HI,
I can’t believe that five weeks have already passed since I was in Glasgow at COP26. While I’ve reported on how it was a great experience, some of my learnings, impressions and conclusions, and the joy of being in the same room and meeting with some great people - I haven’t really yet shared a good summary of the main results and challenges. For there were many, both positive and negative. But I have found it difficult getting a good understanding of all that happened iby the time it ended in a day of overtime. I was reminded of this when presenting some of my COP26 ‘sights, sounds and outcomes’ to a great advocacy group in British Columbia, the BC Coalition Institute. Preparing and discussing with them gave me more insight into it all. So here goes.
First, it is important to understand that Conferences of Parties (COPs) are the official annual meetings of the bedrock global climate change policy, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which came out of the Rio Summit in 1992. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) is the official scientific body of the Convention, now involving 197 countries, providing latest and authoritative scientific findings and conclusions. For some of Glasgow’s COP26 results:
- 105 governments committed to reducing methane emissions by at least 30% this decade, but not China, Russia and India, who contribute about a third of global methane emissions; and not Iran, Turkmenistan and Australia, responsible for super-emitting methane events in recent years. Canada, one of the top 15 emitters joined. Methane is responsible for about ½ of the 1.2C increase in global warming.
- More than 140 countries agreed to halt deforestation by 2030 (Canada included, but this does not cover clear cutting and
replanting, which is what almost all Canada’s forest cutting is about, and which is also highly destructive to forests and ecosystems).
- More than USD 130 trillion in private capital committed to net zero: Climate finance pledges by private companies committed to transforming the global economy to net zero emissions through the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), have been made by over 450 companies. The Alliance is chaired by Canadian Mark Carney (the UK Prime Minister’s Finance Advisor for COP26 and UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance) and is backed by their huge amount of managed wealth. They must use science-based guidelines to reach net zero emissions, cover all emission scopes, include 2030 interim target setting, and commit to transparent reporting and accounting in line with criteria set by the UN Race to Zero campaign, which also must accredit each member.
- USD 1.7 billion was pledged for Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) by the governments of the UK, US, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands recognizing IPLCs important role in nature conservation. This is to promote inclusive policy and decision-making processes, including in national climate plans. At least 32% of global land and associated inland waters is owned or governed by IPLCs, either through legal or customary means.
- The Paris Rulebook was completed after six years of discussions (and this seemed to occupy much negotiation time). In 2018 at COP24 in Poland, parties adopted detailed rules and procedures for implementing the Paris Agreement (from COP21 in 2015), but left some issues unresolved, particularly Article 6, which provides a framework for countries to exchange carbon credits through the UNFCCC as a way to reduce emissions. This, though, allows fossil fuel companies to continue offsetting their emissions – a disincentive for actually reducing emissions, which is critical.
- China and the U.S. agree to cooperate on Paris Agreement goals (e.g., both will discontinue financing overseas coal projects).
- India announces net zero emissions target by 2070 (!).
- Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA: with 10 countries, Quebec and a few others) is launched; it being a new diplomatic alliance to phase out global oil and gas production. "There's no future for oil and gas in a 1.5-degree world,” said Denmark's Minister for Climate Dan Jørgensen, at the launch.
- For the first time at a COP, in 26 years, COP26’s final declaration included the words ‘fossil fuels’ and explicit acknowledgement of their role in the climate crisis.
- Momentum among non-Party stakeholders around the globe towards achieving a net-zero and resilient future continued to grow. This is evidenced by the significant increase in the numbers registered in data sources such as the Global Climate Action Portal (GCAP). As of October 2021, the Portal registered 22,259 actors around the world, an increase of nearly 22% over the previous year, including cities, regions, businesses, investors and others. Particularly noteworthy is the almost 82% increase in the number of participating businesses, bringing the total of companies engaged in climate action to 7,370. Three international campaigns are led by the UNFCCC High-Level Climate Champions, including Race to Zero, Race to Resilience, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (as above). The two serving High Level Climate Action Champions, Gonzalo Muñoz (from Chile) and Nigel Topping (from the UK) are responsible for mobilizing stronger and more ambitious climate action amongst non-state actors. They have a mandate both from the UK and Chilean governments (as part of COP25 and COP26) and the UN Marrakesh Partnership for Global Climate Action to support the implementation of the Paris Agreement by enabling collaboration between governments and cities, regions, businesses and investors to act on climate change.
