Best books of 2022

By Jena Griffiths | January 3, 2023

My book the the year award goes without a doubt to the Guardian newspaper’s environmental journalist George Monbiot for his exceptionally well researched and deeply inspiring book Regenesis, Feeding the world without devouring the planet.

Monbiot’s masterpiece brings hope that we certainly can find a way to re-wild a third of the planet and still produce enough food for humanity’s growing population.

Using his magnifying glass, Monbiot draws us in right from the beginning by sharing his facination with tiny scuttling creatures living in the soil. Then he takes us on a journey into their realm. Below the surface of the soil, England has one of the richest ecosystems on earth. Each square metre of soil hosts several thousand species, an incredible biodiversity, largely unidentified or unresearched.

Monbiot goes on to explore several breakthrough farming techniques. I particulalrly liked the “Stockfree Organic” method by Iain Tolhurst, optimizing biodiversity above and below the ground. The soil is fed rather than the crop using wood chip “[to encourage] bacteria and fungi to bring the soil back to life.” (Chapter 4 “Fruitful”.) This chapter inspired a new enthusiasm for the branch shredder I bought a few years ago. It was far more fun turning a pile of branches and vine prunings into wood chip when you know it will feed earthworms and other little creatures that nourish the soil and bring it back to life.

I also liked that Monbiot exposes several rotten practices hidden behind the angelic facade of “organic farming”, such as the permission to use manure from nonorganic factory farms directly on organic vegetables; the night harvesting practices of some of the larger scale olive producers that result in the death of millions of song birds in the Mediterranean basin each year; UK public subsidies for unsustainable sheep farming and permissions granted for high density chicken factory farming in UK where local councils turn a blind eye to the impact on watersheds resulting in downstream algae blooms killing fish and destroying river biodiversity p. 57-60. Also mentioned, several nefarious schemes using public funds such as the EU subsidies to livestock farmers or for land clearing where hundreds of thousands of hectares natural habitat have been cleared or burnt and biodiversity destroyed (such as in Transylvania) “for the sole purpose of harvesting subsidies.” p. 221.

From a perspective of re-wilding a third of the world, I thought the most exciting project covered was chapter 7, titled “Farmfee”, exploring a fermentation project from Finland aiming to inexpensively produce high quality food by cultivating a soil bacterium that draws it’s energy from hydrogen without using any land whatsoever! Monbiot describes Pasi Vainikka’s fermentation process as “revolutionary … perhaps the most important environmental technology ever developed.” I agree and love what he wrote more recently in a later article, that its essential that this process be decentralised and democratised for future generations to survive and thrive without being held to ransom by food cartels as we are with today’s grain industry.
See his 24 November 2022 article in the Guardian newspaper on this:Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all.

The beauty of books is that they can reach forwards through time and still touch our lives years, or even centuries later. I’m including below books that touched or influenced me in 2022 even though they were published much earlier.

Audio books

The audiobook I enjoyed the most in 2022 was Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life” How fungi make our worlds, change our minds, and shape our futures Published two years ago. (Audio version, Sept 2020)
This fascinating account of the role of fungi play in support of all life is beautifully written and narrated by the author. Sheldrake challenges us to rethink our perception of ourselves as top of the hierarchy of intelligence by exploring how fungi and other organisms solve problems, communicate, make decisions, learn and remember. He also challenges our perception of where we end and other organisms start: “We are ecosystems” says Sheldrake “composed of and decomposed by an ecology of microbes … the 40 odd trillion microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food, and produce key minerals that nourish us. Like the fungi that live within plants, they protect us from disease, they guide the development of our bodies, and immune systems and influence our behaviour.”

I plan to also read the printed version of this thought-provoking book in the coming year. Highly recommended.

Other audiobooks that touched me deeply last year that were also not brand new:
– The Heart of the Soul by Gary Zukav and Linda Francis (2007!) I relistend to it several times while walking in the woods.
“The journey we are all making is from the head to the heart” says Zukav. Couldn’t be more urgent than now.
– The Quantum revelation by Paul Levy. (2020) helps us peek behind the veil of our consensus reality.

