[TheClimate.Vote] August 19, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 19, 2020*/

[we know]
*From 'firenadoes' to record heat, California extreme weather a glimpse 
of future*
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-18/california-heat-wave-brings-extreme-weather-and-a-glimpse-at-our-future-with-climate-change 



[also called global warming]
*The tropics are expanding, and climate change is the primary culprit*
by American Geophysical Union
Earth's tropics are expanding poleward and that expansion is driven by 
human-caused changes to the ocean, according to new research.
- -
A new study in AGU's ,Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 
argues that the failure to agree on an exact mechanism has been, in 
part, because most researchers have been looking in the wrong place. The 
new study found tropical expansion is driven primarily by ocean warming 
caused by climate change rather than direct changes to the atmosphere. A 
bigger shift is happening in the Southern Hemisphere because it has more 
ocean surface area, according to the new study.
- -
A 2006 paper published in the journal Science announced a troubling 
finding: in some parts of the world, the tropics were expanding. 
Researchers have attempted to figure out the culprit ever since that 
paper was published. Scientists estimate from satellite observations 
that this widening is happening at a rate of 0.25 to 0.5 degrees 
latitude per decade. But without pinpointing a root cause, they cannot 
accurately model how quickly the expansion will occur in the future or 
what regions it will impact.

Some researchers have suggested greenhouse gas emissions, ozone 
depletion and aerosols in the atmosphere are driving the expansion. But 
climate models using these variables to explain the expansion 
consistently underestimate the speed of the shift and do not account for 
why expansion is happening in some regions but not others. This has led 
some researchers to theorize that tropical expansion can simply be 
explained by natural oscillations in Earth's climate. But natural 
variation does not quite fit the patterns scientists have already observed.
https://phys.org/news/2020-08-tropics-climate-primary-culprit.html

- -

[source material]
*Tropical Expansion Driven by Poleward Advancing Midlatitude Meridional 
Temperature Gradients*
*Abstract*

    An abundance of evidence indicates that the tropics are expanding.
    Despite many attempts to decipher the cause, the underlying
    dynamical mechanism driving tropical expansion is still not entirely
    clear. Here, based on observations, multimodel simulations from the
    Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) and
    purposefully designed numerical experiments, the variations and
    trends of the tropical width are explored from a regional
    perspective. We find that the width of the tropics closely follows
    the displacement of oceanic midlatitude meridional temperature
    gradients (MMTG). Under global warming, as a first‐order response,
    the subtropical ocean experiences more surface warming because of
    the mean Ekman convergence of anomalously warm water. The enhanced
    subtropical warming, which is partially independent of natural
    climate oscillations, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, leads
    to poleward advance of the MMTG and drives the tropical expansion.
    Our results, supported by both observations and model simulations,
    imply that global warming may have already significantly contributed
    to the ongoing tropical expansion, especially over the
    ocean‐dominant Southern Hemisphere.

*Plain Language Summary*

    Both observations and climate simulations have shown that the edges
    of tropics and associated subtropical climate zone are shifting
    toward higher latitudes under climate change. The underlying
    dynamical mechanism driving this phenomenon that has puzzled the
    scientific community for more than a decade, however, is still not
    entirely clear. A number of investigations argued that the
    atmospheric processes, in the absence of the ocean dynamics, lead to
    the tropical expansion. For example, increasing greenhouse gases,
    decreasing ozone and increasing aerosols are suggested to be the
    dominant factors contributing to expanding the tropics. However,
    these investigations are mostly based on model simulations, and
    observations show a much more complex evolution of expanding
    tropics. By examining the tropical width individually over each
    ocean basin, in this study, we find that the width of the tropics
    closely follows the displacement of oceanic midlatitude meridional
    temperature gradients (MMTG). Under global warming, as a first‐order
    response, the subtropical convergence zone experiences more surface
    warming due to background convergence of surface water. Such warming
    induces poleward shift of the oceanic MMTG and drives the tropical
    expansion.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020JD033158

