Swiss company Climeworks has developed a system to remove carbon dioxide from the air and keep it from being re-released into the atmosphere.
Their technology uses a process called direct air capture, which processes air through filters that can capture and trap carbon dioxide. The air exits the system with 90 percent less carbon than air entering the system. At a geothermal plant in Iceland, Climeworks technology has been used to create the world’s first negative emission power plant, which removes more CO2 from the air than it produces.
While captured carbon can be used to create carbon-neutral fuel, plastic and a range of other materials, the Iceland plant has found a way to inject it underground and transform it into stone, preventing the carbon from being re-released into the atmosphere for millions of years.
So far, direct air capture is only a small part of the global effort to mitigate climate change. It is currently prohibitively expensive and small in scale, but is developing quickly and attracting funding from power investors like Bill Gates.
For the world to meet the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement, we’ll very likely need to not only reduce carbon emissions but also remove emissions from the air. Direct air capture plants like Climeworks and others aim to do so while providing jobs and powering a “new, clean economy.”
Watch the video above to see the new technology in action.
Homepage photo by Arni Saeberg.
MORE: Can the U.S. Continue to Reduce Its Carbon Emissions?
Tag: Climate Change
Why Green Classrooms Could Be the Schools of the Future
When Golestan Education took over the old St. Jerome’s Catholic school in El Cerrito, Calif., it looked much like your average suburban parochial school: a nondescript squat building sporting a cross on one side, abutting 18,000 square feet of concrete. There was not a single tree anywhere on the property.
But that was before Golestan co-founder and executive director Yalda Modabbar unveiled her ambitious plans for the space. Now there are four brand-new sunlight-filled classrooms with massive sliding glass walls that open up to what once was an asphalt-slathered playground, an expanse of green with lots of trees, boulders and bales of hay for kids to play on. Between the classrooms and the playground are two tiers of planters – one at kids’ height filled with plants for them to work and play with, the other with flowers to attract hummingbirds. Connecting the greenery outside with the indoor learning space is exactly the point of it all, says Modabber. “When you’re inside, you feel like you’re outside, even on a rainy day.”
Golestan is one of a growing number of schools across the country that are ditching the old 1940s-era asphalt-slathered playground model in favor of trees, flowers and gardens. And the benefits are more than just aesthetic: A growing body of research indicates that having access to green space at school has a direct impact on mental health as well as academic success.
William Sullivan, professor and head of the landscape program at the University of Illinois, has spent much of his career studying the impact of green spaces on human beings. One recent project involved giving high school kids “mentally fatiguing” tests in one of three environments: a room with no windows, a room with windows but no vegetation, and a room with a view of vegetation. In the room with no windows, the students reported the highest stress and made the most errors on the tests, while kids in the room with the view of trees reported the lowest stress and made the fewest errors.
Sullivan is currently working on research that shows that exposure to green space is predictive of graduation rates, standardized test scores and even college attendance. “Having green exposure on school grounds is not a trivial thing in the slightest,” says Sullivan. “The success that a person has in high school puts them on a life course that’s hard to change from.”
The catch: Golestan is a nonprofit where students pay tuition to attend. How can their model work at a public school, where the student body is largely dependent on financial aid?
Hoover Elementary in West Oakland – just a few miles south but a million miles from Golestan, socio-economically speaking – is attempting to find out. It might be a cash-strapped inner-city school where most students qualify for free lunch, but it has devoted over 5,600 square feet of its property to growing fruit, vegetables, herbs, bushes and fruit trees, enough so that they will start supplying the West Oakland farmers market with fresh produce. The local homeless population are free to take whatever is ripe when they walk by.
“We’ve seen a lot of benefits, not just with healthy eating but also with a connection to nature, says Hoover Principal Ashley Martin. “Being in a trauma-saturated community, the garden really offers a space for kids to help them kind of calm down and regulate.”
