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California’s young voters must participate if we want a livable climate future

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Wednesday, September 11, 2024

The first-time voter conversation by California Voices features authors voting for the first time this November to help Californians understand why new voters believe in the importance of casting a ballot. Read more voices on voting. Guest Commentary written by Bella Tarlton Bella Tarlton is an incoming freshman at Cal Poly Humboldt University and lives in Eureka. She was the editor-in-chief of her high school’s journalism program. As a young Californian, I’ve already witnessed firsthand the rapid and dreadful environmental changes unfolding around us. From wildfires and floods to rising sea levels and scorching temperatures, it’s clear the home we love is in danger. I’m deeply concerned about the future of our planet, and I plan to cast my first vote in support of candidates and policies that support a livable earth.  This election year it is more crucial than ever for voters to actively support candidates committed to using their leadership positions to protect our imperiled planet. This is a central reason that I am a registered voter: I believe in doing the most in my power as a citizen to make change happen.  According to the Public Policy Institute of California, only 18% of people ages 18-34 are registered and likely voters. As a part of this younger generation, I hope to encourage the people around me to use this opportunity for their voices to be heard and acknowledge that their votes are essential to our future.  My generation must unite and use our collective voices to spotlight the fundamental need for decisive action to prevent further irreversible harm to our planet from human-caused climate change.  I fear for my future and the future of our children and grandchildren. What will this world look like for them? What will it look like during my own life? If my vote can make a difference in that outcome, then I will use it to make the most of my power, as every young voter should. Supporting a candidate running for office, whether for the country, your state or your local area, means supporting what they support, including solutions they propose to safeguard our home against the perils of climate change.  Protecting ecosystems that serve as carbon sinks — while simultaneously curbing emissions of additional carbon into our atmosphere to sustain a livable future environment — is a priority concern of mine. Restoring and preserving natural ecosystems with a focus on wetlands is paramount, and deserves robust support from policymakers and candidates alike. “Wetland protections are now more important than ever at the state level after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Sackett v. EPA, which effectively shrunk the jurisdiction of federal wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act at least in half,” said Jennifer Marlow, an assistant professor of environmental law at Cal Poly Humboldt.  Without federal protections, it is our responsibility as voters to elect public officials in California who understand the importance of wetlands as carbon sinks, as well as their role in protecting our communities from flooding events.  This must be done in both local and state elections where our voices matter the most.  Lowering carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere is another important factor in reducing climate impacts to the state. Young voters should support candidates running for office who prioritize funding for research and development of non-fossil fuel and carbon neutral renewable energy infrastructure that can supply all of California’s energy needs.  Voters should also support candidates that have a clear goal of phasing out fossil fuel extraction and usage within the decade. Our state needs to achieve carbon neutrality — and currently, carbon is released at dangerously high rates.  “California sued Big Oil recently, but our state must also stop approving new oil and gas permits,” Marlow told me. “Candidates should support renewed rule-making for regulations that require setbacks — no oil drilling within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, hospitals and other sensitive sites should be permitted.” However we address climate change because the rest of the world is watching. Young voters, especially in California, must serve as role models by voting on how we handle climate policies. If enough young voters make their voices heard, we will collectively set nationwide trends and California will take a leadership role in how we handle the climate crisis.   This starts with supporting candidates who will address climate change without hesitation. Bold and decisive action from our political leaders will ensure California becomes a safe and sustainable home for me and other generations whose future relies on it. It starts with the vote of young Californians like me.

Even if young voters are disillusioned with the American democratic process, they need to participate in our elections and support climate change protections and advocates, writes a Eureka teen.

The first-time voter conversation by California Voices features authors voting for the first time this November to help Californians understand why new voters believe in the importance of casting a ballot. Read more voices on voting.

Guest Commentary written by

Bella Tarlton

Bella Tarlton

Bella Tarlton is an incoming freshman at Cal Poly Humboldt University and lives in Eureka. She was the editor-in-chief of her high school’s journalism program.

As a young Californian, I’ve already witnessed firsthand the rapid and dreadful environmental changes unfolding around us.

From wildfires and floods to rising sea levels and scorching temperatures, it’s clear the home we love is in danger. I’m deeply concerned about the future of our planet, and I plan to cast my first vote in support of candidates and policies that support a livable earth. 

This election year it is more crucial than ever for voters to actively support candidates committed to using their leadership positions to protect our imperiled planet. This is a central reason that I am a registered voter: I believe in doing the most in my power as a citizen to make change happen. 

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, only 18% of people ages 18-34 are registered and likely voters. As a part of this younger generation, I hope to encourage the people around me to use this opportunity for their voices to be heard and acknowledge that their votes are essential to our future. 

My generation must unite and use our collective voices to spotlight the fundamental need for decisive action to prevent further irreversible harm to our planet from human-caused climate change. 

I fear for my future and the future of our children and grandchildren. What will this world look like for them? What will it look like during my own life? If my vote can make a difference in that outcome, then I will use it to make the most of my power, as every young voter should.

Supporting a candidate running for office, whether for the country, your state or your local area, means supporting what they support, including solutions they propose to safeguard our home against the perils of climate change. 