Topics: ecology and nature, Environment | No Comments »

Rethinking refrigeration

By Jena Griffiths | January 2, 2023

Every year, when winter comes around I ponder the insanity of millions of households in Europe keeping their fridges running inside heated homes when it’s freezing outside. This winter I thought I’d experiment on myself a bit before suggesting to others that they switch off their fridges to reduce their carbon footprint 😉

Early November I was going away for a week so I cleared out my fridge and switched it off before leaving. On return I thought, it’s pretty cool outside, why not just leave it off and see how easy out is to store fresh food in the god-given fridge outdoors.

Electrical refrigeration is a relatively new invention. How could our ancestors possibly manage without it for hundreds of thousands of years? Quite well I imagine! In the olden days, vegetables were stored in natural cellars or, when the temperatures weren’t sub zero, they were stored outdoors in fine mesh cupboards to keep out rodents (like the one in the photos alongside, belonging to a friend and still in use today. No electricity bill required to operate it.)

For my little experiment it helped that I live in a house that has multiple levels so I could leave my “goody box” of fresh food on the windowsill on the second floor where it couldn’t be plundered by wild animals.

It worked pretty well but I did have to keep an eye on the temperatures to make sure it didn’t drop too low or rise too high. November and December were rather cool. We even experienced minus 10 degrees Celsius mid December. But on the 31st temperatures here rose right up to 15 degrees C. so I switched the fridge back on for New Year.

Results?
The “box on a ledge” worked quite well except for a few days when temperatures dropped below zero Celcius. We even had a few days of minus 10 to -15 C. (5 F) On these days, instead of turning my fridge back on to keep my fresh veg from freezing, I simply put blue ice box packs outside and moved my fresh veg into a cool box indoors, rotating the frozen ice packs once a day so that there were always some in the cool box and others re-freezing outdoors..

It was all quite do-able but you need to remember to do it! Probably an alarm linked to certain temperature thresholds such as sub zero and + 7 degrees temperatures, would come in handy. Or even better, what about an indoor-outdoor fridge that went right through the wall or a window and could open to the outside depending on external temperatures. Imagine if every household in colder climates had something like this, it could bring down our collective carbon footprint enormously.

Topics: climate change, Environment | No Comments »

Miracle battery? – positive sparks at last!

By Jena Griffiths | August 16, 2022

Batteries vs environment – good news

For the last three decades, the race has been on to create batteries that don’t cost us the Earth, quite literally, through the massive destruction of fragile ecosystems caused in their creation.

Lithium-ion batteries are currently favoured by phone and car companies, but the environmental and humanitarian cost of mining the rare minerals needed in their composition is extremely high. These batteries eventually end up in the trash, further compounding toxic waste, human misery, destroyed ecosystems.

Lithium-sulfur batteries have been researched for years as an alternative because they are made from far less ecologically harmful materials, are much lighter and cheaper to produce, and are far less likely to catch fire. The drawback until now was they had a shorter lifespan than the more environmentally destructive lithium-ion alternative.

But now the good news: an engineering team at Drexel, Phildelphia USA, has discovered a way to make Lithium-Sulfur batteries last more than twice as long as Lithium-ion batteries and with three times the capacity!

Accidental Discovery
The team of researchers were trying to slow down a chemical reaction to improve suphur batteries but then, almost miraculously, accidentally discovered something else: a new chemical phase of sulfur that basically stops battery degradation! They were so shocked by this discovery that they had to check hundreds of times to ensure they weren’t misreading it.

Drexel’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering team leader, Vibha Kalra, PhD. said:
“As we began the test, it started running beautifully – something we did not expect. In fact, we tested it over and over again – more than 100 times — to ensure we were really seeing what we thought we were seeing. The sulfur cathode, which we suspected would cause the reaction to grind to a halt, actually performed amazingly well and it did so again and again without causing shuttling.”

