December News You Can Use
The Healing Power of Joy
The November Presidential election revealed stark divides in the United States. To overcome the hate and demonizing from the campaign season and to resist the likely destructive policies of the in-coming administration, one place to begin is building connections one person to another in our neighborhoods, communities, states and regions. As Ghandi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
“You were born with an innate capacity for happiness. Happiness is part of who you are. Happiness is your birthright. In life, however, you can’t always be happy. Sometimes the conditions of the world around you leave you feeling angry, anxious, hopeless or despairing. Sometimes your own internal world leaves you feeling irritable, sad, lost, frustrated, fearful, or any mixture of emotions. When life is not going well, this book can embolden you to realize the happiness that is innate within you – that is your birthright.” Page 5, A Happiness and Well-Being Rescue Kit by Laura Musikanski, et al
In 2025, Minerva Ventures will focus on fostering restoration and regeneration. Join us at our monthly Climate Leaders meetings. Share the resources and news in these newsletters. Participate in workshops and collaboration to bring meaningful climate solutions and to foster well-being for yourself and in your communities, companies and in the larger ecosystems in which we live. We welcome your thoughts, stories, challenges and hopes.
Resources for cultivating happiness and well-being:
A Happiness and Well-Being Rescue Kit, 2024, By Laura Musikanski, Clinton Bliss, James Bradbury, Margaret Hansen, Rhonda Phillips, https://www.happycounts.org/
This book builds on data gathered since 2011, from people around the world by the Happiness Index. The Index is used to help people measure and understand their happiness, as individually and collectively. The book is organized by topic with tools for increasing many dimensions of happiness and well-being, guided by playfulness and fun.
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, 2012, by Martin E. P. Seligman, https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/resources/flourish-martin-e-p-seligman
Dr. Seligman, a pioneer of Positive Psychology, has worked with teachers, psychologists and the US Army, and others to share his game-changing work on optimism, motivation, and character to show how to get the most out of life — for individuals, for communities, and for nations
The Poetry Pole: For When We Greet Each Other by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I want a new ritual for when we meet each other-
strangers or beloveds, friends or rivals, elders or children.
It begins by holding each other's eyes
the way we behold sunrises or the first cherry blooms,
which is to say we assume we'll find beauty there.
And perhaps some display of open hands
-a gesture with palms up-that suggests both
I offer myself to you and I receive you.
There should be a quiet moment in which
we hear each other breathe—
knowing it's the sound of the ocean inside us.
If there are words at all, let them be formed
mostly of vowels so they're heard more as song
than as spitting, more like river current and less
like throwing stones, words that mean something like
I do not know what you carry, but in this moment
I will help you carry it. Or something like,
Everything depends on us treating each other well.
And if we said it enough, perhaps we'd believe it,
and if we believed it enough, perhaps we'd live it,
treating every other human like someone
who holds our very existence in their hands,
like someone whose life has been given us to serve,
even if it's only to walk together safely down the street,
hold a door, pass the salt, share a sunset,
offer a smile, and say with our actions you belong.
We’d love to hear from you! Send us new technologies, resources, stories and insights.
Events
Climate Leaders Monthly Meeting
Thursday, December 19, 4:00 - 5:00 PM PT
Join the Climate Leaders Meeting to exchange resources and inspiration with others who are also taking action to create a vibrant and healthy future.
All leaders are welcome.
This is a monthly on-line event hosted by Minerva Ventures.
Monday, December 9, 2024, 1:00pm EST / 10:00am PST
Building Capacities for Inner Resilience in the Face of Challenges
Wednesday, December 11, 10:00am – 12:30pm Pacific
Presented by the Sustainable and Resilient Resources Roundtable
This workshop focuses on approaches to sustaining our equilibrium, equanimity, and capacities to contribute to solutions. It is important to pause, contemplate our relationships with each other, with the natural world and our access to insights, to access our ability to address complex problems.
Conference-workshop with Professor Kimberly Nicholas, author of Under the Sky We Make
December 12, 2024 from 9am to 12pm
National Practice Forum on Nature-Based Solutions
The Network for Engineering With Nature (N-EWN) in partnership with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Resilient America Roundtable and the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Center for Coastal Climate Resilience is convening a national forum focused on the practice of nature-based solutions. The two-day event will be held February 4-5, 2025, at the NAS Beckman Center in Irvine, California and online.
Opportunities for Action
Now is the time to lock in the lasting climate progress we’ve accomplished in the last four years. This December, we have a narrow window of opportunity to finalize key climate regulations and get clean energy funding into communities.
