• Twenty-eight companies join forces to push for all electric vehicle sales by 2030: With names like Tesla, Lucid, PG&E, ConEdison, and Uber, the companies have formed the Zero Emission Transportation Association (ZETA) to seek 100% electric vehicle sales in just 10 years. Not only passenger cars, but the entire line-up of light-, medium-, and heavy-duty vehicles. That’s more ambitious even than California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s September executive move to ban sales of new fossil fuel-powered passenger cars and trucks by 2035. Joe Britton, who spent 15 years working for Sen. Ben Nelson and Sen. Mark Udall, is ZETA’s executive director. He said, “For the first time in a generation, transportation is the leading emitter of U.S. carbon emissions. By embracing EVs, federal policymakers can help drive innovation, create hundreds of thousands of new jobs and improve air quality and public health. ZETA’s formation recognizes a pivotal moment for national leadership and reflects the will of the growing clean transportation sector. The next decade will be critical in implementing federal policies that accelerate the transition to zero emissions vehicles and help address these problems head-on. The clean vehicle sector already boasts hundreds of thousands of jobs but, if we encourage its growth, the United States can decisively win the global race to develop a new clean transportation economy and employ hundreds of thousands of Americans right here at home.”
Among the issues ZETA will promote: outcome-driven consumer EV incentives; emissions/performance standards; investments in battery charging infrastructure; policies spurring domestic manufacturing; federal research and development, and federal leadership in cooperation with states and other sub-national entities.
• New Zealand declares climate emergency: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared a "climate emergency" on Wednesday, noting that the science on climate change is clear and action must be taken. "In those cases where we do issue declarations,” she said, “it is often where there is a threat to life, a threat to property, and civil defense emergencies. Vote in favor of this declaration, be on the right side of history, be part of the solution we must collectively deliver for the next generation. If we do not respond to climate change, we will continue to have these emergencies on our shores." The members voted 76-43 for the motion, which is mostly symbolic. The main opposition party noted in a statement that the move was mere "virtue signaling." In May 2019, Britain was the first nation to declare a climate emergency, and since then more than a dozen others plus 1,800 cities and other communities have followed suit, according to The Climate Mobilization, a U.S.-based activist group. Some critics say Ardern’s pronouncements aren’t matched by her words. For instance, Greenpeace noted that her pledge for the nation to become carbon-neutral by 2050 gives a pass to one of New Zealand's major greenhouse gas sources—methane—to protect the nation’s large and lucrative agricultural sector.
• Study shows Americans have a more favorable opinion of “natural gas” than of “methane”: According to a survey of nearly 2,000 people from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Americans have a more positive perception of the term "natural gas" than of phrases that include the word "methane," even though natural gas is 70-90% methane. The Yale team asked respondents—split roughly evenly between Republicans and Democrats—to rate their positive and negative feelings about "natural gas," "natural methane gas," "methane" or "methane" gas. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program and study co-author, said the word "natural" itself is a "very positive term in most people's minds" and gives a boost to the word "gas" on its own. "That's part of it," Leiserowitz told Carlos Anchondo at EnergyWire. "And then the other is that there's just been a decades-long, massive, multiple million-dollar advertising campaign by the natural gas industry to promote its product as natural gas—and moreover, to literally argue that natural gas is clean energy, so they have coupled that, in many people's minds, as natural gas: clean, clean natural gas." David Turnbull, strategic communications director with Oil Change International, an organization promoting a transition away from fossil fuels, said the survey results are hardly surprising because industry representatives and politicians "paint a picture of gas as something different from what it is: a dirty fossil fuel that threatens communities and our climate." In an email, he wrote, "We need decision makers and the public to be dealing in reality and not the distorted landscape that gas industry propaganda creates,"
• TikTok stars and YouTube gamers are climate warriors, says Bloomberg: Both Millennials and Generation Z want action. For a majority of Americans born between 1995 and 2000, climate change is at the top of their list of issues needing to be addressed, according to a 2019 Amnesty International survey. Meanwhile, according to the Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2020, about four out of five respondents think businesses and governments should make greater efforts to protect the environment.
