Massive river heat pump launched to warm thousands of homes.The German project utilises the Rhine’s heat to provide warmth to 3,500 households. One of Europe‘s largest river heat pumps has been officially commissioned in Mannheim, Germany. The river heat pumpoperates by harnessing heat from the Rhine River, capable of generating water temperatures as high as 99°C. It is set to play a pivotal role in the district heating supply managed by Mannheim’s energy provider, MVV. The scale of this river heat pump is considerable, resembling the size of a house.

The CBC report in late May cited a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters that came up with a remarkably precise measureof the fossil industry’s accountability for climate chaos: it traced 37% of burned forest area in Western Canada and the United States between 1986 and 2021 back to 88 major fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. The study was “the first to quantify how corporate emissions have made wildfires worse,” Grist wrote at the time. “Experts say the new research could help advance growing efforts to take polluters to court.” The modelling by the Cambridge-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the University of California, Merced connected the dots between the companies’ climate pollution and 80,000 square kilometres of forest loss. That’s an area larger than Ireland that might not otherwise have burned.  the"I think the accountability piece for fossil fuel companies is really important and part of what makes this research unique," Phillips said. “We know that historically industries have been held accountable for the risks of their products, whether it be tobacco or asbestos. And a big part of holding those companies accountable was research showing the linkages between their product and the impact."Now that the spotlight is on oil, gas, and coal, the law would like a word. While Grist wrote that the connection back to specific court cases could still “prove thorny”, U.S. climate accountability experts said the wildfire study could s , a fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, cited a specific case in Colorado where the city and county of Boulder and San Miguel County are seeking millions from Exxon and Calgary-based Suncor Energy. Out of the various municipal cases on U.S. dockets, “that’s the one lawsuit where wildfire-related damages are forefront and central,”  The key ingredient that could catapult the wildfire study from the news pages to the courtrooms is an exhaustive piece of research by the Snowmass, Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute. The problem for the banks, the pension funds, and the recipients of their fossil largesse is that it’s easy enough to deflect and obfuscate in a short news interview, a lot tougher in a court of law. Climate litigation is still an emerging field, and it’s never wise to count on a win in any one case, especially while court precedents are taking shape. But the Sabin Center’s climate litigation database lists more than 2,300 cases, the momentum is going in the right direction, and legal action is just starting to take a toll: a study released in May by the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics found that legal judgements against “carbon majors” led to a small but discernible drop in their share prices.      https://energymixweekender.substack.com/p/tbt-fossil-investors-beware-here?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=10 68707&post_id=137780262&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=mwxsy&utm_medium=email   

Non-profit that restores the Brazilian Amazon.......Organization Rioterra works with socio-environmental and restoration chain projects in the Amazon and has recovered over 6,000 hectares in the Brazilian state of Rondônia alone. Bruna Garcia Fonseca This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..br São Paulo – In a world threatened by forest loss and global warming, a non-governmental organization based in the state of Rondônia, Brazil, carries out a persistent daily work against deforestation, bringing the forest back to where it belongs. Rioterra is dubbed the largest restorer of the Brazilian Amazon and is responsible for having restored 6,000 hectares.Rioterra works with socio-environmental projects, and besides working on reforestation, it has supported the state of Rondônia in developing the climate change law that was approved late last year. Rioterra founding partner & president Fabiana Barbosa (pictured) gave an interview to ANBA during the Rondônia Rural Show, a multisectoral trade show that took place in Ji-Paraná last month. The nonprofit was founded in 1999, and its work for restoring the Amazon has been developed for over 12 years. “Twenty-three years ago, a group of friends teamed up, and together we founded Rioterra. I was 17,” said Barbosa. The organization has three main areas of activity: reducing social vulnerability, preserving biodiversity, and mitigating climate change by incentivizing reforestation and keeping the forest standing. The ONG has received the title of public interest organization from the Ministry of Justice of Brazil. “We’ve worked against social vulnerability because for understanding the importance of environmental and biodiversity conservation, those living in the forest first must have their basic needs met. The biodiversity conservation is the environmental area of activity, which now include lines of products where we can get more resources and investments,” said Barbosa. The president said Brazil has made a series of agreements for being a country that emits several greenhouse gases due to deforestation. “Deforestation in Brazil is now the leading cause for greenhouse gases,” she said. In 2020 the United Nations created the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which aims to work on forest restoration by 2030 in countries whose leading emissions are deforestation related. “Brazil made a series of agreements to be in line with this policy. Rioterra aligns all of its projects to this initiative, to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and climate agreements like the Paris agreement,” said Barbosa. One of the projects by Rioterra is Foresting 4US, which aims to plant 50 million trees by 2030. The campaign looks to connect people and integrate actions for the reforestation of logged areas in the world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon. The project has produced 7.5 million seedlings so far that were planted across 6,000 hectares. The Rioterra nursery based in Porto Velho, the capital of the state, is capable of producing 2 million seedlings a year, and the seed collection for this production comes from a unit of federal conservation called Jamari National Forest, which is part of the Amazon biome.        https://anba.com.br/en/the-non-profit-that-restores-the-brazilian-amazon/  

