On March 28, 2020, from 8:30 to 9:30 pm, millions of people across the globe will be switching off their lights for one hour as a way to show support for saving the earth and advocating for a sustainable future. This year’s Earth Hour has a particular poignancy as it takes place during the height of the COVID-19 emergency that has awakened in all of us a renewed sense of global inter-connectedness.

Since 2012, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has been asking people around the world to turn off all non-essential lights for one hour during the month of March. This symbolic hour has grown to include participants in 7,000 cities, towns, and villages across 152 countries. This show of support is easy. Just switch off the lights and light up the candles.

What you can do during Earth Hour

• Be creative.
• Play a board game.
• Cook or bake your favorite food or dessert.
• Have a conversation.
• Watch live-streamed events on the WWF website.
• Sign the “Voice for the Planet” petition to let world leaders know that you demand urgent political action to combat climate change.

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On March 1, 2020, New York State’s Bag Waste Reduction Law will go into effect. As of that date, all businesses collecting sales tax will be banned from handing out plastic carryout bags—with some exceptions, like produce bags for bulk purchases of fruits and vegetables and bags given out by pharmacies for prescriptions. This is a major step toward New York making good on its commitment to waste reduction. After all, New York State’s retailers currently hand out a mind-boggling 23 billion plastic carryout bags a year. As we all know, those bags don’t magically disappear. They end up in landfill where they take from ten to one hundred years to decompose. They end up littering streets and highways. Caught in the branches of trees, littering the landscape, and floating in waterways and oceans, they pose a serious hazard to wildlife.

Here’s the thing. This new paradigm calls for behavior modification and creative problem solving that calls on the adaptability of 19.54 million New Yorkers. Will this change prove to be too burdensome? Will New Yorkers pull their kids out of schools, quit their jobs, put their houses or apartments up for sale, and flee to more plastic-tolerant states? Probably not — even though they’d have the choice of resettling in one of the forty-two states that have yet to jump on the “ban” wagon.

Chances are New Yorkers are going to be just fine, just like their adaptable counterparts in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, and Vermont. The truth is that New York’s food shoppers have been voluntarily making the switch on their own for a few years now. They’ve been showing up in increasing numbers in grocery stores with their own quirky collections of reusable bags. If the grocery store experience proves true for the rest of the retail economy, it’s safe to say that protests by consumers or producers demanding the restoration of our constitutional right to create plastic-bag waste will be few and far between.

Still, there may be challenges ahead when home stockpiles of plastic shopping bags disappear. Here are some not-so-serious ones I can think of.

• What will we use to pick up and dispose of various household menaces, like mouse carcasses, cockroaches, and stink bugs?
• How will we keep paint brushes from drying out?
• How will dog walkers tie their poop bags to fences?
• How will we keep fresh bread from tasting like onions stored in the refrigerator?
• How will we prevent clothing from getting soiled by sneakers in our gym bags or suitcases?
• How will we carry home our Chinese take-out?
• How will we clean out our cars?
• How can we be certain we’re in New York City if overflowing waste receptacles disappear?

The solution to some of these conundrums might be to use a paper bag. Under the new law, paper bags will still be available at retailers for a fee if a city or county decides to adopt a state-authorized, five-cent paper bag reduction fee. If, however, paper bags aren’t your thing, don’t worry, New Yorkers. We’ll adapt.

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In the tiny village in New York’s Hudson Valley where I reside, there are 1,135 people. The Village of Kinderhook is just one municipality out of the 16,411 self-governing communities across the U.S. with less than 10,000 residents.

Like other small municipalities, the structure of government is straightforward: a mayor, four trustees, a code-enforcement officer, a village clerk, a deputy village clerk, a department of public works, planning and zoning boards, and a historic preservation commission. In 2014, New York State rolled out a Climate Smart Communities initiative to assist large and small communities in pursuing actions to minimize the risks of climate change, reduce greenhouse gases, and commit to building a resilient, low-emission future.