Etcetera…I know there is more, but as you can see, it’s pretty complicated and not easy to understand all the parts and connections. There were big commitments made by many working hard to make a positive difference. But, all our knowledge and commitments, like with Covid-19, must now be mobilized to mitigate climate warming and adapt to its already incredible consequences around the world.
Please keep reading in today’s Planetary Health Weekly
(#50 of the year) for more information on all this and much more, including highly associated global health issues:
- COP26 AFTERMATH:
- Momentum for global climate action continues to build,
- Indigenous groups unveil plan to protect 80% of the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador,
- Pacific island leaders bemoan weak Glasgow climate pact,
- Five reasons why a healthy ocean is linked to human rights,
- Biden orders U.S. to stop financing carbon-intense projects abroad,
- CORONAVIRUS UPDATES:
- Willingness to vaccinate against SARS-CoV-2: the role of reasoning biases and conspiracist ideation,
- Long Covid is destroying careers, leaving economic distress in its wake,
- This Amazon program has funneled (a few) thousands to anti-vax activists during the pandemic,
- Lung epithelial and endothelial damage, loss of tissue repair, inhibition of fibrinolysis and cellular senescence in fatal Covid-19,
- Secret services: clandestine churches – created to evade Covid public health orders – popping up in farm sheds and machine shops in southern Manitoba,
- Hundreds of phoney Covid tests and vaccine certificates have been found by Canadian border officials,
- Is anyone facing consequences? This terrible book shows why the Covid-19 lab leak theory won’t die, THEN
- A powerful and underappreciated ally in the climate crisis? Fungi,
- Global coral cover has fallen by half since 1950s AND 14% of world’s coral lost in less than a decade,
- LNG Canada on track to become ‘financial albatross’,
- Discrimination still plagues science,
- Fewer children are dying before their fifth birthday – but African countries lag behind,
- Photographer of giant old-growth trees has ‘best and worst job in the world,’
- Humans are doomed to go extinct,
- Shareholder engagement with fossil fuel companies is a failure for climate,
- Autumn Peltier on youth activism, challenging Trudeau and a future in politics,
- Quote by the FEMA Administrator on last week's giant tornadoes in the US,
- “Magic dirt’: how the internet fuelled, and defeated, the pandemic’s weirdest multilevel marketing,
- 11 plastic free eco-friendly swaps,
- The biomass industry expands across southern US thanks in part to UK subsidies. Critics say it’s not ‘carbon neutral’,
- How dolphins use tools, teamwork and trickery to get their dinner AND Rare snow leopard cubs spotted in northern Pakistan,
- New book: “The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin,
- Illustration of Black fetus has Canadian parents, educators calling for diversity in medical resources, and lastly
- ENDSHOTS from Ground Zero today amid latest stats and charts of Covid-19 in Canada and around the world.
Lots to read (always). Best, david
David Zakus, Editor and Publisher
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Along the Hudson River, Looking Towards "Ground Zero" |
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Lower Manhattan, New York City, December 15, 2021 |
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Credit: UNFCCC
While significant change is already underway, evidence shows that it must accelerate in all sectors of the economy and society in order to achieve the Paris Agreement goals and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. One major example is coal, which needs to be phased out at a pace more than five times faster than at present.
Driving this transformation forward are the Climate Action Pathways, the 2030 Breakthroughs, and the State of Climate Action 2021 by the World Resource Institute. They set out sectoral visions for achieving a 1.5° C resilient world in 2050, showcase the long- and short-term milestones for the thematic areas of the Marrakech Partnership, and present the pace of global climate action, respectively.
