#project drawdown

[hope-for-the-planet]

Y'all might like this thread: https://twitter.com/GlobalEcoGuy/status/1553783607197671426?t=3qCHUCR_d7f4xO-TZw_Arg&s=19

Thank you for sharing this! For those who don't know, this is from Dr. Jonathan Foley of Project Drawdown, which is focused on scientifically-backed solutions to climate change. Their website has lots of resources to check out if you are interested.

Here is a selected portion of the thread (emphasis mine):

Compared to 10 or 20 years ago, there is a lot to be optimistic about on climate change. Much more action, and actual changes in emissions.

At the same time, the warming we were always going to see is unfolding around us, and it’s awful.

But don’t let the changes in climate we’re seeing now (which are not at all a surprise to scientists who’ve been in this field for awhile) make you give up on the future.

Yes, we will see more warming before we’re done. But the future is looking better than it did before.

Let’s build on this, double down on our work to stop climate change, and limit the damage as much as we can.

Every tenth of a degree matters. Every ecosystem matters. Every moment matters. We can still make a huge difference—for the better.

p.s I should clarify that reaching 2C is still based on different countries following through on their climate pledges. Some are doing well, but many are not—and some hard work is still needed there.

But the curves are starting to bend. How much is the question.

[…]

But I honestly believe we can still hit well under 2C, and probably well, thanks to some very interesting, recent shifts in technology, markets, investments, business leadership, culture, and politics.

But it’s no guarantee.

What I’m trying to say is this:

There are huge climate challenges facing us, but also some tremendous progress to build on.

Instead of giving in to catastrophic doomism, we can redouble our efforts now, and bend the curve even more.

As we like to say around Project Drawdown—

It’s not game over.

It’s game on!

As Dr. Foley himself points out, it can be hard to straddle the nuanced line between pointing out that was have made progress and are starting to move in the correct direction and that this progress means we need to push even harder not that we can become lenient.

Make no mistake, there is still a lot to do, but the heroic work put in by so many people in the past and present is beginning to pay off and we should also acknowledge that. We are in a better position now because of their work, and we can make life better for future humans based on the work that we do now.

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

"It’s amazing what investing in clean technology can do. A 10% drop in emissions in a single year!" - Dr. Jonathan Foley, Exec. Dir. #ProjectDrawdown

#ThereIsNoPlanetB #TheFutureIsClean --- "It’s amazing what investing in clean technology can do. A 10% drop in emissions in a single year!" --- Dr. Jonathan Foley Executive Director, Project Drawdown

[gaypiratesgalore]

How much of the world’s land would we need in order to feed the global population with the average diet of a given country?

Alexander et al. (2016) highlight that the types of foods we eat have a much stronger impact on land use than the quantity alone. The land requirements of different diets tend to be most strongly correlated to a country’s level of per capita meat consumption—and most notably that of ruminants (beef and mutton).

Looking ahead, what can we do as individuals to reduce the land requirements of our diets? If we are to allow room for everyone in the world to attain diverse, nutritious diets whilst also reducing agricultural pressures, it’s clear that high-income countries will have to adjust their average diets in order to reduce their relative impact.

How do we do this? Arguably the highest-impact change we can make to our diets is to reduce our meat intake—particularly that of beef or mutton.

At national levels, this would require a large shift in dietary preferences away from high-impact meat products. To reach a beef/mutton intake of 10 kilograms per year, countries such as the United States, Brazil or Australia would have to reduce consumption by more than two-thirds'

[reasonsforhope]

You know that whole trope/adage/etc. about the fact that people are strongest and most powerful when united against a common enemy?

Climate change is a common enemy for all of humanity. And unlike most instances of "banding together against a common enemy," fighting climate change doesn't require hurting anyone - only healing each other and the world.

So let's all band together and hurt the hell out of some oil company profit margins instead of each other.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Lately I've been reading "Drawdown", by Paul Hawken et al, a comprehensive set of strategies for tackling the climate crisis. Your Cambrian Wildwoods post reminded me of one of the solutions - Silvopasture, from the Latin for 'Forest Grazing'.

Essentially it means proposing to farmers that a portion of land be forested and that their animals freely graze there. It can be extremely flexible - planting trees in existing pasture, thinning down woodland to allow for forage growth, using trees as natural fencing, and more.

It's got good potential for carbon capture, and also for saving farmers money in feed and fertiliser, creating better conditions for livestock by keeping them in the shade, and potentially providing secondary income sources in fruit, nuts, etc.

What do you think of it as a potential avenue for Welsh farming? The focus in "Drawdown" is on cattle farming, but I don't see any reason not to trial it with sheep - especially since it could be spun as a hybrid of both aspects of traditional culture...

("Drawdown" also emphasises peer-to-peer uptake through word-of-mouth, rather than being pushed by outsiders.)

Oh, yes - it's basically what they did at Pontbren. That was a farmer-led initiative - one of the big expenses with sheep farming is having to bring them into barns over the winter and supply all feed, but traditionally they'd have stayed out all year. So these farmers got together and went, "How do we ethically and sustainably reduce this expense?"

