The Biden administration has finalized a new rule to protect United States public lands, including offering leasing of the lands for conservation in a similar manner as it does for drilling, grazing and mining, reported Reuters.
The final Public Lands Rule will help the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to improve and protect the resilience and health of these lands from the impacts of climate change. At the same time, the regulations will help preserve intact landscapes and essential wildlife habitat, facilitate “responsible development” and recognize natural and cultural resources, a press release from BLM said.
“As stewards of America’s public lands, the Interior Department takes seriously our role in helping bolster landscape resilience in the face of worsening climate impacts. Today’s final rule helps restore balance to our public lands as we continue using the best-available science to restore habitats, guide strategic and responsible development, and sustain our public lands for generations to come,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in the press release.
The new rule builds on the administration’s Investing in America agenda, recognizing the intrinsic value of America’s public lands.
“America’s public lands are our national treasures,” said John Podesta, senior international climate policy advisor to the president. “[The rule] is a huge win for ensuring balance on our public lands, helping them withstand the challenges of climate change and environmental threats like invasive species, and making sure they continue to provide services to the American people for decades to come.”
It also compliments the America the Beautiful initiative — a decade-long effort to protect, restore and connect the country’s lands, waters and wildlife, led by local communities.
“Building on decades of land management experience and emphasizing the use of science and data, including Indigenous Knowledge, to guide balanced decision-making, the rule applies the existing fundamentals of land health across BLM programs, establishes restoration and mitigation leases, and clarifies practices to designate and protect Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACECs),” the press release said.
The rule will help ensure the BLM protects the health of public lands while managing outdoor recreation, clean energy development and other uses of these important areas.
“From the most rugged backcountry spots to popular close-to-home recreation areas, these reforms will help deliver cleaner water, healthier lands, abundant wildlife, and more recreation opportunities for all of us,” said Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in the press release.
As the world faces increasing wildfires, longer droughts and more extreme temperatures, the rule will assist the BLM with tackling changing environmental conditions.
“Our public lands provide wildlife habitat and clean water, the energy that lights our homes, the wood we build with, and the places where we make family memories,” said Director of BLM Tracy Stone-Manning in the press release. “This rule honors our obligation to current and future generations to help ensure our public lands and waters remain healthy amid growing pressures and change.”
The announcement was good news for conservation groups, who have criticized the BLM for putting its focus on development for too long, instead of protecting land health, Reuters reported.
“This rule gives the BLM the tools it needs to right these wrongs and start improving the health of our public lands,” said Kate Groetzinger, spokesperson for the Center for Western Priorities, as reported by Reuters. “It also provides tools for extractive industries to be part of the solution, rather than exacerbate the problem.”
Researchers have found a way to reuse metal waste as an electrocatalyst that can split water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen, which could be help make hydrogen production more sustainable.
Hydrogen is considered a clean, renewable energy source, but the process to produce it often comes with a major carbon footprint. According to a 2021 study, the greenhouse gas emissions from blue hydrogen (hydrogen that is produced and followed by carbon capture and storage) can be 20% greater than natural gas or coal when used for heat, and the World Energy Council reported that 96% of hydrogen relies on fossil fuels for production as of 2019.
Scientists are therefore exploring ways to produce green hydrogen, or hydrogen produced via clean, renewable energy sources and electrolysis.
To investigate more sustainable methods of producing hydrogen, scientists from the University of Nottingham’s School of Chemistry and Faculty of Engineering tested the process of electrolysis using swarf, a metal machining byproduct, including stainless steel, titanium and nickel alloys as the waste materials.
They found that swarf has nanotextured surfaces with grooves that could help bond platinum or cobalt atoms. When bonded, they could lead to effective electrocatalysts which split water and produce hydrogen. The team shared their findings in the Journal of Material Chemistry A of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
“Industries in the UK alone generate millions of tons of metal waste annually,” Jesum Alves Fernandes, leader of the research team, said in a statement. “By using a scanning electron microscope, we were able to inspect the seemingly smooth surfaces of the stainless steel, titanium, or nickel alloy swarf. To our astonishment, we discovered that the surfaces had grooves and ridges that were only tens of nanometres wide. We realized that this nanotextured surface could present a unique opportunity for the fabrication of electrocatalysts.”
