Tag Archives: Climate Strike

Climate Solutions, Sustainable Energy

First there was Doom scrolling, then Greenwashing now we have HopeFishing.

Yes, it’s a thing.

Possibly even worse than greenwashing, HopeFishing is when bad actors exaggerate and accelerate the fantasy of how we can solve the climate crisis, using solutions that either don’t yet exist, or that may actually be harmful if they were ever implemented.

There are entire web sites, which we will not link to for obvious reasons, that publish stories every day about a new invention or discovery that is “sure” to save the world.

Not all of the featured solutions are totally bogus, the clever publishers add in just enough “real” information to keep you guessing, but our informal research showed that 8 out of 10 were either total speculation or something that has been tried in a tiny sample in a lab and would, if ever, come to market in perhaps decade, for example.

Why is this so bad, you say? Because when these faux solutions, always hyped to the hilt, are so outrageously fantastic, that when taken at face value, can overshadow any real solution that might be available today, right now.

An example of this is hyper-efficient design of homes and buildings combined with sustainable energy generation and storage. A perfect combination of existing design techniques and currently available advanced technology these solutions are reedy to activate immediately.

This incredible mix is available and should be, must be, implemented worldwide as fast as possible. Doing so would reduce the cost of shelter, at a time with the affordable housing crisis is exploding worldwide, and at the same time lower carbon and greenhouse gas emissions for all structures built this way to beyond zero (in other words, using less energy than is produced, all from clean renewable sources).

This Climate Solution is a Sleeping Giant

Unfortunately, stories about such realistic and practical ideas will not be published by HopeFishing sites. The all-to-real situation is that a bias toward “deep-tech” and intellectual property generating solutions already exists and many of these are also still in R&D and might never actually work in the general marketplace.

Worse, those who are led to believe that these exaggerated claims and world rescuing solutions are going to be ubiquitous “any day now” are lulled into a state of apathy and complacency. And, all this at a time when the precise opposite is so urgently needed. HopeFishing. As deadly or more deadly than climate denial.

At the same time, those profiting off these “happy” non-news stories can tell themselves they are the good guys, just pointing out how wonderful humans are for inventing a world saving solution every day, sometimes multiple times per day.

Partial HopeWashing is also not ideal which makes things harder to understand

Some, such as Elon musk, “innocently” introduced products and services like the Tesla Semi EV, which is, finally, set for a product launch on December 1, 2022. Five years after it was first announced. As for the Cybertruck, which has yet to see the light of day, or for example, the full self driving feature, which has been announced, over and over and over, yet still has potentially years until it will be fully functional.

This all seems harmless enough but when taken to the next level, where say, a remedy is put forward that claims all electric cars will have batteries that can run for thousands of miles and take seconds to charge, and then, upon deeper research, it turns out this idea is simply a thought, or even a projection of an imaginary claim: at that point it becomes HopeFishing.

Another example of a partial level of this is Cement and Steel. These two materials, heavily used for building and construction, produce some of the highest levels of “embodied” carbon – meaning to manufacture them for use, a large amount greenhouse gasses must be released into the atmosphere. (causing and worsening global warming)

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were alternative versions of these materials that do not harm the environment during manufacture? Sure it would. But it would also be a gold-mine, or like all the world’s gold mines combined, to whoever figures out how to to this with little or no added costs.

Here are just a few companies that have been heavily funded to solve this problem already:

Key Companies Profiled by Fact.MR:

  • CarbiCrete
  • Carbon Cure
  • Cemex
  • CeraTech
  • Ecocem Ireland Lt
  • Heidelberg Cement
  • Holcim
  • Kiran Global Chems Ltd.

This is an old list, there are many, many more that have been formed since this list was published. And that is not including the same scenario for steel.

Again, what’s the problem here? For one, it is an example of how “racing forward to recreate the past” dominates the climate solutions marketplace. Instead of looking for different ways to build our infrastructure with less of these materials, we are desperately trying to find a way to imitate the cheap, massively subsidized growth patterns of the last 150 years.