Protecting ecosystems that serve as carbon sinks — while simultaneously curbing emissions of additional carbon into our atmosphere to sustain a livable future environment — is a priority concern of mine. Restoring and preserving natural ecosystems with a focus on wetlands is paramount, and deserves robust support from policymakers and candidates alike.

“Wetland protections are now more important than ever at the state level after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Sackett v. EPA, which effectively shrunk the jurisdiction of federal wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act at least in half,” said Jennifer Marlow, an assistant professor of environmental law at Cal Poly Humboldt. 

Without federal protections, it is our responsibility as voters to elect public officials in California who understand the importance of wetlands as carbon sinks, as well as their role in protecting our communities from flooding events. 

This must be done in both local and state elections where our voices matter the most. 

Lowering carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere is another important factor in reducing climate impacts to the state. Young voters should support candidates running for office who prioritize funding for research and development of non-fossil fuel and carbon neutral renewable energy infrastructure that can supply all of California’s energy needs. 

Voters should also support candidates that have a clear goal of phasing out fossil fuel extraction and usage within the decade. Our state needs to achieve carbon neutrality — and currently, carbon is released at dangerously high rates. 

“California sued Big Oil recently, but our state must also stop approving new oil and gas permits,” Marlow told me. “Candidates should support renewed rule-making for regulations that require setbacks — no oil drilling within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, hospitals and other sensitive sites should be permitted.”

However we address climate change because the rest of the world is watching. Young voters, especially in California, must serve as role models by voting on how we handle climate policies. If enough young voters make their voices heard, we will collectively set nationwide trends and California will take a leadership role in how we handle the climate crisis.  

This starts with supporting candidates who will address climate change without hesitation. Bold and decisive action from our political leaders will ensure California becomes a safe and sustainable home for me and other generations whose future relies on it.

It starts with the vote of young Californians like me.

Read the full story here.
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Western North Carolina was hailed as a ‘climate haven.’ Hurricane Helene shows it’s not so simple.

Western North Carolina, and specifically the Asheville area, had been considered a possible refuge from the impacts of climate change, but it is now suffering some of the worst devastation from Hurricane Helene. The area was dubbed a potential “climate haven” due to its elevation and temperate climates as recently as 2022. The storm and its...

Western North Carolina, and specifically the Asheville area, had been considered a possible refuge from the impacts of climate change, but it is now suffering some of the worst devastation from Hurricane Helene. The area was dubbed a potential “climate haven” due to its elevation and temperate climates as recently as 2022.  The storm and its aftermath illustrate the damage that can be wrought by just one of the unusually extreme weather events that are becoming more common as a result of climate change, however — and make clear that elevation will sometimes not be enough to protect the region against such events. “Some of these places, especially at higher elevation, it’s not too hot, you’re far from the coast … places like Asheville have a lot of appeal” as climate refuges, said Margaret Walls, an environmental economist and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future. However, she said, in the mountains “the terrain makes it such that flooding is a problem,” and particularly in poverty-stricken areas, “there are a limited number of places people can live so they tend to live in flood prone places.” “From a rainfall perspective, the Appalachian Mountains are woefully unprepared — at the community level, the household level, our infrastructure is not prepared,” said Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Severe flooding and mudslides brought on by Helene have left dozens of people in the region dead and displaced or stranded many others amid the wreckage of buildings and roads. Hundreds of thousands of households in North Carolina remain without power days after the storm hit, according to PowerOutage.us. Search and rescue operations are still ongoing. Much of the rain fell on mountain communities with only one or two roads leading in or out, meaning that once they were washed out, it became all but impossible to deliver supplies and relief through overland routes. Zegre noted the region has been hit with the aftereffects of heavy Gulf or Atlantic hurricanes before, notably in the early 1990s. Since then, however, the effects of climate change have likely made hurricanes more intense and denser with moisture, which made the aftermath of Helene “unprecedented” in the region, he said.  Much of what has made the storm's impact so extreme, he added, comes down to a combination of the mountainous terrain and simple gravity. “When you drop that amount of rain in mountain topography, it’s hard to avoid being impacted by the flood.” In the mountains, “the water doesn't linger like on a flat flood plain … it kind of is concentrated, and it moves at high velocity,” said Philip Berke, director of the Center for Resilient Communities and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Additionally, Berke said, the region had already seen heavy rain in the days before the Helene remnants moved north, and due to the elevation, “cold air goes up, the dew points get reached, and the hurricane was just pumping in all that warm, moist air on top of a highly saturated situation.” An area doesn't have to be regularly impacted by extreme weather events to be devastated by one, experts said. Even if a storm like Helene is a far rarer occurrence for western North Carolina than wildfires are for the western U.S. or tropical storms are for Florida, a single catastrophic event can be enough. “When you look at property damages or damages per capita and you look at the top counties in the U.S., in many counties one single event will shoot them up to the top of the list,” Walls said. “There’s a county in New Jersey that’s very high on the list purely because 99 percent of those damages came from Hurricane Sandy.” “The lesson here is trends matter and there are certain locations that get hit repeatedly, but no place is really immune — every place needs to prepare,” she added. And when an area has limited resources — and a limited tax base — to begin with, a disaster at this level makes the rebuilding process even more difficult and complex. “It’s easier for the city of Atlanta than it is for one of these small counties in North Carolina,” she said. Berke noted that the devastation of the storm comes at a time when much of the region was experiencing the beginning of a resurgence that made it an attractive target for development. “They want to build. They want to expand. They want their tax bases,” he said.  Places like the town of Chimney Rock, which floodwaters all but swept away, were seeing new economic growth in areas like tourism, rafting and vacation rentals that weren’t part of their economies a decade ago. “At the same time, the climate and the heat has been building up and accelerating, so you have these converging forces,” he said. Ultimately, events like Helene and its aftermath demonstrate the need for both mitigation of climate change and a more expansive vision of adapting to its impacts, Zegre said. “We can’t stop the rain, we can’t stop the rivers, so we really need to think about how to adapt,” he said, particularly if the influx of tourism and permanent residents continues. “We need to expect that these storms are going to be a worst-case scenario.”