- -

[interesting statistical study]
*Climate change has been influencing where tropical cyclones rage: study*
- data visualization 
https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2020/5eb02a078d6ae.jpg
While the global average number of tropical cyclones each year has not 
budged from 86 over the last four decades, climate change has been 
influencing the locations of where these deadly storms occur, according 
to new NOAA-led research published in Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences.
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-climate-tropical-cyclones-rage.html



[press release]
We are delighted to announce that a new Climate Policy paper is now 
available free to access. This article is part of our next special issue 
on fossil fuels and explores the impacts of divestment in the sector and 
the transition of the energy system on investment performance.
*The financial impact of fossil fuel divestment*
By Auke Plantinga & Bert Scholtens
Read it here: bit.ly/FFdivestment
The fossil fuel divestment movement tries to increase awareness about 
the need for climate action and heralds divestment from fossil fuel 
producers as a means to combat climate change. Financial investors are 
increasingly showing interest in the non-financial impact of companies 
they invest in, i.e. responsible investing. However, they also want to 
be assured of sufficient returns and limited risks to support the living 
costs of their ultimate beneficiaries. In this context, we investigate 
the impact of divestment and the transition of the energy system on 
investment performance. We rely on an international sample of almost 
seven thousand companies and study a period of forty years. Further, we 
investigate scenarios with very different pathways to the transition of 
the energy system. We find that the investment performance of portfolios 
that exclude fossil fuel production companies does not significantly 
differ in terms of risk and return from unrestricted portfolios. This 
finding holds even under market conditions that would benefit the fossil 
fuel industry. We conclude that divesting from fossil fuel production 
does not result in financial harm to investors, even when fossil fuels 
continue to play a dominant role in the energy mix for some time.

Key policy insights
- Financing the exploration and exploitation of fossil fuel resources is 
increasingly being regarded as controversial, leading to divestment from 
this industry.
- Fossil fuel divestment does not seem to significantly harm financial 
investors and is not at odds with the fiduciary duty of institutional 
investors. This paves the way for more extensive initiatives to promote 
fossil fuel divestment.
- A smooth energy transition will most likely erode the profitability of 
fossil fuel firms and their ability to invest. Therefore, governments 
cannot rely on the fossil fuel industry to finance the energy transition.
Read it here: bit.ly/FFdivestment
With best wishes,
Miguel Saldivia
Editorial Assistant, Climate Policy Journal
https://climatestrategies.wordpress.com/climate-policy-collections/
- -
Climate Policy is a leading international peer-reviewed academic 
journal, publishing high quality research and analysis on all aspects of 
climate change policy, including adaptation and mitigation, governance 
and negotiations, policy design, implementation and impact, and the full 
range of economic, social and political issues at stake in responding to 
climate change. It provides a platform for new ideas, innovative 
approaches and research-based insights that can help advance climate 
policy in practice.


[New Yorker August 17th issue ]
*How Suffering Farmers May Determine Trump's Fate*
As rural Wisconsin's fortunes have declined, its political importance 
has grown.
By Dan Kaufman - August 10, 2020...text and audio
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/17/how-suffering-farmers-may-determine-trumps-fate

- -

[Reap what we sow - from American Prospect]
*Farmers Reject Biden's Pro-Corporate Rural Advisers*
Heidi Heitkamp and Tom Vilsack are promoting a failed strategy for rural 
America. Biden would win support if he broke from that and took on Big Ag.
BY DAVID DAYEN AUGUST 17, 2020
Political conventions traditionally feature an orgy of corporate 
lobbyists and big money courting public officials. You'd think such 
displays wouldn't factor into a convention-at-home setup in 2020. After 
all, where would the lobbyists and hangers-on congregate? The answer is, 
apparently, on Zoom.

