When to grieve and when to fight?

Plus fossil fuel funding for universities, a global biodiversity summit, and climate resilience as a status symbol.

Dear friends,

Consistently immersing myself in climate news is a weighty endeavor. Some days I can turn on the part of my brain that processes the information in a analytical, dispassionate way. Other days I feel awash in grief.

Just last week, reading the news that plants, trees, and aquatic ecosystems have nearly stopped absorbing carbon dioxide in recent years left me feeling deflated and heavy, like there was a giant boulder in my chest and my one impossible job was to go on living with it lodged there.

Thinking about the Joshua trees that have been cut down with chainsaws and shredded to pieces to make way for the massive Arantina Solar Center in the Mojave Desert also makes me feel the boulder in my chest.

Actively grieving—allowing myself to name and experience grief as ebbs and flows, a kind of water cycle of its own—can dislodge the boulder for brief periods of time. But the question I keep coming back to is: How do people know when to grieve and when to fight?

To get back to the Joshua trees, people in the community of Boron California have held multiple protests and over 70,000 people have signed a petition to stop the development, but it appears to be moving forward. As many as 4,000 total trees could be removed, causing a ripple effect of impacts for lizards, tortoises, jack rabbits, and other desert wildlife that depends on the trees. (The photos of the landscape before and after the change are striking.)

As I mentioned in the last issue, the Bureau of Land Management recently published a draft plan that would open up 31 million acres in the West to solar development and we could see massive new arrays built in places like Great Basin National Park, the foothills of the Eastern Sierra, and the shores of the Great Salt Lake — as well as some lesser known places like The Amargosa River watershed in Nevada. And the communities in and near many of those places are resisting the plan. The opponents aren’t just concerned about plants and animals; they’re also thinking about humans.

In a recent op-ed in the Nevada Current, Mason Voehl of the environmental nonprofit Amargosa Conservancy, wrote:

The Amargosa River watershed is also home to over 40,000 people spread across the rural communities of Beatty, Amargosa Valley, Crystal, and Pahrump in Nevada, and Furnace Creek, Shoshone, Tecopa, and Charleston View in California. These communities have poverty rates 15-30% above the national average, and median household incomes 30-55% less than the national average. Living near the Nevada Test Site, where atomic weapons were tested, and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, they are the definition of environmental justice communities.

The nonprofit wildlife advocates Center for Biological Diversity is also pushing for an alternative plan that “would limit development to 8 million acres of already degraded public lands.” A number of other nonprofit groups and county officials from around the West plan to voice their opinion in the coming months. They’re planning to resist unnecessary, unimpeded development in endangered ecosystems for as long as possible.

But the Joshua trees are at risk of disappearing for other reasons too. As the climate in the surrounding desert grows warmer and more arid, they are also at risk of drying out and burning up in wildfires. The Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act, which passed last year, requires several key state departments to make a plan to conserve the trees by the end of this year. It will require developers to pay a fee when they remove the trees and the money will go to a conservation fund that could help keep the trees and other desert flora and fauna alive in special protected areas, with a focus on places that won’t get quite as hot.

The bottom line is that the Mojave and other desert ecosystems probably won’t last in their current form—no matter what. Those of us who have a soft spot in our hearts for the Joshua trees will have to grieve. And yet many—let’s be real, most—Americans work extremely hard to avoid grief. We tend to find fighting easier. Both are important. But we can’t, most of us, do both at once. And without proper grieving—and resting—the will to fight eventually gets snuffed out.

Grieving requires time and space—limited resources that can be difficult to devote to such a purpose. But hear me out: We are losing species of plants and animals at an unprecedented rate, and it will, it is already, impacting us emotionally, as well as practically. Trying to conjure what the losses really mean can feel like standing at the top of the Grand Canyon trying to understand what you’re seeing. It’s ultimately only somewhat possible. And yet, unprocessed grief can get stuck in us—and it can also keep us from fighting to prevent yet more loss.

Of course, working toward policies that take the needs of ecosystems into account is possible. And that work might prevent us from preemptively grieving what is still here.

A Valley Oak. Photo by Scott Hess.