Vision for the Future
The Race to Zero and Race to Resilience campaigns will shift their focus from building momentum to tangible action, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero will encourage the convergence of approaches to a net-zero transition.
To further boost climate ambition from all stakeholders through the Marrakech Partnership, the High-Level Champions have developed a 5-year plan under a 10-year vision for this decisive decade of implementation.
The work will be organized under six core functions:
- Mobilizing and aligning non-Party stakeholders towards science-based goals that maximize ambition;
- Supporting non-Party stakeholders to drive systems transformation;
- Strengthening collaboration between national governments and non-Party stakeholders;
- Broadening and deepening engagement globally, with a focus on helping developing country stakeholders;
- Tracking progress and enhancing transparency and credibility of non-Party stakeholders;
- Building a shared narrative for the decisive decade of climate action. Read more at UNFCCC
SEE ALSO:
At Mongabay: Indigenous groups unveil plan to protect 80% of the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador
At Reuters: Pacific island leaders bemoan weak Glasgow climate pact
At UNEP: 5 reasons why a healthy ocean is linked to human rights
At Reuters: Biden orders U.S. to stop financing new carbon-intense projects abroad
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SARS-CoV-2 & COVID-19 UPDATES |
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How is it that it's getting worse again in many mostly wealthy countries. What have we learned? Why doesn't everyone want to get vaccinated? Globally, the situation is still far from good. How can this be?
Over the last week there were about 4.6 million new cases (down about 4%) and 51,000 deaths (down about 5%). About 270 million people received a vaccine, or an average of some 38.5 million doses per day - continuing impressive and upward trend, while distribution though remains grossly distorted, favouring wealthy countries and the rich. Cases in Canada are up about 40% this week. See many stats and charts in ENDSHOTS.
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"It is the plague in seemingly all sincerity." Bob Woodward |
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Credit: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
Widespread vaccine hesitancy and refusal complicate containment of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Extant research indicates that biased reasoning and conspiracist ideation discourage vaccination. However, causal pathways from these constructs to vaccine hesitancy and refusal remain underspecified, impeding efforts to intervene and increase vaccine uptake.
It is unclear whether/how conspiracist ideation impacts SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.
Psychometric network, causal discovery analyses were used to resolve this ambiguity.
Results suggest that reducing willingness to vaccinate causes conspiracist ideation.
A measure of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine intentions was developed using Item Response Theory. Read more at Science Direct
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Credit: Stephen R Johnson/Alamy
If we want to tackle the climate crisis, we need to address a global blindspot: the vast underground fungal networks that sequester carbon and sustain much of life on Earth.
Fungi are largely invisible ecosystem engineers. Most live as branching, fusing networks of tubular cells known as mycelium. Globally, the total length of fungal mycelium in the top 10cm of soil is more than 450 quadrillion km: about half the width of our galaxy. These symbiotic networks comprise an ancient life-support system that easily qualifies as one of the wonders of the living world.
Through fungal activity, carbon floods into the soil, where it supports intricate food webs – about 25% of all of the planet’s species live underground. Much of it remains in the soil, making underground ecosystems the stable store of 75% of all terrestrial carbon. But climate change strategies, conservation agendas and restoration efforts overlook fungi and focus overwhelmingly on aboveground ecosystems. This is a problem: the destruction of underground fungal networks accelerates both climate change and biodiversity loss and interrupts vital global nutrient cycles. These networks should be regarded as a global public good to be mapped, protected and restored as a matter of urgency.
Read more at The Guardian
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Credit: Tyler Eddy
The world’s coral reef cover has halved since the 1950s, ravaged by global heating, overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction, according to an analysis of thousands of reef surveys.
From the 1,430-mile (2,300km) Great Barrier Reef in Australia to the Saya de Malha Bank in the Indian Ocean, coral reefs and the diversity of fish species they support are in steep decline, a trend that is projected to continue as the planet continues to heat in the 21st century.
A review of 14,705 reef surveys in 87 countries found that the effort required to maintain fish catches had surged dramatically since the mid-1990s, reflecting their worsening health, with catches from reef species peaking in 2002 and declining ever since.
