‘The Morning Show’ Talks Climate, Renewables & China Are Winning, Top Hiking Trails, 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:

🌎 The current season of Apple TV’s “The Morning Show” centers around climate change and environmental pollution as the news storylines for the popular show with an all-star cast. There’s a big climate summit backed by corporate interests using it to greenwash. There are protestors exposing the truth and getting ignored or scoffed at. There’s the billionaire tech entrepreneur played by Jon Hamm, looking to profit from climate solutions, which interestingly in this case is direct ocean capture (very curious to see how they flush this out as the season goes on). Then in a separate storyline, Reese Witherspoon’s character is investigating a coverup by her news network of a corporate environmental disaster that proved deadly for humans and animals in the surrounding area and got the environmental lawyer working on the case murdered. On this last point, it’s a tragic and severely underreported fact that many people have been killed for trying to expose the truth about corporate ecocide. Here’s a recent report about the many fallen Earth heroes who rarely get justice — last year alone 146 people were murdered or went missing for defending the environment. There’s no transition out of that horrible reality. Maybe “The Morning Show” will shed some light on it. All this is to say that I for one am very pleased with the show’s writers for having focused the season on these critical issues. I hope they handle it with truth and care, and that it influences more people to wake up and prioritize climate issues.

Philanthropy At Work:

✊ Environmental groups are supporting participation in the October 18th No Kings marches and events. Per NRDC, “Why should people concerned about our environment and climate future consider participating? Because the Trump administration has pursued an unprecedented agenda to unlawfully dismantle environmental protections, cancel clean energy projects, open millions of acres of public lands and waters to industrial polluters, and stifle action to address climate change and its harmful human and nature impacts.”

👩‍💻 And Stand.earth has a petition to sign that tells Microsoft it better use 100% local renewable energy to power its AI data center boom.

Environmental News:

📈 The big global headline this week was that for the first time ever, renewable energy overtook coal as the leading source of electricity for the first half of this year. While a positive sign, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re at peak fossil fuel use. Global energy demand is rising, which means we need to produce more energy to meet it. The good news is that so far this year, renewables have been able to supply 100% of incremental electricity needs. But that means we’re still burning about the same amount of fossil fuels, and we need not to be. On a micro level, the report found that China and India saw fossil fuel generation decline in the first half of this year, while the US and the EU increased their fossil fuel generation.

📼 Now, the world is unquestionably heading towards a clean energy future. It is a global race in every sense of the word. The question is how long will it take us to get there? We know China read the tea leaves long ago and is currently dominating the global clean energy market. And our country picked the loser, both in office and in energy sourcing. In a Bloomberg analysis, they found that through July of this year, China has exported more clean energy than the US has exported dirty energy, to the tune of $120B to $80B, respectively. Whether money, market share, insight, or innovation talks, the outcome is clear: the US is losing. Trump is really digging us a dirty grave of energy insignificance. Which reminds me of something that the prolific environmentalist, Bill McKibbon, said in an interview during Climate Week. He said semi-jokingly that on our current trajectory led by climate denying politicians and corporations, in the future, the US could become a version of a global colonial Williamsburg, where international visitors come to see how things used to be, with dirty cars on the road, fossil fuel plants spewing pollution, gas stoves in apartments, etc. Except nobody will want to come see that. What a sad vision of demise for what was supposed to be the most innovative, forward thinking country on Earth.

👍 But we won’t let that sad vision of America happen, no sir. So here’s a good thing that happened: New England’s last coal plant closed down in New Hampshire, three years ahead of schedule. Woohoo! And, the property owners have plans to turn the site into a solar and battery storage complex.

📉 In an analysis of electricity prices in states with higher-than-average shares of renewable energy on their grids, it turns out the majority have lower-than-average electricity prices. This is in contrast to Trump’s argument that renewables increase prices, which he uses as ammunition to kill clean energy projects. Case in point, last week the Interior Department canceled a huge solar and battery project in Nevada that would have powered 2 million homes! Energy crisis, eh? What kind of energy crisis denies the addition of cheap, fast energy to people who need it?

👨‍⚖️ After the final dismissal of the 2015 federal climate lawsuit where youth plaintiffs sued the government for its support of the fossil fuel industry and demanded a plan to reverse climate change, the young people are back in court suing the Trump administration in Lighthiser v. Trump with a different approach. They are looking to halt three specific executive orders that keep fossil fuels burning, worsening climate change, and therefore are violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty. This article from Grist takes you inside the courtroom to hear testimony from some of the plaintiffs – kids who recount their multiple experiences with extreme weather and pollution from fossil fuels. It’s a perspective that everyone should hear. These kids are suffering now from a century of human-caused pollution. We all are. The article also documents how the government’s lawyers try to dismantle the kid’s testimonies and cast doubt on their lived experience of climate damage and health issues. It’s disturbing. Well, we’ll be watching this case unfold, and much gratitude goes out to the law firm, Our Children’s Trust, which continues to fight in the courts for our right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy life.

️⚠️ Trump issued an executive order to build a 211 mile road through the Alaskan wilderness to enable a mining company to mine. The government would also take a 10% stake in this Canadian mining company. The Biden administration had previously rejected this project after an environmental review found it would “significantly and irrevocably” hurt the environment and tribal communities. Expect opponents to fight this.

🎤 One more time for the cheap seats in the back: carbon offsets are a failure. The ‘carbon offset’ is a scheme created to allow one party to maintain their current level of greenhouse gas pollution in exchange for funding a project elsewhere in the world that supposedly does not cause pollution, or that even removes pollution from the atmosphere. ‘Supposedly’ being the operative word in that sentence. Turns out, they don’t even do the bare minimum of what their name suggests, which would be to maintain a plateaued level of emissions (which is a failure in and of itself, since we need to drastically reduce and eliminate emissions, not just maintain current planet-warming levels). Per the study’s author, “we have assessed 25 years of evidence and almost everything up until this point has failed.” Buyer beware.

🏆 The Nobel Prize in chemistry went to 3 scientists whose discoveries can be used in climate and environmental solutions like harvesting water from the air in deserts, capturing carbon and methane from industrial plants, and maybe even removing forever chemicals from water. Thank you!

Happy Trails:

🍁 I’ve got hiking in the great outdoors on my mind because I’ll be doing just that very soon. In the spirit of hiking, Huckberry shares their 50 best hiking trails in America, and Field Mag has the best urban hikes. Cheers to some glorious fall trails!