Since this website was launched almost four years ago, there have been some positive changes around the world in both climate policy and the implementation of measures to reverse global warming. However, positive changes and measures are too few and far from being implemented and accepted universally.
What we do over the next 10 to 20 years will determine humankind life on Earth for the next millennium – the problems we face due to the effects of climate change are that serious. We must cut the amount of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere by reducing fossil fuel use and stopping deforestation. Much easier said than done! Politicians are bound up in the day to day business of immediacy and can not and wlll not fix the problem without bipartisan support. Climate change leading to global warming is a collective problem for the whole world. A collective problem is best solved with collective solutions. Now is a good time to embrace some more grassroots solutions and for citizens and communities to get more involved.
Life is not all doom and gloom and to that end posted regularly on the front page of this website will be links to positive climate action, brief articles about people and technology and some reasons to be cheerful.
I hope that some of the things you read on this Rockflat website will inform you and even inspire you with momentum we all need to get back to equilibrium with our climate and ecosystems.
Notifications of new Rockflat Climate essays and posts will now be on Facebook, Instagram and now on Masterdon. Rockflat Climate no longer uses Elon Musk’s Twitter (X).
Robert Watson
Some Reasons for Optimism
From
Fighting Global Warming, One Abandoned Oil Well at a Time
When Curtis Shuck learned that the oil and gas industry had left orphaned wells all over the US, he made it his mission to cap as many as he could.
By: Michaela Haas | August 5, 2024
Curtis Shuck was inspecting wheat crops with farmers in rural Northern Montana in 2019 when he followed a rotten-egg stench and spotted corroded metal surrounding a borehole. The discovery he stumbled upon would change his life, and eventually the trajectory of carbon emissions in the US: He came across an abandoned oil well that spewed pollution, including methane, into the air and surrounding fields. Once he realized what he was looking at, he identified other wells across the surrounding landscape, left behind in the 1990s after the Gulf War tanked crude prices.
“I couldn’t believe what I saw,” Shuck says with his heavy Texan drawl. “I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Or I was at the right place, depending on how you want to look at it.”
The pollution left such a deep impression on the former oil and gas executive that he immediately wanted to take action. His plan: to plug as many oil wells as possible. Before the day was over, he had come up with a name for a nonprofit, Well Done, and registered the domain name TheWellDoneFoundation.org from his truck.
What started out as the epiphany of one hard-charging man has since led to the capping of 45 wells in 14 states …
READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE … https://reasonstobecheerful.world/well-done-plugging-oil-wells/
From ABC News 24 July 2022
Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo is turning African deserts into forest.
In the early 1980s, Niger was “a landscape on the point of ecological collapse according to Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo.
An image taken in the Talensi District in Ghana shows the effect of reforestation using FMNR.
Farmers had cut down existing native forests decades earlier, leaving a denuded landscape sandblasted by 70 kilometre per hour winds and ravaged by high soil surface temperatures and apocalyptic dust storms.
The man the Africans called “the crazy white farmer” employed principles of biodiversity and FMNR (farmer managed natural regeneration) to help transform the desertified land back into productive farmland.
Read this encouraging story here … Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo is turning African deserts into forests