To the surprise of many residents, the village’s elected officials decided that, unlike some other nearby communities at the time, it was important for the village to participate in the state’s initiative. A small group of concerned and determined Kinderhook residents stepped up. They formed a volunteer task force that would help the village contribute to the state’s ambitious goals.

To date, Kinderhook counts itself as one of 285 New York State communities to have adopted the Climate Smart Communities pledge. Those communities represent more than 8.3 million people – or 43 percent of the state’s population.

Adopting a Climate Crisis Resolution

At the village’s February 2020 board meeting, following discussions about nuts-and-bolts issues like snow removal, stop signs, and building-code violations, Kinderhook’s elected officials went a step further.  They adopted a Climate Crisis Resolution.

Knowing all five of the individuals who took this vote, I imagine that they probably didn’t see their “yes” votes as a moment of personal courage. But I saw the vote in a different light. At this critical juncture, when the environmental policies of the federal government are being driven backwards in the most dangerous and destructive manner, five elected officials—with differing viewpoints on local issues and varying political affiliations—stepped up and voted unanimously and yes, courageously, to adopt a symbolic declaration acknowledging the global climate emergency. Residents in attendance raised no objections. The moment seemed almost offhand– like a foregone conclusion. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

If one were to look back at the arc of the four-decade-long struggle for consensus on the reality of the cause-and-effect relationship between carbon emissions and global climate change, nothing in this struggle for the future has been—or still is—a foregone conclusion. In some quarters, even acknowledging the problem is still a difficult political and philosophical road to travel.

The Village of Kinderhook is only the fourth governing body in New York State (New York City, the Town of Saugerties, and Ulster County) and the seventy-eighth governing body in the U.S. to have officially passed a declaration of climate emergency. The reality is that only eight percent of Americans live in a community that has affirmed the seriousness of the climate task we’re facing.

If it is true that recognizing a problem is the first step in solving it, then the record of the world beyond our borders is more reassuring than the current record of where Americans land on the issue of climate change. Across the globe, more than 1,300 governing bodies in 25 countries—representing 809 million people—have declared a climate emergency and dedicated themselves and their governments to climate mobilization and driving down emissions to protect humanity and the natural world. The Village of Kinderhook should take pride in being counted among them.

Village of Kinderhook’s 2020 Climate Crisis Resolution

Whereas, climate change poses a real and increasing threat to our community and our way of life.

Whereas, adoption of the New York State Climate Smart Communities Pledge included a commitment to engage in an ongoing process of climate action.

Whereas, the ability to access potential funding and other resources for rapid mobilization to mitigate climate change can result in economic, environmental, and social benefit to our community.

We therefore hereby declare that a state of climate emergency exists.

[Image: Governing bodies, worldwide, that have declared a Climate Emergency. Searchable image at https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/world-map]

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Here’s a riddle. How many economists does it take to sound the alarm on the need for immediate action to address global climate change?  If you guessed 3,558, you’d be on the money. That’s the total number of American economists, plus four former chairs of the Federal Reserve, plus twenty-seven Nobel Laureates, plus fifteen former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, plus two former treasury secretaries—all of whom signed onto a statement explaining the rock-solid case for passing legislation to establish a carbon tax and dividends. Some of the most recognizable among the group include Alan Greenspan, George Schultz, Ben Bernanke, Lawrence Summers, Paul Volcker, and, my personal favorite, Janet Yellen. [Read the complete roster here.] Their declaration was published just over a year ago in The Wall Street Journal. Of course, America still isn’t listening. Acknowledging the importance of this overwhelming consensus on the part of the most accomplished American minds in the field of economics, the Climate Leadership Council called this urgent message “the largest public statement of economists in history.”

What Is a Carbon Tax?

Basically, a carbon tax is a fee on the burning of carbon-based fuels—or greenhouse gases—like oil, gas, and coal. A carbon tax represents a method by which the users of carbon fuels pay for the damage caused to the climate by the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A carbon tax, according to economists and scientists, is probably the single most effective tool in the toolbox to eliminate the use of carbon-based fuels. How the tax works is simple. The tax creates a strong monetary disincentive to the continued use of carbon-based fuels as a result of higher costs. These higher costs motivate a switch to clean energy by making non-carbon fuels and energy efficiency more cost competitive.

