A regional resource for climate advocates
December 1, 2022
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SAVE THE DATE
Climate Collaborative, Woodwell Climate Research Center to screen groundbreaking climate film
Chatham Orpheum Theater
637 Main Street, Chatham MA
Thursday, December 8, 2022
7:00 PM (Film) / 6:30 PM (Reception)
Join the film producer, Woodwell scientists, Climate Collaborative reps and Chatham CAN members for a 6:30 reception preceding the film and lively panel discussion & Q&A moderated by Dr. Heather Goldstone, Woodwell's Chief Communications Officer, immediately following. All proceeds to benefit the Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative. Read more. View trailer.
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Climate Collaborative in the News
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Four Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative Officers and Directors to Serve on Healey’s Gubernatorial Transition Policy Committees
By Fran Schofield, Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative, December 1, 2022 | Photo credit: Commonwealth Magazine
Brewster, MA -- The Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative (Climate Collaborative) is pleased to recognize that four Climate Collaborative officers and board directors have been appointed to serve on the transition policy committees announced by the Healey-Driscoll Transition. These include Dorothy Savarese, Daniel Wolf, Thomas Cahir, and Paul Niedzwiecki.
Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative president Dorothy Savarese and board member Dan Wolf will serve as members of the climate committee tasked with working on climate readiness, resiliency, and adaptation.
Savarese is Executive Chair of Cape Cod 5 and was recently voted Community Banker of the Year by the American Banker. Climate Collaborative board director and chair of its governmental affairs and policy committee Dan Wolf also sits on the climate committee. Wolf is a former Cape & Islands state senator and founder and board chair of Cape Air. Advisory Council member Thomas Cahir, Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority administrator and former state representative, will serve on the How We Get Around policy committee. Board member Paul Niedzwiecki, CEO of the Cape Cod Regional Chamber of Commerce, will serve on the Jobs and a Flourishing Economy for All policy committee. Read more.
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Community Banker of the Year: Cape Cod 5's Dorothy Savarese
By John Reosti, American Banker, Nov 10, 2022
Dorothy Savarese had been preparing for a leadership role for a decade when Cape Cod 5 named her CEO in 2005.
Savarese, 65, had been named chief operating officer in 2004. Before that she had served several years as director of product planning, a job that Cape Cod 5 created specifically for her when she sought to enter management after working a decade as a commercial lender. Read more.
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The Climate Collaborative is exceedingly grateful to Dorothy for serving at the helm of our organization.
She brings enormous expertise, energy, leadership, and vision to our organization and its efforts to combat climate change on the Cape & Islands and beyond.
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There's a hole in the state's climate efforts: elementary education
By Aimee Moon, WBUR, Nov 18, 2022 | Image: Change is Simple
Most teachers in the U.S. agree that climate change should be taught in schools, with some advocates saying it should start in lower grades. But in Massachusetts, climate change topics are not part of the state's elementary learning standards, leaving schools on their own to find extra resources.
In public schools, elementary students are expected to learn about topics like the weather and energy — but not necessarily how to connect that information to the climate crisis that will inevitably shape their future. Read more.
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Warmer currents may lead sea turtles to danger in Cape Cod Bay
By Paula Moura, WBUR, Nov 29, 2022
Image: Vanessa Kahn| New England Aquarium
The number of turtles becoming hypothermic and getting trapped in Cape Cod Bay has been increasing over the past decade. Researchers say it may stem from warming oceans that are influencing the turtles' geographic range and the timing of their migration. Sea turtles have had hypothermia and washed up on shore in the region since the 1970s, but numbers have increased considerably. Read more.
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Report: Charles River flooding will increase considerably with climate change
By Paula Moura, WBUR, Nov 22, 2022 | Image: Robin Lubbock for WBUR
A new report finds communities along the Charles River will experience an appreciable increase in flooding within the next 50 years.
Due to climate change, extreme storms that are less common now are expected to become more frequent and discharge a higher amount of water. Using these existing rainfall predictions, a Charles River Watershed Association report modeled the impact of future storms on 20 towns along the river and found many places where flooding could damage key infrastructure. Read more.
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Hot, New Electric Cars That Are Coming Soon
Automakers are offering new models in all shapes and sizes
By Yahoo News, Oct 21, 2022 | Image: Toyota
The coronavirus pandemic has slowed auto development and production, but manufacturers’ plans to introduce electric vehicles (EVs) continue unabated. In fact, dozens of pure electric models are set to debut by the end of 2024.