All of this side-steps another critical feature of green schoolyards: their positive environmental impact. When rain hits concrete, it bounces off and can easily overwhelm sewer systems, leading to runoff that can cause flooding and erosion. Stormwater runoff also picks up and carries with it many different types of pollutants that are found on paved surfaces – fertilizer, motor oil, bacteria and so on. Green schoolyards absorb the rain, mitigating these effects while nourishing local plants and trees, something that could make a big difference in cities that regularly experience flooding exacerbated by climate change.
“I like to see schoolgrounds as a microcosm of the city [we] would like to see,” says Sharon Danks, founder and executive director of Green Schoolyards America, a Berkeley, Calif.-based nonprofit that seeks to grow the green schoolyard movement. To her, schoolyards across America represent a vast resource that few communities have begun to tap: Despite its ubiquity, the exact amount of land public schools occupy is unknown, even to city planners. “Cities are essentially planning with gaping holes in their maps where all the schools are,” Danks says. In other words: If that land were developed in a responsible and sustainable way, we might be able to slow the devastating effects of climate change.
None of this is cheap, of course, but tapping existing climate funds, urban-greening grant programs, and even cap-and-trade money could help pay for greening concrete-slathered jungles. “We need to think about this as park planning and apply infrastructure-scale budgets that we would normally apply to a park or a stormwater project,” Danks says.
But how about in dense urban areas, like in New York City, where the schools often don’t have campuses to work with? Most New York City schools have expansive rooftops that are underutilized, says Vicki Sando, who teaches STEM classes at P.S.41 in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Sando was the project and fundraising lead for P.S.41’s green roof, one of the first green school roofs in the city, completed in 2012. “Not all schools are ideal candidates, but the ones that are see multiple benefits,” Sando says. “Our energy usage has gone down about 22 percent with the green roof on there, and the kids are so enthusiastic about going up there and reconnecting with nature in an urban environment.”
Modabber echoes Sando’s enthusiasm. “The younger the child, the more space they need,” she says. “These kids are growing up with a deep love of nature, and they are going to want to preserve it.”
MORE: Ask the Experts: How Can We Fix Early Childhood Education?
Five Apps for the Tech-Savvy Environmentalist
So you want to fix the environment? That’s a big job. Absent clear policy change from the powers-that-be, the onus is on all citizens to do their part and pitch in as much as they can. How much time and energy each one of us can devote to the cause varies, of course. Which is why we’ve rounded up five eco-friendly apps that will help put anyone, no matter their individual circumstances, on the path to sustainability.
SKEPTICAL SCIENCE
Here’s an alarming statistic: In a 2018 study, Yale researchers found that more than a quarter of Americans believe that global warming is naturally occurring (and, worse, 14 percent think that it’s not happening at all). If you happen to strike up a conversation with such a denier, the Skeptical Science app is your secret weapon. Run by a team of volunteers who have a wealth of combined expertise in climate science and environmental issues, the organization’s app lists common climate-denier arguments — such as “lack of consensus on who is causing climate change,” and “animals and plants can adapt” — next to true statements and then links those statements to science-based, peer-reviewed research that support them. Not only will you be able to fact-check the discussion in real-time, you’ll be armed with a wealth of knowledge and statistics that will either keep your heated banter going — or provide some big-picture food for thought that just might turn each skeptic you encounter into a climate-change believer.
DROPCOUNTR
Unless you live in a place where water conservation is mandatory — as was the case in California, for example — chances are you don’t give much thought to every drop you use throughout the day. That’s a mistake, even if droughts aren’t an issue where you are: A decrease in our water supply can lead to increased pollution from over-irrigation, and the destruction of pollution-filtering wetlands. What’s more, monitoring the amount of water you consume in your home can cut your monthly water usage by up to 9 percent, which can translate to serious utility savings and rebates. That’s where Dropcountr comes in: The free app partners with utility companies to track and analyze your home’s monthly water output, alerting you of leaks and usage by the gallon. The easy-to-understand graphs and charts also compare your household with others in the area, alongside data of what’s considered “efficient use” — hey, if a little guilt-tripping gets you to turn off the water when you brush your teeth, we’re game! While it’s only available in a handful of states — search by zip code to see if the app is available where you live — you can email your utility company to request it.