Has Any Community in the U.S. Passed a Carbon Tax?

Boulder, Colorado, became the first city to pass a voter-approved carbon tax in 2007. Boulder’s carbon tax is based on the number of kilowatt-hours used in the generation of electricity.  According to Boulder officials, the carbon tax has reduced emissions by more than 100,000 tons a year and generated up to $1.8 million in revenue per year at a modest cost to residential and commercial users. The funds are funneled through the city’s Office of Environmental Affairs and pay for implementation of the Boulder Climate Action, which includes rebates on energy-efficient equipment, expansion of bike lanes, and funding for community-based solutions to reduce energy consumption.

Is There Any Action on a Carbon Tax from the Federal Government?

The answer, unfortunately, is not much, even though public calls for federal climate action—including a price on carbon—from private citizens and environmental groups, as well as businesses in the energy, food, and transport sectors, have grown louder. Over the past few years, discussions in Congress about a federal carbon-tax proposal have repeatedly been floated only to fade away. The political will simply isn’t there.

With a Republican president in the White House and a Republican majority in the Senate, discussion of any new tax isn’t going to see the light of day. However, even though the most vociferous climate-change deniers occupy the Republican side of the two chambers of Congress, in 2019 carbon-tax bills have been introduced by both Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate. Carbon-tax bills introduced by Senator Christopher Coons (D-DE), Representative Dan Lipinski (D-IL), and Representative Francis Rooney (R-FL) have proposed using the tax-generated revenue for measures as varied as payroll tax cuts, investments in innovation and infrastructure, and carbon dividends (or equal lump-sum rebates to all U.S. citizens, as proposed by the economists’ statement).

No riddle here. From a climate as well as a social-justice and economic perspective, those benefits sound like a win-win if ever there was one.

Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends

Global climate change is a serious problem calling for immediate national action. Guided by sound economic principles, we are united in the following policy recommendations.

1. A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary. By correcting a well-known market failure, a carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future.
2. A carbon tax should increase every year until emissions reductions goals are met and be revenue neutral to avoid debates over the size of government. A consistently rising carbon price will encourage technological innovation and large-scale infrastructure development. It will also accelerate the diffusion of carbon-efficient goods and services.

III.        A sufficiently robust and gradually rising carbon tax will replace the need for various carbon regulations that are less efficient. Substituting a price signal for cumbersome regulations will promote economic growth and provide the regulatory certainty companies need for long- term investment in clean-energy alternatives.

1. To prevent carbon leakage and to protect U.S. competitiveness, a border carbon adjustment system should be established. This system would enhance the competitiveness of American firms that are more energy-efficient than their global competitors. It would also create an incentive for other nations to adopt similar carbon pricing.
2. To maximize the fairness and political viability of a rising carbon tax, all the revenue should be returned directly to U.S. citizens through equal lump-sum rebates. The majority of American families, including the most vulnerable, will benefit financially by receiving more in “carbon dividends” than they pay in increased energy prices.

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which was the first time man walked on the moon. December 11th, 1972 was the last time that man set foot on the moon. This means that it has been over 45 years since man last walked on the moon. I say “man” here because out of the 12 humans who have set foot on the moon, all of them happened to be men. One would think that with all the technological and societal advancements that we have made since the 70s, we would have made it back to the moon again already, and we definitely would have landed a woman on the moon. But alas, NASA had to stop sending men to the moon because they no longer had the money to fund the costly missions. In fact, in today’s terms, the cost of the Apollo missions would be roughly $152 billion. Because NASA stopped sending people to the moon, we now have to pay Russia roughly $80 million per astronaut to send them to the International Space Station. Of course with prices like these, there are going to be plenty of people opposed to furthering space exploration, when the money could be put towards a different area of need.