“After more than a year of testing, the sulfur cathode remains stable and, as the team reported, its performance has not degraded in 4,000 charge-discharge cycles, which is equivalent to 10 years of regular use. And, as predicted, the battery’s capacity is more than three-fold that of a Li-ion battery.

“While we are still working to understand the exact mechanism behind the creation of this stable monoclinic sulfur at room temperature, this remains an exciting discovery and one that could open a number of doors for developing more sustainable and affordable battery technology,” says Kalra.

“Replacing the cathode in Li-ion batteries with a sulfur one would alleviate the need for sourcing cobalt, nickel and manganese. Supplies of these raw materials are limited and not easily extracted without causing health and environmental hazards. Sulfur, on the other hand is found everywhere in the world, and exists in vast quanties in the United States because it is a waste product of petroleum production.”

Sources and more information on this discovery:
https://www.freethink.com/environment/lithium-sulfur-battery
https://drexel.edu/news/archive/2022/February/lithium-sulfur-cathode-carbonate-electrolyte

Photo by Alena Plotnikova on Unsplash

Meantime what to do?
Our ocean ecosystems are at a risk due to deep sea mining of cobalt and other rare minerals needed for the production of Lithium-ion batteries.

Here are some action steps you can take right now.
1. Inform yourself. Go on a quick virtual tour of the ocean depths Here’s an interactive guide to the depths thanks to the Guardian newspaper. It will help you find out a bit of what is living in the oceans at various depths.
2. Find out more about the harm about to be done. Here’s more information thanks to Greenpeace. and an earlier post by me on deep sea ecosystems and why you need to take a stand against damaging or destroying ecosystems on the sea floor that haven’t been fully researched or some even discovered yet.
3. Sign the Greenpeace petition to end deep sea mining stop deep sea mining

4. Inform others. Share on social media. Help end deep sea mining by putting pressure on car companies and battery manufacturers to act responsibly and back sustainable technology. For example,
Send a tweet to car companies encouraging them to accelerate the transition to electric cars without risking irreversible harm to marine ecosystems.

5. Find out more about Mission Blue led by legendary marine scientist, Dr Sylvia Earle who asks of you:
6.“I wish you would use all means at your disposal — films, expeditions, the web, new submarines — to create a campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas; Hope Spots large enough to save and restore the blue heart of the planet.”

“We need to protect the ocean as if our lives depend on it – because they do!” – Sylvia Earle

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Roads as batteries

By Jena Griffiths | January 9, 2022

Photo by Federico Beccari on Unsplash.com

Why not put salt water batteries under roads, so that cars and trucks can be lighter (and therefore require less energy to move). The energy could be stored mostly in or alongside the road, rather than mostly in the car. A switch to salt batteries would do enormous good for the environment, particularly towards the protection of deep sea environments of which we know little, and other fragile ecosystems which are currently in danger of being violated for minerals required for electric cars. Perhaps certain roads could even charge your car battery for limited use while driving off the main grid.

Here’s a great article on salt water batteries by Jacob Marsh April 2020.
The only issue agaist salt batteries seems to be space/volume. If the batteries were stored under the road or in the pavement alongside roads this would certainly solve that issue.

Recently I listened to a podcast conversation with Elon Musk, where Musk said a mere 100 sq miles of solar panels could power the entire USA! That’s phenomenal. Why isn’t this being done? Aren’t there any philanthropists out there who would be willing to buy the land to fund this project. Or perhaps petroleum companies could shift their investment and focus into a project that supports biodiversity and life on this planet.
If each large arid or semi arid country offered 100 sq miles to an international grid of clean energy (GGI-OSOWOG) that would also solve the storage problem if at the end of each day, each country passed on its surplus to others.
What about countries with little space? If all the roads were turned to solar panels, or at least the pavements along side them, this could be another way of tackling this problem.
Perhaps we could have solar panels near the sea pumping salt water inland to arid places, particualarly places impacted by climate change caused by industrialised countries. Sea water pumped in land could then be desalinated (again using solar power) and the salt used to renew the grid’s salt batteries.

Related links
Solar roadwayshttps://solarroadways.com a company well on its way to providing solar roads, pavements and terraces.

