Environment – Page 16 – Things Are Good

How Oysters Protect Cities

We need to anything and everything to mitigate the impacts of climate change, some solutions are global and others are local. In the United States there’s a growing movement to grow oysters along coastal areas that previous generations destroyed. New York City is one such place, as is New Orleans. Both cities encouraged shipping practices that hurt oyster production whereas today they’ve realized without the protection oysters bring the city is negatively affected.

Bring on the oysters!

When Orff looked into Staten Island’s predicament, she couldn’t help but notice how much it resembled the situation in other parts of New York City and, for that matter, in coastal cities throughout the world. At scape, she put together a plan, called Living Breakwaters, for protecting and reanimating Staten Island’s coastline. In 2014, the proposal earned the highest score in the billion-dollar Rebuild by Design competition, an Obama Administration initiative that invited designers, engineers, scientists, and planners to build systems for a wetter, warmer world. Orff designed a necklace of sloped rock formations and “reef streets” to be submerged in Raritan Bay, where they would attenuate the energy of waves crashing into the South Shore of Staten Island and serve as habitats for oysters, lobsters, and juvenile fish. The system, which would be largely invisible to the area’s residents, wouldn’t prevent storm water from reaching their sidewalks and streets. But it would lessen the impact, lowering the risk of major damage in future hurricanes while helping people connect with one another and with the ecosystems that sustain them.

This City Captures Drinkable Water from the Air

Aquifers feel there pressure of increasing populations and farms; as a result, cities around the world get drastically close to running out of water. The solution in some places may have been under our noses the entire time: fog. In Lima they already have a system in place to capture water from fog to supplement existing sources, and other coastal cities are paying attention. The coolest part of the fog catching technology is that it comes from ancient techniques using tees!

In 2009, German conservationists Kai Tiedemann and Anne Lummerich planted 800 she-oak trees in Peru to create a natural fog-catching system that aimed to replicate this ancient technique. During their research they found that trees with vertical, needle-like leaves work as an organic net to which drops of water adhere. They later went on to develop artificial nets that could also capture water.

Marzol has been studying “the hidden precipitation” in fog for nearly 25 years now, partly because modern meteorological instruments struggle to measure its relationship with precipitation. During the course of her research she has witnessed the social transformation that can occur in communities that collect fog water.

Dutch Climate Lawyer Wins Dresden Peace Prize

Yes, a lawyer won a peace prize. Roger Cox, a Dutch climate lawyer who took on Shell, has been awarded the 2022 Dresden Peace Prize for winning a case that inspired similar cases around the world. On behalf of Friends of the Earth, Cox won a ruling in a Dutch court against Shell last year (the case itself was launched in 2015) which forces the company to reduce its carbon output by 45% by 2030. The non-renewable energy company is based in the Netherlands making it subject to Dutch courts.

Climate activists hailed the decision as a victory for the planet that built on a 2015 case Cox brought requiring the Netherlands’ government to cut emissions at least 25 per cent by the end of 2020 from benchmark 1990 levels.
Since then, similar cases have been brought against governments and corporations around the world, with mixed results.
“Peace is more than the absence of war,” the organisers of the Dresden Prize said. “Standing up for peace in times of climate crisis means acting responsibly and fighting for a humane and thus peaceful life for future generations.”

The Climate Change Deniers are Done

Climate change deniers have clearly set back human progress and delayed us in reducing emissions, obviously that’s no good. What is good is that they barely exist anymore. The science has always been done properly around climate change and people are living the chaos that climate change has caused; it’s as impossible to deny as a round Earth. Conversations are no longer hijacked by people who deny climate reality, and that’s a good thing.

How do we know this? Some researchers set out to determine how present climate change denialism was online only to find it declining. A really need potential spinoff from this research is how to look into other aspects of people denying science and how to engage them to better understand reality.

In a study out this week in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, researchers found that outright denying the science is going out of fashion. Today, only about 10 percent of arguments from conservative think tanks in North America challenge the scientific consensus around global warming or question models and data. (For the record, 99.9 percent of scientists agree that human activity is heating up the planet.) Instead, the most common arguments are that scientists and climate advocates simply can’t be trusted, and that proposed solutions won’t work.
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It took Cook and his team about five years to create a machine learning model that was able to reliably detect real-life climate misinformation claims. “Misinformation is messy and doing content analysis is messy, because the real world is always a bit blurry,” Cook said. First, they developed a taxonomy to sort arguments into broad categories — say, “climate change isn’t bad” — narrower claims (“carbon dioxide is not a pollutant”) and even more specific points (“CO2 is food for plants!”). Then they fed common climate myths into the machine until it was able to recognize each one consistently out in the wild.

New York City Bans New Gas Connections

New buildings constructed in New York City are not permitted to connect to natural gas for any reason. This makes NYC the largest city in the USA to do so and likely marks a shift in the country for even more cities to adopt a ban on new uses of the fossil fuel. To avoid catastrophic climate change we need to keep fossil fuel in the ground and with NYC banning new buildings from using the world-destroying product it will force the construction industry to adapt.

The measure already has support from Con Edison, a utility that provides both electricity and gas to New Yorkers. The grid “is well-poised to support the transition to heating electrification,” it said in a November testimony to city council. That’s because the grid usually sees peak demand during the summer when residents blast their air conditioning, it says, and electricity use is typically lower in the winter.

“New York City is taking a massive step off fossil fuels, paving the way for the rest of the state and country to follow,” Food & Water Watch northeast region director Alex Beauchamp said in a statement today.