Urge California to Stand Up For Climate Action
What we do in California to address the climate crisis has a ripple effect across the world. Join The Climate Center in urging Governor Newsom and state leaders to take on corporate polluters, support local clean energy, and invest in natural climate solutions.
Domains for Climate Action
Food and Agriculture
Transitioning Farming to New Practices, En-Mass
Now, a new generation of farmers are being told they must change again — potentially risking their livelihoods — because the products and techniques they currently employ are causing irreparable damage to nature, decreasing biodiversity, and accelerating climate change. Farmers are, however, highly risk averse, and change = risk. In the middle of this change are giant agricultural technology companies like Syngenta, Corteva Agriscience, BASF, and Bayer. Much like the auto industry’s forced transition to electric vehicles, AgTech companies are being pushed to abandon their highly profitable seeds, fertilizers, and crop protection agents for a new wave of nature-friendly products it’s not clear their customers want.Switzerland-based Syngenta, now part of Sinochem, a Chinese government-owned industrial conglomerate, is trying to position itself as a leader in a collection of sustainable practices known as regenerative agriculture.
Central to Syngenta’s plan is increasing farmland yields and reclaiming unproductive land degraded from over-farming, while keeping farming from expanding into natural ecosystems.
Inspiration: Pro Athletes Turn to Farming
In a new trend, former pro athletes, many of them black, are taking up farming, and inspiring others to do so as well. One former NFL star, Jason Brown, turned away from sports to farming when his brother’s death while on military deployment pushed him to look for more meaning in his life. Brown founded First Fruits Farms, a faith-based “agriministry” in Louisburg, North Carolina, outside Raleigh. His hard work has provided roughly 1.5m pounds of food to food banks, soup kitchens and community pantries. His ultimate vision is to influence the kids who followed his athletic career to get into farming. Other former current and former players are looking to help their families build intergenerational wealth and produce healthy food. Their stories are inspiring.
Finance
Energy
Rural Low-Cost Lighting Solution
Honored as part of the Time100 Climate 2024, D.Light, founded by Nedjip Tozun, makes inexpensive and clean lanterns, solar home systems, and other appliances, primarily for people living in rural areas of developing economies with no electricity systems. Using a pay-as-you-go business model, D.Light has brought electricity to 30 million homes in 72 countries, according to Time, and the company hopes to serve one billion people by 2030. The company estimates that it has helped to avoid 38 million metric tons of GHG emissions by replacing kerosene.
Leveraging Nature For Energy Storage
“Long-duration energy storage” (10 hours or more) is the holy grail of renewable energy systems, absolutely necessary for storing the excess energy generated by wind and solar in order to achieve a net zero energy future. And while there are growing banks of lithium ion batteries in use, reservoirs, caverns, and other parts of the landscape actually make much better long duration “batteries”. A newly published study found that building more of this type of long-duration energy storage would reduce electricity prices by more than 70 percent in times of high demand. Research and development with help from the Biden Administration’s Long Duration Storage Shot, has seen investments of in $325 million for 15 long-duration energy storage projects, including one that stores heat energy in concrete and others to make newfangled batteries made of iron, water, and air.
Circular Economy/Materials
UN Plastic Treaty Talks Collapse
Despite a near-consensus among participants that without urgent action to combat plastic pollution, global warming would be likely to intensify, negotiators at the UN conference on plastics in Busan, South Korea were unable to commit to reduce plastic production or pollution. Holding hope for an agreement next year, advocates of limiting production say that no agreement for now is better than a weak one, while plastic producers claim that all that is needed is to manage the waste. Both sides were unhappy with the lack of consensus after two years of fast-tracked negotiations on plastics which began in 2022 when the U.N. Environment Assembly said it would create a binding treaty by 2024 to tackle the world’s “high and rapidly increasing levels of plastic pollution.” Read more.
The Science Behind Overconsumption, a new Netflix Documentary
“Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy”, a new documentary on Netflix, “unpacks the tricks brands use to keep their customers consuming — and the real impact they have on our lives and the world.” Buy Now! makes the case that companies should be held financially responsible for dealing with the waste they generate. In an interview with Grist the film’s producer, Flora Bagenal, points out that any individual’s behavioral change will only tinker around the edges. The real power to create change lies with the corporations. If they choose to create less pollution or do things more sustainably they can have a real impact. Erik Liedtke, the former Adidas exec said at the end of the film, “Stop putting it on us [the public], stop telling us it’s our responsibility. You produce this stuff, you need to account for its life after it gets thrown away.”
