Combatting the frustration of slow change in a time of crisis

I talk a lot about the need for rapid systemic change, and I sometimes worry that I don’t do a good enough job drawing a line between the kinds of individual action for which I advocate, and the scale of change that I want to see in the world. I’ve been hoping for something to help build a sort of social momentum on climate change for a long time. Back in 2011 or so, I started advocating for members of the New England Quaker community who could, to contribute to a loan fund so members of that community could get zero-interest loans for stuff like solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and so on. The idea was to have people pay back the loan out of savings on their power bills (always assuming they could afford to), and then contribute a little extra, as able, to grow the fund and help the next person. Ideally, over time, the number of people helped by that project would grow, and the speed at which they could make change would increase. There have definitely been a number of group efforts on solar panel installation since then, but I don’t know if anything that organized ever cropped up.

Since then, as you may have noticed, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to address the systemic problems that are blocking climate action, but that basic principle remains the same – if you have the patience to do things right at the beginning, you build a movement that’s flexible, hard to eradicate, and capable of achieving great things seemingly overnight. Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay that discussed similar topics a while back, and she recently shared this cartoon illustrating a section of that essay.

For those of you who can’t see it, the image in the tweet is three horizontal, rectangular panels, arranged vertically under the title, “Mushroomed:”. The top panel has a picture of a single mushroom, the second shows several in a cluster, and the third shows a cross-section of the soil, revealing all of those mushrooms to be part of the same organism lying beneath the soil. The images are accompanied by the following excerpt from Solnit’s essay:

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus.

The passage in question then goes on to make the metaphor explicit:

Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and participants in social media. To many, it seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.

Right now we’re at the foundation-laying stage. We’re forming those underground connections (called “hyphae“, if you’re interested), and extending our ability to interact, pool resources, and plan for the future. For me, this process is frustrating, and painfully slow, but it’s important to recognize that the small actions we take can be part of much larger change, especially of those actions are made with the larger change in mind. Altering consumer choices is an “individual change”, but it’s one that has proven itself to be incapable of supporting the more dramatic change that we need. To switch back to the building metaphor, it’s a weak foundation. It might support a small shack above, but any attempt at something bigger will collapse.

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Ground-breaking research expedition gives dire new meaning to “glacial speed”

For a while now, glaciologists have been worried that as the oceans warm and rise, coastal glaciers will be lifted clear of the sea floor, allowing them to flow much faster. The Thwaites glacier in Antarctica has been of particular concern, because it’s holding back enough ice to raise global sea levels by as much as ten feet. If the glacier starts flowing into the ocean faster, the ice behind it will also speed up. As you can imagine, knowing the shape of the sea floor is key to understanding and predicting what the glacier will do. More than that, it can give us insight into what the glacier has done in the past.

And what it has done in the past is worrisome, to say the least:

For the first time, scientists mapped in high-resolution a critical area of the seafloor in front of the glacier that gives them a window into how fast Thwaites retreated and moved in the past. The stunning imagery shows geologic features that are new to science, and also provides a kind of crystal ball to see into Thwaites’ future. In people and ice sheets alike, past behavior is key to understanding future behavior.

The team documented more than 160 parallel ridges that were created, like a footprint, as the glacier’s leading edge retreated and bobbed up and down with the daily tides. “It’s as if you are looking at a tide gauge on the seafloor,” said Graham. “It really blows my mind how beautiful the data are.”

The image is a collage of pictures showing renderings of the sea floor, with regular

a–d, Examples of high-frequency sidescan imagery illustrating the back-stepping conformity of ridge shape (a), non-alignment of ribs to underlying lineations (b), rib formation on terraces (c) and the ‘beading’ (red circle) and overprinting (red arrow) of existing subglacial features (d). e, Multibeam hillshade showing fine-scale landforms, <20 cm high, crossing lineation ridges and grooves. f, Corresponding profile X–X′, demonstrating the subtle geometries of some of the landforms (5–20 cm) and their surprising depth (>740 m). g,h, Multibeam swath bathymetry covering the longest series of ribs (profile Y–Y′ and Z–Z′ combined; stars mark start and end of profile sections). Inset shows close-up example of lateral continuity in the southern portion of the ribs. Black arrows in ‘b’ mark lateral continuation of one oblique ridge. Yellow arrows in each image show ice flow direction inferred from lineations.

