17 May 2017, Yale Climate Connections, Sea-level rise, but no mention of ‘climate change’. A film maker documents sea-level rise risks facing Virginia’s Hampton Roads region, and avoids the baggage of the terms ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming.’ In Hampton Roads, a moniker for both a massive natural harbor in southeast Virginia and a metropolitan region comprising 17 small cities and municipalities, tidal flooding is as common as Chesapeake Bay blue crabs. Oh yes. Lest one forget, Hampton Roads is also home to the world’s largest Naval base. Low-lying roads flood so often that drivers use depth markers positioned on highway shoulders to gauge whether they’ll be able to pass through. Why is this happening? Sea level rise. And why are the seas rising? Well, let’s not talk about that. Shortsighted!, you might say. Or worse. But to film director Roger Sorkin, talking about sea-level rise – and more importantly, how to adapt to it and build more resilient, forward-thinking communities – without talking about climate change is a well-considered strategy. Avoiding buzz words that may turn people off For the record, Sorkin is no climate change contrarian. He acknowledges that carbon emissions are responsible for sea-level rise. And that we humans are responsible. But he also believes in meeting folks where they are. That’s why, he explains, his audiences do not hear the words “climate change,” “global warming,” or “carbon” in “Tidewater,” his documentary film about sea-level rise in Hampton Roads. “Stories matter to us,” Sorkin says. “And the building blocks are the words that you use to tell stories. Certain words press peoples’ buttons and produce visceral reactions.” Sorkin hopes to use “Tidewater” as a way of engaging conservative coastal communities and Republican lawmakers in swing states. His hope is that the film’s apolitical tack will appeal to viewers who tend to associate all things related to climate change with liberalism. “It’s really intended to nationalize the story of Hampton Roads as a real national security concern,” he says. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
22 May 2017, The Conversation, The weather is now political. Until recently, weather talk was an easy filler for any awkward silence. But tragically for polite conversationalists everywhere, the weather is no longer mundane. Especially in summers like the one we just had in Sydney, weather talk has many of us breaking a surprising sweat — and not only from the heat. With climate change a hot-button issue globally (in spite and even because of its lack of mention in national budgets, or erasure from government websites), talk about the weather now has an unavoidably political tinge. While it may not lead directly to impassioned critiques of climate governance, nor immediately sort the sceptics from the believers, talk of brewing storms or dried-up reservoirs now carries with it a whiff of trepidation about our collective forecasts. Bridging the divide Despite the growing politicisation of weather talk, weather and climate are usually understood as empirically distinct bodies of knowledge. Climate is, to quote British comedy duo Armstrong and Miller, “a long-term trend averaged over many years”, as opposed to weather, “which is what’s going on outside the window right now”. The problem with this distinction is that climate change’s global reach and extended time scale can make it seem like it is happening somewhere else and to someone else (or, indeed, not at all). So perhaps the distinction is not useful for the cultural processes of adaptation. What might happen if we were to breach official definitions and disciplinary lines and think of the two things together? Closing the distance between weather as event and climate as pattern can accomplish several things. Most obviously, it reminds us that there is a relationship between the two. Without weather, there would be nothing to amalgamate as climate. While one heatwave does not equate to “climate change”, many and increasing ones give us pause to wonder. Leslie Hughes and Will Steffen are doing the data-driven work in this regard. Ironically, though, while the complexity of climate data might put me off engaged concern for the global climate, the exhaustion I feel cycling behind a truck in 30℃-plus weather might do the opposite. Maybe this bodily discomfort is part of the point. In other words, bringing climate and weather together can remind us that climate change is not only about abstract calculations on scales too big for our small and ultimately short-lived human forms to fathom. Thinking about weather as part of climate underscores that we experience climate change with and on our bodies; climate change is lived by us at a very human scale, too. Read More here
22 May 2017, One Step Off the Grid, Queensland govt kicks off solar trial for low-income, rental households. A Queensland government-funded scheme to use rooftop solar to cut the electricity costs of low income regional households – as well its half a million rental households – has begun being rolled out in the state’s south-east, with plans to extend the trial throughout the state. The public housing solar scheme, announced in March, kicked off in the suburbs of Logan late last week, in the first phase of installations of up to 6MW of solar PV on up to 4000 rooftops across Queensland. State energy minister Mark Bailey said the aim of the trial was to investigate innovative ways to enable public housing tenants in detached government-owned houses to access the benefits of rooftop solar. In Woodridge, alone, nearly 2000 eligible public housing tenants managed through Logan City’s Woodridge Housing Service Centre would be eligible for the scheme. Meanwhile, the Palaszczuk government is calling for expressions of interest from solar PV suppliers to support the trial in Rockhampton and Cairns. Queensland is not the only state or local government to trial and fund schemes like this. The City of Adelaide launched its “Solar Savers” initiative in April 2016, in an effort to remove the usual upfront costs of installing rooftop solar on rented and low-income households, and provide tenants with a long-term payment plan. The ACT launched a $2 million low-income solar scheme in July 2016, open to eligible households, wishing to install rooftop PV but unable to afford the upfront investment. And in NSW, a number of NGO-led and CEFC-backed schemes have sought to build new, highly energy efficient public housing with rooftop solar included. Read More here
22 May 2017, Washington Post, Stop hoping we can fix climate change by pulling carbon out of the air, scientists warn. Scientists are expressing increasing skepticism that we’re going to be able to get out of the climate change mess by relying on a variety of large-scale land-use and technical solutions that have been not only proposed but often relied upon in scientific calculations. Two papers published last week debunk the idea of planting large volumes of trees to pull carbon dioxide out of the air — saying there just isn’t enough land available to pull it off — and also various other strategies for “carbon dioxide removal,” some of which also include massive tree plantings combined with burning their biomass and storing it below the ground. “Biomass plantations are always seen as a green kind of climate engineering because, you know, everybody likes trees,” said Lena Boysen, a climate researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, who led one of the new studies while a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “But we just want to show that that’s not the complete story. They cannot do that much.” Forests have long been recognized as one of the world’s most important natural carbon sinks, capable of storing large amounts of carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere. Simply preserving the world’s forest resources — and replanting areas that have already been deforested — is viewed as an important step in protecting the climate. But for years, scientists have discussed the idea of going further by using large plantations full of fast-growing, carbon-storing trees to pull extra carbon emissions out of the atmosphere, a strategy sometimes called “afforestation.” But the amount of land and other resources this strategy would require to actually help us meet our global climate goals — namely, keeping global temperatures within at least two degrees of their pre-industrial levels — is completely impractical, according to Boysen’s new study in the journal Earth’s Future, and would require the destruction of huge amounts of natural ecosystems or productive agricultural land. Read More here