Greening Netflix, Whale Tales, Lab-Grown Cotton, 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:

🎥 Netflix wants to make the production of its shows greener, but due to the fragmented nature of the entertainment industry, where mostly fossil fuel-powered equipment is rented to individual productions by multiple independent vendors, it’s not an easy process. And ultimately it’s the showrunner, not Netflix, with final say. So it’s nice to see when a show chooses to do the right thing all on their own. For example, Netflix’s Virgin River is electrifying their sets with batteries for lighting and EVs for transportation in order to lessen the emissions from the production. Bridgerton and Stranger Things are swapping in more sustainable equipment and power sources, too. To give these shows credit for their pro-planet efforts, we’re gonna need a new rating icon next to the Rotten Tomatoes score.

In Enviro News:

👕 Personally, I’m a fan of the nascent ‘lab-grown’ industry, where many things in our daily lives are being experimented with to be made in a lab or a brewery-like vat setting in order to avoid the negative environmental impacts from big industry. Meat gets some attention, and I can’t wait for the day I can become a lab-to-table meat eater. The latest commodity being worked on is cotton. Growing cotton out on the surface of Earth takes enormous amounts of land, water, and fertilizer. Boston-based startup, Galy’s lab-grown process reduces these inputs by 99%, 97%, and 91% respectively. Cotton cells are grown in a vat using only sugar. H&M has invested in the company as they work to improve the quality and scale. I’ll gladly wear lab-grown cotton tees, please.

🌳 A group of investors holding $8T in assets is pressuring banks to stop financing deforestation tied to commodities, like agriculture and mining. We’ve seen a lot of this sort of organizing to decarbonize investment portfolios and pleas to stop financing fossil fuel projects, so it’s good to see deforestation getting some attention. Stop the money pipeline.

🌁 The effects of climate change, like extreme heat and flooding, are impacting the safety of our country’s infrastructure, and this article talks about how our bridges were not built for this. A researcher of this very topic was quoted as saying “It’s getting so hot that the pieces that hold the concrete and steel, those bridges can literally fall apart like Tinkertoys”. Terrifying.

🚘 Volvo, GM, Ford, and Mercedes Benz are all pushing out their timelines to go all electric, driven by slower sales this year and relaxed regulations. It’s a frustrating trend to see from the industry that was seemingly serious and competitive about cleaning up its act. They all still plan for an electrified future, they’re just pumping the breaks, which is exactly the problem – we don’t have time to stall and allow more gas-guzzling cars to come into existence and add more GHGs to the atmosphere.

⚓️ Legendary anti-whaling activist, Captain Paul Watson, who also was a founding member of Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd is being detained in Greenland for an arrest warrant from Japan issued a decade ago. Japan accuses Watson of messing with one of their whaling boats and disrupting their business. There are international calls for Denmark (Greenland is a district of Denmark) not to release Watson to Japan, where he’d likely die in prison for his anti-whaling activism. There’s a petition here.

🐋 On the opposite end of the whale-human spectrum, we have the people of Colombia, who don’t kill the whales as they do in Japan. Rather, they celebrate them. A town on Colombia’s Pacific Coast holds a two-part festival to welcome the arrival of the whales for breeding season and to send them off on their migration when it’s time to leave in the Fall. There’s music, dancing, and sharing of stories from past generations of how the people honored these majestic creatures of the sea. Now that’s a beautiful tradition.

🍻 The UK will close its last coal plant this month, making it the first G7 country to end the coal burning era. Cheers to that.

🫡 If you want to be inspired by people doing good things for the planet, check out Grist’s annual list of 50 Americans doing just that.

Travel Things

🏄🏿‍♂️ Surfers in Senegal and Indonesia are making moves to clean up the trash-filled waves in their beloved local surf spots, highlighted in this Conde Nast Traveler article. And what starts with a community-led effort to keep oceans clean, often results in a much larger movement bringing environmentally-friendly actions, business decisions, and nonprofits to the area.

🧊 A trend in the travel industry is something called “last chance tourism” which feels cringey and defeatist. What it actually means is that people are traveling to places and sights that may not exist in the future due to human activity. Note that an influx of tourism to fragile places, aided by the unfortunate effects of social media, increases the wear and tear. Seeing glaciers in Iceland is a prime example of this form of tourism, but it comes with risks. As glaciers recede and melt, their environment becomes unstable. Last month an American tourist was killed when an ice arch collapsed. Maybe instead of a mass rush to snap photos of potentially disappearing places, there should be a mass rush to do everything we possibly can to save them.

🏞 Lastly, if you’re curious about how the Great American Outdoors Act has been helping to restore various neglected aspects of our nation’s national parks, here’s a list of the latest slate of projects and upgrades happening now.