Climate
Agriculture
Mountains

How the ‘Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics’ is lighting a fire under big oil

Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad once worked for Shell. Now, as the country gears up to host the biodiversity Cop16, she is calling for a just transition away from fossil fuelsShe is one of the biggest opponents of fossil fuel on the world stage – but Susana Muhamad’s political career was sparked in the halls of an oil company. It began when she resigned as a sustainability consultant with Shell in 2009 and returned home to Colombia. She was 32 and disillusioned, a far cry from the heights she would later reach as the country’s environment minister, and one of the most high-profile progressive leaders in global environmental politics.Muhamad joined Shell an idealistic 26-year-old. “I really thought that you could make a huge impact within an energy company on the climate issue, especially because all their publicity was saying that they were going to become an energy company, meaning they will not be only a fossil fuel company,” she says, when we meet in the Colombian embassy in London. Continue reading...

She is one of the biggest opponents of fossil fuel on the world stage – but Susana Muhamad’s political career was sparked in the halls of an oil company. It began when she resigned as a sustainability consultant with Shell in 2009 and returned home to Colombia. She was 32 and disillusioned, a far cry from the heights she would later reach as the country’s environment minister, and one of the most high-profile progressive leaders in global environmental politics.Muhamad joined Shell an idealistic 26-year-old. “I really thought that you could make a huge impact within an energy company on the climate issue, especially because all their publicity was saying that they were going to become an energy company, meaning they will not be only a fossil fuel company,” she says, when we meet in the Colombian embassy in London.“I resigned the date that they decided to put their innovation money on fracking.”Muhamad, centre, speaks at a press conference in 2022 on the introduction of a fracking prohibition bill to the country’s parliament. Photograph: undefined/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo SostenibleNow 47, Muhamad, whose surname comes from her Palestinian grandfather, is preparing to oversee biodiversity Cop16, a summit on the future of life on Earth that will bring together leaders from nearly 200 countries in Cali, Colombia, next month. For many, she is a rising star of the environmental movement, joining voices such as the Barbadian prime minister, Mia Mottley, in putting forward an alternative vision of how the world could be, and demanding the developed world finance a just transition.“Susana is the Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics,” says activist Oscar Soria. “Like Kahlo, whose art challenged cultural norms and spoke of resilience, Muhamad paints a vision of ecological justice that goes beyond traditional environmentalism … an environmental agenda that is … reshaping the narrative around climate justice and biodiversity restitution.”Muhamad during a visit to the Colombian embassy in London. Photograph: undefined/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo SostenibleColombia’s embassy is sandwiched between Harrods and its Ecuadorian counterpart, and the room we meet in has a front row seat to the UK capital’s wealthiest extremes. Outside, a Rolls-Royce SUV and a blacked-out BMW wait with their drivers next to the high-end department store. Convertible supercars pass shoppers swinging luxury purchases from their hands. Muhamad, representing Colombia’s first ever leftist government, is entertaining NGOs, journalists and senior British politicians – and pushing a vision of “just transition” that would resolve economic imbalances alongside the environmental.The minister has had to be careful to avoid rhetoric on global inequality that might allow her political opponents to tie her administration to more radical leftwing politicians from her region, but she is not naive to the potential pitfalls on the path to net zero. “We have to be clear that this energy transition cannot be at the cost of Indigenous peoples, local communities and biodiversity,” she told the plenary hall at the conclusion of Cop28 in Dubai last December after a deal to transition away from fossil fuels was passed. “In this balance between opportunity and risk lies responsibility. I want to call on everyone to keep being mobilised because intergenerational justice with this text is still at stake,” she said.Colombia became the first significant fossil fuel producer to join an alliance of nations calling for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty at the December meeting. President Gustavo Petro’s administration is pushing to ban fracking as it tries to phase out coal, oil and gas, pledging to make biodiversity the basis of its wealth in the post-fossil fuels era. Last month, she launched a $40bn investment plan aimed at making this vision a reality. Muhamad was one of the ministers leading efforts to include “phase out” in the final Cop28 text in Dubai – an attempt that was ultimately unsuccessful. Colombia and Brazil, under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have been leading efforts to end deforestation in the Amazon.Muhamad with Cop28 president and UAE special envoy for climate change Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber Photograph: Juan F Betancourt Franco/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo SostenibleThe night before the embassy meeting, Muhamad addressed an event for the nature summit at the Natural History Museum. Standing under a blue whale skeleton and with a statue of Charles Darwin at her back, Muhamad underscored the urgency of the task, inviting the world to the “people’s Cop”. “As we decarbonise, we have to protect and recover nature because otherwise the climate will not stabilise,” she told the crowd.Muhamad has been quick to point out that decarbonisation efforts alone will be futile without the conservation of the natural world and the huge carbon sink it provides, which absorbs half of all human emissions each year. “There is a double movement humanity must make. The first one is to decarbonise and have a just energy transition,” she said in August while announcing her vision for the conference. “The other side of the coin is to restore nature and allow nature to take again its power over planet Earth so that we can really stabilise the climate.”The scientific backdrop to October’s conference is bleak. Figures from WWF show that wildlife populations have plunged due to a mixture of habitat loss, pollution, overconsumption, the spread of invasive species and global heating. Last year was the hottest ever recorded. The droughts and extreme heat have brought catastrophic consequences for Earth’s forests, grasslands and oceans: ecosystems that underpin human health, food security and civilisation. Despite the warnings, the UN’s biodiversity convention has long been overshadowed by its climate counterpart, and governments have never met a single target they have set for themselves on biodiversity.Cali will be the host city for the biodiversity Cop16 to be held from 21 October to 1 November 2024. Photograph: Courtesy of Convention on Biological DiversityThe summit also has important domestic significance. Since Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla, announced at the climate change Cop28 in Dubai last year that Colombia would host the biodiversity conference, he and Muhamad have put Cop16 at the heart of the domestic agenda, hoping to use it as a chance to bring lasting peace with hold-out rebel groups in forest areas. In July, Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla faction that rejected the country’s 2016 peace agreement, threatened the summit after a series of bombings and shootings that were blamed on the group, but it has since backed down on the threat. Even so, 12,000 soldiers and police offers will be in Cali to guard the conference.“It was a very strange situation, and we are also hoping to use Cop as a way to promote peace within the country,” Muhamad says.At home, her ministerial brief ranges from eliminating deforestation across the country, which has fallen to its lowest level in 23 years, to managing Pablo Escobar’s hippos, which have thrived east of Medellín since the drug lord’s death in 1993. Muhamad bursts into laughter when I ask about the hippos and what it is like managing them, before settling into a ministerial answer. She says the African mammals are being phased out with a mixture of euthanasia, sterilisation and hippo transportation: “For us, it’s very straightforward, they are an invasive species that have been declared [as such] officially, not even by this government, by the last government. I agree with that assessment. We have already adopted in April this year the plan to manage the hippo problem,” she says.Muhamad during a 2023 press conference to announce that some of the 166 hippopotamuses belonging to former cocaine baron Pablo Escobar will be euthanized. Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty ImagesMuhamad has lived in an eco-village in South Africa with miners, worked in human rights in Denmark and lived with campesinos in Colombia when she was a student before her first “formal” job with Shell. Now, she is preparing to be a Cop president for the first time, a role that requires her to focus on consensus and make good on her decision to leave Shell. When contact by the Guardian, the company said it is to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050 and they are investing $5.6 billion in low-carbon solutions last year, which was 23% of our capital spending.Ultimately, she says of the vision she bought into at Shell: “I think it was greenwashing … There were people trying to push change but the regime of fossil fuels was too strong,” she says. “All of that influenced me to think that there was a more systematic change that needed to be made. And for me, the conclusion of that was politics.”