The team used magnetron sputtering, a method of physical vapor deposition, for 90 seconds to expose the swarf to platinum and cobalt atoms, which fit into the grooved surfaces of the swarf and reduced the amount of platinum or cobalt needed for splitting water.
The result is an electrolysis method of producing green hydrogen using metal waste while minimizing the cost and environmental impact related to the use of precious metals. Green hydrogen production can also minimize greenhouse gas emissions typically associated with producing hydrogen.
“It is remarkable that we are able to produce hydrogen from water using only a tenth of the amount of platinum loading compared to state-of-the-art commercial catalysts,” Madasamy Thangamuthu, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, said in a statement. “By spreading just 28 micrograms of the precious metal over 1 cm² of the swarf, we were able to create a laboratory-scale electrolyser that operates with 100% efficiency and produces 0.5 litres of hydrogen gas per minute just from a single piece of swarf.”
The researchers have now partnered with AqSorption Ltd, an engineering firm based in Nottingham, to work toward scaling up the technology to produce green hydrogen.
More than 1,220 volunteers have cleaned up nearly 9.9 tons of marine litter from beaches in East Africa’s Seychellesislands, in what researchers called an impressive example of citizen science.
The cleanup took place on 52 beaches across 10 islands from June 2019 to July 2023, a press release from University of Plymouth said.
“This study, and the years of work that led to it, highlight the potential of citizen science and the positive impacts it can have. As an islander myself, I know how people living in the Seychelles rely on the ocean for every part of their lives. But because we are a collection of remote islands, there are challenges in managing waste and we also have to deal with large quantities of items coming from elsewhere,” said lead author of the study Alvania Lawen, a student in environmental management and sustainability at University of Plymouth, as well as Parley for the Oceans’ country manager for Seychelles, in the press release.
The study, “Beached plastic and other anthropogenic debris in the inner Seychelles islands: Results of a citizen science approach,” was published in Marine Pollution Bulletin.
The volunteers picked up trash ranging from rubber and foam to plastics and metals. Of those, 13,525.4 pounds were non-plastic items and 6,250.1 pounds were made of plastic like bottles, food packaging and weathered ocean debris.
“Initiatives such as the beach clean-ups give people the opportunity to be part of the solution, and to tell their own stories about how they are being impacted by environmental issues,” Lawen said in the press release.
Ocean currents bring waste to the islands’ beaches, where it becomes trapped by vegetation.
In some places, much of the trash was recorded as having been produced locally, but as much as 75 percent was determined to have originated elsewhere.
The Seychelles are made up of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean. There are roughly 100,000 permanent residents, but the region’s coral reefs, beautiful beaches and nature reserves with rare animals like the giant Aldabra tortoise draw an influx of visitors each year.
The researchers said the study shows some of the obstacles island communities face with waste management, as well as how locals can help address the issue.
“As is often the case with environmental pollution, this is a clear example of waste generated in one place having significant impacts elsewhere. The quantity of litter collected during the beach cleans is astounding, and a testament to the efforts of citizen scientists living and working in the Seychelles,” said co-author of the study Dr. Andrew Turner, an associate professor of marine and environmental biogeochemistry at University of Plymouth, in the press release.
Turner emphasized the importance of the countries that generate the trash taking responsibility for it.
“However with climate change anticipated to increase the quantity and severity of storm surges, and plastic and other waste being generated in increasing quantities, items will continue to wash up on the beaches unless other, highly populated and industrialized Indian Ocean nations engage in more sustainable waste management,” Turner added.
A new legal theory suggests that oil companies could be taken to court for every kind of homicide in the United States, short of first-degree murder.
The idea of “climate homicide” is getting attention in law schools and district attorney’s offices around the country. A paper published in Harvard Environmental Law Review last week argues that fossil fuel companies have been “killing members of the public at an accelerating rate.” It says that oil giants’ awareness that their pollution could have lethal consequences solidly fits within the definition of homicide, which, in its basic form, is causing death with a “culpable mental state.” In other words, the case can be made that oil companies knew what they were doing.
