A Lesson For Humanity From 17 Million Doomed Creatures

New York Times - Margaret Renkl

If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we cannot escape the world we have shaped.

Credit...Ole Jensen/Getty Images

Author Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

It was the photo of the mink in Denmark, soon to be slaughtered, that hit me the hardest. In it, the animals peer from their cages with open curiosity, ears pricked forward, clever fingers grasping the wire of the cage doors as they study their surroundings. They are clearly trying to figure out what is happening. 

What’s happening, it turns out, is that mink can catch Covid-19 from human beings and from each other. Several other species — dogs, cats, hamsters, tigers, monkeys and ferrets — have contracted the virus from people, but only mink, so far, have passed the virus back to us.

Mink are native to North America, but they are farmed by the millions around the world, including here in the United States. (Let’s be clear: “Farmed,” in this context, means the animals are kept in cages until they are killed and skinned for the fur industry.) Few people come into contact with mink, so the news about Covid-19 on mink farms hasn’t elicited the kind of public terror that would no doubt ensue if dog parks became potential superspreaders.

What makes the news from Europe so alarming is that Covid-19 can mutate as it jumps between humans and mink and back again. So far these mutations have not made the virus more easily transmissible or more likely to cause severe infection. But because one set of mutations in one variant of the virus has the potential, at least theoretically, to limit the effectiveness of a Covid-19 vaccine, Danish officials made the extraordinary decision to kill every mink in the country — some 17 million animals.

It’s a heart-wrenching story of mass slaughter and mass graves. The outcry in Denmark, the world’s largest producer of mink pelts, has focused largely on the shaky legal framework for the government’s order, and on its financial devastation to fur farmers. The real question is why such farms exist in the first place.

It’s not news that life on earth is out of balance. We already know that human behavior — not just in burning fossil fuels but also in food production, wilderness fragmentation, habitat degradation and overpopulation, among other planetary depredations — has imperiled everything from global biodiversity to the actual weather. In the general public, however, warnings from scientists and environmental activists have fallen mostly on deaf ears, even when those depredations come with a cost to us.

We have known for decades what happens when we put pressure on wild animals by degrading their habitats, interrupting their ecosystems, keeping them in cages or otherwise failing them. H.I.V., Lyme, bubonic plague, anthrax, Ebola — all are among the many animal pathogens that now infect human beings. The coronavirus pandemic is just the most recent example of what nature has been telling us all along.

“When diseases move from animals to humans, and vice versa, it is usually because we have reconfigured our shared ecosystems in ways that make the transition much more likely,” Ferris Jabr wrote in The New York Times Magazine back in June. “Deforestation, mining, intensive agriculture and urban sprawl destroy natural habitats, forcing wild creatures to venture into human communities. Excessive hunting, trade and consumption of wildlife significantly increase the probability of cross-species infection.”

The conversation around conservation traditionally pits people who care about the natural world against people who say that nature is great so long as it doesn’t interfere with their plans to build a new subdivision or buy a cheap hamburger or drive a giant SUV or eat raspberries year round. So long as it doesn’t inconvenience them in any way.

The earth is paying the price for our convenience. Headlines of the last few weeks have included reports of the United States officially leaving the Paris climate agreement (followed by a record high temperature of 83 degrees Monday here in Nashville); the continuing decline of coral reefs; a devastating hurricane season; coastal plastic pollution caused by Americans; and the Trump administration’s decision to remove gray wolves from the protected species list.

Our mistake was only partly in believing that the natural world was ours for the taking. Our mistake was also in failing to understand that we ourselves are part of the natural world. If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we cannot escape the world we have shaped. We must begin right now to make preserving biodiversity a priority, to make protecting wildlife habitats a priority, to make living in closer harmony with our wild neighbors a priority. Keeping ourselves safe from a future of ever-renewing pandemics will mean completely reframing the way we think about the natural world.

“Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves,” the British naturalist Helen Macdonald writes in her transcendent new essay collection, “Vesper Flights.” For far too long, human beings believed they’d been given dominion over all the Earth. Now the slaughtered minks in Denmark — and all the creatures who are dying in this human-wrought and rapidly accelerating extinction — are teaching us what we need to do to save them and ourselves, too: We must change our lives.

