ECO Friendly Living USA

Your Next Green Car May Run on Gas and Get 100 Miles to the Gallon  Newsweek
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How environmental engagement can turn Earth Day into an everyday priority  Kyndryl
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EcoMatters Environment Trust, 1 Olympic Place, New Lynn, Auckland 0600
Show map
Saturday 6 April 2024
10.30am-12pm

$20 to $45
TICKET OPTIONS
1. Workshop only $20
2. Workshop + Phoenix Oyster or Pekepekekiore Mushroom log $45* ($5 off both workshop and kit price)
https://events.humanitix.com/ask-a-mycologist-growing-edible-mushrooms-on-logs

Join mycologist Christopher Smith for a fascinating foray into the wonders of mycology! Mycology translates as the ‘study of fungi’ a group that covers mushrooms, yeasts and more.
IN THIS SESSION:
Learn all about the process of mushroom growing on logs using inoculated dowels.
We’ll be learning about Phoenix Oyster or Pekepekekiore edible fungi
Then get together and take turns drilling and making inoculated dowel logs, (or watch and learn)
Christopher will then discuss how to get your grow kit growing for best possible growing and harvest!
*PLEASE NOTE: Christopher requires a minimum of two weeks to prepare the dowels if you’d like to make a mushroom log in the workshop.
Please book by the first week of Ecofest (by Fri 22 March) if you’d like to take home an inoculated log.
If you have access to a cordless drill, please bring with you on the day. Bit size TBC.
PHOTOS:
Main: Oyster mushrooms growing wild
ABOUT
Christopher Smith, aka The Mushroom Smith started in 2017 selling small Phoenix Oyster grow kits at farmers markets. After getting his Masters in Biology at Auckland University he worked at Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research as a technician in the Mycology team. His current mahi is focused on education of our community, growing edible mushrooms and researching our amazing native harore.
This event is part of EcoFest 2024, a month-long celebration of our unique environment to inspire sustainable living across Tāmaki Makaurau.
Share your photos from this event with #ecofestnz
Check www.ecofest.org.nz for more events and the latest updates.
© Auckland Council 2024 All rights reserved
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Yale Climate Connections
Against the regular drumbeat of negative news on climate and the environment, a positive note can be both startling and therapeutic. To keep pressing forward, we need to know that progress has been — and still can be — made.
That’s the motivation behind “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet” by Hannah Ritchie, a senior researcher in the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development and deputy editor and lead researcher for the influential website, Our World in Data. 
In this undertaking, Hannah Ritchie was inspired by another researcher, Hans Rosling, whose data visualizations have awed viewers of his TED talks and instructional videos. Dramatic progress has been made over the last century, the data shows; human beings are less vulnerable now than in the past — even to natural disasters.
“Not the End of the World” and its author have been the subject of numerous interviews and profiles, both congratulatory and critical. The latter point out that small steps in the right direction will not get us where we need to go by the deadlines we’ve set for ourselves.  
But in her book, Ritchie challenges the framing of such thresholds and deadlines. 
First, she notes, we must remind ourselves that dramatic progress has already been made: “In a world without climate policies we’d be heading toward 4 or 5 C at least,” referring to the rise in Earth’s average temperature since the Industrial Revolution. 
Second, “every 0.1 C matters”; the warmer it gets, the worse the impacts, she says. At the Paris climate conference in 2015, the world’s nations agreed to keep temperatures “well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” Like other researchers, Ritchie thinks we’re unlikely to meet the 1.5 C goal: “It’s more likely than not that we will pass 2 C, but perhaps not by much.” But neither number is a threshold for the end of the world, she argues. 
Third, some of the small steps critics have challenged — like peak per capita CO2 emissions or the decoupling of emissions and economic growth — mark historic global turning points. Transitioning to clean energy (including nuclear), electrifying everything we can (especially cars), and “decarbonizing how we make stuff” — all among the many measures for which Ritchie advocates in her chapter on climate change — will be easier on the downsides of those slopes. 
The climate is changing, and our journalists are here to help you make sense of it. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter and never miss a story.
Unlike lukewarmers like Danish author Bjørn Lomborg, who acknowledges climate change but argues we should focus on economic growth so that our richer descendants can solve the problem, Ritchie thinks her generation has that responsibility. “My perspective is very different: We have really good solutions now. They’re cheap, they’re effective. We really need to build on them — now.”
Yale Climate Connections talked with Hannah Ritchie about her new book via Zoom last month. 