An invite obtained by the Prospect from "Leaders of American 
Agriculture, LLC" touts a virtual symposium on Tuesday night, with 
"welcome rooms" about such topics as "Ag Value Chain Resiliency Through 
Innovation." The sponsors of this event include two major farm lobbying 
organizations (the National Farmers Union and the American Farm Bureau 
Federation); trade groups representing biotech, ethanol, agrochemicals, 
corn, cotton, beet sugar, and seeds; AgTech company Indigo; farm lender 
CoBank; animal health company Zoetis; soybean agribusiness Bunge; and 
seed giants Corteva (formed through the merger of Dow and DuPont) and 
Bayer, which merged with Monsanto in 2018.

This gala is a perennial at the Democratic National Convention, bringing 
together "Democratic agricultural leaders" and the corporate interests 
that fund their campaigns. Philip Karsting, a former administrator of 
the Foreign Agricultural Service under President Obama, sent out the 
invite. He's now a K Street lobbyist with Olsson Frank Weeda Terman 
Matz. And he's the co-chair of Joe Biden's rural advisory committee. The 
other co-chair has yet to be filled.

Biden's rural advisers, with deep ties to corporate agriculture, have 
advocates for family farmers concerned. They cite in particular the 
influence of former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, now a lobbyist 
for the dairy industry, and former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, 
whose new organization One Country claims to speak for rural America. 
"The Biden team has too few voices in their ear claiming to represent 
rural and ag issues," says Joe Maxwell, president of Family Farm Action 
and a leading critic of Big Ag monopolies.

At the heart of the dispute is a conception of how to revitalize rural 
America. Business-friendly ag advisers emphasize trade, believing that 
promoting overseas markets will translate to prosperity for family 
farmers and ranchers. But "farmers do not export, Cargill exports," 
Maxwell counters, arguing that Big Ag domination is a far greater 
challenge. If you don't profit from what you produce, he reasons, more 
trade won't fix the problem.

Export strategies force farmers into monoculture crops and 
overproduction, which pushes down prices. Add to that increasing input 
costs for seed and machinery and you squeeze working farmers, who must 
compete with industrial-sized Big Ag operations. Small livestock 
producers are forced to sell low to concentrated meatpackers and watch 
as they pass on inflated prices to groceries, enjoying the middleman 
profits. "The big guys won't process for the little guys and are putting 
the little guy out of business," says Carrie Balkcom, executive director 
of the American Grassfed Association and a family rancher in South Florida.

Standing up against farmer abuse from ag monopolies would be popular in 
battleground Midwest states with farm districts, like Minnesota, 
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa, and advocates for a prairie populist 
strategy are armed with polling that says so. One poll shows that over 
80 percent of rural voters reject ag monopolies and factory farms. The 
Biden team, by toeing the corporate ag line, is "leaving votes on the 
table that perhaps they shouldn't," Maxwell says.
Farmers are increasingly desperate to deliver this message. "We've 
pleaded for years and years that the farmers are being screwed and our 
independence is being ripped away from us," says Chris Petersen, a 
specialty hog farmer in Clear Lake, Iowa. "You can talk to Vilsack and 
Heitkamp all you want, but more corporate control of ag is not the answer."

The Biden campaign has not yet responded to a request for comment.

PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS tried to lump in farmers with his "forgotten men and 
women" rhetoric, but his policies have pounded rural communities. Years 
of trade wars slowed exports and left meat and produce frozen in 
storage. Farm bailouts intended to counteract this damage increasingly 
flowed to the top. Over half of the money went to the richest 10 percent 
of farmers, according to a study from the Environmental Working Group, 
with the bottom 80 percent getting on average just $5,000. Assistance 
for corn growers was an insulting penny per bushel. JBS, the Brazilian 
meatpacker and one of the largest companies for beef and pork, received 
$78 million. A more recent bailout to cope with the effects of the 
coronavirus crisis was similarly tilted toward the top.

The biggest blow in the Trump years came when the U.S. Department of 
Agriculture (USDA) rolled back rules that would have banned Big Ag 
retaliation against small farmers and given them stronger legal tools to 
prevent abuse. USDA chief Sonny Perdue, himself tied to chicken industry 
interests, then dissolved the agency that protects small farms, known as 
the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA), 
folding it into a PR division called the Agricultural Marketing Service. 
Perdue wrote the epitaph for the family farmer when he said at a dairy 
expo last year, "In America the big get bigger and the small go out."

