I'm thrilled to announce 'The Verdant Yank' has been short-listed for this year's Irish blog awards in both the Education & Science and Current Affairs & Politics categories! Twenty percent of the final score is based on public vote so I'd be eternally grateful if you took the time to cast a vote for my blog. One vote is allowed per category so all the better if you can give up a few more seconds to vote for the Verdant Yank in both nominated categories! |
Polls close midnight on Tuesday, August 23rd so please spread the word and get voting. Only one vote is allowed per registered email account. Also, please consider taking some time to cast another vote for my BFF, actress, writer & mother-extraordinaire Melanie Clark-Pullen's new blog and podcast, Strut and Bellow, which has been short-listed in the Arts & Culture category.
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This week, NOAA published their annual State of the Climate report for 2015. Their findings paint a grim picture of a planet in crisis. Watch George Lee's commentary on RTE News from August 2nd with a brief comment from yours truly:
Short-listing takes place between now and September and short-listed entries will be opened up to a public vote, so stay tuned because you may get a call to mobilization from yours truly soon!
Here's hoping for a positive outcome because (in my humble, unbiased opinion) we need a lot more awareness of environmental issues in Ireland and no better way for this Irish-American Verdant Yank to help achieve that than with a seal of approval from the Irish Blog Awards! Find out more about the Irish Blog Awards here. Fingers and toes crossed until September! -Cara PS. Congratulations to fellow blogger and my amazing friend, Melanie Clark Pullen, for nomination of her blog and podcast 'Strut and Bellow' in the 'Arts and Culture' category. One to watch, people! Visions 2100
So why go through such enormous effort to create a vision of the world in eight and a half decades when most of us will be gone? My colleague John Gibbons explained it best when he quoted Nelson Mandela at Visions 2100 Dublin: We need "the vision thing" to figure out what steps to take now to get there, and 2100 is far enough away to let our imaginations run wild, unconstrained by today's technological and societal limits. Emotion = Energy in MotionJohn O'Brien's introductory comments at Vision 2100 Dublin reminded me of the constant communication struggle we have between rationality and emotion. He explained:
For scientists in particular, this conflict between speaking with emotion and rationality is head wrecking. We're told we need to express more urgency to convey environmental threats more convincingly, but when we do, we're attacked for trying to advance an "activist agenda" and discredited for being alarmist. Damned if you do, Damned if you don't... It's no wonder most scientists just try and keep their heads down and advance the science. Why be outspoken and emotional when it only makes you susceptible to attack and threatens your career prospects? That's why John O'Brien's Vision 2100 project is so useful. It gives all of us (yes, you too) the space to speak with emotion without risk of being discredited since no one can tell us our vision of 2100 is wrong (or at least we'll be dead by the time they do!). The Latin derivative for the word emotion, ‘emotere’, means 'energy in motion' and it involves not just mental sensations by physical ones too. When we feel something physically, we connect to it at a deeper level and we're more encouraged to act or move compared to when we are confronted with rational facts.
Within 24 hours, our government reversed its migrant policy as a result of public outcry (though they've yet to take the 4,000 they committed to). We simply have to become more emotional about climate change and climate action in spite of personal consequences. A friend recently reminded me that all major decisions are based on either fear or love. Facts and figures aren't going to enable the kind of action we need on climate. A rationale for 2100In 2100, I expect the world to be almost unrecognizable compared to present day. I grew up before the internet – So in just 3 decades, technology (and thus society) has already changed dramatically.
It’s equally hard to conceive of what our climate, and consequently humanity, might be like in 2100. The variability in the IPCC climate projections is enormous by the time you get to 2100, with anything from a 1.8 degree Celsius temperature rise from pre-industrial baseline (unlikely now given our lack of action to date) to up to 6 degree Celsius rise.
There are so many economic, societal, health and security reasons for most countries to do this, I think it’s fair to assume the world won’t remain dominated by fossil intensive energy for much longer. As a result of that global shift toward renewable energy, I think there will also be a reform of the social inequality we see today. If the world were only 100 people, right now 50% of the wealth would be owned by one individual! The trend of consolidating wealth to a smaller and smaller group of individuals has reached its limits, and the solution to that unsustainable greed is in local social and environmental sustainability. An unlikely model in CubaWhen I think of what a local sustainability might look like in 2100, I think of Cuba today.