“It’s sparking a lot of conversation,” said Aaron Regunberg, senior policy counsel at the advocacy group Public Citizen. After discussing the idea with elected officials and prosecutors, Regunberg said, many of them have moved from “‘Oh, that’s crazy’ to ‘Oh, that makes sense.’”
Starting around the 1970s, oil companies like Exxon understood the dangers that burning fossil fuels would unleash — unprecedented warming that would render parts of the globe “less habitable,” submerge coastal cities, and lead to extensive drought and mass famine. Yet instead of switching away from coal and oil, they doubled down, working to block legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and spreading doubt about the science of climate change. Today, with atmospheric CO2 climbing to levels last seen 14 million years ago, the predicted consequences have begun to arrive. Since the start of the 21st century, climate change has killed roughly 4 million people, according to one conservative estimate.
By 2100, that same number of people could be killed by the effects of climate change every single year, according to the new paper by David Arkush, the director of Public Citizen’s climate program, and Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University. “[T]he scope of the lethality is so vast that, in the annals of crime, it may eventually dwarf all other homicide cases in the United States, combined,” they write.
Criminal law cases are normally brought against individuals, but Regunberg says there’s a strong case for applying it more broadly. “It’s supposed to be about protecting us from dangerous actors that would harm our communities. What if we actually use this system to protect us from dangerous corporate actors that are doing incomprehensible harm?”
Homicide opens up a new flank in the strategy to bring climate change into the courts. Climate litigation is now in its “third wave,” according to Anthony Moffa, a professor at the University of Maine School of Law. The first lawsuits sought to force power companies to limit their emissions by way of federal public nuisance claims, a strategy the Supreme Court shot down in 2011. Then people started suing the U.S. and state governments using the argument that they had a duty to protect their citizens from climate change. The approach bore fruit last year, when young climate activists won a suit against Montana that claimed the state’s failure to evaluate climate risks in approving fossil fuel projects violated their constitutional right to a healthy environment.
That phase also includes a flood of climate lawsuits filed against oil companies in state courts using laws meant to protect people from deceptive advertising, and those cases are finally moving closer to trial after years of delays. Now the strategy has expanded to include racketeering lawsuits, which use the laws that took down the Mafia against Big Oil, and potentially criminal law cases including homicide or reckless endangerment.
Arkush and Braman’s paper suggests that all types of homicide are on the table except for first-degree murder, which requires premeditated intent. One option is “involuntary manslaughter,” or engaging in reckless conduct that causes death, even if it’s unintentional. “Negligent homicide” is similar, but for neglectful behavior. There’s also “depraved heart murder,” which requires engaging in conduct where you knew there was a substantial risk someone would be killed. Other variants include “felony murder” and “misdemeanor manslaughter.” Criminal law differs between states, so an attorney general or district attorney’s approach would depend on the jurisdiction.
Homicide suits could be a powerful force for holding oil companies accountable and forcing them to change their polluting ways. “Where tort law merely prices harmful conduct, criminal law prohibits it — and provides tools to stop it,” Arkush and Braman wrote in the Harvard Environmental Law Review paper. A successful lawsuit could result in courts requiring fossil fuel companies to restructure as “public benefit corporations” that have to balance profits with a commitment to the public good, replace their boards with new members, or make legally binding commitments to forgo certain practices.
To promote the idea of “climate homicide,” Public Citizen has been organizing panel discussions in recent weeks at law schools including Yale, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the University of Chicago. Another panel will be held at Vermont Law School on Monday. Public Citizen is also looking into staging mock trials to see how jurors might react to these kinds of cases and what evidence they find compelling.
“There are a number of prosecutorial offices that seem interested in giving these legal theories serious consideration,” Regunberg said. “They understand that climate disasters — extreme heat, wildfires, floods, and more — are endangering their communities, and if there’s a way to stop criminally reckless conduct that’s contributing to these threats, they’re going to explore that possibility.”