One sun declaration
Jointly led by the UK and India, the new initiative, called “Green Grids Initiative – One Sun One World One Grid” (GGI-OSOWOG), will accelerate the development and deployment of interconnected electricity grids across continents, countries and communities, and improve energy access of the poorest through mini-grids and off-grid solutions.
A desalination project that’s worthy of supporting: https://www.givepower.org/
Each Solar Water Farm Max can provide access to clean water for up to 35,000 people every single day. See how it has already changed the lives of thousands of villagers in Kiunga, Kenya.
https://idadesal.org/
The International Desalination Association (IDA) is the world’s leading resource for information and professional development for the global desalination industry – and the only global association focused exclusively on desalination and water reuse technologies.

Topics: climate change, ecology and nature, Environment | 1 Comment »

Being the light

By Jena Griffiths | January 1, 2022

A concept I’m pondering and hope to master in coming year is

“radical inclusion”

Inspired by this century old poem:

“They drew a circle and shut me out

A rebel, a heretic, a thing to flout

But love and I had the wit to win

We drew a larger circle and took them in”

From an interview with William Ury about getting a yes to the green grid

Photo credit Bacilia Vlad Unsplash

My wishes for you this coming year:

May you see yourself with kind eyes
May you be light and bring light.

Happy New Year!

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Solstice. Our hearts are the place where the turnaround starts.

By Jena Griffiths | December 21, 2021

Today is Solstice. Birth place of 2022. The turnaround point for a new direction, for the planet and all of us on it.
What to turn around?
Perhaps our own apathy?
Solstice of heart for Royal Dutch Shell Moving from apathy to courage. Toward action, safeguarding the wellbeing of other species.
Let’s insist on a turnaround by companies who threaten breeding whales and fragile marine life.
Not with anger but with a gentle firmness. An insistance and a persistance, while staying in gratitude to these amazing creatures and the beautiful blue sphere we share, that supports us all as it turns and turns through space, towards a sun that is always shining, always gifting us its limitless energy, that these companies can and must learn to harvest.
Shell is about to blast extremely loud shockwaves into the Wild Coast of South Africa, a fragile and beautiful ecosystem that is a vital whale breeding ground.
Each shockwave is louder than a space shuttle launch, and local whales, dolphins, sharks and turtles will be subjected to them every 10 seconds, for five months, in whale mating season.

More about this by the Guardian newspaper 3 Dec and pm 1 Dec: last minute bid to stop Shell’s oil exploration in whale-breeding grounds

South Africa is rich in sunlight yet it was one of the few countries that did not support the global initiative towards a clean energy grid at COP26 last month. Why not?

What can we do to support marine life from backward thinking corporations?
What can we do to support the biodiversity of our beautiful planet? Think clean energy.

1. Sign these petitions and any others you can find.
https://action.greenpeace.org.uk/leave-whales-alone
and
https://www.change.org/p/shearwater-geoservices-shearwatergeo-and-shell-stop-blasting-the-wild-coast-our-voices-can-make-a-difference-and-put-an-end-to-shell-blasting-in-the-wild-coast
2. Ask everyone you know to participate too.
3. Stop buying fuel from Shell or any product or service bearing their logo until there’s a change of heart among the leaders steering their enterprise.
4. Write a letter to Royal Dutch Shell asking them to turnaround completely and invest in clean energy such as solar or wind instead of opening new oil fields particularly in such a sensitive ecosystem. Address your letter to the head of this enterprise asking for change: Andrew Stewart Mackenzie, Shell Centre LONDON, SE1 7NA United Kingdom tel +44-2079341234
5. Support Oceans not oil
6. Donate towards litigation though thegreenconnection.org.za: see more in comments below.
7. See also the concept of radical inclusion, mentioned by William Ury in his explanation of the Green Grid. Perhaps by holding a higher vision for Shell, that they respond to this crisis by becoming a leading innovator and supplier of the solar powered green grid?

Other suggestions? Please add them below so we can all take action to support a global change of heart.

