Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The UK has just three decades to reach net-zero emissions and tree planting has emerged as a prominent part of the government’s plan to get there.
With technological solutions in their infancy, trees are for now the only scalable “negative emissions” strategy and can come with additional benefits for wildlife, flood management and health.
Coronavirus has put the kibosh on frivolous travel for the moment, but we might want to do some reflecting before returning to business as usual. Prior to the outbreak, you were constantly told to put on your traveling shoes, cue up some good music for a journey (no, not the band Journey), and pack your bags. But maybe this is the perfect time to start a new conversation about travel and begin aligning our actions with our values.
But we aren’t hopeless bystanders in this fight; we can’t stick our heads in the sand like cartoon ostriches and pretend this isn’t happening. As luck would have it, there is a successful strategy we can use – and we must – to flatten the curve and slow the spread of coronavirus: altruism.
A wave of student-led actions swept across the campuses of around 60 U.S. and Canadian schools last month, as students turned to sit-ins, walkouts and banner drops to pressure universities into divesting their endowments from fossil fuel companies. Called “Divestment Day” by activists, the Feb. 13 series of actions was just the latest escalation for a movement that’s been undergoing a serious revival.
Replenishing and protecting the world’s soil carbon stores could help to offset up to 5.5bn tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, a study finds.
This is just under the current annual emissions of the US, the world’s second largest polluter after China.
Around 40% of this carbon offsetting potential would come from protecting existing soil carbon stores in the world’s existing forests, peatlands and wetlands, the authors say.
Long before the COVID-19 outbreak, fracking firms in the Permian Basin were experiencing a downturn. Now the dramatic devaluation of oil prices will likely bring the already declining drilling boom in the country’s shale regions to a near halt.
“I want to preserve the integrity of organic because there is so much confusion in labels making it hard for consumers to know what they’re getting,” Ron says. “The word organic needs to mean what it says.”
The point to make in this article is of the need to self isolate and/or practice social distancing, at the same time as maintaining economic activity as best we can. There will be no one size fits all ways of doing it and each person will have to improvise during this crisis.
Public Health. What is that, really? It’s not just the services of research institutions, public education, medical professionals, hospitals, equipment, medicines, emergency rooms, insurance and such. It’s a healthy public. The question arising now is: What can we do, as a society, to support a healthy public?
At Post Carbon Institute we have been closely monitoring the global COVID-19 pandemic and encouraging our staff, volunteers, and broader community to take great caution and practice social distancing. But that doesn’t mean we should disengage.
If we really care about the health of people and planet, we should think twice before we decide to spend money on accelerating this destructive trajectory. While it is essential that jobs are maintained and undue hardship is avoided, propping up the status quo is not the only option available.
Artists are enlisted to help ‘deliver the message’ and ‘raise awareness’, as though art were a sophisticated extension of the PR department or a cheap alternative to an advertising agency. This is not only a misconception of what art is and what it’s good at, it’s also a misconception of the knowledge work that remains, when the scientists reach the end of their road.