The study, just published in the journal One Earth, found that the diversity of species on reefs has dropped by more than 60% and total reef cover had approximately halved, accompanied by a similar fall in services that the ecosystems provide for human populations. Read more at The Guardian
See also The Guardian: 14% of World’s Coral Lost in Less Than a Decade
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Photo: JAXPORT/Flickr
British Columbia’s only confirmed liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal may be on its way to becoming a “financial albatross”, according to a new analysis released in September, even as a developer continues to tout a second LNG project in Howe Sound, just north of Vancouver.
The LNG Canada megaproject was approved with lavish provincial subsidies in 2018, producing a massive emissions gap in the province’s climate plan. Now under construction, it’s the intended terminus for the Coastal GasLink pipeline that has become a trigger for militarized raids on unceeded Indigenous land and a railway blockade in the weeks leading up to COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020.
Now, a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) says the first phase of LNG Canada “could be the last liquefied natural gas project built in British Columbia” given changing market conditions, project delays, rising costs, and policy shifts.
“Over the last three years, market shifts and policy changes have tested LNG Canada’s long-term economic viability,” said lead author Omar Mawji, IEEFA’s energy finance Canada analyst. “This project could become a financial albatross for its sponsor investors, and it stands as a warning to other natural gas producers” involved with natural gas fracking projects in the Montney Basin in northeastern B.C.
Read more at The Energy Mix
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Credit: Nature
Social protest movements such as #MeToo and #BlackInSTEM have shone a light on the need for greater diversity, equity and inclusion at scientific institutions worldwide. And Nature’s 2021 salary and job satisfaction survey, which drew responses from more than 3,200 working scientists around the world, suggests that there’s much more work to do.
Just 40% of respondents felt that their employers were doing enough to promote diversity, down from 51% in 2018, when the survey last took place. A substantial minority of respondents said they had witnessed colleagues being subjected to discriminatory behaviour, and another sizeable minority said they had experienced such treatment themselves. The self-selected survey (see ‘Nature’s salary and job survey’) included a series of questions that explore attitudes and experiences relating to diversity. Follow-up interviews with selected respondents and free-text comments have helped to fill out the picture.
The free-text comment section exposed conflicting viewpoints on an often polarizing topic. A late-career Asian woman working in geology and environmental sciences at a European university wrote: “Academics like to think of their community as free spirited and innovative, but there is massive systemic discrimination and power hierarchies that ruin people and careers … This is suffocating science and discouraging early-career academics. Read more at Nature
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Credit: Shutterstock
The world has experienced a 59% decline in the deaths of children younger than five years since 1990. New mortality estimates indicate that the largest drop was in 2019, when global under-five deaths were reduced to 5.2 million from 12.5 million in 1990.
The substantial progress in reducing child deaths occurred four years after the Sustainable Development Goals were launched. These goals include eliminating preventable child mortality; reducing neonatal death to less than 12 per 1,000 live births; and reducing deaths of children younger than five to less than 25 per 1,000 live births. The date for reaching these targets is 2030.
It may be too early to attribute any success to the Sustainable Development Goals. But the progress may be the result of related efforts like improved nutrition, housing, water, sanitation, education and financial security. The availability of health services to prevent or treat common causes of child death may have played a role too.
Despite this progress, sub-Saharan Africa recorded the highest neonatal mortality rate at 27 deaths for every 1,000 children born alive in 2019. A child born in sub-Saharan Africa or Southern Asia is 10 times more likely to die in the first month than a child born in a rich country. Read more at The Conversation
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Credit: TJ Watt
On an overcast day last August, TJ Watt made his way around the trunk of a giant western red cedar. In one hand, he clutched a yellow measuring tape. With his other, he pushed away a thick undergrowth of salal and ferns. "It's a small hike just to get around this thing," Watt called out. A moment later, he read the measurement of the tree's girth: a whopping 11.6 metres. It was the biggest tree that Watt had found all day. To get here, he had hiked several hours off-trail, bushwhacking through dense, moss-laden rainforest, near Barkley Sound on Vancouver Island's rugged west coast.
