Your Planet, Your Health

In this episode, Ralph and Luc venture into the thorny discussions of what to do about the rainforest’s impact on the globe.
In the aftermath of Lula's conference in Belem, Brazil, in August 2023, we spotlight some good news: great strides are being made against deforestation, and South American leaders are keen to protect the Amazonian rainforest.
We also unpack criticisms and highlight pragmatic perspectives from Colombia and Ecuador, such as debt for nature swaps.

Sources:
• We sample a quote from climate scientist Stephen Schneider from this 1981 British TV documentary by Thames Television called “Warming Warning”. You can see the clip in context at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHAbYOXjzk/

• A chart comparing Amazon deforestation between 2022 and 2023:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/E100/production/_131000675_amazon_deforestation_aug_update-nc.png.webp

• You can read the Belem declaration – which the Amazon rainforest countries signed at the end of the August 2023 conference – here (in Spanish): https://www.gov.br/mre/pt-br/canais_atendimento/imprensa/notas-a-imprensa/declaracao-presidencial-por-ocasiao-da-cupula-da-amazonia-2013-iv-reuniao-de-presidentes-dos-estados-partes-no-tratado-de-cooperacao-amazonica/

• Lula’s Speech closing the Belem conference (translated in English):
https://www.gov.br/planalto/en/follow-the-government/speeches/speech-by-president-luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva-at-the-amazon-summit-with-guest-countries-in-belem-brazil/

• Articles in the journal Nature criticising Lula’s ecological record (especially on drilling):
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02511-x/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02187-3/

• You can see Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s address at the Belem conference (in Spanish):
Read: https://www.cancilleria.gov.co/newsroom/news/prosperidad-descarbonizada-otro-tipo-sociedad-poder-economia-propone-presidente/
Or watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehsae42q_Mk/

• More information on Ecuador’s referendum on oil drilling in Yasuni:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ecuador-says-it-will-honor-referendum-yasuni-oil-project-2023-08-24/

In this episode, Ralph and Luc unpack how Americans got so obsessed with maintaining square green carpets on their front yards. We dive into the history to trace back the origins and dissemination of this artificial aesthetic. We also look into solutions, ranging from bans on gas leaf blowers to cash schemes to encourage people to quit their lawn.

We read a poem about the lunacy of leaf blowers, and highlight ways in which manicured suburban imported lawn grass is a synecdoche for colonialism.

You can also watch this episode on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-l1JO3FbzE

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction: Local bans on gas-powered lawn equipment
01:48 Poem about leaf blowers by Touch Moonflower
03:59 Commenting on the poem
06:51 How did lawns become so common in the USA?
07:56 Versailles' green carpet and Italian Renaissance landscapes inspired the British lawn
18:59 How 18th Century aristocratic English turf grass took root on the new continent
21:53 Thorstein Veblen on why American elites found lawns so respectable
24:10 Founding fathers disseminate the pastoral ideal
27:05 Planning communities of continuous lawn: Andrew Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted
32:03 Frank J. Scott tells suburbanites that homogenous manicured grass is neighbourly
34:48 How the lawn got cemented into the American imaginary in the aftermath of World War II
37:16 Post WWII suburban developments empowered Home Owners Associations (HOAs)
41:01 Quantifying the environmental impacts of modern US lawns
45:47 Why imported turf grass is a synecdoche for colonialism
50:40 Carpets of grass are fuel that spreads wildfires
51:38 Gas powered leaf blowers are huge polluters
55:00 How loud are leaf blowers?
55:51 Lawn care is a Sisyphean task of sterilisation
57:53 Norms around lawns are socially enforced
59:59 What solutions have helped people quit their lawn?
1:09:50 Conclusion and wrap up: the zeitgeist is shifting!
1:11:50 Luc's cover of "Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell

Sources:
• Ann Leighton, American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century, 1986.
• Michael Pollan, “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns”, The New York Times Magazine, May 1989.
• Georges Teyssot, The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life, 1999.
• Monique Mosser, The saga of grass: From the heavenly carpet to fallow fields, 1999.
• Cristina Milesi, “More Lawns than Irrigated Corn”, NASA Earth Observatory, November 2005.
• Paul Robbins, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are, 2007.
• Ted Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, 2007.
• Elizabeth Kolbert, “Turf War”, The New Yorker, July 2008.
• Joseph Manca, "British landscape gardening and Italian renaissance painting", Artibus et Historiae (297-322), 2015.
• Jamie Banks and Robert McConnell, National Emissions from Lawn and Garden Equipment, Environmental Protection Agency, April 2015.
• Christopher Ingraham, “Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them”, The Washington Post, August 2015.