Links

• How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases
• Species and Climate Change
• Climate Impacts on Ecosystems
• Animals Affected by Climate Change
• Conservation in a Changing Climate: Impacts to Species and Habitats
• Nature Climate Change: Shifting habitats
• How climate change is hurting ecosystems across the globe
• Ecosystems across Australia are collapsing under climate change

It’s Kids Vs. Parents In This Award-Nominated Climate Novel

Grist - Joseph Winters

Grist / Nola Millet / W. W. Norton & Company

To any young person alarmed by the climate crisis — and frustrated with their parents’ generation for not doing enough to avert it — Lydia Millet’s latest novel may hit eerily close to home.

A Children’s Bible begins with a group of kids and their parents who are vacationing at an oceanside summer home. The adults are languorous — they spend their days dulling their senses with booze, gambling, and waiting for mealtime to roll around. Even when a summer storm causes a flood of biblical proportions, the parents turn out to be more or less useless; after some initial attempts to storm-proof the house, they quickly retreat into the numbness of their usual vices. Specifically: Ecstasy, bourbon, and sex.

A world-changing flood isn’t the only biblical theme in the book. Early on, one of the youngest kids, Jack, finds a literal children’s Bible and begins making connections between its symbols and the surrounding world. In the wake of the flood, he becomes a modern-day Noah, rescuing animals in pairs. Later on, a baby is born in a barn. There’s even a crucifixion.

W.W. Norton

After the flood, Jack and the other children set off on their own, fleeing to find a safe haven. The book’s 12 angsty teens and tweens are exasperated with their parents — with their hedonism, their denial, the way they cling to the status quo even in the face of catastrophe. “Had they had goals once?” the teenage narrator, Eve, wonders. “They shamed us. They were a cautionary tale.”

“I do feel that there has been something stuporous with my generation’s response to the life-support crises that we’re seeing,” Millet told me. “Something really dulled — a kind of stunned, passive fatalism.”

Communicating the climate crisis can be difficult, but with her latest novel, Millet deftly rises to the occasion. She has plenty of experience, having written often about climate change and mass extinction in previous works of fiction, in op-eds to the New York Times, and for conservation groups. She has a master’s degree in environmental policy and spent more than 20 years with the Center for Biological Diversity, first as a staff writer and now chief editor.

A Children’s Bible is one of five finalists for the National Book Award for fiction. Before a winner is announced on November 18, I spoke with Millet to hear her thought process behind the book. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. What inspired you to write about the tension between parents and children?

A. It’s something I had been observing in children and young people. There was just this sort of righteous rage about climate and extinction and other matters of monolithic stature that I hadn’t really observed in my own generation at their age, or even now. People of my general age bracket, we just had this kind of complacency to us. For as long as I can remember, we’ve been willfully turning away from anything that seems overly dramatic, overly earnest, overly serious. I wanted to write about the way that might play out in this particular scenario, where I populate a summer house with this group of families.

Q. You have two kids. Did your role as a mother shape the way you wrote the book?

A. Yeah, I mean they’re both smart and aware, as you can’t really help being when you’re growing up with this stuff. They’re 16 and 12. But I wouldn’t say that either of them is distinctive for their anger. But I have seen it in some of their friends.

The dynamics in the book aren’t based on my personal life, but I think that if I were a kid now, I would be part of that rage. I am part of it, even as a middle-aged person. I like that there seems to be so much solidarity in the rage among the young, a kind of a community.

Q. Denial is also a big theme in your book. I think when people usually imagine climate denial, they think of the really hardcore deniers rejecting science on one side, and then the climate activists on the other side. But you add some more nuance to the idea of denial — it’s about inaction, rather than the rejection of science.

A. I think that’s what we’ll be facing with the next administration, that sort of middle-ground denialism. It’s not anti-science, it’s just a sort of slow, compromise-based grappling with incremental change, where no powerful interests are threatened. It’s about all cars turning electric or something like that — turning away from the notion that radical social transformation is needed from the top down to prevent extraordinary chaos from occurring.

I really think we’re more used to seeing this than the radical denial of President Trump or some GOP members of Congress. What we’re used to seeing is the middle-of-the-road denial that we can sort of slowly and politely talk our way into salvation. But actually we can’t, and the science tells us very clearly that we can’t. Really what we need is a profound shift away from our habits of being in this culture and in cultures across the world. Normally, the denial that we practice is a much softer, gentler denial, but it will probably take us to the very same place if we let it.