Earlier this week, I caught a glimpse of a stand of ancient valley oak trees in a rare tract of the Central Valley that had not been converted to agriculture and the Indigenous land steward working the bordering land shared her grandmother’s memory of gathering acorns there as a child. The oaks are struggling to access water as ag interests in the valley have begun hoarding the rainfall in private basins—but they’re still alive. And I was reminded that resistance is closely tied to celebration. I felt a small but moving sense that I wanted to celebrate those oak trees and their survival instincts, their ability to endure increasingly warm summers.

So with that in mind, maybe the best recipe for approaching this moment in the climate crisis is this:

resist,
grieve,
celebrate,
repeat.

Climate news you might have missed

A last-ditch effort to reverse course on biodiversity—but will it be funded?

Global wildlife populations have dropped by an average of 73% in 50 years—and much of the habitat changes linked to those losses is deeply interwoven with both the drivers and impacts of climate change.

The UN biodiversity summit has drawn delegates from over 190 countries in Cali, Colombia this week and next to continue the work it began almost two years ago to reverse global biodiversity loss by 2030. At the gathering that took place in December 2022, world leaders adopted an official framework that would include placing 30% of the planet and 30% of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030. But in the intervening time they have put very little money toward carrying it out. World leaders agreed to invest $200 billion per year by 2030, with an emphasis on wealthy countries contributing more. They also adopted a new benefits agreement that would‚ in theory at least, reward Indigenous communities for stewarding the vast majority of the world’s biodiversity. However, participating countries have only committed about $250 million to the fund. This week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged countries to pony up with a "significant investment" or face increasingly dire consequences.

Jessica Lopez, a researcher recently based in Columbia, wrote this week about the way “sustainable development” in the form of cattle ranching has led to the deforestation of hundreds of thousands of acres of rain forest there. She pointed to the importance of “reforms to benefit small-scale farmers in the Amazon” and a plan that can disrupt the region’s current economic model, “which is centered on reshaping the land and extracting resources.”

Is it climate resilience or just wealth?

You may have seen the Fast Company story about Hunters Point, the Florida development that weathered Hurricane Milton because it had been built at a higher-than-average elevation and all the homes include rooftop solar arrays with battery systems to store the energy they generate. And while I realize the article is designed to highlight an important solution—solar + battery systems—it also made it clear just who the solution is for. The three-story homes featured in the photo that ran at the top of the story all have pools and they border on a tidy little body of water complete with a white boat. And even if it’s not technically a gated community, it might as well be one.  

The story about the development—and the number of times it has been shared in clean energy circles—gets at the very real class divide at the heart of today’s climate resilience conversation. Should all homes have both solar panels and battery storage that allow them to weather climate disasters? Absolutely. But what the story misses is how solar battery systems can, and do, also add to the collective good. Another recent story, from LAist, talks about how the more than 2,000 megawatts of distributed battery storage on homes, schools, businesses, and government buildings in California has helped the larger grid avoid power outages. And it generates about as much energy as two typical nuclear reactors. To me, that begs the question: Why shouldn’t more of our tax dollars be going to pay for solar batteries?

New data shines a light on fossil fuel funding at elite universities

It’s no secret that fossil fuel dollars are key to many elite university’s budgets, but the latest research is especially damning.

As Molly Taft over at Drilled wrote in a recent analysis of the research, “Elite universities have, for decades, accepted millions of dollars from some of the world’s biggest polluters. In turn, associations with these universities have served to burnish these companies’ public image, fund science that’s used as the basis for industry-friendly policy proposals, and—in some cases—advance their perspectives and goals in front of politicians and policymakers as the world increasingly turns away from their products.”

Schools like Princeton, MIT, and Columbia not only rely on millions of fossil fuel dollars, they also often structure institutes, centers, and special departments around those donations. For example, MIT ‘s Energy Initiative center was founded with $25 million from BP. 

And it’s a truth that speaks to the larger challenges involved in private education, and it calls into the question much of the research produced in these lauded institutions. As the researchers themselves wrote: “We find that universities are an established yet under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry, and that universities' lack of transparency about their partnerships with this industry poses a challenge to empirical research.” 

Carbon capture projects are supposed to be permanent. One of the first is already leaking

Earlier this fall, Politico’s E&E News reported on a carbon capture and storage (CCS) operation in Illinois that had been leaking since last spring. The facility—run by the agriculture giant Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) is designed to take the CO2 created in the ethanol fermentation process and store it deep underground. The company hid the leaks, and failed to mention them during the negotiations over the state’s first carbon capture and sequestration regulations.

