Category Archives: G & F

The dark money protecting the ‘worst energy policy in the country’

by BlanchePointer1 Posted on October 19, 2019

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This summer, Ohio’s beleaguered nuclear and coal plants got a major gift in the promise of a big bailout. Now, the fight over that promise has escalated into one of the most dramatic and bizarre showdowns of the 2020 election cycle.

It all started back in July, when the Ohio state legislature passed a law — called HB6 — that, starting next year, will charge consumers new fees to rescue four struggling power plants. Those charges will eventually add up to a $1 billion bailout for the utility FirstEnergy Solutions’ two nuclear plants, while handing a lifeline to two 1950s-era coal plants owned by another utility, the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation.

Because of the law, Ohio is the first state to reverse its renewable energy standards and efficiency targets, all while funneling more money to coal — a move that has clean energy advocates fuming. Leah Stokes, an environmental political science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, called it the “worst energy policy in the country.”

But this it isn’t your typical environmentalists-vs.-fossil-fuel-industry fight. The side opposing the bailout has clean-energy advocates working alongside the natural gas industry. And though the supporters of the bailout include some of the usual suspects — FirstEnergy, coal-reliant American Electric Power, and Duke Energy, and the coal baron and Trump donor Robert Murray — they have also marshaled a mysterious string of deep-pocketed advocacy groups.

A bit of history: The fight dates back to at least 2014, when FirstEnergy pitched a bailout to Ohio’s utility regulator. FirstEnergy went bankrupt in 2018, around the same time it was urging the Trump administration to use emergency powers to save nuclear and coal. (The Department of Energy considered that proposal, but ultimately it went nowhere.) By early 2019, though, FirstEnergy saw a window of opportunity in the Ohio legislature and spent $1 million lobbying on the bailout law. According to an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch, it contributed almost $1 million to state candidates in the 2018 cycle, including $25,000 to help elect Larry Householder as the new speaker of Ohio’s House.

As soon as the law was passed in July, opponents formed a coalition called Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts. The group, which aims to gather the 265,774 signatures required to get the referendum on the ballot in the 2020 election, hasn’t yet disclosed its funding, but observers suspect that it mostly comes from the renewable energy industry and natural gas companies.

In response, the law’s supporters have waged an unprecedented “all-out deceptive effort to prevent the issue from getting on the ballot,” says Dave Anderson who has tracked developments for the watchdog think tank Energy and Policy Institute.

In addition to FirstEnergy, a number of shadowy groups have materialized to oppose the referendum. Here’s a quick rundown of the major players:

Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs bought $10,000 in ads to target Facebook users, directing them to remove their signatures from the petition supporting the referendum. In the ads, it claims that repealing the law would “kill Ohio clean energy jobs.”
Generation Now, a group that does not disclose its donors, hired the petition firm FieldWorks, which has traditionally worked with Democratic clients. The referendum campaign claims that FieldWorks staff have harassed and allegedly paid off their workers, and firms allegedly deploying “petition blockers” to discourage people from signing onto the referendum. In one case, a confrontation between Fieldworks employees and petition workers escalated to the point where the police were called. Generation Now has rejected those allegations as “vague and unsubstantiated.” Generation Now spokesperson Curtis Steiner added that “Fieldworks has been operating in a very professional manner.” He noted that the employee associated with the incident was dismissed.
Ohioans for Energy Security has flooded local networks with a 60-second ad in which a narrator warns viewers that signing the referendum petition would help the Chinese government, as it’s “quietly invading our American electric grid.”

Thousands of Ohioans received mailers from the same group warning, “Don’t give your personal information to the Chinese Government! Don’t sign their petition attacking House Bill 6!”

The claim, based on the fact that some gas plants received funding from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has been roundly debunked. The ads neglect to mention the funding from other major global banks, or that FirstEnergy has loans from the same bank. “We have pretty strong regulation of utilities that would prevent foreign governments from controlling them,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

“These ads are some of the most bizarre and xenophobic I’ve ever seen in relation to energy, electricity, and climate,” says Director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign Mary Anne Hitt.

