike path and wildflower meadow thanks to an $80 million grant from the federal government via the IRA. I’m heartened to hear about solar farms being built on brownfields; it makes much more sense to me than building them on land that is home to, say, Joshua trees and desert tortoises.

13. The population of Indochinese tigers in a series of protected areas in western Thailand has more than doubled over the past two decades. This is critical territory for these animals, which have been driven out of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam by poachers in recent years. The health of the tiger population is linked to the number of wild deer and cattle, and those animals have also rebounded due to restoration of their key grassland habitats and water sources. It’s heartening to see them make a comeback, as the populations of most of  the world’s remaining apex predators continue to shrink.

Do you have some brighter climate news to share? Please add to the list in the comments below! And I’ll be back to the regularly scheduled terrible news in a few weeks.

Take care,
Twilight