Q. Where did you get the idea to incorporate biblical allusions into your novel, and then to literally insert a children’s bible into the book?

A. I have lived with the greatest hits of the Bible for a long time. I was raised in a very secular home, but both my brother and I proved to be interested in religious myths. I’m really interested in how religions persist and don’t persist in the modern American mainstream, in the psyche. And this particular book seemed to lend itself to a kind of Old Testament narrative because I knew that I wanted to have this flood at the beginning. And I just thought, why not peg it to the greatest hits, you know? Genesis and Exodus, and then forward toward Revelation.

I didn’t want it to be any kind of literal mapping — I just wanted it to include these parallels and coincidences. I certainly didn’t build the whole structure on it. Frankly, I don’t have the biblical expertise to do that. I’m only very selectively interested in scripture. I won’t sit down and just read through Leviticus with great joy or anything like that. I’m interested in the melodrama of the Bible, and I just wanted a piece of that melodrama for myself.

Q. I know in the past you’ve written about the extinction crisis, and you have a particular interest in animals. Did that play into your decision to bring in Noah’s Ark?

A. I’ve always been transfixed by that story. I am so obsessed with animals, although not in the way that a biologist would be. I’m constantly fascinated by just the being-ness of animals. As I get older, I just find them more and more enrapturing. I can stare at them now in a way that would have bored me even 10 years ago. I think also that I’m worried for them. When I see birds or lizards or deer or many other creatures, it’s more emotional for me than it used to be. Their existence seems to be vested with the possibility of demise, you know? They seem to almost flicker before my eyes whenever I look at them.

Q. Toward the end of the book, one of the youngest characters, Jack, has this revelation where he makes a connection between science and Jesus. Do you think that’s the kind of revelation we need more of?

A. Yeah, it’s a playful little series of parallels, but I do actually think that that is the kind of symbolic meaning-making we need to engage in more. For example, many of us who are Christian in this country — and even those who don’t share my politics — believe that Christ died for our sins. He died to save us, making a sacrifice for the good of the people, for the common good. And I think it would be very appropriate for many of us to look at those sacrifices and to say, “We need to make that kind of sacrifice in our lives for our children, to redeem them and to and to save them.” That kind of story, I think, needs to be told around matters of climate change and social transformation.

Links

• How Climate Experts Think About Raising Children Who Will Inherit A Planet In Crisis
• Health Impacts Of Climate Change On Children Don't Need Exaggerating
• One Thing You Can Do: Talk To Your Children About Climate Change
• Our Young Girls Are Bearing The Burden Of Climate Action. But Should They Be?
• How The Climate Kids Are Short-Circuiting Right-Wing Media
• Climate Change Is Scaring Kids. Here’s How To Talk To Them.
• Kids Suing Governments About Climate: It's A Global Trend
• Analysis: Why Children Must Emit Eight Times Less CO2 Than Their Grandparents
• Obligations To The World’s Children In The Climate Emergency

Why Scientists Are So Worried About Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier

Discover -Leslie Nemo

Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica is in serious danger. It's swiftly melting, and a collapse could cause a dramatic increase in sea level rise.

(Credit: NASA/Wikimedia Commons)

Glaciers everywhere might be melting, but only one has earned the most terrifying nickname: the Doomsday Glacier.

Officially called the Thwaites Glacier, this mass of ice nestled into the western edge of Antarctica is melting at an alarming rate. A look at maps of the region's ice loss makes this clear, says Nick Holschuh, a geologist at Amherst College.

“If you were to zoom out and look at the whole picture, there's just this bright red spot to the edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet where Thwaites and [neighboring glacier] Pine Island are thinning like crazy.”

The rate at which Thwaites is slipping away and contributing to sea level rise is only half the reason researchers are concerned about its loss. Behind the glacier lies an even larger body of ice that, for as long as Thwaites is intact, is protected from contact with too-warm waters.

If Thwaites melts away, that much-larger ice block will add water to our oceans as well, further driving up sea level rise. If and when this might happen, however, is what researchers are trying to learn.

