Solutions to Climate Change: Transportation Mary Wildfire page 5-6
Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency wants to know what we think.
Wayne National Forest Proposes Changing Name to Buckeye National Forest
Pub Night with Northeast Ohio Sierra Club September 7 Forest City Brewery
Evolving Technology and Increasing Beauty - Windustrious
Distinguished Speaker Series Saturday, September 16 at 3PM ET Register for this online event here. Dr. Erik Rutkow American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation page 2
Note from FACT Treasurer page 9
August 2023 Newsletter
Fact: Faith communities together for a sustainable future
Fracking Ohio’s Parks Effects Far More than our State Dr. Randi Pokladnik page 3-4
Thank you for reading our newsletter! We welcome your thoughts and look forward to hearing from you. When you submit your comment, please indicate if you give permission for us to print what you have written. Send comments to factohio@gmail.com.
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World Book Review by Ron Prosek page 7
King Coal screening at the Nightlight Cinema in Akron September 1-6
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Dr. Eric Rutkow previously taught at Yale University and recently joined the faculty of the University of Central Florida as an Assistant Professor of History. His research and teaching focus on international relations, the environment, political economy, and tourism. Before earning his doctorate, Rutkow practiced as an environmental human rights lawyer in Cambodia and as a junior associate with Latham & Watkins LLC in New York. He received his BA and PhD from Yale and his JD from Harvard. From the Book Jacket: Like many of us, historians have long been guilty of taking trees for granted. Yet the history of trees in America is no less remarkable than the history of the United States itself--from the majestic white pines of New England, which were coveted by the British Crown for use as masts in navy warships, to the orange groves of California, which lured settlers west.... America--if indeed it existed--would be a very different place without its millions of acres of trees. As American Canopy shows, trees were essential to the early years of the republic and indivisible from the country's rise as both an empire and a civilization. As symbols of liberty, community, and civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures in our country's history.... Today, few people think about where timber comes from, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is to destroy part of ourselves and endanger the future. Winner of the Association of American Publishers’ 2012 PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) Award for U.S. History Finalist for the Reed Environmental Writing Award, 2013 Smithsonian Magazine's Top Books of 2012 Oprah.com Book Club Selection, 2012 New York Times Match Book selection in Science and Nature, 2017 The Diane Rehm Show, “U.S. Forests and Trees,” July 2014 Register for this online event here.
Distinguished Speaker Series Saturday, September 16 at 3PM ET Register for this online event here. Dr. Eric Rutkow, Writer, Lawyer & Historian American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation
The Effects from Fracking Ohio’s Parks Reach Far Beyond the State Dr. Randi Pokladnik Ohio’s HB 507 has opened up state lands to oil and gas exploration using high pressure hydraulic fracturing. If approved, over 20,000 acres in Salt Fork State Park will be leased for fracking. We know from existing data that chemicals used in fracking are dangerous, and many studies have shown these chemicals have polluted groundwater and negatively affected human health. Physicians for Social Responsibility agree that citizens and workers will experience health risks from fracking even if it is regulated more closely. They believe fracking must be phased out. We also know that fracking releases climate changing air emissions like methane and other volatile organic compounds. One of the largest releases of methane gas in the United States occurred in February 2018 when an XTO Energy well pad exploded in Belmont County Ohio. Residents within a mile radius had to evacuate as the well leaked methane gas into the atmosphere for nearly a month. Ohio’s Oil and Gas Land Management Commission (appointed by Governor DeWine) will decide whether or not to approve the recent nominations to frack Wolf Run State Park, Zeppernick Wildlife Area, and Salt Fork State Park. As they make these decisions they must consider the Ohio statues around the law (HB 507), but nowhere in these rules is there any mention of considering the long-term effects of fracking emissions and the greenhouse gasses that will result from burning more fossil fuels. Climate change is not on their radar, but fracking this amount of land will certainly play a significant role in