Heat Wave and Blackout Would Send Half of Phoenix to E.R., Study Says

New research warns that nearly 800,000 residents would need emergency medical care for heat stroke and other illnesses in an extended power failure. Other cities are also at risk.

If a multiday blackout in Phoenix coincided with a heat wave, nearly half the population would require emergency department care for heat stroke or other heat-related illnesses, a new study suggests.

While Phoenix was the most extreme example, the study warned that other cities are also at risk. Since 2015, the number of major blackouts nationwide has more than doubled. At the same time, climate change is helping make heat waves worse and increasing instances of extreme weather around the world.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, suggests that the risk to cities would be compounded if a hurricane, cyberattack or wind storm were to knock out power during a heat wave and deprive thousands of air-conditioning.

This summer, two-thirds of North America, including the Southwest, could experience shortfalls in the electrical grid, particularly during periods of extreme heat when demand for air-conditioning spikes, straining resources, according to an analysis released this month. Phoenix's mayor, Kate Gallego, has urged the federal government to add extreme heat to the list of disasters like floods and hurricanes that could prompt a federal disaster declaration... nyt

E.P.A. Announces Crackdown on Toxic Coal Ash From Landfills

"The Biden administration is moving to close a loophole that had exempted hundreds of inactive coal ash landfills from rules designed to prevent heavy metals like mercury and arsenic from seeping into groundwater, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday.

Coal ash, a byproduct from burning coal in power plants, contains lead, lithium and mercury. Those metals can pollute waterways and drinking water supplies and have been linked to health effects, including cancer, birth defects and developmental delays in children. They are also toxic to fish.

The proposed regulation, part of a settlement between the E.P.A. and environmental groups, would require those responsible for the coal ash to monitor groundwater supplies and clean up any contamination from the landfills.

Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said the rule would help to protect low-income communities of color, where the overwhelming number of old landfills are located."

(Full article link - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/climate/epa-coal-ash-landfills.html?auth=forgot-password&referring_pv_id=maAztSud9J138ausgVBrq3Pc )

How to Quit Cars

"… Progressive urban planners genuinely believed, in a period of panic about the death of cities, that their renewal depended on up-to-date infrastructure. The sensibilities that, in the nineteen-seventies, tore down beautiful old Shibe Park, in North Philadelphia, and moved the Phillies to the soulless Veterans Stadium considered the move an obvious improvement. That the electric trolleys being abandoned in Philadelphia were greener and more efficient was not an insight available to that time. We need not find cloaked and sinister reasons for our ancestors' bad decisions, when ignorance and shortsightedness—the kind we, too, suffer from, invisible to us—will do just fine..."

—Adam Gopnik

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/22/carmageddon-daniel-knowles-book-review-paved-paradise-henry-grabar

Effervescent moments

Meliorists believe there are ripe moments in time when our efforts become transformative. Conclusions are not foregone. Outcomes are not preset. Odell, Klein, and Solnit are meliorists.

"In the conclusion of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein writes honestly about her own fear regarding the future and motions toward kairos as it relates to action. She recognizes "upwellings" and "effervescent moment[ s]" in which "societies become consumed with the demand for transformational change." These moments often come as a surprise, even to longtime organizers—the surprise that "we are so much more than we have been told we are—that we long for more and in that longing have more company than we ever imagined." She adds that "no one knows when the next such effervescent moment will open."

I reread these words in 2020, in the weeks following George Floyd's murder, which were full of such upwellings. For me, this time was an unforgettable illustration of the relationship among kairos, action, and surprise. Time took on new topographies, and the author Herman Gray contrasted "the slow time of COVID and the hot time of the streets." In a July 2021 podcast, Birdsong suggested that the pandemic had invited some amount of culture shift simply by exposing how connected people were to those they'd never thought about, like farmworkers and nurses. It changed how the world and the people in it looked, and it was in this opening that Floyd's death and the uprisings occurred. She suggested that here, in this specific moment, "there was a greater sense of connection… from people who hadn't previously felt any connection to black people being murdered." It was a reminder of what Rebecca Solnit repeats several times in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster: "Beliefs matter."

In the midst of calls to "get back to normal," this book was written in kairos for kairos—for a vanishing window in which the time is ripe. In any moment, we can choose whom and what we perceive as existing in time, just as we can choose to believe that time is the site of unpredictability and potential rather than inevitability and helplessness. In that sense, changing how we think about time is more than a means for confronting personal despair in a catastrophic meantime. It can also be a call to action in a world whose current state can't be taken for granted any more than its actors can remain unnamed, exploited, or abandoned. I believe that a real meditation on the nature of time, unbound from its everyday capitalist incarnation, shows that neither our lives nor the life of the planet is a foregone conclusion. In that sense, the idea that we could "save" time—by recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature—could also mean that time saves us."

— Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell
https://a.co/bdz1gFN

Climate Optimism and Environmental Sustainability

Climate Optimism: Celebrating Systemic Change Around the World https://a.co/d/jiwwNNU

A Guide on Climate Optimism and Environmental Sustainability

Zahra Biabani, a climate activist focused on hope and action, wrote this book to help readers learn why we need to and how we can  stay optimistic in the face of the climate crisis. People are doing good things for our planet all over the world…. it's time we highlight it!

Change the way you think about the future. The fate of humanity can be daunting, but we don't need to live in that space. First, we need to change our attitude in order to implement nature based solutions that help mitigate climate change. Good news: there are numerous encouraging environmental trends that will change the way you think about how we can protect the planet.

Get to know Zahra Biabani, a climate activist, influencer, CEO, and writer. Zahra's content focuses on climate hope, optimism, humor, and doing good things. After unexpectedly establishing a career as an online sustainability educator and influencer her junior year at Vanderbilt University, Zahra decided to jump head first into the waters of entrepreneurship and authorship. Climate Optimism is her way to spread hope in the world.

Inside, you'll find:

• A comprehensive review of the most promising  climate solutions
• Practical advice to change the way you think and feel about climate change
• Two years worth of good news from the "Weekly Earth Wins" series
• Interviews with activists in the Global South working on projects that further environmental sustainability

If you're looking for a sustainable living book or books for activists centered on environmentalism like A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, The Intersectional Environmentalist, or Sustainable Badass, you'll love Climate Optimism. amazon

"Yellowbird Artscape"

Environmental philosopher David Wood's "retreat from civilization" in Woodbury TN, as he described it to me at the party last evening after Carol Gould's Lyceum lecture.

Peter Singer: The Simplest Way to Change the Planet’s Fate

MELBOURNE, Australia — The year of the first Earth Day, 1970, was the year I stopped eating meat. I didn't do it to save the Earth, but because I realized that there is no ethical justification for treating animals like machines for converting feed into meat, milk and eggs. It is wrong to ignore or discount the interests of sentient beings because they are not members of our species.

In the United States and beyond, giant agribusiness corporations continue raising animals in ways that disregard their welfare, never allowing pigs or chickens to walk outside, crowding hens who lay eggs into cages that prevent them from stretching their wings and breeding chickens to grow so fast that their immature leg bones struggle to bear their weight.

Boycotting this monstrous abuse of billions of animals each year is a powerful reason for not eating meat, but the outsize contribution of meat and dairy products to climate change is for me now an equally urgent part of shifting to a plant-based diet. But we need not be hard-line about avoiding all animal products. If everyone chose plant-based foods for just half their meals, we would have fewer animals suffering, and a tremendously better shot at avoiding the most dire consequences of climate change.

Meat and dairy production are major sources of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculates that releasing into the atmosphere a ton of methane will, over a century, raise the temperature of our planet by 28 times as much as releasing a ton of carbon dioxide. That would be bad enough, but the impact is even more lopsided in the shorter term: Because methane breaks down much more rapidly than carbon dioxide, over 20 years, that ton will warm the planet as much as 84 tons of carbon dioxide...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/opinion/earth-day-climate-change-meat-vegan.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Guest%20Essays

Why it's Not Too Late for Climate - and What to Do

Andy Revkin podcast:
Sustain What? is a series of conversations, seeking solutions where complexity and consequence collide on the sustainability frontier. This program contains audio highlights from hundreds of video webcasts hosted by Andy Revkin, founder of the Columbia Climate School's Initiative for Communication and Sustainability. Dale Willman is the associate director of the initiative. Revkin and Willman believe sustainability has no meaning on its own. The first step toward success is to ask: Sustain what? How? And for whom?

Gardening

"The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… Here is the Amen beyond the prayer."

Visionary artists and writers on the creative and spiritual rewards of gardening: https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/gardening-200

https://indieweb.social/@mariapopova/110189190892770917

Berry Center newsletter

Spring '23  

 Scientists discover hyper-intelligent, fast-growing mushroom that could have a major impact on our planet

Story by Jeremiah Budin • Yesterday 7:00 AM

Scientists discover hyper-intelligent, fast-growing mushroom that could have a major impact on our planet (msn.com)

In the hunt for compelling alternatives to plastic, researchers in Finland may have just found a winner — and it’s already growing all over the sides of trees.

