The New Climate. New(s)letter #25
“Homo sapiens are all of us; no matter where you’re from or what you look like, we’re all one people”, said Victor Glover, Pilot of Artemis II, in an interview with CBS from the cabin of his spacecraft hurtling away from Earth. Their achievement, only just sinking in on 5th April as they were halfway between the Earth and the Moon, was made possible, he said, “not just [by] putting our differences aside but when we bring all our differences together and use all the strengths to accomplish something great.”
This wasn’t just a throw-away remark. Glover was responding to the direct question: “given the divisions at home right now” what message does he hope their perspective would bring to the people at home. Just a month ago, the US had launched an illegal war on Iran. As Artemis II circled round the dark side of the Moon, Trump threatened more war crimes — blowing up power stations. The next day he threatened genocide. There was something very fitting about the new ‘Hello, World’ photo, unlike its 1972 predecessor taken from the Apollo 17, showing the Earth at night — only the thinnest sliver of a new day dawning, or was it setting, in the bottom right.
As well as the humanitarian and human rights catastrophe that has been the US military attack of Iran, it also brought implications for world energy. Sarah Miller — for my money, the preeminent fuel and energy writer on Medium — gave us an early explainer piece Iran War: China’s Gain, US Pain on the 6th of March. She wrote that, “Fossil fuel turmoil not only enhances the cost advantages of solar, wind, battery storage and EVs over fossil fuels, it highlights the security advantages of renewable energy systems that require no continuous supply of imported fuel.”
I also touched on this in Net Zero by 2050 is Cheaper than a Single Fossil Fuel Crisis. As Brent crude prices pitched above $100 a barrel and stayed there, a report from the UK Climate Change Committee — drafted for months, its timing just a coincidence — modelled a 2022-Ukraine-equivalent fossil fuel price spike and found the cost to be greater than the entire investment needed to reach a Net Zero, renewable-energy based economy by 2050.
Later in the month, George Dillard also made clear in How to Stick It to Trump and the Ayatollahs that the path to a safer, less genocidal world, is to “use less oil”:
“It’s clear that the more crucial oil production is to an economy, the less likely that country is to be free and democratic. This is not a coincidence. Though oil money might bring in revenues and boost GDP, it usually damages human rights and democracy in a country.”
Shortly after George’s piece, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stated on 30 March that “The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz and damage to regional infrastructure have produced the largest disruption to the global oil market in its history”. The only way now to insulate economies from the whims of murderous autocrats like Putin and Trump is to move rapidly away from fossil fuels and invest in renewable energy safely installed and operated at home.
War isn’t the only damage being wrought by the Trump Administration. Much of the destruction is turned inward on its own people, as long-established environmental protections are ripped up. Stephen Kamugasa writes in The Invisible Deficit: Why the Climate Movement Couldn’t Save the EPA of the repeal of the EPA’s Endangerment Finding and in particular the dismantling of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) mandates: “another chilling reality emerges. We are not only failing to offer sanctuary to the displaced; we are dismantling the very legal foundations that safeguard our own habitat from collapse.”
Forestry academic Lindsey Rotche took a brief break from the final stages of their PhD to tell us This Plan To Save Forests Would Cost Less Than 1% of the Defense Budget. The proposed Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Implementation Plan would “invest in thinning and prescribed burning, fire-adapted communities, reforestation, research, and continued forest management. This would protect us from large swaths of high severity fire.” But this Administration seems in no mood to invest in forestry protection, quite the opposite: the month ended with the news of a gutting of the U.S. Forest Service, opening the floodgate for lumber, and closing more than 50 science research facilities.
Despite the obvious benefits that environmental protection brings to people and economies — Stephen Kamugasa makes the point that removing air quality emissions requirements on cars and industry leads to over $1 trillion costs a year to the US in premature deaths, respiratory ailments hospital visits and more — this message (and battle) seemingly needs to be made again and again. In Australia, for example, Sam Westreich, PhD considers in How The “Bat Ripple” Shows The Economic Value of Australia’s Flying Foxes that flying foxes — or fruit bats — bring a great benefit to the timber industry by spreading seeds in their droppings:
“Just in terms of eucalyptus trees alone, the researchers in this study estimated that the contribution of flying foxes to sustaining timber groves was an average of AUD $611 million per year (with a 90% uncertainty interval ranging from AUD $271 million to AUD $955 million per year).”