The Victoria-based photographer and activist has spent much of the past 15 years searching for and photographing some of Canada's biggest, oldest trees. The trees he finds are often upwards of a thousand years old and wide enough to drive a car through.
His backcountry quests are more than just adventures though. Most of the trees that Watt finds are slated to be cut down. Watt's photographs, which he posts on social media, have become a powerful tool for ramping up public support to protect B.C.'s old-growth forests.
"It can be hard to capture the complexity and the whole essence of this issue," says Watt, who co-founded the non-profit advocacy group Ancient Forest Alliance 10 years ago. "You have to somehow find a single image that encapsulates all of that, and the feelings that go with it." Read more at CBC
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Credit: Jordan Lye/Getty Images
Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1965, when Tom Lehrer recorded his live album That Was the Year That Was. Lehrer prefaced a song called “So Long Mom (A Song for World War III)” by saying that “if there's going to be any songs coming out of World War III, we’d better start writing them now.” Another preoccupation of the 1960s, apart from nuclear annihilation, was overpopulation. Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published in 1968, a year when the rate of world population growth was more than 2 percent—the highest in recorded history.
Half a century on, the threat of nuclear annihilation has lost its imminence. As for overpopulation, more than twice as many people live on the earth now as in 1968, and they do so (in very broad-brush terms) in greater comfort and affluence than anyone suspected. Although the population is still increasing, the rate of increase has halved since 1968. Current population predictions vary. But the general consensus is that it’ll top out sometime midcentury and start to fall sharply. As soon as 2100, the global population size could be less than it is now. In most countries—including poorer ones—the birth rate is now well below the death rate. In some countries, the population will soon be half the current value. People are now becoming worried about underpopulation.
As a paleontologist, I take the long view. Mammal species tend to come and go rather rapidly, appearing, flourishing and disappearing in a million years or so. The fossil record indicates that Homo sapiens has been around for 315,000 years or so, but for most of that time, the species was rare—so rare, in fact, that it came close to extinction, perhaps more than once. Thus were sown the seeds of humanity’s doom: the current population has grown, very rapidly, from something much smaller. The result is that, as a species, H. sapiens is extraordinarily samey. There is more genetic variation in a few troupes of wild chimpanzees than in the entire human population. Lack of genetic variation is never good for species survival. Read more at Scientific American
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Tar sands mining in Fort McMurray, Credit: Dan Barnes Photography/iStockCredit
Shareholder engagement promotes the image of fossil fuel companies as good corporate citizens, and strengthens their political power to fight climate legislation. What should pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors do to help address climate change? The fossil fuel divestment movement calls on funds to divest from fossil fuel companies. Fund owners and managers often oppose divestment, preferring "shareholder engagement"—that is, owning fossil fuel company stocks and voting at shareholder meeting and urging companies to change. While shareholder engagement with fossil fuel corporations on climate change is well intentioned, I will argue that it harms rather than helps efforts to address climate change. Read more at Common Dreams
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SPOTLIGHT ON INDIGENOUS WELLNESS |
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Credit: Blair Gable
In 2016, at age 12, Autumn Peltier came face-to-face with Justin Trudeau and, in front of hundreds of people in a conference hall in Gatineau, Que., she challenged his environmental record, extracting a promise from the Prime Minister that he would “protect the water.”
Peltier, who turns 18 next year, has since emerged as a powerful voice in the climate movement, appearing on the international stage next to the likes of Greta Thunberg and, at home, continuing to keep the pressure on Trudeau. She is also the chief water commissioner for Anishinabek Nation in Ontario. I spoke with her about her ongoing frustrations, and what she expects to see happen in what will be a critical year in environmentalism.
You’ve spoken before about attending a ceremony at Serpent River First Nation when you were eight, and noticing signage about toxic water, and how that led you to become interested in water activism. Can you tell me more about what inspired you? Read more at Macleans
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FEMA chief says powerful storms 'new normal' in era of climate change. Credit: Cheney Orr/Reuters |
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Powerful storms like the ones that tore through parts of the central United States this past weekend are the "new normal" in an era of climate change, the top federal emergency management official said on Sunday.