What they realised is that they were paying for (a) the government-enforced decision post-WW2 to swap to high-yield breeds of sheep that weren't suited to the Welsh climate and topography (i.e. wet as fuck and mostly vertical), and (b) the decline of traditional hedgerow management and shelterbelts. And so the dream was born.

They contacted the Woodland Trust purely to act in an advisory capacity - they wanted to know which trees would be best, and where. They could take much land out of production, but the beauty of hedgerows and shelterbelts is that they're linear features that replace your fences. That was how environmentalists got on board - we were invited, and we remembered that. We were therefore allowed to do a couple of experiments as it progressed, such as testing the infiltration rates of rain into groundwater rather than run-off and comparing it between hedgerow fields and fence fields. Meanwhile, the farmers replaced their stock with native breeds - I believe mostly Welsh Mountain Sheep, which look amazing:

Ain't no rain getting in THAT.

Anyway, a few strategically placed shelterbelts and hedgerows later and:

The sheep can now safely stay out all year round, excepting storms

The sheep are actually healthier and have higher welfare standards

Floods have reduced thanks to higher infiltration rates

Soil erosion is reduced so the fields and river are healthier

The farmers have saved money

The farmers are now making extra money, because they started a tree nursery and sell trees as a side project

You can read multiple publications on it here

So yes! Silvipasture is actually a huge tool for the future that we need to be embracing, as is agroforestry for arable farming, and the frustrating/hopeful part of it is, these are tools we used to use. This isn't new knowledge - it's forgotten knowledge that we need to reclaim. But even aside from the immediate benefits, it also has massive implications for resilience in a world with a warming climate, and we need to do it faster.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Silvopasture gives cows choice in where to be and what to eat, which Karolini Tenffen de Sousa, a postdoctoral fellow at Instituto de Zootecnia in Brazil who specializes in cattle behavior, says can improve their health. Cows can be in the shade when they want, drink water when they want, and graze when they want. “If they don’t experience stress their physiology will be good,” she said. According to a 2017 study from the Center for Agroforestry at the University of Missouri, silvopasture can also extend the grazing season, so that it starts earlier in spring and lasts longer in fall compared to open pasture. Forage also grows better in silvopastures during the hottest times of the summer compared to open pasture, the study found. “The silvopastures are gold during droughts,” Chedzoy said. “The plants don’t wither and burn up like they do in the shadeless pastures.” Chedzoy says the cows’ diet of grass, forage and hay that he harvests in the summer means he doesn’t need to supplement his feed with protein meal or additional roughage the way many farmers do. And having the cows spread out across the forest all year long – instead of being stuck in a barn during the winter – means their waste doesn’t pollute the local watershed. And silvopasture allows for many layers of biodiversity compared to grasslands. They support a wider variety of bird species, more pollinators, bigger and more diverse mammals, and a much wider variety of plant life with more varied root systems. But it also requires careful management and daily rotation, as livestock can damage trees by trampling roots. This wear and tear can go unnoticed for years, and once the damage is visible, it can be too late to save those valuable trees. While research is still in early stages, Project Drawdown, a leading organization promoting climate solutions, has heralded silvopasture as an agricultural solution to the climate crisis due to hopes it can increase carbon sequestration through plants pulling carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, sinking it into soils, and holding it in their own biomass. Alix Contosta, a research assistant professor at University of New Hampshire who focuses on the relationship between land use and climate, says that her research has shown that carbon and nitrous oxide emissions were lower in silvopastures compared to areas that were clear cut or in treeless pasture, meaning cattle on silvopasture has lower emissions. In addition, most silvopastures, like Chedzoy’s, don’t require emissions-intensive fertilizers or feed that has to be grown and shipped to the farm, further reducing the impact on the climate.

[t-top-apologist]

At the end of the day the average civilian wishes to be catered to like an old money steel baron or perhaps one of those chaps from Downton Abbey. The entirety of modern society has come together to enable this, mass-producing cheap facsimiles of fortunes that should rightly either be built on child labor or perhaps serfdom.

Their lawns, taking up what could otherwise be used to grow crops or serve as "outdoor garage space," exist to ape the wide ranging estates meant for the nobility to chase down a fox while adorned in silly jackets. Their houses sport columns and stupid windows meant to imitate three different classical artforms at the same time because of something called "economies of scale." They even have male-centric social clubs meant for parlour games, discussing sports, and dining with friends, in this case franchised out under such names as "Buffalo Wild Wings."

This aping of the upper class continues to the hire of "artisans" to do relatively simple work deemed too complicated to warrant the time of the average citizen. It's not that the jobs are too taxing for your average person, but rather that the market has crystallized around the desire to live like budget royalty. Therefore they take their wafer-thin computers to artisans (now more commonly called "experts" or "Apple geniuses") for repair and have democratized the position of carriagemen to 22 year old dealership lube techs named Ryan who will turn a 15 minute job into a 30 minute endeavor thanks to frequent vape breaks and a brief brush with what the industry refers to as "a misplaced drain bolt."