Beauty aside, what’s alarming is that the rate of Thwaites’ retreat that scientists have documented more recently are small compared to the fastest rates of change in its past, said Graham.

Yeah, “alarming” feels like the right word.

With global warming, it’s not just the changes that are happening that causes problems – it’s the speed. Faster changes mean more people dead. It really is that simple. That’s also why slower action to respond to climate change means more people dead. We know that this sea level rise is coming, we know we’re not ready for it, and we’re doing next to nothing to get ready. The death-cult of Neoliberalism, with its dogmatic adherence to laissez-faire capitalism, could not have taken over the United States at a worse time.

To understand Thwaites’ past retreat, the team analyzed the rib-like formations submerged 700 meters (just under half a mile) beneath the polar ocean and factored in the tidal cycle for the region, as predicted by computer models, to show that one rib must have been formed every single day.

At some point in the last 200 years, over a duration of less than six months, the front of glacier lost contact with a seabed ridge and retreated at a rate of more than 2.1 kilometers per year (1.3 miles per year) — twice the rate documented using satellites between 2011 and 2019.

“Our results suggest that pulses of very rapid retreat have occurred at Thwaites Glacier in the last two centuries, and possibly as recently as the mid-20th Century,” said Graham.

“Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails, and we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future – even from one year to the next – once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed,” said marine geophysicist and study co-author, Robert Larter, from the British Antarctic Survey.

Completely aside from its implications, this mission was an accomplishment all on its own. Getting close to the edge of a rapidly retreating glacier is difficult and dangerous. In this case, it was only possible because of record lows in sea ice, combined with advances in technology.

To collect the imagery and supporting geophysical data, the team, which included scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, launched a state-of-the-art orange robotic vehicle loaded with imaging sensors called ‘Rán’ from the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer during an expedition in 2019. Rán, operated by scientists at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, embarked on a 20-hour mission that was as risky as it was serendipitous, Graham said. It mapped an area of the seabed in front of the glacier about the size of Houston – and did so in extreme conditions during an unusual summer notable for its lack of sea ice. This allowed scientists to access the glacier front for the first time in history.

Anna Wåhlin, a physical oceanographer from the University of Gothenburg who deployed Rán at Thwaites, said, “This was a pioneering study of the ocean floor, made possible by recent technological advancements in autonomous ocean mapping and a bold decision by the Wallenberg foundation to invest into this research infrastructure. The images Ran collected give us vital insights into the processes happening at the critical junction between the glacier and the ocean today.”

“It was truly a once in a lifetime mission,” said Graham, who said the team would like to sample the seabed sediments directly so they can more accurately date the ridge-like features. “But the ice closed in on us pretty quickly and we had to leave before we could do that on this expedition,” he said.

While many questions remain, one thing’s for sure: It used to be that scientists thought of the Antarctic ice sheets as sluggish and slow to respond, but that’s simply not true, said Graham.

“Just a small kick to Thwaites could lead to a big response,” he said.

And that brings us back to our regularly scheduled existential dread!

I believe this glacial retreat, and associated sea level rise are going to happen. I do not think it is a question of “if”, but of “when”. I suppose it is hypothetically possible that all of the world’s rich and powerful decide to completely change how they’ve always behaved. It’s “possible” that they could invest in truly dealing with climate change and its attendant problems. Were that to happen, it’s possible that through herculean effort, we could even stop the warming in my lifetime. Maybe.

I think it is equally possible that I will be named king of the world.

The unfortunate reality is that before we can devote the needed time and resources to climate mitigation and adaptation, we need revolutionary political and economic change. It’s my hope that in working towards that will also push more incremental change, like the recent climate bill. Things like that will never be enough to solve the problem, but they can slow things down, and buy us the time that this research shows we very much need.

This is one more warning among so many that it almost feels like white noise at this point. I think that could be a very real danger. In addition to our propensity to think that “the weather has always been like this”, after a certain point we just don’t have the energy to get worked up over every new apocalyptic update. I think the antidote to that is to keep the focus on the step we’re currently on – building collective power. Networking and organization aren’t just tools for affecting political change – they can also make a community more resilient, and better able to survive the disasters that our governments are too corrupt and incompetent to prevent.