An alternative building material, and there are some out there, that does not require a patented invention just to exist will very likely be minimized while these highly supported “lottery tickets” will be touted and exaggerated back and forth as they all try to dominate a future market in the trillions of dollars.

Secondly, the partial HopeWashing effect comes into play. How should someone who does not spend the time or have the expertise to research the claims of these companies ever hope to grasp just how close they actually are (or aren’t) to removing billions of tons of high carbon producing materials from the supply chain?

And if the answer, after arduous research and due diligence and sober calculation, is that the solution is certain to be too late? Once again the money and effort spent chasing happy unicorns and rainbows (and the past) will already be gone.

Therefore, the funding and attention that should be paid to immediately viable less obviously obscenely-lucrative solutions will be passed over, potentially for years or decades.

And if that happens, HopeFishing will turn out to be far deadlier than climate denial, GreenWashing or any other nefarious game of self-deception humans play on themselves.

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Breaking News, Climate Solutions, Earth and Ecology, News, Politics

Hundreds of Thousands Take to Streets Worldwide for ‘Uproot the System’ Climate Strikes

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

“The climate crisis has not disappeared,” said Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. “It’s the opposite—it’s even more urgent now than it was before.”

Young people by the hundreds of thousands took to the streets across the globe on Friday to deliver a resounding message to world leaders: The climate crisis is getting worse, and only radical action will be enough to avert catastrophe and secure a just, sustainable future for all.

“As emissions and inequalities increase, we rise up and demand climate justice.”

From Pakistan to Italy to Germany to the Philippines, the worldwide “Uproot the System” actions marked the largest climate demonstrations since the coronavirus pandemic forced campaigners to take their protests online last year. Climate activists in developing countries—where access to vaccines is limited due to artificial supply constraints and hoarding by rich nations—were still forced to limit the size of their demonstrations Friday as a public health precaution.

“Last time it was digital and nobody was paying attention to us,” Yusuf Baluch, a 17-year-old activist from the Pakistani province of Balochistan, told Reuters. “In the global north, people are getting vaccinated so they might be out in huge quantities. But in the global south, we are still limited.”

Above: Photo Collage / Great Thunberg – via Instagram / Lynxotic

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, whose solitary sit-down strike outside her home country’s parliament in 2018 helped spark the global Fridays for Future movement, said that “it has been a very strange year and a half with this pandemic.”

“But of course, the climate crisis has not disappeared. It’s the opposite—it’s even more urgent now than it was before,” said Thunberg, who on Friday joined a large demonstration in Berlin, which was hammered by massive, climate-linked floods in July.

Watch Thunberg’s full speech in front of the Reichstag building:

Organizers said that more than 1400 climate strikes are set to take place in at least 70 countries Friday, with hundreds of thousands expected to attend demonstrations in Germany alone.

“As emissions and inequalities increase, we rise up and demand climate justice,” saidBerlin-based climate activist Luisa Neubauer.

The latest youth-led global action kicked off just weeks ahead of the pivotal COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, which many civil society organizations want to be postponed over fears that inequities in coronavirus vaccine access could prevent delegates from developing nations—those most vulnerable to the climate crisis—from attending.

Equalizing global vaccine distribution is one of the six demands that climate campaigners are aiming to put before world leaders during Friday’s mass demonstrations. The full list is as follows:

  1. The Global North needs to cut emissions drastically by divesting from fossil fuels and ending its extraction, burning, and use. We need concrete plans and detailed annual carbon budgets with roadmaps and milestones to ensure we get to net-zero with justice and equity in the time needed to address climate change.
  2. The colonizers of the north have a climate debt to pay for their disproportionate amount of historic emissions and that starts with the increase of climate finance to implement anti-racist climate reparations, the cancellation of debts especially for damage caused by extreme weather events, and providing adaptation funds that serve the communities.
  3. Work towards a genuinely global recovery from Covid-19 by ensuring equitable vaccine distribution worldwide and suspending intellectual property restrictions on Covid-19 technologies. This is an essential step towards a global, green, and just recovery.
  4. Recognize the tangibility of the climate crisis as a risk to human safety and secure the rights of climate refugees in international law.
  5. Recognize the invaluable impact of biodiversity on indigenous communities’ lives and culture, and commit to make ecocide an international punishable crime.
  6. Stop the violence and criminalization against indigenous peoples, small farmers, small fisherfolk, and other environmental and land defenders. Support the work they do. Respect and listen to our defenders. 