That accurately describes agriculture today. The top four hog firms 
control two-thirds of the market; the top four cattle firms, 85 percent. 
Ninety percent of all chickens are raised through the brutal 
"tournament" system, where farmers are pitted against one another. 
Producers specify how farmers must house, feed, and care for chicks, and 
the fattest ones get sold; farmers that lose the tournament get nothing. 
Seeds and dairy producers and farm machinery and farm credit companies 
are all concentrated, as are cafeteria services and grocery stores on 
the food distribution side. Monopolists have grabbed a significant share 
of food profits. Farmers used to earn 37 cents of every retail dollar; 
now it's down to 15.
"Iowa more and more is an outside service center for corporations," says 
hog farmer Chris Petersen. "We're being mined to make Big Money more big 
money."

The Trump administration's failure in rural America provides Biden an 
opportunity to present a message of fairness against powerful interests. 
According to polling taken this spring by Change Research, a whopping 80 
percent of rural voters believed that "political elites impose their 
will on my life," and would be more likely to vote for someone who 
supported breaking up the "handful of corporate monopolies now run[ning] 
our entire food system." An anti-corruption, anti–big business message 
that protected family farms would play well in this region.
The Obama-Biden rural plan gestured toward this strategy, to some 
success. Its platform was notably aggressive on preventing 
anti-competitive behavior, and won states like Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, and 
North Carolina, with better-than-expected rural numbers. "I thought 
Obama would be the next Teddy Roosevelt," says Mike Callicrate, a cattle 
rancher in St. Francis, Kansas, for nearly 50 years.

After the election, Obama's USDA (under Vilsack's control) and the 
Justice Department set out on a five-city listening tour of farm 
country, hearing stories about Big Ag price discrimination, abuse of 
market power, and intimidation. Farmers who spoke out risked retaliation 
from big producers who could crush them. But after the hearings, no 
enforcement actions were taken, more mergers were approved, and GIPSA 
rules were delayed and ultimately weakened. Obama's team dubiously 
asserted that their hands were tied by the antitrust laws.

"He did nothing, and Vilsack did nothing and the Department of Justice 
did nothing," says Callicrate. "They totally betrayed us." This created 
a lack of trust that has now spread to both parties. If Biden broke with 
this past and brought in new advisers with a commitment to protecting 
family farms, that trust could begin to be rebuilt. But instead, the 
Biden team has returned to the same old corporate-ag well.
AFTER LOSING SENATE races decisively in red states in 2018, Heitkamp and 
Indiana's Joe Donnelly started the One Country Project, a dark-money 
group dedicated to winning back rural voters. It starts from the shaky 
premise that two senators who were trounced in rural America hold the 
key to unlocking the region. That One Country's website was registered 
by a corporate lobbying firm doesn't add confidence either.

One Country's issue guide has some decent material on increasing health 
access, stopping climate change, protecting the Postal Service, and 
building rural broadband. But on farm policy, it leads with the need to 
"open markets and make it easier for farmers to make a good living," 
neglecting how Big Ag intercepts trade revenues and impoverishes family 
farmers. During the COVID-19 crisis, meat companies have been exporting 
in record numbers, while blaming shortages for rising grocery prices and 
cutting payments to farmers and ranchers to the bone. An export-driven 
strategy, in other words, has only led to outsized profit margins for 
industry giants.

There's nothing in One Country's materials about corporate concentration 
and monopoly power. "It's a mystery to me what they're up to," says 
Chris Petersen, who is active in Iowa politics and has spoken directly 
to Biden and vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the past. "With 
who Heidi Heitkamp is, with the corporate hat on, it doesn't look good."

