Join us for our bi-weekly meeting as we plan for 2023 and 2024. Our meetings are on a rotating schedule so that we can include people from all regions.

We need volunteers in these areas:

• Intercom
• Facebook group/social media
• Graphics
• Event planners
• Newsletter team
• More tech people
• Phone bankers
• Ohio Outreach
• Database management/Clerical

RSVP to receive the Zoom link to join the meeting.

Dear Members,

We are pleased to announce the upcoming election of our Wiesbaden-Mainz Chapter leadership.

The Election will take place on Sunday, March 5, at 16:00 on Zoom.

The Election is where we will vote for the committee positions for the next two years. The roles we
have available are:

• Chair
• Vice Chair
• Secretary
• GOTV Coordinator
• Press Coordinator
• Comms Coordinator
• Phone Banking Coordinator
• Events Coordinator

You must be at the meeting to cast your vote. To participate in the election, RSVP to receive login information.

DAG chapter elections are right around the corner!  Are you interested in running for a position in your chapter’s elections? Learn more about opportunities in your chapter and all you need to know about being a candidate at the Information Session for Potential Candidates on Sunday, February 5, 2023 from 2-3pm CET.  We'll be there to answer any of your questions! Please RSVP to receive the meeting link.

Join us for our bi-weekly meeting as we plan for 2023 and 2024. Our meetings are on a rotating schedule so that we can include people from all regions.

We need volunteers in these areas:

• Intercom
• Facebook group/social media
• Graphics
• Event planners
• Newsletter team
• More tech people
• Phone bankers
• Ohio Outreach
• Database management/Clerical

RSVP to receive the Zoom link to join the meeting.

The ECCC had a lively discussion on the arts and climate activism in our December Climate Cafe. The most effective way to move our fellow humans is often through art and narrative, not just words and shouting. Let's explore how music, prose, film, graphic art, etc., can expose the human condition and change hearts and actions.

Watch our panel discussion on the multi-award-winning documentary, Youth v Gov, now streaming on Netflix. We welcome filmmaker Christi Cooper, who paints a remarkable portrait of the young Americans suing the government to protect their constitutional rights to a stable climate, Philip Gregory, acting as co-lead counsel on the case, and Nathan Baring, one of the brave youth plaintiffs. YOUTH v GOV is the story of the Juliana v. The United States of America constitutional lawsuit and the 21 American youths, ages 14 to 25, who are taking on the world’s most powerful government. Since 2015, the legal non-profit, Our Children’s Trust, has been representing these youth in their landmark case against the U.S. government for violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty, personal safety, and property through their willful actions in creating the climate crisis they will inherit.

Watch on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/watch/81586492

Submitted by Sam Goodman - A New York voter living in Costa Rica.

This year’s U.N. climate negotiations in Egypt (COP 27) yielded mixed results as nations worked to build on the agreement reached in Glasgow last year. The Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan offered a historic breakthrough on the issue of loss and damage and significant language on reforming the global financial system, but it failed to go beyond last year’s text in terms of phasing out fossil fuels. The uneven result had the conference being dubbed “a tale of two COPs.”

Billed as the “implementation COP” by the Egyptian presidency, the conference was the first to be hosted on African soil since 2016 in Marrakesh. This year’s conference presented a unique set of geopolitical headwinds, leading many to question what progress was actually possible. The war in Ukraine and runaway inflation have led to many nations doubling down on fossil fuels and backsliding on their climate pledges. This year’s host country has an abominable human rights record and threatened to undermine civil society’s presence at the conference. 

The decision to establish a fund for loss and damage broke a 30-year deadlock on the issue, delivering a major victory for frontline communities in the Global South. Loss and damage refer to irreparable damages or irreversible losses from the adverse impacts of climate change. While loss and damage should be considered the third pillar of international climate policy, in addition to mitigation and adaptation, it has not been given equal weight in previous negotiations.

The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference is from Sunday, 6 November, until on Friday, 18 November.

Sam Goodman joins us live from COP27. He will give us an overview of promises, problems, and progress from this important conference.

This month we discuss climate change and environmental justice in Africa. A continent with a vast colonial legacy and suffering the brunt of climate change, Africa has also emerged as a leader in innovative solutions for renewable energy.

Download the slides

Here's the deal with the DHL code: the mobile app doesn't have a field to enter a discount code (at least not that I can find).

• If using the mobile / tablet app, go to https://mydhl.express.dhl/index/en.html and choose Germany as your country.
• Hold down the formatting button (see screenshots for examples of Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android) and choose 'Desktop Website.'

