On November 5th while you weren't looking...
2025 got set up to be the year for climate restoration policy
One of the most significant climate restoration milestones of 2024 happened on November 5th. Yes, really.
It’s also a preview of how young people are taking the reins of the movement.
Climate Restoration Resolution introduced in Washington
After months in the making, a Climate Restoration Resolution (HR 1563) was introduced on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on November 5th. It's modeled after the California Senate’s Resolution 34 and recognizes that “...humanity has an obligation to future generations to restore and maintain a safe climate that ensures our long-term survival.”
Further, it calls on the President and other officials of the US and UN to “take actions that will restore the climate and stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at pre-industrial levels.”
Representative Mike Thompson of California introduced HR 1563 along with four co-sponsors: Anna Eshoo and Salud Carbajal of California, Shri Thanedar of Michigan, and Joseph D. Morelle of New York. I’m looking forward to their re-introducing the bill in the new Congress with bi-partisan support.
Youth in the lead
Remarkably, the measure was propelled not by national NGOs but by high school students. Members of Napa Schools for Climate Action (Napa S4CA) brought the resolution to Thompson’s attention and shepherded it through months of negotiations and revisions. The group’s mentor, Jim Wilson, teaches climate responsibility in high school science classes in Napa County.
In 2023, Napa S4CA had advocated for a similar resolution by the Napa County School District. After a year of surveys, organizing, educating, negotiating… it passed. When that passed, the students immediately looked toward Washington.
“So many people have resigned themselves to the supposed reality that there's nothing they can do—especially youth,” says Abner Silva Tuscano, senior at New Tech High School. "It's important that the youth recognize their power, because they are just as much citizens as older folks.”
A unifying message for polarized times
I often say,“Everybody wants to restore a safe climate for future generations” and no one ever disagrees. Liliana Karesh, a senior at Napa High School and President of Napa S4CA, takes the idea a step further. She told a colleague recently:
“Especially in the United States, where we’re so polarized, a message like ‘We want to restore our climate’ can bring people together. We can use it as a tool to bring politicians together too. And we’ll need to because bipartisanship support is now the only way we're going to get things done.”
More state resolutions could also propel climate restoration, and ease the way for further Washington action
No government funding involved
Notably, HR 1563 doesn’t request any funding. I consider this a positive. Government funding would almost surely make climate restoration political, which is the last thing we want. In any case, government money doesn’t appear to be needed. My view is that many grandparents care so much about their grandchildren’s future that they’ll invest in it. I have in mind not only our friends and neighbors, but grandparents like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and thousands of other wealthy and ultra-wealthy families.
In the meantime, while we watch for next steps on the resolution, I hope this milestone brings you as much optimism as it does me.
Much more is at stake than Co2 and GHG removal THESE will not immediately cool our planet. So there are many other things pulling the chord of heating this planet and I'm certain that many scientists think that they're on top of what is most important. What I'm concerned about is all the stuff most folks remain unconvinced of or totally unaware, including many scientists that continue to reject on the ground evidence.
If only the old scientific community would come down to Earth and follow the on the ground clues and evidence when it comes to our climate our selves.
There are very specific causes for human illness
We run a fever, well the planet is running a fever too, and it is not stopping. And why is it not cooling down even with all the mitigation practices over the last decades? Because we are not treating a significant forcing factor, some of which does have something to do with Co2 fixation but it is only one portion of the many planetary spheres, that is effected by one particular issue, and continues to be mis-diagnosed by the science"experts". Maybe it's time to look at our planet with the same lense we look at human health.
Our Planet: Person or Living Entity?
It’s time to consider our Earth as a living, breathing being possessing systems that keep it running smoothly and in good health. We now have to face the fact that the temperature of the planet is increasing. and as in other living beings this signals that something is happening out of the “normal functioning range”.
Scientists and 75% of the population call this climate change.
We can also say the earth has a fever, and its not going down.
When we humans have a prolonged fever we see a doctor. We test our fluids, our breathing, our blood pressure and our blood for toxic and nutritional levels.
Our cardiovascular system - heart, arteries, veins and capillaries - supply us with nutrients, circulate oxygen from our lungs, and cleanse our kidneys and liver. In short, this system keeps us alive.
Earth, as a living, breathing being, has a similar cardiovascular system in play - a system that is no longer functioning within “normal range”.