When disaster strikes, humanity is always forced back to our single greatest strength – the ability to work together to achieve more than any of us could alone. Warnings like this give us a heads-up that we need to be exercising that muscle now, so that it’s fit for purpose when we really need it.

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Good news: Bioengineered photosynthesis hack promises to dramatically increase yields in a variety of crops

Norman Borlaug is widely credited for saving a billion people from starvation. This comes from his development of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties, which play a real role in the over-abundance of food we currently produce. It remains the fact that, despite hunger still being a big problem in the world, we produce enough food to feed billions more people than are currently alive. Nobody starves because we can’t feed them – they starve because their miserable deaths are more profitable than their lives. That said, I fully expect climate change to cause ever-increasing difficulties for the conventional farming practices on which we rely. This means that even if we do manage to build a society that values life, we may be hard-pressed to grow enough food to keep people alive on a rapidly warming planet. No matter what the future holds, Borlaug’s work will continue saving lives in to the future. It now appears that there may be another similar advance in another staple crop – soybeans:

Photosynthesis, the natural process all plants use to convert sunlight into energy and yield, is a surprisingly inefficient 100+ step process that RIPE researchers have been working to improve for more than a decade. In this first-of-its-kind work, recently published in Science, the group improved the VPZ construct within the soybean plant to improve photosynthesis and then conducted field trials to see if yield would be improved as a result.

The VPZ construct contains three genes that code for proteins of the xanthophyll cycle, which is a pigment cycle that helps in the photoprotection of the plants. Once in full sunlight, this cycle is activated in the leaves to protect them from damage, allowing leaves to dissipate the excess energy. However, when the leaves are shaded (by other leaves, clouds, or the sun moving in the sky) this photoprotection needs to switch off so the leaves can continue the photosynthesis process with a reserve of sunlight. It takes several minutes for the plant to switch off the protective mechanism, costing plants valuable time that could have been used for photosynthesis.

The overexpression of the three genes from the VPZ construct accelerates the process, so every time a leaf transitions from light to shade the photoprotection switches off faster. Leaves gain extra minutes of photosynthesis which, when added up throughout the entire growing season, increases the total photosynthetic rate. This research has shown that despite achieving a more than 20% increase in yield, seed quality was not impacted.

“Despite higher yield, seed protein content was unchanged. This suggests some of the extra energy gained from improved photosynthesis was likely diverted to the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the plant’s nodules,” said RIPE Director Stephen Long (CABBI/BSD/GEGC), Ikenberry Endowed University Chair of Crop Sciences and Plant Biology.

This is very, very, very good news. As a species, we currently get about 17% of our protein from the oceans, and that is devastating oceanic ecosystems. While many of us really need to decrease our protein intake, the fact remains that we need to stop commercial fishing. That means that we’re going to need alternate sources of protein – doubly so because we really ought to get rid of most animal agriculture (though we need to keep some for those with dietary restrictions, and we need to guarantee access to good food, so the decrease in animal agriculture doesn’t suddenly make it astronomically expensive to exist if you require meat to survive). As with most innovations, this one by itself isn’t going to solve all our problems. That said, this could solve a lot of problems, and make it much easier to feed people despite the decline in good farming conditions around the world.

What’s more, this innovation is not limited to soybeans – it seems like it could be used for a wide variety of crops:

The researchers first tested their idea in tobacco plants because of the ease of transforming the crop’s genetics and the amount of seeds that can be produced from a single plant. These factors allow researchers to go from genetic transformation to a field trial within months. Once the concept was proven in tobacco, they moved into the more complicated task of putting the genetics into a food crop, soybeans.

“Having now shown very substantial yield increases in both tobacco and soybean, two very different crops, suggests this has universal applicability,” said Long. “Our study shows that realizing yield improvements is strongly affected by the environment. It is critical to determine the repeatability of this result across environments and further improvements to ensure the environmental stability of the gain.”

Additional field tests of these transgenic soybean plants are being conducted this year, with results expected in early 2023.

“The major impact of this work is to open the roads for showing that we can bioengineer photosynthesis and improve yields to increase food production in major crops,” said De Souza. “It is the beginning of the confirmation that the ideas ingrained by the RIPE project are a successful means to improve yield in major food crops.”

The RIPE project and its sponsors are committed to ensuring Global Access and making the project’s technologies available to the farmers who need them the most.

