Planet Week: Wildfires rage across California
Welcome to Planet Week, where we highlight the last week of environmental news and what it means for our planet.
Welcome to Planet Week, where we highlight the last week of environmental news and what it means for our planet.
The Planet marked Earth Overshoot Day. Rain pummeled Southeast Asia, triggering chaos in New Delhi and along China’s Yangtze River. And don’t look now, but two (2) tropical storms are headed toward the Gulf of Mexico.
In case you missed it, here’s what else happened around the planet:
Sunday, August 16
Hottest temperature ever recorded?
Death Valley in eastern California hit 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 Celsius) on Sunday, setting a world record temperature for August and ranking at least top-three on the planet, for anytime ever.
The reading still needs to be confirmed, but it wouldn’t be the wildest thing to happen in California recently. The state is suffering through brutal heat waves, wildfires (and a fire-induced tornado), and freak thunderstorms. Earther has the story.
Monday, August 17
Trump attacks Arctic
As if we don’t already have too much to worry about, the Trump administration finalized plans to open part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. The decision breaks a 40-year blockade on development in the 19.3 million acre refuge — home to the country’s single largest remaining onshore oil reserve.
“ANWR is a thriving ecosystem that is already under threat from climate change and doesn’t need further damage from oil extraction,” said Victoria Herrmann, managing director of the Arctic Institute, in an interview with The Guardian. “The idea of making a short-term monetary gain from the loss of species, a homeland and a way of life is, well, kind of devastating.”
Tuesday, August 18
Wildfires rage across California
A record heatwave and a barrage of lightning strikes have sparked massive California wildfires, prompting Governor Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency Tuesday. As of this writing, the fires have killed at least five people, displaced tens of thousands, and burned more than 770,000 acres. And climate change has almost certainly fueled the devastation.
“What you could say with certainty is that it was hotter with global warming,” David Romps, director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, told The New York Times. “And certainly the vegetation was drier because of warming. If there were also more lightning strikes, as we would expect, that’s just an additional bump in the direction of more fire.”
Meanwhile, COVID-19 has made everything harder: Social distance requirements hamper firefighting crews, evacuation orders are at odds with stay-at-home orders, and smokey, unhealthy air heightens concerns amid a respiratory-attacking coronavirus pandemic. Follow live updates from The New York Times.
A shit ton of microplastics are swirling in the Atlantic
There’s A LOT of plastic in the Atlantic Ocean, according to a study out Tuesday. In that study, researchers found that between 12 and 21 million metric tons (13 and 23 million tons) of microplastic are in just the top 200 meters of the Atlantic.
That means we’re looking at more like 200 million tonnes (220 million tons) of plastic in that entire ocean, said co-author Richard Lampitt from the National Oceanography Centre, in a statement. That’s 10 times more plastic than previously thought.
More bad news: Since researchers only looked for three common types of plastics at the top of the ocean, the actual number is likely to be much higher. Read more at WIRED.
Dems flip flop on fossil fuel subsidies
Ahead of its convention, the Democratic National Committee quietly dropped the demand to end fossil fuel subsidies from its platform, HuffPost reported. This decision sparked outrage among the environmentalists and called into question Democrats’ commitment to tackling the climate crisis.
After the backlash, the Joe Biden camp doubled-down on its support to ending fossil fuel subsidies, telling The Verge, “Vice President Biden’s commitment to ending fossil fuel subsidies remains as steadfast as it was when he outlined this position in the bold climate plan he laid out last year.”
The DNC, Biden, and VP-pick Kamala Harris have all opposed fossil fuel subsidies in the past, but the latest news shows how shaky those stances may be.
Thursday, August 20
Youth climate strikers meet with E.U.
On Thursday, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and three other activists — Germany’s Luisa Neubauer and Belgium’s Anuna de Wever van der Heyden and Adélaïde Charlier, 19 — met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, reports Euronews.
Germany currently presides over the European Union, which, along with Britain, accounts for 22% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The message from Thunberg and others, outlined in a letter handed to Merkel, argued for immediate climate action.
“[T]he longer we keep pretending that we are on a reliable path to lower emissions and that the actions required to avoid a climate disaster are available within today’s system — or for that matter that we can solve a crisis without treating it like one — the more precious time we will lose,” reads the letter.
Flint gets $600 million, not clean water
Michigan has agreed to pay $600 million to victims of the Flint water crisis, reports Axios. In 2014, residents were exposed to high levels of lead after the city switched their drinking water source from Detroit to the Flint River. At least 12 people died of Legionnaires disease and fetal death rates jumped 58%.
Eighteen months after the crisis began, the city went back to Detroit water, but some work to repair pipes remains unfinished, and it’s still common to drink, bathe, and cook with bottled water.
Bonus
The Washington Wolverines
For the first time in 100 years, wolverines — the largest members of the weasel family — have returned to Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state. Climate change threatens the species, and with only about 1,000 of them in the lower 48 states, their return is good news.
“It’s really, really exciting,” Mount Rainier National Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins told USA Today. “It tells us something about the condition of the park — that when we have such large-ranging carnivores present on the landscape that we’re doing a good job of managing our wilderness.”
See you next week,
Brandon and Sam