adding to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Proponents of fracking neglect to admit that fracking 20,000+ acres in Salt Fork State Park will not only affect all of Ohio and Southeast Ohio’s water, air, and health, but will also impact the rest of the world. Proponents of fracking defend the process with the usual talking points. They claim volcanoes put more carbon dioxide into the air than fossil fuels. This is false. “Greenhouse gas emissions from volcanoes comprise less than one percent of those generated by today’s human endeavors.” Another talking point is “we need to frack for energy independence,” yet the data shows that much of the fracked gas leaves the country. “Today, the United States is a net exporter of natural gas and one of the top exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the world.” Another claim states we need to frack for national security, yet the Pentagon has made statements about the negative impacts of climate change on national security. Former Defense Secretary James Mattis said “climate change is real, and a threat to American interests abroad and the Pentagon's assets everywhere.” Current Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, “There is little about what the Department does to defend the American people that is not affected by climate change, it is a national security issue, and we must treat it as such.” Ohio’s greenhouse gas emissions do not remain above the state, but travel in the jet stream. Ohio shares a common atmosphere with countries around the world. We were made aware of this fact several times this summer. Ohio residents experienced record air pollution levels from climate-driven Canadian wildfires. Ohio was blanketed with ash and particulate matter from these fires. Recently, a non-profit coalition of universities, non-profits, and tech companies, was formed to track greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the globe. Climate Trace uses “technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyze over 59 trillion bytes of data from more than 300 satellites, more than 11,100 sensors, and numerous additional sources of emissions information. The result is a groundbreaking approach to emissions monitoring that is independent, transparent, and timely.” Climate Trace does not rely on self-reporting. Climate Trace’s satellite measurements from the Tropomi satellite, direct measurements, and artificial intelligence, allow a map to be constructed which displays the major greenhouse gas emitters across the globe. These include: electricity generation, manufacturing, agriculture, forestry, waste disposal, and mineral extraction. All the measurements, which include the major greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide, methane, HCFCs, nitrogen oxides and sulfur hexafluoride, are given a weighted average based on their longevity in the atmosphere and their potential to absorb heat. Carbon dioxide has a lower rating of 1, while methane is rated a 30 because it has more heat absorption capacity. Therefore, a smaller quantity of methane can exert a great deal more atmospheric warming than the same quantity of carbon dioxide. The values on the map are reported as CO2e-100 and CO2e-20. This allows one to view the potential amount of warming compared to carbon dioxide during a 100-year period and also a twenty-year period. Looking at the global map, Marcellus shale has a CO2 100-year potential of 124.38 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent heating potential. Utica Shale has a CO2 100-year potential of 33.25 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent heating potential. The Marcellus Shale gas and oil fields are currently #4 globally for emitting greenhouse gasses; Utica Shale ranks #29. For comparison, the Texas oil and gas fields are #1 globally for GHG emissions with a 206 MT CO2 equivalent. The USA is the 2nd highest GHG emitter and ranks 3rd in the world for emissions due to fossil fuels. By allowing fracking to continue in Ohio, we will jeopardize the world’s ability to reach any credible climate goals in this decade. Scientists tell us that we must cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 in order to stay below the 1.5 C global average temperature increase from pre-industrial revolution readings. We have less than seven years to accomplish this task. Citizens are trying to save Ohio’s state parks from becoming another carbon source. What hangs in the balance is more than just wrecking an $8 billion outdoor recreation industry; it’s more than risking the water source for countless rural citizens; it’s more than destroying forested ecosystems. We are risking the survival of our planet. As global citizens, do we want to continue to allow our non-renewable energy resources to be controlled by an industry that has proven they are willing to risk our planet’s existence for a dollar?
