Wind Halts, Coal Mandates, Oil Grabs, & Arctic Plotting

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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I knew I kept last week’s newsletter positive for a reason. If this week had a theme, it’d be: absolute insanity. But we gotta know. In the words of Samuel L. Jackson circa Jurassic Park…hold on to your butts!

Nonprofit Announcements:

🦜 One Earth Conservation is hosting a free conversation series exploring “Transformative Conservation”, an approach that connects personal mindset shifts with systemic change to build a more just relationship between people, wildlife, and the planet. The upcoming session on January 23rd at 1pm ET features Roan McNab of the Wildlife Conservation Society, sharing insights from a lifetime of conservation work in Mesoamerica, with a focus on parrot conservation and leading real-world transformation.

👩‍💻 5 Gyres has a job opening for their Executive Director role. If you or anyone you know is interested in leading this great organization tackling plastic pollution check out the job description here.

Environmental News:

⚡️ The dueling energy directives from Trump continue to escalate and defy logic, as he mandates the continuation of polluting energy (now through international seizure!) and takes more swings to end domestic clean energy production. On the dirty energy front, he continues his abuse of Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, which keeps power plants operating in order to avoid a presumed immediate “energy emergency”. Using this, the DOE ordered at least 4 more coal plants to stay open across Colorado, Indiana, and Washington, despite being scheduled to retire at the end of last year. Meanwhile at the EPA, they’re using a different tactic to keep 11 more coal plants polluting by extending their exemption from a law that would have likely shuttered them. The law, in effect since 2021, prevents coal plants from dumping their highly toxic coal ash into unlined pits, a practice famous for polluting the groundwater used by local communities, among other disease-causing complications. Then on the other side of the coin, is the latest attack on offshore wind. It’s a sequel to last year’s stop-work-orders with the same exact plotline: Trump has ordered 5 major East Coast offshore wind projects to halt work on the baseless claim that they are a threat to national security. Last year a judge reversed this same stop-work order for some of these same projects. But Trump knows that stalling these projects by any amount can lead to their demise, due to the intricate and tightly planned nature of their construction operations plus their daily financial bleedouts in the millions. If completed, these projects together would power 2.5M homes and buildings and create 10K jobs along the East Coast. Sounds great in a so-called “energy emergency”. But not on Trump’s watch – he’s an energy racist. He doesn’t like the electrons supplied by wind, so he suppresses them. Court hearings will start this week, and we’ll soon learn the fate of these offshore projects.

🇻🇪 Venezuela. A climate issue, and for Trump, an energy play to further prop up and extend life support for Big Daddy Oil. The Venezuela situation is about climate because the country embodies the world’s largest oil reserves, and oil is one of the fossil fuels responsible for human-caused global warming. Seizing control of Venezuela’s oil was a gamble in support of the “burn, baby, burn” agenda, and now Trump has a whole lot more in his control to burn. Learning that American oil companies aren’t exactly racing to invest the Trump-requested amount of $100B (or any amount just yet) to modernize Venezuela’s dilapidated extraction infrastructure and to Make Venezuelan Oil Productive Again is somewhat encouraging. The bigger planet-defining narrative that this story ladders up to is the race to transition the world’s energy to clean renewables. We would not be naive to hope that reluctance, political instability, and global market drivers could delay the exploitation of this oil reserve long enough to find its assets, at least most of them, stranded for good. Said simply, the quicker the world transitions to clean energy, the less demand there will be for fossil fuels of any kind, thus making moves like this pointless. Relating this oil seizure to our domestic clean energy market, I find it amusing that Trump’s (false) reasoning for hating wind is that it’s “expensive, inefficient, and ugly”. One could say the same about efforts to extract oil in Venezuela, which has one of the dirtiest and heaviest types of oil, which means it’s more difficult, expensive, and energy-intensive to extract. And oil spills and methane leaks are ugly indeed. Just another episode of Nobody Asked For This, and in this case, not even the oil execs. On top of the political and economic issues that Venezuela has long endured, the country is in an eco-crisis with ongoing oil spills (tens of thousands in a six year period), lingering pollution from decades of oil spills never cleaned up, one of the world’s fastest rates of deforestation, and methane leaks galore. It’s devastating.

⛔️ Trump announced he’ll pull the US out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and be the first and only country to do so. The UNFCCC is the international treaty under which the world agreed to cooperate on tackling climate change, and which produced the Paris Agreement. The US joined the UNFCCC and Congress ratified it in 1992 under George H.W. Bush. The move to pull us out supports Trump’s preferred position as global bully, and is just one example out of 66 international organizations that the current administration plans to drop out of because they “no longer serve American interests.”

🇬🇱 Greenland. Also about climate change.Trump wanting Greenland is admitting he knows climate change is real, because it means he believes the scientific models (and realtime evidence) that the Arctic ice sheets are melting fast. This melting opens up new shipping routes and exposes mineral deposits, making this mostly untouched part of the globe very appealing to global powers in the coming decades. What has been a quiet game of chess is now gaining mainstream attention. Well maybe it will help the reality of global warming sink in for a cohort of deniers, if they’re willing to put two and two together.

🏝️ Speaking of science and Greenland, findings from a scientific study about the last time Greenland’s ice sheet melted are out and it’s another wake up call, this time about the coming sea level rise. It’s very difficult to sample rock beneath Greenland’s massive ice sheet, but an expedition in 2023 was successful. The scientists were able to analyze the sand particles in the rock to know when they last saw sunlight before being covered again by ice, as they remain now (very cool science stuff). The goal was to understand what level global temperatures were at when the ice sheet disappeared, because if Greenland’s entire ice sheet completely melted now, sea levels could rise 24 feet, and have major consequences for human coastal and island civilizations. Turns out the ice sheet melted less than 10,000 years ago, when temperatures were similar to today’s. It’s a significant piece of data that builds on the growing body of evidence that Arctic ice is highly sensitive to warming temperatures, and we are dangerously encroaching on some massive Earthly changes that will be human-caused. Yet another scientifically-supported reason to stop burning fossil fuels NOW.

Climate Meets Culture:

🍄‍🟫 Rising food costs and ever-tightening margins in the food industry may drive more chefs to crack down on food waste and get creative in their menus. Turns out that 45% of food waste in restaurants comes from food prep, which means it can largely be avoided. HAGS, an NYC restaurant aiming to be zero waste is featured in this article, and the chef/owner says this: “’We just want people eating waste,’ says Justice, who calls discarded food a failure of imagination. She concedes that ‘it’s hard work. You have to choose to do it over something else. And we choose to do it.’” Hell yeah. It’s all a choice and it’s up to us to make good ones.

🥩 Speaking of choices, the new US dietary guidelines are out and could encourage food consumption choices that are decidedly not climate-friendly. Animal proteins like beef and dairy are prioritized over plant proteins, and “beef is responsible for 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per gram of protein than beans, peas and lentils”. One might argue that these guidelines are about health (and perhaps supporting certain industries??) and not about climate. But alas, everything is about climate and our environment, and our health is very much dependent on the health of our planet.