The idea has been embraced by Sharon Eubanks, who led the United States’ racketeering lawsuit against tobacco companies in 2005, in which the court found that companies had conspired to deceive the public by covering up the health dangers of smoking. “There were a lot of people who said we were crazy to charge big tobacco with racketeering and that we could never win,” Eubanks told The Guardian. “But you know what? We did win. I think we need that same kind of thinking to deal with the climate crisis.”
So why has no one seriously considered suing oil companies for homicide until now? Recent years have brought advances in the science that connects climate change to extreme weather events and quantifies how corporate emissions have fueled disasters like wildfires, paving the way for these types of cases. Still, the need to include attribution science adds a layer of complexity that hasn’t been present for similar litigation against tobacco or opioid companies, according to Moffa.
And then there’s the fact that prosecutors are reluctant to take corporations to court with criminal law charges. The first time that a corporation was charged under a criminal statute for manslaughter was in 1904, when a steamship owner was found guilty after its ship caught fire and 900 passengers drowned, but the legal strategy never really took off. “So then to say, ‘Why haven’t they ever done this in the environmental law?’ They haven’t really done it in almost any context,” Moffa said.
In their paper, Arkush and Braman argued that fossil fuel companies have been acting as if they were above the law. “Under a plain reading of the law in jurisdictions across the United States, they are committing mass homicide,” they conclude. “Prosecutors should act accordingly.”
The reality of climate change came home for Dr. Samantha Ahdoot one summer day in 2011 when her son was 9 years old.
An assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Ahdoot and her family were living in Alexandria, when there was a heat wave. Morning temperatures hovered in the high 80s, and her son had to walk up a steep hill to get to his day camp.
About an hour after he left for camp, she received a call from a nearby emergency room. Her son had collapsed from the heat and needed IV fluids to recover.
“It was after that event that I realized that I had to do something,” she said. “That, as a pediatrician and a mother, this was something that I had to learn about and get involved in.”
Dr. Ahdoot made good on that vow. She is the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ newly updated policy statement on climate change, which appeared earlier this year. The statement urges pediatricians to talk about climate change to their patients. But research suggests that’s not happening very much yet, and there are practical barriers in the way.
Back in 2007, the AAP was the first national physicians’ group to make a public statement about climate change. The updated statement covers the growing research on the many ways climate disproportionately affects children in particular. Heat raises the risk of preterm birth; infants are among the most likely to die in heat waves. Because their bodies cool themselves less efficiently than adults, children remain more susceptible to heat-related illness as they grow. Children breathe more air per pound of body weight, making them up to 10 times more affected by toxins in wildfire smoke. Excess heat hurts children’s performance in school, especially low-income children with less access to air conditioning. And research suggests that teens and youth are feeling more climate anxiety than older adults.
The new policy statement’s number one recommendation is that its members “incorporate climate change counseling into clinical practice.” This may seem like a tall order, considering the average pediatrician visit is 15 minutes. A 2021 study found that 80 percent of parents agreed that the impact of global warming on their child’s health should be discussed during their routine visits. But, only 4 percent said that it had actually happened in the past year.
“How do you talk about climate change in a visit where you have to talk about X, Y, Z, do all the vaccines, answer every concern?” said Dr. Charles Moon, chief resident at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York. A member of the AAP Council on Environmental Health and Climate Change, he has been working to build a curriculum at his hospital to start teaching pediatricians and other doctors about this.
“I don’t think we have all the answers to that yet,” he said. “I do a lot of work teaching other pediatricians, and it requires a little bit of a mindset shift.”
Dr. Moon sees patients in the South Bronx, nicknamed “Asthma Alley” for its air pollution. Part of his challenge is putting environmental threats in perspective for families who face many different obstacles in their lives, in a way that doesn’t lead to despair or disempowerment.
Or, as he put it: “If you can’t put food on the table, who wants to hear about climate change?”
In Oakland, California, Dr. Cierra Gromoff has a lot of experience with families on Medicaid, and she says the pressure on them and their healthcare providers is real. “There are these already incredibly marginalized groups of kids facing other insurmountable things,” she said. “These providers have so little time, they have to focus on the biggest burning fire — whatever systemic problem is going on.”