Android	Apple

• You'll get the version of this page that runs on a laptop or desktop (or possibly a large tablet). It's hard to use on a small screen, but you get different options, including being able to input a discount code at the end. See the screenshots below for details.

Android	Apple

Submitted by Diana Powers - A Florida voter living in France.

Hydrogen has inspired and excited proponents of the Energy Transition as the missing link, the connective tissue that provides coherence to the disparate pieces of the future energy puzzle. Hydrogen is versatile. It carries energy. It is a feedstock for chemicals. It can link the electricity grid to the gas grid. It can power transportation from scooters to cars to trains and rockets and, in the future, ships and airplanes. It is envisaged as the successor to petroleum as the maker of nations and the remaker of geopolitics.

This tiniest of atoms links up by twos to create H2, the tiniest of molecules.

But not all hydrogen molecules are created equal. And the whimsical hydrogen community has color-coded the many and varied sources of hydrogen.

Submitted Liz Clarey - A Pennsylvania voter living in the Czech Republic.

The Great Green Wall is an international initiative to regrow the once-fertile Sahel region, which stretches across the African continent on the southern edge of the Sahara. This area faces desertification due to climate change and unsustainable farming practices. The Great Green Wall was created in 2007 not only to combat global warming but to create jobs, grow food, and combat poverty across the continent. The African Union leads the initiative in partnership with 20 African countries, the World Bank, the European Commission, and others.

 The Good:

The Great Green Wall aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, capture 250 million tons of CO2 and create 10 million jobs, all by 2030. It is Africa’s most ambitious reforestation project. Ethiopia has been a success story: the country has planted 5.5 billion seedlings on 151,000 hectares of new forest and 792,000 new terraces.

The Bad:

As of 2020, more than ten years after the program's start, the GGW had only planted 4 million hectares after an initial investment of $200 million. To achieve the GGW goal by 2030, this work needs to be doubled each year and requires an additional investment of $4.3 billion per year. The program's progress varies considerably by country, and one of the most pressing problems is the lack of sufficient monitoring and evaluation.

The Nerdy:

Experience showed that just planting trees was not effective. Luckily, the GGW has evolved to account for this. Where the initial idea was a wall of trees, the project has morphed into implementing various sustainable land use practices like water harvesting techniques, agroforestry, and regenerative agriculture. One large success has been the use of indigenous farming practices. These were initially discouraged by colonial legal frameworks but have proven to be the most effective in terms of growing yield and minimal land damage. Though the project might not succeed in terms of initial goals, it provides an example of the kind of multinational cooperation, flexibility, and community engagement needed to combat a changing climate.

This month we talk about the Inflation Reduction Act and how you can use it to maximize your energy efficiency and fight climate change.

Download the slides here.

Submitted Liz Clarey - A Pennsylvania voter living in the Czech Republic.

This past summer has seen a lot of movement toward electric vehicles (EVs). The Inflation Reduction Act will provide tax credits for EV purchases, and California, the largest car market in the US, announced they would ban the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. This means an increasing demand for lithium-ion batteries, which power EVs (in addition to smartphones, laptops, and power grids!). Lithium batteries are efficient and can store energy for a long period of time.

However, the metal is not completely environmentally friendly. Lithium is either mined from rock or extracted from brine and freshwater through an evaporation process. Unfortunately, lithium mining can pollute surrounding environments, and brine evaporation requires enormous amounts of water. Lithium costs are expected to skyrocket with increased demand, and there are concerns about its increasing scarcity.

Written by Diana S. Powers, a Florida voter living in France.

California Governor Gavin Newsom took a giant step forward in climate change adaptation with the publication of “California’s Water Supply Strategy: Adapting to a Hotter, Drier Future ” (the ‘Strategy’) in August 2022. The Strategy admits that California is not merely in one of its usual swings between droughts and floods but that this balance has gone. Droughts last years longer. The less frequent rains and snows deliver less water. While trade-offs between water uses have already been tight and contentious, California faces a future of 10% less water before 2040. The Strategy plans to boost and optimize water resources through water recycling, desalination, and the more complete water capture from rarer flooding events.