“We do know that Thwaites Glacier is quite important,” says Atsuhiro Muto, a polar geophysicist at Temple University. “But still, how much and how fast that is going to increase into the decades and centuries is still uncertain.”

Sending in the Scientists

Getting answers to these critical questions about Thwaites is driving a multiyear, international research expedition. Called the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, the mission brings scientists (including Holschuh and Muto) down to the glacier to inspect how it’s changing through a barrage of studies.

The project is a collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council, which independently recognized that Thwaites was a crucial but under-scrutinized glacier when it comes to understanding future sea level rise.

The concern over the fate of this particular patch of ice dates to the 1970s, when scientists published some of the first papers explaining how the very shape of Thwaites and the continent it connects to makes for precarious melting conditions.

Like other glaciers, Thwaites has a long, thin tongue of ice that sticks out into seawater. If you were to dive into the water beneath the protruding, visible ice and swim downward, you’d eventually see that Thwaites makes contact with rock. This interface is called the grounding line.

Britney Schmidt, a geophysicist at Georgia Tech, has, in a way, dove down to give the junction a close look. As part of the international Thwaites mission, Schmidt and her team navigated a robot submarine down to the grounding line to get a detailed understanding of the ice shape and conditions, as this is where the most important melting action is happening.

Human-caused climate change has warmed ocean waters that swirl around the grounding line. The water, which now sits above the freezing temperature of ice, melts the glacier faster than new ice can form. As the ice disappears, the grounding line retreats and less of Thwaites sits on the rock.

So long as Thwaites connects with the earth beneath it, the glacier will block warm waters from creeping up to the broader, thicker ice — the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet — sitting behind it. But if Thwaites melts enough that it lifts off, the ice sheet will be exposed, too.

And unlike the currently melting glacier, the ice sheet extends into a pit in the Earth’s crust that gets as deep as 1.5 miles below sea level in some places. When exposed ice sits lower than the water, there’s no stopping the melt, Schmidt says. “The water will flow in, the ice will thin rapidly, and then the whole thing that's been stable and sitting on a continent for thousands of years will go away.”

How Will It Turn Out?

To be clear, Thwaites melting is concerning on its own. The glacier is big and disappearing faster than others in the region. If completely liquified, Thwaites would raise sea levels by 1.5 to 3 feet. Beach shorelines would be three feet shallower than they are now — and storm surges during severe weather events would reach farther and deeper inland than ever before.

But researchers still don’t know exactly how much of the glacier will melt or when, which makes it difficult to know if the ice sheet sitting beyond Thwaites will wash away, too.

“Because it’s uncertain, Thwaites has the potential to really be the Doomsday Glacier. It also has the potential to not be so bad,” Muto says. “But as long as we still have that potential for it to be bad, we need to be doing something about it so that we don’t actually tend towards that worst-case scenario.”

By “do something,” Muto means addressing climate change, the force pushing Thwaites to melt. But we also have to prepare for some of the inevitable sea level rise that is coming our way. To behave accordingly — like put up sea walls or move out of low-lying areas — policymakers need to know how much and how fast the waterline will encroach.

“Those kinds of questions are really important because understanding the problem is only one piece of figuring out how we all respond to it," Schmidt says.

It would be nearly impossible to predict how much sea levels will rise down to the exact inch, day, or year. But researchers are keeping close tabs on what's happening to the glacier, which will give them a much better shot at providing specific indications about where the situation is headed.

Their ability to learn more than ever before about the glacier puts a slightly positive spin on the Doomsday Glacier.

“It has really kind of been an incredible exercise, bringing together an extremely diverse range of scientific expertise,” Holschuh says. “It has really allowed us to look at this system in a totally new way. Which makes me optimistic that we're going to learn a lot.”

Links

• Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Is Starting To Crack
• Climate Apocalypse Now
• Climate Change: Satellites Record History Of Antarctic Melting
• Rising Tides, Troubled Waters: The Future Of Our Ocean
• Guest Post: How Close Is The West Antarctic Ice Sheet To A ‘Tipping Point’?
• Greenland and Antarctica 'have lost four trillion tonnes of ice' in 20 years
• The glaciers are still shrinking – and rapidly
• Record Warm Water Measured Beneath Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday’ Glacier
• Antarctica melting: Climate change and the journey to the 'doomsday glacier'
• Underwater robot reveals hidden base of Antarctica’s ‘doomsday’ glacier
• Antarctica's colossal Thwaites Glacier is melting fast -- and scientists may have discovered why
• One of Antarctica's biggest glaciers will soon reach a point of irreversible melting. That would cause sea levels to rise at least 1.6 feet.
• There's a cavity underneath Antarctica that's two thirds the size of Manhattan — a sign ice sheets are melting faster than we thought
• Antarctica's Thwaites glacier is in peril, images reveal. The so-called 'doomsday glacier' could trigger 10 feet of sea-level rise if it melts.

