12/03/2019

From Antarctica To Costa Rica, Women Team Up To Build A Climate-Safe Future

Reuters - Megan Rowling

Women are leading efforts to achieve the world's climate goals - but more need to be involved, leaders say
Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Patricia Espinosa (R) and ex secretary Christiana Figueres are applauded after receiving the 2016 Princess of Asturias award for International Cooperation from Spain's King Felipe, alongside Queen Letizia during a ceremony at Campoamor theatre in Oviedo, northern Spain October 21, 2016. REUTERS/Vincent West
BARCELONA - When former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres spent 20 days on a boat with 80 female scientists in Antarctica in January, she observed more than icebergs, whales and penguins.
She also saw how easily those women gravitated towards a shared purpose of saving the planet.
"It wasn't about, 'How do I improve my career, how do I get to the top of my ladder?' It was, 'How do I use my skills, my expertise, my knowledge and my practice to contribute to a global issue?'," said the Costa Rican ex-diplomat, who leads Mission 2020, an international campaign to cut carbon emissions.
Figueres spoke to the Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of International Women's Day, which this year has a theme of promoting the role of women in innovation and technology.
While those areas offer "unprecedented opportunities", women are held back by their under-representation in related professions, and by a growing digital divide along gender lines, according to UN Women.
Figueres noted that women on the "Homeward Bound" Antarctica expedition - all working in science, technology, engineering, maths or medicine - wanted to make sure their work would help address climate change.
"I do have the feeling that we women tend to be more collaborative, we tend to be more long-term, we tend to be more global in our thinking because of our innate stewardship role ... in society," she said.
That sentiment is playing out back in her home country, which last month launched an ambitious economy-wide plan to decarbonise the country by 2050, aiming to show other nations what is possible in tackling climate change.
A key figurehead of that vision is the president's wife Claudia Dobles Camargo, an architect and urban planner who has coordinated many of the country's green public transport initiatives, including an electric train project.
Andrea Meza, climate change director at Costa Rica's Ministry of Environment and Energy, said women were spearheading her country's push to produce no more emissions than it can offset through efforts such as protecting its extensive forests.
From the first female CEO of the nation's electricity utility to the planning minister and agriculture vice-minister, women in top government jobs were collaborating on a clean development vision for Costa Rica, she noted.
"We are the ones with voices, and we want to demonstrate that women can lead in this area," she said.
The same is happening at the local level too, she added, with women in rural communities driving efforts to fight climate change and improve lives into the bargain.
A woman is seen in an Ikea shop in a mall in Rome, Italy, May 19, 2017. REUTERS/Max Rossi
Feminist Design
Patricia Espinosa, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said women were at the heart of that same struggle around the world.
Some of their efforts are gaining wider recognition through the U.N. Momentum for Change initiative, which recognises successful climate projects run by and for women.
They range from a campaign to get women cycling on the streets of war-torn Damascus to a "feminist electrification" drive in Haiti, and Indian women making compost from ceremonial flowers while cleaning up the River Ganges.
"We must build smarter (and) we must build with the future in mind," Espinosa said in emailed comments.
"Women must not only be a 'voice at the table' but play a key role in planning, designing, building and managing how that infrastructure and those communities are built."
International Women's Day this year aims to explore, among other things, ways to build services and infrastructure that meet the needs of women and girls.
That's already happening at the world's biggest furnishings retailer IKEA Group, where the typical customer is a woman and about half of top executives are female, said its chief sustainability officer Pia Heidenmark Cook on the sidelines of a forum on climate-wise infrastructure in Barcelona this week.
A survey carried out by the Swedish company of public attitudes to climate change in 14 countries, published last September, showed younger people and women were more concerned and interested in acting on the issue than men, she added.
But doing so does not require "something new and fancy" - rather it means simply acting to ensure it is safe to breathe the air, drink the water, and be secure and healthy, she noted.

Women's Money Talks
Younger women are increasingly aware of the threats global warming poses to those rights - a concern seen in their leadership of school strikes demanding climate action, many inspired by Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, observers say.
Kirsten Snow Spalding, programme director for the U.S.-based Ceres Investor Network on Climate Risk and Sustainability, believes they may start to care more about how their money is invested.
Her organisation is looking to work with wealth management firms whose prosperous clients include millennials.
"My guess is that there are many more women in that group than there were 20 years ago," she said.
For some of them, sustainability is likely to be a higher investment priority, and could lead them to accept larger risks to achieve it, she added.
For now in the United States, there is anecdotal evidence of women stepping up their influence over infrastructure investment at the country's biggest pension funds, said Snow Spalding, a priest and former chief deputy treasurer of California.
U.N. climate chief Espinosa said there was a need for more women to get involved to achieve equal participation and leadership in innovation, tech and sustainable infrastructure.
The change "must take place not only at the negotiations table, but in classrooms and communities throughout the world", she added.

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Climate Change And The Power Of One

Press Republican

Greta Thunberg protesting outside Sweden’s Parliament.

Those of us of a certain vintage might remember a memorable photograph/video from June 5, 1989, of an incident that took place on the north side of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. It was the day after the military used deadly force to break up a protest nearby.
As a long column of tanks approached down the middle of a broad avenue, an unarmed, unidentified man calmly stepped in front of the lead tank forcing it to a stop.
As the tank tried to go around him, the man moved with it in order to remain in front of the tank in a non-violent action.
Photos and a video of this event (Wikipedia, “Tank Man”) were “smuggled out to a worldwide audience. Internationally, it is considered one of the most iconic images of all time.”