Here’s the dilemma: do we give NASA more money so that they can send people to the moon again, or do we allocate that money to a more important area of need in the United States? We must ask ourselves if the end goal of getting to the Moon was dedicated to scientific exploration, or was America simply trying to beat the Soviets as a way to show dominance? Interestingly enough, the United States has actually come pretty close to using space as a way to show military dominance over the Soviets through a little operation called Project A119. This was a military initiative undergone by the U.S. Air Force whose purpose was to strike the moon with a nuclear bomb. Yeah, you read that right. During the Space Race and the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force thought there was no better way to show off their power capabilities to the Soviet Union than by nuking the moon. They wanted the Soviets to be able to see the “mushroom cloud” of the nuclear blast from down on Earth, and thus, be struck with intense fear of the United States and its nuclear capabilities. Fortunately, the U.S. didn’t follow through with this plan since scientists determined that they would not receive the “mushroom cloud” reaction from the explosion that they would have wanted.

Thankfully, not everyone views space exploration as a means of promulgating military power like our current president does. Instead, there are people like Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, and Caroline Kennedy, daughter of John F. Kennedy, who have a more peaceful vision for the future of space exploration. In a recent interview with CBS, the Amazon CEO, supported by Kennedy, discussed his theory of The Great Inversion. He explains that currently we send things into space that are made on Earth, but through this Great Inversion, we will have highly manufactured products made in space and then sent back down to Earth. He gives the example of microprocessors as one of these products that would be helpful to have produced in space. Eventually, he believes that the Earth will be zoned solely residential, and that people will be able to choose between living on Earth or living somewhere else in space. If you think all of this sounds optimistic, wait until you hear what’s in store for Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin.

Founded almost 20 years ago, Bezos’s Blue Origin has become one of the top tech companies to achieve many advancements in the field of space travel. Ever since Bezos was in high school, he has believed that the Earth is finite, and in order for the world economy and population to keep expanding, space exploration is the way to go. In fact, Jeff Bezos is so optimistic about space travel, that he believes he will journey to space within his lifetime. He plans to do this by pioneering a new industry dedicated to space tourism. One of his first projects in this new field is that of the suborbital rocket system named New Shepard, after the first American who traveled into space, Alan Shepard.

Aboard New Shepard, passengers will experience an 11 minute flight just above the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and the boundary of outer space. If this sounds like something you’d be willing to try, then I suggest you visit Blue Origin’s website and reserve your seat. That way, when tickets for the 11 minute journey into space go on sale, you can be first in line (along with the many other people who have already reserved their seat too of course). Additionally, on their website you can request to have a payload sent to space on New Shepard for research and technology purposes, but fair warning, this requires a lot of paperwork, so serious inquiries only!

Thus far, New Shepard has successfully flown 8 NASA payloads to space, completed 12 test flights, and most recently, it completed its sixth flight reusing the same rocket and capsule, which further emphasizes the importance of reusability to Blue Origin. As previously mentioned, space travel costs a lot of money, but Bezos believes that we can make it cheaper by creating reusable rockets. In fact, next in store for Blue Origin is New Glenn, a heavy-lift launch vehicle named after the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn. Like New Shepard, New Glenn is designed to carry both research payloads and people, but it is expected to have a lifetime of at least 25 missions, and is twice as big as any existing rocket. Thus far, $2.5 billion has been invested in New Glenn, and its first mission is set to take place in 2021. Of course this is a large sum of money, but when you’re the CEO of Amazon, it’s simple.

Since this year is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we can’t help but wonder, when are humans returning to the moon? Well according to the Trump administration, Americans will be back on the moon by the year 2024. In order to help NASA achieve this goal, Jeff Bezos and his company have designed a lunar landing module called Blue Moon. But, Bezos’s plan is not to just go to the moon and come right back. Instead, he envisions a lunar colony as the first step in his greater plan to have humans live in outer space. Blue Moon’s framework is essential to achieving this dream, since the landing module is powered by liquid hydrogen, meaning that it is able to be refueled upon landing, since NASA has confirmed the presence of ice found on the moon. Bezos is so optimistic about humans living in outer space that he envisions humans living in O’Neill Colonies, which were first introduced by American physicist Gerard K. O’Neill. These colonies are basically spinning structures that feature agricultural areas, high speed transportation, and even entire cities, all floating in a giant cylinder in outer space. Bezos has described the climate in these cylinders as like “Maui on it’s best day all year long.” Who wouldn’t want to live in such a place? Well, this doesn’t really matter to anyone reading this right now, since we will be long gone by the time these O’Neill Colonies could even be put into use.