The mid-40s project manager and mother of 3 is no less competent when changing oil than her grandfather before her who knew what "Valve Lash" is, but what separates the two is a series of wars in the 1900s that required an entire generation of men to become very familiar with operating and repairing machines better than the Germans and Japanese (an exercise that Chrysler would later abandon in favor of the phrase "if you can't beat em, join em").

This conflict ended with a surge of able-bodied men finding themselves returning to their project management jobs (like their granddaughters after them) but armed with captured German weapons and a comprehensive understanding of tubochargers. Just as a line can be drawn from troop drawdowns to political violence, there's a distinct correlations between GIs returning home and the violence with which Ford Flathead V8s were torn apart by inventive supercharging methods paired with landspeed record attempts.

Give a man a racecar and he'll crash it on the salt flats in a day. Teach a man to repair a racecar and it will sit in the garage of his suburban house for a few years in between complete engine rebuilds required by what can only be described as "vaporized piston rods."

Of course this hotrodder generation created the circumstances we live in today, as the market saw their fast cars cobbled together from old prewar hulks and simply stamped out new ones from factory, faster and more convenient for the next generation than building one from scratch. Now the project manager mother of 3 drives a 4wd barge with climate controlled seats boasting more computing power than the moon mission and an emissions-controlled powertrain with more horsepower than her grandfather's jalopy and her fathers factory muscle car combined. And she doesn't care at all.

Yet Amongst the average civilians there walks a rare breed: people who know how to change their own oil. We the chosen move among you silently, bucking the system, operating outside the cultural helplessness and trading in forbidden knowledge in almost-abandoned forum threads (flame wars over conventional vs synthetic).

While we do have a marked air of superiority about this, I can't say I haven't stooped to imitating the rich myself. I've been known to wear a silly jacket from time to time.

[thehopefuljournalist]

weird question, but do you know if regenerative agriculture is growing, and by what rate? it's important to me but looking for articles on my own can trigger a panic attack :[ no worries if not !

Hey! Thank you so much for asking. Honestly, agriculture and sustainable agriculture specifically are very close to my heart as well, so I was glad for the excuse to do some research :) 

Also, thank you for your patience, I know you sent this Ask a bit ago. It’s good that you’re listening to yourself and not going around searching for things that might cause you harm, so thanks again for reaching out!

So, what is regenerative agriculture? 

Regenerative agriculture is a way of farming that focuses on soil health. When soil is healthy, it produces more food and nutrition, stores more carbon and increases biodiversity – the variety of species. Healthy soil supports other water, land and air environments and ecosystems through natural processes including water drainage and pollination – the fertilization of plants.

Regenerative agriculture is a defining term for sustainability in our food system - while there is no one true definition of regenerative agriculture, the concept has been around for centuries, taking root in Indigenous growing practices. Regenerative approaches can bolster soil health and watershed health. They can also add to climate mitigation and potentially tie into regulatory or commercial incentives for a more sustainable diet. 

Regenerative farming methods include minimizing the ploughing of land. This keeps CO2 in the soil, improves its water absorbency and leaves vital fungal communities in the earth undisturbed.

Rotating crops to vary the types of crop planted improves biodiversity, while using animal manure and compost helps to return nutrients to the soil. 

Continuously grazing animals on the same piece of land can also degrade soil, explains the Regenerative agriculture in Europe report from the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council. So regenerative agriculture methods include moving grazing animals to different pastures.

How can it help?

Regenerative farming can improve crop yields – the volume of crops produced – by improving the health of soil and its ability to retain water, as well as reducing soil erosion. If regenerative farming was implemented in Africa, crop yields could rise 13% by 2040 and up to 40% in the future, according to a Regenerative Farming in Africa report by conservation organization the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the UN.

Regenerative farming can also reduce emissions from agriculture and turn the croplands and pastures, which cover up to 40% of Earth’s ice-free land area, into carbon sinks. These are environments that naturally absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, according to climate solutions organization Project Drawdown.

5 ways to scale regenerative agriculture:

1. Agree on common metrics for environmental outcomes. Today, there are many disparate efforts to define and measure environmental outcomes. We must move to a set of metrics adopted by the whole food industry, making it easier for farmers to adjust their practices and for positive changes to be rewarded. 2. Build farmers’ income from environmental outcomes such as carbon reduction and removal. We need a well-functioning market with a credible system of payments for environmental outcomes, trusted by buyers and sellers, that creates a new, durable, income stream for farmers. 3. Create mechanisms to share the cost of transition with farmers. Today, all the risk and cost sits with the farmers. 4. Ensure government policy enables and rewards farmers for transition. Too many government policies are in fact supporting the status quo of farming. The food sector must come together and work jointly with regulators to address this. 5. Develop new sourcing models to spread the cost of transition. We must move from sourcing models that take crops from anywhere to models that involve collaboration between off-takers from different sectors to take crops from areas converting to regenerative farming.

The rise of regenerative agriculture

In 2019, General Mills, the manufacturer of Cheerios, Yoplait and Annie’s Mac and Cheese (among other products), announced it would begin sourcing a portion of its corn, wheat, dairy and sugar from farmers who were engaged in regenerative agriculture practices and committed to advancing the practice of regenerative agriculture on one million acres of land by 2030. In early 2020, Whole Foods announced regenerative agriculture would be the No. 1 food trend and, in spite of the pandemic and the rapid growth of online shopping overshadowing the trend, business interest in the field still spiked by 138%. 

