Two Plans for Climate Action; Talk on the Urgent Need to Act Now
In This Issue:
Project Drawdown - The Climate Mobilization -
Los Angeles Declares A Climate Emergency - Professor Kevin Anderson Talk on the Compelling Reasons to Act - Upcoming Events: Missouri Coalition for the Environment - Columbia Climate Candidate Forum & CAAP Update - Advancing Renewables Conference - Earth Day Festival - Maldives Island President Exile lifted
DRAWDOWN
Solutions To Reverse Global Warming
Project Drawdown is a collaborative effort from over 200 scientists, scholars, policymakers, business leaders, PhDs, and more to create the “most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming.”
What they uncovered is a path forward that can roll back global warming within thirty years. It shows that humanity has the means at hand. Nothing new needs to be invented. The solutions are in place and in action.
An Uros mother and her two daughters live on one of the 42 floating islands made of totora reeds on Lake Titicaca. Installed at an elevation of 12,507 feet, the panel will replace kerosene and provide electricity to her family for the first time. Solar power is a perfect cultural match: The Uru People know themselves as Lupihaques, Sons of the Sun.
When you start to grasp the severity of the climate crisis, it’s easy sometimes to feel a little hopeless. But a new book called Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming presents a way forward to create a future that is perhaps greater than anyone has imagined was possible.
The project, led by activist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, was started in 2013 and has since brought together over 65 researchers from across the globe with 128 experts in climate, sustainability, academia, and business. Together this group developed a unique global systems model, evaluating 80 technologies and practices from the ground up – from innovative energy and agricultural methods to enhanced environmental conservation and restoration.
The results show that combined these 80 solutions could eliminate 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2050, enough to prevent the dangerous climate tipping point of 2 degrees Celsius. Moreover, these solutions would cost less than and produce more jobs that business as usual.
What is drawdown? It is the reversal of greenhouse gases that have built up in our atmosphere primarily from the burning of fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas. Fortunately, major advancements have been made in the past decade to mitigate this problem.
All solutions presented in Drawdown are not just hypothetical. They are real, well-understood technologies and processes that can be scaled around the world. The breakthrough research required for the book has resulted in dozens of new scientific papers, and there are 20 more solutions coming that could create an even greater reduction in greenhouse gases.
Below are the top 10 solutions in order of greatest impact:
To learn more about Project Drawdown, please visit: http://www.drawdown.org/
U.S. Green Building Council - Missouri Gateway Chapter - Drawdown
The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation
Review Highlights Needed to Fight Climate Change in 2018
http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2017-12-28/climate-change-air-quality/review-highlights-need-to-fight-climate-change-in-2018/a60814-1
The Environmental Year-in-Review
http://www.rainforesttrust.org.
The Climate Mobilization: Powering The Planet
By Ezra Silk
Foreword by Paul Gilding
former Executive Director of Greenpeace International
How the U.S. could eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions at wartime speed, contribute to a global effort to restore a safe climate, and reverse ecological overshoot through massive WWII-scale mobilization.
A mobilization on this scale is the only rational response to the level of economic, security and social risks posed by climate change. Anyone who looks at the evidence objectively would conclude that — and historians will look back and wonder why it took us so long to accept it. To be clear — a mobilization on this scale is simply inevitable, with the only question being when we get started.
Read here or read the Executive Summary.
Los Angeles Council Members
call for Climate Emergency Mobilization Department
January 16, 2018
Los Angeles Councilmember Paul Koretz, Naomi Klein and a coalition of environmental justice leaders from L.A. and beyond announced an effort to launch a WWII-scale climate mobilization of America’s second largest city.
Councilmembers Paul Koretz and Bob Blumenfield introduced two “Fierce Urgency of Now” motions to the Los Angeles City Council seeking to turn that vision into reality: A motion to establish a City of Los Angeles Climate Emergency Mobilization Department to oversee an emergency effort to radically reduce and remove greenhouse gas emissions citywide.
As Paul Koretz said at the announcement of these motions, "We’re out of time! We can’t keep waiting around thinking, once it gets bad enough, we’ll have enough time to do something. We’re here today to tell you, it’s bad enough now. We are out of time and need to act, quickly and boldly, like the very planet beneath our feet depends upon it. Like our home depends upon it. Because it does!”
Globally
First and foremost, wealthy nations must move to negative emissions at light speed, not at the convenience of global elites. We also advocate these international policies to advance climate justice abroad, to be elaborated on in consultation with other nations.
Climate Justice in the U.S. and Around the World
The climate crisis is a humanitarian crisis. It is already devastating millions of lives. These impacts are unfairly distributed along generational, national, class, and racial lines. Further, while the WWII homefront mobilization advanced justice and equality in many spheres, these took place alongside a segregated military and the shameful internment of Japanese Americans. The Climate Mobilization will only succeed if it brings the country together, to strive not only for a safe climate, but for a just society and beloved community.
