Since Trump stumbled into the White House, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and related government organizations have become less concerned with climate change and more worried about Trump’s wild, ill-informed wants.

The EPA’s data purge

In late April, the EPA website underwent an extreme update. The organization billed this update as merely a “change” that would help “better represent the new direction the agency is taking,” The Washington Post reports.

One part of the site that vanished challenged statements made by Scott Pruitt, the EPA’s new administrator.

“Another provided detailed information on the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, including fact sheets about greenhouse gas emissions on the state and local levels and how different demographic groups were affected by such emissions,” the Post adds.

The website overhaul also included the “scrutiny” of a two-decades old page that explained climate change.

On a September 21, 2017 search of the EPA’s site, we could not find any information related to climate change.

How cities are stepping up

Earlier this year Grist recently reported that 14 cities republished deleted EPA information on their municipal websites. Chicago was the first city to repost the information. The city’s officials also posted a cheeky, but all-too-real “Climate Change is Real” guide.

The last city that reportedly posted the EPA’s deleted information was Burlington, Virginia. “Climate change is real, and deleting federal web pages that contain years’ worth of research does not alter this global, scientific consensus,” Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger said in a statement regarding the city’s move.

And thankfully, this is not the only way cities across the United States have committed to fighting climate change, Grist adds. Other cities have “pledged to go 100 percent renewable.” And other major cities have joined to help uphold the Paris Agreement’s objectives.

This information is needed

A Washington Post piece reported that people who have questioned some mainstream climate research are on a list of 132 possible candidates for EPA positions on the Science Advisory Board. The board has 47 members. Fifteen members have terms ending in September. This agency is open for public comment until September 28.

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Although solving global warming is complicated, all of us can do small things that make a big impact.

And one city that’s doing a seemingly small thing that could have a large, positive impact  is Los Angeles.

Heat islands

Cities are hot spots for more than entertainment and food. They also are significantly warmer because of something called the Urban Heat Island Effect. This “effect” means that cities tend to get warmer than other towns. Cities also tend to suffer from higher temperatures during heat waves.

So, what’s a city planner to do?

Get to a hardware store and buy a lot of paint, apparently.

Put on a fresh coat of paint

LA Street Services workers are taking to the city’s streets and painting some of them a light, off-white or grey color. This may seem strange, but according to an Environmental Protection Agency report, covering 35 percent of a city’s streets — specifically LA’s streets, in this case — with “reflective surfacing could cause air temperatures to drop by one degree Fahrenheit on average,” Curbed Los Angeles reports.

And so far, it appears that this resurfacing scheme may work. Encino recently completed a similar project. The project helped reduced surface temperature in a city parking lot by 25-30 degrees.

Other city cooling tricks

Although this resurfacing project is a great start, off-white paint alone won’t reverse climate change. So, we’ve done a bit of research to see what other city-cooling tricks are out there.

• Urban tree planting: “Urban forests,” areas, like parks and streetways that are lined with trees, can help reduce air and water pollution by “capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide during photosynthesis”, and alter heating and cooling costs, the U.S. Forest Service reports.
• Cool roofs: Cool roofs are made from coated materials that help the roofs reflect sun and heat away from a building.
• Green roofs: Similar to cool roofs, green roofs are “coated” with a vegetative layer. These plants help reduce roof temperatures and manage stormwater.
• Reclaimed parking lots: Some cities are “depaving” some of their parking lots. For example, Depave, a Portland-based non-profit, “promotes the transformation of over-paved places to overcome the social and environmental impacts of pavement,” the organization explains. “We engage communities and reconnect urban landscapes to nature through action-oriented projects, education, advocacy and stewardship.”

To follow the resurfacing work LA Street Services is doing, check out the city’s Twitter account.

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These days, climate change has a lot of us thinking about the way we treat the environment. But our minds often drift to the obviously offensive images: factory pipes pumping clouds of toxic grey smoke into the otherwise pristine sky. But pollution runs deep, from producers all the way down to consumers, and it can be a result of something as subtle as your last meal. In fact, recent research found that the majority of food waste — a detriment to the environment as well as wasted calories that could feed millions of people —  happens at home.

How Does Food Waste Pollute?

There are two categories when it comes to food waste’s effects on the environment: upstream and downstream. Upstream effects are a result of the production of greenhouse gases through the supply chain of production, storage, manufacturing, and distribution of food. The downstream effects are witnessed after food has been thrown away, either by the consumer or retailer (and often the farmers and distributors themselves). Wasted food is sent to landfills to decompose anaerobically, or without the presence of oxygen. This is when methane is formed.

