Author: vandy

A new year, new commitments. How will you make a difference in this new year?

Take a look at the Minnesota 100% Campaign! They have many helpful ways of taking action this year.

From their website:

The 100% Campaign is bringing Minnesotans together – people just like you – who believe we need an equitable clean energy future for everyone in our state.

With both organizational partners and individual endorsees, the 100% Campaign is grounded in the idea that “to change everything, we need everyone”. We are organizing a cross-sector, statewide, multi-racial, intersectional campaign to build an equitable clean energy economy that works for everyone in Minnesota.

We believe that Minnesotans must act now to ensure our well-being for generations to come. To do that, we must:

• Transition to safe, clean, locally-made energy solutions at scale and as quickly as we can.
• Create solutions that work for all Minnesotans across race, gender, class, and place
• Encourage public & private investments, expand worker training, and create new energy solutions that save us money
• Strengthen all communities that are impacted by pollution or the transition away from fossil fuels

Minnesotans aren’t afraid to lead.

In science. In education. In business or politics. When Minnesota leads with our values, the whole country does better. The future looks brighter.

We can create an equitable clean energy economy, if we demand it.

To accomplish it, there are five policy directions that we need to lead:

Renewables: We must accelerate as quickly as possible our transition to equitable renewable energy for everyone across the state.

Efficiency: We must strengthen our commitment to making all our buildings more efficient while creating equitable pathways to sustainable, high-wage work.

Sequestration: We must improve our land, water, & air while decarbonizing by promoting healthy forestry and land use in urban, suburban, & greater Minnesota.

Electrification: We must invest in beneficial electrification, prioritizing our low-income, rural, and most-impacted communities.

Transition & Adaptation: We must protect our communities that are impacted directly by pollution or the transition away from fossil fuels.

Would you like to learn more and take action this year? Visit their website at https://www.100percentmn.org/home

Since the beginning of the industrial era (around 1850), human activities have raised the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide by nearly 49%.

It continues to grow dramatically each year.

We must take action this year. Extreme weather events, like heat waves, tornados, hurricanes, and floods, are happening more often and becoming more intense.

What can you do?

The most important tool you have is your voice. Talk to your friends and family. Talk to your local, state, and federal representatives about the importance of fighting climate change. Ask them to support laws that limit greenhouse gas emissions. Vote for candidates that support efforts to address the threat of climate change, ensuring that they are part of our nation’s energy and environmental policy.

Make this year different!

Quite a lot! Paleoclimatology scientists use tree rings to explore the past climate.

To learn more, read this NASA Climate Kids article about Trees and Climate change:

https://climatekids.nasa.gov/tree-rings/

Watch this 5-minute video from the British Broadcasting Company

Mass tree-planting is one of the high profile responses to climate change. There are plans to plant billions. But there are growing questions about the merits of doing so. Here’s 5 mins on why. Produced by Mary Fuller, Priyanka Deladia & Tom Brada. https://t.co/5vLaJ2piZF pic.twitter.com/7dUXbMz1w3

— Ros Atkins (@BBCRosAtkins) November 5, 2021

An Open Letter to the Global Media by Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate

Published 10/29/2021

[Nakate is a Ugandan climate-justice activist and founder of the Rise Up Movement. Thunberg is a Swedish climate activist and co-founder of the Fridays for Future movement.]

Dear media editors around the world,

Melting glaciers, wildfires, droughts, deadly heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, loss of biodiversity. These are all symptoms of a destabilizing planet, which are happening around us all the time.

Those are the kind of things you report about. Sometimes. The climate crisis, however, is much more than just this. If you want to truly cover the climate crisis, you must also report on the fundamental issues of time, holistic thinking and justice.

So what does that mean? Let’s look at these issues one by one.

First, the notion of time. If your stories do not include the notion of a ticking clock, then the climate crisis is just a political topic among other topics, something we can just buy, build or invest our way out of. Leave out the aspect of time and we can continue pretty much like today and ”solve the problems” later on. 2030, 2050 or 2060. The best available science shows that with our current rate of emissions, our remaining carbon budget for staying below 1.5°C will run out before the end of this decade.

Second, holistic thinking. When considering our remaining carbon budget we need to count all the numbers and include all of our emissions. Currently, you are letting high income nations and big polluters off the hook, allowing them to hide behind the incomplete statistics, loopholes and rhetoric they have fought so hard to create during the last 30 years.

Third, and most important of all, justice. The climate crisis isn’t just about extreme weather. It’s about people. Real people. And the very people who have done the least to create the climate crisis are suffering the most. And while the Global South is on the frontlines of the climate crisis, it’s almost never on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. As Western media focuses on wildfires in California or Australia or flooding in Europe, climate-related catastrophes are ravaging communities across the Global South, but receive very little coverage.