Climate
Energy
Business

Is climate anxiety a pressing problem, or a luxury?

Concerns about our future are valid — but they aren't always shared by those who are fighting to survive in the present.

This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Moral Hazards, a weeklong exploration of the complex — sometimes contradictory — factors that drive our ethical decision-making in the age of global warming. In May 2014, Kate Schapira carted a little table with a hand-painted sign out to a park near her home in Providence, Rhode Island, and started listening to strangers’ problems. The sign read “Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth,” referencing an emotion that was relatively unknown, or at least seldom named, at the time. As an English professor, she had no psychological training, no climate science background. She could not offer expertise, simply an ear and a venue for people to unload worries.  And people came, tentatively but earnestly, as she brought the table out roughly 30 times over the rest of the summer. Those who approached unloaded a variety of concerns — some directly related to climate change, all compounded by it. A man divulged his guilt over not being able to pay for air conditioning to keep his disabled son comfortable at home. A young woman complained that her roommate used so many plastic bottles “she had her own gyre in the ocean,” referring to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A former student described his fear of a future in which “everything’s melted and burnt.”  Schapira never intended the booth to be a permanent fixture in her life; she did it the first time, she explains now, as a way to lift herself out of a fog — to hear and be heard. Because everything she read about climate change had made her feel depressed and desperate. And worse, when she attempted to talk to friends and colleagues and loved ones about it, they mostly suggested she was overreacting. It was also a way to right a wrong, she says now, one for which she felt substantial guilt. Around 2013, a friend with whom Schapira exchanged letters had started to express more and more distress over the cascading evidence of climate change, and her helplessness in the face of it. Schapira felt herself growing increasingly depressed and anxious by her friend’s concerns, and wrote back to assert what we might call, in contemporary therapy parlance, a boundary: “I can’t hear about this anymore.” “I did someone wrong by saying, ‘I don’t have a place for this for you — there’s no place for this feeling,’” she said. “And then I was like, ‘No, there has to be a place for this feeling.’” (Schapira apologized to her friend for “rejecting an opportunity to listen,” and they continued to talk.) Schapira ended up spending the next 10 years — minus a couple during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic — hauling her booth around New England and the mid-Atlantic. Over time, Schapira observed a pattern to the worries she took in — namely, that the ways in which our world is changing puts a strain on us and our relationships. It dictates how we feel, and then those feelings dictate how we behave. “Whatever the name for that is, I see it in everybody who talks to me,” she said. By 2019, Schapira noticed that those who approached her counseling booth no longer discussed climate change as a future phenomenon, a problem for grandchildren. It was real, it was present, and they were worried about it now. Many of them were afraid of what they would lose, she said. Something had shifted, and climate anxiety had become a mainstream experience. Kate Schapira sits at her climate anxiety counseling booth in 2017. Courtesty of Kate Schapira / Lara Henderson In the information age, awareness spreads very, very fast. In the past 15 or so years, climate change has gone from a niche issue within environmental circles to a widespread public concern. The rise in awareness could be due to any number of factors: decades of grassroots organizing that has pushed major politicians to address carbon emissions; savvier communications from environmental groups and scientists; or the exponential platform growth that youth climate activists like Greta Thunberg found with social media. But perhaps the simplest and most obvious reason is that extreme weather patterns due to climate change have become impossible to ignore. Or rather, they’ve become impossible to ignore for the rich. Hurricane Sandy brought death to the Hamptons. Much of Miami’s priciest oceanfront property will be partially submerged by the middle of the century. The Woolsey Fire burned down Miley Cyrus’ Malibu mansion. Drake’s Toronto home flooded spectacularly in a supercell storm this summer. (The ocher floodwaters, he observed, looked like an espresso martini.) It’s easy to disparage the uber-wealthy for the insulation they enjoy from many of life’s challenges. But the more uncomfortable reality is that until quite recently, the same could be said for the average American relative to other people around the world, especially in the Global South. That, too, is no longer the case. Our planet is transforming in a way that will make life much harder for most people. It already has brought suffering to millions and millions of people. And in the United States, most of us are learning about the scale and significance of this crisis at a point when there is not a whole lot of time to shift course. That realization carries both a mental toll and an emotional reckoning. The mainstreaming of therapy culture, the explosion of the self-care industrial complex, and the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic have all laid the groundwork for a very self-focused, individualistic framework for understanding our place on an altered planet. Is it ethical to focus on ourselves and our feelings, when the real harms of climate change are very much upon people with no time to worry about it? In 2019, Rebecca Weston, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance, was invited to a summit to address what climate change would bring to Montana, where she lived at the time. The conference brought together experts with different skill sets, and as a mental health professional, it was the first time she had thought about the emotional toll that climate change would have on communities, mostly around displacement from one’s home. There had been massive flooding in the state that year, followed by wildfires that turned the sky red and poured ash onto neighborhoods.  