But it’s not just the company’s dishonesty that’s concerning. As my colleague Nina Alkadi reported for Inside Climate News, leaks in CCS operations pose significant danger to groundwater, which it risks contaminating with heavy metals, as well as to the people living nearby.  When a CO2 pipeline ruptured in Mississippi in 2020, many people fell unconscious and 45 were hospitalized. ADM claims that because the leak took place so deep underground that it isn’t a safety concern. But it still seems like a serious concern given how fast the carbon capture and storage industry is poised to grow—and the fact that it is often sold as a companion to polluting industries.

“We are running experiments on communities with none of the protocols that would be in place if a university did it” Carolyn Raffensperger, executive director of the Science & Environmental Health Network told Elkadi. “But we’re letting corporations do it, and there’s no free, prior and informed consent on the part of the communities.”

The pushback

1. There’s a very active debate about the role of non-violent activism — the kind that forces people to stop and pay attention, and prevents business as usual from taking place. Does it really help the larger cause? A new study published this week in Nature suggests that it might. “Our results suggest that increased awareness of a radical group as a result of a highly publicized non-violent disruptive protest can increase identification with and support for more moderate climate groups in the span of only two weeks,” the researchers wrote.

2. Sonam Wangchuk, a high-profile Indian climate activist recently put an end to a 16-day hunger strike. He and a group of 150 activists embarked on an long, arduous march from the mountainous region of Kashmeer to Dehli. His goal is to bring more decision-making power to Ladakh, which is “one of the most ecologically fragile, and scarcely-resourced regions in the country” and which faces water shortages, decreased snow fall, and much warmer temperatures overall due to climate change. After the high-profile strike, Indian lawmakers agreed to negotiate with Wangchuk.

3. Protesters interrupted the Carbon Capture and Storage Association’s annual conference dinner in London earlier this month carrying a banner reading ‘Carbon capture is an oil industry lie.’ The group represents a handful of large oil companies.

4. Time included Ann and Billie Dumaliang, two forest protectors from the Philippines, in their recent roundup of Next Generation Leaders. And in an unusual move the magazine acknowledged just how dangerous Dumaliang’s work as rangers in the Masungi Georeserve—a 6,600-acre conservation site—truly is. International recognition, like the Time list, the sisters acknowledged, acts as a “huge source of social fencing for us.” In other words, it might just be keeping them alive.

5. Dr Rowan Williams, ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, has joined 250 faith leaders and experts in signing a petition opposing the controversial Rosebank oil field off the Scottish coast. Representatives from the Catholic Church and the Scottish Episcopal Church also signed the petition.

On the brighter side

1. In Paris, where city planners have done a lot to build out a robust bicycle infrastructure in recent years (an effort that was helped by the influx of capital for the recent Olympics), people now use bicycles more than cars.

2. The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule that will require coal-fired power plants to capture their carbon emissions or shut down.

3. New York has completed a $111 million project designed that added breakwaters, or sloped rock formations, to the Staten Island coast. The effort will calm water, reduce wave heights, prevent shoreline erosion, and create new habitat for aquatic life.

4. Australia has announced a plan to radically expand Heard Island and McDonald Island, an Antarctic marine reserve that is home to penguins, seals, whales and the country's only two active volcanos. The reserve will keep commercial fishing enterprises out of the waters, bringing the nation’s percentage of protected waters up to 52 percent.

5. Two weeks after Claudia Sheinbaum—a former climate scientist—took office as the President of Mexico, Alicia Bárcena, the country’s new environment secretary, detailed the nation’s renewed climate agenda for Time. The plan includes a “dramatic expansion” of renewable electricity generation and investments in a range of nature-based solutions. “We need to change the development paradigm,” said Bárcena. “And that means that we need to move away from extractivist policies and move towards an egalitarian society and sustainable one.” We can only hope that she means it.

6. Three of New York City’s public pensions representing $207 billion in assets announced that it would no longer make investments in private equity-backed “fossil fuel midstream and downstream companies and projects.”

The Visual

New analysis from World Resource Institute shows that one-quarter of the world’s crops are grown in places where the water supply is “highly stressed, highly unreliable or both.”

Take care,
Twilight