In Between Times 5-14-2024
Join The Leadership Circle, Carbon capture tech political challenges, Forest - fires - and carbon, "How to steal an election" with L. Lessig
As a leader committed to addressing the environmental, energy and economic challenges facing us, we invite you to join a powerful network of high net worth environmental donors, broadly centrist NGO leaders, corporate leaders from strategically significant sectors, small business leaders, and media and campaign strategists. This Leadership Circle includes prominent funders among those who have already committed $20B in the aggregate to climate initiatives, with $10B more expected soon.
These are sophisticated philanthropists and selected NGO leaders they fund. They understand that aggressive communications can raise public awareness, but cannot forge trusting collaborations or resilient solutions to the increasingly serious climate, energy security and economic challenges we face. They know solutions require active private sector participation – spurred and supported by effective, pragmatic and bipartisan public policies. Thus, they now seek to bring a core group of senior executives from leading companies in about five sectors to their inner circle to help advise and collaborate with them.
Develop a close working relationship with these select donors, grantees, leaders, and strategists, in private small group discussions, monthly roundtables, semi-annual summits, and one-on-one meetings that we will arrange at your request. Our private meetings are held under ground rules that create a safe space for exploring ideas, building trust, and deepening relationships. This unique, direct dialogue with the donors funding and leaders directing the campaigns and initiatives affecting your industry, business or activism can:
Build common understanding and consensus on the solutions needed for major challenges like climate change, conservation, ocean health and plastic waste solutions
Identify gaps in funding or support needed for initiatives and organizations focused on developing, advocating, and building stakeholder support for pragmatic, bipartisan solutions
Foster sharing of insights, contacts, and resources with key solution-oriented groups, as the donors currently do with organizations such as ClearPath, Nature Conservancy, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES), American Conservation Coalition, BridgeUSA, Citizens Climate Lobby and Climate Leadership Council.
We hope you will step forward to join us in bringing together unexpected allies to confront these common challenges across partisan, ideological, and sectoral lines.
Sincerely,
Bill Shireman
Volunteer CEO
ENROLL HERE.
Biden and oil companies like this climate tech. Many Americans do not.
Carbon capture is part of the future. What form it takes is an open question.
(From The Washington Post)
The remote stretch of public grazing land in southeastern Montana has hardly changed since homesteading days, but underneath this wind-swept expanse lies a hidden asset in high demand: thousands of acres of porous rock where oil company executives say greenhouse gas could be piped in from afar and stored forever.
ExxonMobil and the Biden administration see in the grassy 100,000 acres a launchpad for one of the world’s most audacious climate experiments, a plan to take emissions spewing from power plants and factories and trap them underground where they cannot contribute to global warming. The scheme is inching forward despite criticism it will permit polluters to keep polluting while slowing the transition to solar and wind energy. And now sponsors face the additional hurdle of intense local opposition.
Click here for the article.
Carbon sequestration faces resistance in rural America
New Jersey Natural Gas announces installation of state’s first CarbinX carbon capture units
Wildfires may be emitting more carbon and toxic chemicals than assumed, by changing soil composition: Study
The interesting challenge is that many forests, particularly in places like the American West, renew themselves with fire. It’s a fundamental part of many healthy forest ecosystems, and one we humans have literally retarded for too long. Built up fallen trees mean much worse, unnaturally powerful fires, when they do eventually occur.
(From The Hill)
“Carbon that’s gone through forest fires and becomes black carbon can actually turn more readily into carbon dioxide by microbes than previously thought,” co-author Scott Fendorf, a professor at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, said in a statement.
Wildfires can benefit ecosystems in many ways, such as increasing the nitrogen content in soils and the water solubility of organic carbon — fostering regrowth, the researchers acknowledged.
Nonetheless, that recovery also hinges upon the presence of other chemicals, called karrikins as many seeds can only germinate if enough of these molecules are present, the authors noted.
Click here for the article.
Wildfires in wet African forests have doubled in recent decades, large-scale analysis finds
We have a different equation in “wet forests”. Much of the fires here appear to be exacerbated by deforestation, though as the attached article indicates we are just coming to understand the role of fire in wet forests.
(From Phys.org)
Scientists have known for decades that wet forests in western and central Africa have fires, but because the fires tend to be much smaller than their counterparts in dry woodlands and savannas, relatively little research has been done on Africa's tropical forest fires. This has led to uncertainty over where and when they burn, what exacerbates them and how that might shift in response to climate change.
"Historically, scientists have not considered fire to be an important part of wet, tropical forests, but there's been work in the Amazon in recent decades that has suggested otherwise," said Michael Wimberly, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma who led the study.
Click here for the article.
Food forests in Africa
Food forests are a great idea and the closer one gets to the equator, assuming adequate water, the easier they are to grow.
Sustainable fishing gets a boost from genomics roadmap
Our fisheries are in a bad way. We heard recently that 90% of the ocean’s large fish have been eliminated over the last 40 years. That is a tragedy.
China is the biggest culprit.
(From Earth.com)
The global fishing industry is facing a crisis. Overfishing, climate change, and other environmental stressors are threatening fish populations worldwide, putting our food security and ocean ecosystems at risk. But what if the solution to sustainable fishing lies not in nets and quotas, but in the very DNA of the fish themselves?
A team of researchers at Texas A&M University, led by Dr. Leif Andersson, is pioneering an approach to fisheries management that leverages the power of population genomics. This cutting-edge field involves analyzing the genetic makeup of entire fish populations to gain unprecedented insights into their biology, ecology, and vulnerabilities.
Click here for the article.
Event
Special Note: Your editor once hung out with Lawrence Lessig at a teach-in at Occupy in Washington DC. We met up after emailing the week before and had a great discussion. We encourage you to check him out.
May 15 - May 15
How To Steal A Presidential Election w/ Lawrence Lessig
Fix Democracy First
Location: Online
SPECIAL EVENT: How To Steal A Presidential Election with Lawrence Lessig
Fix Democracy First is hosting a special Democracy Happy Hour event with Lawrence Lessig to discuss his latest book, How To Steal A Presidential Election, on Wednesday, May 15th @ 5 pm PT/8 pm ET.
Lawrence Lessig is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and Equal Citizens.
His his most recent book, How To Steal A Presidential Election, he and co-author Matthew Seligman, both distinguished experts on election law, take an alarming look at how the American presidency could be stolen—by entirely legal means.
Even in the fast and loose world of the Trump White House, the idea that a couple thousand disorganized protestors storming the U.S. Capitol might actually prevent a presidential succession was farfetched. Yet perfectly legal ways of overturning election results actually do exist, and they would allow a political party to install its own candidate in place of the true winner.
Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman work through every option available for subverting a presumptively legitimate result—from vice-presidential intervention to election decertification and beyond. While many strategies would never pass constitutional muster, Lessig and Seligman explain how some might. They expose correctable weaknesses in the system, including one that could be corrected only by the Supreme Court.
Any strategy aimed at hacking a presidential election is a threat to democracy. This book is a clarion call to shore up the insecure system for electing the president before American democracy is forever compromised.