Water/Natural Resources/Biodiversity
Built Environment
3D Printed Homes from Plastic Waste
Azure Printed Homes recycles plastic water bottles into affordable custom homes, produced in it’s California factory in a process that takes between 4 and fifteen days and uses about 150,000 plastic bottles. Recycled plastic is mixed with fiberglass and other additives, treated for fire protection and with an ultraviolet light stabilizer. "Plastic makes great resin," according to co-founder Gene Eidleman. "Mixed with fiberglass, it's stronger than concrete and much lighter." The printer can be brought to where the homes are needed, or completed homes can be shipped from factories.
Straw Homes
Straw homes have a lot of advantages: they sequester significant amounts of carbon, can utilize agricultural waste, and now they can be efficiently manufactured. “Tightly compacted (and in the case of some manufacturers, prefabricated into wall panels), insulating straw is dense, easy to work with, and not subject to significant pest, mold, or fire problems. And it doesn’t require new technology adoption or a radical shift in current construction blueprints for homes.” “It’s astonishing how much better straw is than virtually anything else,” says Chicago-based architect Tom Bassett-Dilley. And while the details remind to be worked out, construction is under way, and shows great promise.
Transportation
EBikes Are Great for Climate
The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day – about 1% of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Read more here in The Conversation.
Improvements in EV Battery Technology
New batteries have significant advantages over the batteries currently used for EVs. The current generation of EV batteries use nickel, manganese, or cobalt, which are both costly and environmentally destructive to mine. Lithium iron batteries being adopted for use by a number of EV manufacturers are less expensive and more resilient, meaning they can handle more charge/discharge cycles. And while they are less energy dense, and thus provide less range for the same weight of battery, they are fast-charging, and the build-out of charging stations will help make range less of an issue over time.
Another innovation in battery chemistry moving toward mainstream adoption literally runs on salt. Sodium ion batteries have many advantages, including the abundant availability of sodium, the fact that they outperform lithium ion batteries under extreme cold, and they have a much lower fire risk. The main disadvantage is the lower energy density, which means sacrificing range. Venkat Srinivasan, a battery scientist at Argonne National Labs, expects sodium-ion batteries to gain market share over the next few years, especially in low cost EVs for people who live in cities or suburbs and don’t place a high premium on driving range.
“It will not be a fringe player,” he said, about sodium-ion. “It will actually be a fast-growing segment.”
Health
Air Pollution from Fires Kills 1.5 Million People Per Year
On the rise due to rising temperatures, new research shows the extreme health impacts of air pollution from “landscape fire”, wildfires and deliberate agricultural fires. A recent study published in The Lancet found the following death tolls linked to fire: 450,000/year from heart disease, 220,000/year from respiratory disease, and a total of 1.53 million/year from all causes connected to air pollution from fires. More than 90 percent of these deaths were in low and middle-income countries. Read more here.
Climate Interventions:
Regeneration, Methane, Geoengineering, CCUS
Data Reveals High-impact Opportunities for Cutting GHGs
Climate TRACE is now able to report monthly emissions inventories for every state and province, every county, and more than 9,000 major urban areas around the world, providing access to key insights into the “low hanging fruit” opportunities for decreases emissions. In addition, their data includes “key non-GHG air pollutants for the world’s largest single point sources of emissions, including pollutants that are implicated in millions of deaths around the world every year.” Among other insights, “analysis of Climate TRACE data suggests that decarbonization efforts focused on overburdened communities can often reduce more GHG and non-GHG emissions with the same resources.” Their interactive map and more information can be found at CarbonTrace.org.
The Race to Save The Eelgrass
The most common seagrass along the eastern United States shoreline, eelgrass is rapidly vanishing. The recent discovery of its effectiveness at sequestering carbon, 35 times faster than tropical rainforests, and its critical role as habitat, have birthed a concerted seagrass restoration effort from Maine to North Carolina. Using assisted migration, never before attempted for a marine plant, a multidisciplinary team of scientists brought together by The Nature Conservancy are working to identify thermo-tolerant individuals and relocate them into areas experiencing temperature stress. If successful, they will conserve crucial habitat for a wealth of species including commercial fisheries, preserve the coastline from erosion, and sequester a lot of carbon.