The worldwide demonstrations came a week after the United Nations warned that even if the 191 parties to the Paris Agreement meet their current climate targets, global greenhouse gas emissions will still rise 16% by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. The U.N. also estimated that the planet is on track for 2.7°C of warming by the end of the century, a level of heating that experts say would be cataclysmic—particularly for developing nations.

At the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week, the leaders of vulnerable countries pushed wealthy nations—the largest contributors to the climate emergency—to stop shirking their responsibilities to confront the planetary crisis.

“We simply have no higher ground to cede,” Marshall Islands President David Kabua said Wednesday. “The world simply cannot delay climate ambition any further.”

Participants in Friday’s global action pointedly amplified that message. Valentina Ruas, a Brazilian activist, told The Guardian that “the global north should be developing climate policies that have at their core climate justice and accountability to the most affected people and areas.”

“Instead,” she added, “they continue to exploit vulnerable communities and recklessly extract fossil fuel, while bragging about their insignificant emission reduction plans.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under Creative Commons.

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Climate Solutions, Observation

Climate Inaction Has Left Majority of Young People Believing Humanity Is ‘Doomed’

Image / Pixabay

International survey reveals ‘shocking’ rise of eco-anxiety and hopelessness. “If this isn’t a wake up call for world leaders, what is?”

Amidst a sharp increase in deadly wildfires and flooding, increasingly violent storms, and extreme heat, new research published Tuesday found that refusal by governments to act on the climate emergency is causing a widespread sense of hopelessness and eco-anxiety in teenagers and young adults worldwide.

The global advocacy group Avaaz joined researchers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and five other universities to survey 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25—the first large-scale eco-anxiety survey of its kind—and discovered that majorities of the respondents were fearful for the lives and livelihoods of their families and the future of the planet.

“If this isn’t a wake up call for world leaders, what is?” —AvaazAs Luisa Neubauer, a 25-year-old leader of the global Fridays for Future movement in Germany, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, while the climate extremes caused by the planetary emergency are frightening, inaction by world leaders “is too much to handle, too much to accept.””Government is pushing us in front of a bus,” Neubauer told the outlet.

The mental health professionals who conducted the study spoke with young people in 10 countries including Nigeria, the Philippines, India, the U.K., and the U.S., finding that respondents in both wealthy countries and the Global South are facing “feelings of anger, fear, and powerlessness” as the climate crisis directly causes at least one famine, deadly flash flooding, and wildfires in multiple regions.

Nearly half of respondents said their worries about the climate crisis negatively affect their daily life and their ability to function, and more than half told the experts they feel humanity is “doomed.”

Four in 10 said they would hesitate to have children in the future due to the state of the planet, while three-quarters of respondents described their futures as “frightening.”

Avaaz reported that one of the most “shocking” findings was how respondents described their feelings about government inaction, including more than half who said they feel policymakers “are betraying them.”

“If this isn’t a wake up call for world leaders, what is?” asked Avaaz.

Young people in the cyclone-ravages Philippines and Brazil, where deforestation—driven by President Jair Bolsonaro’s government—has become increasingly destructive in recent years, showed the most anxiety of the countries surveyed. More than nine in 10 respondents said they were frightened about the future.

Caroline Hickman, lead author of the study, which was published in The Lanceton Tuesday, cautioned adults against telling young people it is up to them to save the future of the planet.”Thinking the way to cure eco-anxiety is eco-action isn’t right,” Hickman told Thomson Reuters, adding that what will solve the climate crisis is decisive action by world governments.