The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Yale Climate Connections: Your title and subtitle seem to move in two very different directions.“Not the End of the World” is a shorthand way of saying, “Don’t worry about it.” But “How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet” is a call for action. How do you harmonize those two very different notes?
Hannah Ritchie: Yes, I guess there [are] two ways you can say “not the end of the world.” One way is kind of dismissive: ‘This is not a problem, don’t worry about it.’ 
That’s very, very far from my position. 
What I mean is an affirmative: No, we will not let this be the end of the world. These are big problems, but we can tackle them — and be the first generation to build a sustainable planet.
YCC: You bring your own experiences into the book. Could you talk about your personal journey to this understanding?
Ritchie: I grew up with climate change. It seemed to always be on my radar. But back then, climate change didn’t get the coverage that it does today. So I felt very alone as a kid, feeling this impending doom and not really having anyone to talk to about it. Then I went to university where I did environmental geoscience, and then I got a PhD. I was so steeped in environmental metrics about how things were just getting worse and worse that I reached this stage of helplessness. I extrapolated that human metrics, too, were also getting worse: Poverty was rising, child mortality was rising, life expectancy was declining. Everything, I felt, was going in the wrong direction. 
The turning point for me was discovering the work of Hans Rosling. What he showed in his talks is that when you step back to look at the data, many of our conceptions about human progress are upside down. All of the metrics I assumed to be getting worse were actually getting much better. That shifted my perspective. 
Our ancestors had lower environmental impacts, but their quality of life was often poor. Over the last couple of centuries that has tipped the other way. Humans have made progress, but it’s come at the cost of the environment. This led me to ask, is there a realistic way we can achieve both of these things at the same time? 
I should say that a decade ago, my answer to that was no. But that’s shifted a lot over the last 10 years. I can see signs for cautious optimism: There are solutions to our problems, and we are actually starting to implement them.
YCC: You have seven chapters in your book — on air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity, ocean plastics, and overfishing. Each chapter follows a pattern, almost a template. Could you talk about the steps you take your readers through, steps that hearken back to your title and subtitle? 
Ritchie: I should say, first, that trying to distill a whole environmental problem into one chapter is very challenging. I could have written a whole book on any one of them. 
The goal in each chapter is to show how we got to where we are now and to point to where we can go from here. So every chapter starts with an alarming headline. Then I ask, what does the data and research actually tell us about that headline? Then I map out the historical trajectory of how we got to where we are. 
Climate change, for example, is primarily the result of burning fossil fuels for energy.  Mapping out where we are today requires looking at where those fuels were burned. And that leads to countries, to historical contributions, and to sectors of the economy. 
Then we need to look at future trajectories. What emissions path are we on? What temperature change would that lead to? And what are the pathways that might undercut that? 
The final step is to ask what we need to do next. And for climate change, that’s looking at how we move away from fossil fuels to clean energy. Are the solutions actually there? Are they cheap enough? 
YCC: At the end of each chapter, you also address the individual and say, in effect: Here are things you maybe don’t need to worry about so much. And here are things you could do if you really want to take action.
Ritchie: I want the book to empower people to make changes that are effective. Many people want to make a difference; they just don’t know what to do or are bombarded with so many suggestions that they become overwhelmed. We need to focus on the big stuff and spend less time and energy on things that don’t make much difference.
YCC: Can you give an example of a common misperception on what actually makes a difference? 
Ritchie: If you ask people, ‘What’s the most effective thing you can do for climate change?’ they’ll mention stuff like recycling. But recycling is just so small. More people are now seeing the importance of moving away from cars, especially gasoline-powered cars, but they really don’t get the importance of diet. 
Read: A big source of carbon pollution is lurking in basements and attics
YCC: Speaking of the importance of diet, several chapters in your book look at the critical interconnections between diet, land, energy, climate, and biodiversity. Could you lay that out in greater detail? 
Ritchie: People don’t understand how environmentally damaging our food systems are. We’re not going to tackle climate change by only focusing on food, but it’s impossible to solve climate change without focusing on it to some extent. And it goes far beyond that. For most of our environmental problems, agriculture is a leading driver. It’s a leading driver of land use, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water pollution, and water stress. 