Adaptation and Resilience
Policy
Why It’s Critical to Preserve The US Loan Programs Office
Lead by Jigar Shah, an outspoken former solar entrepreneur who has called clean energy the “largest wealth-creation opportunity of our lifetime,” the Loan Program has reshaped the American energy landscape. It has succeeded in developing a domestic supply chain for electric vehicles and batteries to counteract China’s stranglehold. It has enabled investments in novel technologies including turning cornstarch into jet fuel, or using lasers to spot methane leaks, and a zinc-based battery for electric grids that can store power longer than conventional lithium-ion batteries. With growing uncertainty about the future of the loan programs office, there is some urgency to expedite as many loans through the process as possible. There is hope that the programs office will survive the transition to the new administration, as it is profitable, and the loans support technologies that are critical to both a stable US energy future and US competitiveness.
Climate Policy and Reality: Which Way From Here
2024 will be the first year we will exceed 1.5°C, on the way to formally exceeding the target this century. And while clean energy deployment is exceeding expectations, demand for electricity is rising too rapidly for it to reduce demand for fossil fuels, and thus GHG emissions continue to rise. The good news is that pure economic drivers will continue to incentivize clean energy and clean technology. The bad news is that even with ambitious reductions in fossil fuels around the world we are on track for temperatures to rise 2.6°C by the end of the century, with accompanying devastating impacts. And while the new US administration may well repeal policies supporting climate interventions, the more devastating impact on the climate is likely to be from tariffs and other isolationist policies that will slow down deployment of the most cost-effective technologies while also reducing the necessary international cooperation to address climate change. More here.
Climate News
COP29’s Unsatisfying Outcome
One of the key objectives of this year’s Climate COP in Baku was to obtain commitments to fund climate aid. Heavily impacted countries in the developing world were seeking $1.3 trillion annually to support decarbonization and disaster adaptation projects in vulnerable regions like sub-Saharan Africa. They also wanted grants, not more debt-producing loans. What they got was a commitment to $300 billion in loans by 2035, and a vague statement about raising $1.3 trillion in global climate investments by that year, with no teeth, and nothing about how that would be accomplished or by whom. This all falls far short of what representatives from Africa, Asia, and Latin America were seeking, and left many bitter. The agreement reached this year does open up some possibilities for the future, however, proposing a shift away from loans, streamlining the international grant funding process, and possibly taxing polluting industries to raise funds for climate-vulnerable nations. Unfortunately these remain just vague possibilities, and not commitments. Read more.
The International Court of Justice Examines What International Law Requires Countries To Do About Climate Change
The case is the result of a campaign led by Vanuatu that asserts that the global response to climate change has been inadequate, and that those who caused the problem should be held accountable, and required both to take stronger action and to make reparations. Testimony will continue through Dec. 13 and can be viewed on the U.N. website. The court has also posted the written submissions it received. The opinion, expected next year, would be non-binding, but could open the way for more climate litigation that might compel stronger action.
Book Recommendations
“As sustainability veteran Auden Schendler argues in this provocative, powerful book, we're living a big green lie. The hard truth is that much of the modern environmental road map could have been written by the fossil fuel industry specifically to avoid disrupting the status quo. We have become somehow complicit.” His book is both a stinging critique, and a call for passionate action to tackle climate change at the corporate, community, and individual levels. “Terrible Beauty is a unique and inspiring call for a new environmentalism, showing us that the key to saving the planet is to tap into our own humanity.” You can read an interview with Schendler here.
About Minerva Ventures:
Are you concerned about climate change and seeking ways to take action? Business survival depends on addressing competitive challenges every day. Leaders attend to urgent business matters while counting on tomorrow’s weather and operating conditions to be similar to yesterday’s. What happens when underlying conditions change as climate consequences become more severe? It is hard to adjust to a disruptive future while you are focused on competing today.
Minerva advises clean tech companies on strategic and business development. We help you find customers, new markets, and new investors to build your momentum and success. Minerva helps established companies create strategies to identify and contend with climate risks to your business. Discover how you can protect your operations, assets, products, and services. Understand how climate risk will affect your suppliers, customers, and partners. Determine how you can strengthen your company to navigate change and seize opportunities as markets reconfigure in the face of the coming changes. Find innovative ways to change your operations, products, and services to help address climate change. Consider policy measures that your industry can pursue that will help address shared risks.
Minerva can help you find new solutions that will make your business more resilient and adaptable to change. Your company will be advancing climate solutions rather than just reacting to disruptions to your industry and markets.
Visit Minerva Ventures’ website at MinervaVentures.com!
Newsletter Editor: Dinyah Rein, Consultant, Minerva Ventures, LLC
Copyright (C) 2024 Minerva Ventures. All rights reserved.