While the groups opposing the referendum don’t disclose their funding, the Energy and Policy Institute has found links between several of them and FirstEnergy. For example, Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs appears to share an address with two lobbyists that FirstEnergy hired to pass HB6.

The Dayton Daily News recently reported that Ohio Attorney General David Yost is investigating some of these allegations of harassment and intimidation. His investigation includes a charge that the opposition has tried to buy off firms working with the referendum for as much as $100,000, which would be considered a felony under state law.

FirstEnergy has neither denied nor confirmed its role in the campaign to scuttle the referendum, instead maintaining that the referendum is unconstitutional and “inherently misleading and confusing to Ohio voters.”

Gene Pierce, a spokesperson for the referendum’s main support group, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, admits that the efforts by the law’s supporters have slowed the signature-collecting process and “driven up the price to hire people.” The referendum has only recently launched a website and an ad campaign that fight back.

If the referendum fails, the outlook for Ohio’s clean-energy advocates could be bleak. The state is the third-biggest consumer of coal in the country. Nuclear power, which provides 15 percent of the state’s electricity, is the state’s biggest source of carbon-free energy. In 2018, the state got a measly 2.5 percent of its power from solar, wind, and biomass — making it one of the lowest users of renewable energy in the country.

Beyond the coal plants the new law helps directly, FirstEnergy has hinted that the extra money from the bailout may help it reverse its plan to close down one of its coal plants. The true cost of the bailout could be higher as coal becomes more unprofitable. All told, “there’s more money in the Ohio law to bail out dirty old coal plants than to support carbon-free nuclear power,”Stokes says.

Sierra Club’s Mary Anne Hitt echoed those concerns. She called the effort to uphold the bailout “one of the most extreme and also aggressive efforts like this that I have ever seen.” She added, “Unfortunately, it’s regular Ohioans who end up paying the price.”

Originally posted here – 

The dark money protecting the ‘worst energy policy in the country’

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Sea-level rise threatens 13 million Americans. Can FEMA help?

by IvaMoenchfnsr Posted on October 9, 2019

Entrepreneur and presidential hopeful Andrew Yang caught flak at the second Democratic debate in July for saying that the time has come to move Americans living in the path of sea-level rise to higher ground. “You can run but you can’t hide” doesn’t make a particularly good presidential slogan. After all, admitting defeat and letting nature take its course isn’t exactly our first instinct as human beings.

Managed retreat — abandoning areas that become so threatened by sea-level rise that they are, for whatever reason, considered not worth saving — has been a far less popular idea than adaptation strategies like flood gates, levees, and pumps. (Just look at Miami.)

But in many respects Yang’s realism is spot on. If the world keeps burning fossil fuels as usual, between four and 13 million Americans will see their homes inundated by sea-level rise this century. In the future, managed retreat will become unavoidable.

Don’t take Yang’s word for it. That’s one of the conclusions of a new study in Science Advances — the first to evaluate how managed retreat is functioning in the United States on a national scale. The study’s authors analyzed the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s voluntary buyout program — an initiative that allows owners of flood-prone properties to sell their homes and land to local governments, usually in the aftermath of a disaster. The aim of the program is to get vulnerable people and assets out of flood plains and to ensure that at-risk property doesn’t go back on the market so some other unfortunate soul ends up buying a house that floods once a year. So far, a little more than 40,000 people in 49 states have taken advantage of the program. That’s not a lot of households, and the study found that the number of buyouts overseen by FEMA has actually gone down over the past three decades.

By looking at buyouts that occurred between 1989 and 2017, the study’s authors were able to evaluate the way communities are utilizing (or not utilizing) FEMA’s buyout program, what demographics are benefiting from the program, and how retreat fits into a wider climate strategy.

