Refugia Newsletter #37

Seed starting, the High Seas Treaty, a new IPCC report, the Willow Project, protesting banks, and tomato aspirations

Refugia News

After a delightful but intense few days of speaking engagements among friends old and new in Pella, Iowa, I’m back in my regular routine of classes, grading, etc. But I took a little time yesterday to do my seed-starting for the spring. As all the cool people do, I ordered seeds from Baker Creek—just a few tomatoes, peppers, spinach, basil, and zinnias—and now I’ve got some seeds in soil. So the waiting and watching and watering begins. Do I know what I’m doing? I do not. But I’ve been watching YouTube videos and learning! This is my third attempt. Last year was a dismal failure.

This year I invested in proper seed starting cells and a tray. Also those shelves. And don’t worry: I’ll turn that grow light on soon.

No more gigs coming up for the next month, so I can focus on my students’ work and on my massive reading list, which just keeps getting longer.

Meanwhile, if you need something for your reading list, or for those loved ones with spring birthdays, please note that the Fortress Press Women’s History Month discount is good through March 31, and Refugia Faith is among the titles you can get for 30% off.

This Week in Climate News

Since I skipped news stories last time, I’ve got four today, including the IPCC Report, which I’ll handle in the Deeper Dive down below. Let’s start here with the High Seas Treaty, the Willow project, and a climate finance story.

First, the High Seas Treaty. On March 4 in New York, the United Nations member states reached a “framework of agreement” for ocean conservation. This is the watery counterpart of “COP15,” which produced the land-focused biodiversity agreement reached last fall in New York.

About the new ocean deal, Patrick Greenfield in The Guardian writes:

Late last Saturday in New York, exhausted negotiators reached a landmark agreement on protecting life on Earth: the high seas treaty, the second big environment deal in just three months after Cop15, the biodiversity summit in Montreal. The moment, nearly two decades in the making, overwhelmed the president of the conference, Rena Lee, who cried as she announced that a deal had been done.

On paper at least, countries nearly have a complete strategy for action on the three planetary crises of our era: the climate emergency, biodiversity loss and pollution. Governments are still negotiating a UN agreement on plastics pollution, with another round of talks scheduled in Paris this year. But world leaders, business heads – all of us – know what we must do in the next decades to avoid disaster. [emphasis added]

Another article, by Delaney Dryfoos and Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News, gives some details about the agreement:

The treaty covers the open oceans, one of the only parts of the Earth’s surface that isn’t divided along national boundaries, similar to Antarctica, although several countries have made territorial claims there. The spirit of the treaty is that the high seas will be managed collaboratively by the whole world, for the common good, for the benefit of ecosystems and for the benefit of the climate. 

Oceans generate 50 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere. They capture more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases and absorb between 25 and 30 percent of human-caused carbon emissions.

With language linking climate firmly to marine biodiversity, the treaty represents an ambitious new form of international cooperation, marine policy experts said. [emphasis added]

I found this graphic from the article especially helpful.

Will the High Seas Treaty result in any real and effective action? Well, time will tell. The agreement has to be ratified, but it looks like it will be. In some sense, the process of creating the agreement is significant in itself. The process, wrangly though it is, creates momentum, raises public awareness, and builds what we might call “agreement infrastructure.” Now, doesn’t a plastics conference in Paris sound like fun?

Next up: the Willow Project. On March 13, President Biden sparked an uproar of protest by approving the Willow Project, allowing ConocoPhillips to drill on three new sites in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Climate activists lobbied hard against the approval, but the Alaska legislature, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and some Alaska native peoples’ groups lobbied for the project.

In an effort to mitigate the backlash, the Biden administration limited the project to make it smaller than proposed. The administration is also initiating numerous new environmental protections in Alaska and elsewhere. Nicholas Kusnetz of Inside Climate News writes:

In a statement on Monday, the Interior Department said it would propose a new rule that “will consider additional protections for the more than 13 million acres designated as Special Areas,” including Teshekpuk Lake, “in recognition of their importance to wildlife and subsistence uses.” The statement also said the administration would protect about 2.8 million acres of the Arctic Ocean, banning oil and gas drilling indefinitely. Paired with steps taken by the Obama administration, that would remove all federally-managed waters in the Arctic Ocean from possible drilling. 

Despite efforts to make a bad thing less bad, the Willow Project is still a win for the industry. They promise to drill in a nice, responsible way, but they’re still drilling for new oil. Nearby native groups and the ecosystems in the preserve will be forced to deal with the disruption.

While some praise the decision as a response to the need for “increased supply” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fact is, the Willow Project will not even help. First of all, it will take six years to begin production. And by then, renewable energy infrastructure looks on track to meet energy needs along with the fossil fuel supply structure we already have. Emma Marris of The Atlantic writes:

[T]he oil from the three drill sites approved on Monday won’t begin to flow for six years. It won’t address any of our next-week, next-month, or next-year supply concerns. In fact, Willow probably won’t do much of anything. By the time it’s finished, the gap [between renewable energy capacity and energy needs] may already be largely bridged. The world might not have enough renewable energy to power everything by 2029, but we’ll have more than enough to keep the lights on without additional drilling. [emphasis added]

So the Willow Project, to be frank, is dumb. Unsurprisingly, it will get litigated. Could the thing get tied up in court long enough that ConocoPhillips eventually abandons the plan because demand for oil has decreased? Alas, one can hope. I have no evidence for this myself, but I do wonder if approving the project is a political chess move on Biden’s part, a sacrifice he hopes won’t end up being too severe, that will in turn enable him to get other things he wants in the climate/conservation space.