Food waste is the single biggest occupant in U.S. landfills. When it is discarded and broken down, it produces carbon dioxide. But even more alarming is that it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25-times stronger than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Each kilogram of food waste produces 3.8 kilograms of greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, food waste pollutes the land. Many countries around the world are running out of landfill space. How do they remedy this? They destroy more land to accommodate it. The underground water and runoff is then infected with the food waste. The overuse of fertilizers creates excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus, which poison drinking water and aquatic ecosystems.

11 Facts About Food Waste You Can’t Ignore

1. In the U.S., agriculture itself emits 9% of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, American farmers are throwing away as much as 50% – half! – of all produce because it doesn’t live up to consumers’ aesthetic standards. Imagine how much food waste and agriculture sector green house gas emissions we could cut by learning to love ugly fruits and vegetables!
2. About 60 million tons of produce – $160 billion – are wasted by retailers and consumers each year. This constitutes one third of all foodstuffs.
3. An American family of four wastes $1,600 worth of food each year.
4. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that one-third of the world’s food is lost or wasted. That amounts to nearly $3 trillion.
5. If food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases with a carbon footprint of 3.3 gigatonnes of CO2.
6. Food waste is economically driven. Fresh produce makes up 15% of supermarket profits. Reducing food produce waste by 50% would cause supermarkets to go from a 1.5% profit margin to a 0.7% one. And losing 50% of consumer waste would result in a loss of $250 billion in economic activity.
7. According to the UN, reducing food waste by just 25% would be enough to all the currently malnourished people.
8. About 1.4 billion hectares, or nearly 30% of available agricultural land, is used to grow or farm food that ends up wasted.
9. Consumer waste per capita is between 95 and 115 kilograms each year in Europe and North America. Consumer waste per capita in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia is only between six and 11 kilograms per year.
10. In the US, 25% of all the freshwater consumed annually is associated with discarded food.
11. Despite America wasting 50% of total produce, nearly 42 million Americans live in food-insecure households. That means millions of children don’t know where their next meal will come from.

How to Solve the Food Waste Problem

It’s a much longer and more difficult road to start transforming the agriculture sector by targeting farms and distributors. As consumers looking for the prettiest fruits and vegetables, we contribute to their dilemma. How do we expect to transform farming and distribution practices if we continue to refuse to purchase an apple with a minor blemish, even if its quality and taste is completely unaffected by the blemish? Let’s embrace ugly fruits and vegetables and demand them from our local grocery stores. Meanwhile, let’s also download a shelf life cheat sheet and learn about the true lifespan of our favorite foods. Then, let’s purchase food and plan our weekly meals accordingly, understanding how long food stays fresh before spoiling as well as proper storage methods.

Re-use your leftovers as a rule and whenever your fruits or vegetables are rounding their last leg, turn them into a juice, a casserole, soup, fruit pie, or fruit bread. In the meantime, seek out local “ugly” produce companies that make the best of otherwise tossed fruits and vegetables. Companies like Imperfect Produce, Perfectly Imperfect, and Fresh Direct are leading the charge.

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Would you wear a shirt that shows how polluted water actually is?

Don’t worry—the “experiment” is simple, fun, and fashion-forward.

The project

Lauren Bowker, material alchemist and founder of THEUNSEEN, and David de Rothschild, of lifestyle company The Lost Explorer, use fashion and science to engage people in the climate change discussion.

The duo recently launched Water, a project designed to help people better understand the effects of water pollution via fashion. Jacob Chabeaux and Dazed Digital had a hand in producing the project, too.

The project allows people to use simple science and t-shirts to make pH sensors.

It’s all about red cabbage

Did you know that red cabbage has a component that can indicate pH levels? The cabbage’s natural dye changes color when it comes in contact with different pH levels.

“PH is an innate property of water, one that defines the limits within which life can and can’t thrive,” Bowker says.

After following a specific but simple recipe, your t-shirt will initially be purple. This color indicates that purest form of neutral water.

“When the t-shirt comes into contact with non-neutral water, the pH level of that water is then revealed through the colour of the garment, forming colour shifts through the pH scale from alkaline green to acidic red,” Bowker explains.

“This enables the wearer to visualise the level of pollution in the water they are being exposed to.”

Embrace the change

Climate change scares a lot of people. And De Rothschild totally gets it. That’s a natural reaction! However, he also thinks that if people truly want to understand climate change, they have to embrace it.

He’s concerned that people merely fear nature—they focus on killer storms and other deadly natural disasters, which causes disconnection.

That’s why Bowker and de Rothschild hope that Water will make people take notice and think, “woe—nature is a bit freaky—but incredibly awe-inspiring, too.”