The study took FEMA’s publicly available buyout data, compared it to other data sets, and found that the counties that take advantage of the program on average have higher income and population density than those that don’t. Within those counties, however, the neighborhoods where the buyouts took place were actually lower-income, denser, and more racially diverse. To the authors of the study, these trends signal that not all local governments have equal access to the program. For example, in Harris County, which includes Houston, there have been more than 2,000 buyouts since 1989. But Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi — the three states that have had the highest levels of property damage from flooding — rank lowest in the nation in state-wide property buyouts.

The study also found that counties are, for the most part, buying up a few properties at a time with FEMA funds, instead of entire swaths — a predictable outcome when buyouts are voluntary. That’s a missed opportunity to restore flood plains and reduce overall risk to the community. To compound the complexity of the issue, FEMA hasn’t done a good job of documenting its own progress — when logging buyouts in its system, the administration neglected to fill out nearly half of the entries. That means that in many cases researchers don’t know what type of residence was bought out, including whether it was a rental or mobile home.

Millions of Americans may have to contend with managed retreat; why have so few taken advantage of FEMA’s program? Part of the reason may be due to the fact that retreating to higher ground hasn’t really been a central part of states’ flood risk mitigation plans thus far. Local governments have long prioritized approaches like disaster assistance and improved engineering. That could change, though, thanks to a perfect storm of factors. “Even places that have not done buyouts to date are increasingly thinking about the combination of hazards,” Katherine Mach, the lead author of the study, said in a conference call with reporters. “In Louisiana, for example, it’s the combination of oil extraction plus reduced sediment supply plus sea-level rise in normal circumstances versus disaster circumstances.” Buyouts will likely be part of the state’s “full suite of responses,” Mach said.

So what happens if Yang’s prediction of devastating sea-level rise comes true? There are 49 million housing units on the U.S. coast and over $1 trillion worth of infrastructure within 700 feet of the coast, says study author A.R. Sider. “If even one-tenth of that needed to relocate, we’d be talking about orders of magnitude larger than we’ve ever done before with buyouts,” she said.

The study’s authors hope their work lays the groundwork for more research on this topic. “One of the questions we’re trying to answer is what the impacts of buyouts are for the households that participate in them,” said Caroline Kraan, another of the study’s authors. “Where do these households move to? Are they better or worse off in the long term?” We know at least one presidential candidate who’s probably very interested in the answer.

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Sea-level rise threatens 13 million Americans. Can FEMA help?

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Gene editing could help save the planet — if scientists can avoid the typos

by LeannaFoust8593 Posted on October 7, 2019

For the last few years, writers and scientists have marveled at the potential for gene editing to allow farmers to grow more food on less land and allow more of the earth to grow carbon-sucking forests and savannas.

The main advantage of gene editing is precision. It’s right there in the name: Instead of dealing with the randomness of breeding, or the rough power-tool work implied by the term “genetic engineering,” the “editing” suggests that scientists could now change the letters of genetic code with the same ease that a writer corrects typos.

But in late July, FDA scientists found a chunk of bacterial DNA in gene-edited calves, prompting people to wonder if this precision tool wasn’t as precise as advertised. That hopeful vision of a gene-edited future — verdant with pesticide-free, carbon-sequestering crops — flickered.

On Monday, the scientists studying these gene-edited cattle published a paper in the journal Nature Biotechnology explaining what happened. Essentially, this new paper tells us that gene editing precisely tweaked specific letters of DNA, exactly what it was supposed to do. But scientists also used older, cruder tools, and one of those caused the genetic typo. Even so, the end result might be that gene-editing slides into the muck of controversy over GMOs.

To be clear, the cows at the center of this study have nothing to do with creating more productive, pest-resistant foods. The scientists had edited their genes in stem cells, which grew into calves without horns. Farmers usually remove the horns to prevent cattle from injuring each other — goring is a real danger.

