6 ways environmental advocates can change climate concern into action

August 26, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*Valley of Heroes, Tjentište , Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo by Nikola Majksner on Unsplash.*

Many Americans are ready for meaningful progress on climate change — so how can they make it happen?

By Karin Kirk, Geologist and science writer, ensia (CC BY-ND 3.0)

This piece is part of Carbon Zero, a collection of stories around transitioning to a carbon-neutral world.

August 25, 2020 — In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans have not forgotten about climate change. In fact, our recognition of the problem is at or near all-time highs, according to research from Yale and George Mason universities. Polling data from the universities from April 2020 revealed that 61% of registered voters accept that humans are changing the climate, and most support policies like a carbon tax or a fee-and-dividend program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s impressive that the public commitment to act on climate change remains steadfast in the face of new challenges. But the flip side is that only 13% of registered voters have urged an elected official to address the problem. They may be primed for action, but we have yet to fully step into that role. So what’s the best way to do that?

What follows is an inexhaustive list of concrete ideas and tools individuals can use to boost civic engagement on climate change — steps that experts say can translate data like those from Yale and George Mason into meaningful progress, right now.

1. Learn where the public is already aligned with policies that address climate change

“Know thy audience,” the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication recommends, noting that public opinion is a major influence on public policy. Delving into the data, there’s strong bipartisan agreement on many elements of climate policy, especially for renewable energy. Yale, Utah State University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, have created climate opinion maps that plot climate beliefs and energy policy preferences down to the scale of individual counties and congressional districts. The same institutions have assembled customizable fact sheets that summarize climate opinions for adults by state, county and congressional district.

These tools allow people to find angles that are likely to resonate within a given community. Policymakers may appreciate knowing where most of their constituents are already on board.

2. Build racial and social justice into climate solutions

Research on pollution inequity is increasingly able to quantify how Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) bear the brunt of the pollution burden, while the people whose lifestyles cause the most pollution are shielded from its ill effects. For example, according to a 2019 study in PNAS, “Blacks and Hispanics on average bear a ‘pollution burden’ of 56% and 63% excess exposure, respectively, relative to the exposure caused by their consumption.” This imbalance likely partly explains why Hispanics/Latinos and African Americans tend to be more concerned about climate change than white people. Environmental organizations, such as Earthjustice, 350.org, Sierra Club and others, are recognizing that racial and social justice are an integral part of the push for climate solutions.

Environmental activist Leah Thomas proposes several starting points in her article, “Why Every Environmentalist Should Be Anti-Racist.” She encourages environmental advocates to “hold themselves accountable and do the inner anti-racism work to achieve both climate and social justice.” Listening and learning how environmental injustices are affecting BIPOC communities is important, writes Jocelyn L. Travis, an organizing manager for the Sierra Club: “People know what they need. They just need to be heard.” BIPOC-led organizations can be one source for solutions that help those communities specifically.

3. Dig into energy production

Science has long told us that burning fossil fuel is the primary cause of anthropogenic climate change and reducing fossil fuel use, the most potent solution to the problem. Finding out where an individual’s energy comes from is an important piece to the puzzle.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s state energy profiles show energy production and consumption and energy sources for electricity generation in all 50 states. Meanwhile, Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Jacobson has developed fact sheets about state-by-state opportunities for renewable energy.

Total consumption is the heat content of energy consumed by all end-use sectors, including energy losses associated with the generation, transmission, and distribution of the electricity flowing within and across state lines. Source: State Energy Data System (SEDS).

Judy Dorsey is president and principal engineer at the Brendle Group, a consulting firm that helps communities plan climate action. She recommends that people who want to reduce their climate impact look at their energy provider’s “resource plan,” which is the mix of energy sources the company intends to use in the future. This information is usually available on the company’s website. “If the utility is municipality-owned, then there would be opportunities for public input,” she says. If the company is investor-owned, people can “look for roundtables or other ways to get involved,” Dorsey advises.

Some utilities allow an option to buy into an energy portfolio that’s greener than their general portfolio. If a utility does not offer a low-carbon electricity product, customers can ask it to do so. Corporations are greening up their energy use, too, and consumers and investors can support companies that have proven track records for purchasing renewable energy.

4. Follow the money

Public policy researchers have found connections between money in politics and inaction on curbing pollution. For example, the fossil fuel industry exerts considerable financial resources to influence elections and reward policymakers who vote against environmental policy measures. Furthermore, a look at lobbying and campaign donations in federal politics shows that the fossil fuel industry outspends the renewable energy industry by more than 13 to 1.