On this inaugural episode, Ralph and Luc briefly describe the practice of greenwashing, with examples ranging from:

• BP's popularisation of the carbon footprint, to
• the labels on water bottles, to
• Volkswagen evading emissions tests, and
• the practice of carbon offsets...

In this episode, Ralph and Luc spotlight what the oil companies knew about CO2’s impact on the climate, and how they lied to you to sustain their fossilized business model – even if it risks drilling us into oblivion... This argument will soon be heard in court as part of a series of lawsuits against Big Oil.

We start by looking into the history of scholarship on this issue, dating back to the 19th Century.
We highlight the record of what the oil companies such as Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute were saying behind closed doors – and contrast this with their contemporaneous public statements.

We draw upon scholarship uncovered by Naomi Oreskes and the #ExxonKnew movement.

Sources:
• If you would like to read California's lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and the American Petroleum Institute for deceiving the public for decades, you can access it here:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/FINAL-9-15-COMPLAINT.pdf

• We quote from the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt; How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

• We also sample a couple clips from the 2014 documentary derived from it, also titled Merchants Of Doubt, directed by Robert Kenner and co-written by Kim Roberts.

• We cite reporting from this 2017 article from the Center for Public Integrity: “The United States of Petroleum” by Jie Jenny Zou, accessible at

https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/

• You can read Edward Teller’s “Energy Patterns of the Future” 1959 Presentation at the Energy and Man conference organised by the American Petroleum Institute in full here:
https://www.planetaryhealthforbusypeople.com/whats-now-and-whats-new/edward-teller

• We sample a couple clips from the 1981 British TV documentary by Thames Television called “Warming Warning”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMjnvfkeJJ0&list=PL7WD0g9dS3jlkXemuiPdoj4RF416JTpn6&index=3

• We read from Exxon's 1982 internal primer on the CO2 "Greenhouse Effect", which was made accessible thanks to reporting by Inside Climate News in 2015, and is accessible here:
https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1982-Exxon-Primer-on-CO2-Greenhouse-Effect.pdf

• We also read from the oil companies' advertorials, as highlighted in a 2017 research article: "Assessing ExxonMoblil’s climate change communications (1977-2014)" by Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f

• We refer to elements from the 2021 book The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E Mann.

• We also cite the 2023 Science article "Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections" by Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063

• We excerpted a clip from Naomi Klein's June 2023 appearance on the podcast "The Audit", hosted by Dave Anthony and Josh Olson on David Sirota's Lever Network, which you can listen to in full here:

https://www.levernews.com/the-audit-the-climate-change-misinformation-machine

(This episode is also available as a video on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muNF_1mC3FI&list=PLwI-SH3khGtbDQ76_3VXTO3AaLkZ-sqnA&index=3 )

Chapters:
0:00:00 Introduction - Current lawsuits against Big Oil
0:07:16 History of science of C02 and climate change in the 1800s
0:12:10...

In this episode, Ralph and Luc listen to a stand-up routine by comedian George Carlin about environmentalists. We engage with Carlin’s pontifications and his ingenious framing by providing context from a scientific perspective. We also gesture at disarming some of his cynicism while steering clear of fully explaining away what made his take comedic in the first place.

This episode contains 4 brief excerpts from George Carlin's "Jammin' in New York" special.

Erratum: we said microplastics were found in the blood of 99% of people tested – in fact, plastic was found in the blood of 17 of 22 subjects tested (77%).
• original article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412022001258
• and a write-up in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/24/microplastics-found-in-human-blood-for-first-time.