Nature Home Tour, Solar-Powered Boats In Ecuador, Solar Is Tops in EU, 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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Good Out There:

😍 This is what I call ‘modern environmentalist porn’ 🤤. Just listening to architect Jim Cutler describe his love and respect for nature and how deeply thoughtful he was about every single aspect of building this home without killing the life around it makes me swoon. Add in the beautiful, modern design and harmonious living in nature, especially getting to see, hear, and feel her presence at every moment while at home…well this is the dream. Highly recommend you give this video a watch. Regardless of whether you’re into architecture or home design, it’s worth it to see another human individual prioritizing the preservation of nature in his work. It’s his nonnegotiable. A true modern environmentalist indeed.

Philanthropy At Work:

🛶 In the Ecuadorian Amazon, solar-powered boats are replacing the diesel-powered ones that have long polluted the rivers and depleted fish stocks, an important source of food for the Indigenous people living there. The Honnold Foundation has been supporting this work since 2020, providing grants to help build these solar-powered boats for the Achuar communities living along the Amazon River Basin. Learn more about this project from Honnold Foundation (you can support their work with your Gen E roundups!), and read a recent New York Times article featuring this clean tech.

News You Need To Know:

🌞 Solar was the top source of electricity in the EU in June, a happy first. And renewable projects around the world are still happening, despite the domestic efforts to kill clean energy here. One of the world’s largest offshore wind farms is underway in the UK, financing was secured for a wind farm off the coast of Taiwan, and Africa’s largest wind farm just went online and can power 1M homes. Clean will prevail, eventually.

🇮🇩 Indonesia plans to get to 100% renewable energy by 2040, but thinks it can get there by 2035. This is from a country heavily reliant on coal, currently running on 80% fossil fuel energy. Love where their head’s at, though.

🏡 For the non-city dwellers, Bloomberg lists ways to safeguard your home from extreme heat, an unfortunate and dangerous recurring symptom of our warming world. It talks about ‘cool roofs’, or painting roofs white to reflect the sun back towards space. Atlanta is the latest city to require that new roofs follow this cool-suit, and they estimate this ordinance alone will cool the city 2.4°F and up to 6.3°F in some areas. Other ways to cool the home include insulating walls with straw bale (fascinating how nature is so smart!), and putting awnings over windows, among other things.

👎 And now it’s time to tackle the climate implications of the passing of that bill, the OBBB. No surprises here. The TLDR is that the US clean energy market will contract, jobs will be lost, emissions will soar, and we’ve passed the baton to China for global economic dominance. The bill targets wind, solar, and EVs as the biggest losers. Biden-era clean energy tax credits will largely disappear over the next few years, with the soonest being the $7,500 EV tax credit ending in September of this year, and energy-efficient home improvement tax credits ending within a year. Wind and solar tax credits will be phased out over the next year, though a new executive order aims to further prevent these projects from getting off the ground, with one estimate suggesting new solar and wind capacity could fall by half by 2035. Nuclear and geothermal have a longer lifeline to claim tax credits, but also take much longer to build (it all makes sense when your MO is to prolong the fossil fuel industry’s life). These clean energy incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act were powering a US manufacturing comeback, but now several planned projects that would’ve created jobs and boosted domestic supply chains for batteries and green tech have been abandoned or delayed. The current administration’s war against clean energy and innovation for the future surely cements China as the winner in green technology and its supply chains. There are of course emission consequences to the reckless abandonment of accelerating our nation’s clean energy transition. Estimates out of Princeton University and analyzed by Carbon Brief project the US will now only reduce emissions by 3% by 2030 versus the 40% required in our Paris Agreement pledge, aimed at keeping the global temperatures within safe limits that support a decent life. We’ll end it there for now, but there’s much more to cover over the coming weeks as to how this bill impacts our lives.

🙅‍♀️ There’s lots of chatter regarding the preparedness of federal and local staff in predicting, notifying about, and responding to the Texas floods. Regardless, it’s an example of an extreme weather event made worse by human-caused climate change. It’s also a present-day exhibit-A for saying yes to investing in climate adaptation projects and early-warning systems. We now know that Kerr County, where the flooding hit hardest, and the state rejected federal money that could have been used to build the flood warning system, somewhat based on political reasons. There will continue to be more frequent, disastrous weather-related events like this due to the warming that has already occurred, so measures to safeguard communities must be taken. Where that funding to do so comes from is the challenge to all climate solutions.

✍️ Kudos to the 270 EPA employees who signed a letter of dissent regarding the current administration’s neglect and dismantling of the agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment. Heroes. But because we live in an age where exercising our right to free speech can get you fired, cancelled, or who knows, EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, promptly placed 139 of the named signators on leave pending an investigation. Is that legal, you ask? Probably not, and their union is fighting it. Unbelievable, but the positive here is how these vulnerable federal employees are not willing to sit back and watch as our country’s environmental protections are gutted. Read their letter outlining the EPA’s current pro-pollution stance here.