Saturn Tonight, More Environmental Rollbacks, Climate Satire, 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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Pop Culture:

🧘 It’s a somewhat comforting and invigorating sign to see the creative ways people out there are drawing attention to the many, many climate offenders in our world. In this case, we have a group of creatives shining light on the PR firm, Edelman, which creates marketing campaigns for Big Oil clients and is responsible for aiding and abetting planetary demise through the practice of manipulating minds. Basically, Edelman helps Big Oil hide the truth about greenhouse gas pollution causing climate change, as well as helps them shift responsibility for human-created climate change onto anyone but themselves. This clever YouTube video makes fun of the PR job to “keep people calm about the climate crisis, so [Edelman] and his clients can go on making lots and lots of money”.

Philanthropy At Work:

This week we have a few actions that take less than a minute. They are in response to last week’s flurry of proposed environmental policy rollbacks that allow further pollution and destruction of our land and water, as Trump attempts to narrow the scope of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, plus open more ocean areas to dirty drilling. More on these stories in the news section.

📣 NRDC is part of a coalition of environmental groups suing the Trump administration for failure to study the impact of offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico will have on coastal communities and the endangered Rice whale. They will fight the new drilling plan, as well. Public comment to voice your opposition to more offshore drilling here and/or here.

📣 EDF has this simple public comment form if you want to speak up against the recent Trump move to remove protections for the majority of our wetlands, which are critical water sources in the ecosystem of our drinking water, but also protect against flooding, and provide habitat for many fragile populations of plants and animals.

Environmental News:

🚨 Public commenting just opened (I’ll share an easy way to comment soon when our environmental nonprofit friends send it out) for the heartless changes Trump is planning to make to weaken the Endangered Species Act, in order to allow for more drilling, mining, and extraction at the expense of other living beings, especially those facing extinction. “One of the most contentious proposals would allow the government to assess economic factors, such as lost revenue from a ban on oil drilling near critical habitat, before deciding whether to list a species as endangered.“ That quote pretty much sums up this admin’s grotesque positioning of human dominance above all. But thank goodness for our slow and inefficient system of government, where many decisions can be reversed in the next term. Supposedly these laws would take up to two years to rewrite. Hopefully our environmental law friends can tie it all up in court long enough to get us over the finish line before industry can begin to do more damage to the fragile places the Endangered Species Act is meant to protect.

🚨 The EPA is planning to lift protections from water pollution and development on 85% of our country’s wetlands and streams, a move that would make industries like builders, industrial farmers, and chemical companies happy. Much of the drinking water our country’s population relies on flows through these very wetlands. Everything is connected, and it’s just sickening to see how short-sighted and unintelligent this administration is, especially as it relates to treatment of our country’s natural features.

🚨 Also last week, Trump announced a 5 year oil and gas offshore drilling plan, opening up an area half the size of the US to harmful, unnecessary infrastructure and enabling decades more of planet-warming greenhouse activity, when we know as an intelligent species, that the fossil fuel era must end now. This announcement was on top of drilling leases he has already mandated as part of the policy bill signed earlier this year. The new plan mandates oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf, off the coast of California and Alaska, including untouched ocean in the high Arctic. But as always with these leases, there has to be interest from the oil and gas industry to invest, and there are cases to be made that at least in the high Arctic and off California, they may not want to due to the economics and politics.

👀 The New York Times has been running an important series of stories called Lost Science, highlighting the work of scientists whose grant funding was eliminated this year under the Trump administration. Programs that lost funding include research into the link between heat and children’s health, creating early warning systems meant to help cities anticipate storm damage, how emissions are heating up cities, and the link between air pollution and infertility, to name a few. Science reveals truth, but truth doesn’t support Trump’s agenda, so he’s shutting it down.

🦋 For the first time ever, we are able to track individual monarch butterflies on their migration journey thousands of miles south. Teeny tiny solar-powered trackers are attached to the critters, and as they fly, the sensor pings bluetooth enabled devices to pinpoint their location. So far, it appears these monarchs are able to carry the slight but additional load of the sensor, as some have already made it down to Mexico and beyond. This app allows you to track their paths.

🤦‍♀️ COP30 concluded yesterday in Brazil, and there’s nothing significant to report. It appears that this year’s annual climate summit was a dud. It was the side antics that stole the show, with shoddy construction of event spaces that allowed daily flooding from torrential rains, one venue literally caught fire (very poetic, as our planet also goes up in flames), and people had to sleep on cruise ships acting as makeshift hotels due to lack of accommodations in Amazon. The biggest failure was not meeting the goal of creating a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels. Instead, the very language of ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels’ was itself transitioned away from, as it did not make the final cut of inclusion in the official COP30 document.

Saturn Tonight:

Tonight is a rare Saturn event. Saturn will be visible ‘without’ its rings due to the angle of its axis as Earth crosses its path. Why would we be excited about seeing Saturn without its coolest feature? Because there’s more to Saturn than just its rings, and I suspect Saturn itself might answer that with a “my eyes are up here”. So get out your telescopes and look up at the ‘interplanetary optical illusion’, right in our own night sky. You can also see Saturn with the naked eye tonight, just not the details.