Cool For Climate Cate Blanchett, Beef Woes, New Drought Emoji, 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!)

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In Pop Culture:

🎬 In her acceptance speech at the Toronto International Film Festival, Cate Blanchett seized the moment to talk about the industry’s environmental accountability. “In an industry that naturally recycles and reexamines ideas, I think there’s an inherent creative circularity to the way we make work,” she said. “And as we all know, gloat and excess are the enemy of creativity. I think the piece of change we’re missing is to make work as an industry more sustainable, more circular.” When the ‘stop talking music’ began to interrupt her, she said “You mention climate change, and that’s what you get”. Love her.

In Enviro News:

🥩 On average, a pound of beef costs $5.34, but if you add in the environmental costs of emissions, land and water use, it’s actually more like $27.36. Some countries are experiementing with displaying these ‘true cost accounting’ prices, like putting the true cost side by side with the current cost to see if it changes consumer behaviors. It doesn’t sound like anyone thinks the end consumer should be paying these additional costs. Rather, the companies making decisions to harm the planet should be faced with the true cost of their decisions, and then some. Still, exposing the environmental impact of products to the public would likely be eye-opening to most people and ultimately drive positive change.

👎🥩 Tyson is being sued for false claims over its so-called ‘climate-smart’ beef, for which it created an entirely new brand, with the help of consulting firm Deloitte, in order to seize the market opportunity for people who care about the planet (but we know better than to succumb to their greenwashing schemes!). The brand is called Brazen Beef, and not-so-coincidentally, the brand’s website is down (at least when I was researching it). As we discussed in a previous newsletter, ‘climate-smart’ should never be used to describe beef because there’s no such thing. The only way to be climate-smart about beef is to not eat it. An inconvenient truth indeed, but let’s just be honest about it.

🚘 In the largest 100 metro areas in the country, people are driving 12.3% more than they were pre-pandemic. This means more emissions are polluting the air, not to mention the other annoying things about cars in cities. In New York Metro, average daily vehicle miles traveled are up 14%, and unfortunately we won’t have congestion pricing to help curb that.

🏭 Utility companies in the U.S. are planning to expand gas-powered plants at a rate not seen in years, as electricity demand surges and AI data centers are expected to drive data center energy usage to ten times current levels by 2030. The International Energy Agency had projected demand for oil and gas to peak by 2030, and has urged that no new fossil fuel infrastructure be built from now on. Gas plants typically last 40 years, which means that each time a new one is born, that’s 40 more years of polluting emissions warming our atmosphere. But a positive fossil fuel trend is that China’s oil consumption has declined this year and there are signs it could stay that way, which would have a significant impact on global demand and emissions, as China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.

The Emoji Files

🌳🥵🗡 Finally, a new climate change emoji is coming. Next year, the emoji gods will debut 7 new ones across different categories (see above). The climate emoji is a dead tree meant to represent drought, though in my opinion it doesn’t really do that. It simply looks like a tree without its leaves, which is obviously nature’s designated Fall/Winter look for deciduous trees. In any case, we’ll take it (insert new baggy-eyed emoji). The standard emoji collection is both cluttered and lacking if you ask me. What emojis do you wish existed?