Doom and gloom – and bloom!

Bill Knight column for 11-11, 12 or 13, 2019

The news almost daily details new environmental dangers (ozone threatens corn crops, the University of Illinois recently reported), but less noticed are positives such as the Pasta Straw (produced from bucatini by the U.K.’s Stroodles company to replace plastic straws).

All is not lost with the environment – yet.

The Big Picture: Humanity faces “untold suffering due to the climate crisis,” says a statement signed by 11,000 scientists just out in the journal BioScience, and it’s happening much faster than forecast, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in September.

“We’re seeing that climate-change impacts are already happening,” said Columbia University professor Ben Orlove, a lead author of IPPC’s new study, adding that if civilization ignores the crisis, harmful effects will increase to unprecedented levels, yet “the report does not prescribe telling anyone what to do. We show the consequences.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres commented, “Global emissions are increasing; temperatures are rising. The consequences for oceans, forests, weather patterns, biodiversity, food production, water, jobs and, ultimately, lives, are dire.”

Meanwhile, David Wallace-Wells, author of this year’s “The Uninhabitable Earth,” says 2019’s extreme weather “is our own doing”; there’s a big gap between research and how news media report climate change; and more must and can be done.

Francesco Femia, co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, has summarized an approach if survival is possible: “Manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.”

Our species isn’t helpless and therefore shouldn’t feel hopeless. However, change is required.

After all, says Wallace-Wells, the future could go either way.

“The next decade could contain more warming and more suffering, or less warming and less suffering,” he said.

Even if the emergency isn’t eliminated, adjustments can make it less threatening.

“You can see it's a much, much rosier picture with perhaps less than a meter of sea level rise even centuries out into the future, and that's something that I think we can all probably deal with and tolerate,” commented Robert DeCanto, a lead author on the UN report.

Already, more than 70 countries pledged to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, said Guterres, adding that asset managers administering about half the world’s capital investments (some $34 trillion) called for carbon fuels to be priced realistically and phased out.

In places ranging from West Virginia to Brazil, ambitious tree-planting programs are underway.

Last year, the European Union banned single-use plastics by 2021, realizing that patches of plastic garbage float in the Atlantic, Pacific and even the Arctic Oceans to such an extent that in the next century the seas might have more plastic and micro-plastic by weight than fish.

This spring, Maine and Maryland banned throwaway polystyrene-foam containers, as did cities such as Los Angeles, Miami Beach, New York and Seattle. Polystyrene (Styrofoam) is seemingly everywhere (and Americans discard the equivalent of 82 Styrofoam cups a year, according to the Illinois Public Research Group), it’s made from fossil fuels, isn’t biodegradable, can’t be recycled and can kill animals that mistake it for food.

Reform faces opposition from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which encourages state lawmakers to pass “pre-emption” laws overriding local reforms, but things can be done by individuals, or by groups, whether neighborhoods or governments, Orlove added.

“There are things that people can do in their homes, in their communities, in their countries and around the globe,” he said.

For instance, students Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao developed a way to use chemicals to break down un-recyclable plastics. The pair founded BioCellection four years ago, when they were 21. Funded in part by a UCLA institute and partnering with San Jose, Calif., their operation breaks down plastics into compounds that can be used to make clothing, carpet, etc. Recognized last year by Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30” feature, Yao and Wang this year moved into a new facility in Menlo Park, Calif.

Elsewhere, the UN’s Convention to Combat Desertification this month reported that stopping greenhouse gases and gaining decades of time to address the climate emergency can be achieved by investing $300 billion (about what the world’ military spends in two months) in returning land to food crops, pasture or trees to help convert carbon into biomass “with political will,” added the UN’s Rene Castro Salazar.

Greta Thunberg, the teen who’s led global demonstrations supporting a dramatic, worldwide response to humanity’s extinction risk, said, “I know so many people who feel hopeless. They ask me, ‘What should I do?’

“And I say: ‘Act. Do something’.”

The BioScience statement adds, “The good news is that transformative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-being than does business as usual.”