Our food and agriculture systems are key to all of these challenges, which as you say are very much interconnected. 
YCC: In your chapter on biodiversity, you seem to acknowledge but you don’t name the “environmentalist’s paradox,” the strange fact that measures of human well-being have improved even as the environment has come under greater and greater stress. What does the newest data say to you here? 
Ritchie: The chapter on biodiversity was arguably the hardest chapter to write, for two reasons. One is that it’s very hard to measure biodiversity. Ecosystems are so complex that trying to capture their condition in a single metric doesn’t really work. 
The other challenge is that while it’s very clear that humans rely on biodiversity for maintaining the ecosystems on which we depend, we don’t quite know how those systems work. If we tamper with them, will it have a small impact? Or will it cascade into a really big impact? 
The other factor that makes biodiversity the most challenging problem to tackle is that it’s linked to everything else. You can only solve biodiversity by solving all of the other problems discussed in the book. And even then, there are trade-offs. 
In agriculture, for example, there’s the debate over land sharing versus land sparing. We can avoid habitat loss by not letting farmers and ranchers creep into forests and wildlands. But that’s typically achieved only through agricultural intensification, which can be worse for local biodiversity. 
I think it will be very difficult to eliminate biodiversity loss entirely, but I do think we can dramatically reduce rates of loss — by addressing our food systems and agriculture.
YCC: Each of your other chapters seems to be aimed at retuning our thinking. So how do we need to retune our thinking about ocean plastics?
Ritchie: There are two problems with plastics. One is plastic as a material in itself, and here I’m thinking about microplastics. We know that microplastics are everywhere. We just don’t know yet what impacts they have on human health. If we want to stop using plastics completely because of that, I don’t have a solution to that. 
But the second problem is a very tractable problem, which is plastics leaking out into the environment, into rivers, into the ocean. That problem is less about using plastic than disposing of it. It’s more about how you handle the waste. There is a very good case that if we just built really tight landfills, we wouldn’t have plastic leaking out into the environment. 
The challenge has been that many countries have grown very quickly. People can now afford plastic, so they buy plastics. But the waste management infrastructure is not there to gather it, so it leaks into rivers and then ultimately into the ocean. If we just invest in good waste management, then it’s essentially a solved problem. 
Listen: The plastics industry’s carbon footprint has doubled in the past few decades
YCC: In your conclusion, you note that we may have to recalibrate our intuitions about our actions, and that “being an effective environmentalist might make you feel like a bad one.” Could you explain what you mean by that?
Ritchie: Our social perception of “environmentalists” leans into a kind of natural fallacy: they live in a rural area; they have a small farm they get all of their food from; they don’t use synthetic products. 
The problem with this vision is that solutions that might have been environmentally sustainable for small populations just don’t work for 8 billion people. What would work for billions and billions of people, and actually is the more environmentally sustainable thing to do, is dense cities where you don’t need lots of transport, where you can share heating and cooling and achieve other efficiencies. 
Part of the reason that the 21st century has been more resilient and less deadly than the 20th century is because of a more globalized system. We can trade food and other resources; countries support one another post-disaster. Previously if there was a local weather disaster and your crops failed, you were in a really dire position. No one was coming to help you. There was no network for you to import food from elsewhere. That’s not the case today; international cooperation has made the world more resilient, not less.
So what we typically perceive to be the environmentally friendly thing to do is, in a modern world of billions of people, often the opposite.
YCC: Human psychology is a thread that runs through your whole book. You note our penchant for apocalypticism, our nostalgic visions of the past, and our susceptibility to moral licensing. Do you see your book as a psychological intervention?
Ritchie: I think that would be a bold ambition on my part! 
But it’s valid, I guess, to suggest that my book is trying to shift the way that people think about these problems and their solutions.
The key is not stopping our natural psychological leanings — because it’s not possible to halt them completely. It’s about pausing and trying to put those initial gut reactions into context, so we can then make better decisions from a more rational place. 
We help millions of people better understand climate change and what to do about it. Help us reach even more people like you.
Michael Svoboda, Ph.D., is the Yale Climate Connections books editor. He is a professor in the University Writing Program at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he has taught since… More by Michael Svoboda