Please consider contacting The Oil and Gas Land Management Commission and urging them to DENY the lease nominations in Salt Fork and Wolf Run State Parks. Act now: deadlines for comments will be closing soon. Emails should be sent to: Commission.Clerk@oglmc.ohio.gov Emails should be titled with one of these three subjects: Guernsey County Nomination #: 23-DNR-0009 (closes Sept2) Wolf Run Public Comments on Nomination #: 23-DNR-0008 (closes Sept10) Salt Fork Nomination #: 23-DNR-0010 (closes Sept16) Emails can express your concern for our Ohio Parks, the need to preserve our natural areas, and any of the information that Randi has provided in the article above.
The Bayan Obo mine located in the Inner Mongolia region of China is the world’s biggest rare-earth element mine. The U.S. depends on China for 80 percent of its rare-earth metal consumption.Google Earth
Transportation: Solutions to Climate Change Mary Wildfire Mary Wildfire lives on the Hickory Ridge Land Trust in West Virginia with her husband Don. She endeavors to grow more and more of their own food, while continuing her quest to figure out how to save the world. Mary feels that clear, detailed depictions of a positive future are being dangerously neglected. She writes to help us all envision the sustainable, healthy communities that we work to create. Currently Mary’s reviews and commentaries can be found at resilience.org where this article was originally published. In the US, transportation is said to be the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The most common solution put forth is a false one: “we’ll electrify all our cars, maybe our trucks too.” Planes and ships are usually not proposed for replacement by electric versions, but trains are. So what’s wrong with this idea? The main problem is that the reason transport is such a heavy sector in the US is that we do too much of it. Our cities, and our economy, are designed with the assumption that most people will drive to work; often families have multiple cars going in different directions to work or school every morning. Our manufacturing relies on an absurdly complex chain of just-in-time delivery of myriad parts from myriad places. Thus to maintain the status quo, only with electric instead of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, means replacing hundreds of millions of cars and trucks with brand new ones. But something like a third of all the energy used by a car in its lifetime is embedded energy in its manufacture. So retiring the ICE vehicles early wastes a great deal of energy. Creating an entire fleet of new electric vehicles would take a gargantuan amount of energy and materials…at the same time we’d be using a gargantuan amount of energy, and mostly the same materials, to create the massive replacement fleet of solar panels and windmills and batteries to replace fossil fuels…as well as the additional power plants to fuel this new fleet of cars. How can we do that without spiking greenhouse gas emissions way into red alarm territory? As for the materials, the main problem with electric cars is the batteries, which require some rare earth metals. Few of these are actually rare, but they are currently mined in only a few places, likely because the mining process is environmentally and socially damaging. Researching this is difficult as there are widely diverging analyses, and I suspect many of the authors have axes to grind one way or the other. My conclusion, however, is that electric cars are almost certainly better in greenhouse gas terms than ICE vehicles…but not necessarily by a huge margin. Anyone who imagines an electric vehicle is pollution free is deluding herself. There is a social justice angle to this as well, since often the mines are in poor countries, where the pollution remains, and the miners are often exploited, often children. People sometimes wave away these concerns with statements like “We must ensure that the mining is as environmentally clean as possible, and that communities are consulted…” But is mining that doesn’t damage the environment possible? I doubt it, especially now that many minerals are in short supply, meaning an enormous tonnage of source rock must be extracted and gone through to find a little usable ore. Is “free, prior and informed consent” possible for a process sure to damage the environment, and therefore public health? No—instead we will have “consultation,” where the companies line up the officials and permissions, then give the community a dog and pony show about how harmless it will be and all the jobs it will provide (never as many as promised); then the community says no, then the company says “All right, we consulted them, now give us the permits.” The model for transportation which features freeways filled with eight lanes of cars rushing one way and another eight going the other, twice every day, has other destructive impacts. Quite a percentage of land in our cities is taken up by roads and parking spaces; our houses often feature garages almost as big as the house. A change in the layout of our towns and our working arrangements could allow us to walk or bike to work (and to school, to dine, etc.), freeing up space around our homes, schools and workplaces for gardens, and space along our roads for people to walk, bike, and meet up with friends at roadside cafe tables. Ships have an obvious solution for cutting down or eliminating their climate impact—they can go back to using sails (perhaps modern design could make for more efficient sails). I saw a clip for the Tres Hombres, “the world’s only sailing cargo ship”—I think there might be a couple more now—and I think it’s wonderfully romantic . None of these options move as fast as what we have come to call “conventional” modes of transportation. I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with the air pollution and climate damage of ICE vehicles, the enormous damage from the oil industry, the social oppression, the wasted space in cities and suburbs. Of course, some don’t have the physical capacity to pedal a bike, and people sometimes need to go farther, or haul too much for a bike to be feasible. But there are motorized vehicles with much less impact than American cars—from motorized bicycles to micro cars. The latter have the advantage of protecting the occupants from weather, but would not be legal in the U.S., or safe as long as they must share the road with two-ton behemoths. So yes, electric cars are an advantage over ICE vehicles and a good choice if you’re going to buy a car anyway. But simply junking all our current fleet of oversized, overpowered ICE behemoths and replacing it with similar electric cars is not a solution. We need to be much bolder than that.
