Lisa Jackson touts Apple's environmental initiatives in Earth Day talk
Apple Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson appeared in the Earth Day Network's "Earth Day Live" livestream on Wednesday, where she briefly outlined the company's green initiatives and invited others to join in the fight against climate change.
Apple VP Lisa Jackson discusses environmental initiatives during Earth Day Live.
Jackson in a short, pre-recorded speech aired on the Earth Day Network's official Twitch channel provided a history of her work as an environmentalist, noting her tenure as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama. Her first brush with environmental initiatives occurred much earlier, however.
"But long before that, I was an 8-year-old girl who saw my neighbors in New Orleans battling illness caused by chemical plants in our backyard. A girl who in 1970 wrote a letter to President Nixon, imploring him to do something to protect the health of people and the environment," Jackson said. "That same year, we celebrated Earth Day in the U.S. for the very first time. And by the end of 1970, the EPA had officially opened its doors."
The Apple executive served as head of the EPA from 2009 to 2013. She joined the Cupertino tech giant to head its environmental initiatives division in May 2013 and was promoted to her current position in 2015.
Jackson went on to relate the ongoing coronavirus pandemic to critical environmental issues.
"We're living at a moment when health is always front of mind," she said. "And COVID-19 has reminded us of two essential truths: that humanity is best served when we work together and that science is our best tool to navigate the challenges we face."
Jackson underscored the importance of science by harkening back to the EPA's Endangerment Finding on Greenhouse Gases in 2009. More than 10 years later, the program is still bearing fruit that, according to Jackson, represents irrefutable evidence that there is "no time to waste in addressing climate change."
"Policy is one part of the solution, innovation is another," she said. "And we're bringing Apple's creativity and innovative spirit to the fight against climate change by operating every one of our facilities around the world on 100% renewable energy, and helping our suppliers to do the same."
Apple in 2018 announced a successful transition to 100% renewable energy, noting its entire operation, from offices to retail stores, now runs on some ilk of green power. Those efforts have since expanded to partner manufacturers in China and beyond.
Jackson also noted Apple is using recycled and renewable materials "more and more" in product manufacturing. The company in 2017 set the ambitious goal of one day creating a closed loop supply chain in which its products will be made from 100% recycled materials. Apple's "Daisy" disassembly robot, which breaks down iPhones into smaller components that can be further processed for mineral extraction and refinement, is one step toward realizing that goal.
In 2018, Apple introduced MacBook Air and Mac mini models with enclosures made from 100% recycled aluminum. Likewise, the company's product packaging, typically a major source of waste, is crafted from 100% renewable wood fiber.
"We are seeing many of our industry peers step up to the plate, but we all know there's more to do," Jackson said. "We still need the kind of compassionate, urgent action we've seen around the COVID-19 response to help our world transition to a clean, green economy."
The Earth Day Live broadcast featured discussions with dozens of environmentalists, scientists, world leaders and celebrities, as well as musical performances and special films. Actor and prominent green movement advocate Ed Begley Jr. hosted the event with daughter Hayden Begley.
Apple VP Lisa Jackson discusses environmental initiatives during Earth Day Live.
Jackson in a short, pre-recorded speech aired on the Earth Day Network's official Twitch channel provided a history of her work as an environmentalist, noting her tenure as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama. Her first brush with environmental initiatives occurred much earlier, however.
"But long before that, I was an 8-year-old girl who saw my neighbors in New Orleans battling illness caused by chemical plants in our backyard. A girl who in 1970 wrote a letter to President Nixon, imploring him to do something to protect the health of people and the environment," Jackson said. "That same year, we celebrated Earth Day in the U.S. for the very first time. And by the end of 1970, the EPA had officially opened its doors."
The Apple executive served as head of the EPA from 2009 to 2013. She joined the Cupertino tech giant to head its environmental initiatives division in May 2013 and was promoted to her current position in 2015.
Jackson went on to relate the ongoing coronavirus pandemic to critical environmental issues.
"We're living at a moment when health is always front of mind," she said. "And COVID-19 has reminded us of two essential truths: that humanity is best served when we work together and that science is our best tool to navigate the challenges we face."
Jackson underscored the importance of science by harkening back to the EPA's Endangerment Finding on Greenhouse Gases in 2009. More than 10 years later, the program is still bearing fruit that, according to Jackson, represents irrefutable evidence that there is "no time to waste in addressing climate change."
"Policy is one part of the solution, innovation is another," she said. "And we're bringing Apple's creativity and innovative spirit to the fight against climate change by operating every one of our facilities around the world on 100% renewable energy, and helping our suppliers to do the same."
Apple in 2018 announced a successful transition to 100% renewable energy, noting its entire operation, from offices to retail stores, now runs on some ilk of green power. Those efforts have since expanded to partner manufacturers in China and beyond.
Jackson also noted Apple is using recycled and renewable materials "more and more" in product manufacturing. The company in 2017 set the ambitious goal of one day creating a closed loop supply chain in which its products will be made from 100% recycled materials. Apple's "Daisy" disassembly robot, which breaks down iPhones into smaller components that can be further processed for mineral extraction and refinement, is one step toward realizing that goal.
In 2018, Apple introduced MacBook Air and Mac mini models with enclosures made from 100% recycled aluminum. Likewise, the company's product packaging, typically a major source of waste, is crafted from 100% renewable wood fiber.
