Save The Amazon, East Coast Sinking, BYOReusables, 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:

A new documentary is coming out next month about the ongoing fight led by the Minnesota-based Bad River Ojibwe tribe to save Lake Superior from an oil pipeline on the brink of a spill. Narrated by Indigenous activist and model Quannah ChasingHorse and Edward Norton, and backed by a team of Hollywood heavy hitters, Bad River looks to be an important film to support. Watch the trailer here.

GETTING DOWN TO CLIMATE BUSINESS:

🌳 A new study finds that by 2050, up to half of the Amazon rainforest will no longer be rainforest, and will instead become a degraded land area that cannot support rich biodiversity, nor could it act as the carbon sink that it is today. Parts of the forest would transform into an entirely different type of ecosystem. This is driven by rapidly declining conditions in this critical area of Earth due to deforestation, warmer temperatures, drought, and fires. The Amazon’s role in balancing Earth’s carbon budget cannot be overstated, not to mention the life and livelihoods it supports. COP30 (two COPs from now) will be held in Brazil, which will help draw attention to the topic.

🏝 Up and down the East Coast, land is sinking as sea levels are rising, compounding the threat of massive flooding. This interactive article shows which areas are sinking fastest and why.

🏭 As the politicized liquified natural gas wars wage on in Capitol Hill, the US is getting ready to bring a gas export facility online on Mexico’s west coast, a strategic move that avoids the Panama Canal on an expedited shipping route to Asia. Every new fossil fuel infrastructure project that comes online locks in decades of greenhouse gas emissions added to our atmosphere. And we all know that we’re in the era of subtraction, not addition. Five more facilities are being planned in Mexico, but they are currently on pause per Biden’s recent decision to review the environmental impact of new LNG export facilities.

± ESG Plus/Minus: New York State’s pension fund is divesting some (not all) of their Exxon holdings due to Exxon refusing to alter their oil and gas expansion strategies. That earns half a plus. Meanwhile, Republican anti-ESG efforts prevail as JPMorgan and State Street pull out of a major investor climate action coalition aiming to decarbonize their portfolios. And Blackrock straddles the line by transferring its involvement in the coalition from its US to its International division.

🛰 You may recall us telling you about the Environmental Defense Fund’s methane-tracking satellite project, called MethaneSAT. Well it’s finally launching next month and they’ve announced a partnership with Google AI that will help pinpoint and google-map exactly where the methane leaks are coming from (oil and gas infrastructure). Bonus: this fun tool will be free to use. Bonus query: will Taylor Swift sue the sleuth who decides to use this tool to track Swiftie-related methane?! MethaneSAT is expected to be the most comprehensive view on global methane, a GHG that’s 80x more potent than carbon emissions. Methane-leaking offenders will now have nowhere to hide. But making the oil companies fix these leaks will be another story…

Some Stats:

20%: PERCENT OF MIGRATORY SPECIES FACING EXTINCTION (UN)

15-20: YEARS OF GLOBAL CO2 EMISSIONS STORED IN THE AMAZON FOREST (NATURE)

BYO…Reusables

I loved reading this article in Eater entitled “The Hottest New Accessory in LA Restaurants? Your Takeout Containers From Home.” So much of what the author says resonated with me and my own experience in thinking about, trying out, and then recently forgetting about (until now!) the act of bringing my own Tupperware to dinner. Pre-pandemic I struggled with this one – I felt anxiety and even shame at the idea of BYO’ing. Would the waitstaff somehow be annoyed? Why does it somehow feel like stealing as I’m coyly scraping my own food into my own container? Would the other patrons think I’m lame? But then I realized: who gives a sh*t! All that matters is that it feels like the right thing to me. So I just did it. And turns out that not only does it feel right, it feels good. Especially when my waiter would compliment me and we’d have a nice little banter about how good it is to be environmentally responsible. This happened nearly every time – smiles all around. Plus, per this article, I learned that there are many reasons why restaurants love this. Afterall, every cent counts in the industry and by BYORing, we are saving them money and time that’s otherwise eaten up by packing people’s leftovers into single-use nonsense. So let’s normalize this one, shall we? Though maybe not so much that the overconsumerati start buying a new reusable container to match every damn outfit they own (ahem, Stanley mania).