Transportation: Solutions to Climate Change, cont
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World Book Review, Ron Prosek In the June issue of the FaCT Newsletter, I wrote about how climate change was being brought home to us in the form of smoke from Canadian wildfires. Since that time, the Maui town of Lahaina has been mostly incinerated by a wildfire on that island, and Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, threatened by a massive wildfire, had to be completely evacuated. A couple weeks before fires in Maui, I began reading Fire Weather: A True Story from a hotter world (June 2023), by John Vaillant, a nature writer from British Columbia. The first part of the book describes in great detail “Wildfire 009” near and eventually in Ft. McMurray, Alberta in May 2016. The weather was unusually warm and unusually dry, with humidity at about 14 percent. And, as in Maui, there were also winds. This was a perfect setup for a massive wildfire, one probably started by lightning. At first, authorities said it was all being handled, that everyone should just go about their normal business, including going to school. But, authorities said, be ready to evacuate if that should become necessary. As the day went by, the wildfire grew more ferocious and came closer and closer to Ft. McMurray. Eventually, the fire became unstoppable. In spite of valiant firefighting efforts, the wildfire pushed into residential neighborhoods, completely incinerating entire blocks and then moving on to other neighborhoods, eager to devour the fuel that the homes provided. Fire breaks were tried. The fire jumped over these. Water was hosed toward the flames. The water never even reached the fire. It turned into steam and was sucked up into the atmosphere. After a few days, thousands evacuated in their cars, some driving north and some south. The bitumen mining and processing operations north of town was shut down and all the workers had to be evacuated. Vaillant then goes on to explain how climate change has set up conditions that make wildfires like these break out all over the world – on every continent, except Antarctica but including Greenland, where even the tundra has burned. I highly recommend Fire Weather because Vaillant brilliantly connects all the dots—the science, the history, the economics – everything that has lit our planet afire. And he clearly implicates the fossil fuel industry, the industry that ironically built Ft. McMurray. At 595 pages Fire Weather is a rather lengthy book, but the writing is so brilliant and the descriptions of fire’s power so impactful that it’s hard to put the book down. Fire Weather includes many stories of bravery and heroism in the face of the fire monster and amazing feats performed by fire – forming “fire tornadoes” that lift and move multi-ton vehicles. He describes how wildfire fronts can have the energy of four Hiroshima bombs exploding every minute. But most profoundly, Vaillant lays before us a vision of where we are headed if we don’t seriously curtail our destructive ways, especially our reckless dumping of massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Fire Weather: a true story from a hotter world is available in both print and electronic editions.
