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Carbon Rangers/Ecozoic Times
Volume 11 No. 4

April, 2018
EARTH DAY 4/22/18
END PLASTIC POLLUTION
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Dear Reader,

Earth Day.  We have come to Earth Day 2018.  April 22nd is the official day. The theme this year : End Plastic Pollution.   The banner photo above sums up the pervasiveness of our plastic pollution.  You will be made aware of this problem in numberless public service efforts I would hope. 



Plastic First.  This edition of the Carbon Rangers/Ecozoic Times divides into three parts.  First we talk about  Plastic Pollution.  Then, we turn toward the fossil fuel and ghg challenge now complicated by concern that we are falling behind the Paris Agreement goals agreed to in 2015.

Some Shifting on Fossil Fuels.  You may recall our March issue showed the world energy balance overwhelmingly dominated by fossil fuels- 81% according to good authority.  We can see some signs in the industry that the tide may be turning. Some revelations of industry knowing about the problem for a long time but not acting to make a remedy.  Some corporations stepping away from the fossil fuel industries.   Not everywhere and not all at once.   To change everything we will need everyone.

Good News. Finally, there is a brief catalog of what I am calling the "good news" section- some encouragement in the face of too much that is awful to contemplate.  Can we not take solace occasionally in a bright spark of goodness?   And please click on the Drawdown link below and join with me on the Thomas Berry Forum Team for the Drawdown Challenge.  

Pope Francis and Thomas Berry have wisdom for us at the finish of the news stories this month.



Let me hear from you if you have ideas for improving the Carbon Rangers.
Email: kcawley1@mac.com


Cordially,
Br. Kevin


Edmund Rice International  
http://edmundriceinternational.org/jpic/

Thomas Berry Forum for Ecological Dialogue at Iona
http://www.iona.edu/About/Iona-in-Community/The-Thomas-Berry-Forum-for-Ecological-Dialogue.aspx

EARTH DAY- END PLASTIC POLLUTION
Earth Day this year will focus on mobilizing the world to End Plastic Pollution, including creating support for a global effort to eliminate single-use plastics, along with global regulation for the disposal of plastics. See: https://www.earthday.org/earthday/ INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGNS ON REDUCING PLASTIC USE


Reduce Plastic. Globally, campaigns are being rolled to eliminate or reduce the use of plastic in our lives. This is at a critical juncture, as time is not on our side! Plastic is a substance the earth cannot digest, is the strapline of the Plastic Pollution Coalition campaign and sums up how urgent the plastic pollution problem is. A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and these bottles cannot biodegrade – they virtually last forever, some estimate more than 500 years.

Plastic in Oceans.  Millions of these bottles end up in our oceans and are wreaking havoc on marine life around the planet. Ellen McArthur campaigns to promote the circular economy in which plastic bottles are reused, refilled and re-cycled rather than used once and thrown away. The circular economy is one that we can all embrace, so it is good to see that the United Kingdom is now set to join 38 countries in having a recycling scheme in which all containers, whether plastic, glass or metal, will to be covered by a deposit return (DRS) scheme in retail stores.

Ninety Nine Percent Recycled in Germany.  In Germany a DRS was introduced in 2003 and 99 per cent of plastic bottles are now recycled. It is now time that all governments introduced such schemes to curb the millions of plastic bottles a day that go unrecycled.

Plastic- Getting Urgent Now

The plastics crisis is more urgent than you know. Recycling bottles won’t fix it
John Vidal
THE GUARDIAN. MARCH 28, 2018 . Link
Photograph: screengrab/BBC NHU

Ubiquitous. Since we started engineering polymers to make plastic on a mass scale in the 1950s, this byproduct of the petrochemical industry, which uses about 6% of all the oil we extract a year, has spread to myriad manufacturing processes. Plastic is now ubiquitous, insidious and impossible to avoid. It makes up our clothes, containers, bottles, electronics, food trays, cups and paints.

Global Choice. Our cars depend on it, so do our computers, roofs and drain pipes. It’s the global packaging material of choice. We sleep on it, wear it, watch it, and are in direct bodily contact with it in one form or other all day and night.
 
Blue Planet.  ‘The BBC’s hugely popular Blue Planet series and a stream of scientific studies have made us aware of how the oceans are being polluted. It may have profound societal benefits, but this most successful of all man-made materials sticks around for centuries. When exposed to sunlight, oxygen or the action of waves, it doesn’t biodegrade but simply fragments into smaller and smaller bits, until microscopic or nano-sized particles enter the food chain, the air, the soil and the water we drink.
Blue Planet Spreads the Word
Human Health Impacts.  The BBC’s hugely popular Blue Planet series and a stream of scientific studies have made us aware of how the oceans are being polluted, but we still have little understanding of how human health is impacted by the many synthetic chemicals and additives that are used to give plastic its qualities. In the past few years, minute microplastics and fibres, measuring the width of a human hair or far less, have been found in an extraordinary range of products, such as honey and sugarshellfishbottled and tap waterbeer, processed foods, table salt and soft drinks.