More recently, PepsiCo announced it was adopting regenerative agriculture practices among 7 million acres of its farmland. Cargill declared it intends to do the same on 10 million acres by 2030, and Walmart has committed to advancing the practice on 50 million acres. Other companies pursuing regenerative agriculture include Danone, Unilever, Hormel, Target and Land O’ Lakes.

According to Nielsen, 75% of millennials are altering their buying habits with the environment in mind. This sentiment, of course, does not always materialize into tangible actions on behalf of every consumer. However, it is clear from the actions of PepsiCo, General Mills, Walmart, Unilever and others that they believe consumers’ expectations of what is environmentally friendly are shifting and that they will soon be looking to purchase regeneratively-produced foods because of the many benefits they produce.

The next step in the transition to regenerative agriculture is certification. The goal is to create labeling that will allow the consumer to connect to the full suite of their values. Some companies are partnering with nonprofit conveners and certifiers. The Savory Institute is one such partner, convening producers and brands around regenerative agriculture and more holistic land management practices.

In 2020, the Savory Institute granted its first “Ecological OutCome Verification (EOV) seal to Epic’s latest high protein bars by certifying that its featured beef was raised with regenerative agriculture practices. 

The program was developed to let the land speak for itself by showing improvement through both leading and lagging functions such as plant diversity and water holding capacity. There are now thousands of products that have been Land to Market verified, with over 80 brand partnerships with companies such as Epic Provisions, Eileen Fisher and Applegate.  Daily Harvest is giving growers in that space three-year contracts as well as markets and price premiums for the transitional crop. It's focusing on that transitional organic process as a stepping stone toward a regenerative organic food system.

Daily Harvest’s Almond Project creates an alliance with the Savory Institute and a group of stakeholders - including Simple Mills and Cappello’s - to bring regenerative practices to almonds in the Central Valley of California.

These companies are working with Treehouse California Almonds, their shared almond supplier, to lead soil health research on 160 acres of farmland. Over five years, the Project will focus on measuring outcomes around the ecosystem and soil health of regenerative practices – comparing those side by side with neighboring conventional baselines.

“We need industry partnership; we need pre-competitive collaboration,” says Rebecca Gildiner, Director of Sustainability at Daily Harvest, of the Almond Project. “Sustainability cannot be competitive. We are all sharing suppliers, we are all sharing supply – rising tides truly lift all boats. The industry has to understand our responsibility in investing, where historically investments have disproportionately focused on yields with a sole focus of feeding the world. We know this has been critical in the past but it has overlooked other forms of capital, other than financial. We need to look towards experimenting in holistic systems that have other outcomes than yield and profit - instead of saying organic can’t feed the world, we have to invest in figuring out how organic can feed the world because it’s critical.”

////

In short!!!

Many articles are stating regenerative agriculture as a defining, and rising “buzz word” in the industry. It seems that consumers are becoming more and more aware and are demanding more sustainable approaches to agriculture. 

We, of course, have a way to go, but it seems from the data that I’ve gathered, that regenerative agriculture is, in fact, on the rise. Demand is rising, and many are working on ways to globalize those methods.

Source Source Source Source

[mariacallous]

Scientists are running low on words to adequately describe the world’s climate chaos. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could already say earlier this month that there was more than a 99 percent chance that 2023 was the hottest year on record. That followed September’s sky-high temperatures—an average of 0.5 degrees Celsius above the previous record—which one climate scientist called “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.” When one of this summer’s rapidly intensifying hurricanes, fueled by extraordinarily high ocean temperatures, leapt from a 60-knot tropical storm to a 140-knot Category 5, one scientist simply tweeted: “Wait, what???”

For many climate scientists, words are failing—or at least getting as extreme as the weather. It’s part of the conundrum they face in delivering ever more shocking statistics to a public that may be overwhelmed by yet more dismal climate news. They need to say something urgent … but not so urgent that people feel disempowered. They need to be shocking … but not so shocking that their statements can be dismissed as hyperbole. But what can they do when the evidence itself is actually extreme?

“We’ve been trying to figure out how to communicate the urgency of climate change for decades,” says Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “You have to find this balance of being both scientifically accurate—because that is your credibility and your trust and your personal comfort and self-esteem as a scientist. But you also have to be communicating in really powerful ways.”

There’s another problem: Pick your superlative, and it’s probably growing increasingly deficient for characterizing a given disaster. Take the phrase “mega,” for describing supercharged climate-related catastrophes from megafires to megafloods. “We tack ‘mega’ on everything,” says Heather Goldstone, chief communications officer of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “It’s a megaheatwave, a megadrought, and a megastorm. And it just kind of loses its punch after a while. It still fails to convey the true enormity of what we’re facing.”

