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Climate Activists Are Turning Their Attention to Hollywood

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Thursday, March 16, 2023

On a warm, windy fall night in Los Angeles, I stood in a conference room at the Warner Bros. Discovery television-production offices, straightened my spine, and stared down my showrunner, preparing to defend my idea for a minor character in our near-future science-fiction series.“This character needs a backstory, and switching jobs because she wants to work in renewable energy and not for an oil company fits perfectly,” I told the unsmiling head honcho.His face twisted, as if his assistant had delivered the wrong lunch. “Too complicated. That just feels like a lot of information to cram into a backstory. What if her story is that she wants this job because it’s near where her brother was killed in a terrorist attack? We’d just need to invent a terrorist attack.”As I tried to come up with a response, I looked at the writers, lawyers, agents, and camera operators surrounding us. I was taking part in a workshop organized by the Climate Ambassadors Network (CAN), a group of young climate activists working in Hollywood. Along with three other workshop participants, I had received a yellow index card with a mission: to convince this pretend showrunner—a documentary filmmaker in real life—that a character in the series needed a climate-related backstory.Ali Weinstein, a 28-year-old wearing a flowered jumpsuit and a dimpled grin, leaned in to hear my answer. She was all too familiar with this situation: When working as a showrunner’s assistant, she had often suggested climate story lines to her bosses, only to be rebuffed. Now, Weinstein is using that experience to help others make a stronger case for climate stories. The goal of CAN is to “infiltrate every part of the industry with climate knowledge,” Weinstein, who is now a television writer, told the group. “Hollywood is a huge cultural influence, and so if we are starting change within Hollywood, we can change a lot of other industries as well.”While Weinstein’s “infiltration” is hardly sinister, her mission is still a provocative one. The world urgently needs to slow the destructive march of climate change, but using entertainment to send social messages can be a fraught endeavor (as well as the source of a lot of cringe television). And the industry has little experience with climate stories: A collaboration between USC’s Media Impact Project and a nonprofit story consultancy called Good Energy found that 2.8 percent of the 37,453 film and television scripts that aired in the United States and were written between 2016 and 2020 used any climate change key words. Ten percent of stories that depicted “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes and wildfires tied them to any form of climate change.Weinstein and her allies argue that it’s time for the industry to tell more—and more varied—climate stories, not only to nudge societal attitudes but to create better, more believable entertainment. Television, with its ability to tell stories on a human scale, might have an especially important role to play: Recent research by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that while 65 percent of American adults said they were worried about the climate crisis, only 35 percent reported discussing the topic even occasionally. Could the stories we see on-screen, in the intimacy of our homes, get us talking about the realities of life in an altered climate?Anna Jane Joyner, who founded the Good Energy story agency, says climate stories are infinitely more varied than writers and audiences might assume. When researchers from her agency and USC asked 2,000 people for examples of climate-themed movies or television shows, the most frequent answers were The Day After Tomorrow, which is almost 20 years old, and 2012, which is about the end of the world, not climate change.In an effort to expand Hollywood’s definition of a climate story, Joyner’s group created the Good Energy Playbook, a guide for writers who want to integrate climate change into their scripts. The playbook encourages writers to think beyond apocalypse, and instead approach climate change, in all its awful manifestations, as an opportunity for more inventive scriptwriting. What would a climate story look like as a Hallmark holiday movie? Could a rom-com be set at a ski resort that can no longer depend on snow and has to pivot to another business model? How might a hotter summer impact the Mafia’s waste-disposal work—and would Tony Soprano talk about it in his therapy sessions?In October 2021, the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy aired an episode called “Hotter than Hell” that depicted a heat wave in Seattle. It was a story proverbially ripped from the headlines: The previous summer, a record-shattering heat dome had enveloped the Pacific Northwest, causing ecological turmoil and human misery. Zoanne Clack, a former ER physician who is an executive producer of Grey’s Anatomy and Station Eleven, wanted to feature a disease caused by climate change, but none of the possibilities were acute enough to work within the show. She opted for a failing HVAC system that created dangerously high temperatures in the hospital’s operating rooms.Clack says climate change is now so familiar to viewers that it can serve as a convenient cheat code for scriptwriters. While Grey’s Anatomy strained viewers’ credulity in its fifth season, in 2008, with an episode about a freak ice storm—an unusual occurrence in Seattle, where the show is set—Clack says now she can attribute all kinds of wild, injury-inducing weather to climate change. “You don’t have to explain anything or go into big discussions about it, how weird it is. If you say those two words, people get it.”Dorothy Fortenberry, a writer and producer on The Handmaid’s Tale and the upcoming climate-themed anthology Extrapolations, says writers are only beginning to explore the creative possibilities. “If all the climate stories are the