“This has been a road of more than a quarter century for me personally,” said Long. “Starting first with a theoretical analysis of theoretical efficiency of crop photosynthesis, simulation of the complete process by high-performance computation, followed by application of optimization routines that indicated several bottlenecks in the process in our crops. Funding support over the past ten years has now allowed us to engineer alleviation of some of these indicated bottlenecks and test the products at field scale. After years of trial and tribulation, it is wonderfully rewarding to see such a spectacular result for the team.”

Combined with changes in farming practices, an increase in indoor farming, and increased reliance on things like microalgae and edible bacteria, this could save billions of lives, if we can build a society that sees that as a thing worth doing.

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Shocking and unexpected news! Overfishing and climate change are bad for fish!

So, I actually think there’s a lot of value in doing research on subjects with “obvious” answers. We’ve done a lot of damage to this planet by assuming we already know what’s what, and I think that it would be reckless and short-sighted to assume that because we know more than we used to, we don’t need to examine what we think we know. That doesn’t mean wandering through life in a state of existential befuddlement, but it does mean scientists actually taking the time to check that we’re right.

This kind of research is also useful in a world full of highly-paid industry propagandists who spend all of their time finding ways to spread doubt about the harm done by various industries. In this case, the fishing industry, and the fossil fuel industry (because of course).

Researchers at UBC, the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and University of Bern projected the impact that different global temperature increases and ranges of fishing activity would have on biomass, or the amount of fish by weight in a given area, from 1950 to 2100. Their simulations suggest that climate change has reduced fish stocks in 103 of 226 marine regions studied, including Canada, from their historical levels. These stocks will struggle to rebuild their numbers under projected global warming levels in the 21st century.

“More conservation-oriented fisheries management is essential to rebuild over-exploited fish stocks under climate change. However, that alone is not enough,” says lead author Dr. William Cheung, professor in the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF). “Climate mitigation is important for our fish stock rebuilding plans to be effective”

The research team, including co- author Dr. Colette Wabnitz of Stanford Centre for Ocean Solutions, used computer models to find out the climate change levels at which over-exploited fish stocks cannot rebuild. Currently, the world is on track to exceed 1.5 degrees of warming relative to preindustrial levels and approach two degrees in the next few decades, says Dr. Cheung.

The study projected that, on average, when fisheries management focuses on the highest sustainable catch per year, the additional climate impacts on fish at 1.8 degrees Celsius warming would see fish stocks unable to rebuild themselves.

If people around the world fished only three quarters of the annual highest sustainable catch, fish stocks would be unable to rebuild at a higher degree of warming, 4.5 degrees.

That last bit strikes me either over-optimistic, or over-pessimistic. I do believe that if we were to dramatically decrease fishing, fish populations would recover, even with another degree of warming, but at 4 degrees? At that point it seems like mass extinction would be far more likely than not, even without overfishing. Still, if we get to that temperature and we haven’t made dramatic change to society, I doubt that we’ll have the capacity for over-fishing, even if we do somehow still exist, and still have most of our current technology.

On the one hand, I appreciate the rosy view of the future. I also would like to think that there would be a way for humanity to thrive even at those temperatures, but I think that in order to get there, we will have to have already solved problems like overfishing. This article feels a bit like the whole “end of history” thing, where it’s assumed that Liberal Democracy with minor adjustments is the “final form” of human politics, and the need for revolutionary change – despite all evidence to the contrary – is a thing of the past.

It is entirely possible that I’m reading far too much into this, but I feel like it’s an example of how the indoctrination of our society has placed boundaries on the kinds of society we’re capable of imagining. I don’t know whether those limitations also influence the design of models like this. I certainly hope they don’t, but when I see that kind of projection, I do have to wonder what’s being missed because nobody involved in the research would even think to check it. It’s not a new problem by any stretch, nor is it limited to our society. I think this is a concern in any society, which is part of why institutionalized hierarchies seem like a dangerous thing to have normalized. I mainly focus on the society in which I live, because I can clearly see the path that we’re on because of it, and it does not look good.