Lessons from Tupperware Bring Climate Messaging to the Mainstream. Grassroot marketer Brownie Wise would be called a community manager today. In the 1950s, she sold one of history’s most popular petroleum products by getting outside the bubble. SEP 16, 2023 Who would ever have imagined that one of history’s most ubiquitous and popular petroleum products would provide a template for meeting people where they’re at and bringing climate messaging from the margins to the mainstream? And what can a massive grassroot marketing campaign in the 1950s teach us about listening and connecting, at a moment when immediate pocketbook concerns are drawing attention and political leverage away from voters’ widespread worries about climate change?Those questions bring us to the story of Brownie Wise, the grassroot marketer who took a product that was languishing on store shelves and made Tupperware a household name, for better and for worse. But filmmaker Laurie Kahn had a more vivid take on what made Wise so effective at reaching around and under conventional messaging while changing the lives of 1950s women who had few other options for jobs or incomes. “Instead of having a man, for example, with a suitcase full of product knocking cold on doors, home parties relied on women inviting their neighbours, their family, their friends, people from church, whatever, into their living rooms,” Kahntold CBC’s Day 6 program earlier this year. “And then somebody would demonstrate the product, and then they would play games. They had fun. And then at the end, they would take orders from the guests.” By understanding her community and working from the ground up—by designing Tupperware parties around the needs of the rural and suburban, divorced and married, abled and disabled women from multiple different racial and religious backgrounds who hosted them—Wise built a sales network so powerful that it made her the first woman ever featured on the cover of Businessweek.                                                                                                  But her grassroot methods came to mind this week when the Leger public opinion poll reported on the vanishingly small percentage of participants in a recent online survey who cited climate change as their top priority—even though nearly three-quarters said they were concerned about it. To some extent, the Leger results showed that the answers you get depend on the polling questions you ask.Asking people to say how much they would pay individually employs a strategic frame that causes respondents to think of themselves in isolation, individually on the hook, and perhaps defensive,” said James Boothroyd, managing director of Vancouver-based EcoAnalytics Research. But survey respondents “will support transitioning to renewables when framed as a public investment that is fair, that all contribute to.” So if setting the frame makes such a big difference in the way we ask a question, certainly it should shift the way we present ideas and answers. That means connecting a summer of record heat, devastating wildfires, and killer storms and floods to the pocketbook issues that are also keeping people up at night. Changing the channel can make all the difference in the way Canadians outside the “bubble” of active climate concern engage with the problem and its solutions, just as it did in a very different context when Brownie Wise turned Tupperware into a marketing juggernaut. This isn’t an argument for shutting down the necessary, harder-edged messages that we’ve been seeing as this weekend’s climate strike spreads across the globe—but we do need something more. Opening up a big suitcase of consumer products or energy transition arguments will draw in some audiences, and if that latter group of active, angry citizens were big and influential enough to deliver faster, deeper carbon cuts, the cuts would already be happening. Getting beside that next tier of support—connecting climate impacts with the affordability crisis, and climate solutions with jobs, health, safety, and stability—is where we find wider common ground without triggering kneejerk ideologies and automatic opposition.......fascinating- read on!             https://energymixweekender.substack.com/p/lessons-from-tupperware-bring-climate?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1068707&post_id=137097541&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=mwxsy&utm_medium=email