The substance in question is a type of mushroom known as Fomes fomentarius. It grows on the rotting bark of trees and has historically been used mainly as a fire starter, lending it the nickname “tinder fungus.” (It has also been called “hoof fungus” because its shape resembles a hoof.)

However, a research team at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland thinks that it could be much more than that. 

“F. fomentarius fruiting bodies are ingeniously lightweight biological designs, simple in composition but efficient in performance,” the team’s study, published recently in Science Advances, said. “Growing the material using simple ingredients is an alternative solution to overcome the cost, time, mass production, and sustainability of how we make and consume materials in the future.”

In short, instead of mass-producing plastic at an enormous cost to our planet, in the future, we could simply grow a mushroom with similar structural integrity to plastic at scale.

 

The experience of poetic attention

The Art of Noticing – and Appreciating – Our Dizzying World

The poet Jane Hirshfield invites us to embrace the habits of a poetic mind — and observe the beauty that unfolds.

"Poetry is the attempt to understand fully what is real, what is present, what is imaginable, what is feelable, and how can I loosen the grip of what I already know to find some new, changed relationship," the poet Jane Hirshfield tells me. Through poetry, she says, "I know something new and I have been changed."

Hirshfield is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry and two illuminating essay collections about what poetry does to us and in the world: "Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry" and "Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World." Her book "Ledger" is one I gift to people most often. Hirshfield's true talent as a poet is her singular ability to imbue the ordinary, the invisible, the forgotten with a sense of majesty and wonder. Her work is littered with lines that force you to stop, to slow down, to notice what you might have missed or overlooked.

[You can listen to this episode of "The Ezra Klein Show" on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

Greta’s climate book reviewed by NPR

https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/109915945540794010

6 Podcasts to Help Tackle Your Climate Anxiety

These shows, full of passionate reporting, will leave you better informed and perhaps less prone to doom paralysis.

Feelings of despair about the climate crisis have become so commonplace that "eco-anxiety" is now an emerging field in psychology, and apocalyptic visions of the near future are reportedly prompting some couples to decide against starting families. Given the drumbeat of troubling climate news, it's easy to fall into a state of doom paralysis. But these six podcasts — full of smart, passionate reporting about the natural world and our relationship to it — will leave you more informed and perhaps better able to embrace climate optimism.

'Hot Take'

Hosted by the writer Mary Annaïse Heglar and the investigative journalist Amy Westervelt, this is one of the most accessible environmental news podcasts on offer. Even though the updates they're delivering are often bleak, the hosts' real-life friendship creates an intimate vibe that helps the bitter pills slip down easy (as does their self-proclaimed penchant for dad jokes). In each episode, Heglar and Westervelt discuss the latest climate headlines and provide irreverent, straight-talking insight into the crisis our planet faces, often joined by guests with expertise in areas like sustainable fashion, environmental legislation and the impact of climate change on Indigenous communities. The show wrapped up its run in December, but there's a back catalog of more than 70 episodes to delve into.

Starter episode: "Follow the Money, Eat the Rich"

'The Climate Question'

This BBC World Service podcast delivers in-depth climate discussions with a global perspective, exploring the hurdles that stand in the way of a more sustainable future. In each episode, the BBC journalists Kate Lamble and Neal Razzell are joined by a panel of guests, including reporters, lawyers, academics and activists; recent installments have tackled the uneven effects of global warming, the costs and benefits of meat substitutes, and how giving legal rights to rivers, forests and ecosystems may help to combat climate change. The show's scope is broad enough that even the most eco-savvy listeners are likely to learn something, yet the conversations never feel overwhelmingly dense or complex, with episodes reliably clocking in at under 30 minutes.

Starter episode: "Could Giving Nature Rights Help Fight Climate Change?"

'Drilled'

This rigorously reported investigative show, also hosted by Amy Westervelt, was originally billed as a limited series when it debuted in 2016, promising to tackle the causes of climate change through the lens of the biggest podcast genre of all — true crime. That first season focused on the origin story of climate denial in the 1980s, with Westervelt exploring how a disinformation campaign "turned America's individualism on itself and twisted it," and the integral role Exxon's efforts to mislead the public played in that. Subsequent seasons of "Drilled" have focused on big oil, fracking, and an Ecuadorean court battle involving Chevron, while a spinoff show, "Damaged," tracks climate lawsuits across the world. It's all enervating but essential listening.