On a brighter note, something that we might be able to witness within our lifetime is humans on Mars! NASA actually plans to have boots on Mars by the 2030s. When it comes to private companies though, Bezos is focused on space tourism and going to the moon, whereas, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, is more determined to get humans to Mars. Founded in 2002, the goal of SpaceX as stated on their website is to “enable people to live on other planets,” the first of which being Mars. Elon Musk believes that if he could make the cost of flying to Mars equivalent to the cost of buying a $500,000 home in California, then he thinks that there would be enough people willing to buy a ticket, that humans could eventually inhabit Mars. Like Bezos, many of Musk’s aspirations may sound impossible, but we have to remember that at some point in time, humans thought it impossible to put a man on the moon.

But at the end of the day, we must ask ourselves, is the goal to send humans to Mars, or is the goal to colonize Mars? Should we be fixing our own problems here on this planet before we destroy another one? With these questions in mind, one can only wonder, is all of this just a big waste of money? Should we be using the one billion dollar yearly budget that Blue Origin has on something else? Even back when man landed on the moon 50 years ago, there were concerns that the money the U.S. government was spending on space exploration could be better spent. A man named Ralph Abernathy coordinated a group of 500 people at the Kennedy Space Center days before the Apollo 11 launch, as a way to protest the government’s spending on the project, since there were starving children out on the streets. Another reason why people might be hesitant to top companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX making rapid advancements is because there is a possibility that the U.S. government will view these advancements as possible tools of war, like they almost did with the Soviets. But then again, that’s what the Space Force is for, right?

To wrap up this article on a somewhat lighter note, here’s a short list of 10 things you might not have known about the missions to the moon:

1. As a member of the Apollo 14 mission, Alan Shepard became the first man to hit a golf ball on the moon.
2. On the moon, if you were to drop a hammer and a feather at the same time, they would fall to the surface at the same speed.
3. The Apollo 11 crew took remnants of fabric and a small piece of wood from the original Wright Flyer to the moon.
4. Buzz Aldrin took the Holy Communion once Apollo 11 landed on the moon before Armstrong took his famous first step.
5. President Nixon had a statement already written in case the Apollo 11 mission didn’t go as planned, and the astronauts died on the mission.
6. A Jamestown cargo tag from a ship that traveled from England to the New World in 1611 flew to the ISS and back on the 400th anniversary of the colony.
7. The light-saber used by Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi was sent to orbit aboard Space Shuttle Discovery to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars trilogy.
8. Commander Mark Polansky took a teddy bear to the moon that was a replica of one owned by a Holocaust survivor.
9. Astronaut Satoshi Furukawa built a Lego replica of the International Space Station while aboard the International Space Station itself.
10. Astronauts trained for walking on the moon in zero gravity by being suspended sideways and walking on a slanted wall.

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Acknowledging human’s contributions to climate change is pretty easy to understand, at least for 60% of the American population.

But at times, political action in support of addressing climate change can create a situation in which the commitment to environmental change is overshadowed by the irony of the tactics.

Such was the case on Friday, September 20 when student protesters in Washington, DC and elsewhere formed human barricades on major thoroughfares, bringing traffic to a halt. At first, it seems like a really good idea. It is a way of broadening the awareness to the ‘content with fossil fuels’ part of the population. The message was that their complacency will not be tolerated by most young people who will have to live with the inaction of today’s ruling class of adults.

But the problem with the tactic of blocking traffic was vividly pointed out by ABC reporter Kristen Powers, not to be confused with fellow journalist Kirsten Powers. Kristen Powers made the following observation in Twitter protesters in DC:

She points out an obvious disconnect in the protest. Some people walking by the protesters asked them why they were blocking cars that are burning fossil fuels to get their point across. The longer that the cars are stalled in traffic, the more pollutants that their vehicles emit into the atmosphere, thus contributing to further global warming and climate change.

