🌱 The Grumpy Optimists #80
Back once again with the climate optimism, power to the people, back once again...
Happy Monday. 👋
Welcome back to another episode of The Grumpy Optimist, your weekly newsletter for positive environmental news and your way to fight off climate anxiety.
This week we’re looking at how we can use nature to slow the flow of rainwater and prevent flooding, seeing how the law is being used once again in the fight against climate change and why indigenous groups should be given a seat at the biodiversity table and funding for protecting nature. Shall we dig in?
👀 Articles to read
🌡️ Could Europe’s excess heat power the region? A new report published last week by the engineering company Danfoss estimated that in the EU, excess heat equals the same amount as the total demand for heat and hot water. Surplus heat comes from a number of different sources, such as waste plants, buildings, underground transport, and data centres. In some places, the heat is already used via methods like district heat pumps. Making the most of excess heat could be another tool in our arsenal to tackle climate change. It’s almost as if we're burning energy and heating a room, but we’re leaving a window wide open.
🏟️ London Stadium to be covered in solar panels. As a Leeds United fan, I don't often have too many nice things to say about West Ham, but this is pretty cool. The 2012 Olympic Stadium, now home to West Ham United, will be covered in a solar membrane to produce energy. The £4 million in funding will be paid back within a five-year period, which is a pretty great deal.
🌊 Seagrass farms planted in Wales to absorb carbon. Over five million seagrass seeds will be planted off the Welsh coast to combat climate change. Blue carbon projects have the potential to absorb billions of tons of carbon and provide biodiverse ecosystems that support marine life.
⚖️ BNP Paribas sued over fossil-fuel financing. Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, and Notre Affaire à Tous are suing the French banking group BNP Paribas on the grounds that its loans to oil and gas companies are breaching its legally binding duty to ensure they do not harm the environment. The three NGOs behind the suit are using the historic lawsuit in which a Dutch court successfully ordered Shell to reduce their emissions by half. This demonstrates the power of the legal system to challenge the fossil fuel industry, which is a major reason to be positive in 2023. pats back
🪨 Carbon removal industry comes together to scale its impact. In order to reach net zero, we'll still need to pull up to 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each and every year, making carbon removal technology a key innovation in the battle against climate change. Currently, the capacity for carbon removal is 2 billion tonnes, but this is mainly through nature-based solutions such as biomass. As a result, we need to massively scale up the technology to permanently remove carbon dioxide. The newly formed Carbon Removal Alliance hopes to bring industry players together to make this happen.
💭 Why it matters. As of 2021, less than 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide had been permanently removed from the atmosphere by new technologies—1 million times short of the annual scale needed.
📈 EU carbon price reaches €100 for the first time. The €100 threshold is seen as psychologically important because it is likely to accelerate the pace at which companies seek to decarbonise and invest in expensive and emerging carbon capture technologies such as those in the story above. The higher the tax on environmental damage, the more likely we are to see a reduction in pollution and more action taken.
🌻 How can nature-based solutions prevent flooding? As society has developed over the last few hundred years we’ve spent a lot of our building roads, buildings and infrastructure that has replaced nature. As a result, we’ve built ourselves into a problem where we try to get rid of water as soon as possible, mixing it with sewage in the process which in times of heavy rain results in sewage going into rivers. But how do we slow the flow and ‘re’ or ‘un’ engineer the way we deal with water? We should look at how we can harness nature and create sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS). Who knew wastewater treatment could be so fun?
⛰️ How we can learn from indigenous groups to protect nature and help biodiversity thrive. In December, world leaders met at Cop15 - the biodiversity conference of the parties and outlines what they will do to protect biodiversity and nature but one voice is missing from the table, indigenous groups. This is particularly important given that indigenous groups protect up to 80% of biodiversity. In this article, Minnie Degawan, an activist from the Cordillera region of the Philippines calls for leaders to use the knowledge that indigenous groups have and give them funds to protect the planet.
👉 As a side note, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer is a fantastic book about our connection to nature and the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's notion that plants and animals are our best teachers.
😊 Black Girl Environmentalist challenge climate doomism. Black Girl Environmentalist seeks to empower black girls, women and non-binary people into climate action, providing representation, optimism and agency. With racial and climate justice deeply connected and a history of quite literally removing black women from the climate debate, see Vanessa Nakate, this is a story that brings me and I’m sure you a lot of joy.
🙃 Just because I wanted to share
While we’re on the theme of carbon removal with this week's episode I would like to introduce you to two of my favourite meme pages, Carbon Removal Memes for Climate Restorative Teens and Bros For Decarbonization (not parody). If you’re going to enjoy a meme, may as well make it climate-related.
This episode was written after a great weekend appreciating what London has to offer and realising how nice it is to have access to public transport, green spaces in a city and great coffee. It was also written to a delightful mix of Mac Miller and Drake because vibes. Have a great week.
The Grumpy Optimists 💚