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:

Quinta Brunson and Stephanie Hsu will speak at this month’s Hollywood Climate Summit.

GETTING DOWN TO CLIMATE BUSINESS:

🏘️ We’ve covered the impending wave of climate migration several times in this newsletter, but new research shows that most people who move don’t travel far. Rice University sociologists studied the results of a federal program that moved roughly 50,000 families out of flood zones since the 1980s, and they found that most of these families stayed within 20 miles of their original homes. This might indicate that larger climate migration patterns won’t see huge cross-country waves. Of course, they might be more willing to move once they find out how beautiful Sheboygan is this time of year.

🌡️ Scientists at the World Weather Attribution initiative are working on an attribution model that can more accurately tell us what climate change’s role was in extreme weather events. Needless to say, they’re finding increasing evidence of climate change intensifying these events around the world. Certain events, like heat waves in Siberia or America’s Pacific Northwest, were virtually impossible without climate change. Finally, when a climate denier says, “There’s always been droughts and hurricanes,” you’ll have something to rub in his face!

🤝️ Great bipartisan news: job opportunities created by climate tech in rural areas are popular on both sides of the political spectrum. In fact, rural areas, which generally lean conservative, can offer a lot for climate tech startups, like clean power, repurposable infrastructure, access to organics, and labor talent. However, it’s important for companies moving into these areas to build community relations and focus their message on the pro-business, pro-jobs argument. And if you make a mean blueberry pie for the local bake sale, that doesn’t hurt, either.

🌩️ Activists are always saying there should be more climate experts in congress. If you’re one of them, you might be interested in this profile of Illinois Rep. Eric Sorensen, a former meteorologist and member of the Agriculture Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee. In the interview, he discusses the Weather Act, the groups seeking to unseat him in the upcoming election, and climate communication. Wait a second… that’s my beat, Sorensen!!

💨 US climate envoy John Kerry warned us to be “very skeptical” of the promises of carbon capture, a technology pushed by fossil fuel companies to avoid slowing production. Currently, there is no viable, scalable method of carbon capture. That being said, every Project Drawdown scenario to stay under 1.5 degrees of warming involves carbon capture technology. So let’s all figure out how to do the mental gymnastics of being skeptical but optimistic about vacuums that will suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

🚰 Here’s a new thing I didn’t know I needed to worry about – according to a new study, “we’ve pumped so much groundwater that we’ve nudged the Earth’s spin.” Apparently, “humans have shifted such a large mass of water that the Earth tilted nearly 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) east between 1993 and 2010 alone.” I’ve been wondering why things have felt a little off for the past few years, maybe it’s that.

SOME STATS:

55M: TONS OF SEAWATER BLASTED INTO THE AIR IN A VOLCANIC ERUPTION NEAR TONGA, CREATING HEAT-TRAPPING WATER VAPOR (NY TIMES)

2500: NUMBER OF WORLD BANK CLIMATE PROJECTS REVIEWED IN A NEW STUDY THAT REVEALED FEW HAD ANY TANGIBLE CLIMATE BENEFITS (FINANCIAL TIMES)

Just Let The Experts Do It

As temperatures are set to increase across the country, many experts are recommending we turn to Indigenous people’s expertise for heat management strategies. These groups have millennia of experience living on and cultivating the land that modern strategies have found most challenging, and using their strategies would not only keep people safe from the heat, it would also help return stewardship of the land to the people who originally managed it.