🌱 The Grumpy Optimists #175
In defence of bogs: swamps that eat carbon, wetlands that stop tanks, and a wind industry back from the dead
Happy Monday. 👋
Welcome back to another edition of your favourite (hopefully) positive climate newsletter.
Now more than ever it feels like we need positive news. I’m genuinely so fed up with sweating. To think this is going to be the coldest summer for the rest of our lives. 🙃
With that being said, there are plenty of bits of good news for you. For those who have watched Chris Packham’s People’s Climate Emergency Briefing, the petition for a UK-wide briefing has hit 100,000 signatures so it will now trigger a parliamentary debate.
And if you want a number for why a national climate briefing is not a nice-to-have: this summer’s heat is on course to cost EU economies around €180 billion, roughly the bloc’s entire expected growth for the year. Climate policy is forever framed as a cost to business. This summer is what the actual cost to business looks like.
Anyway, on with the rest of the stories shall we?
👀 News to make you feel good this week
🌾 Virginia re-wet a swamp, and the restored peat now traps 200,000 tonnes of carbon a year. The US Fish and Wildlife Service installed 46 water-control structures across 150 miles of old drainage ditches in the Great Dismal Swamp, undoing damage that started in the 1760s with ditches dug by a company part-owned by George Washington. The re-wetted peat now offsets the annual emissions of 42,000 cars, while also cutting wildfire risk and bringing back wildlife.
🇫🇮 Finland wants to restore its peatlands to help the environment, and to slow Russian tanks. Yes, a second bog story. It has been a big week for peat. Finland’s environment and defence ministries have jointly identified at least 180,000 hectares of drained peatland for restoration, at roughly €1,000 per hectare. Restored bogs store carbon and boost biodiversity, and they also turn one-metre drainage ditches into five or six metre wide obstacles that heavy armour cannot cross. Research from one nature reserve shows the wettest restored areas are still impassable twenty years on.
💠My thoughts? When the defence ministry starts co-signing wetland restoration, the business case is officially watertight. Nothing unlocks environmental funding quite like the idea of a Russian invasion.
💨 The European wind industry is finally turning a corner. After five years of brutal cost inflation, stingy clients and Hurricane Trump, this week’s results from Vestas and Ørsted suggest the worst is over. Vestas’ operating margins hit 9.4 per cent, up from 1.5 per cent a year ago, Ørsted had no new bad news for once, and governments are backing wind again. Even US onshore installations are set to be the highest in five years, because data centres do not care about culture wars, they just need power.
💠My thoughts? Wind has been a spectacularly bad investment and an even worse headline generator, and yet here we are: margins recovering, auctions clearing, and demand climbing on hard-nosed commercial and security grounds.
🇨🇳 China’s landmark Ecological and Environmental Code takes effect. As of Friday, over 30 laws, 100 administrative regulations and 1,000 local rules have been consolidated into a single code of 1,242 articles covering pollution, ecological protection and low-carbon development. It is only the second statutory code in modern China, after the Civil Code. That is a telling signal of where the environment now sits in the hierarchy of national priorities.
✨ Spark Grants launch: £300 to £1,000 for people starting things in the UK. A huge shoutout to my wonderful friend Leone Baron who is launching small, fast grants for individuals starting community initiatives. Think hackathons, a dinner series, zines, clubs, magazines. The inspiration is the Homebrew Computer Club, on the logic that without computer clubs there would probably be no Apple. This is not necessarily a climate story but it could well be if you wanted it to be.
So, you got an idea you think would be cool and you need a bit of cash to launch? Check out what Leone’s doing.
🎵 This week’s music pick is SWIM and Ova Looven. The song makes me feel like I’m floating through the sky or I’m in a movie and I kinda love it.
That’s it for this week. Sign the petition, forward this to a friend who needs some good news, and if you spot a story I should cover, hit reply.
George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