And scientists are also just people. “It’s a really tricky balance to navigate, in between being a scientist and being a thinking, feeling human being,” says Kate Marvel, a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown, which advocates for climate action. “Because we are all conflicted. We’re not neutral observers—we live here.”

Scientists walk a fine line, and a constantly shifting one. They are objective measurers of our world and its climate, gathering temperature data and building models of how Antarctica’s and Greenland’s ice are rapidly deteriorating, or how wildfires like the one that destroyed Lahaina in August are getting more ferocious, or droughts getting more intense. “Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas” is not a phrase you’d ever find in a scientific paper, but it’s a reflection of how even objective measurers of the world are getting floored by those objective measurements.

For the past 10,000 years of human civilization, the climate has been fairly stable. People built coastal cities not expecting sea levels to rapidly rise, or in water-rich regions that are now running dry, or near floodplains that are now filling with ever-bigger floods. In regions where high humidity combines with high temperatures, people are already reaching the thermal limits of their biology. Think of that civilizational fabric as a tablecloth. “We’ve set the whole table for 10,000 years, assuming the tablecloth was going to stay the same. And what we’ve done is pulled the tablecloth out from underneath all of that,” says Goldstone. “The ‘new normal’ is not what we’re seeing right now. The new normal is constant change.”

And constant change is hard to communicate. But what’s essential is to keep people out of harm’s way and to keep them from complacency. If the public gets the idea that climate change is too big and too inevitable, they won’t fight against it. “There’s fear that if you make people hopeless, then they’ll be less likely to take action or to think about climate change when they’re voting,” says Dahl. Hopelessness also leaves people more vulnerable to greenwashing campaigns by fossil fuel companies. “They’ve tried to position themselves as leaders in this transition to a safer, healthier future,” Dahl continues. “If you’re already feeling like your individual actions don’t make a difference, then having the company that provides the gas that fuels your car say, ‘We’re doing our best to reduce carbon emissions,’ it’s easy to go along with that.”

Scientists are finding that the most effective way to communicate news about climate change is to make it more local and personal. Tell a story, and emphasize that all is not lost. When there’s good news, be sure to talk about that, too. This counteracts what’s known as climate change fatalism. “At a certain point, even people who believe that climate change is happening—it’s human caused, it’s important—they simply can no longer engage with the topic, because they just feel so overwhelmed by the idea of it,” says Stony Brook University’s Christine Gilbert, who researches climate communication. “I am of the opinion that there is space for talking about the wins and the successes as a way to kind of continue to ground yourself.”

Just as we can apply any number of dramatic descriptors to the dramatic effects of climate change, so too can we apply them to progress. Scientists and environmentalists have roundly celebrated the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which allocates hundreds of billions of dollars toward climate action. That includes tax breaks for electric appliances and home efficiency upgrades, and will work to juice the domestic green energy economy. And this September, the Biden Administration launched the American Climate Corps, an army of workers who will prepare the country for the climatic challenges to come.

At the same time, the costs of clean energy have cratered: Just in the 2010s, the price of solar dropped more than 80 percent. Wind power is getting cheaper and so are the batteries required to store all that electricity. In California, a quarter of new cars sold are now plug-ins.

“I feel like we also need a new set of superlatives to talk about climate action,” says Marvel. “If you told me even 10 years ago that this is going to be a really big, politically salient issue, and there are going to be multiple governments on multiple levels taking action, I would be pretty stunned. But that’s not to say that it’s going fast enough, because it’s not. I don’t mean to be like a Pollyanna optimist here. But it really is stunning to me how far we’ve come.”

[climatecalling]

By allowing existing trees to grow old in healthy ecosystems and restoring degraded areas, scientists say 226 gigatonnes of carbon could be sequestered, equivalent to nearly 50 years of US emissions for 2022. But they caution that mass monoculture tree-planting and offsetting will not help forests realise their potential. “Conserving forests, ending deforestation and empowering people who live in association with those forests has the power to capture 61% of our potential. That’s huge. It’s potentially reframing forest conservation. It’s no longer avoided emissions, it’s massive carbon drawdown, too,” said Tom Crowther, the head of the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich. He said thousands of different project and schemes were needed to preserve and revive forests. “It can be achieved by millions of local communities, Indigenous communities, farmers and foresters who promote biodiversity. It could be agroforestry for cacao, coffee or banana, natural regeneration, rewilding or creating habitat corridors. They’re successful when nature becomes the economic choice. It’s not easy but it’s doable.” ... “There is still only a finite amount of land to dedicate to forests, and ability of trees to sequester carbon is limited. The reality is that we need to slash fossil fuel emissions, end deforestation, and restore ecosystems to stabilise the climate in line with the Paris agreement.”

[female-malice]

Last week Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced $1.2 billion in new funding for “Direct Air Capture” projects, including a giant project led by Occidental Petroleum(link is external). Unbelievably, we will be giving tax dollars to an oil company – as Big Oil makes record profits – to try to mop up some of the pollution they created. And this is only part of a $3.5 billion DOE commitment to Direct Air Capture projects, and a much larger portfolio of government funding and tax breaks that reads like a love letter to the fossil fuel industry. (This is on top of the estimated $20 billion(link is external) in other annual subsidies the government already gives Big Oil.)