Business as usual
Another, more recent image from September 2018 also stands out as a powerful visual in a peaceful protest.
The image here may be more subtle in the sense that no tanks or armed police are present.
But the cause here is for “Climate Justice.”
Greta Thunberg, who has been in a recent climate article published in this paper, positioned herself in front of the stone edifice of Sweden’s Parliament.
Based on her study of climate change, and reports from the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change, she is alarmed that the powers that be, both political and business, are not taking the threat to our planet seriously.
It is business as usual.
The image (above) of the then-15-year-old student, protesting all by herself during school hours is powerful by itself.
Her modesty, sincerity, and articulate presentation of the dangers of climate change and a warming planet, and to her future, inspired the U.N. Council of Parties — or COP24 — to give her the platform to speak to a worldwide audience.

Speaking her mind
The meeting was held in Katowice, Poland in December 2018.
She spoke for only 3-and-a-half minutes but captured the whole issue of climate change and the lack of responsibility of our leaders to address it so that she, and tens of millions of other young people, have a future.
Now 16, she was also invited to Davos, Switzerland in January 2019, to give a similar address to an audience of business leaders, the wealthy and many political leaders.
To keep her carbon footprint small and to be consistent with her beliefs, she traveled from Stockholm to Davos by train. It took about 32 hours.
She shunned an extravagant hotel room and slept in a tent.
Meanwhile 1,500 private jets landed with other attendees.

Youth movement
Her actions have since sparked interest and ignited protests around the world including the U.S.
The theme is basically keep fossil fuels in the ground, stop CO2 emissions, move to clean renewable energy, now.
In January 2019, when the new Congress was being sworn in, many students urged our legislators to move on a “Green New Deal” which centers around clean, renewable energy.
Students and youths in a hallway of Congress. Michael Brochstein/SOPA/Images/LightRocket
Strike for change
The United Kingdom has seen a large number of protests in many cities throughout the country recently. In February thousands of young people in Britain left their classrooms to take part in “a growing movement to protest the lack of action on climate change.”
This global movement is known as “Youth Strike for Change,” with protests from Tasmania to Europe.
They want climate change to be treated like a crisis it is by their politicians.

Just 12 years
The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report supports their contention that climate change is serious, dangerous and needs to be addressed now.
We have just 12 years to avoid the more serious consequences of catastrophic climate change.
More than 10,000 youths in Leuven, Belgium have skipped school for the fifth Thursday in a row.
Some climate change deniers claim that these events “are being manipulated by politicians and environmental organizations.”
Indeed, one Belgian Environment Minister was forced to resign after she said she had security confirmation that these recent demonstrations were staged as a plot against her.
Meanwhile, NASA just confirmed that the last 5 years are the “Hottest Years On Record Globally”.



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Trump’s Climate Policies Face 6 Big Legal Battles This Year

Grist - 

Letitia James is an American lawyer, activist, politician and Attorney General of New York.
Newsday LLC / Contributor
The Trump administration has been chipping away at the bedrock of environmental protection in the United States. It didn’t happen overnight. But slowly, like toxic mold spreading through a home, polluter-friendly policies have started to build up.
Left unchallenged, the administration’s relaxed rules on pollution could add more than 200 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year by 2025, a new report from The State Energy & Environmental Impact Center finds. “In short, the Trump administration is prepared to take us over the climate cliff,” the authors state.
But lawyers are putting up a good fight. Here are six pieces of noxious Trump-era policy that state attorneys general are gearing up to battle in court this year, as laid out in the report:
  1. The so-called “Affordable Clean Energy Rule,” proposed by the EPA last August, would allow fossil fuel-fired power plants to pollute even more than they already do. The rule would replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan and could result in 1,630 more premature deaths and 120,000 more asthma attacks by 2030, according to the report. Twenty-one state attorneys generals are opposing the new rule, led by Letitia James of New York and Maura Healey of Massachusetts.
  1. The Trump administration’s rollback of 2012 clean car regulations would add an additional 16 to 37 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere by 2025. The proposal would also revoke a waiver that allows California, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the country’s cars, to set stricter fuel economy standards than the federal government. A group of state attorneys general, led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, is fighting the proposal.
  1. The EPA’s pending repeal of a 2016 rule would loosen emissions requirements for glider trucks, some of the dirtiest vehicles on our highways (they typically release 20 to 40 times more pollution than other trucks). In November 2017, former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt tried to reopen an old loophole that allows glider trucks with old, dirty engines to pass as new. Anti-pollution proponent Becerra is also leading the fight against this move on the basis that it undermines the Clean Air Act.
  1. The EPA is trying to weaken methane emissions standards for new oil and gas equipment. The proposal would also allow the industry to monitor methane leaks less frequently. These changes would result in the release of about 380,000 tons of methane — a greenhouse gas that’s 86 times more potent than CO2 in the short-term — between 2019 and 2025. James of New York is leading the multi-state coalition challenging the EPA’s proposed rule.
  1. The EPA is failing on its obligation to reduce methane emissions from old sources. Oil and gas operations prior to 2012 are responsible for up to 90 percent of methane emissions, and under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is legally obligated to address these sources. The agency hasn’t exactly done that — prompting a coalition of state attorneys general, led by James, to sue.
  1. In September 2018, the Trump administration repealed the 2016 Methane Waste Prevention Rule, which would have cut emissions by at least 175,000 tons a year. The original rule would reduce the waste of natural gas (from, say, leaks or venting) on public and Native American lands. In ongoing litigation, Becerra and New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas have challenged the repeal.
Americans are already feeling the effects of the Trump administration’s changes to environmental policy on the ground. As a New York Times investigation showed, some daycare facilities in California now take into account the spraying schedules for chlorpyrifos (a pesticide the Obama administration had moved to ban), a waterway in West Virginia is still being polluted with hundreds of pounds of selenium, and a coal plant in Houston is releasing harmful amounts of sulfur dioxide into the air with no consequences.

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