Inadvertently, they created a platform for sustainable food production where locally-grown, organic food has become the most convenient and inexpensive food available to people. Another interesting thing about Cuba is that an individual is only permitted to own one place of business, so the majority of businesses remain locally-owned and community focused. This is where our own food production systems need to go if we’re serious about sustainability. The greatest threat to Cuba’s localized model today is the capitalist consumer dream that the rest of the world has so deeply bought into. In my 2100 vision, the rest of the world finally comes to the realization that consumerism only benefits the mighty few, so we’ve traded that pipe dream for a dream of well-being, health, education, and re-connection of community for all the Earth’s citizens. Regret + Optimism = 2100Emotionally, my vision of the world in 2100 is a mix of regret and optimism... I couldn’t ignore the fact that even if we stopped burning all fossil fuel today, we’ve locked in a further 0.6 degrees Celsius temperature rise and that we know low lying areas like the Maldives and Bangladesh will struggle to survive in a world with warming beyond 1.5 degrees C. I think those facts warrant some serious regret. But I am also an optimist (at least until Donald Trump destroys the planet), and I see signs all around me of a global society that wants change -not climate change, but system change.
My 2100 Vision"We waited too long to act. By mid-century, climate change and its tragic consequences were inevitable. Saharan heatwaves swept across the Mediterranean. “Super-hurricanes” became the norm. Glaciers melted and their freshwater was lost. Seas rose and maps had to be redrawn. People were forced to migrate and cities are crowded now, but we prevailed and learned from the mistakes of our forebears. Eventually, we defeated corporate fossil fuel powers and de-carbonized our energy and transport systems, an admirable feat that united the world and empowered civil society. Your Turn
So when I saw a request looking for new writers, I jumped at the call and was thrilled when Editor Susan Clark responded with an offer to join their "New Voices" team Reading back through The Ecologist's 46 year history makes me even more proud to now call myself a part of their legacy. Through words, they've affected real change and still continue to do so. Former Ecologist Editor Mark Anslow once said "Understanding how climate change is linked to economic growth, population, consumption, and the structure of Western society is something few seem willing to contemplate – The Ecologist's role has always been to point out these links." If you've read any of my blogs, you can see that this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship!
Check out my first comment piece: A message to the scientific societies that climate and politics are still at odds, and if they really want to help, polite letter writing simply isn't enough! I recently penned an opinion piece for the Agri-business section of Irish Examiner on the EU debate on agri-chemical glyphosate (commonly known as RoundUp, manufactured by Monsanto). You know you've made an impact when the trolls come alive and accuse you of all sorts... My latest blog on the Verdant Yank is an extended version of my Examiner OpEd to provide the evidence base to dispute their attacks.
“Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee” – Why nature works better than RoundUp.Glyphosate is the world’s most ubiquitous herbicide and the active ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp. Its license for application within the E.U. expired at the end of June. Last Tuesday, the EU extended the license by 18-months pending further scientific study in spite of failing to obtain a qualified majority when Member States voted on the decision the previous week. When glyphosate was officially authorised in the E.U. in 2002, the evidence used in the approval process relied entirely on studies funded by the pesticides industry, many which were unpublished. The 2002 E.U. approval process also only considered studies on glyphosate alone without the full spectrum of chemicals in RoundUp, which some studies indicate may increase the toxicity of glyphosate. Furthermore, the 2002 approval process for glyphosate failed to consider whether the herbicide could disrupt human hormone and reproductive systems. In parts of South America, rates of birth defect and miscarriage have increased in areas where pregnant women live close to fields sprayed with glyphosate. When this piece was published in the Irish Examiner, that sentence elicited a strong response, with some on Twitter calling it a "gish gallop" and accusing me of "ignoring the literature". As a scientist, I take pride in being able to support claims with scientific peer-reviewed evidence, so it was with extreme caution and discussion with the Editor that I included that statement in my OpEd. Unfortunately, a 750 word limit doesn't give you the opportunity to demonstrate the consideration that goes in to every sentence. To address those unfounded accusations, here's a brief peer-reviewed evidence base:
