2024 progress, challenges, and what you can do
A year of climate stories - the good, the not-so-good, and what you can do about it
Last week, I shared tips for navigating climate conversations over the holidays. This week, as we step into the New Year, I want to highlight some of my top stories from 2024: a mega-list of “did you know…” and “you wouldn’t believe…” conversation starters you can use to spark constructive and effective discussions in the weeks ahead.
NOT-SO-GOOD NEWS
Global warming is already affecting our food. It tripled cacao prices last year, and is contributing to rising food prices world-wide. Bananas will be harder to grow in a warmer world and coffee supply is also at risk. Warmer waters are making fish smaller, while higher levels of carbon pollution in the air is making many fruits and vegetables less nutritious.
In terms of our health, tiger mosquitoes that spread diseases including dengue, West Nile, and Chikungunya are thriving in a warmer world. In addition to causing over 8 million premature deaths each year, particulate pollution from burning fossil fuels is also responsible for up to a third of premature births worldwide.
"Extreme weather reached dangerous new heights in 2024," a report by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central found, adding that "This year’s record-breaking temperatures ... contributed to the deaths of at least 3,700 people and the displacement of millions in 26 weather events." Around the world last year, most people (probably including you!) experienced at least 41 days of extreme heat, including the heatwave that caused the deaths of some 1,300 pilgrims during this year’s Hajj.
Last year made it clear that our infrastructure isn't prepared for these impacts, either. In some places, it’s getting so hot in some places that “bridges can literally fall apart like Tinkertoys,” as one civil engineer said. 2024 saw the deadliest Atlantic hurricane season in nearly 20 years, with some communities in the Carolinas not regaining power and water for weeks afterwards. Devastating floods that destroyed homes and roads in the Philippines and Spain were also super-sized by climate change. Increasing extreme weather risk is driving up insurance prices (including where I live in Texas) and causing insurers to pull out of some areas of California, Florida, and Louisiana entirely. Around the world, one analysis estimated that all the carbon we’ve already emitted will depress global income by 19 percent.
That’s a long list! Which means, there's bound to be something whoever you’re talking with doesn't know yet but would easily relate to.
GOOD NEWS
Clean energy soared in 2024. In the US, solar and wind made up 90 percent of new capacity. Meanwhile, China installed more solar last year alone than the US has in its entire history. Its carbon emissions are about to peak, if they haven’t already, and within a decade China will be generating more electricity from solar alone than the US uses in total.
When it comes to clean energy, there’s no silver bullet; we need everything we can get, and every year people are coming up with creative ways to provide the power we need. For example, by building new renewable projects near soon-to-be retired fossil fuel plants, operators can repurpose existing grid connections, like at the Sherco coal power plant in Minnesota. The Ulkatcho First Nation in British Columbia plans to build Canada’s largest off-grid solar farm to date. And new electric cargo ships are sailing in China and Norway now.
Working with nature to generate climate solutions can add a whole new set of benefits. Last year, for example, in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea, scientists discovered a type of cyanobacteria that consumes carbon dioxide astonishingly quickly. An Albanian start up is trying to mine nickel - a crucial metal for manufacturing EV batteries - from plants. A new UK law requires new development to demonstrate “biodiversity net gain” – leaving the natural environment measurably better than it was before! Pollinator-friendly solar farms can help tackle the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis at the same time, and Priyanka Singh taught us that even a balcony in Mumbai can be turned into a pollinator haven.
A four-day workweek reduces both carbon pollution and increases worker happiness. In Scotland, the city of Edinburgh has barred airlines, SUVs, cruise lines, and oil companies from advertising in city limits. Universities across the US and the world, from UC San Diego to the University of Barcelona, are adding courses on climate change to their graduation requirements. Education will be key to how we solve this problem, so this is something to celebrate!
Musicians and grandmothers were my favourite climate messengers of 2024: from Australia’s Knitting Nannas, who show up in bright yellow shirts, knitting in hand, and pull up a chair to protest everything from unfair legislation to coal expansion, to Coldplay, who cut their tour emissions by almost 60 percent. And there’s even a concert venue in Scotland that is heated and cooled using the body heat of concertgoers.
Wherever we look, climate solutions are proving it is 100 percent possible to tackle big challenges while building a better and healthier world for ourselves and for generations to come.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
At home, you can take a big bite out of your carbon footprint by electrifying everything from appliances to heating and cooling. Rewiring America has a handy Personal Electrification Planner for both home-owners and renters. You can also take steps to prepare for hurricane season or other climate-fueled extreme weather disasters. And online, consider switching your search engine to Ecosia, which plants one tree for every 45 searches.
A great place to engage in effective climate action is at the level of your local neighborhood association or other local organization. Climate Herald has a handy tool to help you find an organization near you that might be a good fit. And while you’re at it, ask any organizations you’re involved with to cut their plastic use, reduce their food waste, and recycle their aluminum and paper waste.
Schools, from their buses to how they heat and cool their buildings, have a large carbon footprint, but there are plenty of ways to cut those emissions, starting with your local school board. Students, too, can use their voices; like the middle schoolers in California who got their school to swap out an inefficient gas boiler for a new heat pump.