(AU) Scott Morrison Flags Shift On Kyoto Climate Change Carry-Over Credits

 ABC News - Melissa Clarke

Scott Morrison says he hopes Australia doesn't need to use the credits but is keeping the prospect open. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

Key points Australia's target is to cut emissions by 26 to 28 per cent based on 2005 levels The use of carry-over credits is not banned but few other countries are using them The Greens want Australia to commit to not using the credit "loophole"

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has signalled he may reverse one of the most controversial aspects of the Federal Government's climate change policy: using Kyoto "carry-over" credits to help meet Paris agreement emissions reduction targets.

In an address to a private dinner hosted the Business Council of Australia, Mr Morrison said it was his ambition to "not need them" and this was a "goal" for the Federal Government.

"I've … said we will only use that carryover … to the extent that it is required," he said.

"Let me be very clear. My ambition, my Government's ambition, is that we will not need them.

"And we are working to this as our goal, consistent with our record of over-delivering in these areas."

Australia's current 2030 target under the Paris Agreement is to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 per cent compared to 2005 levels.

On current projections, that will only be achieved by continuing to claim "carry-over" credits from over-achieving on previous emissions reduction targets under the Paris Agreement's predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol.

Whilst using carry-over credits is not explicitly banned under the rules of the Paris Agreement, most nations have declared they do not consider it valid to count emission reduced under the Kyoto Protocol towards future targets.

The Federal Government has found no support diplomatically from allies for its continued use of carry-over credits, which is particularly controversial as Australia was allowed to increase its emissions under the Kyoto Protocol because of the nation's reliance on the resources sector.

PM flags new emission reduction policies

The United Nations has encouraged all countries to present more ambitious emissions reduction plans at international climate change talks in Glasgow next year.

The Federal Government has so far resisted pressure to increase its 26 to 28 per cent target, instead announcing a "Technology Investment Roadmap" that focuses on backing a select few technologies and supporting heavy industry.

It has also declined to adopt a target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, despite other major industrialised countries committing to the goal.

But Mr Morrison flagged his Government would have more to say on emissions reduction policies in the next few weeks.

"I hope to have more to say about this before the end of the year as we update our emissions projections that will take into account new policies and measures," he said.

Greens leader Adam Bandt said dropping the use of the carry-over credit "loophole" would be a positive step, but still insufficient.

"The Government's terrible 2030 targets leave Australia exposed," Mr Bandt said.

"We're in the critical decade and domestic political games will provide no cover for Australia's climate-pariah status on the world stage.

"With Europe and the United Kingdom looking to cut pollution by well over half by 2030, and the United States having already agreed to cuts of 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2025, five years earlier than Australia, we're becoming increasingly isolated."

Links

• Kyoto carry-over credits 'baseless' in international law, experts say
• Australia’s carbon accounting plan for Paris goals criticised as ‘legally baseless’
• Australia is the only country using carryover climate credits, officials admit
• Australia’s carbon accounting plan for Paris goals criticised as ‘legally baseless
• 'Betrayal of trust': Australia faces backlash for 'carry over' emission credits
• (AU) Scott Morrison Refuses To Commit To Net Zero Carbon Emissions By 2050 
• (AU) Prime Minister Facing ‘Difficult Territory’ As Australia Becomes ‘Globally Isolated’ On Climate Change 
• (AU) Australia Suddenly Isolated In The New Global Climate 

The World's Leading Universities Join The Climate Fight

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

A new international network of top universities including the University of Melbourne, Monash and the University of NSW, as well as Oxford, Caltech and the Sorbonne is calling for wealthy nations to commit to net zero emissions targets.