SEAFOOD WATCH
If you’re eager to add more fish to your diet but are concerned about the environmental impact of doing so, Seafood Watch is here to help. Developed by scientists at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium, the app is a pocket guide to finding fish caught or raised in an environmentally sound way that protects the long-term health of the species — info that’s not always easy to come by when buying seafood (or dining at your favorite sushi restaurant). Search for sustainable fisheries near you by inputting your zip code, or look up specific types of fish by name. The latter produces a shockingly comprehensive list of fish by type, ocean location and catching method, along with colored fish icons that indicate your best option. Overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Research your favorites before going out, and you’ll have no need to worry about putting your waiter or fishmonger on the spot.
GOOD GUIDE
If you’re confused about whether there’s anything toxic in the products you use on your body or in your home, you aren’t alone. A quick trip to the FDA’s website underscores the problem: “Under U.S. law, FDA does not have the authority to require cosmetic manufacturers to submit their safety data to FDA,” it reads. “The burden is on FDA to prove that a particular product or ingredient is harmful when used as intended.” That leaves a loophole the size of the Kardashian empire for cosmetic and household-product manufacturers to walk through — and walk through it they do.
Needless to say, much of this has a direct impact on the physical environment. Common cleaning products like this one contain chemicals that persist in the environment and are toxic to many forms of life; microbeads from a vast array of products end up in our oceans, absorbing toxins as they enter our food chain.
Enter Good Guide and its product-rating system. The Good Guide team assesses personal care, cosmetic and household products — more than 75,000 to date and counting — and gives each product a score from zero to 10. Scores hinge on what a product contains and the degree of transparency from the company regarding those ingredients (for example, “fragrance” is about as specific as “natural” when it comes to describing what exactly is in that bar of soap you just bought).
The app is easy to use, and you may be surprised by what you discover. Procter & Gamble’s Magic Eraser, for instance, scores a 10 (the least toxic rating) while Little Twig Organic Baby Powder gets a big fat zero (meaning, run for the hills!). Speaking of babies, there’s a special “Baby & Kids” section, so that you can keep your kiddos clean — and safe.
OROECO
There’s been much hand-wringing over our carbon footprint here in the U.S., and there’s good reason for it. We are the biggest carbon polluter in history, ahead of the EU and even China, and our per capita fossil-fuel consumption still dwarfs every other country by comparison.
If you’re looking for a way to reduce, or just track, the size of your climate footprint, Oroeco is a bit like the MyFitnessPal of the eco-app space. Oroeco allows you to see how so many disparate aspects of your life contribute to the warming of our planet — even things you might not necessarily think much about, like the clothing you choose and the entertainment you consume. The app then turns that data into a game of sorts. Users can track performance, set goals and compete with friends to see who can hit the lowest carbon “score.”
In order to benefit from its full range of services, Oreoco requires a bit of a lift upfront — you need to input a variety of info, including your salary range; the average number of miles you fly per year; how much you eat; and the amount you spend on goods and services. But the results should present you with a pretty good idea of how you measure up to your peers and where you can shave off a few points to win the game. In the process, you’ll become a more responsible global citizen — and that’s a win for everyone.
The Bee Guardian
For more than 20 years, Corwin Bell has been on a mission to save the honeybees.
In 2005, after a decade of refining his beekeeping hobby, he launched BackYardHive in Eldorado Springs, Colorado. Besides selling beekeeping accessories and build-your-own hive supplies, the blueprints for which he designs, the site provides learning tools that act as an alternative to conventional beekeeping methods. Bell believes that by arming people with a convenient, actionable way to combat one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time, we can help honeybees survive and thrive — and do so right from our own backyards.
Though the rates of Colony Collapse Disorder — first identified in 2006 after colonies of worker bees mysteriously disappeared — have declined in recent years, honeybee populations continue to be threatened by pesticides, mite infestation, low genetic diversity and climate change.
In 2017, beekeepers across the U.S. lost 40 percent of their colonies, which Bell attributes in part to extreme temperature shifts that are occurring more and more frequently.
To that end Bell, who had already been making hives based on the traditional top-bar design, eventually invented what he calls the “cathedral hive” to help bees survive cold winters and preserve their genetics.
