…week of Jan 18, 2021
Welcome to my weekly letter! This week we will dive into the doom and gloom of our environment! Without further ado…
Weekly Read
- Fossil Fuels Still Supply 84 Percent Of World Energy — And Other Eye Openers From BP’s Annual Review (Forbes) – This was published in June 2020, reviewing 2019 data, yet still scarily high considering the problem has been better understood in recent years, specially after Greta’s wise warnings.
- The good, bad, and ugly from the UN’s stark climate report (Mashable) – echoing and continuing from the post above, this article confirms that 2020 data expectedly contract due to the travel reduction incurred by COVID-19 but it will take more effort to ensure the reduction continues even after COVID.
- The Ongoing Collapse of the World’s Aquifers (Wired) – as our planet becomes warmer, droughts will become longer and more common, which then amplifies our dependency on underground water. Thus subsidence gets worse. There’s actually a natural recharge process (and it worked well in Taiwan for the past 30 years), however, it won’t happen quickly enough for dryer, more extreme situations.
- Climate Change Needs an Operation Warp Speed (Wired) – yes! if there’s a way to shorten a process from 7~10 years down to several months, we would need a similar improvement on our effort to save our planet. (teaser spoiler: our new POTUS is on it since day one)
Thoughts
Sitting at the peak intersection between human’s technological evolution and environmental damage to Earth, it is surreal yet frightening to see the developing news showing the closing timeline of nature’s total revenge. Yes, the OZone is broken, too much sun shine is now bad for you, our air, water, and even food are carrying more toxic than ever, melting glaciers and subsidence will accelerate rising sea level submerging inhabitable land.
At times, one may feel powerless as these things seem so out of our control. The good news is, there are so many opportunities, so much to do!
Obviously the governments and private sector can take the larger strides on changing the systems (policies and regulations), incentivise more talents and driving innovation on carbon emision reduction as well as conversion. But there are other simpler things to be done too! From everyday’s effort of reducing wastes, modernizing our food and power sources, changing the transportation patterns, to educating individuals and others on getting the right information about our world’s health status. There are a lot we can do!
Lastly, and most importantly, is NOW is the time to do them! We need to acknowledge that as a society we have been deprioritizing this task against other things in life. And we now need to change. We know there’s a deadline for saving our world, and that deadline can continue to be pulled in earlier. There’s no longer any excuses to deprioritize sustainability effort.
Get it into your weekly schedule, planner, Trello board, TODAY.
Stay Tuned…
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