The survey “shows eco-anxiety is not just for environmental destruction alone, but inextricably linked to government inaction on climate change. The young feel abandoned and betrayed by governments,” Hickman told the BBC. “Governments need to listen to the science and not pathologize young people who feel anxious.”

The survey results were released less than two months ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26), where policymakers will meet in Glasgow to discuss commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, provide climate mitigation support for frontline communities across the globe, and rapidly transition to an emissions-free energy system.

Young people are “doing everything we can” to push for climate action, Neubauer told Thomson Reuters, “but that won’t be enough.”

“We won’t fix it” through the Fridays for Future movement, she added. “We need everyone there.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JULIA CONLEY and republished under Creative Commons.

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Climate Solutions, Entertainment

Greta Thunberg is back in Hulu Documentary: rise of Acclaimed Young Climate Activist

Video

An intimate look inside the life and rise of the remarkable Ms. Thunberg

At the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit, a young girl made headlines as she condemned world leaders on destroying the climate and leaving the younger generation to deal with the environmental repercussions. Her heartfelt speech received much attention from fellow activists, celebrities and leaders.  During the UN Climate Action Summit, she said “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic grow – How Dare You!”  

Read More: “Kiss The Ground” Documentary Offers Hopeful Remedy To Climate Change Focusing On Soil Regeneration

The, then 16 year old, soon became the inspired voice for the youth, a next generation’s leader, as she has continued her mission in raising awareness of the global climate emergency. Last year, Time Magazine named her ‘Person of the Year’ and she has also been nominated two years in a row for a Nobel Peace Prize.  Her name, if you already didn’t know, is Greta Thunberg.  

The upcoming “I am Greta” documentary which will stream on the Hulu platform November 13 follows the teenage climate activist during her rise to prominence and how she sparked a global impact with her school strikes and protests.   The doc gives viewers a deeper look and will include never-before-seen-footage, capturing meetings with government leaders, public appearances and global protests. 

The film will also show the young lady behind the scenes and how she lives her daily life, including scenes of being with her family, her process of writing speeches, how she deals with the stress of nonstop travel and her Asperger’s syndrome. The doc also features footage of Greta having to deal with the public scrutiny, from climate-deniers to hangers-on and the toll taken from being the “face of climate change”.   

https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1304701344415129600/vid/1280x720/LWOEJ8Yt8M4wXdPf.mp4?tag=13

The documentary culminates with Greta’s extraordinary two-week journey on a wind-powered sailboat. Her voyage across the Atlantic Ocean starts as she leaves the UK  in order to reach the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City.  Thunberg took to the sea as she no longer flies to any events due to the high carbon emissions caused by air travel.

Nathan Grossman, a Swedish director, told press when asked what he hopes viewers will take away from the film, “Greta and other young people demand a safe future and that leaders listen to the science – instead they are met with empty words from politicians, and ridicule or even death threats from individuals. This is the source of so much of her frustration and I hope viewers will leave with a lot of that frustration as well.”

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

Click here to see “No One is Too Small”
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The groundbreaking speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist who has become the voice of a generation, including her historic address to the United Nations 

In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day in order to protest the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

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Climate Solutions, Earth and Ecology, Movies

‘Anthropocene: The Human Epoch’: Documentary shows Reality of Climate Change

Video
https://movietrailers.apple.com/movies/independent/anthropocene/anthropocene-trailer-1b_h1080p.mov
Official trailer for “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch”

A Growing Urgency and yet Denial Remains a Stubborn Reality

Coincidentally or not, corresponding with week’s nationwide climate strike, Mercury Films is releasing an environmental documentary focusing on the human impact on the planet. In “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch,” filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, and Nicholas de Pencier travel to twenty countries across six continents to show the irreversible effects that human beings have had on the natural landscape.

While many environmental documentaries with such a global scale might focus on the earth’s beauty in order to get audiences to appreciate the planet, “Anthropocene” takes the opposite route, and looks at the some of Earth’s least flattering, most unnatural images. Rather than taking us to the mountains, prairies, or deep seas, the film shows us landfills, mines, power plants, refineries, and junkyards on both land and water, revealing the Anthropocene’s unavoidable and unattractive reality.