Aside from saving bees, Bell’s bigger vision includes educating more backyard beekeepers. Through BackYardHive, he offers bee guardianship courses ranging from the beginner level to intensive, hands-on workshops.
“We have bee guardians all over the U.S., and for sure all over the world, that are creating this extended habitat for the bees,” he says.
Watch the video above to learn more about the plight of the modern honeybee and how Bell’s efforts are helping this very vulnerable population.
Can Religion Save the Environment?
Evangelical Christians and climate change? The two aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath, unless referring to the former as staunch and outspoken deniers of the latter.
Like the origins of life itself, the notion of man-made climate change is one that frequently puts religious conservatives at odds with the scientific community. And despite the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists agree the threat of ecological disaster at the hands of humans is real, just over a quarter of white evangelicals believe the same. Even less believe in climate reform.
This puts the small cohort of eco-conscious Christians in a bind: How do they convince their fellow worshippers that the earth is warming due to human activity, that it will disproportionately affect the poor, and that evangelicals have a role to play in stopping it?
“There’s a lot in the Christian faith that is chock-full of evidence of God’s love for the world that he created, and particularly in the non-human world,” says Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, a national organizer and spokesperson for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. “Faith and a concern for the environment tend to get pitted against each other and get associated with one side of the aisle or the other. We don’t have to bridge these two seemingly disparate concerns because they are the same concerns.”
Meyaard-Schaap and others in the so-named creation-care movement are facing an uphill battle, if numerous studies are right. Two years ago, for example, evolutionary biologist Josh Rosenau dug into a massive 2007 Pew Research Center survey on America’s religious beliefs. He created a chart that examined the relationship between a denomination’s acceptance of evolution and the degree to which it supports stricter environmental regulations.
Rosenau found that the more a religion dismisses evolution in favor of creationism, the more its members push back against government action on climate change.
But while evangelicals’ religious beliefs inform their views on climate change, it’s their politics that might be more responsible for their attitudes — especially where environmental regulations affect the fossil fuel industry. (To wit: Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin’s christening of Oct. 13 as “Oilfield Prayer Day.”)
That entangling of religion, science and politics has become a hallmark of the current administration, perhaps most visibly in the appointment of Scott Pruitt, a former Sunday school teacher and deacon, to sit atop the Environmental Protection Agency. Just as he once said there aren’t “sufficient scientific facts to support the theory of evolution,” Pruitt has made no bones about his dismissal of man-made climate change. In a February interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he alleged that unfettered development of the nation’s energy reserves is rooted in Scripture.
That view is in line with most evangelicals, who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. For many of the faithful, earth was created for human “dominion” — a word found in Genesis and used often in the argument against human-led climate change.
But that kind of literal reading of the Bible is problematic — and misguided — says Rev. Mitch Hescox, a leading voice in the creation-care movement.
“There are some very conservative people who believe that humanity’s right to use the earth is biblical, and correcting that understanding is my number one job,” says Hescox, who also serves as president of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). He adds that the church has long ignored creation-care.
Creation-care isn’t a new movement — EEN was founded in 1993 — but it has gotten more attention in recent years as prominent religious leaders, such as Pope Francis, have agitated on behalf of environmentalism and balked at the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. And from its beginnings, creation-care has pushed a human-centric message whereas liberal-leaning groups might focus on more abstract concepts like melting glaciers and eroding coastlines.
“We’ve never been climate deniers; we’ve acknowledged it was real, but it didn’t ever impact [our] day-to-day life,” say Dave and Lonna Schaap, Kyle Meyaard-Schaap’s parents, who were convinced to pay attention to climate change by their son’s campaign. “We have other values. We care for the poor, for orphans, for those in prison. And we’ve always been taught to care for those things.”
Hescox says the focus on people is where those in the left-leaning environmental movement get lost in relaying the message.
“What liberals don’t get is that faithful conservatives have a different value system,” Hescox says. “Trying to get conservative folks to care about polar bears is the wrong issue. And where maybe people like polar bears, people will not change their life over a polar bear. People will, though, change their life when you start helping them understand how fossil-fuel pollution affects children around the world.”