Carcinogens.  In one study, 95% of all adults tested in the US had known carcinogenic chemical bisphenol A in their urine. In another, 83% of samples of tap water tested in seven countries were found to contain plastic microfibres. A study published last week revealed plastics contamination in more than 90% of bottled-water samples, which were from 11 different brands. And earlier this year the River Tame in Manchester was found to have 517,000 particles of plastic per cubic metre of sediment – that’s nearly double the highest concentration ever measured across the world. 

More and More Found.  The more researchers look, the more they find in the human body. The same scientists who raised the alarm on air pollution from the deadly particles emitted by diesel vehicles are now finding plastic microparticles raining down on cities, and blown into the air from cars and construction sites, washing lines and food packaging. Indoor plastic pollution may be even worse than outdoors, with a single wash of sports kit or man-made textiles found to release thousands of microfibres into the air.
Plastic Now in Food
In What We Eat.  At a recent UK workshop convened by the marine group Common Seas, 30 scientists, doctors and others compared notes, and agreed unanimously that plastic is now in what we eat, drink and breathe, and constitutes a significant and growing threat to human health.

 California and Indonesia.  Fish caught off the coasts of California and Indonesia and sold in local markets have been found to have plastics and textile fibres in their guts, raising concerns over food safety.  Chelsea Rochman at the University of California Davis school of veterinary medicine and her team visited a fish market in Half Moon Bay and Princeton in California and in Makassar, Indonesia.


Comprehensive Plan Needed…It is not enough to single out plastic bottles, coffee cups, or the microbeads found in cosmetics. We urgently need  to form a comprehensive plastic action plan. Banning all plastic bags and single-use packaging would be a good start, but we need to go way beyond that. Plastic production has to be reduced, just as alternatives should be encouraged. Regulators must think about phasing out whole groups of chemicals of concern, rather than slowly restricting individual chemicals one at a time, and consumers must be helped to understand what they are being exposed to, and to navigate the complexity of what can be recycled, composted or burned.
Massive Plastic Output to Grow Further

Huge Increase.  In the 1950s the world made about 2m tonnes of plastic a year. Now that figure is 330m tonnes a year – and it is set to treble again by 2050. It’s not enough to return a few plastic bottles, or even to pick up an old mattress on a beach.   Link. 

Million Per Minute.  A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021.   New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade. 

Twenty Thousand Per Second.  The demand, equivalent to about 20,000 bottles being bought every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable desire for bottled water and the spread of a western, urbanised “on the go” culture to China and the Asia Pacific region.
United Nations Surprises
The U.N. Security Council surprised expert observers in February when it passed a resolution recognizing the "adverse effects of climate change" as a central factor in the destabilization of Somalia. "The fact an old-school body like the Security Council [is] sitting up and taking notice of climate security risks should not be underestimated," said Camilla Born, a senior policy adviser at the climate change think tank E3G. "Never before has this powerful body mandated the U.N. to practically deal with climate change in the here and now as a threat to peace."
UN Secretary General: Alarm Bells re: GHG!

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres wondered aloud to reporters in New York recently about "how many more alarm bells must go off before the world rises to the challenge" of slowing global warming. "Climate change is still moving much faster than we are," he said. The "tsunami of data" from recent extreme weather events and wildfires "should create a storm of concern." And there was no shortage of new data this week to further raise concerns.

Sahara Expanding. The Sahara, which is already the world's largest desert, is expanding across once-fertile swaths of Sudan and Chad, according to a study published Thursday in the Journal of Climate. "The finding was impressive because it was happening in the summer season—the growing season where Africa receives most of its rainfall, a really important season for agriculture," said senior author Sumant Nigam, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at the University of Maryland.
Mobil Knew of GHG Impact in 1998, Then Merged With Exxon
Mobil Knew.  Meanwhile, ThinkProgress obtained video taken during an internal Mobil Oil meeting in 1998 at which then-CEO Lucio Noto addressed employee concerns about the impact of the company's products on the planet's climatic stability. While Noto acknowledged that "climate change associated with the buildup of greenhouse gases" could be a "big issue," he said the company—which merged with Exxon in 1999—was "not prepared to admit that the science is a closed fact and that we should take draconian steps tomorrow to reduce CO2 gases." Besides, he added, "customers using our products probably account for 95 percent of those emissions"—an argument used by Big Oil today to defend itself in a growing number of climate liability lawsuits.

The Next Section -

Good News Only...


People are always asking, "what can I do?"