Topics: climate change, ecology and nature, Environment | 6 Comments »

Storing carbon in your basement (or garden)

By Jena Griffiths | December 19, 2021

Recently a friend chucked out most of her beloved books and went digital. But what to do with the real gems and treasures you no longer have room for? I took some of them on, including the Quran and a Year the Rumi, because I couldn’t bear to see them turned into “pulp fiction” and, perhaps later, someone else’s toilet paper. storing carbon as books Early 2019, while clearing all my clutter at my parents’ house, I had the same problem. Looking through numerous books, rediscovering old friends, some had been in boxes for over 30 years. Some I kept, most were given away, some may have been valuable, some may find their way to recycling works but I sincerely hope not. There must be a better solution.

My thoughts on this
How much carbon in the world is currently stored in books? What would happen if all that carbon got released into the atmosphere and all those prized treasures lost? What would happen if all books were recycled in the coming years, everything went digital and then the digital web crashed or got upgraded to something else and all that wisdom and culture got lost? (If you’ve been around a while, how much of your treasured records are now inaccessible because they’re stored on now defunct discs, chips, tapes or old software version? A few millennia of homeo sapien’s ponderings blitzed by a software upgrade somewhere in the galaxy.
In a few years we’ve gone from paper, to floppy disk, to stiffie, to CD to USB stick to the cloud but where to next? It’s very easy to delete history with just one click.

Do you have documents you can’t open any more? I do! Stories I wrote on doc files only 18 years ago can no longer be opened by my current laptop. What about everything written on my first laptop, which could store only a few megabytes, and were saved on floppy disc. Or saved on “Stiffies”. That was only 30 years ago. Who in the world born after 1990 even knows or cares what a Stiffie is? Or how on earth to play a tape cassette? But most people can still read fortunately and preserving paper is a great way of storing carbon.

I think we can all do our bit for future generations by preserving old books; storing them in our basements or burying them in watertight containers in our garden, old underground tunnels or wherever else they can be stored. Firstly, it prevents this carbon going into the atmosphere and secondly its possibly the most reliable way of preserving our rich cultural heritage, in case the reset button for humanity gets pushed by our current or future leaders and future generations find themselves back in caves trying to make sense of their history and why they are here and whether the world is flat or how come some people are funnier than others etc. etc. Imagine what a cache it would be finding a load of books…

If you were to leave a crate of books for future generations which books would you choose?
Top of my list would be Victor Frankl’s Man’s search for meaning. And Richard Unger’s Lifeprints. Deciphering Your Life Purpose from Your Fingerprints. I’d also include Humankind, a hopeful history by Rutger Bregman and a selection of novels and poems across time such as William Blake’s Illuminated books, Tao te Ching…Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Maybe it would turn into 2 crates and and… I’d also store as many hand prints as I could, preferably along with the biography of each owner. As each hand print is a love poem about its owner. Future generations would learn a lot about us really quickly. If you have hand prints that you are thinking of throwing out mail them to me, preferably with a biography of the person. You can also upload hand prints of deceased people in a research data base for future generations.

Topics: climate change, ecology and nature, Environment, writing | No Comments »

The anatomy of inaction – what does climate change have to do with collective trauma?

By Jena Griffiths | November 13, 2021

What does climate change have to do with collective trauma and how each of us can contribute to healing the climate crisis by doing our own inner work – by becoming aware of frozen places within inhibiting our ability to respond?

Our willingness or ability to respond to the urgency of the crisis in which we find oursleves has been impaired by numbing and overwhelm, a shutting down of our nervous system, says Thomas Huebl.

A powerful exploration on the “anatomy of inaction” by Thomas Huebl in conversation with Kosha Joubert of the pocketproject.org

Introduction to this talk

Rough transcript of introduction to this discussion (first 28 minutes)

KJ: What is trauma and how does it co-create or shape our reality?