A few years later, right around the start of the pandemic, Weston began seeing references to “climate anxiety” everywhere. You couldn’t open a newsfeed without seeing a reference to an epidemic of mental health crises about climate change. Read Next It’s not just you: Everyone is Googling ‘climate anxiety’ Kate Yoder “It was in the very typical way that the media frames a particular kind of phenomenon as very white, very upper-middle class, very consumerist-oriented and individualist-oriented,” said Weston, highlighting one New York Times article in particular that she found “deeply offensive.” “And so when we think about climate anxiety, that’s the stereotype that emerges, and it’s a real problem. Because not only do I think that’s real and valid for the person [who experiences it], and she needs empathy, but it also really misidentifies a whole host of experiences that people feel.” That host of experiences encompasses both existential fear and acute trauma. Can we say that a mother in suburban Illinois stuck in a cycle of consuming news about climate catastrophe is having the same emotional response to climate change as a Yup’ik resident of the Alaskan village of Newtok, which is slowly relocating as chunks of its land are sucked into the Bering Sea? Probably not — the difference is an anticipatory fear of what could be lost versus mourning what already has been lost. That distinction, of course, is defined by privilege. The backlash to climate anxiety didn’t take long to emerge. In early 2019, the writer Mary Annaïse Heglar published a famous essay that chided white climate activists who deemed climate change “the first existential threat,” failing to recognize that communities of color have always had to reckon with threats to their safety and survival in a racist society. Jade Sasser, a professor of gender studies and sexuality at the University of California, Riverside, has spent the past five years interviewing predominantly young climate activists of color about their perceptions of the future, specifically with regard to having children. She found that most did not identify with the concept of climate anxiety. It was more: “Climate change makes me feel overwhelmed when I consider it in the context of everything else I’m already grappling with.” “A lot of the dominant narrative around climate anxiety assumes that people who experience it don’t have other serious pressing anxieties,” she said. “That’s what, I think, leads to it being perceived as a privileged narrative that some people really want to reject.” The sun rises behind a ridge of trees in 2019 near Missoula, Montana. The state has faced destructive flooding and wildfires in recent years. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images In April 2020, Sarah Jaquette Ray — a professor at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt — published A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, an amalgamation of research and actionable advice largely directed toward young people overwhelmed by their fear of a warming future. But over the course of writing and then promoting her book, Ray encountered pushback, largely from young people of color.  One Chicana student referenced offhand, in a class presentation, “the white fragility of worrying about the future,” an observation that hit Ray like a “bolt of lightning.” At a talk Ray gave in South Africa to University of Cape Town students about her book, her discussion of the mental health impacts of confronting climate change was met with dismissal, even indignation: This is just not an issue for my community. We are dealing with drought, starvation, disease, much bigger things than what you are talking about. “And I remember feeling embarrassed — that I was talking about something like climate anxiety when they were dealing with [issues of] survival,” she said. In 2021, Ray wrote an essay of her own exploring the “overwhelmingly white phenomenon of climate anxiety” for the magazine Scientific American. AA number of climate psychologists and activists have expressed that the rise of climate anxiety is a normal, even logical reaction to a global existential threat. It’s entirely reasonable to feel worried or sad or enraged about the degradation of ecosystems that have supported human life for eons, especially when humans’ economic progress and development is directly responsible for that degradation.  Which leads to the question: How should we deal with feeling anxious and depressed about climate change? Worrying about the effects of too much carbon in the atmosphere is not an illness to be cured by medical treatment or antidepressants, but it does influence how we behave, which is a key element of climate action.  The field of psychology tells us that human brains try to protect themselves from emotions that hurt us, leading to disengagement and retreat. Psychoanalysis goes a step further, arguing that much of our behavior is dictated by unconscious emotions buried deep within — and to change that behavior, we need to unearth those feelings and deal with them. In 1972, the psychoanalyst Howard Searles wrote that our unconscious psychological defense against anxieties around ecosystem deterioration contributed to a sort of paralysis of action, which was culturally perceived as apathy.  “If we don’t go deeply into those feelings, we become really scared of them, and we then make it much, much harder to stay engaged with the problem,” said Weston, with the Climate Psychology Alliance. She also said that unexamined emotions can lead to burnout: “If [you move] too fast from those feelings to action, it’s not actually processed feelings — it’s push them away, push them away — and invariably that model burns out.” The premise of the Climate Café, an international initiative to engage people to share their emotions about climate change, originated in the United Kingdom in 2015 and started gaining traction virtually during the pandemic. It’s a gathering where people can simply talk “without feeling pressure to find solutions or take action.”  