Climate change impacts all living things in the biosphere largely through the water. Dry areas will become drier, while wet areas will become wetter. For California, however, drought and water scarcity are nothing new. In its gravity-defying attempt to meet the needs of an ever-growing population in an inhospitable, largely desert climate, Californians have begged, borrowed, stolen, and tricked to take water for both urban and agricultural needs for over a hundred years, as described in the riveting book and documentary, “Cadillac Desert.” No infrastructure project has daunted them when armed with the conviction that water is the basic need for all human activity. Emptying lakes, diverting rivers, and constructing dams all have been accomplished. Nature has paid the price, with many habitats permanently destroyed.

The Florida Democratic Party has prepared two flyers to summarize arguments for friends and families on why Rubio needs to go, and how the Biden economic agenda is working for all Americans.

Submitted by Karen Lee, Ohio voter living in Greece.

The locals? That’s pretty condescending, isn’t it? Who are these ‘locals’? I set out to better understand who this group is and how they think when considering the challenge facing us as a nation and planet when addressing climate change.

If we are those Democrats and other progressives living away, abroad, outside the home state, etc., then ‘the locals’ must be the folks back home. And if we’re concerned about how to talk to them, it probably means they’re either Republicans (or worse), or libertarian-leaning independents, or just those whose first thought of the morning is not about politics.

The locals might also include those ‘brain-dead, Fox-warped, QAnon-fringe, crypto-fascist Christians who keep propounding extreme authoritarian ideas that only 15% of the population supports and hinting they might know someone willing to start a civil war if they don’t get their way. They may even refer to us as libtards and snowflakes. Bah, locals! Don’t waste your time on em!

If you like a good donnybrook, as I do, you might take them on frontally. We can sling epithets as good as the next guy’s, right? If you like winning … an election, a fight for the soul of democracy, etc., you may want to rethink the whole process and the ‘locals’ you plan to engage.

But, I’m thinking ‘the locals’ are a lot like me.

Submitted Liz Clarey - A Pennsylvania voter living in the Czech Republic.

As someone who lives abroad, you probably take a few long-haul trips a year. Maybe more than a few! Airplane travel is responsible for 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. For many people who do fly, those flights make up a sizeable portion of their individual carbon footprint.

The Good:

Even though burning petroleum-based jet fuel is extremely polluting, air travel makes up a smaller portion of our collective emissions compared to other sectors. Moreover, many airlines are in the process of making changes to their aircraft to improve sustainability. The most obvious, of course, is replacing jet fuel with fuels that create lower emissions. Airlines are also working on technologies to make airplanes lighter, more aerodynamic, and more durable. There is some promise that some short-haul flights (which are typically under 3 hours) will be able to run on electricity.

The biggest project, of course, is creating sustainable aviation fuels, or SAFs. Most companies are looking at drop-in fuels, which are alternative fuels that can work with existing jet-engine technology. To do this, most SAFs need to be blended with traditional jet fuel. While the ratio varies, most combinations are 50% SAF and 50% jet fuel. SAFs are often created from biofuels made from waste and by-products.

Every U.S. citizen has the right to vote in federal elections. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived abroad or if you have never lived in the U.S.

You have a vote. Please use it!

Time is running out! 

Request your absentee ballot today at https://www.votefromabroad.org/. 

Ask for your ballot to be delivered by email.

Voting Questions? email to [email protected]

🎉Change is in the air. The Democrats had a fantastic series of wins. Democratic Senators and House members passed the Inflation Reduction Act without one Republican vote. We still need parental leave and child care credits, but at least we can do something to mitigate climate change, make corporations pay something, and chase down some big-time tax evaders. And then there was KANSAS!!! Polls are starting to show some candidates in positive territory, and public opinion is moving to our side.

😟 We aren’t the least bit sorry that Republicans showed their true colors to the public by:

• Trying to hurt veterans and voting no on the PACT Act before having a change of heart and
• Voting against reducing the cost of insulin.
  
• We are very sorry for people with diabetes who must pay outrageous sums for a life-saving medication they must have.

👍 There is new polling out on the popularity of the Inflation Reduction Act, and it is OFF THE CHARTS! This is NOT what Republicans wanted to hear, so they are doing what they always do – lie. Robert Hubbell explained in a recent newsletter how the New York Post is attempting to manipulate and distort the facts. Please grab every opportunity to amplify the provisions of this bill.

✨ Yesterday, President Biden announced a three-part plan to provide more breathing room to America’s working families as they recover from the strains of the COVID-19 pandemic. This plan offers targeted debt relief as part of a comprehensive effort to address the burden of growing college costs and make the student loan system more manageable for working families. Learn more about Student Loan Relief for Borrowers Who Need It Most here.