? Rebecca Leber, at Mother Jones, reports that a campaign created for the Website Women for Natural Gas is literally invented, using stock photos -- and not much imagination. "Back in May, the site showed testimonials from Natalie White, Carey White, and Natalie Smith, with identical quotes for the two Natalies (notwithstanding the overlapping names)," Leber writes. "By August, the names had diversified, a little, to Rebecca Washington, Natalie Smith, and Carey White, and the identical quotes had also changed again."
? FEMA has come up with a useful new tool for evaluating which communities are most at risk from rising sea levels. It incorporates variables such as poverty, homeownership, and insurance coverage into a resilience index -- and finds, for example, that Cowlitz County, Washington (which is 50 miles inland, but on the Columbia River, which has a long history of flooding) may be the most vulnerable spot in the nation.
? A safe prediction is that we'll hear more hype about hydrogen in the year to come, so the Clean Energy Group has provided a useful service by helping to explain the difference between clean-energy uses of the gas and those that serve mostly to keep fossil-fuel companies happy.
? Craft breweries are turning to a new process that allows them to "capture off -- gas from the fermentation process, clean and scrub the recycled gas, and either reuse or resell the resulting beverage-grade CO2."
? Jasmine Banks and Jennie C. Stephens, in the online magazine DAME, look askance at Charles Koch's recent efforts at reputation repair. "The Koch-funded Center for Regulatory Studies at George Washington University," they write, "almost universally advocates against environmental regulation and relies primarily on researchers with ties to groups funded by the Koch family. The Trump administration has acted on many of the center's polluter-friendly recommendations, such as reducing the costs that the government attributes to greenhouse gases and raising the bar for issuing new energy efficiency standards. All of which continues to harm the most vulnerable communities impacted by environmental racism."
? The photographer Alex Basaraba has been working on a project in which he pairs images of climate activists with the data that they're trying to communicate. Here's a portrait of Lia Zakiyyah, the program coà rdinator for the Collaborative Australia-Indonesia Program for Sustainable Development and Climate Change, overlaid with a graph showing projected changes in precipitation in Indonesia.
?ï You know the plastic pillows used in online-shopping packages? According to the environmental group Oceana, if you strung together all the ones that Amazon alone used last year, they would circle the globe 500 times.
?ï Solar-panel installations have spiked in the United States during the pandemic, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association and the consulting group Wood Mackenzie. As the Times reports, "Large solar farms led the growth, but residential installations also jumped," in part because some homeowners were spending less money on entertainment and eating out, and so had more cash for home improvements.
?ï Truly depressing: California's wildfires have taken a horrible toll on coastal redwoods, giant sequoias, and ancient Joshua trees. A fire ecologist told the Times, "They've lived through literally hundreds of fires in their lifetimes. Now we're seeing them killed in one fell swoop."
?ï Considerably less depressing: a new study, led by the Brigham Young University researchers Sara Sayedi and Ben Abbott, finds that subsea permafrost in the Arctic holds enormous stores of carbon, but it seems likely that it will melt fairly slowlyover centuries, not decadesespecially if we hold temperature increases below two degrees Celsius.
I've been contending that there's an emerging micro-genre of climate songs by climate scientists. For further proof, here's an homage to Tennessee Ernie Ford and cumulative carbon emissions, by Oxford University's Raymond Pierrehumbert. You can hear it at the fifteen-minute mark of this recording of Andy Revkin's weekly "Song Swap." Also featured: the world-renowned glaciologist Richard Alley, with his dulcimer-playing daughter, Karen, and the eminent Adirondack limnologist Curt Stager.
Bill McKibben
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