When I visited the University of California Davis in 2015, I saw a pair of these black-and-white bull calves standing and chewing in an outdoor pen, like ordinary but adorable bovines. Unlike other calves, however, they wouldn’t have to suffer through a painful dehorning operation, in which a veterinarian burns out their horn buds.

Some cows are naturally hornless: Angus and Hereford breeds, for instance. But those are beef cattle. For dairy you want Holsteins or Jerseys, and these champion milk producers are more carefully bred than the winners of the Westminster dog show. If you started crossing muscled Herefords with black-and-white Holsteins, it would take decades of breeding to move the hornless trait into the dairy line then weed out all the beefy traits.

What if you just plucked a single gene and moved it into dairy cows? With gene editing, you could tweak dairy cows without messing up their finely tuned milk-producing DNA so that they would no longer have to endure dehorning. The Minnesota-based company Recombinetics tried this using a technique called TALENS (you might have heard of CRISPR — this is just a different version of the same thing).

To run with the editing metaphor, Recombinetics basically took out the DNA that laid out instructions for “HORN” and replaced it with 202 letters of DNA that said “HORNLESS.” But first, they attached it to a bacterial plasmid — think of it as a sub-cellular copy machine — that would reproduce this strand over and over again (HORNLESS, HORNLESS, HORNLESS!). Then they injected all those copies into a cow cell — that gave one of those copies a much better chance of bumping into the one spot in the DNA that read HORN. This is where things went wrong. Instead of just replacing HORN with HORNLESS, the plasmid also folded into the cell’s DNA so that it read something like HORNLESS-COPYMACHINE-HORNLESS. That genetic information went into an egg, which went into a cow’s uterus, and, in 2015, grew into a hornless calf. No one noticed until years later.

The calves I saw at Davis were there to be studied by Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal geneticist. Funded by a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to assess the risks of biotech, her team first verified that the hornless trait was being passed down through generations of cattle. “Basically, we found that Mendel knew his shit,” said Van Eenennaam (that’s Gregor Mendel, the scientist from the 1800s who described how traits are inherited).

With this new paper, Van Eenennaam’s team showed that the bacterial plasmid had also been passed down to some of the calves, again following the rules of genetics 101. It doesn’t seem to be causing a problem — it’s fairly normal for DNA from germs and viruses to work its way into genomes (the human genome is about 8 percent virus DNA), and critters can usually just roll with it. But because these cattle had DNA from a bacteria, it meant they were genetically modified organisms, or GMOs in the eyes of government regulators. That, in turn, meant they would have to undergo years of testing. A giant corporation like Bayer could afford that, but not a small startup like Recombinetics. The FDA is now treating gene-edited animals like new drugs, requiring multiple rounds of safety testing, which effectively puts an end to the quest to make hornless dairy cows. Longtime opponents of biotechnology think that would be a good thing. Friends of the Earth recently released a report with Janet Cotter, who runs the consultancy Logos Environmental, condemning gene edited animals.

“The scientific evidence shows that gene editing, particularly in animals, is far from precise.” Cotter said in a statement. “Instead, it can produce unintended changes to genetic material and disrupt genetic processes. Such effects could have far reaching consequences for food safety, so these applications will require a rigorous assessment if they are to be used in agriculture.”

It would be easy enough to screen out plasmids before putting gene-edited eggs into a cow’s womb. That’s a routine procedure, said Van Eenennaam. But she worries that won’t quell fears that gene editing is sloppier than expected. Treating gene-edited animals like drugs is not proportionate with the risk, Van Eenennaam said, and would prevent breakthroughs that might help us meet the challenge of climate change, whether it’s cows that don’t belch methane, or corals that can survive heat., Van Eenennaam said.

“The debate has pretty much blocked the technology in animals through my whole career. I was hoping gene-editing would be different,” she said. “I have students who are excited about gene editing for disease-resistance — but now I feel like it’s Ground Hog Day. Here we go again.”