I suppose this is an odd conclusion for an article about fish populations, but I think there’s a degree to which we need to become more comfortable with political uncertainty. Not the “will the president try to become a dictator?” kind, but rather “our society is flexible enough that we might briefly form a formal institution in order to get something particular done, and then dissolve that institution”. Maybe a circumstance will arise in which we need a corporate structure with incentives to work particular jobs, but that doesn’t mean that that institution will need to exist in perpetuity. The same is true of governments, nations, and borders. There may be a case for setting certain geographical boundaries – bioregionalism is interesting, and when it comes to commons like the oceans, it’s clear that some coordination is required.

But I think we may need to let go of the notion of an ever-lasting government as a means of achieving security and stability. It doesn’t seem to be providing either very well, especially with a global perspective.

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What Evo Morales did for Bolivia

When I was a kid, and nobody knew what an asshole Scott Adams is, I loved reading Dilbert. I think part of it was that I spent a fair amount of time hanging out at the office where my dad worked, so office humor clicked with me. I’m bringing this up because as far as I know, a Dilbert strip was the first time I was made aware of the existence of Bolivia. Basically, Dogbert gets extremely rich, goes a little power-crazy, and “buys Bolivia”. In context, Bolivia was cast as poor and possibly backwards, like the fictional nation of Elbonia. Bolivia was a poor country, and that’s all there was to it.

I learned more as life went on, but it wasn’t until I heard Michael Brooks talking about Evo Morales on The Majority Report that I actually started learning anything about the country of Bolivia, rather than the comic strip stereotype. As with most South American countries, Bolivia has a large Native American population that has largely been kept out of power by the Europeans who made up the country’s government. It’s a story of colonialism, oppression, and genocide, and as with all such stories, the idea that Bolivia is “poor” was always a lie. The poverty experienced by the Bolivian people was in service to the enrichment of their rulers, and of capitalists on a global scale. Most recently, Bolivia has gained attention for its rich supply of lithium, and those watching events were quick to point at that the coup that removed Evo Morales from power in 2019 was likely tied to the decision to nationalize Bolivia’s lithium industry, and to focus on Bolivian manufacturing. That meant that rather than selling raw lithium on the international market, and then buying it back in products at a markup to enrich other people, Bolivia would make products in Bolivia, and sell those, thus keeping the profits from that industry within Bolivia. This would definitely cut into the profits of those people currently relying on cheap lithium to get rich off things like electric cars and house batteries, and so it wasn’t a stretch to assume that this coup, like many others around the world, was about preserving the wealth and power of the capitalist class. I think that this case is strengthened by evidence of ongoing efforts to prevent Morales’ MAS party from returning to power, following the bloody failure that was the brief Añez regime.

Edit: As was pointed out in the comments, it IS worth mentioning that Morales seeking a third term came after he had served two terms, and had championed a constitution limiting presidents to two terms.

I’m writing all of this as an introduction to a twitter thread I came across that I thought was worth sharing. Morales served as president of Bolivia from 2006 until the 2019 coup. At the time, I heard people saying that him being president for that long was “dictator behavior”, and evidence that the coup might be the sort of uprising we ought to support. I did not hear any clear answer as to why that wouldn’t also justify an uprising against Angela Merkel, who was Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. When there’s controversy surrounding a politician, people find things to hate, and find excuses to justify their hatred. That can make it difficult to figure out what’s actually going on. At times like that, I find it useful to look not at the rhetoric and claims being made, but at the material circumstances. What effect did the governance of Morales and the MAS party have on the people of Bolivia?

The answer to such a question is always going to be complicated, but I think this is one of those times where it’s safe to say that Morales’ government did good things for his country. This thread is a decent look at why people support him, and the MAS party more broadly:

There’s this weird phenomenon, where if people have a bad feeling about a particular politician, any bad things at all will be justification enough to condemn them wholly. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this myself, and I think it’s a destructive shortcut we take to avoid the work of learning more about the actual material situation in question. The system that the MAS party has started creating is not a utopia, but it seems to be a lot better than the hell-world capitalism has been creating.

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Flooding in Pakistan highlights the need for global solidarity.

In this Age of Endless Recovery, we’re being treated to a rolling barrage of escalating climate disasters. The increasing frequency of extreme events is already making it clear that having a global society like ours comes with unique vulnerabilities. Our just-in-time system has no room or redundancy for the kinds of disruption that we’re just starting to see. Those people in the United States who’ve been under the misapprehension that their nation and lives are somehow removed from the rest of the world, are going to be increasingly confronted by the economic effects of climate change, even if they somehow manage to tune out the human effects.