On the menu are cars and an increasing number of SUVs and pickups. Read more.
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Concerned about getting left behind as other businesses electrify their fleets? Mass Fleet Advisor is here to help!
By Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Nov 2022
In an increasingly competitive business environment, finding an advantage that helps your business to thrive has never been more important. Let Mass Fleet Advisor’s FREE electrification planning support be your business’s advantage. With the help of the program’s technical experts, Mass Fleet Advisor is a powerful tool for fleet managers who want to meet the demands of the ever-changing business environment and get a head start on thinking about electrification. Read more.
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How Floating Wetlands Are Helping to Clean Up Urban Waters
By Susan Cosier, Yale Environment, Nov 24, 2022
Image: Dave Burk
Five small islands roughly the size of backyard swimming pools float next to the concrete riverbank of Bubbly Creek, a stretch of the Chicago River named for the gas that once rose to the surface after stockyards dumped animal waste and byproducts into the waterway. Clumps of short, native grasses and plants, including sedges, swamp milkweed, and queen of the prairie, rise from a gravel-like material spread across each artificial island’s surface. A few rectangles cut from their middles hold bottomless baskets, structures that will, project designers hope, provide an attachment surface for freshwater mussels that once flourished in the river. Read more.
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"Carbon Handprint" Can Measure Companies' Positive Climate Impacts and Spur Additional Action
By Ben Somberg, ACEEE, Nov 14, 2022
As companies seek to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, there is growing interest in improving the measurement of the climate impact from the use of goods and services that a company provides. This information, which has been labeled the carbon handprint, more accurately reflects a company’s contributions to the climate change problem and its solutions.
Researchers at MIT and at LUT University in Finland have developed methods for using the carbon handprint (also known as scope 4 emissions) as an approach to assess these emissions more accurately and consistently, and complement the more common carbon footprint, which is made up of the emissions resulting from the operations of the company. Read more.
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Recycling Our Cities, One Building at a Time
By Aaron Clark and Erica Yokoyama, Bloomberg Green+City Lab, October 25, 2022 | Image: Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg
Takumi Osawa kneels on the narrow balcony of a wooden house outside Tokyo and describes how, 140 years ago, workers would have hoisted baskets of mulberry leaves to the second floor to feed silkworms. When they ate, it sounded like rain. Read more.
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Why you should almost always wash your clothes on cold
By Allyson Chiu, Washington Post, Nov 29, 2022 | Image: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post
In Elena Karpova’s household, the rumbling sound of a clothes dryer has become an unfamiliar noise.
Instead, Karpova prefers to air dry her clothes. Dryers, she says, are “energy gobblers” and when combined with machine washing too often can wear out clothes much more quickly, in addition to having huge environmental and climate impacts.
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Around the Country & the Globe
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A Virginia island community moved to the mainland, but the fast-rising sea followed — a warning for the entire East Coast
By Chris Mooney, Zoeann Murphy and Simon Ducroquet, The Washington Post, Nov 28, 2022
From The Washington Post’s expanded Climate and Environment team: More than a century ago, residents of Hog Island, Va., moved to the mainland after a series of hurricanes. Now the town where they took refuge is being threatened by climate change and fast-rising seas, perils faced from Virginia Beach to Miami. Read more.
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The world is missing its lofty climate targets. Time for some realism
Global warming cannot be limited to 1.5°C
By Carl Godfrey, The Economist, November 3, 2022
To accept that the world’s average temperature might rise by more than 1.5°C, declared the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands in 2015, would be to sign the “death warrant” of small, low-lying countries such as his. To widespread surprise, the grandees who met in Paris that year, at a climate conference like the one starting in Egypt next week, accepted his argument. They enshrined the goal of limiting global warming to about 1.5°C in the Paris agreement, which sought to co-ordinate national efforts to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. Read more.
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Inside the Saudi Strategy to Keep the World Hooked on Oil
The kingdom is working to keep fossil fuels at the center of the world economy for decades to come by lobbying, funding research and using its diplomatic muscle to obstruct climate action.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times, Nov 21, 2022
Image: Iman Al-Dabbagh |The New York Times
Shimmering in the desert is a futuristic research center with an urgent mission: Make Saudi Arabia’s oil-based economy greener, and quickly. The goal is to rapidly build more solar panels and expand electric-car use so the kingdom eventually burns far less oil. But Saudi Arabia has a far different vision for the rest of the world. A major reason it wants to burn less oil at home is to free up even more to sell abroad. Read more.
