 Climate Change
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Image: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
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Biden Announces Roadmap to Build a Climate-Resilient Economy
By Amy Lupica, ODP Daily Editor
In May, President Biden ordered government agencies to evaluate and develop a plan to mitigate the risk that climate change presents to the US economy. Last week, the administration released a first-of-its-kind roadmap to building a climate-resilient economy. The 40-page report was announced Friday and lays out concrete government-wide steps to protecting financial, insurance, and housing markets — as well as individual savings for Americans.
Why This Matters: Climate change isn’t just destructive; it’s expensive. Climate disasters like hurricanes and wildfires cost the nation tens of billions of dollars every year. And residents caught in the path of catastrophe can be left struggling to access recovery aid, pay insurance premiums, or rebuild their homes. Additionally, climate change can increase serious health risks like COVID-19, and other respiratory and cardiac problems, which can be expensive to treat. As explained by Gina McCarthy, the White House National Climate Adviser, “If this year has shown us anything, it’s that climate change poses an ongoing urgent and systemic risk to our economy and to the lives and livelihoods of everyday Americans, and we must act now.”
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 Water
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Image: Sebastian Kasten via Wikimedia Commons
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Northern Canadian Indigenous Communities Face Water Contamination & Crisis
By Elizabeth Love, ODP Contributing Writer
Authorities in the Canadian Arctic territory Nunavut, announced a state of emergency this week due to a possible contamination event affecting the City of Iqaluit’s water supply.
Tests were performed after residents reported the smell of gasoline coming from their tap water, but they came back clean. However, the potential for petroleum hydrocarbon contamination was detected in subsequent tests, which prompted officials to investigate.
Why This Matters: Petroleum hydrocarbons can cause serious health risks, like cancer, to people of all ages — even at low levels of exposure. The population of Iqaluit is largely Inuit, and the declared state of emergency is yet another example of environmental injustice for Indigenous peoples. Many First Nations communities in Canada have already been living without safe water for decades. They have been forced to live on bottled and prepackaged water, which can be incredibly expensive in remote regions like Iqaluit.
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Climate Change
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Study Finds Disparities In Escaping Extreme Heat
By Natasha Lasky, ODP Staff Writer
As the earth’s temperature skyrockets, so will the demand to beat the heat with air conditioning. While access to cooler air is yet another example of climate inequity, a new study published in Nature found that people in lower-income countries may also have to pay much more than those in wealthy countries.
Why this Matters: The study shows that climate change will widen the vast inequities that already exist between the rich and the poor. And this isn’t just a matter of sweating it out; heat can be deadly, and pressure on power grids from high demand for cooling can lead to blackouts. To protect the world from increasingly extreme heat, action must be taken to close the cooling gap, and find less energy-intensive ways to keep cool.
The paper argues for “the critical role of economic development in shaping how energy consumption patterns respond to climate change” and concludes “that much of the world will remain too poor in the coming decades to spend substantially on energy-intensive cooling technologies.”
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 Air
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Image: Andrew Mandemaker via Wikimedia Commons
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One Cool Thing: A Breath of Fresh Air
Delegates attending the COP26 conference in Glasgow will get to see a very cool display during their stay. So cool, in fact, that it’s been frozen since 1765. Artist Wayne Binitie and scientists of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have retrieved an Antarctic time capsule containing the world’s purest air. The pocket of atmosphere was captured in ice just before the industrial revolution, which catapulted the rapid pollution of our world.
Like rings on trees, the Antarctic ice has layers upon layers beneath it, allowing scientists to pinpoint precisely when air, or even volcanic ash, was captured inside. “Snow falls in Antarctica year by year — but there’s no melting going on,” explained glaciologist Dr. Robert Mulvaney of the BAS. “So, the snow builds up and compresses all the years of snow beneath. As we drill down, we’re driving further and further into the past.”
The Polar Zero exhibit will display the ice core and even allow visitors to touch and taste the ice. It “seems more urgent than ever before to ask what it means to touch and be in touch with the earth,” said Binitie.
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