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Gene editing could help save the planet — if scientists can avoid the typos

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Climate change is coming for our toilets. Here’s how we can stop it.

by Dominik58K Posted on October 2, 2019

Of all the amazing conveniences Americans are lucky enough to enjoy, the bowl that makes the poop go away is one of the best — on par with the tap that turns the water on and the box that makes the food hot. But I am here to ruin your day and tell you that climate change could compromise the humble toilet. If we don’t act soon, the consequences could be disgusting.

About one in five households in the United States depends on a septic system to eliminate waste (that’s 60 million households, for those of you who don’t like fractions). Septic systems not only dispose of our waste, they also protect public health, preserve precious water resources, and provide long-term peace of mind for city planners and plumbers alike. But that septic-associated security could go down the drain, according to information in a U.N. report on oceans published last week.

While the report is not specifically about your bathroom, per se, it shows how a stealthy threat — sea-level rise — could make it more difficult for people with septic systems to flush their toilets. A brief primer on septic systems, which are common in rural areas: The stuff in your toilet goes into an underground tank, where it breaks down (I’m gagging) and gets drained out into a leach field (gross) that’s at least 20 feet from your house. In order to function properly, those drainage fields have to be relatively dry.

Rising groundwater levels (a problem that accompanies sea-level rise) are soaking the fields, making it more difficult for our waste to break down and get absorbed properly. Rising groundwater also affects the soil’s ability to filter out harmful bacteria, which poses a public safety risk. And to make matters worse, increased rainfall, another climate change-related perk, is exacerbating the issue. It’s a back-up problem that can’t be solved with a plunger, if you catch my drift.

New England, where roughly half of homes rely on septic systems, is especially at risk. So is Florida — home to 12 percent of the nation’s septic systems. Miami-Dade county commissioned a report on vulnerable toilets this year and found 64 percent of tanks could run into problems by 2040. Minnesota, an inland state, has to contend with another climate-related toilet problem: lack of snow. Snow, which keeps things nice and insulated, has been noticeably absent in early winter and spring. Freezing temperatures are still kicking around, though. That means the frost line has taken a dive deep underground and compromised thousands of Minnesotans’ septic systems. See? Septic tanks are getting it from all sides these days.

So is the solution to dig up all the septic tanks, put them on stilts, and clothe them in Canada Goose parkas? Not exactly, says Elena Mihaly, staff attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation. She worked on a 2017 report on climate change’s effect on wastewater treatment systems that laid out some possible solutions to this poopy problem.

One method is to reform the way septic systems are regulated so that new systems are evaluated for their susceptibility to climate change before they’re put in. Researchers are already mapping out areas with infrastructure that’s vulnerable to groundwater level rise in coming years in states like New Hampshire. When it comes to existing septic systems, Mihaly says inspecting them when houses change hands at point of sale is a “way to make sure that we’re checking in on how infrastructure is doing given current risk, and how it’s changed from 30 or 40 years ago.”

And there are other practices that can head off this problem, too. Shallower leach fields, for example, rely on a narrower depth to treat water. Municipalities can install town-wide sewer systems in areas where household septic tanks don’t make sense. Frequent inspections are key, too. “It’s important to get your septic system inspected every three or four years,” Mihaly said. “Not only looking at all the pieces on the outside but at what’s happening with the groundwater that is flowing near it.”

Most importantly, it’s crucial to understand that groundwater doesn’t act in predictable ways, and it can impact more than just septic systems. “It’s not a given that if you have 3 feet of sea-level rise you’ll always have this much groundwater rise inland,” Mihaly said. “It’s really dependent on the underlying geology of that area, so it’s going to be very location-specific.” Roads, drinking water wells, landfills, and other infrastructure are susceptible to rising groundwater, too. “We actually have infrastructure that’s inland that we need to be thinking about as well in terms of reliability and functionality in the face of climate change,” she said.

You hear that, America? Climate change is coming for our conveniences. It’s time to get potty trained.

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Climate change is coming for our toilets. Here’s how we can stop it.