THE DRAWDOWN CHALLENGE IS A TERRIFIC WAY TO GET CONNECTED AND FIND OUT HOW YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS CAN ENGAGE JOIN THE THOMAS BERRY FORUM TEAM AND HELP US WIN POINTS!

DRAWDOWN CHALLENGE: Link to Berry Forum Team





Company Halts Controversial Canadian Pipeline Expansion After Fierce Opposition. 

Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images
 
Kinder Morgan announced Sunday that it would stop all nonessential spending on the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, citing a need to protect their shareholders because “the Project is now facing unquantifiable risk.”

First Nations Opposed.  The company has already spent C$1.1 billion (over $865 million) on the expansion project that, if completed, would allow the pipeline to transport three times more crude oil from Alberta to British Columbia. But it has faced fierce opposition from the B.C. government and the First Nations, who have challenged the federal government’s approval of the project in court.

Deadline May 31.  “The uncertainty as to whether we will be able to finish what we start leads us to the conclusion that we should protect the value that KML has, rather than risking billions of dollars on an outcome that is outside of our control,” Kinder Morgan CEO Steve Kean said in a statement. The company issued a deadline and ultimatum: Unless it’s given assurance by May 31 that British Columbia will not be able to continue blocking construction, it will drop the project altogether.

Protesters in Storm.  The announcement came just one day after protesters gathered for a demonstration at the construction site even in the midst of a storm, forcing the company to stop activities for the day.
Vertical Forest in Milan
In a charming interview republished from America Oggi, the architect Stefano Boeri reflects on how his famous tree-covered skyscrapers in Milan have fared.  All 800 trees planted in 2012 are still thriving and the new ecosystem has attracted swallows, he says, expressing hopes that the concept will spread to cities around the world.

Future Crunch news….

 
The global media went into a frenzy over Cape Town's water shortages and Day Zero. Strangely, nobody is reporting how the Mother City successfully averted the crisis. apolitical
 
Portugal generated enough renewable energy to power the entire country in March, and the government has also just suspended all fossil fuel subsidiesQuartz

More bad news for fossil fuelsNew Zealand just banned new oil and gas exploration, and only half of the United States' coal plants earned enough to cover their costs last year.
 
A new report says that, thanks to shifting tastes amongst millennial, 70% of the world's population is reducing meat consumption or leaving meat off the table altogether. Forbes


Four years after imposing a 5p levy, the United Kingdom has used 9 billion fewer plastic bags, and the number being found on the seabed has plummeted. Independent

Colombia, Indonesia, India. Colombia has been ordered by its courts to protect the Amazon, in Indonesia they're cleaning up the world's dirtiest river, and in Mumbai, turtles are returning to the beaches.
USA Secretary of Interior  Zinke Sees 'little' Demand For New U.S. Offshore Drilling  Reuters, April 6, 2018
 
Protests From Coastal States. PRINCETON, NJ (Reuters) - U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said on Friday that he sees little demand from oil and gas companies for new offshore drilling leases, which could pose problems for his plan to ramp up output from federal waters.   The comments come just three months after Zinke had proposed opening nearly all U.S. ocean coastlines to drilling, in a bid to raise domestic oil and gas production. The plan sparked immediate protests from coastal states, environmentalists and the tourism industry.
 
Auction Fell Short.  Zinke said a record-sized U.S. auction of offshore oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico, held in March, showed "modest to little" interest from drillers, and he added the likelihood for strong demand elsewhere is small.   "If you don't have the infrastructure, it's more expensive," Zinke said at an offshore wind power conference in Princeton, New Jersey, responding to a question about the possibility of drilling off the East Coast.

Bloomberg News – Fossil Fuels Losing Ground

Economics Not Working.  Analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) turned some heads  with the release of a report concluding that the economics of fossil fuels are rapidly losing ground as the cost of renewable energy technology plummets. By 2023—just over five years from now—solar and wind energy will become less expensive than coal power in most places, BNEF said. "Some existing coal and gas power stations with sunk capital costs will continue to have a role for many years, doing a combination of bulk generation and [grid] balancing.

Record Low Prices for Wind and Solar.  But the economic case for building new coal and gas capacity is crumbling," said Elena Giannakopoulou, BNEF's head of energy economics. "We are seeing record low prices being set for wind and solar," said Seb Henbest, head of BNEF for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "This is having a powerful effect. It's changing perceptions."
Laudato Si': On Care For Our Common Home   

"The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity and the responsibility of everyone. If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all. If we do not, we burden our consciences with the weight of having denied the existence of others. ". Read More.
 
1914-2009

Message from Thomas Berry

“Here we might observe that the basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the earth. If the dynamics of the universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the sun, and formed the earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.” (Thomas Berry, “The New Story,” in The Dream of the Earth, 137).
Photo by Lou Niznik 10–6–1999
Copyright © 2018 Edmund Rice International, All rights reserved.


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