Wash Me

Good news, bad news, and a poem.

Dear friends,
This week I wrote a poem. Feel free to scroll down to the news if poems are not your thing.

Wash Me

My kid’s friend, over for the afternoon,
writes “wash me” in the dust
on the car’s back windshield.

In Canada, fires burn underground
through the winter and resurface
when the snow melts.

And the Atlantic Ocean
may soon lose its way.

We still raise our children
like they’ll have the same choices we did.

But at some point, I keep thinking,
there will just be much less to burn.
And we might feel relieved.

We medicate in creative ways.
Forget and remember and forget
what it means to know a place.

And we are still expected
to wash our cars.

So, we do. Even in years
when the rivers dry up
and acres of trees give up the ghost.

And in truth the washing is like a small baptism
every time. Or a low-stakes chance to start again.

But what if we don’t need to be so clean
and orderly to belong?

What if we already belong
to the mist that rises around us
when we remember to wake at dawn.

To the stones
that rumble over one another
when the waves crash in.

What if we could wash
ourselves of these manias?
If it were not too late to learn?

Climate news you might have missed

Will 2024 be a climate election after all?

Inflation and the high cost of living are by far the biggest priorities for today’s voters aged 18–34. But they’re also increasingly ranking climate among their top-five election issues, according to a new poll conducted by the Environmental Voter Project in five swing states—Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Of the young voters polled, 78 percent named climate as “a motivation to vote.” Meanwhile, 92 percent of young Democrats polled said it was important that candidates prioritize climate, as did 70 percent of Independents and 67 percent of Republicans. And 40 percent of the respondents said they will only vote for a candidate who prioritizes climate action.

These numbers might help explain why Kamala Harris is hard at work this summer trying to translate the Biden administration’s climate efforts to the widest audience possible.

A still from an NBC segment on the Environmental Voter Project.

The Lego conundrum

A few months ago, I accompanied my nephews to a Lego resale store that boggled my mind. In addition to giant tubs of the colorful blocks available by the pint, the store offered shelf upon shelf of pre-loved Lego people known as “minifigures” for $5–10 each. I thought about this ingenius business model recently as I read a thread from Ed Conway, author of the book Material World, about the carbon footprint of the little bricks.

As Conway points out, Legos are made with Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS), and every block is made from 2kg of crude oil. A few years back, the company tried to replace the bricks with plastic made from recycled plastic bottles. “Virgin RPET was far too soft, so it needed additives and to be highly processed. The upshot was its carbon footprint was actually HIGHER than those old oil-based ABS bricks,” writes Conway.

Conway goes on to talk about how difficult it will be to replace many of the petroleum-based products around which we’ve built our modern lives, saying that doing so will “make for an extraordinary industrial challenge the likes of which we haven't had for centuries.”

In the meantime, reuse is an important option to consider. My kid inherited a huge bag of well-loved Legos from a neighbor who had just aged out of them, and they spent a good five years building things—without instructions or limitations.

When is greenwashing illegal?

A new bill proposed in Pennsylvania would “prohibit corporations from using deceitful and manipulative practices,” including references to terms like “net zero,” “low carbon,” and “cleaner energy,” as a means of “intentionally market[ing] their products in a manner that makes them appear to be better for the planet than they really are.” The bill is in line with a newly expanded law prohibiting greenwashing in Canada, as well as others that may follow soon in the EU.

According to the ExxonKnews newsletter, the Pennsylvania law could allow state officials to fine companies for “‘paltering’ (telling selective truths to give an overall false impression), ‘net zero’ emissions claims, or ‘reputational advertising’ (selling a brand, not a specific product) that give an overall deceptive impression of its products.” I’ll keep you posted on this bill as it moves forward.

Can a carbon removal advocate act as an impartial third party on the science?

Big tech companies—the same companies that have sailed right past their net-zero goals by pouring billions into AI and the data centers that power it—want badly to invest in carbon credits that promise to “cancel out” their own emissions. And they have their eyes on the wide range of carbon removal projects that are currently being planned and built all over the country. In fact, companies like Alphabet, Meta and Stripe have already pledged to buy carbon removal credits.

As billions in tax dollars and private investment pour into the carbon removal industry, however, just what it means to “remove carbon” from the atmosphere is being hotly debated. For instance, if carbon-removal technology helps polluting industries grow while subtracting just a portion of their emissions, does it really count as carbon removal?

Now, Anu Khan, former head of science and innovation at the group Carbon180, has launched the Carbon Renewal Standards Initiative (CRSI), a nonprofit designed to help governments and NGOs craft set regulatory standards for the practice.

The group is promising to focus on “rigorous quantification,” but Carbon180 is a nonprofit that was designed specifically to build the carbon removal industry, so it’s a little like someone from inside the industry raising their hand and offering to help governments greenlight more projects. At least that’s how it looks from where I’m standing. And CRSI has made a point to say it “will not benefit financially from the sale of carbon credits or growth in the carbon industry”—but their first major backer is Bill Gates’ climate investment firm Breakthrough Energy, which is also financially backing multiple carbon removal schemes, so their claim to impartiality seems a little shaky.

