Llewellyn King: On the 50th Earth Day, grounds for hope amidst the mess

President Nixon and his wife, Patricia, plant a tree on the White House grounds to mark the first Earth Day, in 1970. The Republican Party had many environmentalists back then. In the same year, Nixon signed into law the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

On the face of it, there isn’t much to celebrate on April 22, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. The oceans are choked with invisible carbon and plastic which is very visible when it washes up on beaches and fatal when ingested by animals, from whales to seagulls.

On land, as a run-up to Earth Day, Mississippi recorded its widest tornado – two miles across -- since measurements were first taken, and the European Copernicus Institute said an enormous hole in the ozone over the Arctic has opened after a decade of stability.

But perversely, there’s some exceptionally good news. Because of the cessation of so much activity, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the air has cleared dramatically; cities around the world, including Mumbai and Los Angeles, are smog-free. Also, the murk in the waters of Venice’s canals and the waves from motorboats are gone, revealing fish and plants in the clear Adriatic water.

Jan Vrins, global energy leader at Guidehouse, the world-circling consultancy, was so excited by the clearing that he posted and tweeted a picture taken from a town in the Punjab where Himalayan peaks are visible for the first time in 30 years.

The message here is very hopeful: With some moderation in human activity, we can save the environment and ourselves.

The sense of gloom and hopelessness that has attended a litany of environmental woes needn’t be inevitable. Mitigating conduct in industry and, particularly in the energy sector, can have a huge impact quickly; transportation will take longer. Vrins says the electric utility industry -- a source of so much carbon -- is now almost entirely engaged in the fight against global warming. Just five years ago, he says, they weren’t all fully committed to it.

Another Guidehouse consultant, Matthew Banks, is working with large industrial and consumer companies on reducing the impact of packaging as well as the energy content of consumer goods. Among his clients are Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson. The latter, he says, has been working to reduce product footprint since 1995.

“This is an important moment in time,” Banks says. “Folks have talked about this as being The Great Pause and I think on this Earth Day, we need to think about how that bounce back or rebound from the Great Pause can be done in a way that responds to the climate crisis.”

I was on hand covering the first Earth Day, created by Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat, and its national organizer, Denis Hayes. It came as a follow-on to the environmental conscientiousness which arose from the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring, in 1962. That dealt with the devastating impact of the insecticide DDT.

Richard Nixon gave the environmental movement the hugely important National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. With that legislation, and the support of people like Nelson, the environmental movement was off and running – and sadly, sometimes running off the rails.

One of the environmentalists’ targets was nuclear power. If nuclear was bad, then something else had to be good. At that time, wind turbines -- like those we see everywhere nowadays -- hadn’t been perfected. Early solar power was to be produced with mirrors concentrating sunlight on towers. That concept has had to be largely abandoned as solar-electric cells have improved and the cost has skidded down.

But in the 1970s, there was reliable coal, lots of it. As the founder and editor in chief of The Energy Daily, I sat through many a meeting where environmentalists proposed that coal burned in fluidized-bed boilers should provide future electricity. Natural gas and oil were regarded as, according to the inchoate Department of Energy, depleted resources. Coal was the future, especially after the energy crisis broke with the Arab oil embargo in the fall of 1973.

Now there is a new sophistication. It was growing before the coronavirus pandemic laid the world low, but it has gained in strength. As Guidehouse’s Vrins says, “We still have climate change as a ‘gray rhino’, a big threat to our society and the world at large. I hope that utilities and all their stakeholders will increase their urgency of addressing that big threat which is still ahead of us.”

Happy birthday Earth Day — and many more to come.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

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Llewellyn King: Homelessness in America at crisis point

The British call it sleeping rough. We call it for what it is: homelessness.

It starts the day when all the support systems -- fragile as they often are -- fail. When there is no home to go to; no bed to sleep in, no meal to eat, no toilet to use, no place to wash even a face -- just the hard, cold and often wet streets that offer no succor. The hospitality of a concrete sidewalk is scant.

That is what faces 4 million luckless children each year in the United States, according to Renee Trincanello, chief executive officer of Covenant House Florida, which operates shelters in Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando. Once they hit the streets, they are vulnerable to every horror that can happen to a child, including sex trafficking. “They also are used by drug dealers to inculcate a habit,” Trincanello told me.

In the United States, homelessness is at a crisis point. Cities are clogged with the homeless from coast to coast. If you travel a lot, as I do, you are aware of how homelessness is at its most conspicuous where there is prosperity -- a byproduct of high rents in cities like San Francisco, Austin, New York and Boston.

Very close to the Capitol in Washington, around Union Station, the homeless sleep on the sidewalks, sometimes with the barest needs met by charities -- needs like a sleeping bag, if they have been identified and are lucky. Train stations are a mecca for the homeless because they have public toilets and offer warmth. But Union Station has removed most of its seating to keep out the homeless.

To draw attention to the misery and extreme danger of children sleeping in the streets, and to raise money, Covenant House branches in the United States, Canada and Latin America organize sleep outs. Once a year, executives like my friend Jan Vrins, managing director and leader of Navigant’s global energy practice, takes a sleeping bag, puts it on top of a cardboard box and gets a hard night’s rest on a parking lot pavement.

Vrins says, “It isn’t fun to sleep in a concrete parking lot on a carton box with a sleeping bag. But the time we spend with these youths before we sleep out is wonderful. First, we have dinner with them and have sessions where they share their stories.” Afterward, the children are safely tucked up in the shelter and the adults repair to the parking lot.

In every case, Vrins says, something has happened to them. “Their families have broken up, sometimes because of addiction; there have been storms, as in Puerto Rico, and they end up in the shelters. So, climate change is leading to more kids on the street,” he says.

Vrins says that he was introduced to Covenant House by an executive from Florida Power & Light. “That was 11 years ago, and I got hooked,” he says. Now he is Covenant House Florida’s vice chairman.

Trincanello, who is married with two daughters, has spent her career with Covenant House. She told me that her father wanted her to be a lawyer; she pushed back and became a social worker.

If you sign up to sleep out with Covenant House, whether it is in chilly Toronto or as, as Vrins notes, more benign Florida, you will join some of the cream of America’s executive talent from Accenture and Black Rock, to Cisco, KPMG and other companies. In fact, prominent companies field “teams.”

Vrins, who is married with two sons, heads the Navigant team. Each sleeper is expected to raise $1,000 for Covenant House. This year, he laid down on the concrete in Ft. Lauderdale on Nov. 26. He says 130 people slept out there and raised $270,000.

A native of the Netherlands, Vrins is one of those gregarious people who puts his arms around you with his smile. He speaks with passion and love of the homeless children in their crises. Trincanello, whom I have not met, has a voice as warm as a winter hearth. I can imagine it melting fear in a scared child. Together they do work which is not a molecule short of noble.

Vrins says of sleeping out: “When you wake up in the morning, you feel blessed. When homeless kids must look for the next place to spend the night, you feel blessed.”

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2