In an open letter to EU policy makers, presidents of the UK farming organisations wrote, “European farmers need glyphosate to provide a safe, secure and affordable food supply while increasingly responding to consumer demand for greater environmental sensitivity.” Do we really need glyphosate for “safe, secure and affordable” food? The World Health Organisation declared glyphosate a ‘probable carcinogen’ last year, and there’s no doubt glyphosate negatively impacts farmland biodiversity, water quality and food supplies for birds and insects. Glyphosate can hardly be categorised as “safe”. One could argue in the short term glyphosate could make our food supply more available by making farmers’ work easier and possibly increasing crop yields. However, in the long-term, continued use of such chemicals is more likely to decrease our food safety and security rather than improve it. Ultimately, food security is dependent on nature. When chemicals like glyphosate kill the food supply of birds and insects, they contribute to the death of wildlife we need to pollinate our crops, fertilise our soils or control pests naturally. We’ve already seen how agricultural chemicals can damage nature with the collapse of honeybee populations as a result of neonicotinoid pesticides in the EU or with the historic ‘Silent Spring’ detailed by Rachel Carson in the 1970s after DDT was implicated in thinning eggshells in bird populations across the U.S.A. Both neonicotinoids and DDT are banned as a result of their devastating impacts on nature, but these chemicals persist and accumulate in flora and fauna and even in our bodies. Despite a U.S. ban 40 years ago, DDT continues to be found in American produce and has been measured in the blood of 99% of Americans tested. DDT is still implicated as a cause of cancer, infertility, and other health effects among the U.S. population. Glyphosate appears no less endemic. A 2015 study carried out by University of California San Francisco found glyphosate in the urine of 93% of Americans tested, and a 2013 study in Europe found traces of glyphosate in the urine of individuals from all 18 countries tested. The more glyphosate is applied, the more weeds become resistant and the more application is required to achieve the same effect. In an effort to combat these “super weeds”, we expose our environment and our bodies to more of this chemical. The farming lobby argues glyphosate improves soil structure, but it also damages soil chemistry by affecting the biological and chemical processes around plant roots, including the ability to fix nitrogen, resulting in the need for increased fertilisers at additional environmental and economic cost. In this battle between the agricultural industry and environmentalists, the argument has been falsely framed as a choice between “safe, secure and affordable food” versus protection of nature and environment. In reality, what environmentalists are fighting for is not nature at the expense of people’s food but “nature for people’s food”. In the long term, what may make farmers’ jobs a little easier today will take such a toll on nature that their livelihoods, and our food security, will become more challenging in the decades to come. It is nature that creates the optimal conditions to grow food, not Monsanto.
For the rest of the world, electing Donald Trump quite possibly means the end of planet Earth as we know it. This sounds like hyperbole, but when it comes to climate change I'm deadly serious. We have a limited window of time to tackle climate change once and for all. To keep our Earth’s temperature within safe limits for life as we know it, we now have to make dramatic and swift changes to how we generate energy and power our homes, transport, and food production systems. To solve climate change, we have to transform to an essentially fossil-fuel free society across the globe within the next three decades. In December 2015, 197 countries within the United Nations agreed to attempt such change as part of the Paris Climate Agreement, but if Donald Trump is elected president he could single-handedly undo that tremendous global effort. He already said as much when his energy adviser, Congressman Kevin Cramer (a self-professed climate denier) recommended he “just pull out” of the U.N. Climate Agreement and Trump agreed that “at minimum” he would “renegotiate the deal” – A deal that has already taken over 21 years to negotiate. For the climate, the alarm bells are sounding now as Arctic temperatures reach unprecedented warming and we see flooding and storms around the world the likes of which we’ve never seen before. We no longer have time for further negotiation, let alone a U.S. president who doesn’t take the biggest global challenge of our time seriously.
Guardian journalist, Dave Eggers' assessment of Trump supporters at a rally in Sacramento recently was probably the most accurate of media analysis - that they’re not all misogynists, racists and homophobes, but rather normal women and men looking for something different in American politics and they see Trump as an entertaining answer to that search.
Climate change is undoubtedly the most difficult problem of all. If left unchecked, it will affect every person on every corner of the globe and make much of the world uninhabitable by the end of the century, and yet to solve it requires changing everything we do, everywhere. The United States, as a global “superpower” and one of the largest emitters of the gases that contribute to climate change, must lead the way in solving this crisis. Without U.S. leadership, the climate and the world’s future is at risk of eventual chaos. America, if you're listening, please don’t choose a president for the sake of a few laughs at the rest of the world’s expense. The climate can't be fixed in the hands of a comic.