“We implore world leaders - particularly G20 leaders - to learn lessons from managing the pandemic: namely, to heed expert advice, to act with urgency, and to prioritise investments strategically,” says the International Universities Climate Alliance’s first declaration, published on Wednesday.

Climate change could have long-standing impacts on agricultural yields. Credit: Nick Moir

“In the case of climate change, this means decarbonising the economy to build a climate-resilient world for future generations. Without a focus on a carbon-neutral economy, investments are incompatible with the important commitments that nations have pledged in the Paris Agreement."

The declaration, signed by 37 leading universities, says that the G20 group of the world’s richest nations has a particular responsibility to act because they represent 85 percent of the world’s wealth and 80 percent of its emissions.

"We still have a window of time to make the necessary transition to a carbon-neutral economy, we strongly encourage world leaders to ensure that all COVID stimulus measures maintain their countries’ commitments under the Paris Agreement and work toward a net-zero emission plan," it says.

The declaration of the International Universities Climate Alliance comes ahead of the G20 summit in Saudi Arabia this weekend. But according to Professor Ian Jacobs, president and vice-chancellor of the University of NSW, in future it will become a network for sharing climate resources and advice to governments, business and industry as well as the broader community.

University of NSW Scientia Professor Matthew England said that while many academics and universities have in the past been reluctant to participate in debates that are perceived to be political, academics and universities were becoming more determined to speak out.

He said Australia's goal of reaching net zero emissions sometime in the second half of the century was not in keeping with the goals of the Paris agreement.

“We have seen this in Australia on climate change for many decades now. Back in the 90s, early 1990s, when the IPCC was established, we already knew enough back then that we needed to get off our addiction to fossil fuels and move towards solar, geothermal, wind, all these different technologies.

“For 30 years, we've been calling for these changes, and the policy implementation in Australia has been far too slow. So scientists are starting to amp up the advice they're giving.

“If, for example, we come out of this pandemic and we go back to our old ways of creating energy with carbon intensive technologies, we're really going to surrender the planet to impacts of climate change that are just prohibitively costly for future generations to deal with.”

Links

• Top universities urge G20 leaders to prioritise net zero emissions
• The International Universities Climate Alliance launches with over 40 members
• Universities form global network on climate change
• This is how universities can lead climate action
• UNSW spearheads world university ‘climate alliance’ to arrest climate change

(AU) Going Underground — Lessons For Suburbia From Subterranean Coober Pedy

ABC News - Luke Radford | Shannon Corvo

A typical living room in a Coober Pedy dugout house. (ABC News: Luke Radford)

Key Points Residents of Coober Pedy live underground to escape the searing heat The University of South Australia's Stephen Berry says indoor conditions in underground homes are stable One businessman has created a semi-underground house called the Earthship

It is summer in Australia and the temperature is soaring towards the 40s, so you reach for the air-conditioning remote but cringe at the thought of the energy bill come March.

The struggle for energy efficiency in a changing climate and the mental maths of keeping your home comfortable are a dominant point in day-to-day life.

But deep in the South Australian outback is a town that has been dealing with this problem for years.

So, what's the secret?

Digging down

Coober Pedy is a difficult place to live.

Set on the edge the Stuart Range, the town of 2,000 people sits atop a bed of sandstone glittered with opal, with no topsoil and practically no vegetation.

The average daytime temperature in summer is 37 degrees, but living in a house in such conditions is uncomfortable and expensive.

So, the locals turned to dugouts: underground homes.

Many Coober Pedy residents live underground to avoid the heat. (Flickr: BRJ Inc)

Stephen Berry, manager of the University of SA's Research Node for Low-Carbon Living, said it was obvious why.

"When you have a building that's covered in earth or is underground, you effectively get infinite thermal mass," he said.

"That means the indoor conditions remain remarkably stable — they hardly vary at all.

"If you have a building with high thermal mass but let the sun's light pour in uncontrolled, it would be uncomfortable."

Despite the temperature edging into the 40s during summer, dugouts in Coober Pedy usually stay between 19 and 25 degrees, which saves residents huge amounts of money on cooling expenses.


Coober Pedy Underground Accommodation

So, why aren't we living underground?

If underground housing has such obvious benefits, why isn't it more widespread?

Dr Berry said not everywhere was as well suited to building underground as Coober Pedy.

"Coober Pedy is fantastic because it's soil type allows for relatively easy construction of underground buildings," he said.