Thomas's answer

TH: “Trauma is what happens in us when we are going through a strongly overwhelming experience, or series of experiences. There is an intelligent response, that evolution developed, which means, if trauma is a moment when the “computer” get overloaded. There are two movements, One is extremely high stress, and the other is a shutting down or a numbing. So then we have two. The nature of trauma always creates two, and inbetween is a fragmentation. So I have very high intensity of stress because of the experience, and because it is so overwhelming, in a “part of the city” the light goes off. Imagine you have a city at night and you shut down a quarter of the city’s lights. (Similarly with trauma) one part of my nervous system goes dark. Which means I pull out my sensitivity and shut my sensitivity down. And this is very important because once I understand that the trauma response in itself is very intelligent, it’s better than without it. An untaken care of trauma response, that hasn’t been restored or integrated, creates symptoms. Why? Because in follow up situations or situations that just remind me of my overwhelm, I become extremely reactive or I don’t feel anything. I’m indifferent, dissociated and numb.

“So I have these two forces in me, very reactive or very scared, fearful, overreactive, or I’m numb, I’m indifferent, I’m distant, and a part of myself I cant feel any more. Perhaps I can feel a certain part of my body. I can feel a certain fragment of my emotional experience and I can feel you and a certain part of you, but because trauma hurts our relational capacity, the relational movement, “I feel you feeling me”, has been reduced or fragmented and shut down. And one consequence is that subjectively, I feel more separate. I feel more alone. I feel more distant. Separation is a trauma phenomenon. But disembodiment is also. So when I ask you at the beginning to make a screenshot of your body, and when you drop deeper into your body, you can connect to your body where you feel yourself. You can also connect kind of to your body when you feel yourself just a little. But in certain areas of your body are where you are numb, you cannot connect to your body, and maybe you don’t even know that you can’t feel yourself.

“The reason why we bring this into the climate conversation is because evolution and development are capacities of movement. Relating to each other are capacities of movement. When I feel you and I listen to you I create more synchronisation so that my nervous system and yours together create a more coherant relational space. These are capacities of movement. But trauma is a reduced movement. Trauma is reducing the movement of life, because it’s a freezing. And we all know this wen we say, “part of my life is more difficult.” Or “I had a difficult situation.” Or “I had a difficult interaction with somebody.” That’s where we feel the reduced movement. And that’s why, even if we are very intelligent, we cannot solve certain situations or parts of our life, not because we cannot but because of the triggers that come up. And the other point is, trauma didn’t start with us. And that’s where collective trauma comes into being. Trauma was here thousands and thousands of years. All of us have been born into a pre-traumatized world… and so detaching trauma from a merely personal experience, trauma is what happened to me when I was 3 or 7 or I had a car accident, then something happened and I can connect by biography to the trauma, so a lot of the trauma work we see is centred around that, but what I have seen these last 20 years in all those bigger facilitation processes that we did around large scale wounds, is we can attach trauma to a bigger around large scale wounds.

“I grew up as a boy in post war Vienna and no-one told me that the atmosphere I felt, certain kinds of interactions between people, how people behaved, certain thinking, that all of that is due to frozen aspects of life. So I grew up thinking this is how life is, until I learned, no Thomas this is not how life is. There is one part, how life is, that’s true, but then there is another part, and that’s how life is when it’s hurt… If we normalise trauma we normalise repetitive processes that are actually living in the past. And the we complain about them because we say, say you see, this happens over and over again. … Trauma is bound to repeat itself because its partly runs … until we become aware of it.

TH: “…Trauma is a social issue that concerns all of us.
“We are living in a normalisation of systemic trauma factors that are partly running the show without us knowing. ..That why the responsiveness of society to an obvious threat needs to be seen also through the lens of collective trauma. Because Trauma doesn’t want to change. Its nature is to freeze so if there’s enormous change process coming towards us, in our fluid state… we have adaptability… in trauma we don’t have adaptability. In trauma it scares me to change and if someone pushes me, like an activist, I push against it because it scares me even more.” Thomas Huebl

The conversation about this follows on from about 28 minutes in.

Supportive tools

Below an excellent exercise with Jens Riese Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: climate change, collective trauma, Environment | No Comments »

One Sun, one World, One Grid – hurray!