And don’t forget that the most impactful climate action you can take has nothing to do with your personal carbon footprint! Here is as list of the most effective ways individuals can catalyze change:
Start a conversation about why climate change matters and what people can do about it
Join a climate action group to amplify your voice and others
Consider where you keep and how you spend your money (including your bank, credit card, retirement, and purchases)
Spark ideas for change at work, school, church, or any other organization you are part of
Hold politicians at every level accountable by voting and by telling them why climate change matters and what you want them to do about it (this includes showing up at town hall meetings!)
Reduce your personal footprint and make your actions contagious by talking about them with people you know and encouraging them to do the same
As environmentalist and Third Act founder
often says, “the most important thing an individual can do is not be such an individual. Join together with others to make change!"
Wed Jan 29 at 6:30pm ET - Envisioning a Livable Future with Nancy Tuchman, Benjamin Sovacool, and John Carroll University - in person at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio, and online; registration link above.
What can scientists do?
How about thinking of our planet as a Person or Living Entity?
Lately it’s fashionable to think of this planet we share as having Environmental Personhood and afforded status equal to a living person and entitled to Environmental Justice.
It’s time to consider our Earth as a living, breathing being possessing ancient hereditary systems that keep it running smoothly and in good health. We now have to face the fact that the temperature of the planet is increasing. and as in other living beings this signals that something is happening out of the “normal functioning range”.
Scientists and 75% of the population call this climate change.
We can also say the earth has a fever, and its not going down.
When we humans have a prolonged fever we see a doctor. We test our fluids, our breathing, our blood pressure and our blood for toxic and nutritional levels.
Our cardiovascular system - heart, arteries, veins and capillaries - supply us with nutrients, circulate oxygen from our lungs, and cleanse our kidneys and liver. In short, this system keeps us alive.
Earth, as a living, breathing being, has a similar cardiovascular system in play - a system that is not functioning within “normal range”.
In the Earth’s cardiovascular system, we can think of the oceans and atmosphere as its heart and lungs, large rivers its arteries, smaller rivers and streams, wetlands and bogs its veins and capillaries sending nutrients to its extremities.
Terrestrial ecosystem provide sustenance: nutrition, oxygen, and a home to living beings. Land is connected to the waterways providing food and life to aquatic species that travel, breed and participate in the lifecycle of the Earth. and those avenues of support are severely clogged, (similar to cardiovascular disease in humans) by large hydroelectric dams: mega-dams.
The huge proliferation of Mega-dams, with their highly regulated flow regimens within the Northern Hemispheres subartic have radically altered many significant rivers natural flow creating clots in the world’s circulatory system, not only retaining water for electricity generation, but prohibiting passage of nutrients which the marine ecosystems need to live and thrive.
The damming of rivers is one of mankind’s most significant modifications to the worlds cardiovascular system impacting the flow of water and associated materials from land to sea. Included in these nutrients are nutritional elements like nitrogen and phosphorus, required by all life on Earth, and silicon, which is required by diatoms, the plankton that account for the largest percentage of biological productivity in the oceans.
Diatoms in the oceans sequester more Co2 than all the rainforests of the planet
Prior to the mid 20th century many of the larger rivers had been functioning normally. Rivers have always been the main nutritional delivery system for the smallest microscopic living things in the oceans: diatoms (plankton), which feed the largest of marine mammals the Blue Whale.
The estuaries, bays, and Continental Shelf flood from river-flow each spring and during stormy periods, feeding the earth with rich nutritional sediments from erosion. Through the late 1950s into the 1980s many of the major rivers and waterways that emptied into the Northern Hemisphere oceans had large dams constructed that obstructed the natural flows containing much of the nutritional requirements of marine life.
Dams and flow regulation on rivers weaken the force of upwelling ocean currents so fewer nutrients are available. The marine food chain is very dependent on diatoms, and their populations are declining rapidly; the world’s ocean fisheries are also in decline.
Many other species, also important for carbon sequestration, are starving because of the nutrients withheld by river impoundments. NASA has indicated diatom populations are diminishing by about one percent per year. This equates to a significant increase in CO2 levels, because CO2 removal by diatoms is not occurring at the same rate it was prior to dams and river impoundments
River obstruction and impoundment cuts off much of the nutrient flow to all marine life, stockpiling it behind dams, decomposing (emitting methane) and accelerating global warming. Clearly out of the historical normal range, the planet’s coronary arteries are now severely compromised. Our lungs, the planets atmosphere is choking on GHGSs
Like cardiovascular disease in humans, deprivation of this ‘blood supply’ results in the starvation of aquatic life and with it the decline of livable terrestrial habitat. Check your map: Desertification areas on the globe are increasing.
Unfortunately the earth does not have a primary care physician who would recommend surgery to remove these blockages, freeing up the blood supply allowing the patient to recover.
It is up to us, the tenants, to take the helm and choose not to invest in damming up its cardiovascular system. We need to live with, not on, the earth and allow it to recover from our antiquated energy generation practices, which are doing what may be irreparable harm.
Divest from mega-dams. Remove the blockages that are continuing to damage our climate by preventing nutritional flow, thawing the permafrost and destroying habitats for all living things, land and sea.
Let’s allow the Earth to heal itself by freeing up the natural flow of river waters. we're certainly trying to reduce GHG carbon. Its time to work on the hearts(ocean) blood supply
Let the rivers run free again.
Danke bitte weiter so 👍💯❤️🙏