The financial ties of elected officials and candidates are easy to track; the Follow the Money database allows users to research state and local politicians. Similarly, the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets is a tool to explore contributions to federal campaigns and lobbying information. Here are some examples of how climate advocates can use Open Secrets:

Find House and Senate candidates with the largest fossil fuel funding; the oil and gas industry has donated more than US$70 million (and counting; the tally increased by over US$10 million while this article was being edited) to national-level candidates in 2020.

Learn how the oil and gas industry is spending money in national politics.

Dig into key electoral races and see where fossil fuel funding may be tilting the balance. In the Colorado senate race, for example, the database compares the funding for Cory Gardner and John Hickenlooper, showing stark differences in fossil fuel ties.

Advocates can use such information in conversations with voters, letters to the editor and public meetings and with the public officials themselves.

5. Get to know elected officials

Brittany Webster, program manager of public affairs at the American Geophysical Union (AGU), credits public engagement for “forward movement” of climate policy in Congress. Webster says the arena for climate change has shifted from debating the science to exploring what to do about it. But still, “they’re not talking enough about solutions,” she says.

Webster advises people to “look at the consequences and impacts to your community.” For people in Florida, for example, climate change is “literally seeping into their back yard,” she says. Taking a local focus and carrying it forward to lawmakers is “how you start the conversation,” says Webster.

Cities are increasingly making bold plans for climate action. “Many cities have an energy and climate task force,” says Dorsey. “Look to see if your city has a climate and energy plan, and ask about joining their volunteer advisory board.” Climate change can be part of planning for development, transportation, utilities, food systems and water resources in every community. Currently, given the global pandemic, some city meetings are being conducted online, making attendance easier for some.

If a particular city has not yet begun climate planning, nearby localities may have, giving examples and strategies that could work elsewhere. The Wisconsin Clean Energy Toolkit contains resources for communities seeking to transition to renewables.

“Raising your voice” is another strategy, said Andrew Valainis, executive director of the Montana Renewable Energy Association, in a recent policy webinar. “Advocates are really important,” he said. “If you’re not up there raising your voice, then all the legislators hear is the opposite opinion.” Groups like Citizens’ Climate Lobby or regional advocacy organizations offer opportunities for people to get involved.

Local environmental groups track state and local politics and send alerts when action is needed, such as those around key bills, opportunities for hearings or public service commission meetings where people can share their ideas. It might seem like one voice is too small to matter, but, Valainis said in the webinar, “It’s really important. It makes a big difference.”

At the national level, Webster advises that constituents call their senators’ and representatives’ D.C. offices instead of the local office to connect. “Identify yourself as a constituent,” she says, and ask for the email address of the staffer working on the issue you want to discuss. Then write to the staffer and ask to set up a phone call. “You’re working to build a relationship,” Webster says. Advocates can use the first meeting to share their story about why tackling climate change matters, using a local angle when possible. Webster suggests asking for support of specific measures because a concrete and tangible “ask” is likely easier to act on than an open-ended request.

AGU offers advice about how to effectively talk to policymakers.

6. Hit the campaign trail

Voting for candidates who will aggressively pursue climate policy is one way to bring about change, but involvement can go further than that. Campaigns all around the country look for people to help with phone and text banking, organizing, and getting out the vote. “If you don’t help, who will,” writes Larry Walker, an educational consultant who works with historically Black colleges and universities, in an article detailing the benefits of campaign volunteering. Interested individuals can find their local campaign office or join national groups like the Environmental Voter Project. Individuals often feel powerless in the face of devastating environmental news. But no one is powerless, and no one is alone. There are dozens of avenues for engagement. Many can be pursued from home. And every action puts a dent in the problem.

Western Wildfires Are Spinning Off Tornadoes – Here’s How Fires Create Their Own Freakish Weather

August 25, 2020 / activist360

Fire tornado damage: WAPA's steel infrastructure mostly survived the fire intact, with one exception: the site of the fire tornado in Redding, July 26. The fire tornado destroyed at least three steel structures, including ripping two from the ground. Image by Western Area Power (Staff photo) (CC BY 2.0). — Fire tornado damage: WAPA’s steel infrastructure mostly survived the fire intact, with one exception: the site of the fire tornado in Redding, July 26. The fire tornado destroyed at least three steel structures, including ripping two from the ground. Image by Western Area Power (Staff photo) (CC BY 2.0).

By Charles Jones, Professor of Atmospheric Science, University of California, Santa Barbara and Leila Carvalho, Professor of Meteorology and Climatology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Published in collaboration with The Conversation (Public License).

It might sound like a bad movie, but extreme wildfires can create their own weather – including fire tornadoes.

It happened in California as a heat wave helped to fuel hundreds of wildfires across the region, many of them sparked by lightning. One fiery funnel cloud on Aug. 15 was so powerful, the National Weather Service issued what’s believed to be its first fire tornado warning.