Clearly, the protesters made their point. But they were aware of the irony of how their tactics were worsening a situation that they were trying to make better? I don’t know if it would have been better had they seen the disconnect, or not see the disconnect.

Even if the protesters had not been generating more pollution into the atmosphere, one has to wonder about the effectiveness of tactics that create victims out of people who are possibly innocent by-standers. Does pissing anyone off really help the cause? There are times when protesters of varying stripes seem to ignore that their tactics can create backlash.

None of this should detract from the remarkable work most of the protesters who are passionately trying to awaken America’s adults to the reality that climate challenges have far greater impact on today’s youth than today’s adults. Like every component of social change, protests require fore-thought and planning. Just the way in which our government would be better if there was a Department of Common Sense (perhaps instead of the Supreme Court), protesters could benefit in their planning with a few critical contrarians. All the same, mega-kudos to the protesters, and last Friday was a remarkable learning experience for all of us.

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New York State has approximately 2,625 miles of coastline. There are, of course, a myriad of reasons for protecting the state’s coastline. Beyond the coastline’s beauty and its role as an irreplaceable habitat for wildlife and endangered species, there is the indisputable fact that those 2,625 miles of coastline support industries that are vital to New York States’ economy—industries like commercial fishing, tourism, recreation, and shipping that employ more than 345,000 workers and contribute billions to the state’s revenues. It’s no surprise, then, that when Donald Trump signed what he called his “America-First Offshore Energy Strategy” in 2017, the response from New York, as well as other coastal states, was immediate and vehement. By declaring his intention to reverse an Obama-era ban on drilling in Alaska and parts of the Atlantic and his intention to open up previously protected areas of the Outer Continental Shelf to gas and oil exploration, Trump threw down a gauntlet that coastal states could not ignore.

That initial salvo was followed up with the announcement in 2018 that the Interior Department intended to hold forty-seven lease sales for oil and gas drilling between 2019 and 2024 in more than two dozen previously protected areas, nine of which would have been along the Eastern Seaboard. Since that initial signing and the Interior Department’s announcement, every state on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts has declared its opposition to offshore drilling. Legislatures on the East, the West, and the Gulf coasts have crafted various legislative responses to protect their coastal assets. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, 200 municipalities, 1,200 local officials, and 40,000 businesses in coastal areas have declared in no uncertain terms their opposition to the Trump administration’s embrace of the oil and gas industries’ reckless pursuit of profits that fail to take into account the environmental costs of oil spills, climate change, and habitat destruction.

This past week, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation—passed with the overwhelming support of the newly elected Democratic majority in the state legislature—prohibiting all oil and gas exploration in coastal waters. In a statement at the signing, Cuomo declared, “This bill says no way are you going to drill off the coast of Long Island and New York, because we must lead the way as an alternative to what this federal government is doing.”

New York’s legislation bans the use of state-owned coastal areas for oil and natural-gas drilling. The legislation also seeks to prevent the Office of General Services as well as the Department of Environmental Conservation from authorizing any leases intended to increase oil or natural gas production in federal waters. Going even further, the legislation prohibits the development of any infrastructure associated with the development or production of oil or natural gas from the coastal waters of New York State.

With this signing, New York State joins California, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Oregon, all of which have enacted their own laws preventing the expansion of federal leasing for oil and gas exploration off their shores. Similar legislation has been introduced in Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

On a positive note, the courts have stepped into the fight for preserving America’s coastal waters. On April 25, 2019, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt revealed that the Trump administration’s plans to hold lease sales and expand offshore drilling in federal waters along the East Coast and the Arctic have been suspended indefinitely, following a federal court ruling upholding a ban on drilling in Alaska and parts of the Atlantic put into place during the Obama administration.

Watch the video below, called “Why Trump Is Wrong about Offshore Drilling,” for a brief history of how offshore drilling has been traditionally regulated and an explanation of the dangers of opening up new areas to drilling.