But this isn’t new. Previous administrations also funded Big Oil’s industrial carbon capture schemes, including ridiculous “Clean Coal” and Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) projects that claimed they would reduce carbon pollution from fossil power plants. Of course, the projects flopped and wasted billions of tax dollars – even prompting a rebuke from the Government Accountability Office(link is external).

Currently, carbon removal technologies are so insignificant compared to emissions that they are effectively zero (see the green line on the above graph from the Project Drawdown Roadmap.) Eventually, they will have a role to play in removing the most stubborn emissions. But for now, resources would be better spent on emergency brake solutions and new low-carbon systems to reduce emissions as quickly as possible.

[countessofbiscuit]

3, 4, 6, 7, 11 and 13 for Permissive Environment? sorry i really like this story! 😳

Haha, thank you so much! I like it too and am happy to talk about it, though I'll only be talking below about the first chapter, which is the original fic (as apposed to the addendum drabbles).

Link to Permissive Environment

 3. What’s your favorite line of narration?

This is tough! Not sure if it was playing in a different story ‘environment’ or working with totally new characters, but the prose in this one is some of my strongest, I think. I'll pick three lines:

Desert glass had nothing on the penetration of Eleni Syndulla’s eyes, Howzer decided, though it had bored through earth and sky.

Like the scent between his lekku under the midday sun, the shape of Cham’s cock was embedded in Howzer’s mind.

When it came time for drawdown, Howzer was determined to be on the last larty out of Lessu.

4. What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

Eleni chuckled and tutted. “Don’t flatter him, Howzer — or any Rylman. It will go straight to his lek and make him dangerous.”

6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

I don’t normally write such detailed stories for new ships on the back of an unexpected prompt. How quickly this fic flowed out really impressed me. I remember needing a good project at the time and immersing myself in the worldbuilding — watching obscure videos on mosaics and Greco-Roman architecture and ancient cosmetics and and and (you get the idea) — brought maximum escapism. 

It’s also dear to me for the hotwifing element … my favorite kink and one I should write more of. 

7: Where did the title come from?

The DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Jan, 2021) :p

permissive environment — Operational environment in which host nation military and law enforcement agencies have control, as well as the intent and capability to assist operations that a unit intends to conduct.

Obviously, there’s a double-meaning in there about the Syndullas as very permissive hosts; but the fic was just as much about what might have brought Howzer's unit to Ryloth and what the aftermath of a successful GAR operation on friendly soil would have looked like. So, the military pun.

11: What do you like best about this fic?

It’s a well-textured story, studded with detail and sensory notes. If that reads like a wine bottle label, well this is one of the few fics I like better with age :p

13: What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?

The soundtrack to Black Hawk Down — the instrumentation and often plaintive melodies work for the vibe — and "Gortoz a Ran" especially, which is weirdly perfect because it’s a song in Breton about waiting for a storm. Given the whole twi’leks-as-space!French-Resistance thing, it was easy to imagine the song belonging to twi’leks who speak an ancient tongue that's quite different from modern Ryl.

And also Oh What A Mess I’m In by Hayden Calnin 

I know this might seem a little less alright / But here I find a little place to hide / Oh, what a mess I'm in

Thanks for the ask!

Fic Questions

[hylianengineer]

I am smacking you all in the face with hope for the future, dammit! (affectionately)

There’s a trend I’m noticing with people in their 20s (I am also in my 20s but I’m not Like This for whatever reason): people keep saying stuff like “The world isn’t gonna be around for another 50 years” or “I’m not gonna live past 40.″ Which is disturbing in a lot of ways, obviously, and I suck at interpreting jokes so maybe it’s that, I do think they’re at least partly joking, but... Y’all need some hope in your lives, Jesus Christ. I know we live in an era of uncertainty and bad things exist but holy cow, you’ve gotta remember good things exist too! Otherwise you’ll just lose your mind and that’s not helping anything.

I know there are a lot of factors here, including human rights and politics and economics, etc., but I’m going to focus on the one I know the most about: climate change. And I’m in a unique position, because I am an environmental science student, which means I have heard all the climate doom stuff AND many of the possible solutions. I’ve been thinking of making a climate hope blog for a while now, but I’m having a hard time finding the energy. I’m increasingly convinced that needs to be a thing, though, so while I battle the annoying tasks of Real Life which are currently devouring my free time, here’s a reading/other resources list for anybody who needs some hope for the (environmental) future (tentatively organized from being the most-to-least work to read/watch/whatever, though that’s just in my experience and ymmv):

[Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of these things or their creators, they’re just things I enjoyed or found helpful]

The Future Crunch Newsletter: Want to hear about all the ways the world is getting better? Want to read about the downfall of the fossil fuel industry, the  successes of renewable energy and electric vehicles, or the mind-blowing improvements in health and quality of life that are happening around the world? Then you will love this newsletter! This is one of those things I never stop recommending to people, because I know I’m not the only person whose sanity desperately needs it. This one does have a paid version which has more stuff but the free one is awesome too. I also highly recommend the annual “100 Good News Stories You Missed In [Year]” article. This is the single easiest and most accessible thing on this list, so if you find it hard to read books (very understandable, so do I), then you might find this newsletter more appealing.