So, what has to happen for a wildfire to get so extreme that it spins off tornadoes?

As professors who study wildfires and weather, we can offer some insights.

How Extreme Fire Conditions Form

Fires have three basic elements: heat, fuel and oxygen.

In a wildland fire, a heat source ignites the fire. Sometimes that ignition source is a car or power line or, as the West saw in mid-August, lightning strikes. Oxygen then reacts with dry vegetation to produce heat, ash and gases. How dry the landscape is determines whether the fire starts, how fast it burns and how hot the fire can get. It’s almost as important as wind.

Fire weather conditions get extreme when high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds combine with dead and live vegetation to produce difficult-to-fight, fast-spreading wildfires.

That combination is exactly what the West has been seeing. A wet winter fed the growth of grasses that now cover large areas of wildland in the western U.S. Most of this grass is now dead from the summer heat. Combined with other types of vegetation, that leaves lots of fuel for the wildfires to burn.

The remnants of Hurricane Elida also played a role. The storm increased moisture and instability in the atmosphere, which triggered thunderstorms further north. The atmosphere over land was pretty dry by then, and even when rain formed at the base of these clouds, it mostly evaporated due to the excessive heat. This led to “dry lightning” that ignited wildfires.

Wildfires Can Fuel Thunderstorms

Fires can also cause convection – hot air rises, and it moves water vapor, gases and aerosols upward.

Wildfires with turbulent plumes can produce a “cumulus” type of cloud, known as pyrocumulus or pyrocumulonimbus. Pyrocumulus clouds are similar to the cumulus clouds people are used to seeing. They develop when hot air carries moisture from plants, soil and air upward, where it cools and condenses. The centers of these “pyroclouds” have strong rising air.

It’s pretty common, and it’s a warning sign that firefighters could be facing erratic and dangerous conditions on the ground from the indraft of air toward the center of the blaze.

In some cases, the pyroclouds can reach 30,000 feet and produce lightning. There is evidence that pyrocumulus lightning may have ignited new blazes during the devastating fire storm in Australia in 2009 known as “Black Friday.”

Where do fire tornadoes come from?

Similar to the way cumulonimbus clouds produce tornadoes, these pyroclouds can produce fire‐generated vortices of ash, smoke and often flames that can get destructive.

A vortex can form because of the intense heat of the fire in an environment with strong winds. This is similar to a strong river flow passing through a depression. The sudden change in the speed of the flow will force the flow to rotate. Similarly, the heat generated by the fire creates a low pressure, and in an environment with strong winds, this process results in the formation of a vortex.

One fire tornado, or fire whirl, that developed during the deadly 2018 Carr Fire devastated parts of Redding, California, with winds clocked at over 143 miles per hour.

These vortices can also increase the severity of the fires themselves by sucking air rich in oxygen toward the center of the vortex. The hotter the fire, the higher the probability of stronger updrafts and stronger and larger vortices.

Persistent heat waves that dry out the land and vegetation have increased the potential of wildfires to be more violent and widespread.

Is extreme fire weather becoming more common?

Global warming has modified the Earth’s climate in ways that profoundly affect the behavior of wildfires.

Scientific evidence suggests that the severity of prolonged droughts and heat waves has been exacerbated not only by rising temperatures but also by changes in atmospheric circulation patterns associated with recent climate change. These changes can enhance extreme fire-weather behavior.

A study published Aug. 20 found that the frequency of California’s extreme fire weather days in the autumn fire season had more than doubled since the early 1980s. Over that four-decade period, autumn temperatures in the state rose by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit and autumn precipitation decreased by about 30%.

Firefighters and people living in wildfire-prone areas, meanwhile, need to be prepared for more extreme wildfires in the coming years.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Disclosure statement: Charles Jones receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the University of California. Leila Carvalho receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Scientists are Reproducing Coral in Labs to Save Them. This is How it Works

August 24, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*Soft corals, algae, fish ( a doctorfish and butterflyfish), and sponges in a highly diverse reef scene. Photo by NOAA on Unsplash.*

By Jenny Mallon, PhD Candidate in Coral Reef Biogeochemistry, University of Glasgow, World Economic Forum published in collaboration with The Conversation (Public License).

Coral reefs are important natural ecosystems but are at risk from a variety of factors, including climate change.
Marine biologists are helping corals to reproduce in restoration projects.
Understanding successful reproduction could be the key to coral reefs’ survival.

Coral reefs host a quarter of all sea species, but climate change, overfishing, and pollution could drive these ecosystems to extinction within a matter of decades.

Marine biologists have been racing to restore degraded reefs by collecting corals from the wild and breaking them into fragments. This encourages them to grow fast and quickly produces hundreds of smaller corals which can be raised in nurseries and eventually transplanted back onto the reef.