And while climate activists and “communicators” try frame the issue in terms of how it will directly affect some of the most insulated people in the world, other people are fighting to survive.

Pakistan declared a national emergency on Friday as catastrophic monsoon rains, exacerbated by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, continued to pummel the country for the third consecutive month.

Since mid-June, flash floods and landslides across the South Asian nation have killed least at 937 people, injured more than 1,300, and destroyed well over half a million homes, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. In addition, nearly 800,000 livestock have died and at least 1,900 miles of roads and 145 bridges have been wiped out, disrupting the supply of food and further driving up prices.

This is a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions,” Sherry Rehman, the nation’s climate change minister, told reporters on Thursday.

“Pakistan is going through its eighth cycle of monsoon while normally the country has only three to four cycles of rain,” said Rehman. “The percentages of super flood torrents are shocking.”

More than 100 districts across Pakistan’s four provinces have been hit by flooding since the start of the monsoon season. The impacts have been especially devastating in the southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan, which have received 784% and 496% more rain this month compared with the August average, according to the minister.

The two provinces have lost at least 306 and 234 people, respectively, and tens of thousands more have been forced to live in makeshift camps far away from their inundated cities and towns.

“Thirty-three million have been affected in different ways,” said Rehman. “The final homeless figure is being assessed.”

https://twitter.com/Joyce_Karam/status/1563252444179492866?

Countries like the US should be helping Pakistan because they have the resources to do so (assuming they ever decide they stand for more than enabling the ultra-rich), but also out of self-interest. It’s hard to predict who’s going to get hit next, or when the next major supply chain disruption will come. We’re entering a period of time in which trying to maintain “business as usual” will be increasingly destructive and dangerous. The longer the warming continues, the more we’re all going to need help, and the less we’ll be able to afford to support a useless and negligent ruling class.

Now is the time for those nations with the means to reach out to people and nations in need of help, both to improve the resilience of those who are currently struggling, and to build up more solidarity and trust between people, groups, and nations. It’s something that the aforementioned useless ruling class ought to be doing. It’s also something that they will not do.

The good news is that with the internet, we can network internationally, and hopefully start building connections between the working classes of various countries. That could be a good tool for generating empathy in the imperial core, and for breaking through people’s personal bubbles.

I don’t know if there’s much any of us can do about the death and suffering in Pakistan right now, at least directly. Keep an eye out for ways to help, of course, but in many ways the best thing an average resident of the U.S. can do is work to change how the U.S. government conducts itself. This is not only key to actually doing good for humanity with the riches of “the richest nation on the planet”, but also to ending a pattern of military and political interference.

In light of what’s happening to the climate, we really don’t have time for the petty and destructive games of a spoiled and callous aristocracy.

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Man the tredges! We must protect children from air pollution!

Every once in a while, I like to talk about the benefits of incorporating plant life in and our buildings and cities. In addition to the mental health benefits, which I think are reason enough, there’s ample evidence that more plant life can reduce the harmful effects of air pollution. This is another one of those times when it’s so obvious something’s a good idea, I find it perplexing that more cities aren’t investing more heavily in urban vegetation. I know a great many cities around the world have been doing just that, but as ever, it’s not enough to satisfy me.

So, here’s some more evidence that we should have more plants around us:

A team of researchers led by Barbara Maher, Emeritus Professor at Lancaster University, and supported by Groundwork Greater Manchester, installed ‘tredges’ (trees managed as a head-high hedge) at three Manchester primary schools during the summer school holidays of 2019.

One school had an ivy screen installed, another had western red cedar and the third school had a mixture of western red cedar, Swedish birch and an inner juniper hedge. A fourth school, with no planting, was used as a control.

The school with the ivy screen saw a substantial reduction in playground particulate matter concentrations, but an increase in black carbon. The playground with the mixture of planting saw lower reductions in air pollution to that of the western red cedar.

The biggest overall reductions in particulate matter and black carbon were shown at the school with western red cedar planted. The results showed almost half (49%) of black carbon and around 46% and 26% of the fine particulates, PM2.5 and PM1 emitted by passing traffic were captured by the western red cedar tredges.

The tredges also significantly reduced the magnitude and frequency of acute ‘spikes’ in air pollution reaching the playgrounds.