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U.S. Government Accountability Office
Climate change is likely to exacerbate natural hazards—such as floods and drought. The risks to nuclear power plants from such hazards include damage to systems and equipment that ensure safe operation.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s oversight process includes addressing safety risks at these plants. However, NRC doesn’t fully consider potential increases in risk from climate change. For example, NRC mostly uses historical data to identify and assess safety risks, rather than data from future climate projections.
We recommended that NRC fully address climate risks to nuclear power plants.
Operating and Shutdown Nuclear Power Plants in the U.S.

Climate change is expected to exacerbate natural hazards—including heat, drought, wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and sea level rise. In addition, climate change may affect extreme cold weather events. Risks to nuclear power plants from these hazards include loss of offsite power, damage to systems and equipment, and diminished cooling capacity, potentially resulting in reduced operations or plant shutdowns.
Examples of Natural Hazards that May Pose Risks to Nuclear Power Plants
 
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) addresses risks to the safety of nuclear power plants, including risks from natural hazards, in its licensing and oversight processes. Following the tsunami that led to the 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, NRC took additional actions to address risks from natural hazards. These include requiring safety margins in reactor designs, measures to prevent radioactive releases should a natural hazard event exceed what a plant was designed to withstand, and maintenance of backup equipment related to safety functions.
However, NRC’s actions to address risks from natural hazards do not fully consider potential climate change effects. For example, NRC primarily uses historical data in its licensing and oversight processes rather than climate projections data. NRC officials GAO interviewed said they believe their current processes provide an adequate margin of safety to address climate risks. However, NRC has not conducted an assessment to demonstrate that this is the case. Assessing its processes to determine whether they adequately address the potential for increased risks from climate change would help ensure NRC fully considers risks to existing and proposed plants. Specifically, identifying any gaps in its processes and developing a plan to address them, including by using climate projections data, would help ensure that NRC adopts a more comprehensive approach for assessing risks and is better able to fulfill its mission to protect public health and safety.
NRC licenses and regulates the use of nuclear energy to provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection of public health and safety, to promote the common defense and security, and to protect the environment. Like all energy infrastructure, nuclear power plants can be affected by disruptions from natural hazards, some of which are likely to be exacerbated by climate change. Most commercial nuclear plants in the United States were built in the 1960s and 1970s, and weather patterns and climate-related risks to these plants have changed since their construction.
GAO was asked to review the climate resilience of energy infrastructure. This report examines (1) how climate change is expected to affect nuclear power plants and (2) NRC actions to address risks to nuclear power plants from climate change. GAO analyzed available federal data and reviewed regulations, agency documents, and relevant literature. GAO interviewed officials from federal agencies, including NRC, the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and knowledgeable stakeholders from industry, academia, and nongovernmental organizations. GAO also conducted site visits to two plants.
GAO is making three recommendations, including that NRC assess whether its existing processes adequately address climate risks and develop and implement a plan to address any gaps identified. NRC said the recommendations are consistent with actions that are either underway or under development.

