There is No Shortage of Solutions to the Problems We All Face

            When contemplating climate change, it helps to remember that we have a vast suite of technologies, adaptable land management techniques (reforestation, soil conservation, fuels reduction), and sustainable alternatives (bamboo, hemp, biofuels) for many plastic or petroleum consumer products available to us. We have the money to revamp our infrastructure and prepare for the future, we simply have to shift resources away from fossil fuel companies and invest them in sustainable and renewable solutions.

Fire preparedness is the most immediate, time-sensitive solution we can all implement, right this very moment, by clearing defensible space around our homes, using rain catchment systems for emergency fire suppression, thinning fuels through selective timber harvests and prescribed burns, and replanting burn scars to stabilize soils and promote forest regeneration. We must also protect old growth forest to maintain and preserve ecologically critical carbon sinks and sensitive wildlife habitat. All of these strategies must be executed simultaneously. They are not mutually exclusive. There are numerous resources available through the Hayfork Watershed Research and Training Center: https://www.thewatershedcenter.com as well as the Trinity County Fire Safe Council: www.firesafetrinity.org and the Trinity RCD: www.tcrcd.net.

Transportation accounts for 29% of our national carbon emissions (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions). Did you know that every gallon of gasoline puts twenty pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? That’s breathable, free oxygen being bound up in CO2. Personal solutions include carpooling, ride sharing, riding the Trinity Shuttle, walking, or biking. Commuting with a car that gets 45 mpg is monumentally preferable to a vehicle that gets 15 mpg. Societal solutions include building high-speed electric rail to reduce air traffic, and increasing shuttle and bus services. No one person can reduce their footprint 100% because we haven’t yet built a decarbonized world. Perfection for each individual is not the goal. Small changes in our choices magnified over hundreds of millions of people adds up to a big difference nationally and globally!

All of the United States is catered to the private automobile: our laws, pop culture, infrastructure, roads, the arrangement of our commercial centers and neighborhoods. People are only truly “free” and mobile if they have an expensive personal vehicle, one that is extremely costly to repair and maintain, all while shoveling hard-earned income into the greedy, hungry, profit-devouring mouths of oil companies. Chevron, Shell, Exxon, and BP make tens of billions of dollars of profit, on average, while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of publicly-funded tax subsidies each year. Our fossil fuel dependency puts our fate into the hands of authoritarian dictators and corrupt oligarchs. Transportation will never be completely carbon-free, but we can reduce overall vehicle miles traveled. Electricity generation currently accounts for 25% of U.S. emissions (ibid.), but if we chose to harness electrical energy from the sun, earth, wind, waves, and water, we would further avoid stuffing the pockets of dangerous geopolitical actors.

Agriculture accounts for 10% of U.S. carbon emissions (ibid.). At-home solutions include: growing personal and community food gardens, composting food waste to amend and bolster soil, and buying local meat and produce. Eating locally and lower on the food chain are the two best choices you can make to reduce your carbon footprint. On a national scale, we could incentivize American farmers to rotate their crops, reduce tillage, remediate soil, plant cover crops, use integrated pest management practices, disuse chemical pesticides, and avoid growing disease- and drought-susceptible monocrops. Complex environments supporting complicated food webs are more resilient than sterile landscapes with few species present. Protecting biodiversity serves the well-being of all lifeforms.

This is a heavy topic, with planet-sized stakes. But we have a myriad of solutions available. We have many alternative choices we can make, new infrastructure we can build, new modes of transportation and consumption we can adopt. The answers are right in front of us. We must examine the problem in its entirety and then peer beyond the problem through to the other side, to a brighter, healthier future, with clean air and water, robust soils, thriving resilient forests, and public transportation that can take us anywhere, regardless of our vehicle ownership status.

Let’s work! Let’s build. Let’s act while we still have the time and resources to do so.

Welcome to Callie’s Climate Corner! The Civilian Climate Corps May Offer Us Hope for the Future.

Happy New Year, dear readers! And welcome to Callie's Climate Corner!

I just love alliteration. But my favorite "CCC" will forever be the Civilian Conservation Corps for constructing beautiful, time-tested infrastructure across the nation. During its nine-year existence (1933-1941), the CCC employed about 3 million young men. They built roads, bridges, campgrounds, dams, and strung thousands of miles of telephone lines. We still use the infrastructure they built to this very day! These men also fought wildfires, reseeded grazelands to stabilize topsoil, constructed trails and shelters, and planted upwards of three billion trees (https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/civilian-conservation-corps). A quick reminder: trees are a major carbon sink, drawing CO2 down from the atmosphere and storing it in their biomass. Forests are dubbed the “lungs of the world” and we can’t have a healthy planet without healthy forests.

Looking to the past provides us with potential answers to the most pressing issues we collectively face today. FDR’s CCC existed during two separate crises: the Great Depression and World War II. Today we face the dual challenge of COVID and climate change. It’s an ideal time to establish a modern-day Civilian Climate Corps and put our young people to work. The Climate Corps would be managed by the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, and its project initiatives would resemble those of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Corps Network. Climate Corps members would continue building and maintaining trails and structures, as well as combat invasive species, remediate wetlands, replant trees (where appropriate), and reduce the fuel loads in overgrown forests prone to wildfire.

Now, ideally, this conservation work would be completed in tandem with a complete overhaul of our expired, failing, fossil fuel- and nuclear-powered electrical grid. And rebuilding our grid would require the work of millions of contractors and manufacturers. Although we will always need to consume some fossil fuels for our transportation and manufacturing sectors, it is quite possible for America to invest in a nationwide electrical grid powered by wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal power.

It’s safe to say that we as a nation have maxed out our hydroelectrical potential , considering we’ve built an estimated 84,000 dams, impounding approximately 17% of the nation’s rivers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in_the_United_States). There are many good reasons to remove some of these dams: many are in disrepair and pose safety hazards, while others have choked out fish populations. But realistically, hydro power will need to remain a sizable piece of the puzzle if we are to succeed in our decarbonization efforts. We must maintain and repair the roughly 2,400 dams that produce hydroelectricity, and the fate of other dams will need to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Now, to this day our potential renewable energy sources remain largely untapped. Wind and solar power have grown cheaper over time, and there is plenty more energy to be harvested from the sun, wind, and the very earth itself than we are currently using. The American southwest is an ideal location for solar fields. The Midwest is well suited for wind farms. Geothermal energy exists everywhere. All that would remain is building a large enough distribution system to transport electricity generated in remote areas of the country to the more populous areas. And more than anything, we must encourage and fund the building of renewably-powered localized micro grids that are more resilient, reliable, and less prone to catastrophic failure than our current system.

I believe it is infeasible to completely disuse fossil fuels, but I also believe it is crucial and well within our technological capacity to increase renewable energy use while simultaneously developing carbon sequestration technology (capturing atmospheric CO2 and burying it deep underground in geologic reserves). Executing such great feats would be a veritable job boom for all workers who build things, and establishing a Civilian Climate Corps would carry on the legacy laid down by the original CCC, a legacy that established, defended, and nurtured our public lands. The United States rebuilt itself after the Great Depression. It is my most fervent hope that we rebuild our great nation once more. Our future is always worth the investment.