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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
– Margaret Mead
Image: The Star
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What was once the worst-case scenario for climate change seems much less likely.
By German Lopez, The New York Times, Oct 27, 2022
Image: Walt Pickering |The New York Times
An optimistic shift: Five years ago, the journalist David Wallace-Wells explored a worst-case scenario for climate change: one in which the planet warmed by as much as 5 degrees Celsius by 2100 — causing widespread extreme weather, economic collapse, famine and war.
While 5 degrees of warming once seemed possible, scientists now estimate that the Earth is on track to warm by 2 to 3 degrees. That difference might not seem huge, but it translates to fewer record-breaking floods, storms, droughts and heat waves and potentially thousands or millions of lives saved in the coming decades. Read more.
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Climate justice gets harder as world population passes 8 billion
By Gloria Dickie, Reuters, Nov 15, 2022 \ Photo - Mohammad Ponir Hossain
The world population surged past 8 billion people on Tuesday, the United Nations said, warning that more hardship is in store for regions already facing resource scarcity due to climate change.
Whether its food or water, batteries or gasoline, there will be less to go around as the global population adds another 2.4 billion people by the 2080s, according to U.N. projections.
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MIT Policy Hackathon produces new solutions for technology policy challenges
Hackathon explores policy solutions to challenges in cybersecurity, environmental justice, and city planning focused on post-pandemic efforts to build a better society.
By Kaitlin Provencher.MIT News, Nov 28, 2022
Almost three years ago, the Covid-19 pandemic changed the world. Many are still looking to uncover a “new normal.” “Instead of going back to normal, [there’s a new generation that] wants to build back something different, something better,” says Jorge Sandoval.
Erika Spangler, a public high school teacher from Massachusetts and member of the environmental justice category’s winning team, says that while each member of “Team Slime Mold” came to the table with a different set of skills, they managed to be in sync from the start. Read more.
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Cape Cod Technology Council's First Friday
Cape Cod leads in adoption of electric airplane technology!
Friday, December 2, 2022
Cape Cod 5 Headquarters
1500 Iyannough Rd, Hyannis, MA
Cape Air/Nantucket Airlines is bringing on a fleet of all-electric planes - a first in the world! Cape Air board chair and founder Dan Wolf is our featured First Friday speaker. It's not just the planes, but how to support them. Join the Cape Cod Technology Council this Friday!
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Commonwealth Wind and Park City Wind to hold live and virtual open houses
Monday, December, 5 2022
7:00-9:00pm via Zoom
Thursday, December 8, 2022
5:00-7:00pm
Centerville Library, 585 Main Street, Centerville
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The Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative would like to thank the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Falmouth (UUF) for hosting a benefit concert featuring the Pernambuco Piano Quintet, proceeds from which benefited the Climate Collaborative.
The concert -- the UUF's first live event since the pandemic lockdown began -- featured the Pernambuco Piano Quintet, with musicians Shirie Leng, violin; Jessica Baum, viola; Judith Glixon, cello; Michael Goldring, double bass and voice; and Daniel Goodman, piano. The concert was extremely well attended and a balm for the soul.
We thank the UUF and Pernambuco Piano Quintet for their generosity!
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Study Reminding Americans of their personal climate actions does not decrease their willingness to take collective action
By Anthony Leiserowitz, Yale Climate Change Communication, Nov 29, 2022
Both personal and collective action are needed to reduce carbon emissions and limit the impacts of climate change. Even so, solutions to climate change are often presented as a trade-off between personal and collective behavior. Some argue that people taking individual actions to reduce climate change may be less willing to participate in collective actions because they feel like they’re already doing enough, and vice versa. Read more.
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Annals of a Warming Planet: Climate Change from A to Z
The stories we tell ourselves about the future.
By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 21, 2022
Illustrations: Wesley Allsbrook
Arrhenius:
Svante Arrhenius was, by nature, an optimist. He believed that science should—and could—be accessible to all. In 1891, he got his first teaching job, at an experimental university in Stockholm called the Högskola. That same year, he founded the Stockholm Physics Society, which met every other Saturday evening. Read more.
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We are a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is reduce the Cape & Islands' contributions to climate change and protect our region from its potentially devastating impacts. We depend upon the generosity of our stakeholders to conduct our work. All donations are tax deductible as allowed by law.
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The Climate Collaborative's Climate Action Alerts newsletter is curated and edited by Fran Schofield with production assistance by Lauren Gottlieb. We welcome climate news from your home, school, business, town, faith community, or organization. Please submit your news, events, or article ideas to [email protected].
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