To include the element of justice, you cannot ignore the Global North’s moral responsibility to move much faster in reducing their emissions. By the end of this year, the world will have collectively burned through 89% of the carbon budget that gives us a 66% chance of staying below 1.5°C.

That’s why historic emissions not only count, but are in fact at the very heart of the debate over climate justice. And yet historical emissions are still being almost completely ignored by the media and people in power.

To stay below the targets set in the Paris Agreement, and thereby minimize the risks of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control, we need immediate, drastic, annual emission reductions unlike anything the world has ever seen. And as we don’t have the technological solutions that alone will do anything close to that in the foreseeable future, it means we have to make fundamental changes in our society. This is the uncomfortable result of our leaders’ failure to address this crisis.

Your responsibility to help correct this failure cannot be overstated. We are social animals and if our leaders, and our media, don’t act as if we were in a crisis then of course we won’t understand that we are. One of the essential elements of a functioning democracy is a free press that objectively informs the citizens of the great challenges our society faces. And the media must hold the people in power accountable for their actions, or inactions.

You are among our last hopes. No one else has the possibility and the opportunity to reach as many people in the extremely short timeframe we have. We cannot do this without you. The climate crisis is only going to become more urgent. We can still avoid the worst consequences, we can still turn this around. But not if we continue like today. You have the resources and possibilities to change the story overnight.

Whether or not you choose to rise to that challenge is up to you. Either way, history will judge you.

Greta and Vanessa

We are living through the last years still left to prevent a future of permanent and catastrophic climate change. The planet’s future – humanity’s future – is in our hands.

That’s the inescapable conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
(IPCC) “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis” report, which was released in August 2021.

Our world is warming faster than any point in recorded history – and the report details the many and far-reaching consequences. More and worse drought. Seas rising. Greater extremes in temperatures. Ever-stronger hurricanes. And on and on.

Did you know that just talking about the climate crisis is one of the most effective ways you can make a difference? To download the 15-page e-book, register at: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/world

Sleeping Bear LLC Managing Member Vandy Johnson attended the “Minnesota Forest Carbon Series: Carbon Markets” event hosted by the University of Minnesota Sustainable Forests Education Cooperative.

The three-day event was designed to review the why, who, and how of forest-based carbon markets. We heard from representatives of forest carbon credit programs serving large and small-acreage owners and public and private landowners who are actively involved in carbon markets on their land.

We also spent a day in the woods at the University of Minnesota Cloquet Forestry Center, visiting stands to visually compare and contrast forest carbon inventory data and projections in a variety of stands. The goal of the program was to facilitate a strong understanding of key terms and concepts and how different carbon credit programs work, and which, if any, might be right for your land.

Thanks to Dr. Eli Sagor, SFEC Program Manager, and Dr. Matt Russell, UMN Extension and Department of Forest Resources, for leading the event.

If you are interested in Sustainable Forests and Minnesota Forest Carbon, visit the SFEC Home Page and sign up for email updates!

Susannah Meadows writes in today’s NY Times:

The evidence of our planet’s warming is all around us. But many of us have been able to comfort ourselves, if only slightly, with the knowledge that the more cataclysmic fallout is still a ways off, that it may be preventable. Perhaps the gradual nature of the worsening conditions we see everyday has lulled us into a sense of complacency.

What I saw in Yosemite feels like a wake-up call that’s come too late.

Sometimes it takes 20 years to see a drastic change.

Coming into the park from the south, up California 41, I looked out onto mountains that appeared studded with giant charred toothpicks. The 2018 Ferguson fire had decimated this once magnificent forest.

Other trees were dying off, victims of bug infestations abetted by warming temperatures and milder winters. The waterfalls were pathetic wisps in the wind, shadows of the lush, white horse-tails that spilled down the summer I lived there.

Wildfire, tree-death, and dwindling waterfalls are natural occurrences. But these problems are exacerbated by climate change, according to the National Park Service.

With the worsening heat — it hit 104 degrees in the valley this month — you can’t enjoy being there as much. The West Coast is being battered by those three awful cousins, drought, heat and wildfire. When will the hot weather leave certain unforgettable, vertical hikes, like to the top of Half Dome, out of reach?

Yosemite’s last two glaciers are rapidly retreating. They will most likely disappear in a few decades, threatening the summer and autumn water supply in these mountains. By the time I visited in the first week of July, some of the streams in the high country — relied upon by animals and backpackers alike — were already dry. The river that threads through the valley, the Merced, was low and listless. When I lived alongside it years ago, it was so swollen with melted snow and the rapids so loud, I would have to close my window before making a phone call.

Read the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/opinion/yosemite-west-coast-smoke.html

Here in northern Minnesota, the once Mighty Mississippi is down to a trickle. We can no longer kayak down the river. Climate change has Minnesota in a desperate drought and the air is choked with wildfire ash. We have the hottest summer temperatures on record.

We must stop climate change now. . Use the US House of Representatives website to contact your representative today! https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative Tell them now is the time to end climate change.