Role of Young People in the Fight Against Climate Change.

According to UN reports, there are 3.5 billion people under 30 living on the planet, that makes half of the population. 1.8 billion people are adolescents or early adults, ranging from the age of 15 to 24. Half of all youth reside in the developing countries. Our world has never seen so many young people. Following the international saying, “children are the future”, then, youth is the present. Apart from being the most well-educated generation in all history, with the highest numbers when it comes to literacy, entrepreneurship, social engagement, etc., young people, regardless of their nationality, face one common problem: Climate Change.

“If we let them, young people will be the world’s
most powerful solution.” — Denise Dunning

As stated by the Stockholm Resilience Center (SRC), a Swedish research center focused in socio-environmental resilience, climate change along with other major problems account for the 9 Planetary Boundaries — a group of quantitative planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. Crossing these boundaries increases the risk of generating large-scale abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. The bad news is: we are crossing the threshold faster than what we thought. Recent evidence published by the SRC show that we have reached a point at which the loss of summer polar sea-ice is almost certainly irreversible. Sea level rise is a growing concern, especially for small islands nations, like Fiji, Maldives, or Tuvalu. The latest IPCC reports indicate that we are not on track to reach the 2ºC goal agreed upon the Paris Agreement. Youth is and will be directly affected by all the changes that happen in the environment. That makes it the perfect group to take the lead towards developing solutions to tackle Climate Change.

Read the story from Medium by Thales Dantas - “Role of Young People in the Fight Against Climate Change.”

The Site of an Environmentalist’s Deadly Act of Protest

On a Saturday morning in the spring of 2018, an environmentalist and former L.G.B.T.Q.-rights lawyer named David Buckel stood on a berm of grass in Prospect Park, doused himself in gasoline, and set himself on fire. Minutes before, he had e-mailed prominent media outlets a lengthy cri de coeur against the environmental devastation we are daily wreaking on the Earth. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” he wrote.

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Buckel’s death succeeded in provoking a brief flurry of press coverage. But then the media cycle moved on. (“A Man Set Himself on Fire. We Barely Noticed.” an Op-Ed headline in the Times read.) Unlike other famous self-immolation protests, such as that of the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc, in 1963, or the Tunisian produce vender Mohamed Bouazizi, in 2010, Buckel’s death was not photographed, and thus the grisly scene did not sear itself into the public consciousness. This was perhaps by design: Buckel chose to end his life early in the morning, as the day broke, seemingly to minimize the number of witnesses. Next to his remains, first responders discovered an identification lanyard and an additional handwritten note directed at them. The note concluded, “I apologize to you for the mess.”

Read the story from The NewYorker by Chris Wiley - “The Site of an Environmentalist’s Deadly Act of Protest.”

The African Anthropocene

Every year, human activity moves more sediment and rock than all natural processes combined, including erosion and rivers. This might not shock you. In fact, you’ve probably seen similar soundbites circulating online, signals of the sheer scale of how we’re terraforming the planet in the era of the Anthropocene. Natural and social scientists argue passionately about almost everything Anthropocenic, from the nuances of nomenclature to the start-date of the new geological epoch, but most agree on one thing: the Earth will outlive humanity. What’s in doubt is how long we will populate the planet, and under what conditions.

But who, exactly, are ‘we’?

Consider the cover of Nature in March 2015, in which two Earths, one blue-green and one grey, are entangled in a human body. The title emblazoned across the man’s six-pack invites us to see this body as representative of ‘the human’. But there’s no such thing as a generic human, of course; the image repeats the centuries-old conflation of human with white man. Perhaps the artist sought to subvert such racist overtones by obscuring the man’s eyes, making him an unseeing subject blind to the damage he’s wreaked on his body and his planet. Still, the image impels a common critique of the Anthropocene concept: it attributes ecological collapse to an undifferentiated ‘humanity’, when in practice both responsibility and vulnerability are unevenly distributed.

Read the story from Aeon by Gabrielle Hecht - “The African Anthropocene.”

What is the 6th Mass Extinction?

The planet is undergoing a sixth mass extinction: so that means it’s the sixth time in the history of life on Earth that global fauna has experienced a major collapse in numbers.

The Amur leopard is critically endangered.

In short, it’s human caused. While we consume things, words and the internet, something more important is actually occurring around us. You know, to Vehicle Earth and the environment.

This isn’t an Earth Day litany, this is the environmental apocalypse. A lot of people just don’t get it and are too short sighted to care.

Earth has supported life for 3.5 billion years, but its hospitality is hardly consistent. There are these global “resets” on what life can or could be. Human beings have devastated global biodiversity in a very short period.

Read the story from Medium by Michael K. Spencer - ”What is the 6th Mass Extinction?”

Those 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed

It’s often said that of all the published scientific research on climate change, 97% of the papers conclude that global warming is real, problematic for the planet, and has been exacerbated by human activity.

Hard to deny.

But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics have suggested that the authors of studies indicating that climate change is not real, not harmful, or not man-made are bravely standing up for the truth, like maverick thinkers of the past. (Galileo is often invoked, though his fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions—it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.)

Not so, according to a review published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology. The researchers tried to replicate the results of those 3% of papers—a common way to test scientific studies—and found biased, faulty results.

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, worked with a team of researchers to look at the 38 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last decade that denied anthropogenic global warming.

Read the Quartz story by Katherine Ellen Foley - “Those 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed.”

Clearing the air: who should do the most to tackle climate change?

In the balmy waters off Queensland’s coast grows a red algae that promises to help rescue the planet.

Whose responsibility is climate change?

Sprinkled into the feed of cows, trials show the super-seaweed can all but eliminate greenhouse gas emissions produced by their burps and flatulence.

But the algae – Asparagopsis taxiformis - has never been farmed at scale. Scuba divers must painstakingly pluck it from the ocean. As research founder Rob Kinley of the CSIRO says, the challenges of commercial production are immense.

“The potential is global ... but the barrier is the supply of seaweed. The scale of that is monstrous,” Kinley said.

Read the story by Nicole Hasham from The Age - “Clearing the air: who should do the most to tackle climate change?”

GDP is destroying the planet. Here’s an alternative.

GDP is a poor measure of progress — it increases as we destroy the natural capital of the planet.

The value of the planet needs to be factored into our financial system.

We need economic growth, but we cannot continue to measure it using GDP. We need a ‘quality adjusted’ GDP linked to transactions which recognise how much social and natural capital they are building.

Although the International Energy Association reported that carbon emissions stabilised for 3 years in the 2014–2016, the best estimates for 2017, which are waiting formal confirmation, are that they increased 2%. This is in the context of Christina Figueres, former chair of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, together with leading scientists, saying that we have “three years for carbon emissions to peak and drop rapidly to avoid catastrophic climate change”. That was June 2017. We now have two years.

Read the World Economic Forum story - “GDP is destroying the planet. Here’s an alternative.”

Learn about the important work of 350.org

350 uses online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions to oppose new coal, oil and gas projects, take money out of the companies that are heating up the planet, and build 100% clean energy solutions that work for all. 350's network extends to 188 countries.

Learn more about the important work of 350.org here.

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.

Cattle at an illegal settlement in the Jamanxim National
 Forest, state of Para, northern Brazil, November 29, 2009.
With 1,3 million hectares, the Jamanxim National Forest
is today a microsm that replicates what happens in the
 Amazon, where thousands of hectares of land are prey of
 illegal woodcutters, stock breeders and gold miners. 

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

Read the story by the environment editor The Guardian, Damian Carrington - “Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth.”