By Jena Griffiths | November 13, 2021

Possibly one of the most promising commitments to come out of COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference, is the idea of an international grid of clean energy. Beautifully explained here by William Ury, author of Getting to Yes and several other books.

This interview with Ury thanks to the pocketproject.org

What happens if we all work together? Ury also explained the concept of radical inclusion and the importance of compassionate listening.

“Listening to understand is the key art to transforming our lives and the lives around us” says William Ury.

See about 31 minutes 30 into the conversation, regarding the concept of radical inclusion
inspired by a poem from a 100 years ago

“They drew a circle and shut me out.
A rebel, a heretic, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle and took them in.”

For this project to work what is required is radical inclusion, says Ury.
We need to open our arms and reach out to the climate deniers, and families of coal miners or steel workers and draw a wider circle to include them in the solution. This requires deep listening to these people and include them and take care of them such as providing jobs in harvesting solar energy instead of fossil fuels. We can work backwards by imagining a clean energy future 10 years ahead of now. To achieve this, what needs to be in place 9 years from now? 7 years? 5 years? … And lastly, what do we need to do this year to be on track.

More about the One Sun One world One grid initiative

Text below re the One World – One Sun – One Grid project

taken verbatim from the UN Climate Change Conference 2021 website:

2 November 2021

Green Grids Initiative – One Sun One World One Grid: One Sun Declaration

“The untapped potential of the sun is well known – all the energy humanity uses in a year is equal to the energy that reaches the earth from the sun in a single hour. The sun never sets – every hour, half the planet is bathed in sunshine. By trading energy from sun, wind and water across borders, we can deliver more than enough clean energy to meet the needs of everyone on earth. This trading is already beginning to happen through discrete bilateral and regional arrangements. But to meet the sheer scale of the challenge, these efforts need to be brought together and supplemented to create a more inter-connected global grid. We call this vision: One Sun One World One Grid.

We need new transmission lines crossing frontiers and connecting different time zones, creating a global ecosystem of interconnected renewables that are shared for mutual benefit and global sustainability. This must be combined with expanded and modernised national and regional grids and complemented with the rapid scale-up of mini-grids and off-grid solar solutions.

To help deliver the vision of One Sun One World One Grid, we have resolved to combine our efforts and create a more inter-connected global grid. Our next step is to develop an action agenda for global cooperation on this agenda. Through working groups of interested governments, regulators, financiers, institutions, companies, legislators and researchers, we will seek to provide a common global framework for efforts on:

Investing in solar, wind, storage and other renewable energy generation in locations endowed with renewable resources for supporting a global grid.
Building long-distance cross-border transmission lines to connect renewable energy generators and demand centres across continents, underpinned by effective and mutually beneficial cross-border power trading arrangements.
Developing and deploying cutting edge techniques and technologies to modernise power systems and support green grids which can integrate billions of rooftop solar panels, wind turbines and storage systems.
Supporting the global transition to zero emission vehicles through incorporating the role of electric vehicles to help improve grid flexibility.
Attracting investment into solar mini-grids and off-grid systems to help vulnerable communities gain access to clean, affordable, and reliable energy without grid-access in their own areas, enhancing socio-economic development and a resilient power supply for all.
Developing innovative financial instruments, market structures, and facilitate financial and technical assistance to attract low-cost capital, including climate finance, for global solar grid infrastructure.

Through these and other efforts, we intend to cooperate internationally to share ideas and learn from each other’s successes and expertise. In this common endeavour, we can ensure that the sun becomes a secure and reliable source of energy for all, especially for the world’s underprivileged citizens.

Realizing One Sun One World One Grid through interconnected green grids can be transformational, enabling all of us to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement to prevent dangerous climate change, to accelerate the clean energy transition, and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. These efforts can stimulate green investments and create millions of good jobs. By sharing the sun’s energy, we can help to build a more peaceful and prosperous world.