So go ahead. Put on your fashion-forward, pH detecting t-shirt and embrace the strange, curious world of science.

Want to make your own pH detecting shirt? Check out the short tutorial here.

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Danish members of parliament from both the Alternative and Red-Green Alliance parties are on a mission to highlight the environmental issues with livestock production: they’re going vegan for 22 days.

It turns out not all politicians on the world stage are bloated ketchup-on-steak egomaniacs. Some are pragmatic and willing to self-sacrifice in order to make the world a (hopefully) better place. (Not that going vegan is any kind of sacrifice.)

Unlike the climate deniers in office in the U.S., Danish politicians are fully aware of the impact of a warming planet, and the many factors contributing to its condition, namely our aggressive animal production. Around the world, more than 56 billion animals are raised for food every year — not including fish and seafood. That’s nearly ten times the amount of humans on the planet, and most certainly an industry impacting our climate.

“Western food production has an enormous climate footprint,” Uffe Elbæk, Alternative party leader, said in a statement. “Political action is needed, and I find it important that we, as politicians, take the first steps and begin to ‘walk the talk.’”

Denmark isn’t historically known for a plant-based diet – or even for that many plant-based meals in general, save for a few cabbage dishes. It’s got a rich history of eating animals (pork, beef, and liver are some of its signature foods). But as a progressive country working toward clean energy and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, the Danish Council of Ethics has been emphasizing plant-based foods as an easy, effective, and healthy way to curb the country’s impact on the climate.

“We need to take action on both a personal and political level in order to address the serious issues of climate change,” says Red-Green Alliance’s environmental secretary, Maria Gjerding.

“Going vegan for 22 days is not going the save the world in itself, but it’s a great opportunity to put focus on Western consumption of animal products and the environmental and animal welfare problems it causes.”

Neighboring countries Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany all have updated dietary guidelines promoting more plants, and the German Ministry of Environment has banned meat from being served at official state events.

If the 22 days plant-based program sounds familiar, you may remember Beyoncé did a similar challenge (and then went on to fund the 22 Days meal delivery program).

“Ditching animal products is a great way to fight climate change,” says Mercy for Animals’ Joe Loria. “In fact, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, carbon dioxide emissions from raising farmed animals make up about 15 percent of global human-induced emissions, with beef and milk production as the leading culprits.”

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Who knew climate change could be so fun?

The climate change coloring book aims to provide people with coloring activities that explore scientific research and data related to climate change. Sound cool? Kickstart the project here.

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When we think of food waste, we usually think first about our own consumption, and that’s a great start. But it’s just the start.

From commercializing “ugly” produce that once never would have made it to the supermarket to revolutionizing expiration dates, the developed world has been making leaps and bounds in reducing its food waste. But there’s another, less visible but even more important problem: two-thirds of the food that is lost or wasted on the planet happens at the production or distribution level. This is happening mainly in emerging economies due in large part to a lack of reliable cold chain.

“We grow and produce enough food today to feed 10 billion people,” explains John Mandyck, Chief Sustainability Officer at United Technologies Corporation. “We live on a planet of 7 billion people. And only about 6 billion people are getting enough food.”

What is a Cold Chain?

A cold chain is a temperature-controlled supply chain allowing perishable food to be transported in a refrigerated environment from where it is produced to where it is consumed.

In the developed world, the cold chain is a well-oiled machine. Truck and trailer units in the United States and Europe can cool a single truckload to three different temperature points, allowing distributors to transport frozen fish, fresh meat, and delicate strawberries all at once.

In the developing world, where such technology is not available, countries often use an open pickup truck to transport food to open-air markets, meaning that perishable food is less likely to make it all the way to its destination without at least some spoilage.

“In some countries, 50 percent of fruits and vegetables are lost before consumers can have access to them,” says Mandyck. “The International Institute of Refrigeration has estimated that less than 10 percent of the world’s perishable foods are refrigerated today.”

Finding a Solution to Cold Chain Woes

In order to reduce the amount of food waste caused by cold chain problems, the solution seems clear: introduce refrigerated transportation technology to the developing world. Of course, this is not nearly as easy as it sounds.

The distribution systems that work so well in the developed world are difficult to translate to developing countries, due to a lack of appropriate road infrastructure for transport vehicles of this size, lack of support infrastructure for servicing them, and the price tag on these technologies.

That’s where Mandyck and his team come in. They have been working to reverse engineer their products to develop high-quality yet simpler refrigeration systems that would cool to just one temperature point. These smaller, more affordable systems have already helped jump-start the cold chain in developing economies like India, where United Technologies Corporation has already successfully introduced such vehicles.

