CA Fights Plastic, NPR Cuts Climate, Ocean Data Drowning, & Swimmable Cities

Welcome to The Climate Roundup newsletter. Your weekly edit of the climate and environmental stories shaping our planet and our culture and how the two are deeply connected. We live in a global ecosystem shaped by human decisions. Let’s make good ones.

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In Pop Culture:

🎾 The heatwave that scorched the French Open at the end of May “would have been virtually impossible in the preindustrial era”, said a climate scientist referring to the time before humans began continually dumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. The French Open organizers have never yet had to cancel a match due to heat, since the tournament has historically taken place outside the window of extreme heat risk, but that’s not the case in our increasingly hotter world. The idea of exerting lots of energy to play a sport in direct sunlight on a clay surface sounds like hell. Some players were impacted by heat stress and illness and fans suffered.

🏊‍♀️ One of my dreams for NYC is for all the surrounding waterways to be clean and swimmable with a variety of access points to wade in and jump into (and I’m not talking about the floating swimming pool being planned for Manhattan’s East River). Open, accessible waters, just like in Copenhagen. I’m not alone in wanting this. It’s already happening in Chicago, Portland, and Baltimore. This article in Outside mag gives an overview of the movement to make cities swimmable.

Philanthropy At Work:

🦋 Mad Ag published a white paper called “Wilding” and it’s about how 200 years of “row crop” agriculture has stripped our country’s lands of its native plant and biodiverse glory. So they are proposing a plan to bring the depleted land back to life by planting native perennials in a sort of “wild grid”, with the big vision of covering “65 million acres of functionally connected, multi-use habitat woven through U.S. agricultural landscapes over fifty years.” It would be beneficial to all, including farmers, whereby “prairie plantings on just 10% of a watershed have been shown to reduce nitrate loss by 67%, phosphorus loss by 90%, and sediment loss by more than 95%.” “They more than double bird species richness and increase pollinator abundance several-fold.” That is a vision to get behind!

✊ WECAN was in DC last month meeting with representatives in Congress to advocate for strong support to keep the Roadless Rule in place and fight Trump’s announced rescission of it. The Roadless Rule is particularly important for the Tongass forest in Alaska, which also happens to be the world’s largest temperate rainforest! It deserves to remain intact with its old growth trees and wealth of wildlife, and the Roadless Rule has protected it from getting sliced and diced by roads and industry extraction. WECAN has been standing up for the Tongass for years.

Environmental News:

🚯 California’s big plastic crackdown law goes into effect this month. The Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act aims to reduce the production of single-use plastic packaging, ensure that 60% of it is actually recycled, and that all of it can be recycled. This puts the burden where it belongs, in the hands of the companies creating this future waste in the first place, making it expensive for them to deal with their mess and incentivizing them to innovate better ways of doing business. But from the sounds of it, the new law has a rocky road ahead, with all impacted and concerned parties complaining about either a lack of clarity on the rules or a weakening of the rules. Still, we gotta start somewhere in addressing the massive plastic pollution crisis we find ourselves in. I have to mention this disturbing point in the referenced article: earlier this year, Republican attorneys general from ten states sent letters to 80 companies telling them that their involvement in plastic reduction initiative groups violates antitrust laws, and that these AGs will be investigating them. This is how deep the fossil cartel goes, because it is Big Oil that is behind the making of plastic and they don’t want that product line to go away. But if the act of companies choosing to hold themselves accountable by vowing to reduce their plastic packaging waste violates our country’s holy laws of capitalism…how many more examples do we need to indicate the system is broken?

🔭 A judge has blocked the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a globally critical climate science center in Colorado that was founded in 1960 and has led to many major advancements in weather research used the world over. This was one of the many attacks that really hit a nerve in the science and climate community, so we can all take an exhale, at least until…

🌊 Another attack on science happened last week. Trump will dismantle our country’s system of ocean monitoring and data collection, which includes a network of 900 instruments affixed to the deep ocean floor in sites off both coasts, Alaska, and between Greenland and Iceland, the installation of which were engineering feats in themselves. This ocean monitoring network has allowed scientists to collect highly valuable data about ocean currents, water temperatures, and acidity. It helps us better understand the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon (one of its natural jobs), plus monitor data relevant for fisheries. The list of uses for this data goes on and on. But after two failed attempts to cut the budget for this ocean monitoring system, Trump managed to do it anyway. He’ll use an undisclosed amount of our taxpayer dollars to send big ships equipped with technical equipment to uninstall these fixtures to “save its $48 million operating budget”, all while doling out $700 million to the dying coal industry. Democrats vowed to fight this aggressively idiotic decision. Let’s hope they can stall while these instruments continue to collect data for the many scientists relying on them. Semi-coincidentally the EU announced last week that it’s investing more money into its own ocean monitoring system and noted the stark contrast between them and us.

👎 NPR is the latest newsroom to lay off and/or kill its entire climate desk, following in the footsteps of CBS News and the Washington Post. Just last week I featured their (final?) annual climate solution week package! Laying off climate journalists has been a sad trend in newsrooms across the country since Trump was reelected. Coincidence? It’s probably true that climate stories don’t get the clicks that a bunch of other stuff does. But the climate story, the most life-threatening story of our time, needs to be told regardless of clicks from all angles, consistently, repeatedly, period. Without dedicated climate editors to keep the topic alive, chances are the already under-reported climate perspective will be forgotten. The reality and problem is that not enough people are working on this all-encompassing issue, and until that changes, we need climate-minded people to continually remind everyone else what we are facing, in newsrooms and everywhere else.

🤿 China has built the world’s first undersea data center that uses offshore wind power. The article doesn’t fully detail how this works, or what the risks are to sea life. But what’s interesting is that this data center uses seawater for cooling, so my question is why can’t all data centers use seawater for cooling vs our very limited fresh water?