"The effects we are seeing of climate change are the crisis of our generation… This is going to be our new normal."
Deanne Criswell, Adminstrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
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- January 16-17, 2022: 6th International Covid 19 Studies Conference (New York, USA). By Institute of Economic Development and Social Researches)
Open to all covid-19 and pandemic studies from all disciplines. Presentations will be in disciplinary sessions, inp-erson and online participation.
- March 28th-April 1st, 2022: Healthy People, Healthy Planet, Social Justice. (CUGH Virtual Satellite Sessions: March 21st-25th, 2022)
- April 1-3, 2022: CUGH 2022 Global Health Conference - Hybrid: Healthy People, Healthy Planet, Social Justice (Los Angeles, California). Virtual Satellite Sessions: March 21-25, 2022; In-person Satellite Sessions: March 31, 2022
- April 23 - 25, 2022: 8th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health (online streaming)
- May 14-15, 2022: Canadian Conference on Global Health (Montreal, Quebec)
- May 15-19, 2022: 24th World Conference on Health Promotion (Montreal, Quebec)
- October 31 - November 4, 2022: 7th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research (Bogotá, Colombia)
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FYI#1 SPOTLIGHT ON MEDIA |
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'Magic Dirt': How the Internet Fueled, and Defeated, the Pandemic's Weirdest Multilevel Marketing (MLM) |
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Credit: Robert Beatt for NBC News
The social media posts started in May: photos and videos of smiling people, mostly women, drinking Mason jars of black liquid, slathering black paste on their faces and feet, or dipping babies and dogs in tubs of the black water. They tagged the posts #BOO and linked to a website that sold a product called Black Oxygen Organics.
Black Oxygen Organics, or “BOO” for short, is difficult to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from decayed plants, that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. The website of the Canadian company that sold it billed it as “the end product and smallest particle of the decomposition of ancient, organic matter.”
Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. “A gift from the Ground,” it reads. “Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it.”
BOO, which “can be taken by anyone at any age, as well as animals,” according to the company, claims many benefits and uses, including improved brain function and heart health, and ridding the body of so-called toxins that include heavy metals, pesticides and parasites.
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Going completely plastic free is hard, especially when so many of our daily essential items are made from plastic, or come in unnecessary plastic packaging. It’s also difficult to find sustainable options readily available and at our disposal.
The good news is that while the world moves towards a ban on plastics and industries begin tapping into the demand for environmentally friendly products, there are ways we can start making a difference and reduce our use of plastics today.
Check out: Reusable straws, plastic free shampoos and soaps, biodegradable cotton buds, bamboo toothbrush, reusable shopping and produce bags, biodegradable trash bags, take-away ice-cream, reusable coffee cups, reusable water bottles, beeswax food wrap, sustainable shaving razors.
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FYI #3 |
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The Biomass Industry Expands Across Southern US, Thanks in Part to UK Subsidies. Critics Say it’s Not ‘Carbon Neutral’ |
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Credit: Buddy Bartelsen/ullstein bild via Getty Images
When a British company decided two years ago to locate a wood pellet manufacturing plant in North Carolina’s Robeson County, with its large Black and Indigenous population, it came as no surprise to Shalonda Regan. Regan lives in Lumberton, two miles from where Active Energy Renewable Power has been working to convert a former textile mill into a plant that turns wood chips into pellets that the company says can be burned as a renewable fuel alongside coal or as a coal substitute.
“In my part of town, I would say there is just a lack of knowledge when it comes to things that could possibly harm us, or affect our health,” said Regan, a youth tutor and construction project manager who has joined a lawsuit against the company. Our literacy rate is pretty low. The poverty rate is high. It just felt like it was selected strategically,” she said.
Environmental justice and climate advocates see Lumberton as among the newest battlefields in an international fight over biomass fuels and global warming that has only grown more intense this year in the run-up to the Conference of the Parties (COP26), the United Nations-led climate negotiations next month in Glasgow.
