A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
|
|
|
|
Welcome to May: Memorial Day on the horizon, the air warming, the country vaccinating, and the promise of socializing to come. We’ve been very spring-themed recently at Apocalypse Soon, with investigative stories on this season’s familiar rituals: gardening, grilling, and trying not to kill anyone while installing clunky air conditioners in the windows. |
| Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
| —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
|
Let’s start with a wild story from Ellie Shechet about an epic, 16-state federal plant hunt that practically no one knows about. A shipment of diseased rhododendrons with the capacity to spread Sudden Oak Death to the nation’s forests started showing up in an Indiana Walmart, and samples positive for the pathogen were eventually traced to over 100 nurseries, garden centers, and other locations. It ended with nearly 14 million plants being inspected in Washington alone, with thousands of them being steamed to death to kill the pathogen. I guarantee you will learn weird things in this piece. And if you’re a gardener or plant person, you won’t be able to get it out of your head. On Monday, we published Chikezie Omeje’s cross-border investigation of the international charcoal trade. It’s possible your barbecue is being fueled by charcoal illegally exported from Nigeria, where charcoal production is driving rapid deforestation despite the government’s best efforts. Nigeria has twice tried to limit charcoal export, with limited success, in part because the international community doesn’t have standards for rejecting illicit charcoal shipments. Oddly, there are international standards for enforcing bans on that very same tropical wood when it’s made into furniture. Here’s some food for thought before your next cookout. |
Finally, Nick Martin wrote about the problem with the air conditioners that many of you have been hauling out of the basement or closet. The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to regulate hydrofluorocarbons, which are used in air conditioning as well as refrigeration but are a powerful greenhouse gas. Air conditioning makes summers more comfortable, but it’s also increasingly necessary in many places at this point, to deal with ever-more-dangerous heat waves. As the industry moves to replace HFCs, Nick wrote, could we also just make air conditioners suck less? Oh, and we did not forget about the 17-year cicada apocalypse coming later this month. Stay tuned. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
|
|
|
|
Multicropping (rather than planting all one thing) and adding in woody perennials like nut trees could make farming in the Midwest more sustainable, reducing erosion and runoff, managing risk, and increasing carbon storage, Sarah Derouin reports at Mongabay. |
|
|
As a general rule, both the agricultural industry and the financial sector are wildly underprepared for worse and more frequent natural disasters, Georgina Gustin writes at Inside Climate News. |
That’s the increase in electrical grid blackouts since 2015, as climate change has made heat waves worse, according to a new study. The study found that power failures in major cities during heat waves could expose millions of residents to heatstroke. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
|
|
|
|
Last December, Bloomberg published a deeply troubling report on the Nature Conservancy’s bogus carbon-offset program. Now ProPublica and MIT Technology Review have teamed up to show that California’s offset market has problems, too: |
| CarbonPlan estimates the state’s program has generated between 20 million and 39 million credits that don’t achieve real climate benefits. They are, in effect, ghost credits that didn’t preserve additional carbon in forests but did allow polluters to emit far more CO2, equal to the annual emissions of 8.5 million cars at the high end. Those ghost credits represent nearly one in three credits issued through California’s primary forest offset program, highlighting systemic flaws in the rules and suggesting widespread gaming of the market |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright © 2021 The New Republic, All rights reserved. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