A clinical child psychologist, Gromoff has been concerned about the environment since her childhood as an Alaskan Native in the remote Aleutian Islands. She thinks that to overcome these obstacles, state and federal insurance providers should require or reward doctors for taking the time to include environmental health in their assessments.
She is the co-founder of a telehealth startup, Kismet Health, which is building a tool that could show local environmental threats that are indexed to a patient’s home or school address.
The tool could help doctors recognize climate risks, by showing if a patient lives near a green space, an urban heat island, or a polluting chemical plant.
Gromoff said she would like to see free resources that pediatricians can give families on everything from the signs of heatstroke in a baby to eco-anxiety.
“We should have a screening question,” she said. “‘Are you worried about what’s happening to our earth?’ And if they say yes, we should be able to provide some type of handout: What you’re feeling is real. These are small steps you can take.”
The good news, say Moon and Ahdoot, is that interest in the topic is picking up in the medical community. Over half of medical schools are covering climate change in the curriculum, a number that’s more than doubled since 2019. And there are state research consortiums on climate and health in 24 states, Ahdoot said. The American Academy of Pediatrics has been creating continuing education materials on the topic as well.
Incorporating climate change into clinical practice is not about adding another item to an already long checklist, Ahdoot said. It’s also not about transforming pediatricians into activists, or talking about factors that families can’t do anything about.
“Pediatricians never want to be proselytizing,” she added. “It always has to be valuable to the individual patient.”
The goal of the new climate policy for pediatricians is to help doctors translate their climate knowledge into solutions and helpful advice for their patients. A few examples from Ahdoot include: running a test for Lyme disease for patients in Maine, which used to be too cold for ticks; beginning allergy medication in February because pollen arrives earlier in the year; or teaching athletes the warning signs for heat exhaustion.
For Ahdoot, it’s also important to be aware of how climate affects a child’s mental health. Part of the answer, she said, is talking about actions that families can take that benefit both people’s health and the planet, like eating more plant-based diets, and walking or biking instead of driving.
“What’s good for climate,” she said, “is generally good for kids.”
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.
In December, Catherine Murupaenga-Ikenn used a power tool to erase the words on a museum display of the Treaty of Waitangi, an 1840 document that asserted British sovereignty over Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand.
For years, many Māori, like Murupaenga-Ikenn, had criticized their national museum for displaying the English-language agreement that their ancestors did not endorse, wrongly suggesting the Māori people had agreed to relinquish their sovereignty. Activists had spent years waiting for the museum to change the display; when nothing happened, they took matters into their own hands. Her case is now in court.
Murupaenga-Ikenn is now in New York City this week, attending the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the largest annual global gathering of Indigenous advocates and leaders. There, she spoke on the United Nations General Assembly floor on Wednesday, drawing a connection between the disillusionment her people feel with their state government and the frustration Indigenous people feel with the United Nations as a whole.
A decade ago, global leaders stood in that same room and agreed to respect and promote the rights of Indigenous peoples. At the World Conference of Indigenous Peoples in 2014, they negotiated a 40-paragraph agreement — known as an outcome document — loaded with promises like providing equal access to health care for Native peoples; respecting their contributions to ecosystem management; and working with Indigenous peoples to address the effects of extractive industries. To date, little has been accomplished, and now many like Murupaenga-Ikenn want the United Nations to urgently course-correct.
“Ten years on from the adoption of the outcome document, what I see is the U.N. is suffering a crisis of Indigenous peoples’ mistrust,” Murupaenga-Ikenn said.
Wednesday’s meeting, where Murupaenga-Ikenn spoke, was particularly important because it featured Dennis Francis, the president of the General Assembly, a high-ranking official of the United Nations, second only to the secretary-general, António Guterres.
United Nations General Assembly President Dennis Francis speaks during a press conference on January 24, 2024.
Kabir Jhangiani / NurPhoto via Getty Images
But unlike the conference in 2014, this conversation focused heavily on the climate crisis. The original outcome document features the phrase “climate change” only once.