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Q&A: How Can I Monitor My Solar Power System?

by ThereseDelprat Posted on October 2, 2019

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In the early days of solar-powered electricity, solar system owners installed panels but received little information on how the system was performing. The system’s solar inverter might have a read-out of real-time system production, but it was hard to get any details. If you were away from the system during the day, it was tough to know how it performed.

It is helpful to have answers to some basic questions about the performance of your solar power system. Are all of the solar panels producing the same amount of power? How much energy is the system producing over a month or year? Are any issues hindering power production? It used to be very difficult to know, and lack of information also made the warranties less valuable.

If your panels weren’t producing as much power as expected, how would you know?

Welcome to Solar System Monitoring

Now, many solar systems come with monitoring capabilities. This allows home and business owners to analyze solar panel output, with both real-time and historical data.

In many cases, information on each solar panel’s output is available, making it easy to pinpoint and troubleshoot problems. Monitoring helps determine if the equipment is running properly, allowing solar technicians to identify and troubleshoot issues.

There are a variety of solar monitoring systems, and most are associated with solar inverters. Common brands of solar inverters include Fronius, SolarEdge, SMA America, Enphase Energy, and Tigo Energy. Each of these companies typically offers proprietary monitoring software that integrates with their inverters.

Another option is a plug-in that adds monitoring capabilities to your existing solar system. Sense, for example, makes a solar monitoring tool that plugs into a Wi-Fi network to track solar power production and your energy use.

Doesn’t my power bill show how my solar system performed?

No, utility bills are not an accurate way to calculate total solar energy production.

Most electric utilities do compensate their customers for surplus solar energy. This means that there will be a credit line on your bill for solar energy that is fed to the power grid. This number quantifies surplus power from your solar system, not total energy production.

For example, if your refrigerator and air conditioner are running in your home, the solar electricity will power these devices first. Then, the surplus electricity goes to the grid. The utility bill only shows the surplus and won’t reveal how much electricity the appliances were using. This is why monitoring your solar system is crucial. It calculates total solar system production and not merely what is fed to the power grid.

How can I access solar monitoring data?

Data access varies a bit by the platform, but most have apps and online portals to access the data. This means that you can view real-time and historical data with just a few clicks.

Most solar systems that are installed today have monitoring capabilities. Some portals also allow you to sign up to receive alerts if the solar system isn’t performing correctly.

Solar monitoring is a great way to identify production issues early on, such as faulty wires or solar panel issues. Real-time data makes it easier to identify problems quickly before they cause a significant decrease in solar energy production.

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Q&A: How Can I Monitor My Solar Power System?

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What the climate petition filed by 16 kids at the U.N. really means

by dylanconnibere Posted on September 25, 2019

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What the climate petition filed by 16 kids at the U.N. really means

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Meet the other Greta Thunbergs at the first-ever U.N. Youth Climate Summit

by RichieStillwell Posted on September 23, 2019

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Meet the other Greta Thunbergs at the first-ever U.N. Youth Climate Summit

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Earth911 Podcast, Sept. 23, 2019: CBD Sustainability, Solar Installation Contracts, & Indoor Vertical Gardens

by MarlysJacobs Posted on September 23, 2019

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Following the rapid rise of CBD-based products, Earth911 looks at the environmental footprint of the non-psychoactive product of hemp and cannabis plants. We also walk you through the steps to a successful home solar installation contract and explore the opportunity to green your interior with vertical gardens. Join Evelyn Fielding-Lopez, Sarah Lozanova, and Mitch Ratcliffe for this week’s sustainable living and recycling discussion.

Products containing CBD are promoted as cures of pain, anxiety, and animal health, but is the production of CBD sustainable? We explore how CBD is grown and packaged to discover if your cannabis-based skin regime or sleep aide is good for the planet. Most CBD comes from industrial hemp farms, which use the spent plant material to make textiles and rope, among various other uses for this ancient plant. We also answer a related Earthling Question about how to determine the quality and dosage of CBD products.