Heitkamp's fingerprints are all over Biden's rural policy. She endorsed 
Biden before the North Dakota primary in March, and has led rural voter 
events for the campaign. Liberty Schneider, Heitkamp's campaign manager 
in 2018, became the Democratic National Committee's director of rural 
outreach and engagement last year. According to trade publication 
Agri-pulse, One Country is working to help Biden and Democratic 
congressional campaigns with rural outreach. Biden has openly praised 
Heitkamp, and behind the scenes, he has floated Heitkamp as a leading 
choice to run USDA, sources tell the Prospect. In this sense, One 
Country looks like a vehicle for a Cabinet appointment.
- -
"The track record of Heitkamp was not one that understood the importance 
of certain issues to family farmers and ranchers," says Maxwell, of 
Family Farm Action. He noted that Heitkamp was the top Senate recipient 
of funds from the crop production industry in the 2018 cycle, with over 
$247,000, and she received money from meatpacking giant Smithfield Foods 
and its Chinese-owned parent company WH Group. In 2018, Heitkamp voted 
against an amendment to the farm bill that would have added transparency 
to "checkoff" programs intended for agricultural marketing, which have 
become slush funds for lobbying organizations, used in campaigns that 
hurt family farmers...
- -
Maxwell thinks that the platform language should be stronger, returning 
to the initial intent of the Packers and Stockyards Act, with stiff 
penalties for monopoly abuse of family farmers and ranchers. But the 
real problem, he explains, is that Vilsack, "the person that candidate 
Biden is listening to, has an eight-year commitment of not living up to 
those issues."

Cattle rancher Carrie Balkcom echoes this concern. "We're not going to 
get anywhere as long as they are the voices in Washington," she says. 
"They're representing the big people that keep the little people 
trapped. I've been kicking the door in for 20-some years. We've got to 
be at the table."

ALL OF THE FARMERS interviewed for this article thought the 
post-coronavirus moment was perfect for a message of shorter supply 
chains and local processing. Petersen says his Berkshire Gold 
non-confinement pork has six-month waiting lists. Balkcom adds that 
family farmers are seeing upticks in sales. Whether because of worker 
abuse in meatpacking plants or high grocery prices, a light bulb has 
gone off that supporting family farmers makes moral and economic sense.

It's also a bridge to a more equal America. "If you could have things 
processed locally, you bring back those economies, supporting the local 
hardware store and local schools, and money stays in the community," 
says Carrie Balkcom. In her hometown in South Florida, there are three 
dollar stores and no grocery for fresh foods. "We've become part of a 
secondhand economy," adds Mike Callicrate. "Farmers are eating out of 
dollar stores, they can't even get good food."

This is the fork in the road available to Biden: Break with corporate 
agriculture and drum up support in communities ground down by monopoly 
power, or maintain the corporate-ag model, and continue the decades-long 
Democratic trend of bleeding support outside big cities. "These issues 
are well known to rural America," Maxwell says. "You don't have to 
convince them that corporate concentration and monopolies are bad for 
them. They live through it every day."

A lot of anti-monopoly work can be done unilaterally, outside of 
Congress. Biden could rewrite the GIPSA rules and let family farmers sue 
over abuses, while restoring the oversight agency's power. He could 
rewrite merger guidelines and review markets under that higher standard. 
He could restore country-of-origin labeling for beef and pork.

Callicrate believes that rural America turned to Trump because they hate 
both parties. "Now we find out that Trump is worse than either party," 
he says. "We have to go after concentrated power and wealth, it's the 
greatest threat to any free society in history," he explains. "We're 
scared shitless. We cannot survive with the policy that exists. There is 
not going to be anything left of rural America."
https://prospect.org/power/farmers-reject-bidens-pro-corporate-rural-advisers/


[as Providence, Rhode Island goes, so should the world]
*Transitioning from Climate Justice Planning to Climate Justice Action*
The Providence Climate Justice Plan offers an exemplary approach to 
prioritizing the communities and neighborhoods most impacted by the 
environmental effects of development and industrial pollution.
Joan Fitzgerald - August 10, 2020

Like many cities, Providence has a long history of racial injustice with 
an environmental dimension. South Providence, Washington Park, Wanskuck, 
and the West End communities that border industrial areas have multiple 
sources of pollution and the highest levels of poverty, asthma, and lead 
poisoning in the state.

