Al Gore Inspo, Pension Funds, Carbon Removal Explainer, and More!

Hey climate heroes! Welcome to The Climate Roundup, where we round up the change, er the news about climate and the environment. As part of the Gen E community, we thank you for making climate action part of everyday life. (Reading this newsletter counts!)

Sign up for The Climate Roundup weekly newsletter here

In Pop Culture:

⚽️ “Playing For Our Future” is a docu-series premiering April 1st on TNT Sports and discovery+ in the UK that investigates how climate change is impacting the world of sport, from grassroots to elite competitions. Watch a trailer here, it looks pretty powerful.

Philanthropy At Work:

🌎 A very special and pivotal moment in my early climate journey was training to be a climate leader at a Climate Reality Project training back in 2018 with the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Al Gore. He’s doing several of these trainings this year, under the campaign name The Reality Tour, with the current one being in Paris. For me, the most special part of the training was the introduction presentation from Mr. Gore – it was a revelation, incredibly moving, and enduringly inspirational. Well, you are in luck. Climate Reality is opening up access to his Paris presentation for anyone to watch. If you have 2.5 hours to spare on potentially life-changing content, I recommend you give it a go (fyi you will have to create an account). I wish every human could watch his trademark talk, because I don’t know how anyone could come out of it NOT hyped up to save our planet from human-caused climate change NOW.

🌊 GreenWave announced a new three-year long partnership with Rodale Institute to study the impacts of kelp-based biostimulants on land farming. The findings could help with adoption of this climate-friendly solution to some of Big Ag’s problems. GreenWave helps ocean farmers earn a living growing kelp, while also growing the kelp market. Land farmers are a key growth area, because decades of using synthetic fertilizer has depleted soil health, and the runoff pollutes fresh water sources. Kelp biostimulants are a natural, sustainable way to improve microbial activity in the soil and boost crop resistance to drought – critical factors for farmers in a climate-changed world.

In Environmental News:

🧊 Global sea ice is at a record low, per NASA, which stands to reason as our planet has consistently logged record highs in global temperatures – hence the melting ice. NASA also reported that sea level rise happened faster than expected last year. Annual sea level rise has more than doubled since 1993, when satellite record-keeping began.

🎥 CBS Sunday Morning has a great 7 minute video segment that simplifies the arguments for and against the carbon removal/capture industry, specifically direct air capture. Direct air capture refers to technology that sucks CO2 out of the air. Our planet naturally does this through ‘carbon sinks’ that absorb CO2, like trees, soil, and oceans, but not nearly enough to remove the excess planet-warming gases that humans have pumped into our atmosphere over the last century. The first, second, and third priority is to stop human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Then we need to absorb all the excess. Watch the segment to gain a foundational understanding of carbon removal.

💪 Turns out that US pension funds may be the one bright spot (and by bright I do mean both positive and intelligent) in the investment landscape when it comes to investing in a future vs investing in the demise of that future. While many banks and large asset managers, like Blackrock, have recently dropped their climate commitments and are backing out of net zero alliances to appease dirty and dangerous market interests, it’s the long-term investors who are standing strong and honoring their fiduciary duty to manage long-term returns on their portfolios. They know that climate-risk is a non-negotiable factor in investment decisions, and they aren’t backing down from actions like divesting from fossil fuel investments. It’s refreshing to see.

👿 The latest scheme by the Environmental Pollution Agency is to help industrial facilities gain exemption from restrictions on emissions of toxic chemicals like mercury, arsenic, and coal ash. The EPA announced that companies should email the agency with a pre-populated template for ease, and say that the technology isn’t available for the companies to reduce their pollution, and that it’s in the interest of national security that they don’t have to. And then ‘the president will decide’ to exempt them from the Clean Air Act regulation in question. We can’t have ‘the cleanest air’ if we keep polluting it!

🚨 This Bloomberg Opinion piece outlines the first 52 days of the Trump-led massacre of climate action across our government. There have been 80 actions across 20 government bodies to repeal, kill, delete, and deny anything relating to climate change and the environment. If you can’t access the article, reply to this email and I’ll send you a gift link.

The Thin Blue Line

Al Gore says that if he could only use one slide in his keynote presentation on the climate crisis, it’d be this image. This is a photo of our home planet taken from space, with the sun rising over the horizon. The thin blue line is our atmosphere. It’s our life-giving layer of oxygen and other gases that separates us from the Universe. Without it, we couldn’t survive – no life could, which is why our planet is so special. However, as Al says, we’re using this life-giving, very thin layer as “an open sewer for our gaseous waste”, and it’s warming our planet to dangerous levels. Let’s not do that. Let’s protect it instead, as if our lives depended on it.