The videogame sector, which generated $120.1 billion in revenue in 2019, is taking note. Twenty eight companies with a combined audience of over 970 million players have joined the United Nations’ Playing for the Planet Alliance, pledged to reduce emissions and to insert green elements into games.
Microsoft, which has promised to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it has emitted by 2050, is making its Xbox carbon neutral. Its direct competitor, Sony’s PlayStation, has improved the energy efficiency of its upcoming PS5.
• Portuguese youths’ climate lawsuit will be fast-tracked at Europe’s highest court: The lawsuit, brought by six young people to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, accuses 33 European nations of violating their right to life by disregarding the climate crisis. The six are Cláudia Agostinho (aged 21), Catarina Mota (20), Martim Agostinho (17), Sofia Oliveira (15), André Oliveira (12) and Mariana Agostinho (8). They are bringing the case with the nonprofit law firm Global Legal Action Network, which claims no country has adopted adequately ambitious targets to cut their greenhouse gas emissions in line with what the Paris Climate Agreement calls for to keep global average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This is the first climate lawsuit to be filed with the court and could produce a landmark judgment.
• Georgina Mace, who shaped the global endangered species Red List, dead at 67: Cancer took Mace Sept. 19, but her death received little notice. One of the world’s leading conservation biologists, she developed a solid scientific foundation for the Red List of endangered species put together by International Union for Conservation of Nature as a means of helping environmental advocates to focus their efforts. Before Mace got involved, the Red List was “a haphazard affair” when it was created in 1964, said Simon Stuart, director of strategic conservation for Synchronicity Earth, an environmental charity, and a former official of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. No clear criteria for inclusion on the list was available at the time. Rather, “politics and personalities played a big role in decisions,” he said in a phone interview with John Schwartz at The New York Times. The list at the time tended toward “charismatic” species, like the great apes. Mace was then working for the Zoological Society of London and began developing a practical, rigorous method quickly applicable to thousands of species. The list now includes more than 120,000 species of animals, plants and fungi of which some 32,000 are currently listed as endangered. When Mace first began her efforts, these were seen as radical. But eventually others came around. Nathalie Pettorelli, a senior scientist with the Zoological Society of London, said of Mace, “She was never the one that shouted, but she was always the one that would be listened to.” You can read a eulogy for her here.
• Mobile River Basin, an American wilderness, is being destroyed bit by bit: It’s the fourth largest river system in the nation in terms of water flow and one of the world’s richest in terms of species and types of habitat. It contains hundreds of thousands of acres of forest, what author and filmmaker Ben Raines calls “America’s Amazon,” which is “far and away the most biodiverse river network in North America.” But while this ecosystem has managed to remain mostly intact, it’s under assault now: Raines notes, “Tragically, it now sits on the cusp of decline, facing death by a thousand cuts, just as the scientific community has begun to appreciate its riches. Habitat destruction, development, and lax enforcement of environmental regulations conspire to take an increasing toll, making the area a global hot spot for extinctions, particularly of aquatic creatures.”
• Sunrise Movement strategist Justin Guay says most important climate legislation has already been passed:
As it turns out, one of the most powerful pieces of climate change legislation the Biden administration will need has already been passed: the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. This legislation, known for creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other public safeguards against financial wrongdoing, also empowers key agencies including the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission to limit systemic risks to financial stability.
The largest systemic risk of them all, climate change, is driven by reckless investments in fossil fuels, exactly the kind of speculative activities Dodd-Frank was designed to bring to a halt in order to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. That means Dodd-Frank gives the Biden administration the power to inhibit or prohibit investments in fossil fuels — a power that could be critical for achieving his pledge of delivering a carbon-free power sector by 2035.