In the Earth’s cardiovascular system, we can think of the oceans and atmosphere as its heart and lungs, large rivers its arteries, smaller rivers and streams, wetlands and bogs its veins and capillaries sending nutrients to its extremities.
Terrestrial ecosystem provide sustenance: nutrition, oxygen, and a home to living beings. Land is connected to the waterways providing food and life to aquatic species that travel, breed and participate in the lifecycle of the Earth. and those avenues of support are severely clogged, (similar to cardiovascular disease in humans) by large hydroelectric dams: mega-dams.
Mega-dams are creating clots in the world’s circulatory system, not only retaining water for electricity generation, and prohibiting passage of the nutrients which the marine ecosystem needs to live and thrive.
The damming of rivers is one of mankind’s most significant modifications to the worlds cardiovascular system impacting the flow of water and associated materials from land to sea. Included in these nutrients are nutritional elements like nitrogen and phosphorus, required by all life on Earth, and silicon, which is required by diatoms, the plankton that account for the largest percentage of biological productivity in the oceans.
Diatoms in the oceans sequester more Co2 than all the rainforests of the planet.
Prior to the mid 20th century many of the larger rivers had been functioning normally. Rivers have always been the main nutritional delivery system for the smallest microscopic living things in the oceans: diatoms (plankton), which feed the largest of marine mammals the Blue Whale.
The estuaries, bays, and Continental Shelf flood each spring and during stormy periods, feeding the earth with rich nutritional sediments from erosion. Through the late 1950s into the 1980s many of the major rivers and waterways that emptied into the Northern Hemisphere oceans had large dams constructed that obstructed the natural flows containing much of the nutritional requirements of marine life. In the subarctic regions stretching all the way from Siberia to Labrador the many of the major fresh water rivers, along the entire upper portions of the Northern Hemisphere, were dammed for hydroelectric generation
Dams and flow regulation on rivers weaken the force of these upwelling ocean currents so fewer nutrients are available. The marine food chain is very dependent on diatoms, and their populations are declining rapidly; the world’s ocean fisheries are also in decline. 1.
Strict flow regimens caused by hydroelectric dams in the subarctic regions have decapitated the Northern Hemisphere's largest rivers. Now 95% of the water stagnates in sea-size impoundments for 6 months of the summer and continues melting the permafrost. long hours in the sun has led to excessive humidity and added greater amounts of methane rich fresh water to these dam reservoirs, insuring a now a much larger volume of and now warmer water to be discharged only all winter-long. This is not only warming these regions in the winter but sending this much larger volume and warmer fresh water into the bays and Arctic Ocean region. these rivers that used to flow 24x7 for eons of time now sit stagnant for 6 months at a time
Many other species, also important for carbon sequestration, are starving because of the nutrients withheld by river impoundments. NASA has indicated diatom populations are diminishing by about one percent per year. This equates to a significant increase in CO2 levels, because CO2 removal by diatoms is not occurring at the same rate before dams.
River obstruction and impoundment cuts off much of the nutrient flow to all marine life, stockpiling it behind dams, decomposing (emitting methane) and accelerating global warming. Clearly out of the historical normal range, the planet’s coronary arteries are now severely compromised.
Like cardiovascular disease in humans, deprivation of this ‘blood supply’ results in the starvation of aquatic life and with it the decline of livable terrestrial habitat.
Unfortunately the earth does not have a primary care physician who would recommend surgery to remove these blockages, freeing up the blood supply allowing the patient to recover. It is up to us, the tenants, to take the helm and choose not to invest in damming up its cardiovascular system.
We need to live with, not on, the earth and allow it to recover from our antiquated energy generation practices, which are doing what may be irreparable harm.
Divest from mega-dams. Remove the blockages that are continuing to damage our climate by preventing nutritional flow, thawing the permafrost and destroying habitats for all living things, land and sea.
Let’s allow the Earth to heal itself by freeing up the natural flow of river waters.
I am so inspired by the high school teens who went from
getting a school district to commit to something to getting a resolution introduced into the USA congress. Hats off to their mentor, and Hats off to those who got the Resolution through the California legislature, too. As almost a grandparent, I support the Resolution introduced that states that we acknowledge that we owe future generations a stable climate similar to what we grew up in. The primary measure of that is to reduce our current levels of CO2 (423 parts per million) back to the normal level of 280 to 300 parts per million.
There will need to be restoration of ecological
systems, and of course emissions reduction, yet removing the excess CO2 (and methane) that we've known for decades warms the planet is what we need now.