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In an emotional address to members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on April 16, 2019, sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg delivered a stark message. “I want you to panic,” she began. “I want you to act as if the house is on fire.”

Thunberg, the founder of a now-global movement of student climate activists called Fridays for Future, has become the inspiration for more than 2,000 student strikes in more than 100 countries around the world. Inspired by the walk-outs of traumatized students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where fourteen students were brutally gunned down, Thunberg saw in the students’ anti-gun tactics an opportunity to harness through similar actions the energy of young people to jolt politicians out of their complacency about the looming dangers of climate change.

See you for yourself in the video below why Thunberg’s eloquent and passionate plea for immediate climate action has both inspired legions of young people and also forced some climate-change denying politicians and fossil-fuel lobbyists to take seriously this determined young woman.

In fact, the climate deniers are taking the threat of Thunberg’s rhetoric so seriously that they’ve launched a campaign questioning her motives and casting doubt on the sincerity of her efforts. There’s a good chance those politicians and lobbyists are seeing exactly what I see: first, a young woman who poses a threat to the status quo and the fossil-fuel industry’s control of the narrative. And, second, the shocking realization that an unusually gifted sixteen-year-old might just be today’s most electrifying spokesperson for climate-change activism out there, and that there’s a fighting chance that Thunberg—and her young supporters—could succeed in convincing the global community to heed the emergency alarms, ignore the special interests, and unite to address the crisis that is climate change.

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In 1985, three British scientists working at the British Antarctic Survey stunned the world when they discovered that at certain times of the year a hole opened up in the stratospheric ozone layer above the South Pole. Their observations, backed up by data provided by NASA satellites, were published in Nature magazine in that same year.

Subsequent studies demonstrated that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used at the time in air-conditioning and refrigeration systems as well as in aerosol sprays, were tearing open a hole in earth’s ozone layer, causing dangerous levels of ultraviolet, cancer-inducing radiation to reach the earth’s surface.

Just two years later, in August 1987, a unified global community rallied together and finalized The Montreal Protocol, which phased out the production and consumption of man-made ozone-depleting substances.  At the time, America’s Republican president, Ronald Reagan, encouraged the Senate to ratify the agreement, which it did.

In the speech he delivered at the signing, Reagan took the opportunity to underscore both the global nature of environmental challenges and the need for international cooperation. Here are his words:

“The Montreal Protocol is a model of cooperation. It is a product of the recognition and international consensus that ozone depletion is a global problem, both in terms of its causes and its effects.”

This historic agreement—ratified at a time when science still held sway over at least some of public policy—has been hailed as “one of the most successful multilateral agreements in history.”

Before the 2016 election that brought Donald Trump to the White House, preceding administrations had affirmed America’s commitment by joining the international community and agreeing to additional amendments to the protocol. The fifth and most recent amendment, called the Kigali Amendment, was negotiated as late as 2016 with the full support of the Obama administration.

The Kigali Amendment proposes to phase down the production and consumption worldwide of hydro-fluorocarbons (HFCs), which have been used as a substitute in refrigeration and air conditioning since the phase-out of CFCs mandated by the Montreal Protocol. As understanding of climate science has advanced, it’s been proven that HFCs are greenhouse gases that are more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the atmosphere.

Currently, thirteen Republican senators, led by Louisiana’s John Kennedy and Maine’s Susan Collins, have recommended that the Trump administration support their efforts to gain support for ratification of the Kigali Amendment. Tragically, even with the support of the refrigeration and air-conditioning industries and projections of increased manufacturing jobs and significant export growth, the Trump administration is slow walking the proposal and calling for more study on the issue.

Good news

In the big picture, The Montreal Protocol proves that a firm and long-term commitment by the international community to science-based responses to climate change can achieve significant results. According to multiple studies, including one released at the end of 2018 by the United Nations entitled “Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2018” and another completed by NASA, thirty years after implementation of The Montreal Protocol, the phased elimination of CFCs has done exactly what the scientists had hoped it would. The ozone layer is now on the path to recovery.

And there’s even better news. The Montreal Protocol’s Scientific Assessment Panel now projects that the ozone layer will see almost complete recovery by the middle of the twenty-first century.