Still, that doesn’t mean EEN and other groups have found it easy to convert the faithful. According to an analysis by the nonpartisan think-tank New America, it’s a battle of David-and-Goliath proportions, where eco-conscious evangelicals just don’t have the resources or organization and lobbying power to go head-to-head with opposing groups — groups like the Christian Right, for example, whose network of outspoken evangelical leaders have pushed back against the environmental activism of their fellow followers.
The reason? It’s political.
“First, evangelicals’ political partners saw Creation Care as a menace for economic conservatives and opponents of environmental regulation, and did not hesitate to let evangelicals know it,” concluded the New America report. “Second, the evangelical old guard saw the Creation Care activists as threatening their role as the arbiter of evangelicalism’s political engagement.”
Another Pew study likewise found that once you take political leanings out of the conversation, there are only a few areas where deeply religious individuals actually digress from conventional scientific thinking.
And that’s news that Meyaard-Schaap, Hescox and others in the creation-care movement can use, especially where younger evangelicals are concerned.
In the past six years, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, the group Meyaard-Schaap helps lead, has grown from 18 people signing a call to action to currently reaching over 10,000 youth, he says.
“A lot of conservative lawmakers are the ones holding up on the progress of climate change from a policy position, and most conservative lawmakers rely on evangelicals to keep their seat,” says Meyaard-Schaap. “So now we’re using our voice to say, ‘You’ve depended on the support of our community to keep your seat and be a member of Congress, and you have to continue relying on our support. So now you have to pay attention.’”
Creating Food Out of Thin Air
Lisa Dyson is on a journey to revolutionize the way protein is made. “We have a lot of work to do,” she says.
By 2050, the world’s population is estimated to hit 10 billion. Food production will need to increase by 70 percent. Traditional farming won’t be able to keep up.
Dyson knows the answer. It’s literally all around us: carbon dioxide.
An odorless, colorless gas, CO2 is used to carbonate drinks, make dry ice and helps smother flames when put in fire extinguishers. It’s also a byproduct of burning fossil fuels — and a known culprit of climate change.
Producing food from thin air? Sounds too good to be true. That is, until you consider that Dyson holds three degrees in physics, including a Ph.D. from M.I.T., where she studied string theory. “My dream growing up was to become a scientist,” she says.
Several years ago, Dyson and a colleague, John Reed, began searching for technical solutions for climate change. They stumbled across NASA reports written in the 1960s and ’70s that discussed using powerful microbes to recycle carbon dioxide aboard spacecraft.
“We were fascinated by their research,” Dyson recalls. “We wondered if we could develop a similar technology that would enable us to recycle carbon dioxide into valuable products here on Earth.”
The answer is yes. Today, Dyson and Reed’s startup, Kiverdi, uses those microbes to transform carbon into bio-based products. The magic happens in special bio-reactors, similar to the giant urns used to brew beer.
This year, they’re commercializing a new process to transform CO2 into protein powder. The end product, called Planet+Protein, is packed with essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals, and contains over 50 percent more protein than many other non-animal-based proteins, like soy-based foods.
“Think of it like the flour you have in your kitchen,” says Dyson. “It can be mixed with other ingredients to make flavorful foods.” Burgers, pastas, smoothies … the possibilities are endless.
Not surprisingly, Planet+Protein has “an amazingly low environmental footprint,” Dyson says. “To produce it uses significantly less land and less water than most other proteins.”
By the time Planet+Protein is for sale at your local supermarket, Dyson’s hope is that it will be one of the most sustainable protein options up for grabs — but not the only one.
“A change is necessary and inevitable, given the increasing demand for protein and our continuously growing population,” she says. In the future, Dyson predicts we’ll see numerous products on store shelves that follow the same conscientious credo: an earth-friendly process that inevitably helps reduce greenhouse gases.
You don’t have to be a scientist to help stop climate change, Dyson adds. “If you have your own idea that you believe will have an impact, then jump in with both feet. You’ll discover there are so many people willing to help you.”
