Reusables In The Dugout, Deforestation Ups & Downs, Native Seeds, 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:

♻️ Spotted: With his team’s season on the line, with single-use plastic bottles right next to him, Milwaukee Brewers manager, Pat Murphy, drinks out of a reusable container in the dugout during game 3 of their Wild Card series. Respect.

In Enviro News:

🌀 Asheville, North Carolina has a nickname: “Climate City”. That’s because of its large population of climate scientists and others working on climate-related issues at the federal agencies, nonprofits, and universities based there. In fact, the world’s largest library of weather and climate data lives in Asheville (it survived). Asheville has also been called a “climate haven”, which is a phrase used to describe geographical locations seemingly insulated from a warming climate’s greatest threats. But Hurricane Helene had other plans, as it ravaged the city with 14 inches of rain and flooding. Though it’s too early to confirm, early number crunching suggests that climate change made this storm 20 times more likely to happen and boosted it with 50% more rainfall.

🌳 The EU is trying to move the world forward on more environmentally-friendly practices, but the world keeps pushing back. Case in point is their big anti-deforestation law that would effectively ban products that contribute to deforestation. But due to pressure from nearly all countries involved, including the U.S., they’ve delayed implementation by a year. This law would cover a lot of products: coffee, chocolate, beef, palm oil, rubber, and timber products to name a few. And it’d be a huge step in the right direction to clean up corporate supply chains and force accountability, plus help to reverse global warming. According to WRI, if tropical deforestation were a country, it would rank third after China and the U.S. in emissions released. Not to mention it murders all the wildlife in its path. Needless to say, this delay is a very disappointing decision.

💰 There’s a glimmer of hope in addressing deforestation at its source, if the concept catches on. Brazil is behind a new financial mechanism that would pay developing countries to keep their forests standing. The payments would come from a $125B fund dubbed the Tropical Forests Forever Facility. (🎵Sidenote: the fund should definitely purchase rights to The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and make it their theme song. Try it out, it’s fun, even when you shove in ‘Facility’ at the end.) Yes, we’ve heard this story before, but what makes this iteration of ‘pay-to-stay away’ different is that the countries and investors paying into the fund will receive their money back plus interest because the money will be invested in a diversified portfolio to earn returns. Applying this financial structure to trees could be just what is needed to keep them alive…in this economy.

🚒 Wildfires in the U.S. are outpacing our ability to replant new trees, and our country doesn’t have the capacity to collect nearly enough seedlings from live trees or manage nurseries for them. Because of climate change, fires are burning hotter and more frequently, which is destroying the native seedlings that might otherwise have survived, while also making the ground too hardened and barren for new life to regrow on its own. The result over time could be drastically less forests and more grasslands, which has cascading effects for our ecosystems.

🌱 Which means we need lots and lots of native seeds, patience, and money. The government does have a $2B restoration plan in place, of which $8 million will go towards funding the National Seed Strategy, and another $18M towards infrastructure and people-power to build up our native seed supply chain. But the underreported-on native seed industry is struggling. It deals in genetically diverse seeds, as opposed to the monoculture seeds used in commercial farming. Guess which industry does NOT benefit from subsidies? Yup, it’s the wholesome native kind. This article in Bloomberg dives into the surprisingly interesting native seed industry, and how private equity is swooping in to…help?

☕️ Starbucks has bought two ‘research farms’, one in Costa Rica and one in Guatemala, where it will test various methods of farming and different varieties of coffee to build resiliance to climate change. One farm will focus on new technologies, and the other will work with degraded soil and land conditions to try to bring them into health. Climate change is already impacting coffee supply, quality, and livelihoods due to a new normal of drought, heat, and disease. This year was especially bad, so credit human-caused climate change for the spike in coffee prices. Starbucks is looking to mitigate these issues with their research investment.

🚀 MIT Technology Review released their annual list of climate tech companies to watch. The list covers companies working to make different pockets of our economy cleaner, from cement to chemicals to mining and more.

Eddie Better

🐋 Pearl Jam is getting behind the movement to free whale and ocean activist, Captain Paul Watson. As mentioned in a previous newsletter, The Captain is currently being detained in Greenland on an international arrest warrant from Japan for interfering with their whaling activity. His only crime is trying to protect whales from slaughter. Ok, maybe that’s not his only crime, we don’t know the ins and outs of his movements. What we do know is that he’s dedicated his entire life to protecting life in the ocean. And whales deserve their own Batman to protect them. It’s the least we can do.