Glacier Art, Green Paris, Shipping The First Global GHG Tax, 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:

🧊 Disappearing glaciers are one of the highly visual casualties of the climate crisis that seem to touch most people. I think one reason is because glaciers appear larger than life and like permanent fixtures of planet Earth, so to be witnessing their demise by human activity in our lifetime feels especially tragic. In fact, grieving humans around the world have held funerals for expired glaciers. At the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, artist Ohan Breiding is paying tribute to a beloved glacier of his childhood that is melting away – the Rhône glacier in Switzerland, which feeds the Rhône river and Lake Geneva. He’s seen it shrink significantly and scientists predict it will be completely gone by 2050, a sad reality that villagers are trying to postpone by covering parts of the glacier with thermal blankets. The exhibit runs through December 14th.

Philanthropy At Work:

🐝 Mad Ag released their 2024 Impact Report. One cool highlight is that Mad launched a pilot wilding program last year with 4 farms across the country. What this means in farming is that they planted ‘prairie strips’ with wildflowers, trees, shrubs, and grasses around the perimeter and in unproductive areas of farms. This practice has a bunch of positive impacts, such as bringing biodiversity back to the land, supporting pollinators, improving soil health, and mitigating runoff. Next, they’ll focus on scaling this model.

In Environmental News:

🏠 The city of Paris voted yes to convert 500 city streets to be car-free and supplemented with plants and trees. Sounds like heaven! Anyone who’s lived in a big urban city knows that car-free streets mean less noise, less pollution, less chaos, and more calm. Plus the addition of trees will in time help cool down the hot summer temps and add much-needed shade to daily walks.

🚄 Also in France, have you seen the photos of their new high speed trains? Basically a boutique hotel on rails (very nice), these trains are 20% more energy efficient than their last version. Here in America, we can only dream of mass transit so beautiful and efficient.

🚢 Countries agreed to a global tax on shipping emissions of $100 per ton above a certain threshold. This the first ever global tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Shipping accounts for 3% of global emissions, and the main limit would reduce the industry’s emissions by only 8% by 2030, indicating that the tax should be much higher. Still, it’s a start. And the revenue, projected to be around $11B annually, will go into a fund to help countries transition to cleaner fuels.

👎 Trump signedexecutive orders that aim to revive the dying coal industry, which the White House says is to support the energy needs of AI data centers. Bringing back coal, really bro? Coal is the unfiltered cigarette in a world of vape pens. It’s the dirtiest, and nobody wants that. Well, mostly nobody wants that: 2/3rds of Americans want to transition away from all fossil fuels, and 76% want carbon emissions regulated as a pollutant – the opposite of how this administration is trending. Also important to note, the clean energy alternatives are cheaper. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “adding coal power would cost $89 per megawatt hour, compared with $31 for onshore wind or $23 for solar”.

👎 The EPA is planning to end a greenhouse gas reporting requirement for thousands of pollutant-intensive industrial facilities across the country, such as fossil fueled power plants and chemical factories. This publicly-available data has been collected since 2010 and impacts policy decisions, plus informs global accounting of planet-warming gases. So we need it.

🪵 Trump has removed protections on half of the land managed by the U.S. Forest Service to allow for logging, which the administration hopes will lead to an “an increase in America’s wood independence”. Nevermind that many of these previously protected trees are old-growth, storers of carbon, and home to wildlife. Sigh.

O-hi👋-o