The Offline Report

This summary is from earthweek.com and it appears beneath the last page of the sports section the "Sporting Green" section of our Sunday newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle. Occassionally I'll clip one of the articles and past it to this blog. But this week each of the seven articles seemed equally alarming. On closer inspection, four of the seven articles are alarming as in "climate change is here" right now. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

A president visited California today to talk about the importance of "A forest nation." Nobody knows what he meant, but it's a great time to mention "Afforestation" as the 15th of 80 most-effective means of reversing CO2 emissions as ranked by climate scientists the world over, edited by Paul Hawken into a book called "DrawDown" (in bookstores now! Makes a great coffee table book! Remember what you tell your kids: many politicians get in front of a parade!) The DrawDown book and website describes Afforestation : Creating new forests where there were none before is the aim of afforestation. Degraded pasture and agricultural lands, or other lands corrupted from uses such as mining, are ripe for strategic planting of trees and perennial biomass. Afforestation can take a variety of forms—from seeding dense plots of diverse indigenous species to introducing a single exotic as a plantation crop, such as the fast-growing Monterey pine, the most widely p...

The world's largest iceberg has shrunk to 58% its size from the year 2000 - which can mean one of two things: Climate change is underway or Microsoft corp. is saving cooling cost payments by operating a data center under the sea . Join us for meeting number nine of the DrawDown bookclub. Since it's such a low-stress week we're serving high-carb comfort food, recipe courtesy of thekitch.com (We could not find zucchini noodles for the recipe, but with regular noodles, the parsley-pistachio pesto sauce offers a refreshing twist on traditional pesto.) I. Review II. Recycled Paper, page 168 III. Next Readings Summer officially starts days from now on June 20th, but in California first responders are already at work dousing small fires. And, thanks to many preventative controlled burns, only twelve "major fires" are burning up and down the state right now, CalFIRE's map says . This is early - fire season hasn't really started yet, we've a hot sum...

( * Nov 4 2018, we appended an update , below.)     A San Francisco Board of Supervisors debate in 2007 dragged for weeks, weighing whether to ban plastic bags at retail checkouts. Dozens testified in support, but momentum stalled with an industry lobbyist urging instead, a ban on plastic bag bans. A conservative, usually combative, drop-by visitor, jolted the idea back into motion: 40-ish Irish-American man, president of the Residential Builders Association, stood to report a similar ban passed in Ireland and "we keep paper bags in the trunk of the car" there now, it couldn't be easier to comply! People are talking about plastic this week. We're talking "BioPlastic" page 168 for the eighth meeting of DrawDown bookclub. Part I is Review, part II covers "Bioplastics" page 168 and Part III decides what to read next. Do know plastic news is breaking as we begin this meeting. Monday June 5 was "World Environment Day" the search results f...

Welcome friends to meeting #7 of the bookclub where we read DrawDown, the book of climate change solutions. This week we discuss "Walkable Cities", page 86 , and a special essay chapter, "The Man Who Stopped the Desert" page 118 . Announcement: next week we'll read one chapter instead of the usual two. I. Review II. Walkable Cities, p. 86 III. The Man Who Stopped the Desert , p. 118 IV. Next Week's Reading (Recommendation: skip past this current climate events section, start at I. Review .) A lot happened this week - Friday June 1st was the start of hurricane season in the U.S. Volcanic lava flow now blocks evacuation routes on Hawaii's big island . A Pakistani activist I discovered on twitter Umar Arshad is evangelizing tree planting there . Pakistani tweeps (twitter peeps) publish frequent posts on a severe drought in its first stages, which explains the wave of tree-planting calls to action from Pakistan twitter. In California our state senat...

What a week, bookclub members. While authorities are separating migrant children from their parents in the U.S.A. then losing track of them, Congress deregulates banking just as we're bidding on houses in an over-heated market, and more, we won't postpone a book club meeting. We hold a vague sense that composting and gun violence and climate change are connected. We can't explain it. But grab a virtual plate - given the stress of the week, we're serving a comfort food favorite: veggie burgers and fries. Of course, I pulled this recipe from Bon Appetit yesterday afternoon, ingredient-shopped, then chopped and assembled the mix until 1:00AM. B.A. recipes seduce with a great photo, then pull you in with prep-cook step after step. But it's done - indulge! I. Review II. Composting (page 62) III. Wind Turbines (page 2) IV. Next Meeting I. Review (Invest in Tree Farms, We're Bullish on Paper) Last week we reviewed Household Recycling (page 158) and Conse...

There's no time right now to slow down, read, prepare food, invite people over and discuss two chapters from project DrawDown in hopes of correcting climate change. Since there's no time, we have to make time, and we're doing that right now. Join us! Grab a virtual plate - today's nosh is a salad made with re-hydrated seaweed, asame seaweed specifically, inspired by the sea-farming segment we saw last week on 60 Minutes . Correspondent Leslie Stahl reported seaweed farming is starting to take off, removing carbon dioxide from the ocean. And seaweed's in such high demand, sea farmers can't produce fast enough, and are recruiting entrepreneurs and ex-fishermen to set up ocean plots, plant water crops, and join the craze. We searched three grocers before finally purchasing dried asame seaweed online. Lots of climate change-related news items were published since we last met for a DrawDown discussion March 30 . One published story reported people are giving up...

( * Nov 5 2018: update , below.)     This "Three-D Sea Farming" news segment weeks ago on 60 Minutes was a hopeful report in our journey to course-correct climate change. A fisherman or "sea hunter" became a sea farmer, growing produce and livestock inside "columns" of water, cubic square feet of ocean, instead of plots of land. Seaweed up top, "sausage nets" of muscles just below seaweed, cylindrical cages of scallops growing at mid-tier, and oysters growing at sea floor. Cool seaweed-seeding column technology and oyster cages shown in the CBS video of the seaweed story, now online here . The more big fires racing through cities and towns, the more CO2-sequestering trees and brush are destroyed, the more CO2 is released into the air. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the hotter the atmosphere becomes, which heats the polar icecaps, ... (somewhere here more CO2 is getting into the ocean, "acidification" the oceanographers call it....

Nobody ate kale a few years ago. Now seaweed farming is pulling CO2 out of circulation in the ocean, and farmers grow muscles and oysters in the same sea "column." Please see this amazing story that was on 60 minutes last night. This week we'll try to locate "sea greens" for next week's "Meatless Monday." See also - seaweed can propel cars. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/seaweed-farming-sampling-fresh-picked-sea-lettuce/

Last night seven winners, one from each continent (including "island nations") were recognized at the San Francisco ceremony of the 29th annual Goldman Environmental Prize. With recent conversations on the futility of fighting climate change circulating this "Earth Week," the Goldman Prize winner from Vietnam is worth highlighting in this blog post. In this site's fourth meeting of DrawDown bookclub on microgrids , we noted the book's findings that under-developed rural areas had great potential to "leapfrog" toward renewable energy because their grids had not yet been built out, and financial interests had not yet taken too much hold. We said: "But building microgrids in urban areas will be more obstacle-ridden. Rural areas are better for breaking ground." The winner from Asia -- the first Goldman winner from Vietnam -- worked to persuade her government to divert investment away from coal and toward renewable sources like wind and ...