If you are planning to install solar panels before the next annual reduction in government subsidies, check out Sarah’s guide to finding the right contractor and negotiating a good deal.

As we head into fall, it’s a good time to look indoors for vegetative inspiration. Vertical gardens beautify your home while freshening the air and supplying herbs for your winter meals. And if you’re looking for other projects for the longer nights ahead, we have some ideas for using the wood from shipping pallets to make furniture, kitchen racks, and more. We cover how to choose the right pallets, the tools you’ll need, and point to some great DIY projects.

This week’s Earthling Questions are about how to recycle the interior of a vehicle and whether alkaline batteries need to be bagged for recycling. Be sure to keep your guides to recycling single-use batteries and rechargeable batteries handy.

Join the conversation and share your thoughts with the community in our Earthling Forum.

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.
Follow the podcast on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube.

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Earth911 Podcast, Sept. 23, 2019: CBD Sustainability, Solar Installation Contracts, & Indoor Vertical Gardens

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‘We’re not alone:’ Thousands of NYC students join Greta’s climate strike

by isaacgalloway1 Posted on September 21, 2019

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‘We’re not alone:’ Thousands of NYC students join Greta’s climate strike

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TIME magazine devoted an entire issue to climate change AGAIN

by Madelai90A Posted on September 13, 2019

Every story in this week’s edition of TIME is about the climate crisis — one of only five times the magazine has devoted an entire issue to a single topic. “2050: The Fight for Earth” comes 30 years after TIME’s first climate issue, when they put “Endangered Earth” on the cover instead of their usual Person of the Year in 1989.

The threat to our planet posed by climate change, the TIME editorial staff decided, was “the most important story of the year.” Unfortunately, life on Earth is still in pretty imminent danger — even more than they realized it was back in 1989 — but the stories and articles just released detail how much our ability to address the climate has grown since then. We read it, of course, so you don’t have to — but we still hope you do. It’s well worth your time.

I know, reading an entire magazine’s worth of news about our heating planet probably seems like a good way to ensure that you spend the rest of your day steeped in extreme existential dread. But reading these stories actually made me feel … hopeful? Or at least, like doom isn’t necessarily inevitable (which might be the closest a climate reporter gets to hope these days).

To be sure, “2050: The Fight for Earth” is not filled with light reading material. A long multimedia piece viscerally documents the deforestation occurring in the Amazon right now. The piece is unequivocal about just how high the stakes are: “The Amazon tipping point could also lead to a cascade of other potential climate tipping points,” writes journalist Matt Sandy. “Scientists believe that these changes combined could result in runaway global warming that humans would find impossible to reverse.”

As you read more stories, a clear trend emerges: We aren’t doing enough, whether that means stopping deforestation and ocean warming, reforming manufacturing practices, or adapting to the changes already set in motion.

You’re probably thinking, that doesn’t sound hopeful at all. But the clear-eyed presentation of the severity of the problem makes me believe TIME’s writers and editors when they put forward solutions and reasons for hope. They don’t say it’ll be easy — in fact, they acknowledge it will be quite hard — and so I trust them when they say it is possible to avert the worst outcomes of global warming.

So what could we be doing? The issue includes an overview of much-needed technological innovations that are on the horizon. Profiles of 15 women leading the climate movement illustrate that many people, especially those who will bear more of the consequences of a hotter planet, are already doing incredible work to avert those outcomes. Al Gore chimes in (it’s the TIME climate issue — did you really think Al Gore wouldn’t be in this thing?) with a similar message: We need to support the work of young, frontline activists.

It’s easy for journalists to inspire despair when writing about something as dire as climate change or simply fall into the trap of oversimplifying the issue and making unrealistic promises about what options are still on the table. But especially given the dearth of climate coverage we’ve seen in past years, a whole issue that realistically, honestly examines how we may be able to move forward feels like a win worth celebrating.

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TIME magazine devoted an entire issue to climate change AGAIN

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