"In many other places, there are different soil types — there's a groundwater table that you have to deal with."

Martin Freney, a lecturer in Sustainable Design at the University of South Australia, said while building underground homes in suburban areas was not impossible, it was extremely difficult.

"You're essentially digging a big hole and if that's near neighbouring buildings or fences, there's the potential for undermining and the collapse of those structures," Dr Freney said.

"If you want to build a fully underground house, you might get some pushback from the planning officer at council, because it probably won't comply with the streetscape rules."

Coober Pedy has a mixture of above ground and below-ground housing options. (Supplied: Justin Lang)

The art of compromise

While building underground homes might be difficult, there are alternatives.

Alongside his work as a lecturer, Dr Freney also runs a business that builds a style of house known as an 'Earthship'.

The Earthship concept was developed by an American architect named Michael Reynolds in the 1970s and was designed as a self-sustaining, off-the-grid house.

Earthship-style buildings are dug slightly into the ground and the rear of the building is covered with an earthen mound and reinforced with a retaining wall made of recycled tyres.

The mound gives the building a high thermal mass: absorbing heat during the day and radiating it at night to keep the temperature consistent.

The Earthship design seeks to minimise the earthworks while still getting some of the benefits of living below ground.(Supplied: Allan Bjerre.)

"If you have the mound itself, ideally to the east, south and west, combined with glazed glass facing north and well insulated walls, you can get the benefits of an underground house in suburbia," Dr Freney said.

"At the end of the day, you don't have to use nearly as much energy for heating and cooling."

But according to Dr Berry, much like entirely underground houses, the Earthship is not without its downsides.

"The earth sheltered concept is a fabulous one, and it's very useful for particular situations," Dr Berry said.

"We're unlikely to see a high number of earth-covered buildings in suburbia … because each type of house isn't valid in every location." 

Links

• (AU) Fight For Planet A: Our Climate Challenge 
• (AU) Fight For Planet A: Our Climate Challenge Episode 2
• (AU) Fight For Planet A: Our Climate Challenge Episode 3
• (AU) The Green Recovery: This Builder Used To Be Sceptical About Green Homes. Now He’s A Convert
• Could Rooftop Gardens Save Our Cities From Climate Change?
• Where Are The Architects Who Will Put The Environment First?
• Building Code Not Ready For Climate Change

42 Catholic Institutions To Divest From Fossil Fuels, Bring Total To Over 200

National Catholic Reporter - Brian Roewe

Sunflowers stand in a field near inactive oil drilling rigs Jan. 21, 2016, in Dickinson, North Dakota. (CNS/Andrew Cullen, Reuters)

For the second time this year, a group of 40-plus faith-based organizations committed to avoiding investments in fossil fuels, pushing the number of Catholic groups making such public pledges to over 200.

On Monday, 47 religious institutions — 42 of them Catholic — announced they will end or continue to eschew financial holdings in coal, oil and natural gas, the energy sources that are driving increasing climate change on the planet.

Among the organizations, located in 21 countries, are the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union, Caritas Asia, three dioceses, 13 lay organizations and 20 religious congregations and associations — including the Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Commission of the International Union of Superiors General, or UISG, the largest umbrella group of women religious congregations, representing 2,000 worldwide.

The announcement also includes the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests and the U.S.-based Catholic philanthropic network FADICA.

Along with them, four Christian groups in the United Kingdom — including the Southern and Thames North Synods of the United Reformed Church — and the human rights-focused American Jewish World Service also divested, making this the largest joint divestment announcement by faith institutions to date, according to organizers.

In May, another 42 faith organizations in 14 countries announced their intent to divest. Both joint announcements were the result of a campaign by the Global Catholic Climate Movement. In the last four years, its divest-invest campaign has organized eight such public declarations by Catholic groups.

Their mobilizing has helped make faith-based organizations the largest share of the 1,200 organizations and businesses worldwide that since 2012 have publicly pledged to divest more than $14 trillion. Of those, more than 220 have been within the Roman Catholic Church.

The latest divestment commitments from Catholic groups comes days before the scheduled start of a major summit convened by Pope Francis on creating a more sustainable economy. The Economy of Francesco conference will take place Nov. 19-21 online, as the coronavirus pandemic upended original plans to invite young economists, students and entrepreneurs to Assisi, Italy.

