Bionic Planet: Reversing Climate Change by Restoring Nature

Environmental NGOs have long pressured companies to reduce their impact on forests, and companies have long complained that every NGO seems to come with different demands.

Now a coalition of more than a dozen NGOs have called the corporate bluff by creating a framework that provides a universal way of accounting for deforestation.

They call it the Accountability Framework, and today's guest, Jeff Milder, is one of the people helping to pull it together.

It's an article of faith among some on the left that markets and capitalism are the roots of all evil, while some on the right see pure, free markets as the invisible hand of God, and regulation as the work of the Devil.

Most economists will tell you they're both wrong, because there's no such thing as either a pure free market or a marketless society. We need markets to get things done, and we need governance to keep markets honest.

That's especially true in environmental markets, which almost always exist because of laws that require people to clean up their messes or reduce their pollution.

To slow climate change, for example, we have to put a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions, but how do we meet that cap?

There are basically two ways.

In command-and-control, a regulator writes up detailed, step-by-step prescriptions that have to be followed to the letter.

In cap-and-trade, which is a market-based mechanism, emitters find their own way of meeting the cap, and they're allowed to sell emission-reductions to others if they reduce more than the law requires. On the other hand, they also have to buy emission-reductions if they fail to meet their obligations.

If you're a regular listener, you know that carbon is just one of many environmental markets that are helping to fuel a $25 billion per year restoration economy, and that's just in the United States, as companies and municipalities rush to restore degraded rivers, forests, and other ecosystems on which our entire economy depends.

Environmental markets, however, don't replace regulation. What they do is provide flexibility in meeting regulatory requirements.

They work, and they work well, but only if properly regulated.

Unfortunately, regulators have seen their budgets frozen or even cut -- ostensibly to reduce costs. The result, ironically, isn't just less protection, but higher costs of compliance.

Today's Guests:

Todd BenDor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Jason Brenner, RiverBank

Murray Starkel, Ecological Service Partners

Jud Hill, Ecological Service Partners

Dave Groves, Earth Partners

Environmental scientist Tim Male has worked the conservation puzzle from both the NGO and governmental sector -- first with NGOs like Environmental Defense Fund, then as an elected councilman, and finally as an adviser to the Obama Administration's Council on Environmental Quality. In 2017, he distilled his views in a paper called "Nature, Paid on Delivery", which examines the ways the US states of Louisiana, Maryland, California and Nevada are restoring large swathes of degraded land with only small amounts of taxpayer money being paid up-front.

Can Pay for Success work in ecological restoration?

We've been fairly US-centric lately, but only because so much is finally happening there. In today's episode, we speak with Rhiana Gunn-Wright of New Consensus. That's the Think Tank that's helping freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and veteran Senator Ed Markey develop policy to support the Green New Deal they proposed last month.

We're losing pollinators at an alarming rate, which scientists attribute at least in part to the loss of native plants, which evolved alongside hundreds of native pollinators -- including bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies.

Dave Neu and Joe Krischon of the Conservation Land Stewardship have been helping to resurrect a degraded ravine north of Chicago, and today they explain how this backbreaking work helps revive colonies of bees and butterflies, and how you, too, can join the restoration economy.

Wetlands cover 274 million acres of the United States, and they ultimately provide more than half the country's drinking water, which is one reason the federal government protects them -- or has, until now.

Back in December, the US EPA and Army corps of engineers unveiled new rules for regulating water, and you'd be surprised what it leaves out. More half of the country's wetlands will no longer have federal protection, and neither will so-called "ephemeral streams", that only flow in certain conditions.

As of February 15, the public has 60 days to comment on the rule, so I'm running this piece I posted way back in August. If you're a paying patron, you will not be charged for this, and if you're not a patron, I invite you to become one at bionic-planet.com or at patreon.com/bionic planet.

I planned this piece as a two-parter, but haven't delivered the second half yet because I couldn't afford to, and that's a fact. These packages, with multiple voices and tons of research take a lot of work, and I've got a full-time job that's really time and a half as Editor of Ecosystem Marketplace. I did write a five-part series that achieves what the second half of this podcast was supposed to do, and if enough people give me enough support, I'll also be able to finish that second half, which would be great!

I hope you like the show, and I especially hope it moves you to action. You have nothing to lose but your clean water.

We hear a lot about the Sustainable Development Goals, or "SDGs" these days, with major pension funds like Calvert aligning their portfolios with them, and up to $12 trillion in finance, by one estimate, ready to do the same the same. But what are they?

That's a question I tried answering almost three years ago -- way back in 2016. It was right after world leaders had reached the Paris Climate Agreement, and right before my fellow countrymen shot the world in the butt by electing Donald Trump as President of the United States.

This encore presentation looks at the Sustainable Development Goals -- the SDGs -- which are more important now than ever -- and I think today's show, even though it's almost three years old, is more relevant than ever, too.

That's because it looks at the SDGs in the context of the global institutions that emerged from the ashes of World War II, and that Donald Trump, Vladmir Putin, and the Koch Brothers, among a whole bunch of other miscreants, are trying to destroy. We're a big, diverse planet, and we've pushed our living ecosystems to the brink. We need to work globally, together, if we're to fix this mess, and today we look at how we've done that in the past, and how still can in the future.

If you like what you hear, then I encourage you to become a patron at bionic-planet.com or patreon.com/bionicplanet. I am listener supported, and you can support me for as little as $1 per month.

Yvo de Boer served as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from August, 2006 to July, 2010; and in November of last year, he became president of the Gold Standard, which is an NGO-led global partnership that sets standards for everything from carbon projects to the way we recognize contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

In this wide-ranging discussion, we discuss everything from the outcome of the most recent talks in Katowice to the odd phenomenon of explosive chickens -- as well as how we can quantify the impact that countries and companies have on achieving the SDGs.

Agriculture emits roughly 20 percent of all greenhouse gasses, but sustainable management of forests, farms, and fields can turn the world's farms into massive carbon sinks that absorb greenhouse gasses by the gigaton, yet farmers -- as opposed to agriculture ministers -- have been nearly invisible at year-end climate talks. That changed this past year, thanks to a global farmer-led effort to promote climate-safe agriculture and the emergence of the Koronivia joint Working Group on Agriculture, which creates a fast track for integrating agriculture into the Paris Climate Agreement. Today's guest, Fred Yoder, is an Ohio family farmer who has become a leading proponent of climate-safe agriculture within the Americas. He tells us how farmers moved from the fringes to the center of climate negotiations in just two short years.

Also appearing: Ceris Jones, Theo de Jager, Tonya Rawe, and Jason Funk