While the importance of long-term state environmental policy is perhaps nowhere made more clear than in The Netherlands, where much of the small coastal nation is below sea-level, making the fight against sea-level rise truly existential. But as Durkha @ Terra Palss explains in The Netherlands’ Bold Bet on Nature, what you think you know about Holland’s hydrological approach — dams and dykes — is only the first half of the story. The more contemporary second half has been to work with nature, not fight against it.
BOBBY’S DAZZLERS
In terms of what individuals can do to lighten their load on the planet, one subject perhaps crops up — and antagonises — more than most: how many kids you choose to have. Following on from his previous piece on sex, Roberto Suarez naturally moved on to considering the resultant offspring in The Carbon Cost of a Child. It is perhaps the most even-handed article I have read on the subject. He followed this with a piece on the Carbon Cost of Pets. Strangely, as he acknowledges, this is an even more taboo subject than kids. And it is, again, amongst the best articles I have read on the topic.
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Another writer with the propensity to expand our horizons by inviting us into his is Ricky Lanusse. In What Skiing Into the Eye of a Volcano Taught Me About Climate Change he takes us along with him on a ski-mountaineering adventure in Patagonia. The picture below is taken by him. The belly-button like dip in the snow leads to the mouth of a volcano. If that’s not enough to make you want to dive right into his story immediately then, really, there’s nothing more he or I can do.
Ok, here’s another one. Here’s Ricky himself as he reaches the edge:
SOLVING PROBLEMS
Ben Shread-Hewitt doesn’t use the term ‘climate doomerism’, but it was arguably the context of his piece Is ‘Apocalyptic’ Language Part of the Problem? Have we become numb to the dire warnings of climate reports? Has the language itself left no headroom? He writes:
“Ironically, hard climate science is already somewhat ahead of the game on this with tipping points; as these manage to succinctly convey that climate systems don’t just weaken — with enough stress, they break, leading to wholly new (and rarely positive for human society) states. But it’s the cascading impacts which lack the language to explain the substantive difference between ‘things are getting worse’ and ‘things are now broken’.”
From problem, to solution. giuseppe baldassarre’s wonderful debut piece for The New Climate was, like Lindsey’s forestry article, the culmination of years of fieldwork research. In “Coffee Is Not Forest!” — But Can It Become Part of a Solution? he informs us how integrating local ecological knowledge with agroforestry helped ensure the long-term sustainability of coffee production while preserving the unique landscapes of Thuan Chau and Northwest Vietnam.
And staying on the food and agriculture theme, if you (like me) have recently enjoyed a turmeric latte, then boy have I got the perfect piece for you. Niladri Giri | 10+ Years Agriculture Field Work’s In the Eastern Ghats, India, Climate Change is Erasing the Taste of Home transports us to a time and a place on the front line of climate change. Farmers are still managing to maintain their yields of turmeric root and coffee beans, but the quality — and taste — is diminishing: “She lets the pieces fall onto the bamboo mat where they settle into a heap of dull ochre — the color of weak tea or sun-bleached cardboard, not the blazing, sunset-orange that once made Koraput turmeric legendary”.
The reason, writes Niladri, is the curcumin — a polyphenol compound that serves as the plant’s own immune system, protecting it from pathogens and provides the anti-inflammatory properties it’s famed for — is temperature-sensitive. When soil temperatures exceed the 30°C threshold during the critical “rhizome-bulking” phase, the plant’s internal chemistry begins to fail. Curcumin concentrations can decline by 12% to 36% in a single season. Niladri writes, “The loss is visceral and economic, but it has no bureaucratic name. It is a slow-motion bankruptcy of the soil’s biological wealth.”
I wonder if, as the crew of Artemis II looked back at our planet — unique, in the known universe, for its biological wealth — as it became small in the rear window, they considered this slow-motion bankruptcy. Or given the news as they headed home, perhaps its fast-forward destruction was more front-of-mind.
Tim Smedley, The Editor, The New Climate.