Professor Maher said: “Our findings show that we can protect school playgrounds, with carefully chosen and managed tredges, which capture air pollution particulates on their leaves. This helps to prevent at least some of the health hazards imposed on young children at schools next to busy roads where the localised air quality is damagingly poor, and it can be done quickly and cost-effectively.”

I could never have predicted that becoming a writer would one day lead me to learning the word, “tredges”. That said, I’m not surprised that I’m learning about this from researchers in England.

It seems pretty clear that this is a good investment. It also seems like the kind of thing that parents interested in direct action could band together to demand, or even just do. I’m not speaking from experience, but I expect this would be hard for local politicians to oppose, and easy to unite parents around, regardless of ideology. There may be parents out there who wouldn’t support better health for their children, but I doubt there are many.

There are a lot of small things that most communities are capable of doing for themselves, but that don’t get done. I think at least some of that is people just not realizing that they have the resources they need, but a lot of it is the likelihood that any good will be undone by the system that’s supposed to be working for us. Where that system is working against us, it may be worth doing something like – in this case – putting up a hedge, without waiting for permission. If one were to do that, I imagine it would be best to have signs attached to it, explaining what it’s for, and encouraging people to fight to keep it. Even if one lost such a fight in the short term – if the hedge (or tredge) is destroyed because the right paperwork wasn’t filled out, then that would become something around which you could rally support.

There are a lot of problems in the United States caused by activist parents making noise at school board meetings and other such local political events. This seems like a way to activate people in a more constructive direction by using similar tactics (assuming that getting your tredges isn’t as easy as I think it ought to be). Getting a hedge put between a play area and a road is a small enough change that I think most people will believe that it’s within reach, which will make them more likely to put in the effort to make it happen. I also believe it that the conversation about the benefits of greenery for children could fairly easily be turned to conversations about air pollution and greenery in general, waging a campaign like that could well make people think about what other things they could accomplish by working together. I don’t know whether good fences really make good neighbors, but good tredges definitely make better neighborhoods.

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Video: What Siberia’s sinkholes mean for the climate

This week has been hectic and exhausting for a number of largely unrelated reasons. I’ll have something more substantial up tomorrow, but in the meantime, this video is a good look at something worrisome that’s been happening in the Arctic. Some of you may remember hearing about a number of larger, bizarre craters appearing in Siberia. As I followed the story, it became pretty clear that the culprit was the explosive release of a gas buildup under the permafrost. I had assumed that the gas buildup was from microbial activity in newly thawed organic matter, but it turns out they’re actually from a different scary problem.

Apparently, the permafrost has been acting as a lid on oil and gas deposits for the last few hundred thousands years, and now that it’s thawing, the methane from those deposits is finding its way to the surface. This isn’t methane from rotting permafrost, it’s climate change just releasing natural gas into the atmosphere. It’s currently not certain that these are a new phenomenon. It seems likely that they are, but all we can currently say is that this is new to science. The best-case scenario is that this has been happening all along. Given how rapidly these craters turn into lakes that look the same as other permafrost lakes, it is possible that even prior to the recent warming, this is just one way in which the permafrost has always “bubbled”.

Personally, I’m inclined to believe that these are either a new thing, or an old thing that is becoming much more common. As ever, bad news doesn’t much change what needs to be done. Do what you can to build collective power, and community resilience. Do what you can to move politics and political discourse leftwards, and in keeping with those ideals, do what you can to take care of yourselves.

Video: Carbon offsets

Since the environmental movement gained popularity, corporations have been finding ways to profit off of people’s reasonable desire to safeguard the ecosystems around us. These greenwashing tactics tend to be actively counterproductive. They encourage people to believe that the problem is being solved, often by the very people who are causing it. This absorption of movements for systemic change has been extremely effective in preventing that change from actually occurring, and the same has been true of climate action. Carbon offsets are a part of this. The idea makes sense in a vacuum. If you assume that society is making a good-faith effort to deal with climate change, there will still be some fossil fuel use for at least another few decades, and one way to reduce that harm is to actually work to capture carbon, to balance it out.

Works in theory, but unfortunately, everything is still run by capitalists, who have a powerful motivation to make sure nothing changes in any meaningful way. As always, John Oliver does an excellent job breaking down exactly why carbon offsets are a scam.