Weston, as a clinician, has run several of the events, and she describes them taking a “pretty predictable arc”: tentative quiet, followed by a brave participant’s admission of guilt for the future their children would inherit. Then someone else chimes in to express helplessness, or overwhelm, or fear. And then another person gets so uncomfortable with naming those feelings that they interrupt to suggest a petition to sign, and someone else recommends an organization to get involved with. “And immediately,” Weston said, “those feelings are lost,” meaning they’ve been pushed back down and left unprocessed. A new book edited by the psychotherapist Steffi Bednarek, called Climate, Psychology, and Change, includes a chapter that addresses the question of whether Climate Cafés are “a function of privilege.” The answer the authors arrive at is, essentially, that ignoring or pushing aside feelings of distress about climate change risks “the creation of a fortress mindset and prevents those in the Global North from taking action that is needed.” In other words, people shut down to protect themselves. A group of young climate protesters, part of the Fridays for Future movement, gathers in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., in May 2019. Eric Baradat / AFP via Getty Images Sasser, in her research with young climate activists of color, encountered a lot of rejection of the idea that we need to process our feelings about the climate crisis. “The rationale was, we don’t have time to sit around feeling sad and worried about climate change because we have to do the work,” she said. “For so many members of marginalized communities, paralysis is not an option. If you’re paralyzed to the point of not taking action to fight for the conditions that you require for survival, then you won’t survive, right?” That’s compounded, she added, by the fact that marginalized communities face many barriers to mental health care. Then there is the question of whether feelings drive action at all. When climate anxiety became a mainstream concept around 2019, the neuroscientist Kris de Meyer remembered “having debates with people from the therapeutic side, who said that everyone had to go through that emotional quagmire to come out in a place where they could act.” But he argues that it’s the other way around: that emotions are much more predictably the consequence of an action than the driver of one.  His research shows that the complexity of individual response to emotions means that you cannot reliably expect someone to take up arms against fossil fuel companies when they feel fear or rage or despair about climate change. What you can expect is that once that person exercises some sort of action, they’ll lose that feeling of powerlessness. Another critique of the mental health profession, articulated in Bednarek’s book, is that it has been too shaped by the “capitalist values of individualism, materialism, anthropocentrism, and progress,” with little focus on our collective well-being. Read Next The UN report is scaring people. But what if fear isn’t enough? Kate Yoder To that end, after a decade of running the climate anxiety booth, Schapira observed that what people expressed to her wasn’t necessarily climate anxiety, but a sense of unease and powerlessness that undergirded all their troubles. That they were so small in the face of massive political, societal, and ecological dysfunction, and had no sense of what they could do to make any of it better. “Mental health and mental illness themselves are community questions,” she said. “How does a community take care of someone who is in profound distress, but how do communities and societies also create distress? And then, what is their responsibility in addressing and alleviating that distress, even if that distress appears to be internal?” People told her they began to feel better, she said, when they got involved with something — a group, a campaign, a movement — and found their place as part of something bigger. In 2018, during Nikayla Jefferson’s last year of undergrad at the University of California, San Diego, she became deeply involved with the youth climate group Sunrise Movement as an organizer. She participated in a hunger strike at the White House. She helped lead the 266-mile protest march from Paradise, California, to Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in San Francisco to demand stronger federal climate legislation. She published op-eds in national outlets demanding action on a Green New Deal and mobilizing voters for candidates who she felt really understood the gravity of the climate crisis. Jefferson felt extremely anxious about climate change, but she also felt that that was the “fuel of her climate work” — a special pill she could take to push herself to the extremes of productivity. She had internalized popular messaging of that era of climate activism, specifically that there were 12 years left to stop catastrophic climate change, according to an IPCC projection of a need to curb emissions drastically by the year 2030. “And if we didn’t do this thing, then the world was going to end, and we would fall over some time horizon cliff, and [the Earth] would be completely inhabitable in my lifetime.” By the end of 2020, she was in the hospital with a debilitating panic attack, and something had to change. She started a meditation practice, got involved in the Buddhist community, and ended her involvement with the Sunrise Movement. I asked Jefferson about how fellow activists in her generation had related to the idea of climate anxiety, as it was clearly pervasive among its members. There was resistance to using the term, she said, for fear that it would alienate marginalized communities that were important to the movement’s success. “But I don’t think I agree,” she said. “I think we are all human beings, and we are all experiencing this pretty catastrophic crisis together. And yes, we are all going to be anxious about the future. And if we’re not feeling anxiety about the future, either we have made great strides in our journey of climate acceptance, or we’re in denial.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is climate anxiety a pressing problem, or a luxury? on Oct 3, 2024.