Of course, as the industry continues to balloon rapidly, there is clearly value in adding a third party voice to the equation. I’m just not sure if this effort is truly that.

The push back

1.  AJR, a pop band made up of three brothers, has been on tour this summer, and they’ve also used that time to mobilize their fans to take a series of local climate actions—from stopping diversions from the Great Salt Lake in Utah to creating clean jobs in Chicago to asking lawmakers in Phoenix to recognize extreme heat as a climate emergency. AJR bandmember Adam Met (the oldest brother) also directs the nonprofit Planet Reimagined, which released a report designed to get other pop stars thinking about their potential to mobilize the masses to respond to the climate crisis, which reads: “Every year in the U.S. over 250 million people attend concerts, providing a rare opportunity to bring communities together and remind them of their collective ability to produce change.” Planet Reimagined also surveyed showgoers and found that 72% said climate change is an important issue, and 78% are already taking some form of climate action.

2.  Protesters participating in the Summer of Heat campaign keep blocking the entrance to Citibank in a dogged effort to get the company to stop funding fossil fuels, invest in clean energy and pay into the UNFCCC’s Loss and Damage Fund. This week marked the 21st time they’ve returned to the Manhattan-based headquarters. Sometimes they wear suits and look like bankers. Sometimes they wear attention-getting costumes. And sometimes they get punched by security guards. But they nearly always get arrested.

Biologist Sandra Steinberger was scheduled to speak while organizer John Mark Rozendaal defied a restraining order and played the opening notes of Bach’s “Suites for Cello” outside of Citibank’s headquarters. That didn’t happen because just minutes into the song, they were both arrested along with a dozen other people. Steinberger went on to publish the speech online, however. Here’s an excerpt: 

I would have liked nothing better than to spend my life studying trees. But the acceleration of the climate crisis is now torching forests around the world. And drowning them with saltwater. And ravaging them with emergent diseases. And driving their pollinators into extinction. And otherwise stressing them to the point where they can no longer remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the air around them.

So, that’s why I became a civil disobedient with the Summer of Heat campaign. My responsibility as a plant biologist in this moment in human history is to do more than just teach photosynthesis and praise trees. All the oxygen we breathe is provided to us by plants, and they are in trouble. And governments aren’t acting. And banks like Citi keep on financing new fossil fuel projects that are ravaging ecosystems.

3.  Despite a 2021 court ruling that ordered the elimination of methane-emitting gas flaring in oil-production regions of the Amazon, the Ecuadorian state continues to allow the practice. Last week, Amnesty International profiled the Guerreras por la Amazonia, nine young women defending the Amazon from the gas flares. The young women are still taking to the street to affect change, despite the tall odds of government corruption.

4.  Wired published a long profile of 26-year-old Léna Lazare, one of the leading members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth Uprisings), a French organization described as “the most extreme of a new wave of radical European climate groups formed in the past five years.” In it, Lazare, a “soft-spoken” former physics student who has led efforts to sabotage water-holding tanks in French agricultural regions, is portrayed as heralding in a new era for climate activism—and one that is unlikely to go away any time soon. The piece reads:

If Greta Thunberg was emblematic of an earlier stage of the global climate movement, Léna Lazare signals what comes next. Today’s activists are wrestling with deep disappointment that 2019’s mass climate demonstrations didn’t portend big changes, and a certainty that they are running out of time to prevent climate catastrophe. A combination of urgency and despair is pushing them to actions previously seized by only the most radical fringe of the environmental movement.

And yet, unlike with Thunberg, Wired chose to treat Lazare and Les Soulèvements de la Terre a little like fashionable rock stars—a fact that might indicate a sea change in itself.

On the brighter side

1.  The Interior Department has granted almost $7 million for Indian Youth Service Corps Projects. The projects, listed here, involve restoring critical habitat, forests, trails and irrigation systems (acequias), as well as planting native species and caring for land that’s in dire need of investment and stewardship. The Department of the Interior also recently invested $20 million in a series of projects in Hawaii geared toward climate resilience.

2.  For the first time in almost 50 years, an endangered ocelot was spotted (see what I did there?) in the Atascosa Mountains just five miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border.

3.   Three years after a wildfire burned 97 percent of California's Big Basin Redwoods State Park, several parts of the forest have made a ‘remarkable’ comeback.

4.  Solar and wind often account for a higher percentage of U.S. energy usage in the first part of the year, but coal typically surges in the summer. Not this year, reports Politico. Instead, wind and solar are on track to outpace coal for the first time this year.

5.   Thirty years ago, Copenhagen’s main harbor was polluted with industrial waste and sewage. Since then, the city has modernized its sewage system and invested in cleaning the water, making it a great place to swim, according to the Outdoor Swimming Society website.

The Visuals

Photo on the left from Trail Cam.
Photo on the right from Reel Deer Whisperer.

Take care out there,

Twilight