How Today’s Street Artists Are Mobilizing Activists
Josh MacPhee grew up looking at art. His father was an artist, and the discipline helped him cope with his teenage years in the mid-1980s, when the DIY punk scene was gaining steam in the U.S.
“Some people were in bands, some people did ’zines and some people, like myself, did artwork,” says MacPhee, now a graphic designer and street artist in Brooklyn, N.Y. “I got involved in politics through that independent culture, using my skills to address the issues and communities I felt were important.”
That was more than 25 years ago. In the decades since, graffiti and street art has gone from underground movement to mainstream acceptance — it’s no longer rare for rogue wheat-pasted and spray-painted art to be sold at Christie’s auction houses, for one. Driving this change are artists like MacPhee, who is also a founder of the radical-art distribution project called Justseeds. Their visual representations of hot-button issues like climate change, immigration and civil rights are more in demand than ever.
There’s a long history of using art to make a political statement. Nearly a century ago, the antiwar Dadaists and painters like Diego Rivera, a dedicated Marxist who advocated for workers’ rights, were creating art meant to drive social change. Today that tradition continues, albeit in a different form. Thanks to the ubiquity of social media and the elevated profiles of world-famous street artists like Banksy, it’s easier than ever for artists to reach the public with their images of protest.
It’s also allowed collectives like the Seattle-based Amplifier to hit upon a unique niche: commissioning mission-driven artists to produce works that can be printed, for free, by activists and others agitating for change, both in the U.S. and around the world.
“I don’t think the world has ever seen an art machine like this: one that does not exist to make money,” says executive director Aaron Huey, who founded Amplifier in 2014. “We turn any money that does come in into more art and awareness. We build campaigns that can and do change the national narrative.”
Huey has friends in high places. He was able to recruit big names like Shepard Fairey — probably best known for his Obama “Hope” poster — and the muralist Mata Ruda to contribute art to campaigns ranging from voting rights to prison reform. Early last year, in the run up to the worldwide Women’s March protests, Amplifier launched a campaign called We The People, placing its artwork in full-page ads in the Washington Post, the New York Times and USA Today. The group also distributed more than 30,000 placards, some of which were also designed by Fairey, in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Half a million more people downloaded and printed the posters themselves. Featuring stylized photographs of a diverse group of Americans, the campaign’s goal is to encourage dialogue about national identity and values.
“It’s an opportunity to represent marginalized groups and to get stories out that aren’t always in the mainstream press,” says Chip Thomas, who works under the name Jetsonorama in Arizona. He’s known for wheat-pasting enlarged photos of residents of the Navajo nation, where he also works as a family doctor, onto the sides of buildings, water tanks, grain silos and fences around the reservation. His work was highlighted by Amplifier last spring during the People’s Climate March in D.C. and hundreds of other cities around the world.
“The most I can hope for is that [my work] would stimulate people to see some things differently and not just think about taking action, but actually doing it,” says Thomas.
For MacPhee, whose designs were also featured in Amplifier’s climate-change crusade, the most effective campaigns aren’t the ones tied to large national demonstrations, but rather those targeted to local communities.
“I’m happy Amplifier did what it did with the Women’s March, but I try not to spend my time doing grandiose cultural work,” MacPhee says. “[Change happens] in actual physical places, not on the internet, so it has to connect to people on the ground.”
Last year, MacPhee partnered with Amplifier to design and distribute oversized foam fists for the New York–based Close Rikers campaign. The props were carried by demonstrators during a series of protests in the city against the massive Rikers Island jail complex.
“They were used over and over again. They just have become a staple of the campaign,” says MacPhee, who will be an artist in residency at Amplifier’s Seattle headquarters in 2018. “One of the things I’ve always wanted — and I think many artists who work in this space want — is to print 20,000 posters and bring them out on palettes to demonstrations and have them disappear. One of the things about Amplifier is that they’ve been able to actualize that.”
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that MacPhee runs Justseeds and is currently an artist in residence at Amplify and that Amplify started in 2010. NationSwell apologizes for these errors.