Financing the Cold Chain

Of course, there is one issue: even with a lower price point, these vehicles are often still too expensive for those who need them. There is, however, one major incentive for governments to invest in them: climate change.

Given the extremely intensive way in which we produce food – from electricity for water pumps to diesel for transport vehicles to methane produced by intensive animal agriculture – food waste worldwide produces 3.3 billion metric tons of CO2, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

“We’re encouraging countries to look at food waste as the sleeping climate issue,” explains Mandyck. “It is the only climate policy that will reduce significant greenhouse gases, feed more people, save water, and promote national security. There is no other climate policy that can do that.”

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Bill Nye could explain climate change to even the most skeptical climate change deniers.

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Endangered species are at our mercy. And according to recent research, essentially every purchase we make, particularly in the food and fiber industries—“green” or not—is killing off the world’s most magnificent creatures.

“The cup of joe that helped you get through the morning, the must-have chair purchased at that trendy furniture store and the palm oil that’s key to a favorite family recipe all have elements ripped from the habitat of a threatened or endangered animal somewhere in the world,” reports the Washington Post.

The Post points to new research published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, which shows that habitats around the world are in jeopardy because of commerce and climate change happening as a result of increased industry. More than 15,000 industries and products consumed in 187 countries are endangering animals including the world’s large cats, monkeys, and elephants.

Shrinking habitats are largely to blame—land taken away from animals to produce consumer goods or support the industries vital to our consumptive habits have put more than 6,500 species in danger of extinction. But disease and lack of food are taking tolls as well as invasive species, warming oceans, and toxic air, water, and food supplies.

The researchers looked at global supply-chain databases and their imprint on corresponding habitats of endangered species (listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and BirdLife International), areas the researchers out of Japan and Norway call threatened biodiversity hot spots.

“Biodiversity hot spots is a well studied topic, and it is known that the last reserves of biodiversity are harbored in a small number of places,” lead researcher Daniel Moran of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology told the Post. “Economic pressure, even at the margin and in small increments, exerts pressure at these places. Almost any human pressure at the places, unless very well managed, will have a big impact on species there.”

“Logging in Brazil to create products that wind up in the United States, for example, cuts down trees used by red-face spider monkeys. Fishery trade and gold mined and bound for Japan affects mangroves off Papua New Guinea that are home to diverse plant species and an endangered sea cow,” reports the Post. “A hydroelectric dam that traps water to irrigate agriculture, including trees that produce palm oil exported to other parts of Europe and the United States, threatens the Iberian lynx.”

While more than 180 countries were identified as contributing to the problem, the issue is mostly driven by U.S. and European consumer product demands, which not only affect land animals, insects, and flora, but also marine ecosystems as well.

The study also notes wildlife habitats are being condensed—animals forced to share habitats in unprecedented ways because of the impact of industry.

“For threats driven by U.S. consumption, the 5 percent most intensively affected land area covers 23.6 percent of its total impact on species,” the study noted, “and at sea the 5 percent most intensively impacted marine area affects 60.7 percent of threatened species habitats.”

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Climate change could spell significant trouble for East Antarctica’s ice sheet, a new study finds.

According to the research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, strong winds may contribute to enhanced erosion.

“There is enough frozen water sitting on top of the world’s polar continent to raise sea level by dozens of meters and redraw the world map if it melts,” Phys.org notes.

Scientists have traditionally focused more on the status of the West Antarctica ice sheet where large chunks have been melting at alarming rates. The East Antarctic ice sheet is much larger than the West, leading scientists to think it was more stable in recent years as the region has been studied extensively for clues about the pace of global warming’s damage. But East Antarctica appeared to be in good shape, even adding to its mass while the Western ice shelf has been losing significant bulk.

But recently, scientists noticed the presence of a crater located on the King Baudoin ice shelf, which shows the East’s vulnerability to erosion that could spell disaster for the world’s oceans.

“Combining climate models, satellite data and on-site measurements, [the researchers] concluded that strong winds carrying warm air were blowing away reflective snow,” reports Phys.org, “allowing the Sun’s rays to be absorbed into the darker ice rather than bounced back into space.”

With increases in global air temperatures in recent decades (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), warming oceans cause the ice shelves to melt faster than they can replenish ice and snow. And the new research says these erosion estimates may be more significant than previous assessments.

Increased erosion could lead to a significant ice shelf collapse in East Antarctica, causing catastrophic and irreversible damage to the continent. The repercussions could include rising sea levels and temperatures elsewhere on the planet, jeopardizing scores of ecosystems as well as threatening human health and safety.

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