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The carbon offset OS powering purposeful portfolio management and growthmolecutrack enables you to easily track, manage, and grow your carbon offset portfolioOne stop shopAll players. One platform.Easy portfolio navigation, performance management, and status tracking for all your carbon removal projects Direct communicationNo middle men.  Direct communication channels between developers, standard setters, and businesses Grow your portfolioPurposeful portfolio growth.Directly source and transact carbon removal projects via a secure and cost effective market place© 2019 Molecutrack. All rights reservedmolecutrackWhat does it mean for you?Project DevelopersLeverage the power of digital integration Standard SettersBusinessesDirect access to buyers.Manage your portfolio of projects through a streamlined interface and grow it through direct access to buyers and standards Increase visibility to your standards. Attract more projects to your standards, increase the flow of issuance, and easily manage your portfolioDrive transparency & purpose.  Easily track, manage and grow your portfolio in projects & geographies where it matters. Drive transparency through your portfolio’s value-chain  Find out moreWhat are carbon offset projects?Natural climate solutionsSustainable energy goalsCarbon capture technologiesNatural carbon sinks.  Conservation, ecosystem restoration and improved land management across global forests, wetlands, grasslands and agricultural lands Capture and utilize carbon.Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) projects that reduce and sustainably re-use carbon  Clean energy solutions.Community focused clean energy solutions that replace hazardous and carbon intensive fuel. Clean cooking stoves and heating for 2.9 billion people in developing world  Find out more details about our products

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Opinion | The Coronavirus and a World Without Meat – By Jonathan Safran Foer – The New York Times

By Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of “Eating Animals” and “We Are the Weather.”

• May 21, 2020
• • 3431

Credit…Jun Cen

“Is any panic more primitive than the one prompted by the thought of empty grocery store shelves? Is any relief more primitive than the one provided by comfort food?

Most everyone has been doing more cooking these days, more documenting of the cooking, and more thinking about food in general. The combination of meat shortages and President Trump’s decision to order slaughterhouses open despite the protestations of endangered workers has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is.

Is it more essential than the lives of the working poor who labor to produce it? It seems so. An astonishing six out of 10 counties that the White House itself identified as coronavirus hot spots are home to the very slaughterhouses the president ordered open.

In Sioux Falls, S.D., the Smithfield pork plant, which produces some 5 percent of the country’s pork, is one of the largest hot spots in the nation. A Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa, had 730 cases of the coronavirus — nearly 60 percent of its employees. At another Tyson plant, in Waterloo, Iowa, there were 1,031 reported cases among about 2,800 workers.

Sick workers mean plant shutdowns, which has led to a backlog of animals. Some farmers are injecting pregnant sows to cause abortions. Others are forced to euthanize their animals, often by gassing or shooting them. It’s gotten bad enough that Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has asked the Trump administration to provide mental health resources to hog farmers.

Despite this grisly reality — and the widely reported effects of the factory-farm industry on America’s lands, communities, animals and human health long before this pandemic hit — only around half of Americans say they are trying to reduce their meat consumption. Meat is embedded in our culture and personal histories in ways that matter too much, from the Thanksgiving turkey to the ballpark hot dog. Meat comes with uniquely wonderful smells and tastes, with satisfactions that can almost feel like home itself. And what, if not the feeling of home, is essential?

And yet, an increasing number of people sense the inevitability of impending change.

Animal agriculture is now recognized as a leading cause of global warming.  . . . “

Opinion | The Pandemic Has Created a Youth Unemployment Crisis. We Can Fix It. – By Collin O’Mara – The New York Times

By Collin O’Mara

Mr. O’Mara is the president and C.E.O. of the National Wildlife Federation.

• May 18, 2020

A Civilian Conservation Corps enrollee planting a tree circa 1938.Credit…Fotosearch/Getty Images

“Nearly 7.7 million American workers younger than 30 are now unemployed and three million dropped out of the labor force in the past month. Combined that’s nearly one in three young workers, by far the highest rate since the country started tracking unemployment by age in 1948.

Nearly 40 percent worked in the devastated retail and food service sectors. And as the most recently hired, young workers are typically the first let go and often the last rehired, especially those of color.