“It is thanks to Indigenous peoples, as guardians as 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, that the sophisticated traditional knowledge and practices they employ, that we have seen gains in the conservation and sustainable use of our increasingly threatened biodiversity,” Francis said in his remarks to attendees. “We must harness the potential of Indigenous knowledge and innovations to mitigate the effects of climate change.”
A decade ago, the world hadn’t yet experienced month after month of record-shattering heat. Global leaders hadn’t met in Paris to sign international agreements to prevent catastrophic warming. Far fewer people drove electric cars and relied upon renewable energy. The European Union and the U.S. had yet to sign their landmark climate laws.
Now, the United Nations’ weather agency is warning that the world is close to surpassing 1.5 degrees of warming. Scientists are proving that climate change is already exacerbating extreme weather events like heavy rainfall. And leaders say now is more important than ever for U.N. member states to take seriously both the concerns of Indigenous peoples and the potential for their traditional knowledge and practices to provide much-needed solutions.
“So many brothers and sisters have come to this meeting year after year to call to humanity, to states, to multinationals, to ask them to comply with these agreements,” said Leonidas Iza Salazar, a Kichwa-Panzaleo activist from Ecuador, who spoke on behalf of Central and South America and the Caribbean region at Wednesday’s meeting.
In the 2014 outcome document, such promises include recognizing Indigenous peoples’ knowledge when creating national climate change response plans and protecting Indigenous rights, which include “free, prior and informed consent” to projects on their land. This would mean giving Indigenous peoples the opportunity to agree to energy developments like pipelines and lithium mining on their land before such projects are underway.
“However after 10 years of having established these mechanisms and having this declaration, the states — rather than creating conditions to meet the commitments they have made to the Indigenous peoples of the world — they have forged ahead with economic policies, mining, extraction, despoiling Mother Earth without limits,” Salazar said. “All of that has brought with that terrible consequences.”
Throughout Wednesday’s meeting, Indigenous peoples took turns sharing their frustration and disappointment with the lack of follow through from state governments, whose officials intermittently stood up to describe their progress and restate their commitments to Native peoples and nations.
Some state governments were more willing to embrace reform than others: A representative from Colombia said the country would support enhanced participation of Indigenous peoples in the U.N. system through the creation of a separate status for them. Right now, Indigenous nations are lumped in with non-governmental organizations in the U.N. system like advocacy groups, and can’t serve on key committees where important conversations happen between U.N. member states.
Many Indigenous advocates spoke up about the need for such enhanced participation in United Nations processes, which states promised to consider in the outcome document. Indigenous peoples’ status at the U.N. still hasn’t changed in the last decade.
Ghazali Ohorella, an Alifuru Indigenous rights advocate from the Maluku Islands in Indonesia, spoke on behalf of the Pacific region and was one of several advocates who urged Francis, president of the General Assembly, to schedule a high-level meeting in 2027 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the signing of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Those meetings, Ohorella said, are a key part of Indigenous advocates’ efforts to hold states accountable for their promises. And while there’s no way to actually hold states accountable, a major event can help Indigenous advocates shine a light on failures, highlight any successes and ensure their concerns are not forgotten.
“The thing is, with Indigenous peoples, because we’re like a mighty mouse fighting an 800-pound gorilla, you need to keep the pressure on,” Ohorella said. “What we’re here to do is definitely to challenge the status quo and make sure that we’re not just participating in the system, we’re changing it.”
That optimism resonates with Murupaenga-Ikenn from Aotearoa. Murupaenga-Ikenn used to attend the Permanent Forum frequently but then got disillusioned by the lack of progress and stopped attending.
But recently she decided it was time to come back. A new right-wing government elected last fall in Aotearoa pledged to roll back many of the progressive Indigenous policies that Māori peoples spent decades fighting for. Already, the new government abolished the Māori health agency, despite entrenched health disparities, is minimizing the use of the Māori language, and exploring how to withdraw the country’s support of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Thousands have taken to the streets to protest the changes.
Murupaenga-Ikenn feels like this is the time to speak out again, and to find allies internationally. Yet halfway through the first week of the Permanent Forum, she’s already frustrated with how repetitive the gathering has been as Indigenous advocates ask state governments over and over to respect their rights.