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FYI #4 |
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How Dolphins Use Tools, Teamwork, and Trickery To Get Their Dinner |
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Credit: Chesapeake Bay Foundation
There’s no question dolphins are incredibly smart. But how they use their intelligence to survive continues to astound marine biologists, who discover new and fascinating behaviors every year.
There are 36 known dolphin species, from the 110-pound Maui’s dolphin to the motorhome-size orca, and all face the same struggle: How to catch food with no limbs?
One of the most studied species, the common bottlenose dolphin, has evolved an impressive suite of hunting strategies, such as mud-ring feeding. With a few strong flicks of their tail and a circular swimming motion, these predators corral a school of fish within a tornado of mud. To the fish, the plume looks like an impenetrable wall, which causes them to panic and try to jump over the barrier at the water’s surface. Unfortunately for them, that’s where other hungry dolphins wait with open jaws.
See also at Tribune: Rare Snow Leopard Cubs Spotted in Northern Pakistan
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FYI #5: DECEMBER READING: NEW BOOK |
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"The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations" by Daniel Yergin |
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Credit: Books
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin offers a revelatory new account of how energy revolutions, climate battles, and geopolitics are mapping our future.
The world is being shaken by the collision of energy, climate change, and the clashing power of nations in a time of global crisis. Out of this tumult is emerging a new map of energy and geopolitics. The “shale revolution” in oil and gas has transformed the American economy, ending the “era of shortage” but introducing a turbulent new era. Almost overnight, the United States has become the world's number one energy powerhouse. Yet concern about energy's role in climate change is challenging the global economy and way of life, accelerating a second energy revolution in the search for a low-carbon future. All of this has been made starker and more urgent by the coronavirus pandemic and the economic dark age that it has wrought.
World politics is being upended, as a new cold war develops between the United States and China, and the rivalry grows more dangerous with Russia, which is pivoting east toward Beijing. Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping are converging both on energy and on challenging American leadership, as China projects its power and influence in all directions. The South China Sea, claimed by China and the world's most critical trade route, could become the arena where the United States and China directly collide. The map of the Middle East, which was laid down after World War I, is being challenged by jihadists, revolutionary Iran, ethnic and religious clashes, and restive populations. But the region has also been shocked by the two recent oil price collapses--and by the very question of oil's future in the rest of this century.
A master storyteller and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin takes the reader on an utterly riveting and timely journey across the world's new map. He illuminates the great energy and geopolitical questions in an era of rising political turbulence and points to the profound challenges that lie ahead.
Named Energy Writer of the Year for The New Map by the American Energy Society
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FYI#6: SPOTLIGHT ON EDUCATION |
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Illustration of Black fetus Has Canadian Parents & Educators Calling for Diversity in Medical Resources |
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Credit: Chidiebere Ibe
Syrus Marcus Ware, an assistant professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, was "immediately struck" by an image shared several days ago by his cousin in California.
The illustration of a pregnant Black woman, showing a Black fetus inside her belly, was created by Nigerian medical student and Illustrator Chidiebere Ibe. "I realized that I had never seen anything like it," Ware told CBC Hamilton.
Ware — a trans man who carried his now-10-year-old daughter Amélie — said he has "read countless pregnancy books, including very progressive ones," but had never seen that kind of representation, aside from a drawing of his own he once made. "I had literally never seen a Black baby drawn in a uterus ... I realized that I hadn't even noticed that was the case until the evidence was right in front of me.
"It's so interesting how normalized it is that we are so used to only ever seeing white babies that we don't even notice, and so it's so striking to see this Black baby drawing this way," Ware added.
Ware, who teaches with McMaster's school of the arts, said he and many others have shared Ibe's illustration. "The medical illustrator went from having about 2,000 followers to now having [more than 100,000] followers just over the weekend."
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GROUND ZERO TODAY
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
DECEMBER 15, 2021
Amid Latest Covid-19 Stats and Charts from Canada and Around the World
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Photo Credits: David Zakus |
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