If passed, these motions could begin the first true WWII-scale climate response in the world, rooted in the social and environmental justice principles outlined by the coalition of Angelenos who have been struggling to phase out our toxic economy for decades. The World War II homefront mobilization began with the creation of new agencies, such as the War Production Board, tasked with coordinating the extremely fast conversion from peacetime to wartime production. By introducing these motions in our second largest city, Councilmembers Koretz and Blumenfield are setting a new precedent for how governments must respond to climate disruption in 2018.
This could be a giant first step toward the mobilization we need to protect life on earth. You can be a part of it:
Naomi Klein, Author and Activist: “Our collective house is on fire and nobody knows that better than the people of Los Angeles. It’s time we started acting like it. These City Council motions recognize the real lesson of these unprecedented winter fires and mudslides — that the time has come for an immediate, whole-of-society mobilization to address the climate emergency, with the highest priority placed upon a just transition and the needs of frontline communities.”
Bob Blumenfield, Los Angeles City Councilmember, 3rd District: "Over the past few months, we have seen some of the most vicious fires in our city’s history rip through our communities, testing the limits of our emergency management capabilities. The sad reality is that due to climate change, as well as a deliberate lack of environmental leadership out of Washington, it is up to us to lead and ensure that we are doing everything possible to reduce our carbon footprint and clean our environment. I am proud to stand with Councilmember Koretz and many environmental organizations in continuing to steer Los Angeles toward being the greenest and cleanest city in the nation.”
Why Scientists Underplay The Severity Of Climate Change
Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and adviser to the British Government on climate change, discusses the science, strategies, and probabilities for our survival as a civilization until 2100.
". . . So you start to see why as a scientific community, as an academic community, an expert community, we are flavoring our work to fit within this view that 2 degrees C is achievable. We've all come round to this way of thinking. We don't step outside of it anymore.
No one really questions the almost fraudulent nature of the venture we're engaged in - not the climate change, not the science, but actually we are underplaying the severity of what that science implies for what we need to do as a society, because it is very uncomfortable."
Policy is still often dominated by long-term targets e.g., 80% reduction by 2050 - despite such targets having no scientific basis "Yet the IPCC makes clear it's cumulative CO2 that matters i.e. the carbon budget (emissions between now & 2100) ... The budget is blown. ...& it provides carbon budgets (CO2 only) for different probabilities of 2 degrees C. ...
"You wouldn't take a chance on a plane with a 50:50 chance of falling out of the sky, or with a 50:50 chance of a nuclear power station blowing up, but with the planet, that's fine. ..."
Kevin Anderson is the Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research; holds a joint chair in Energy and Climate Change at the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester and School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia; and is an honorary lecturer in Environmental Management at the Manchester Business School.[2][3] He is an adviser to the British Government (as of 2009) on climate change.
Watch More:
Delivering on 2°C: Kevin Anderson
'Delivering on 2 degrees' Keynote Prof Kevin Anderson - Climate change: triumph and tragedy in Paris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gJ78vDU17Y
Missouri Coalition for the Environment (MCE)
Spring Break
March 19-12, 2018
Join Missouri Coalition for the Environment (MCE) for Spring Break in St. Louis on March 19, in Columbia on March 20, or Raytown on March 21!
MCE is hosting our second legislative spring break tour of Missouri. We'll update you on policies related to clean water, healthy food access, and state parks. Each event will have free food and held at a brewery with a focus on sustainability and conservation.
State lawmakers have been invited to each event and we hope you'll join us for their unique insights into these issues. Unfortunately schedules didn't work out for a stop in Springfield this year.
Find out how your City Council candidate feels about policy regarding climate and energy concerns!
Representatives from local organizations will ask 2nd Ward candidates Mike Trapp and Paul Love and 6th Ward candidate Betsy Peters to answer some compelling questions about our energy future, their views on climate change, and how they foresee Columbia's Climate Action Plan unfolding.
The forum will conclude with an overview of the plan's status by Barbara Buffaloe from the City of Columbia Office of Sustainability.
Gather for refreshments and mingling at 6:30. Forum starts at 7:00. Sponsored by Citizen's Climate Lobby of Columbia, Mid-Missouri Peaceworks, Mizzou Energy Action Coalition, Renew Missouri, and Sierra Club - Osage Group.
Advancing Renewables in the Midwest Conference
Conference Information & Registration:
Columbia Earth Day Festival
Columbia Earth Day Festival
Sunday, April 22
(Backup rain date Sunday April 29)
If you would like to be involved in promoting earth-conscious living at the
Columbia Area Earth Day Festival,
contact Laura Wacker at 314-825-4444.
For information on having a booth at Earth Day, please see our website at:
columbiaearthday.org or call 573-875-0539.
Maldives Court Drops Terrorism Conviction Against
Former Island President Nasheed
Climate Hero Languishes In Prison - Let's Fight To Get him Out!
In the Pacific Island nation of the Maldives, a court has thrown out “terrorism” charges against former President Mohamed Nasheed and several other former politicians. Mohamed Nasheed was the Maldives’ first democratically elected president, known internationally for his work on climate change. In 2012, he was ousted in what he called an armed coup by supporters of former dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and has since been living in exile in Great Britain.
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