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In Pop Culture:

🚫🍔 RZA of Wu-Tang Clan talks in a recent interview about his choice to not eat meat, and how he promotes a vegan lifestyle alongside his many other creative pursuits. “Meat and beef and all these burgers are pleasure food, and we’d rather destroy our environment for our pleasure, and it’s foolish of us”. Time to hold the C.R.E.A.M. ya’ll.

GETTING DOWN TO CLIMATE BUSINESS:

🤞 The End of Coal: The Biden administration dropped a major climate regulation that aims to eliminate emissions from the remaining 200 coal-fired power plants in our country. These rules could mean the end of times for US coal by 2040, since it will be cheaper to shut these plants down than to deploy yet-unscalable carbon capture technology to hack their emissions. Expect a legal and political showdown from coal-loving states and industries, though let’s try to believe this into reality, as this is some of the lowest hanging fruit in the US emissions-cutting game plan.

👷‍♀️ Climate Corps Is Live: Looking for a job that helps fight climate change? The American Climate Corps is now accepting applications for its inaugural program, which was inspired by FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps. With opportunities spanning from coastal conservation to forest management, participants will get paid to fight climate change while gaining valuable skills. The program aims to employ 200,000 people in five years. Go green go!

🚗 Very Green Indeed: Battery recycling is changing the game for electric vehicles when it comes to their upfront environmental impact. Redwood Materials, the largest US battery recycler, founded by a Tesla co-founder, can recover over 95% of key minerals needed for battery production, slashing emissions by up to 80% compared to traditional supply chain methods. As recycling scales up, EVs built with recycled materials will be in an elite class of clean.

🍾 Blame Climate Change: A prominent cava maker in Spain is furloughing hundreds of workers due to the “terrible drought, originated by climate change”, per the Catalonian company’s statement. This story highlights the tangible impact of climate change on industries like winemaking. No cheers to that.

👨‍⚖️Designer Jailbird: Luxury handbag designer Nancy Gonzalez, known for her use of exotic skins such as alligator and python, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for smuggling protected wildlife skins from Colombia to the United States. The court found her guilty of violating wildlife protection laws. May she act as an example for others in an industry that’s still split on selling vs banning exotics.

SOME STATS:

2%: PROPOSED GLOBAL WEALTH TAX ON BILLIONAIRES TO HELP PAY FOR THE CLIMATE CRISIS (G20 MINISTERS)

$7B: MONEY GOING TO LOW INCOME NEIGHBORHOODS TO BRING THEM SOLAR ENERGY (EPA)

Just Buy Less

It seems a popular debate is the one around whether it’s worse for the planet to shop online vs in store. This article breaks down the details and suggests that online shopping could eventually have a lesser impact if delivery trucks go electric and less packaging is used in the shipping. But that doesn’t make sense to me, as it omits similar factors for the in-store argument. Individuals driving to the store could also be driving an EV that’s powered by renewable energy, so those emissions are a wash. And the items bought in store wouldn’t require the additional instance of packaging needed to ship to a home, since the items would have arrived at the store in bulk, just like the online delivery items arrived at a warehouse in bulk.

Personally, I greatly reduced my online (and overall) shopping several years ago when I decided to simply walk to a store when I needed something. Since I live in a major city, this was a very achievable goal. Sure, it felt inconvenient at first, but then it became second nature. I liked that I was not only eliminating packaging from my orbit, I was also moving my body to do the errand, and interacting with people. Nixing the mindless ease of online ordering also made me really think about whether I needed that thing, which drastically reduced my spending on unnecessary stuff, because in fact, I probably didn’t need that thing. And that is an example of an intentional behavior upgrade that I deem beneficial all around.