How To Save A Planet [podcast]: This is mostly what is sounds like: a podcast in which each episode focuses on a planet-saving solution, and ends with a call to action about how you can contribute. Actually, hang on, back up: I don’t mean planet-saving in the sense of superhero movies, where one solution fixes everything. I mean little things that can all contribute to the big picture - that’s generally the kind of solutions those of us in the field of environmental studies talk about, and if you want to see this on a big scale (as in literally a step-by-step plan for putting a bunch of little things together into the big picture), check out Project Drawdown - I’ll talk about it more later.

 It’s just neat to hear about the different (and sometimes bizarre) ways people are trying to solve this problem.

2040 [documentary]: Well, sort of a documentary? It’s been described as “an exercise in fact-based dreaming.” It’s the story of a filmmaker who travels the world to imagine a hopeful future for his daughter: one in which already existing solutions have been used to solve climate change. These solutions run the gamut from fairly normal (solar power) to kinda bizarre (kelp farming via marine permaculture - look up permaculture if sustainable farming is something you’re into, it’s insanely cool). Okay, kelp farming doesn’t sound that bizarre, but the way it’s depicted made my head explode, in a good way. Maybe that’s just me. I’ll stop rambling, here’s a Wikipedia article with a synopsis in case none of that made any sense.

Project Drawdown: Okay, fair warning, this one might melt your brain a little. (I mean, not all of it, they’ve got some great intro videos too. Just... the table of solutions is overwhelming.) But that’s not entirely a bad thing, because it is literally a step-by-step guide to climate change mitigation. Of course it’s not going to be simple. And yes, they did the math: the table of solutions consists of 94 different  strategies, and how much CO2-equivalent emissions they would prevent or sequester in the next 30 years according to two different scenarios. It’s kinda wild to look at, because holy shit they did the math! It makes the whole thing feel concrete in a way most discussions of climate mitigation don’t. And if the math sounds a bit much, maybe check out these lovely video lessons, which are each about 15 minutes long.

(You might notice I keep saying mitigation, as opposed to say, prevention or something. Sorry folks, but we’re kinda past the stage of preventing it - we’re already experiencing climate change. But that doesn’t mean we can’t stop the worst of its effects, or that the world is gonna end. The world is changing, yeah. It does that, always has and always will, it’s just changing right now in ways we haven’t seen before. Yes, those changes could be really bad - some already are - but they’re far from the worst thing this planet has been through, and we have a lot of really brilliant and dedicated people working on this. It’ll be rough, no question, but I really do believe this is something we can get through.)

The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers: A sorta solarpunk scifi novel focusing on the multi-species crew of a wormhole-building spaceship and their chaotic found family dynamic. Some of the best worldbuilding I’ve ever encountered, and it’s an interesting story for our era because it shows how humanity has rebuilt after a mentioned-in-passing catastrophe which destroyed Earth, and somehow isn’t morbid about this at all. It’s also got an interesting dynamic on the galactic politics side of things, as humans aren’t in charge - we’re actually a small and minimally influential species, and one of the key parts of the novel is how the human captain of the Wayfarer wants to do big tunnel-building jobs that are usually left to other species. Becky Chambers has a lot of hopeful, cozy scifi novels, most of which I have not yet read, but everything I have read by her has been awesome.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer is a nonfiction book by a botanist, professor, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. It focuses on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (that’s a thing environmental academics talk about and it’s basically what it sounds like: the ways people in a variety of cultures, especially Indigenous ones, traditionally interact with and know the world around them), the relationship between people and the environment, and how these can intersect with Western science. If you’d like your entire understanding of human-environment relationships turned upside down in a way that will give you hope for the future, this is the book for you. It’s a great antidote to that thing people say about how humans are just bad and destructive and a plague upon the earth, yada yada yada. It’s also organized such that you don’t have to read the whole thing; each chapter stands well alone, and you can get a lot out of it even if you just read one (I admit to not having finished the book, executive dysfunction is a thing). I had to read this for a class last year and have recommended it to people every chance I’ve gotten since; it is that good.

[arbtvtr]

Climate change progress

[reasonsforhope]

Do you have a tag specifically for stuff about the climate crisis/what is being done/can be done to help stop or reverse its effects?

Basically just read a post that was "I'm not trying to be alarmist but- *spends seven paragraphs about how climate change is inevitable, we will never possibly recover from it, it's not global warming anymore its global "boiling", none of the damage can ever be undone and we're all going to be dead in the next five generations*" and I'm trying.. very hard not to spiral from it.

Sorry for bothering you 🙏

The "climate crisis" "climate change" and "climate hope" tags should do the trick.