Unlike many cities, Providence has put these frontline communities at 
the forefront of its climate action. It is the only city in the country 
with a Climate Justice Plan. The process has been exemplary. The jury is 
out on what changes it will produce in practice.

I recently talked with the city's director or sustainability, Leah 
Bamberger, to find out how the Climate Justice Plan came about. The 
process started when Bamberger was recruited from Boston to lead the 
Providence Office of Sustainability in 2015. When community organizers 
immediately started pushing her to focus on the needs of their 
neighborhoods, Bamberger was onboard. With grants from The Funders 
Network, an organization of private foundations that invests in building 
local capacity to create equitable and sustainable communities in the 
U.S. and Canada, and the Rhode Island Foundation, her team partnered 
with the Environmental Justice League and Groundwork Rhode Island, and 
with One Square World facilitating, a new kind of planning process began.

The Office of Sustainability was an equal among partners in the planning 
process. In addition to five members representing city departments, 
representatives from the community were part of a Racial and 
Environmental Justice Committee that would explore ways to integrate 
racial equity into the city's sustainability and resilience planning. 
After committee members, and city officials--including Mayor Jorge 
Elorza--participated in Undoing Racism trainings, the planning process 
began. Community representatives committed to about ten hours of 
meetings per month, for which they received a $1,300 honorarium.

The committee's Equity in Sustainability report was released in June 
2016. It listed 12 priorities identified by residents of frontline 
communities, including clean streets, industrial hazards, safety, public 
transit, and gentrification. A second year of funding allowed the 
committee to develop a framework for an updated plan that would 
establish equity goals, action items, and systemic evaluation of these 
goals. Bamberger explains, "Our intent was to shift the decision-making 
power to frontline communities, whose residents really led the 
development of this work."

In October 2019, with the Just Providence Framework as its guidance, the 
city and committee released the Providence Climate Justice Plan. It 
outlines a strategy for achieving Mayor Jorge Elorza's 2016 executive 
order calling for Providence to become a carbon-neutral city by 2050 
while prioritizing the needs of frontline communities.

So the question is whether putting frontline communities first is 
aligned with the aggressive measures needed to achieve carbon 
neutrality. It's easier said than done. Bamberger offers the example of 
increasing solar adoption. "The theory of change for many climate plans 
is to design policies and programs that capture the most people to reach 
the goals. This typically means starting with people who can afford 
solar, electric vehicles, or heat pumps first, leaving behind those who 
are most impacted by the climate crisis--low income communities of 
color. We start with the challenge of addressing the needs of these 
frontline communities first--working towards affordable, clean energy, 
and mitigating pollution in their neighborhoods, for example. We assume 
that markets will take care of wealthier residents."

Will all this city-blessed community involvement lead to real change? 
One challenge is funding. One of the first elements of the plan to be 
implemented is the creation of two green justice zones for priority 
action, Olneyville and South Providence. Among the potential projects in 
the zones are building microgrids in key facilities to maintain power 
when outages occur, weatherization, renewable energy development, job 
training, and zoning reform to prevent polluting land uses, But to date, 
only $1 million of the city's $222 million capital improvement plan, 
passed in January 2020, has been earmarked to support the zones. And 
with city and state budgets in crisis, it isn't clear whether there will 
be additional funding.

Utility interests aren't on board with the environmental justice goals 
and it appears that Governor Gina Raimondo isn't either. In October 
2018, regulators approved a controversial $180 million National Grid 
liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility on the industrial waterfront that 
is adding to the pollution mentioned above. Opponents pointed out that 
it would increase the state's dependence on dirty shale gas obtained by 
hydraulic fracturing and lock in carbon emissions for the life of the 
facility. The Rhode Island Department of Health and several 
environmental and community organizations criticized the proposal as 
well. Governor Raimundo fought having their environmental justice 
concerns included in the proposal that went to the Federal Energy 
Regulatory Commission for approval. And despite his embrace of climate 
justice as a general principle and his adamant opposition of the new LNG 
facility, even Mayor Elorza supports the polluting energy infrastructure 
of the industrial waterfront as a needed economic development driver.