As our country’s leaders consider a range of solutions to address this crisis, there’s one fix that will put millions of young Americans directly to work: a 21st-century version of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt created the C.C.C., he was facing, as we are today, the possibility of a lost generation of young people. The conservation-minded president’s idea was to hire young unemployed men for projects in forestry, soil conservation and recreation. By 1942, the 3.4 million participants in “Roosevelt’s Tree Army” had planted more than three billion trees, built hundreds of parks and wildlife refuges and completed thousands of miles of trails and roads.”

If People Grasped the Full Cost of Cars, They Might Make Greener Choices

“If more consumers understood the total costs of car ownership it could promote a shift to cleaner, lower-emission alternatives, according to a new paper co-authored by an economist at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES).

In a survey of more than 6,000 consumers in Germany, researchers found that people underestimate the total cost of vehicle ownership by €221 ($240) per month on average. Although they correctly estimated their spending on fuel on average, they “severely” underestimated all other major expenditures, including depreciation, repairs, taxes, and insurance. The misjudgment amounts to 52 percent of the actual costs.

“We discuss a set of potential solutions. For example, rather than having a label on new cars only showing the future fuel costs, the label could include the full expected monthly costs of ownership.”

— Kenneth Gillingham

If these consumers were aware of the true costs, the researchers then calculate, it could reduce the number of cars in Germany by as much as 17.6 million, or 37 percent.

“If people underestimate how much it costs to own a car, they are more likely to own cars, rather than use other, cleaner, modes of transportation,” says Kenneth Gillingham, an associate professor of environmental and energy economics at F&ES and corresponding author of the paper. “And because repair costs are higher for conventional gasoline-powered cars, the underestimation could affect the uptake of electric vehicles as well.”

The researchers suggest that these miscalculations can be used as leverage in creating new policies that promote cleaner transportation choices — for instance, car sharing, alternative-fuel vehicles, public transport, biking or walking.”

Source: If People Grasped the Full Cost of Cars, They Might Make Greener Choices

The Original Long Islanders Fight to Save Their Land From a Rising Sea – By Somini Sengupta and Shola Lawal – The New York Times

By Somini Sengupta and Shola Lawal

• March 5, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
• • 3

“SHINNECOCK NATION, Southampton, N.Y. — A maritime people who once spanned a large swath of the eastern Long Island shore, the Shinnecock Indians have been hemmed into a 1.5-square-mile patch of land on the edge of a brackish bay. Now, because of climate change, they’re battling to hold on to what they have left.

Rising seas are threatening to eat away at the Shinnecock lands. But the tribe is using everything at its disposal to calm the waves and restore a long, slim beach at the edge of Shinnecock Bay: dredged sand, sea grasses, beach grasses, boulders, oyster shells.

It’s a forever battle. Climate change is swelling and heating the world’s oceans at an accelerating pace. Inevitably, the Shinnecock will have to bring more sand to replenish what the rising tide keeps washing away. More grass will have to be planted. This spring, Shavonne Smith, director of the tribe’s environmental department, wants to expand the oyster reef designed to dissipate the energy of the waves.

“We have an inherent responsibility to protect the homeland,” Ms. Smith said on a recent Monday morning walk along the shore. “It’s not the type of thing where you can work against nature. You work with it.” “

David Lindsay:

Thank you Somini Sengupta and Shola Lawal for a lovely article. The Shinnecock Indians are using nature to fight the rising sea in eastern Long Island, which is important. However, overpopulation and pollution caused by humans are root causes of global warming and the rising sea, according to about 99% of credentialed climatologists. Edward O Wilson of Harvard has written that some scientists think that the right population for the planet is perhaps 4 billion, or approximately half of the 7.6 billion we are at now.

I am currently reading “A Distant Mirror,” by Barbara Tuchman, about Europe in the 14^th century, and how it dealt with the Bubonic Plagues that wiped out roughly half of Europe’s population. The doctors then said it was caused by the position of the planets. Most common people were sure it was God’s punishment for unpardonable sins—like Noah’s flood. No one suspected it was a tiny thing called a virus, carried by the rats and fleas which were part of every day life.