But if each fragment is an identical copy with one common parent, any resulting colony is likely to be genetically identical to the rest of the population. This matters – having a diverse range of genetically conferred traits can help insure reefs against disease and a rapidly changing environment.

So what if scientists could use sexual reproduction in coral restoration projects? In the wild, the stony coral species that compose the bulk of the world’s tropical reefs cast their sperm and eggs into the water column to reproduce. Corals often synchronise these mass spawning events with full moons, when tides are exceptionally high. This ensures powerful water currents disperse the eggs far and wide, so that they’re fertilised by sperm of distant colonies.

*Corals often broadcast reproductive material during the full moon, to take advantage of powerful water currents. Image: Jenny Mallon, Author provided.*

Sexually produced offspring have a unique combination of genes from distinct parents, and this helps keep coral populations genetically diverse. Reefs restored with corals created by sexual reproduction are likely to be more resilient, though managing this process hasn’t been easy for scientists to do. But by working on one project in Mexico, I saw what is possible, and learned how to do it myself.

Coral Sex in the Lab

Coral reefs are so enormous they’re visible from space. But watching them spawn is surprisingly tricky. They only do it on a handful of nights each year and the exact date and time is determined by environmental factors that scientists are still working to fully understand.

Climate change is causing reefs with known spawning patterns to shift their timing too, making these events less frequent and predictable. This makes it difficult for different colonies to synchronise spawning, reducing their chances of successful fertilisation in the wild.

The CORALIUM Laboratory of the National Autonomous University of Mexico is part of a Caribbean-wide network of dedicated coral spawning experts. Scientists here collect coral sperm and eggs from multiple Caribbean reefs in order to fertilise them in the lab.

The team wait for the full moon to signal when corals are likely to spawn. Coral sperm and eggs are collected with floating nets and plastic containers, and divers take extreme care to avoid damaging the reef. The millions of sperm and eggs collected are rushed back to the lab where they’re cleaned and monitored all night as they undergo assisted fertilisation to begin life as free swimming larvae. These larvae are very sensitive to water quality, temperature and pathogens, so they need constant care.

Eventually, the larvae settle on hard surfaces where they change into polyps – the initial building blocks of a coral colony. In the ocean, these surfaces are often dead coral skeletons. In the lab, they are seeding units – 3-D shapes designed by scientists at the conservation organisation SECORE to resemble coral rubble that can float on ocean currents before resting on reefs.

*Seeding units mimic coral rubble that floats on ocean currents. Image: SECORE International/Amanda Baye, Author provided.*

Each juvenile produced this way carries a unique mix of genes which they will pass on to a new generation of corals. The resulting population has a stronger gene pool that can help it withstand new diseases and other threats. This long-term strategy also ensures sexual reproduction can continue on restored reefs, which would not be possible for a population composed of identical clones.

Restoring Caribbean Reefs

The Caribbean may have lost as much as 80% of its coral cover since the mid-1970s. The colonies that remain are now relatively isolated, reducing the chances of them being able to crossbreed. But in the controlled conditions of the lab, fertilisation rates of over 80% are common and larval survival is high. That means thousands of juvenile corals are reared until they’re ready for the reef after just a few weeks of incubation.

But with late night dives by experts, specialised materials for collecting spawn and a lab where fertilisation is carefully controlled, this work is often too expensive for smaller restoration projects. So scientists here have developed low-cost methods for lab spawning and are training teams from across the Caribbean to do it.

I took their course in 2016, and one year later, found myself setting up a new spawning site in Akumal, one hour south of the CORALIUM lab near Cancun. Coral spawning had never been observed here, but I trained volunteers from a local dive centre on how to spot the signs. On our fifth consecutive night dive, we saw the synchronised spawning of multiple colonies of Elkorn corals.

We set up a hotel room as a temporary lab with sterilised plastic larvae tanks and filtered seawater and produced thousands of coral babies for restoration sites. In 2018, we built a beachside coral spawning laboratory on a shoestring budget. Positioned under a tree, the breeze block structure has mosquito netting walls that allow the cool sea breeze to keep the tanks at a constant 28-29°C.

*Scientists are using laboratories for coral spawning, to ensure survival. Image: Jenny Mallon, Author provided.*

The lab was just about up and running in time for that year’s lunar eclipse. We hadn’t anticipated a mass spawn of so many colonies, so the lab inauguration was a chaos of colour coded collection cups from different sites and parent colonies.

Running a coral spawning site has been the most rewarding experience of my career so far. It is everything that research should be: cutting edge, dynamic and challenging. It’s what I signed up for when I became a marine scientist.