Climate
Activism
Crisis

Brazilian State to Host COP30 Climate Summit Defends Gold Mining Rules

By Ricardo BritoBRASILIA (Reuters) - The Brazilian state of Pará, which will host the COP30 global climate talks next year in the Amazon, is...

BRASILIA (Reuters) - The Brazilian state of Pará, which will host the COP30 global climate talks next year in the Amazon, is defending local regulations that encourage illegal gold mining, according to documents in the case before the Supreme Court seen by Reuters.Brazil's Green Party has challenged the regulations allowing municipal authorities to license gold prospects of up to 500 hectares. The Green Party argues the rules encourage wildcat mining in the state where most illegal gold is produced.The federal government through the environmental protection agency Ibama, its solicitor general and the country's top public prosecutor are backing the lawsuit calling for the abolition of Pará's mining rules.A Federal Police forensic report added to the case said wildcat miners use chemicals that are poisoning rivers that are vital for Indigenous communities. For instance, mercury is used to separate gold from ore and cyanide is used in gold leeching.The state government said the regulations have been in force for a decade and predate the administration of Governor Helder Barbalho, which told Reuters in May it was studying a revision of the rules.The Pará government currently opposes the lawsuit in the Supreme Court. A request for comment from Reuters went unanswered.Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva asked to host COP30 in Pará's state capital Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon River, to showcase his efforts to stop deforestation of the rainforest, which acts as one of the world's largest carbon sinks to slow global warming. He has also pledged to end illegal gold mining, much of which takes place on protected Indigenous lands.The police report said water samples gathered by inspectors showed mercury contamination on the Tapajos River was "above tolerable limits" in areas inhabited by Munduruku Indigenous people and riverine communities.(Reporting by Ricardo Brito, writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by David Gregorio)Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters.

Climate
Chemicals
Government

Hurricanes Kill People for Years after the Initial Disaster

The average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths, new research finds