Wayne National Forest Proposes Changing Name to Buckeye National Forest Nelsonville, Ohio (Aug. 21, 2023) - The USDA Forest Service is proposing to change the name of the Wayne National Forest to the Buckeye National Forest. The effort comes in response to requests from American Indian Tribes and local community members. The national forest is currently named after General Anthony Wayne, whose complicated legacy includes leading a violent campaign against the Indigenous peoples of Ohio that resulted in their removal from their homelands. The current forest name is offensive because of this history of violence. Buckeye National Forest is one of the names suggested to the Forest Service by American Indian Tribes. Other proposed names considered included “Ohio National Forest” and “Koteewa National Forest.” The Agency is seeking local perspectives on the proposed name as it reflects the historical importance of the national forest to Ohio. A 15-day public engagement period beginning on August 21, 2023, will allow interested members of the public to share their thoughts. Feedback should indicate whether there are any reasons the proposed name would be unacceptable. Comments may be submitted to r9_wayne_website@usda.gov. The Forest Service will review public input and make a recommendation to the Secretary of Agriculture, who has the authority to change the name.
Pub Night with Northeast Ohio Sierra Club Thursday, September 7 Forest City Brewery 2135 Columbus Rd, Cleveland, OH 44113 6pm We'll gather at Forest City Brewery Thursday, Sep. 7 at 6 pm for appetizers, beverages, and talk about Cleveland's new electric aggregation provider and Sierra Club energy work. SOPEC will tell us about their program and other information about Cleveland's electric aggregation agreement. Chad Stephens will update us on his work for Ready for 100 and other energy related programs with National and Ohio Sierra Club. It has been a long time! So come and catch up with your friends and fellow Sierra Club members to share our stories and build a more sustainable future.
King Coal screening at the Nightlight Cinema in Akron September 1-7 The cultural roots of coal continue to permeate the rituals of daily life in Appalachia even as its economic power wanes. The journey of a coal miner’s daughter exploring the region’s dreams and myths, untangling the pain and beauty, as her community sits on the brink of massive change. https://www.nightlightcinema.com/
The Community of St. Peter will host a community engagement meeting with NOACA (Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency) Wednesday, September 13th at 7pm at 7100 Euclid Avenue, Suite 125, Cleveland OH NOACA seeks input on what climate-related issues the public are most concerned about, and what criteria NOACA should consider using to evaluate mitigation and adaptation efforts to protect the regional assets most vulnerable to the climate related hazards. Please RSVP on our website to receive the agenda and discussion questions for the evening.
From the Treasurer Ron Prosek I am happy to report that the money FaCT raised for aid to East Palestine, $4,000, has been put to good use. Judy Comeau-Hart and I just spoke to Rev. Dr. Bob Miller of Emmanuel Methodist Church in East Palestine, who reported that the money we raised was used to purchase 14 high quality air purifiers for residents in the affected areas of the community. We are approaching the end of the fiscal year, which will be September 30, the date of the Annual Meeting (via Zoom). So now we are in the process of assembling the budget proposal for the consideration of the Board. It looks like we have grown from a program funded at about $48,000 to a Fiscal Year 2024 budget of more than $60,000. Grants will help underwrite most of the programming. However, we depend on a successful Annual Fund Campaign this October-November to raise funds for basic operations. Let me explain what is meant by “basic operations.” This includes paying for our distinguished speakers that we present every other month, supporting the monthly fee for our development consultant contract, paying for our website, funding our constituent data base subscription, funding our Zoom account, including extra storage that we need for event and educational videos, printing expenses for brochures and print editions of the newsletter. These things ALL depend on YOUR generosity. I’ll be frank with you. We are looking for some very generous donations in our Annual Fund Campaign this fall. Some four-figure and a lot of three-figure donations are really needed! But whatever you can afford to donate will, of course, be most deeply appreciated. Many of our constituents donate once per year—to the Annual Fund; so it is important to remember, most of the dollars we need for operations will have to come out of this Annual Fund Campaign. As one of our ministers used to say in our church’s Annual Fund Campaign, “Give til it feels good!” FaCT is a 501c3 charitable organization under IRS rules. All donations to FaCT are tax-deductible.