Of those, "climate change" is the one that has the most content by far, just because the others are more narrow and "climate hope" is a much more recent term, so to speak, because I keep forgetting about it lol

I don't post anything that's not good news, so you can go through the general "climate change" tag without fear

Also, while I'm at it, that person is wrong. For a lot of reasons, including that we're actively fixing a lot of damage to ecosystems literally right now. And also also, GLOBAL WARMING WILL BE AT LEAST SOMEWHAT REVERSIBLE

Why? Well, the rise in average global temperatures is caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As we keep fixing the planet, restoring ecosystems, and stop burning fossil fuels, nature will siphon more and more of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

And if there's less carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) in the atmosphere, then more heat can once again escape the planet and radiate out into space

Will this be easy? Probably not! This planet's natural systems are incomprehensibly complicated - but that also means there are solutions out there that we haven't even discovered. There are some additional problems to overcome, like the fact that the oceans will be surfacing excess heat for a few decades after we stop CO2 emissions, and also "natural gas" and "carbon capture" are fake solutions/oil company traps.

But we can do it. I so, so, so sincerely believe that.

One term that I think we'll be seeing more and more of in the coming years is "Drawdown": "Climate drawdown refers to the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline.[1] Drawdown is a milestone in reversing climate change and eventually reducing global average temperatures." (from wikipedia)

We can achieve drawdown. Will life in the future look very different? Yes, in both good and bad ways.

Climate change is the earth's "feedback" to humanity: "Fix your shit or die."

People are, in general, really, really, really committed to finding ways not to die.

I genuinely believe the rest of us can overcome the few dozen billionaires trying to screw the rest of us over. Money is powerful, but the remaining 7 billion plus people on this planet are more so. And the fortunes of billlionaires are made off the backs of the rest of us - which means we can make those fortunes run dry.

Sources for this answer (warning, these talk about the negative side of things a lot too, they're not the uplifting reads themselves. that's next): x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x

Other sources to read for hope: FutureCrunch, Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration good news websites in general such as Positive News and Goodgoodgood, which I think are the best content fits for what you're looking for. Make sure to check out Goodgoodgood's roundups specifically. And know that there are way, way more good news stories - and way bigger ones, too - than I've had time to post about lately, because work has been really hectic

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Drawdown of Klamath River Reservoirs

The Klamath River in southern Oregon and northern California is now running freer. In late 2023 and early 2024, four of the six dams along the river were breached and reservoirs drained. These actions were part of an effort to restore hundreds of miles of riparian habitat. It is thought to be the largest dam removal project in history.

The four dams—Iron Gate, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2, and J.C. Boyle—were built between 1918 and 1962 to generate electricity. Facing steep costs to modernize them in the early 2000s, the utility that owned the dams opted for deconstruction instead. In addition to removing aging infrastructure, the project is expected to eliminate the ecosystem and human health risks posed by toxic algae, which has regularly reached harmful levels in the reservoirs since 2005. Restoration efforts will focus on revegetating hundreds of acres and reinvigorating fish populations in what was once the third most productive river for salmon on the West Coast.

The first dam to be removed, Copco No. 2, was also the smallest; that project wrapped up in September 2023. Copco No. 2 did not impound a reservoir but rather diverted the river’s flow through a tunnel system to a powerhouse downstream.

More-visible changes would come later, after the image on the left was acquired with the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 on December 23, 2023. At that time, the Iron Gate, Copco No. 1, and J.C. Boyle (upstream and not in view) dams were still holding back water. Drawdown of the Iron Gate Reservoir began on January 11, 2024, followed by the controlled release of water from Copco Lake and J.C. Boyle Reservoir.

By February 15, the initial phase of drawdown was complete, according to a news release from the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC), the organization managing the project. The result is evident in the second image (right), acquired with the OLI-2 on Landsat 9 on February 25. A river channel meanders through the beds of the drained reservoirs.

The KRRC estimated that 5 million cubic yards of sediment previously held behind dams would travel downstream during this drawdown phase. Scientists expect the release of sediment early in the project to degrade water quality in the near term, increasing turbidity and lowering dissolved oxygen content. “The river is undoing a century of being impacted by these dams, and that may look messy right now,” said NOAA fisheries biologist Shari Witmore in a statement.

A steady supply of river sediment will help build up habitat for organisms downstream, transport nutrients, and replenish coastlines over the long term. The Klamath is one of many river systems, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, to have gone without many of these benefits for decades. A recent analysis of Landsat and hydrological data found that 20th-century dam building in North America, Europe, and Asia has halved the global delivery of suspended sediment from rivers to the oceans relative to pre-dam conditions.

Researchers have documented rapid and long-lasting ecological gains following other dam removal and river restoration projects, such as the one on the Elwha River in Washington state in the 2010s. To jumpstart restoration on the Klamath, NOAA Fisheries, the Bureau of Reclamation, tribes, and other partners are conducting controlled water releases from dams farther upstream to maximize the movement of sediment and minimize impacts to fish.

In the coming months, the three remaining dam structures will be completely disassembled. The removal of Copco No. 1, a concrete arch dam, began in March; Iron Gate and J.C. Boyle, both earthen dams, will be deconstructed after the spring runoff period. The removal of all three is slated to be complete before the fall Chinook salmon run. Restoration of the approximately 1,300 acres that were previously underwater has already begun with the dispersal of climate-adapted seeds collected throughout the watershed.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.