The coronavirus COVID-19 is a reminder that God, or nature, works in mysterious ways. It is a tragic irony, that such modern plagues might help mitigate the onset of global warming and the sixth great extinction of species. We have only decades, not centuries, to reduce our carbon dioxide and green house gas footprint to zero, or see the wrath of God again, as in 1348.

If you are a Franciscan Christian, or an environmentalist of any persuasion, that believes in the sanctity of all forms of life, and values non-human species, you have to be torn, when the plague comes knocking at your door. As you and some of your loved ones die a wretched death, you can temper your despair. The silver lining is that it might, possibly be for a greater good.

The Gates Foundation has developed a cleaner, safer nuclear power plant and reactor – by David Lindsay Jr – InconvenientNews.Net

Yesterday was a wonderful day full of good news for environmentalists. And I’m not thinking about Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobushar, but of Bill and Melinda Gates. Someone at a recent  CT League of Conservation Voters meeting recently suggested to Kathleen Schomaker that she watch the new Netflix documentary, “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates,” directed by Davis Guggenheim, who won an Academy award for “An Inconvenient Truth.”

There are three episodes, each about an hour. Part One, while describing Bill Gate’s blessed childhood in Seattle, bounces up to the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The short segments on the foundation, tell the story of it improving  sewage conditions in third world countries, especially by starting an international competition to invent a new toilet: a stand alone, recomposting toilet. The foundation also developed a new power plant that runs on fecal waste, creates electricity, and produces clean potable water. I have posted three reviews of the series at my blog, and one of them said that the reporting was full of technical “wonky” details on revolutionary toilet ideas!

Episode Two covered Bill’s high school years and getting to Microsoft, and how the Gates Foundation set about to eradicate polio from the planet. They were nearly successful in some of the worst places for polio in the world, like Nigeria, until the rise of Boko Haran. The terrorists started killing the vaccinators, and polio hasn’t been eradicated in Boko Haran territory.

But it is part three than got us wildly excited. The personal details of Bill and Melinda’s courtship and marriage, and the anti-trust cases against Microsoft were informative, but the big news was the third project of the Gates Foundation—developing a cleaner, safer nuclear power plant and reactor. A team of teams led by Bill came up with a new and radically different nuclear reactor design that they are quite confident will not be able to have a meltdown during even a missile strike. It will not run as hot, or need water for cooling, and it will run on nuclear waste–used and depleted uranium–so it will not create much more waste, and will give a use to all the nuclear waste dumps in the world today and use the waste up. If it works, it is a game changer. They decided the best place to build the first one was in China, since the Chinese were still actively building nuclear power plants, but when Trump came to office, he began tariffs and cancelled the carefully arranged partnership. The episode ended without more info. We just know that the Gates Foundation still has to build and test their first prototype somewhere, to see if the simulations in their labs and on their computers are accurate.

Inside Bill’s Brain review: a Netflix docu-series that keeps getting distracted – The Verge

“The title of Davis Guggenheim’s three-part Netflix documentary Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (which debuts on Friday, September 20th) speaks to its subject’s opacity. What makes one of the world’s wealthiest people tick? What formed him? How did he come to dominate a fiercely competitive industry so thoroughly that the US government sued Microsoft under antitrust statutes?

Guggenheim gets into all that… sort of. Over the course of nearly three hours, Inside Bill’s Brain covers the basics of Gates’ life: his childhood, education, Microsoft stewardship, marriage to his wife Melinda, and the charitable foundation they co-manage.

At times, though, it seems like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is this doc’s real subject. Each episode of Inside Bill’s Brain focuses on one of the foundation’s major initiatives: improving sewage conditions in developing countries, eradicating polio, and developing a cleaner, safer form of nuclear power. Each of the three parts shifts rapidly between interviews, biographical material, and fly-on-the-wall footage of the Gates team’s philanthropic missions. Guggenheim eschews traditional transitions, and instead jumps from subject to subject, even when there’s no clear connection between them.”

Source: Inside Bill’s Brain review: a Netflix docu-series that keeps getting distracted – The Verge

‘Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates’ Review – 9/4/2019 by Stephen Farber| Hollywood Reporter

Oscar-winning documentary director Davis Guggenheim enlists Gates’ cooperation for a three-part Netflix series on some of the billionaire’s passion projects.