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$100 billion eco-friendly ‘Forest City’ is now a ghost town  Supercar Blondie
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By Larisha Paul
In an effort to raise awareness about the music industry’s sustainability practices, or lack thereof, Billie Eilish is highlighting the ways in which artists — herself included — can avoid feeding into the cycle of overconsumption. In a recent interview with Billboard, the musician called out the “wasteful,” yet popularized, trend of artists releasing multiple vinyl variants with slight differences in artwork or track listing to encourage more purchases. But the point of her criticism was nearly overshadowed by speculation about whether she was subtly calling out anyone in particular.
“It would be so awesome if people would stop putting words into my mouth and actually read what I said in that Billboard article. I wasn’t singling anyone out, these are industry-wide systemic issues,” Eilish wrote in a statement shared via Instagram Stories over the weekend. “When it comes to variants, so many artists release them — including ME! Which I clearly state in the article. The climate crisis is now and it’s about all of us being part of the problem and trying to do better. Sheesh.”

Eilish’s original comments focused mainly on the scale of the artists who most engage in these practices as well as the driving force behind these multiple releases. “It’s some of the biggest artists in the world making fucking 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more,” Eilish told Billboard. “It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money — and it’s all your favorite artists doing that shit.”
The pushback to the statement came in large part from Taylor Swift’s fanbase. Swift has released vinyl packages with varying colors, covers, and bonus content for her recent releases, including 1989 (Taylor’s Version), Midnights, and the forthcoming The Tortured Poets Department. Swift has also received heat for the carbon emissions from her private jet, making sustainability and environmental protection something of a touchy subject for Swifties, who are quick to jump to her defense.

But musicians including Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, Ed Sheeran and more have also released multiple pressings for their album releases. Eilish herself released at least a dozen for Happier Than Ever. But she never claimed she wasn’t complicit.
“It is right in front of our faces and people are just getting away with it left and right, and I find it really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable and do the best that I can and try to involve everybody in my team in being sustainable,” Eilish added. “I was watching The Hunger Games and it made me think about it, because it’s like, we’re all going to do it because [it’s] the only way to play the game. It’s just accentuating this already kind of messed up way of this industry working.”
Eilish, who spoke alongside her mother, Maggie Baird, in the interview, detailed her approach to promoting sustainability in everything from vinyl packaging (she’s released some pressings made from recycled materials), transportation, food, and most particularly, her merch. “It’s about how it feels and how it looks and how it’s made,” she explained. “And so the problem is to make sure that my clothing is being made well and ethically and with good materials and it’s very sustainable and that it feels good and is durable. It’s going to be more expensive.” She also reduced the amount of merchandise being created for drops, Baird added.