That’s great news for the global community. With full, continuing implementation, this still-groundbreaking agreement will have long-lasting health and environmental benefits. It’s estimated that:

• 280 million cases of skin cancer will be avoided.
• Approximately 1.6 million skin cancer deaths will be prevented.
• More than 45 million cases of cataracts will be avoided in the U.S. alone.
• Decreased ultraviolet radiation will prevent reduced agricultural output and the disruption of marine ecosystems.

To view a video on the science of ozone, CFCs, and HFCs, watch here.

The post The Montreal Protocol: Saving Earth’s vital ozone layer appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s official. Six years and two lawsuits after then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg first proposed a ban on plastic-foam products, New York City is now a polystyrene- (or Styrofoam- as it’s more commonly called) free zone. New York City’s ban includes all single-use Styrofoam coffee cups, soup bowls, plates, trays, and clamshell-style take-out cartons, as well as packing peanuts.

If you’re in the camp that thinks that a Styrofoam ban is nothing more than a tree hugger’s dream come true, think again. For New York City, which generates more than 14 million tons of trash each year with a tab of more than $2.3 billion for trash collection and disposal, the ban is an economic imperative.

It’s not just New York

As of 2019, the Big Apple joins a group of environmentally committed and financially challenged municipalities and counties across the country where Styrofoam already is officially banned—among them, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Miami Beach, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle. In California, more than eighty cities, towns, and counties are full in on the ban, with more to come. And that’s not all. A host of other major cities, like Chicago, Boston, Honolulu, and Philadelphia, as well as smaller cities and towns in red, blue, and purple states, currently are considering bans.

If you’re thinking this sounds like a movement that’s gathering momentum, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. You’d also be correct to assume that the road to Styrofoam-free zones has generated considerable pushback, particularly in the food industry.  After all, a ban on Styrofoam packaging will dramatically alter how restaurants and street food vendors serve food to the public. In places where the ban is in place, food purveyors will now be required to use biodegradable, environmentally friendly containers. And although biodegradable take-out containers are cheaper than ever, they’re still more costly than containers manufactured from traditional Styrofoam.

Costs

How much more costly is the question. Let’s look at the facts. On average, Styrofoam cups cost $25 per 1,000. Biodegradable cups cost approximately $100 for 1,000. For a business that uses 1,000 cups per year, the additional cost is $75 per year. For green take-out containers, the additional cost to businesses is approximately $140 per year on a count of 1,000.

On the other side of the spreadsheet are some troubling facts. First, there’s the issue of disposal.  Styrofoam products, manufactured from non-renewable fossil fuels and toxic chemicals, take a minimum of 500 years to biodegrade. Think about that. Then there’s the fact that 99.8% of Styrofoam products end up either in landfills or in the oceans where they sicken or poison wildlife. And did you know that Styrofoam products now account for an astonishing 30% of all of the waste in U.S. landfills? One estimate captures the scale of the problem on the micro level: One individual purchasing a disposable cup of coffee every day generates approximately 23 pounds of waste per year.

Health issues

Second, there are potentially harmful health issues that have flown under the radar for far too long.  It’s been known for many years that as polystyrene comes into contact with hot, greasy, or acidic foods, the chemicals and toxins used in the plastics’ manufacture can leach into the food we ingest and the hot beverages we drink. Five years ago, in 2014, the National Research Council stepped up and sounded the alarm by signing off on the National Toxicology Program’s conclusion that polystyrene should be listed as a human carcinogen.

Economics, health, and the environment. All will be positively impacted by the commitment of communities—large and small—across the country to ban single-use Styrofoam products. And in case we’ve forgotten, this is what commonsense, fact-based, and responsible governance looks like.

If you’re interested in learning more about the health issues concerning polystyrene, a good place to start is to take a look at the information provided by Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, a coalition representing 450 organizations and businesses and more than eleven million parents and professionals who share the goal of educating the public about health issues related to toxic chemicals.

The post Why New York City has gone Styrofoam-free appeared first on Occasional Planet.