So while Providence is exemplary in bringing neighborhood groups and 
environmental justice goals into the planning process, the usual 
obstacles to real progress remain: inadequate funding, powerful interest 
groups, and contradictory goals. The Climate Justice Plan is a start in 
that it gives frontline communities a formal planning role and a bigger 
megaphone--which they will surely need.

As Scott Campbell pointed out in his classic 1996 article on the 
contradictions of sustainable development in the Journal of the American 
Planning Association, city (and state) officials will almost always 
choose economic concerns over environmental ones. That is the challenge 
of climate justice planning.

Joan Fitzgerald is a professor in the School of Public Policy & Urban 
Affairs at Northeastern University.
https://www.planetizen.com/node/110144
- - -
[buy the book]
*Greenovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change,* was published this 
March by Oxford Univ. Press.

Collectively, cities take up a relatively tiny amount of land on the 
earth, yet emit 72 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly, cities 
need to be at the center of any broad effort to reduce climate change.

In Greenovation, the eminent urban policy scholar Joan Fitzgerald argues 
that too many cities are only implementing random acts of greenness that 
will do little to address the climate crisis. She instead calls for 
"greenovation"--using the city as a test bed for adopting and perfecting 
green technologies for more energy--efficient buildings, transportation, 
and infrastructure more broadly. Further, Fitzgerald contends that while 
many city mayors cite income inequality as a pressing problem, few 
cities are connecting climate action and social justice-another aspect 
of greenovation. Focusing on the biggest producers of greenhouse gases 
in cities, buildings, energy and transportation, Fitzgerald examines how 
greenovating cities are reducing emissions overall and lays out an 
agenda for fostering and implementing urban innovations that can help 
reverse the path toward irrevocable climate damage. Drawing on 
interviews with practitioners in more than 20 North American and 
European cities, she identifies the strategies and policies they are 
employing and how support from state, provincial and national 
governments has supported or thwarted their efforts.

A uniquely urban-focused appraisal of the economic, political, and 
social debates that underpin the drive to "go green," Greenovation helps 
us understand what is arguably the toughest policy problem of our era: 
the increasing impact of anthropocentric climate change on modern social 
life.
https://www.amazon.com/Greenovation-Urban-Leadership-Climate-Change/dp/019069551X




[aimed at the hobby farmer or indoor greenhouse]
*Farmtrac Electric Tractor as featured on BBC Countryfile | 100% 
Independent, 100% Electric*
Aug 17, 2020
fullychargedshow
LIKE if you think electric machinery is the way forward & SHARE if you 
want more people to be aware of alternatives to polluting combustion 
engines. See full description below...

Robert heads down to Bemborough Farm in Gloucestershire to try out the 
Farmtrac 25G electric tractor. The first of its kind in the country, 
this 4x4 electric tractor is a brilliant first step towards electrifying 
bigger and more powerful farming machinery. With pressures on farmers to 
reduce their carbon footprint, a tractor that can be powered by wind or 
solar energy generated on the farm makes a lot of sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClNdrJRan5k


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - August 19, *

August 19, 2015: The New York Times reports:

"A little-noted portion of the chain of pipelines and equipment that 
brings natural gas from the field into power plants and homes is 
responsible for a surprising amount of methane emissions, according to a 
study on Tuesday.

"Natural-gas gathering facilities, which collect from multiple wells, 
lose about 100 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year, about eight 
times as much as estimates used by the Environmental Protection Agency, 
according to the study, which appeared in the journal Environmental 
Science and Technology.

"The newly discovered leaks, if counted in the E.P.A. inventory, would 
increase its entire systemwide estimate by about 25 percent, said the 
Environmental Defense Fund, which sponsored the research as part of 
methane emissions studies it organized."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/science/methane-leaks-in-natural-gas-supply-chain-far-exceed-estimates-study-says.html?mwrsm=Email 


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