When Liberals and Conservatives Came Together on the Environment
Kyle Meyaard-Schaap’s environmental revelation came on the top of a mountain. What was left of one anyway.
As an undergrad at Calvin College, a Christian liberal arts school in Grand Rapids, Mich., Meyaard-Schaap began learning about mountaintop-removal mining. He took trips to West Virginia in 2010 and 2012, where for decades swaths of mountains in the mid-Appalachian region have had their peaks blasted off, allowing miners to bore out the coal within. Before then, Meyaard-Schaap, who grew up in a close-knit evangelical family in a small Michigan town, hadn’t given much thought to the environment. “Those issues weren’t even on my radar,” he says.
But in West Virginia he camped with nuns on top of denuded, geologic stumps. They had to shower with rainwater, because the groundwater had become so polluted. He met with families of children diagnosed with cancer attributed to the mining waste that had seeped into the region’s aquifers.
“I started to connect environmental care with people care,” says Meyaard-Schaap, 29, who went on to found the activist group Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA). “It wasn’t much of a stretch to connect that to climate.”
Meyaard-Schaap is part of a new generation of activists who fight for tougher environmental laws — the sort usually associated with liberals — by asserting the values and policies more commonly embraced by conservatives. Framing issues of the left through the political lens of the right is a method that’s worked in the past, especially when it comes to climate change.
A POLICY INNOVATION THAT ‘SKIPPED-A-BEAT’
Two decades before Meyaard-Schaap’s activism, a Republican lawyer and political advisor named C. Boyden Gray crafted a potential solution to the rising threat of climate change. Gray had been intrigued for decades by the possibility of using cap-and-trade to clean the atmosphere. The system works by setting aggregate limits on pollutants while allowing businesses to meet them by paying, trading or innovating to account for their share.
Gray had previously worked for Ronald Reagan, a president whose popularity with evangelicals helped catapult him to the White House, and watched as Reagan’s tenure ended with an environmental crisis. So much sulfur had been belched by Rust Belt coal plants into the wind currents that blew across the Great Lakes and into Canada that fragile ecosystems, along with many thousands of people, had become sick. The prime minister of Canada quipped grimly about declaring war.
In 1988 — the first presidential election to feature staunch environmentalist Al Gore as a candidate — Republican nominee George H. W. Bush pledged to be an “environmental president.” Gray saw his opportunity. With little fanfare he helped write cap-and-trade legislation targeting sulfur; it became law under the Clean Air Act of 1990. Within a few years, the amount of acid rain (which occurs when sulfur rises in the atmosphere and mixes with water, oxygen and other pollutants) decreased by half — at a cost of around one-eighth what critics had feared. The success was resounding.
“You let the market take over, and government doesn’t get in the way,” Gray tells NationSwell. “It’s the most efficient, frictionless way to reduce pollutants.”
Gray and others believed this tool, cap-and-trade, could be expanded and modified to squelch climate change too. But then government — or, rather, politics — did get in the way.
Far-left environmentalists and far-right Republicans both soured on cap-and-trade. Meanwhile, the common ground stood on by centrist members of both parties was splitting apart. Environmentalism was ceded to the left, and then weaponized against them by the right. By 2009, Democratic representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts had written cap-and-trade legislation for carbon that passed the Democratic-controlled House. But Senate Republicans wouldn’t even consider it.
Cap-and-trade, Gray says, “skipped a beat.”
TAKING IT TO THE STATES
Three years earlier, the acrid political climate had made state lawmakers in California give up on the federal government. Assembly speaker Fabian Nunez, a Democrat from Los Angeles, co-authored the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. In sweeping fashion, it reshaped the state’s electric, construction and automotive industries. Inspired by the success against acid rain, parts of this act included cap-and-trade. But Nunez insisted, against the wishes of then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, that it also include mandates limiting carbon emissions.
“My idea was, we’ve got do a mandate; necessity is the mother of invention,” says Nunez today. “I’m a Mexican-American from Los Angeles. I grew up in a polluted neighborhood in San Diego underneath the smokestacks of a shipbuilding company, surrounded by junkyards and stray dogs. I care about the environment; I just came about it a little bit differently.”