The hope, as they expressed, is that the small things will add up to big changes. But the industry often prioritizes profit over the planet and the people who live on it.
“We know from research that fans are more likely to take action if they believe the artist is authentic. Which I think unfortunately scares off a lot of artists because they’re like, ‘Well, I don’t want to say I’m trying to do X because I’m not perfect on Y,’” Baird stated. “That’s a barrier that is really challenging to break, especially with social media and the culture of cancel and hate. The truth is, you just have to do it anyway. Artists can cast a giant shadow of influence. If you’re not perfect, but you are influencing many, many, many people to do better, it’s multiplied hundreds of times.”
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U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) appears on “Meet the Press” in Washington D.C., March 3, 2024.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – When U.S. Rep.-to-be Debbie Dingell was growing up in St. Clair, she’d get in an inner tube and ride in the wake of freighters passing on the St. Clair River.
She fished there too.
“Those waters were dirty then,” says Dingell, a member of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources and co-chair of the Congressional Great Lakes Task Force.
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“We didn’t know how dirty,” says Dingell, an Ann Arbor Democrat.
Due to high levels of contamination, the U.S. and Canada designated the entire 40-mile St. Clair River, which connects Lake Huron with Lake St. Clair, as an Area of Concern in 2012.
Michigan’s other "Areas of Concern are Deer Lake, Manistique River, Lower Menominee River and St. Marys River in the Upper Peninsula and the Clinton River, Detroit River, Kalamazoo River, Muskegon Lake, Saginaw River and Bay, Torch Lake, White Lake, Rouge River and River Raisin in the Lower Peninsula.
In the St. Clair River, the principal sources of the contaminants were from intensive industrial and agricultural development in and near Port Huron, Michigan, and Sarnia, Ontario, according to the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. 
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A dozen years after the designation of the St. Clair River and 30 other Areas of Concern in the Great Lakes Basin, Dingell says she expects continued bipartisan government action on improving and protecting Great Lakes water quality.
That’s despite the fact that this is a bitterly partisan election year.
Republicans and Democrats in the congressional delegations of Michigan and the other Great Lakes states have successfully pushed for federal funds for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, fisheries protection and the cleanup of contamination by PFAS, a type of chemicals that don’t break down in the environment, build up in wildlife and fish, and can move through soil and pollute drinking water sources, Dingell said.
“There’s strong bipartisan support,” she said in an interview in her Capitol Hill office. “How can you not support” the source of 20% of the world’s freshwater? 
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“There are a lot of things we’re doing together,” said Dingell, who also belongs to the House Energy and Commerce Committee and congressional caucuses dealing with the Endangered Species Act and national wildlife refuges. “We understand the importance of clean water. It’s not just a Great Lakes issue.”
Her other legislative priorities on the environmental front this year include continuing efforts to keep invasive species out of the Great Lakes, she said.
When it comes to the auto industry amid increased attention to electric vehicles, she says the federal government needs to support jobs and ensure that vehicles are affordable. She noted that half of U.S. households have no garages, which is where owners usually recharge their EVs.
EVs have become a national campaign issue. On one side, the Biden administration has aggressively advocated and funded research and manufacturing initiatives for EVs and batteries. 
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For example, U.S. Energy Secretary and former Gov. Jennifer Granholm and U.S. Labor Acting Secretary Julie Su recently released the Battery Workforce Initiative’s National Guideline Standards for certified apprenticeships for battery machine operators. The announcement came in Lansing, where they were joined by United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
And in January, the Energy Department announced $60 million in funding for a vehicle battery research and development project in a collaboration by Stellantis, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors. 
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump has targeted EVs on the campaign trial.
For example, speaking in Macomb County last September, Trump told supporters that President Joe Biden “wants electric vehicle mandates that will spell the death of the American auto industry.” Biden, he said, “is selling you out to China, he’s selling you out to the environmental extremists and the radical left.” 
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Dingell called Biden “the most pro-environment president we’ve ever had.”
The Biden administration’s newly announced budget proposal would significantly increase funding for public lands, including a 21% boost for the National Park Service, a 7% boost for the U.S. Forest Service and an 11% boost for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, according to a statement by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, a national advocacy group.
The National Wildlife Refuge System, managed by the Fish & Wildlife Service, would get a 14% boost under the proposal. Dingell has long championed the agency’s 6,200-plus acre Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge straddling the Michigan-Ontario border.
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Although the gel of the aloe vera plant is commonly used to treat sunburn, moisturize skin and boost gut health (among other applications), its peels are typically discarded. New research now suggests that those peels could also be used, to make non-toxic insecticide for use by farmers.
The study is being led by Asst. Prof. Debasish Bandyopadhyay, of the University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley.
His interest was first piqued when he and a colleague visited an aloe vera production center and noticed that while insects were going after the leaves of other plants, they left the waste aloe vera peels alone. This observation prompted Bandyopadhyay to take some of the peels back to his lab for chemical analysis.
The peels were initially dried in a dark, room-temperature environment, by blowing air over them – this approach was taken in order to leave the bioactivity of the peels unaltered. A number of naturally insecticidal chemicals were subsequently extracted from them, including dichloromethane and hexane.
Although those two substances are toxic, the scientists also extracted non-toxic insect-killing chemicals such as octacosanol, subenniatin B, dinoterb, arjungenin, nonadecanone and quillaic acid.
Further research will now have to be conducted in order to see how well those aloe-derived compounds work when applied to actual crops in fields. If those trials go well, use of the chemicals in spray-on mosquito or tick repellents may also be investigated.
“By creating an insecticide that avoids hazardous and poisonous synthetic chemicals, we can help the agricultural field,” said Bandyopadhyay. “But if the peels show good anti-mosquito or anti-tick activity, we can also help the general public.”
Source: American Chemical Society via EurekAlert

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