“You just want to keep on doing this for another 100 years?” she said. “Good on you, but not me. And certainly not our young people. Because there will be nothing left, nothing left to salvage if we keep on doing this, and only this.”
This year marks the 54th year of Earth Day! What better way to celebrate than to explore opportunities to join others in helping combat the climate crisis and make our planet cleaner, greener and more sustainable? Here are a few suggestions to get you started.
1. Square Up Against Plastic Pollution
Earth’s future at stake.
Plastics impact every inch of our planet, from land to water. We’re entwined with plastic, ingesting & breathing it.
EARTHDAY.ORG, a global environmental group that grew out of the first Earth Day in 1970, has announced that the official theme of Earth Day 2024 is Planet vs. Plastics. The organization hopes to mobilize its worldwide network to demand a 60 percent cut in plastic production by 2040, with a view toward eliminating the toxic petroleum products entirely.
“The word environment means what surrounds you. Now plastics do more than surround us; we have become the product itself — it flows through our blood stream, adheres to our internal organs, and carries with it heavy metals known to cause cancer and disease. Now this once-thought amazing and useful product has become something else, and our health and that of all other living creatures hangs in the balance,” EARTHDAY.ORG President Kathleen Rogers said in the press release announcing the theme. “The Planet vs. Plastics campaign is a call to arms, a demand that we act now to end the scourge of plastics and safeguard the health of every living being upon our planet.”
To help anyone join the campaign, EARTHDAY.ORG has published an Earth Day 2024 Action Toolkit that includes a petition for an ambitious Global Plastics Treaty, resources to learn about the relationship between plastic pollution and fast fashion and advocate for a sustainable clothing industry and an invitation to take the #PlasticDetox Challenge on social media and reduce your reliance on single-use plastics.
You can also either search for or create your own Earth Day event or tackle plastic pollution directly by organizing or joining a Great Global Cleanup near you. If you want to go even deeper, you can sign up to Dive for Earth Day and remove trash from vulnerable ocean ecosystems like coral reefs or marine protected areas.
Earth Day 2024 follows closely on the first 12-month period on record in which global temperatures breached 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. While some of this heat likely comes from an ongoing El Niño event, it’s exacerbated by global heating caused chiefly by the burning of fossil fuels. Several youth climate organizations including Sunrise Movement, Fridays For Future US and the Campus Climate Network are using Earth Day as a chance to pressure President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.
“Congress grants the president various national defense powers that can be deployed during times of genuine emergency,” the groups explain in a petition. “Since the National Emergencies Act was enacted in 1976, every president has declared at least one national emergency during their term of office. By declaring a national climate emergency, Biden can unlock these emergency executive powers to aggressively combat the crisis.”
Declaring a climate emergency would allow Biden to take steps including pausing oil exports and oil and gas drilling, using the Defense Production Act to bolster renewable energy installations and create green jobs and provide free healthcare and housing to people impacted by extreme weather events.
To add your voice to their call, you can sign the petition to Biden; join the Global Climate Strike on Friday, April 19; or sign up for a Sunrise Movement Earth Day teach-in taking place from April 19 to 23. If you’re a university student, you can also attend a Reclaim Earth Day protest calling on schools to divest from fossil fuels, sever any connections with the fossil fuel industry and eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions.
3. Concert to End Fossil Fuels
If you find yourself in Washington, DC this Earth Day weekend, the Earth Day DC 2024 Concert to End Fossil Fuels will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 20, at the National Mall.
“This Earth Day weekend we are coming together to continue the fight to End the Era of Fossil Fuels! Communities around the globe are plagued by severe storms and weather events, and politicians have been ignoring the scientific warnings for decades,” Action Network said in its press release on the event. “But we have the solutions. We know that we need an immediate just transition to renewable energy. We’re fighting back against green washing and false solutions that fail to address the root cause of the climate crisis. We demand that giant fossil fuel companies be held accountable and pay for the harm they have caused. Our future lies in the will to pass bold policies and make systemic change.”