Starter episode: "The Bell Labs of Energy"

'Outside/In'

Though it's not specifically about climate change, this New Hampshire Public Radio podcast is a valuable reminder of what's at stake when we talk about saving the planet. Hosted by Nate Hegyi, an environmental reporter, "Outside/In" is a fun, touching weekly tribute to the joys of the natural world, offering reflections on humans' relationship to wilderness alongside discussions of environmental news stories. It's a bright spot in any climate news diet, and sometimes presents deeper explorations of a specific subject, as in the five-part spinoff series "Windfall," about the birth of offshore wind in the U.S.

Starter episode: "Hot Dam! Climate News That Isn't Terrible"

'How to Save a Planet'

This upbeat and energizing series from Gimlet Media gathers a crew of self-proclaimed climate nerds to discuss environmental problems and solutions. Hosted by Alex Blumberg, whom podcast fans may know as the former co-host of NPR's "Planet Money," "How to Save a Planet" is packed with information and tips; each episode ends with a "call to action," offering listeners concrete ways to live more greenly. "How to Save a Planet" came to a premature end last fall, as part of a spate of cancellations by Gimlet's parent company, Spotify. In response to that news, listeners took to Twitter to share the ways in which they had taken action because of the podcast. These testimonials, compiled in a Twitter thread by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, one of the show's creators, are an inspiring read.

Starter episode: "What's Your 2022 Climate Resolution?"

'Outrage + Optimism'

It's tempting (and perhaps inevitable) to fall into despair when considering all the challenges, but "climate doomism" can prove counterproductive and foster inaction rather than solutions. As the title suggests, this podcast allows space for both, proposing that healthy outrage and a resilient sense of optimism are both essential to reshape the world. The show's promise to "help you realize that this is the most exciting time in history to be alive" might sound Pollyannaish, except that the hosts are anything but naïve — Christiana Figueres, a former head of the United Nations' climate agency, oversaw the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015 with Tom Rivett-Carnac, while Paul Dickinson founded the Carbon Disclosure Project, a nonprofit group focused on corporate transparency — and their focus on positivity is pragmatic. The trio discusses environmental issues and breaking news with guests who have included Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough, and each episode offers a sense of community to anyone grappling with eco-anxiety.

Starter episode: "The Breakthrough Effect"


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/arts/podcasts-climate-change.html?smid=em-share

Greta's Climate Book

I’m so pleased to share that The Climate Book is now available in the USA and Canada! I have gathered the wisdom of over one hundred contributors to highlight the many different crises we face and equip us with the knowledge we need to avoid a climate disaster. 1/2

https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/stat

us/1625575675888295955

The wisdom of birds

"Birds don't exist to teach us anything — they have their own purposes and their own complicated lives — but we are fools if we can't learn something important for our purposes, too, for our own complicated lives, in their dazzling, life-sustaining cooperation. How sensible it is for a fragile species, having no fangs and no claws, to share resources. How wise to turn to one another for help." Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/opinion/sandhill-cranes-migration.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
What We Can Learn From This Magnificent Migration

Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors by Grist | Goodreads

Hopeful and forward-looking climate fiction stories that explore how the power of storytelling can help create the world we need Afterglow is a stunning collection of original short stories in which writers from many different backgrounds envision a radically different climate future. Published in collaboration with Grist, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions, these stirring tales expand our ability to imagine a better world.

Afterglow draws inspiration from a range of cutting-edge literary movements including Afrofuturism, hopepunk, and solarpunk--genres that uplift equitable climate solutions and continued service to one's community, even in the face of despair. The Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, disabled, feminist, and queer voices in this collection imagine intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind. Whether through abundance or adaptation, reform, or a new understanding of survival, these stories offer flickers of hope, even joy, as they provide a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.

Afterglow welcomes a diverse range of new voices into the climate conversation to envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress. A creative work rooted in the realities of our present crisis, Afterglowpresents a new way to think about the climate emergency--one that blazes a path to a clean, green, and more just future.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60199853-after glow

Gas stoves

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CoSSyA8M-Sf/?igshid=NWQ4MGE5ZTk=

Groundhog Day

Well, it's Groundhog Day, again.*
"Only in America do we accept weather predictions from a rodent but deny #ClimateChange evidence from scientists."

https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109794108222453902

The Overstory comes to life in Atlanta

"…The battle over South River Forest is our national crisis in microcosm: environmental anxiety, racial tension and ethnic animosity, the growing gap between rich and poor, concern for public safety, suspicion of the police, the reckoning with our symbols of historical injustice. The issues are complex and do not lend themselves to easy answers…" -Richard Powers

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/atlanta-police-center-protests.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The Fierce Protests in Atlanta Are Eerily Familiar to Me