[GWSG] 200 new US CH4 emitters; C neutrality in the UK; Franzen stops pretending; prayer demos; new designs; million mile cars

[Tilley, Al]

1. Utilities in the US plan to build over 200 methane (“natural gas”) plants. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/09/09/climate-change-threatens-earth-us-open-nearly-200-power-plants/2155631001/

2. Bristol has the highest concentration of industrial greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. The Bristol council has voted to become carbon neutral, partly through carbon capture. Glasgow and Edinburgh are already in the process of becoming carbon neutral by 2030. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/09/energy-firms-plan-uks-first-carbon-neutral-industrial-cluster

3. Jonathan Franzen has published an article in the New Yorker, What If We Stopped Pretending? The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it. Ed Brock and Cherrill Heaton both sent the article. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending

To the best of my knowledge we can probably still succeed in averting runaway heat, but we cannot avoid a world in which great tracts become too hot to inhabit and most of our coastal communities will need to be relocated--and that is probably going to be well underway within the next decade. No matter what we do. That's if things go as well as they could. We could could become more at home on the earth, or we could cling to the fossil-fuelled present and it will destroy us. The IPCC estimate is that we need to limit heating to 1.5C to avoid catastrophe. So we need to get cracking, and we need as we go to adapt to  the new world we are fashioning.

4. Demonstrations by the Extinction Rebellion have spontaneously turned to prayer—Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, though the extended meaning of “prayer” could include about any authentic religious practice. In my tradition, we might recite the end of Hakuin’s Song of Zazen: “As the truth eternally reveals itself, this very place is the Lotus Land of Purity; this very body is the body of the Buddha.” “What seems different now is that the availability of religious and spiritual resources seems to emerge out of a need within the dynamics of the movement itself, and speaks in new ways to its difficult subject matter.” https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/extinction-rebellion-and-new-visibility-religious-protest/

5. This three minute video features designs which enact a world with a future: plastic raincoats made from algae, coffee cups you rent, a public park and sustainable development flood control area on a former industrial waste site. https://www.fastcompany.com/video/these-innovative-designs-will-help-save-the-planet/INRUhgW5

6. Elon Musk has said that the Tesla Model 3 is built to last a million miles. Next year it expects to get a battery pack that will last as long. https://climatecrocks.com/2019/09/08/teslas-new-battery-could-roll-up-a-million-miles/

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