Members of the Green Grids Initiative – One Sun One World One Grid Steering Committee:

Australia

France

India

United States of America

United Kingdom

Endorsed by:

Albania

Algeria

Argentina Republic

Azerbaijan

Bangladesh

Barbados

Belize

Belgium

Benin

Botswana

Burkina Faso

Burundi

Cambodia

Cameroon

Chad

Comoros

Cote d’Ivoire

Cuba

Democratic Republic of Congo

Denmark

Djibouti

Dominica

Egypt

El Salvador Equatorial Guinea

Ethiopia

Fiji

Gabonese Republic

Gambia

Germany

Ghana

Grenada

Guinea

Guyana

Haiti

Italy

Jamaica

Kiribati

Madagascar

Malawi

Maldives

Mali

Marshall Islands

Mauritius

Mozambique

Myanmar

Namibia

Nauru

Nepal

Netherlands Nicaragua

Niger

Nigeria

Oman

Papua New Guinea

Peru

Rwanda

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Samoa

Sao Tome and Principe

Saudi Arabia

Senegal

Seychelles

Somalia

South Sudan

Sri Lanka

St. Lucia

Sudan

Suriname

Sweden

Tanzania

Togolese Republic

Tonga

Trinidad and Tobago

Tuvalu

Uganda

Ukraine

United Arab Emirates

Vanuatu

Venezuela

Zambia

Zimbabwe

source

I’m rather disappointed to see that, unlike most other Afican countries, South Africa did not endorse this initiative towards a global grid of clean energy even though they are extremely rich in sunlight.

Topics: Being in transition, climate change, ecology and nature, Environment | No Comments »

Ending the climate crisis in one generation

By Jena Griffiths | November 8, 2021

Highly recommended reading! Paul Hawken’s book Regeneration, Ending the climate crisis in one generation is an empowering, hopeful and beautiful book offering us sane advice in a world that’s seemingly spinning in the opposite direction.

“It’s not game over. It’s game on,” says Paul

and his solution is simple:

“Stop. Turn around. Go the other way.”

The solutions are not technical. They are about relationship. We can choose practice the one superpower we can all evoke at will – to be humane.

“The root cause of global warming is the massive disconnetion between each other, between people and nature…regeneration is really about reconnecting those broken strands.”
“Vital connections have been severed between humans and nature…
and it is where we can discover solutions…
“Regeneration means putting life at the centre of every action and decision.
“The ultimate power to change the world does not reside in technologies. It relies on reverence, respect, and compassion – for ourselves, for all people and for all life. ” Paul Hawken

Where to start?

Paul offers 12 Guidelines, the yes or no questions listed below, that help us sharpen our focus to see the longer view.

We can apply these guidelines to every action or decision we take.

Does the action create more life or reduce it?
Does it heal the future or steal the future?
Does it enhance human well-being or diminish it?
Does it prevent disease or profit from it?
Does it create livelihoods or eliminate them?
Does it restore land or degrade it?
Does it increase global warming or decrease it?
Does it serve human needs or manufacture human wants?
Does it reduce poverty or expand it?
Does it promote fundamental human rights or deny them?
Does it provide workers with dignity or demean them?
In short, is the activity extractive or regenerative?

“There is no difference between a climate denier and someone who understands the problem but does nothing;,” says Paul. “No one is coming to help. Collectives begin with one person and then another, the invisible social space where commitment and action join and come together and become a movement.”

Are your moment to moment choices supporting life and regeneration or the opposite?

Action by action ask yourself:
What am I eating? What am I buying? What am I wearing? What am I making? ….

More about this, see Paul’s website: regeneration.org

Some recent interviews:

30 minutes

2 hrs with garrison institute

Drawdown solutions

Surprisingly reduced food waste is the 3rd biggest solution to reducing carbon in the atmosphere!

This is something we can all easily address. So too changing what we eat and what we buy or support.

Check out all the Nexus Challenges and solutions that address and prevent the climate crisis. Details of what needs to be done and how to do it on all levels of agency. Going live soon Agroecology, Heat Pumps, Marine Protected Areas, and Boreal Forests.. .get engaged wherever you feel inspired or called to.