"We are seeing many of our industry peers step up to the plate, but we all know there's more to do," Jackson said. "We still need the kind of compassionate, urgent action we've seen around the COVID-19 response to help our world transition to a clean, green economy."
The Earth Day Live broadcast featured discussions with dozens of environmentalists, scientists, world leaders and celebrities, as well as musical performances and special films. Actor and prominent green movement advocate Ed Begley Jr. hosted the event with daughter Hayden Begley.
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But a new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” being released free to the public on YouTube today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments.
“Planet of the Humans was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. “I assumed solar panels would last forever,” Moore toldReuters. “I didn’t know what went into the making of them.”
The film shows both abandoned industrial wind and solar farms and new ones being built — but after cutting down forests. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at was a solar dead zone,” says filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, staring at a former solar farm in California. “I learned that the solar panels don’t last.”
Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. “We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,” says a well-coiffed environmental leader. “Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,” says a scientist.
In truth, humankind has never been at risk of running out of energy. There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/04/21/new-michael-moore-backed-documentary-on-youtube-reveals-massive-ecological-impacts-of-renewables/#16384bed6c96
The projects Apple has rolled out are not deforesting the planet. There is no "dead zone" above Apple's biogas or geothermal projects. This entire bit you copied and pasted here is a string of logical fallacies, particularly the idea that green energy is based on "Malthusian ideas," and that the primary intent of moving to renewable energy is that we are running out of oil.
Malthus was a religious philosopher writing in the late 1700s, not a scientist. He postulated that societal problems he witnessed centuries ago could only be solved by a huge die-off in population. It's absurd to say that's the basis of moving to green energy today.
And while there was once the fear that we would run out of good sources of oil back in the 1970s, we've since developed technology to extract oil from shale and frack it out of sources formerly considered worthless. There's lots of oil left, that's not even the issue.
The issue is that fracking blows new toxins into the ground that end up in our water, and cause all sorts of unexpected things like earthquakes in places that are unusual because we are changing the composition under our feet. These issues are just as bad if not far worse than "what do we do with old solar panels" and "hey lets not deforest the earth just to set up solar arrays."
Moore's film is raising an issue and blowing it out of proportion, and it's being promoted by interests who want to vilify the people raising awareness of renewable tech. He's the same filmmaker who visited Cuba and wondered aloud why it has a better healthcare system than the US, mixing some reality into a large bit of fiction uninformed to the point of being misleading.
We need to follow science and a constant re-evaluation of what's working best, not just more fallacious scaremongering so that we are paralyzed by outrage. And unfortunately, everyone in the media appears to be motivated by nothing other than outrage inducement, portraying everything as bad and the "somebody famous" behind it as being maliciously evil as part of a greater conspiracy. That only acts to protect the moneyed interests that depend on the status quo being maintained: a massive military-industrial complex that has to defend the oil underneath a religious battleground and maintain its price to keep the frack-destruction of our own nation in place, so we can continue to build a car-centric wasteland to support massively excessive vehicles making unnecessary trips. We need to rethink the whole thing.
to
hmm, where to begin. Drill ships, offshore oil platforms, land-based oil wells, pipelines, tanker ships, tanker trucks, storage tanks, and all the other giant heavy bits used to drill for, pump, store, transport, refine, transport again, burn to generate electricity, oil infrastructure.
How many centuries would a giant steel oil tanker have to last to justify the enormous energy and natural resources dug up and processed to make its steel, deliver that steel, forge it, roll it, transport it again to the ship yard, weld it into a ship, and at the end of its lifespan break down that ship? Plus all the fuel it uses to transport the oil it moves across the world?
you really think humans control the earth’s temperature and it’s as simple as turning off all CO2 sources???
in the great post war period from world war 2 until the late 1970’s was when try’s industrialization took off and the amount of CO2 we emitted took off, yet temperatures went down. Care to explain???
over the last quarter century the earth’s temperature, from a statistically significant stand point has not changed.
over the last 30 years all the CO2 emitted has caused a significant greening of the planet as well as increased crop yields and crop efficiency, meaning less water is required.
did you know that 97% of CO2 occurs naturally???? Thus whether we emit our 3% or not it’s irrelevant!
did you know that the almost 8 billion humans on the earth each and everyone of us exhales 2 lbs of CO2 every single day, 365 days of the year. So should we start to kill everyone off???
97% at a minimum of actively publishing climate scientists agree climate change is real and mostly caused by human activity.
CO2 is not a pollutant? above a certain percentage it is toxic (your breathing stops).
Temperatures WERE dropping during your cherry-picked range of dates - but they aren't dropping now, with no other demonstrated cause and have shown a steady increase since 1900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record . The CO2 greenhouse effect was demonstrated as far back as the 1800s
Statistically significant? Based on what metric?
CO2 may result in increased crop growth, but it also results in an increase in starch in many crops and a reduction in other, more important nutrients so not particularly helpful.
The trick here is also about recycling. Recent reports were talking about how windmill blades were going into landfills. That's because there hadn't been a market demand/supply to recycle them so there weren't any plants.
There are now plants in construction to recycling windmill blades (into insulation). That is also happening with solar panels as they begin to reach end of life.
You can stop right there. A pollutant is something that adversely affects the usefulness of a resource. In this case, our atmosphere is the resource, the components of which are in balanced proportions. While CO2 is an essential part of the ecosystem, too much of it would be harmful to much of life on earth, including plants.
You first.