“One of the hottest tickets at this year’s Telluride Film Festival was not one of the eagerly awaited narrative features but the first showing of a Netflix docuseries on Bill Gates. Patrons lined up for the screening of Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, with the subject himself on hand for a discussion. The series was directed by Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman, He Named Me Malala), and it contains some of the filmmaker’s best work.

No doubt Gates trusted the director enough to provide candid interviews on his personal life, along with information on his ambitious projects to use his wealth to build a better world. Although the docuseries does not skirt controversial episodes in Gates’ past, it gives him credit as a visionary thinker while also painting a surprisingly human portrait of the computer geek turned philanthropist and concerned citizen.

The three parts of the series encompass Gates’ efforts to provide clean drinking water for people in the poorest countries of the world, his battle to eradicate polio and his efforts on behalf of safe nuclear power as an alternative to climate-destroying fossil fuels. Along with exploring these potent issues, the film delves into Gates’ early family life and his marriage to Melinda, who is partnered with him on his charitable foundation, which he has focused on since stepping down from Microsoft in 2008.

Guggenheim collected an impressive group of pundits to discuss some of these issues, including scientists and technical experts, along with New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof, who provides especially pithy interviews. But the series also includes interviews with Melinda, Gates’ two sisters and, of course, extensive talks with Gates himself. Some of the most revealing interviews concern Gates’ relationship with his mother, a strong woman and something of a community leader in Seattle; he describes her early death as the most difficult time in his life.

Gates’ developing relationship with Melinda also provides fascinating material. Clearly Bill had difficulty entering into personal relationships, and when he was debating whether to marry Melinda, he prepared a detailed chart listing the pros and cons of a union. She has proven to be an invaluable partner; for one thing, he acknowledges that she is much better at dealing with people, a crucial quality in accomplishing the goals that he wants his charities to produce.

One of the thorniest of these issues is Gates’ commitment to nuclear power. As the film indicates, he and his team were making progress on changing public opinion until the Japanese nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2011 once again incited widespread fears. There are also issues regarding the disposal of nuclear waste, and Trump’s trade war with China has made Chinese cooperation on this project more challenging.”

Source: ‘Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates’ Review | Hollywood Reporter

Review: Netflix documentary on Bill Gates reveals chaos, determination and love ‘Inside Bill’s Brain’ – BY KURT SCHLOSSER – GeekWire

“In his relentless pursuit to try to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems around sanitation, disease eradication and climate change, Bill Gates is practically robotic in his quest for information and in his inability to give up. It’s glimpses of the Microsoft co-founder’s human side that help power “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates,” a three-part documentary series from Netflix.

Directed by Academy Award winner Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), the series is at times an intimate and revealing look at Gates’ life, from his upbringing to his education, his family and friendships, the drive to make Microsoft a global powerhouse, the transition to philanthropy, and his love for and partnership with wife Melinda Gates.

For those familiar with many of the benchmarks and anecdotes from Gates’ long life in the public eye, there are repeated tales of his accomplishments and idiosyncrasies. They are spliced throughout three 50-minute episodes with footage from his home and offices in Seattle to far-flung locations around the planet.”

Source: Review: Netflix documentary on Bill Gates reveals chaos, determination and love ‘Inside Bill’s Brain’ – GeekWire

‘All-Electric’ Movement Picks Up Speed, Catching Some Off Guard – The New York Times

By Jane Margolies

• Feb. 4, 2020

 

 

“When Berkeley, Calif., became the first city in the country to ban natural gas hookups in new construction last July, no one knew the effects would ripple out so far and so fast.

The Berkeley ban was part of an effort to wean developers off buildings that consume fossil fuels, a cause of global warming, and promote cleaner electric power. And it spurred other communities in the state to enact ordinances to encourage all-electric construction.

The effort has spread to other parts of the country. The Massachusetts town of Brookline passed a prohibition on new gas connections, and municipalities near it are poised to do the same.

Now major cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, are in various stages of considering pro-electric legislation as part of the “electrify everything” movement.

As interest quickly blossoms, real estate and construction industries are scrambling to keep up. Some national organizations that represent builders and developers have yet to formulate a position.”