Anthropocene as a term denotes a new geological age, or epoch, in which humans are the primary influence on the natural world. With today’s hot debates about climate change and global warming, Anthropocene has become somewhat of a buzzword, but the term dates back to the 1980s when scientists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer first coined it. Evidently, the process has been going on for a while, but in the current day and age, the Anthropocene is increasingly hard to ignore, as the human footprint eats up more of the natural world and the effects of climate change are becoming increasingly tangible.

Photo / Mercury Films

Where are the Solutions and what can any of us do to Slow Down the Juggernaut?

The question on everybody’s mind, then, is how do we combat climate change? It is a lofty question that even the brightest of scientists and the most ambitious of politicians struggle to find consensus on. At the most basic, humanistic level, the answer might start with everybody doing their parts to live sustainably and spread awareness of the issue. From an artist’s perspective, that means of spreading awareness might come in the form of a painting, a novel, or a film. 

Film has certainly had its bouts with addressing climate change in the past. Many documentaries from Al Gore’s revolutionary “An Inconvenient Truth” to Leonardo DiCaprio’s foreboding “Before The Flood,” have zeroed in on the issue. On the complete opposite side of the cinematic spectrum, the concept has even made its way into recent blockbuster movies such as “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Mission Impossible: Fallout,” both of which had eco-terrorists as their main villains.

It almost seems impossible to make a movie about the world and not have it relate to climate change in some way. Animal-focused docuseries like BBC’s “Planet Earth” or Netflix’s “Our Planet” may avoid people altogether, but their subject-matter always comes back to anthropogenic preservation. Similarly, documentaries working in other sectors of environmentalism, such as the recent “Supersize Me 2: Holy Chicken!” or “The Game Changers,” which focus on diet and nutrition, all circle back to the correlation between consumption and climate in one way or another. Clearly, the issue is deeply engrained in any conversation we might have about the environment, and with eco-criticism becoming a growing sector of theory and thought, audiences will start to notice the topic emerging in even more ways.

https://movietrailers.apple.com/movies/independent/anthropocene/anthropocene-clip-excavator_h1080p.mov
Clip – Excavator from “ANTHROPOCENE: THE HUMAN EPOCH”

Watching “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch,” however, does not require a lot of deep thinking to realize that it is addressing global warming. The subject is made quite clear through the documentary’s unambiguous and straightforward expository mode.

Directors Baichwal, Burtynsky, and de Pencier are no strangers to this blatant style of informative documentary that focuses on pressing issues. The three have collaborated before on the award winning documentaries “Watermark” and “Manufactured Landscape,” both of which covered environmental topics. But while these two earlier films only touched on the concept of climate change and its effects, “Anthropocene” goes full-throttle, traveling far and wide to illustrate the harrowing impacts of this new epoch. It shows urban floods, melting glaciers, excavated canyons, and poached animals on the edge of extinction, all aiming to evoke an emotional response from viewers—none of whom are blameless for or exempt from this planetary phenomenon.

Photo / Mercury Films

What does it take to Wake Up a Population that Sleeps as the Threat keeps growing?

Nevertheless, as effective as “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” might be in pulling on our heartstrings and making us fear for the future, one must question weather the environmental documentary is as impactful as people often make it out to be. Fourteen years have gone by since Al Gore warned us about global warming in “An Inconvenient Truth,” and since then countless documentarians have approached the topic from several different angles. Sadly, though, we are hardly any closer to an environmental reformation. The general public may have caught on to the issue’s severity, but many people—particularly people in power—still refuse to even acknowledge climate change. 

This is not to say that “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” or other films in the same vein are futile gestures. They are compelling and will likely inspire many people to live more environmentally consciously. However, as a society—or rather, as a human species—we should probably be past exposition and be making more progress in combating and adapting to the changes already going on in the world around us. As a film, “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” is bound to be captivating and informative. As a piece of activism, though, the odds are unfortunately against it.

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