Used EV Guide, Nature Journaling, Pope Planet, and the Latest Deregulations

Welcome to The Climate Roundup newsletter. Your weekly edit of the climate and environmental stories shaping our planet and our culture and how the two are deeply connected. We live in a global ecosystem shaped by human decisions. Let’s make good ones.

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In Pop Culture:

🥾 SNL alum Kevin Nealon is telling us all to “take a hike”. The good kind! Watch this short PSA of sorts for a wholesome message.

⚽️ World Cup athletes will be wearing 100% recycled uniforms when they compete next month. Nike is supplying all the outfits and used “advanced chemical recycling” to create them from textile waste. This article in Grist goes into the details of whether this is symbolic of a step forward towards the fantasy of circular fashion (clearly, I’m of the mind that it’s not, also the “chemical” in “advanced chemical recycling” alarms me). It’s good to work on solutions, but the only real way out of the mounting fashion waste problem is to significantly reduce production in the first place. As is the case with emissions, as is the case with plastic…

🚙 Ready to buy an EV? It’s prime time to buy a used one, as a wave of leases expire from the good old Biden days when there was a surge of electric vehicle adoption. Now those vehicles are ready for their forever homes. Here’s a handy guide to help you navigate the ins and outs of buying a used EV.

🚘 Speaking of EV’s, you may have heard that Ferrari finally unveiled their first fully electric car. And people hate it. The stock dropped hard. My first thought was also one of distaste and disappointment. It’s yet another example of inconceivably subpar design for an electrified version of a brand known for elite design (and yes performance too). By changing perfectly good design to be bad, and then attaching that bad design to something good (electric), all it does is harm the movement to electrify transportation. (Looking at you, electric Ford Mustang Mach-E. An abomination.) To the car companies with portfolios of popular gas models: don’t reinvent the damn wheel (just the engine!). Keep the same iconic beloved designs and just make it electric. Is that so hard? Jeez.

Philanthropy At Work:

🙌 Al Gore celebrated 20 years of presenting his trademark climate lecture and slideshow with what else than another climate lecture and slideshow! He did it back at the source of its origins, in his hometown of Nashville, among the latest cohort of Climate Reality’s training of climate leaders. Keep going, Mr. Gore, for 20 more years, I hope.

✍️ Northeast Wilderness Trust put together a short 3 minute video about Nature Journaling. It’s a very pleasant watch that could be a nice shift in energy if that is what’s required (speaking from experience). Nature journaling is about being outside, noticing the details in sights and sounds, and then drawing or writing about it.

🦌 Also from Northeast Wilderness Trust, they have two projects they are fundraising for to be able to purchase more acreage to make them forever wild, forever protected. The College Hill Wilderness Sanctuary in Vermont and River’s Edge Wilderness Reserve in Massachusetts. You can learn more about them in the links, and both have beautiful short nature videos providing a visual tour of the creatures and landscapes.

🌊 The Ocean Cleanupannounced an expansion of their LA efforts to intercept trash from flowing into the Pacific Ocean from rivers (the main way plastic reaches the ocean, along with fishing gear being discarded at sea). They will install their river interceptor technology in the San Gabriel and LA rivers. This follows the ongoing success of their interceptor in Ballona Creek, which stops plastic from flowing into Santa Monica Bay.

Environmental News:

🤝 NPR ran a week of stories dedicated to local communities embracing climate solutions. Take a look through and have a listen to any of the many uplifting stories that paint a picture of what an all around friendlier world could look like. Perhaps it can inspire some local action of your own!

🙏 Pope Leo continues to impress. He published a new document about the ethics of AI, highlighting the need for regulation and restraint because it is a threat to humanity and our planet. It’s important that the very real concerns about the technology’s impact on humanity’s relationship with human connection, truth seeking, and with our natural environment comes from the mouth of one of our era’s most respected human beings. All flaws in Catholicism aside, we are lucky to still have influential leaders and voices grounded in spirituality and love.

🇦🇺 Australia is suing 3M for damages of $1.4 billion, charging that the company hid the truth about the harmful effects of its “forever chemicals” (PFAS). A sad and all-too-common story, when companies know their products cause serious harm, but decide to sell and use them anyway.

♨️ For most cities, their biggest source of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions is their buildings. In Denver, Colorado, where they have an ambitious goal of getting to ZERO emissions by 2040 (rock on!), they are testing something new to heat and cool their buildings. It’s called a thermal energy network, and it essentially regulates building temperatures using heat pumps that rely on an underground system of water-filled pipes that use the Earth’s natural heat to regulate temperatures. Emissions-free! The cherry on top is that they plan to use the city’s wastewater to at least partially fill the pipes, which diverts it from getting dumped into a river, which is not good. So yay, Denver! Oh and they’ll also use the underground system to heat sidewalks to naturally clear them from snow and ice. Genius!

🛑 Utah is poised to be the bearer of what is being touted by investors as the world’s largest data center, powered by dirty gas. It will occupy an expanse of land the size of Washington DC! (And people complain about solar arrays co-existing on depleted farmland). Well thanks to relentless Utahns protesting and organizing rather cleverly, the Republican governor, Spencer Cox, who recently signed into law a bill granting legal immunity to fossil fuel companies from climate-related accountability in his state, has announced that this data center will “never” be run by all gas. That means he’s still allowing some gas, but he said out loud that it will be a mix of gas, nuclear, geothermal, and even solar. Scan this article for some striking figures regarding the resource needs and impact of this massive data center. One major one: if this project were to run on 100% gas as it was originally intended, it would single-handedly increase the entire state of Utah’s emissions by 64%. That’s insane, and that is what we’re dealing with here, folks.

🤯 In this week’s roundup of idiotic pro-pollution Trump administration moves, the EPA is weakening restrictions and the phase out of the super pollutant hydrofluorocarbon (HFC), which is used in AC and refrigerators. Most countries in the world have agreed to phase out HFCs, per the UN Kigali accord because their heat-trapping powers are exponentially stronger than other greenhouse gases, and we already have less harmful alternatives. Next, the Fish and Wildlife Service cleared the weedkiller atrazine for continued use on crops, claiming that it does not cause extinction of species. Last year, the World Health Organization found atrazine to be “probably carcinogenic to humans” and the EU banned it over twenty years ago. But here in the US, we spray it all over our corn and other crops because it increases productivity (our country’s tagline). Finally, the EPA went ahead and followed through with their rollback on limits to PFAS “forever chemicals” in our country’s drinking water. The MAHAs are not happy about these last two decisions, both of which dismiss the truth that companies are producing and using highly toxic chemicals that cause serious health issues to humans and wildlife. PS: in NY state, Gov Kathy Hochul succeeded in weakening and delaying the state’s groundbreaking climate law that was passed in 2019. So she belongs in the same bullet point with Trump. She’s weak herself and fell victim to the false narrative that to ride the affordability train, we must forget about upgrading our energy systems to use free, clean energy. It’s infuriating.

☢️ The Trump administration is planning to hand over weapons-grade plutonium, the main ingredient in nuclear bombs, from our country’s stockpile of dismantled warheads to private companies, including startups, to use as fuel for nuclear power reactors. What could go wrong?! A lot, according to those who remember the Cold War, starting with the security risks from plutonium being resurrected from tightly locked storage and brought into the light of private markets. The human-created, unnatural plutonium does need to be dealt with, and the other side of the argument says that using it as fuel is a form of recycling. Perhaps, but is it worth the risks?

Nature Thought