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In May, the Vatican bank confirmed to EarthBeat that it does not maintain investments in fossil fuels. A month later, the Vatican issued operational guidelines on the environment for dioceses and parishes.

The guidelines, originally published in Italian but since released in English, include a section on finance that critiques the pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term negative consequences for communities and ecosystems.

Specifically, it recommends speeding up investment in sustainable infrastructure and establishing ethical investment principles that "promote responsible investments in social and environmental sectors, for example by evaluating progressive disinvestment from the fossil-fuel sector."

Of the 47 faith institutions in Monday's announcement, 18 committed to fully divest their investment portfolios from fossil fuels. Another 25 do not currently hold such investments and have committed to avoiding them in the future.

FADICA, or Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities, has fully divested its stocks and bonds from fossil fuels, said president and CEO Alexia Kelley, who added it still has "a very minute exposure" to natural gas through passive investments in funds screened according to environmental, social and governance criteria.

The Catholic philanthropic network's focus on environmentally friendly investing ramped up several years ago, after it updated its investment policy statement to align more with Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home."

Several members also attended a 2018 impact investing conference at the Vatican, where participants pledged almost $1 billion in new investments to address issues related to health, migrants and refugees, youth employment and climate change.

The conference also led FADICA to develop workshops and resources for its members, to support their growing interest in making an impact in the area of creation care, Kelley said.

"Catholic philanthropists are more and more interested in looking at all the tools they have in their toolbox to achieve their mission," she said.

The International Union of Superiors General's Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Commission is among the groups that have never held investments. Franciscan Sr. Sheila Kinsey, executive co-secretary of the commission, told EarthBeat in an email that their commitment does not extend to the full UISG body, but the commission has promoted fossil fuel divestment and alternative investing as part of its Sowing Hope for the Planet campaign, which aims to help women religious implement Laudato Si'.

Sr. Sheila Kinsey is the executive co-secretary for the Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Commission, a project of the International Union of Superiors General. (Provided photo)

Kinsey said those efforts will continue as the Vatican advances its own "Laudato Si' Action Platform" — a grassroots program that encourages the Catholic Church at all levels to adopt seven-year plans toward total sustainability, which among seven dimensions includes investing in renewable energy and fossil fuel divestment.

The Sisters of the Holy Cross in England joined Monday's announcement. In a statement, the sisters' leadership team said that after attempts to use their position as shareholders to press fossil fuel companies to reduce reliance on such energy sources, "we have realized that engagement with these companies only has limited success. We have now informed our Investors that we have decided to completely disinvest from fossil fuels, and thus work towards a zero-carbon future."

An October energy outlook from Bloomberg projected that investment in clean energy and battery storage technology could reach $11 trillion by 2050, with wind and solar energy providing more than half of the world's electricity. The report predicted that natural gas would be the only fossil fuel to see an increase in demand in that same period.

Like the UISG commission, the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union does not hold investments in fossil fuels, but committed to avoid them. Its support for fossil fuel divestment follows similar moves by several national bishops' conferences, including those of Austria, Belgium, Ireland and Greece.

"We encourage others also to join us in taking concrete steps to solve the climate crisis," the commission's secretary-general, Fr. Manuel Enrique Barrios Prieto, said in a statement, highlighting the importance of meeting commitments under the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal.

"Solving the climate crisis protects the human family from the dangers of a warming world, and decisive action is needed now more than ever," he said. 

The Association of U.S. Catholic Priests also does not have a history of investing in fossil fuels through its endowment. Fr. Bob Bonnot, its executive director, said the decision represents an ongoing commitment by the association and its 1,200 members to address climate change.

In the past, the association's climate change working group has produced homily helps to relate Laudato Si' to weekly scripture readings. It also hosted webinars during this year's Season of Creation.

"We feel [divestment is] a way that we can manifest our commitment to this mention of caring for our common home, and we have to exemplify that and model that if we're going to say we are committed to it," Bonnot said.

Other divesting groups include the Dioceses of Victoria, Spain, and Penang, Malaysia, and the Archdiocese of Luanda, Angola; the World Union of Catholic Women's Organizations; the English province of the Congregation of Christian Brothers, based in Ireland; and four religious orders in Kenya. 

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