That landmark California law inspired others. Hawaii, for example, made a bold commitment to get its energy completely from clean renewables by midcentury. Dozens of U.S. cities also did the same. Some states, including Illinois and New York, have made more gradual commitments.
Utilities are responding to this pressure. Duke Energy, a large utility provider in the Southeast and former scourge of environmentalists, has set a “new goal to reduce C02 emissions 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2030,” says spokeswoman Dawn Santoianni.
This dogpile against carbon pollution by states, cities, shareholders, customers and citizens could be the best strategy in an era of federal abdication to fight climate change. The common denominator uniting these various tools — cap-and-trade, mandates, shareholder demands and citizen protests — is the assignation of a negative financial, legal or social value on excess carbon.
“If the true cost of production is taken into account, cleaner sources of fuel, such as solar and wind, will be more competitive,” says Tom Erb, national field organizer for the pro-carbon tax campaign Put a Price on It.
CONNECTING ACROSS THE AISLE
How can more bodies be added to the weight of the masses trying to clamp shut the carbon vents cooking the world? Michael Livermore, the executive director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, says the answer for environmentalists lies across the partisan chasm.
“The most important actors out there,” he says, “are people who care about climate and are Republicans.”
Meyaard-Schaap, of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, had a revelation about that too.
He listened as language used by many on the left to convey the urgency of climate action turned to static on the social frequencies attuned to by his loved ones. So he looked to the American evangelical tradition for a solution: Stories of personal transformation can connect where scientific data does not.
He says his own family is an example. Not too long ago, Meyaard-Schaap’s parents and grandparents were “suspicious” about climate change, he says. Since he testified to them about his change of heart, they now donate regularly to his nonprofit. So far, YECA has engaged more than 10,000 people across the nation in the fight against the warming of the planet.
“When it comes to climate change, you’re not going to get anywhere unless you affirm the values of your audience,” he says. “What we’re trying to do is bear witness to the fact that this doesn’t have to be such a divisive issue.”
Hope in the Amazon
When discussing solutions to climate change, conversations usually center on reducing carbon emissions. Equally important is preserving and restoring natural ecosystems, like the Amazon rainforest, that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
In Brazil, three decades of ranching and farming development have leveled large tracts of Amazon. This growth has made the South American country one of the largest exporters of beef in the world, but it’s also come at a severe cost to the environment.
Since 1988, The Nature Conservancy has worked in the Brazilian Amazon to ensure that the forest can regenerate after ranching operations move out. Much of the organization’s focus is on preserving vegetation around streams and on mountaintops and providing technical expertise to farmers interested in sustainable crops.
Watch the video above to see how The Nature Conservancy is working with locals to find climate solutions and click here to learn about the organization’s efforts across the globe.
Erecting Skyscrapers With Climate Change in Mind, Coping With Pain Through Virtual Reality and More
Building to the Sky, With a Plan for Rising Waters, The New York Times
As climate change becomes impossible to ignore, real estate developers are adjusting their plans for rising storms and sea levels. A new waterfront property in New York City features generators with the ability to power tenants’ refrigerators and power outlets for a week, because “if you have your phone and your refrigerator, you can survive,” as one designer put it. After devastating hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, “resilient design” has become the buzzword in architecture.
Virtually Painless — How VR Is Making Surgery Simpler, Science Focus
Could VR headsets replace painkillers? That’s what a handful of surgeons are betting on in regions where sedatives are expensive and hard to come by. Once a high-tech luxury, virtual reality is becoming ever more mainstream and affordable, and has proven to reduce patient pain by up to 50 percent.
First Class Meal: Could the Declining U.S. Postal Service Deliver Food to the Needy? The Guardian
A creative proposal from students at Washington University in St. Louis aims to turn the stagnant U.S. Postal Service into a thriving food delivery service for underserved communities. A number of organizations are working to curb food waste in a nation where, despite its wealth, one in seven residents experiences food insecurity. But most lack a sustainable transport system to get surplus food to those in need. With vehicles, routes and workers already in place, the declining postal service could be an invaluable resource in the fight against hunger.
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