When climate does make the news, it's usually in a manner that doesn't bring us any closer to solving the problem. Where Irish Times gets it rightThat's why I’ve been enjoying the Irish Times so much lately. I've seen a real shift in how they're covering climate change. At the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris last December they had not one but three journalists in attendance, and they've been covering climate from all angles ever since. This week alone, climate solutions have featured in:
Where Irish Times got it wrongI was equally pleased to see an Irish Times article on June 20th regarding best buys for eco-friendly cars as I'm in the market for one myself, but I was pretty shocked at their analysis. In addition to including mostly hybrid vehicles (a weak compromise that won't actually solve climate change), the article included a used Volkswagen model – a company that notoriously cheated the public and enabled the release of 40 times the legally acceptable level of nitrogen oxides in 11 million cars worldwide. A recent peer-reviewed study in Environmental Research Letters demonstrated the excess emissions in the U.S. alone will lead to 59 premature deaths and 45,000 disability adjusted life years at a cost of $39 billion dollars due to the excess particulate pollution Volkswagen generated.
If you want to read a much better analysis of eco-friendly cars, check out Dave Robbins practical blog on electric vehicles in Ireland written after he'd purchased one himself. We're getting it all wrong on cars...Transport's impact on climate change has been weighing on me a lot recently. Last week was National Bike Week and at an event I spoke at for Dublin Cycling Campaign, I was reminded by one of their members just how much cars dominate our advertising space. It seems every second radio and television ad is telling us to buy a Skoda, Volkswagen, Ford, etc. Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Irish Times got it wrong on eco-friendly vehicles given the number of petrol-guzzling cars that dominates its pages.
Cars are even used as a plaster for our struggling economy. Every time the government needs a boost of capital, they issue a scrappage scheme to get us to throw away our old cars and buy new ones! When you think about the fact that we need to move our economy from this linear "take-make-and throw away" model to a more circular economy to address our resource limits to growth, this whole scrappage concept is madness but it keeps the exchequer and the motor dealers fat and happy. Last May, Ireland's EPA reported: “Transport emissions are projected to show strong growth over the period to 2020 with a 13%-19% increase on current levels depending on the level of policy implementation." Given where our country's greenhouse gas emissions need to go (way way down), the EPA's announcement was shocking but it didn't even make the news. We're letting transport away with a free pass and shrugging our shoulders while we all bicker about how agriculture needs to do its fair share to address climate change and complain about the prospect of ever more wind turbines on the horizon. Ultimately, allowing transport emissions to grow either means agriculture and energy have to reduce their emissions even more to compensate or tax payers will have to pay millions of euros in EU fines as Ireland fails to meet its emission reduction targets.
The existing bus service operator and I mapped three routes that would take in all major employers, the Watershed, schools and residential areas. I spoke to a utility company and other possible partners to develop an electric three shuttle bus service, subsidised from on street parking charges and the State. Effectively, we handed a proposal for a service to the Council on a plate and nothing happened. As with nearly every environmental injustice, this kind of behavior impacts the most vulnerable in our society first. Failure to invest in public transport and cycling infrastructure isn't just environmental injustice, it's social injustice too. Elderly people in Kilkenny are distraught at the prospect of losing this bus service. In rural Ireland, the expectation that everyone can afford and is able to drive a car to get around is shocking and unfair. But there's nothing stopping us from getting it right!The solution to transport emissions is actually pretty simple. We don't need to wait for e-car technology and infrastructure to reach maturity (ahem, Minister Naughten!), we just need to divert a portion of National Transport Authority (NTA) funds away from road construction and into cycling infrastructure and fossil-fuel free public transport. As usual, it all comes down to money! Cyclist.ie and Dublin Cycling Campaign have an easy way for all of us to ask Transport Minister Shane Ross to make that happen on their website, and it's great that the cycling community has recently joined the Stop Climate Chaos network in Ireland to make climate action a core part of their work.
I'm becoming more suspicious that the media and the government are giving transport an easy time on climate action because car sales suit their bottom line. If that's true, then all the more need for the people of Ireland to push them harder on transport related issues, not just for environmental reasons but for reasons of societal well-being too. We all need to be more proactive about asking our politicians (national and local) and our media to break the transport silence and get to work on solutions. In light of Friends of the Earth Europe's recent report evaluating the impacts of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on European agriculture (particularly Irish agriculture), I'm resurrecting my own work on TTIP so far. It's more than ironic that some of our political elites (including Commissioner Phil Hogan and acting Taoiseach Enda Kenny) repeatedly tell us that agriculture is Ireland's most treasured indigenous sector while they're willing to squander it for a trade agreement. TTIP by 'The Verdant Yank':
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