The concert will feature local bands, artwork and speeches from community and youth activists.
“We are gathering this Earth Day weekend with music and art to continue this fight, to strengthen our movement and hear from youth voices. We will also be hearing from youth in the constitutional climate lawsuits around the country, such as Juliana vs. Gov and Held vs. Montana as part of Our Children’s Trust!”
What better way to celebrate Earth Day than to get your groove on in the nation’s capital while being inspired by others at the forefront of the climate fight.
4. Earth Day 2024 Virtual Stage
Another opportunity for community connection is the Earth Day 2024 Virtual Stage, presented by Earth Day Initiative and March for Science New York City. Programming begins at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Earth Day itself.
This online collaboration features activists, filmmakers, artists, authors, actors and podcasters engaged in conversation about climate action, environmental justice and green living.
Some of the presenters scheduled to grace the Earth Day 2024 Virtual Stage include:
Environmentalist and drag queen Pattie Gonia with artist and activist Benjamin Von Wong and Maggie Kervick, global head of sustainability at Kiehl’s skincare, speaking about how to make the beauty industry more circular.
Actor, author and podcaster Angourie Rice with a special message on climate action.
Author and CBC Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue and Earth Day Initiative’s Executive Director John Oppermann on “How to Prepare for the Climate Crisis.”
Emily Fano, National Wildlife Federation senior manager for climate resilience education, and Alyssa Shearer, March for Science NYC’s director of programming, with a discussion on climate change education.
Leslie Ann St. Amour, RAVEN’s campaign director, speaking with actor, filmmaker and environmental activist Luke Mullen about the “Indigenous Fight Against Climate Change.”
A conversation about “Reducing Food Waste at Home” by JacobSimonSays LLC founder and climate educator and creator Jacob Simon and Jeremy Lang, who is the co-founder and vice president of sustainability at LOMI.
An explainer on sustainable furnishings by actor, writer and director Megyn Price and Laurence Carr, CEO and founder of Laurence Carr Inc. and Studio Laurence.
Past segments of the virtual stage can be viewed here.
Whatever you choose to do to celebrate our planet this Earth Day, we hope it includes time in the outdoors, inspiration and community!
Climate change damage worldwide will cost approximately $38 trillion annually by 2050, according to a new study by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
The impacts will be felt all over the world, but will most affect countries that have contributed the least to the climate crisis.
“Our study highlights the considerable inequity of climate impacts: We find damages almost everywhere, but countries in the tropics will suffer the most because they are already warmer. Further temperature increases will therefore be most harmful there. The countries least responsible for climate change are predicted to suffer income loss that is 60% greater than the higher-income countries and 40% greater than higher-emission countries. They are also the ones with the least resources to adapt to its impacts,” said co-author of the study Anders Levermann, PIK’s head of research department complexity science, in a press release from PIK.
The study, “The economic commitment of climate change,” was published in the journal Nature.
“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany and the U.S., with a projected median income reduction of 11% each and France with 13%,” said study co-author Leonie Wenz, a PIK climate scientist and economist, as The Associated Press reported.
The severity of the impacts will almost definitely increase as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, reported Reuters.
“These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately – if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100. This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering non-economic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity,” Wenz said in the press release.
The research team used empirical models along with climate simulations and also examined the persistence of climate impact effects on the past economy. In assessing how changing climatic conditions would affect future economic growth, the researchers looked at 40 years worth of data from more than 1,600 regions across the world.
“Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected. These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure,” said Maximilian Kotz, a PIK climate scientist and first author of the study, in the press release.
The range of economic damages is estimated to be from $19 to 59 trillion by mid-century. The cause will mainly be rising temperatures, with additional impacts from rainfall changes and variations in temperature. Additional weather extremes like wildfires and storms could also increase the economic costs.
“[W]e find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices,” the researchers wrote in the study. “These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2°C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices.”
Levermann emphasized the need for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels.
“It is on us to decide: structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas and coal,” Levermann said in the press release.
Wenz said the extent of the inequity of the impacts was unexpected.
“It’s devastating,” Wenz said, as The Guardian reported. “I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking.”