October 2, 20244 min readHurricanes Kill People for Years after the Initial DisasterThe average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths, new research findsBy Andrea ThompsonThe Rocky Broad River flows into Lake Lure and overflows the town with debris from Chimney Rock, N.C., after heavy rains from Hurricane Helene on September 28, 2024. Approximately six feet of debris piled on the bridge from Lake Lure to Chimney Rock, blocking access. Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty ImagesMore than 160 people have lost their lives to the ferocious winds and catastrophic flooding wrought by Hurricane Helene. But the true death toll will take years—likely more than a decade—to unfold.A new study published on Wednesday in Nature found that the average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths (those beyond what would typically be expected), compared with the average of 24 direct deaths reported in official statistics. The study’s authors estimated that, between 1950 and 2015, tropical storms and hurricanes caused between 3.6 million and 5.2 million excess deaths—more than those caused by traffic deaths or infectious diseases. And such storm-related deaths involve people from some groups more than others, marking an “important and understudied contributor to health in the United States, particularly for young or Black populations,” the authors wrote.“These are individuals who are dying years before they would have otherwise,” says study co-author Rachel Young, an environmental economist at the University of California, Berkeley.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.This study is part of a burgeoning trend: assessing the full health consequences of the growing number of disasters fueled by climate change. Epidemiologists and other experts have increasingly been emphasizing that heat wave deaths are significantly underestimated, and recent research has found that wildfire smoke kills thousands of people in California—many more than the actual flames. “We thought that there was something similar with hurricanes,” Young says.So she and Stanford University economist Solomon Hsiang looked at hurricanes that hit the U.S. from 1930 to 2015, as well as mortality data and used statistical methods to compare a state’s deaths before a storm with those that occurred over the course of 20 years after from 1950 to 2015. “We thought we’d see maybe six months or a year of a delayed effect,” Young says, but data showed excess deaths occurring for 15 years after a storm. “We were so stunned,” she says, that the researchers spent years testing and retesting to make sure the effect was real.Zane Wolf; Source: “Mortality Caused by Tropical Cyclones in the United States,” by Rachel Young and Solomon Hsiang, in Nature. Published online October 2, 2024Thinking beyond the data, the duration of the effect makes sense because “these are huge events,” Young says. “Look at what’s going on with Helene.” Families may have to spend months in damaged or mold-riddled homes before repairs are made. People may have to use their savings for repairs, leaving less money for their health care for years. People may be forced to move and live farther away from crucial social support networks. And these events exert a considerable mental health burden. “It’s devastating to the individuals, and it's devastating to the local and state governments, too,” Young says, noting that other research shows these governments experience budget declines for many years after a hurricane. For those affected, she adds, “you’re in a version of the world where you have less money, you have less resources, you have more pollution exposure”—a bad combination when it comes to staying healthy.When breaking out the data by age groups, the study found that people aged 65 and older had the largest number of storm-related excess deaths. But when the higher general probability of death in this age range was factored in, this group’s storm death risk was smaller than that of others. The biggest risk was found to be for infants under the age of one, with almost all of these deaths occurring within less than two years after a storm. Young says that this effect could be influenced by people’s inability to afford prenatal care in a storm’s wake, as well as stress or other factors.The risk of death was also higher among Black people than it was among white people, even though the white population that was exposed to storms was much larger than the exposed Black population.Zane Wolf; Source:“Mortality Caused by Tropical Cyclones in the United States,” by Rachel Young and Solomon Hsiang, in Nature. Published online October 2, 2024 (data and reference figure)The analysis further showed that “the mortality response isn’t going down over time,” Young says, meaning storms today have the same long-tail mortality impact as they did decades ago. Young and Hsiang don’t know exactly why this is the case and say it will take more research to dig into the reasons.That mortality finding particularly struck Eugenio Paglino, a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki Institute of Demography and Population Health, who was not involved with the new study. He says that on first reading the paper’s abstract, he thought the numbers of excess deaths the authors found “seemed pretty large,” but he felt they did a thorough job of checking the robustness of the results. He would like to see additional research examine what might actually be causing these excess deaths and further bolster the findings.Young and Hsiang also want to see this kind of follow-up research—and hope to do some themselves. It’s a necessary step toward the ultimate goal of informing policymakers of what is needed to safeguard communities in the face of the growing climate disaster. As Helene shows, “local and state governments and first responders are doing heroic work to help people after disasters,” Young says. “We don’t want their efforts to be in vain.”

Climate
Government
Health

Suggested Viewing

Can Hydroponic Farming Help Reduce the Effects of Climate Change?

"Can Hydroponic Farming Help Reduce the Effects of Climate Change?" is an entertaining and educational short film. Rachel and her remarkable robot companion, Rex, witness the dire consequences of climate change through news reports of devastating natural disasters. When Rex encounters an alien emissary, he embarks on a journey to a ruined world where pollution and climate change led to the collapse of an entire civilization. Returning to Earth the three main causes of global warming are reveal—electricity production, transportation, and wasteful agriculture—and stress the importance of transitioning to clean energy sources, electric transport, and hydroponic farming. Rex takes on the mission of educating robots and humans alike about combating climate change. The film ends with a global commitment to address the crisis and a poignant celebration of Rex's role in this vital endeavor, reminding us of the urgency to protect our planet from climate catastrophe.

Conservation
Education
Climate

Reboot

Humans have exploited Earth to the point where it is no longer possible to live on it. Their only option is to relocate to Mars. When the last group of people has boarded the spaceship for the red planet, the Earth can finally breathe easy. Like an expressionist painting, Reboot depicts a world in which the absence of our species is the only chance nature has to recover its lushness and flourish once more.

Animation
Crisis
Cosmos

LEAVES

An academic woman in Texas becomes concerned when a massive red oak in her backyard seems to be ailing, though she isn’t sure why it bothers her so much. At the same time, in her small cottage, her attention to her work is distracted by news reports she sees and hears. They tell in graphic terms of the out-of-control forest fires up and down the West Coast. Her attention is further pulled in the direction of other stories about the worsening conditions of the world’s rainforests which she discovers are disappearing at the astounding rate of 200,000 acres a day. Suddenly such stories are all she seems to hear and see on the radio or television or on her computer. But when she hears/sees a science report about how trees actually communicate with each other, she begins to realize there may be a connection between her tree and what she is learning from the news. She begins to recall a strong connection she herself has with that tree and allows that connection to regrow…..

Pollution
Forests
Inspirational

Heimat - Requiem For The World As We Know It

Four theater-makers from Belgium travel to the melting glaciers on Greenland. Their goal: to play a new composed requiem and say goodbye to the world as we know it.

Music
Culture
Climate

Rise and Fall

A film to provide an awareness of climate change and the individual measures we can take to combat it. The production process of Rise and Fall began as your stereotypical documentary meant to showcase various aspects of the Earth and Ocean Sciences Department at UNCW. Still, as the interview process was underway, it was quickly decided to move in another direction. It is an essay film about the science of climate change, what we can do in our day-to-day lives to combat it, and its impacts. Without using talking heads, the images of the natural world provide a sensual look at what will be affected by climate change.

Climate
Nature
Documentary

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