Pre-Halloween environmental news

• high-waste holiday
• Pumpkins: 2018 - farmers produced over a billion pumpkins, many of which end up decomposing in landfills and emitting methane
• Candy: many are made with palm oil, linked to deforestation. Also much of the packaging can’t be recycled, becomes part of landfill.
• Costumes: made from cheap materials, lots of chemicals in production process, only used once or twice
• Solutions - set limits on what you need, use what you already have in your house, clothing swaps, make-your-own-candy

Thank you so much to Alyssa for her collaboration with this slide show. Used with permission.


    TED's climate countdown movement has begun. Countdown is a TED media platform to introduce climate ideas, organization and cross collaboration between contributors, event planning, and to facilitate real world science and design to engineer an array of multidisciplinary projects to tackle current and future climate challenges and to expand environmental thinking into new solution spaces.
    The main goal of countdown is to help accelerate our world's progress to a zero emission 2030, reduce damage already done, and help prevent further damage through investment in education and targeted projects. Although large in scheme, many of the projects supported by TED are impact heavy: have specific targets and effective methods of meeting those goals. While countdown was announced October 2019, the event has now officially begun in October 2020. 

    
    I have always been a huge fan of TED talks, first drawn by the cutting edge science, engineering (biomedical engineering), and LEED talks particularly the ones by researchers at the MIT research labs and have always appreciated TED’s interest in environmental causes. For the first time, TED is shifting its focus to a particular cause, in this case the climate and climate justice. Already, new talks about hightech solutions to climate change utilizing AI and computer modeling have shown the possibility for real results.     A recent talk by Thomas Crowther unveils an application which has modeled the entire earth and can predict based on patterns found in nature the best locations for planting new trees and what species to plant where.     TED is also featuring talks by leading developers in projects to address challenges in a wide range of disciplines: climate leadership, city design and waste, energy production, food production, soil carbon, geo-engineering, and biodiversity, etc. 

    Have you watched any climate related TED talks? What have you thought? What do you think about TED and this trend towards climate discussion? What do you think about TED letting large tech companies like Amazon and Apple present about their path towards a carbon neutral 2030?

Thanks so much for reading!