Finally, a quick word about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. It was fun to watch certain severely fact-challenged Republicans blame the collapse on “woke” things like climate investment and diversity initiatives, when the real reasons had to do with interest rates, Treasury bonds, and Bitcoin. The episode actually created an opportunity for reporters like Kristoffer Tigue of Inside Climate News to pull together stats on the profitability of renewable energy:

In fact, clean energy investments generated returns that were seven times higher than those from fossil fuel companies between 2011 and 2021, according to a joint report by the Centre for Climate Finance at Imperial College Business School and the International Energy Agency. And Pitchbook forecasts that the climate tech sector will become a $1.4 trillion market—with a compound annual growth rate of 8.8 percent—within the next five years. [emphasis added]

I also enjoyed the dry sarcasm of economist Dean Baker, an economist from the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

“I don’t know if making money’s now woke,” he said. “I mean, some of them [investors in clean energy] might be doing it because they think it’s good for the planet, but I mean they’re doing it as profit making companies—and they are making profits.”

Deeper Dive

The truth here is that I haven’t actually done a deep dive myself yet into the recent IPCC Summary Report, released March 20. This report is the culmination of the Sixth Assessment reporting period, which included three major reports over the past few years on the science, impacts, and mitigation strategies. This one, like the previous reports, comes with a 37-page summary. That’s my next project. Meanwhile, you can find the report here. And I’m reading the reports about the report. Here are some excerpts from Somini Sengupta in the New York Times:

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).”

This is the most striking sentence in a 37-page summary, issued today, of the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It tells us what’s possible. It tells us the stakes. …

It plainly warns that the world is on track to exceed that threshold [1.5°C], at least temporarily, in the first half of the 2030s.

The actions taken during this decade will “largely determine” what happens for centuries to come.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, called it a “how to guide to defuse the climate time bomb.”

We know all this already; the report simply rings the alarm bells again.

While the report itself is depressing enough, this article by Michael Thomas might make you even grumpier. Thomas writes about the differences between the gigantic slabs of science in the 1000+-page reports and the summaries, which must be approved by the governments in the Conference of the Parties. According to Thomas, things get edited out.

One of his particular beefs (sorry) is with the way that delegates from Argentina and Brazil, for example, insisted on softening language around the climate impacts of meat and dairy production in the summary reports. We know that cutting down on or eliminating beef and dairy could have enormously helpful impacts on reducing carbon emissions and improving land use. Yet this week’s report only contains mild language about diet changes. Here’s a nifty graphic from Thomas’s article.

Yikes! I must say, that chart comports with data summarized and duly charted and graphed in several chapters of Greta Thunberg’s new compilation, The Climate Book. For my part, I have been trying to eliminate most meat from my diet lately. Beef and lamb: no problem. Cheese: oof, that’s much harder. And chocolate? Help! Thankfully, potato chips seem climate-friendly (relatively).

Meanwhile, this piece by Kevin Anderson in The Conversation also takes the IPCC report to task for its too-mild conclusions about carbon emission reductions, based on models that benefit the largest-emitter countries. Warning: this one is more technical.

Bottom line: addressing the climate crisis sufficiently may be an even tougher go than the grim IPCC summary lets on—because politics and the self-interest of the affluent stalls our efforts.

Refugia Sighting

Numerous times while I was working on The Refugia Podcast, my guests described to me how climate activism becomes itself a refugial space. Doing the work with others feels like leaning into a life-giving space where people can regain strength and build capacities to endure the crises we face. That’s why I was a little bummed this week that I was traveling (irony! by plane! ugh!) on the Third Act Day of Action, so I could only cheer from afar (above?).

On Tuesday, Third Act—a 50,000-member group of older people in the “Third Act” of life—joined with partner groups to stage 100 protests outside bank branches for the Big Bad Four: Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. These are the banks that provide most of the capital that continues to fund new fossil fuel projects (like Willow). People hung out in rocking chairs outside banks to make a fuss and demand that these banks “cut it out or we’ll cut it up.” That is, we’ll cut up our credit cards.

And we did! Even though I couldn’t “rock out” with the protesters, husband Ron and I are in fact moving our money out of Chase Bank, where we have banked for almost three decades. Are we hurting the mighty Chase by removing our little sums? No. Are we now pure and holy with our money? No. But it’s a message, and the point is to make a theatrical fuss and raise awareness.

Image credit: Craig Hudson for the New York Times

The Wayback Machine

Whew! That was a lot in one week. Let’s get back to the wholesome and quiet practice of seed starting. I wrote this piece in 2021 about my first—and successful!—attempt to seed start and then cope with the actual plants and what they produce. Things get complicated quickly!

This was the year I also learned that you cannot lovingly cherish every little stem the plant pops out. Nope. Cruel to be kind, baby. Get out those pruners and go to town. Remove every sucker that grows at a forty-five degree angle from the main “leader” and the leaves. Yes, I’m serious. Every one. Cut off flowers if you have to. Just do it.

May all the seeds you plant this spring sprout and grow and bless. Until next time, be well.