same, and the same type of view, it will be boring and bad,” she says. “My hope is every creative person takes this in the direction that is fruitful for the narrative and we end up with a real panoply of narratives.”Faced with the realities of climate change, some people switch abruptly from complacency to doomerism—perhaps because certainty of any kind feels safer than the muddle of a looming crisis. Joyner says climate-themed stories can help audiences navigate between these extremes, by either offering examples of courage and creativity or providing opportunities to process grief. There’s nothing wrong with apocalypse narratives, she says, but other approaches offer more hope: “Stories help create a world that isn’t the apocalypse, but shows us something more positive or somewhere in between—a vision for something we’re working towards.”Screenwriters have reason to believe that even passing mentions of climate change can transform public attitudes. Americans watch an average of three hours of television every day, meaning that they spend almost a fifth of their waking lives in the worlds it creates. History shows that issues raised on television can lead to real-world change—for better, and for worse.Producers of the show Cheers, which aired from 1982 to 1993, helped to popularize the concept of a “designated driver” by showing the patrons of the show’s eponymous bar calling cabs or getting a ride home after drinking. The term, which Harvard’s Center for Health Communication began promoting in 1988 in an effort to prevent alcohol-related deaths, became so common after appearing in the show’s dialogue that in 1991, it was listed in the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary. Seven years later, a poll showed that a majority of adults who drank had either been a designated driver or been driven home by one—and the uptake of the practice was strongest among the youngest drinkers. Between 1988 and 1992, alcohol-related traffic fatalities dropped by 25 percent, a decrease researchers attributed in part to the messages of shows like Cheers.Will & Grace, which first appeared on NBC in 1998, was the first popular sitcom with two gay lead characters. At the height of the show’s popularity, 17.3 million people tuned in each week to watch two successful men living openly as a couple. In 2006, the final year of the show’s original run, a study analyzed attitudes around homosexuality. “For those viewers with the fewest direct gay contacts, exposure to Will & Grace appears to have the strongest potential influence on reducing sexual prejudice,” the authors wrote, “while for those with many gay friends, there is no significant relationship between levels of prejudice and their exposure to the show.” In 2012, then Vice President Joe Biden cited the show as one reason for Americans’ support of marriage equality—cementing the show’s legacy as a landmark influence.The power of television isn’t always harnessed for health and equity. A recent study that compared tobacco use in cities that had access to TV in the 1940s, when it first appeared, with those that didn’t concluded that television increased the share of smokers in the population by 5 to 15 percent, creating 11 million additional smokers in the U.S. In 2023, the industry-funded Propane Education and Research Council plans to spend $13 million on its anti-electrification campaign, including $600,000 in fees to “influencers” such as cable-TV home-makeover stars who extol the virtues of propane as they remodel houses. Meanwhile, shows ranging from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to The Kardashians glamorize private planes, huge homes, and ways of living that are far from sustainable.When I asked Weinstein about the frequent characterization of climate content as a form of propaganda, she shrugged. Every detail in a TV show is a choice, and in her view, show creators can use those details, and the stories that surround them, to address climate change and its potential solutions—or they can choose not to. Those who choose not to, Weinstein and her allies argue, risk being left behind by their audiences. Most viewers surveyed by the USC and Good Energy researchers believed that they care more about climate change than the characters they see on television and in film. Half of the respondents wanted to see more climate-related stories in scripted entertainment, and another quarter were open to them.Joyner acknowledges that major studios are still wary of being perceived as environmental activists, and that writers, and their bosses, have long avoided touchy political and cultural issues out of fear of alienating audiences: “Historically, there were two things you couldn’t talk about in a writer’s room: abortion and climate.” But resistance from the top might be softening. At COP 26, the international climate meeting held in Glasgow, Scotland, in late 2021, 12 of the U.K. and Ireland’s biggest entertainment CEOs signed a Climate Content Pledge, and representatives of major U.S. studios now meet regularly to discuss how to better represent sustainability on-screen.  This winter, as rain flooded the streets of Los Angeles and hillsides started to liquefy in Northern California, I logged on to a restricted website to watch a few episodes of a new experiment in climate storytelling: the drama series Extrapolations, which begins streaming tomorrow on Apple+. The show begins in the near future, in 2037, and follows a mix of characters into the 2040s and beyond.In the world of the show, the science is familiar: Oceans are so acidified that biodiversity has dropped precipitously, wildfires rage everywhere, and companies race to bank species’ genomes before they go extinct for a future zoo. Yet the dramatic tension in Extrapolations is less about whether the characters will die from climate change than about how they can live through it, and with it: A rabbi in Miami tries to convince the city that his temple is worth saving from rising seas; a mother struggles to help her young son, who suffers from a genetic heat-related health condition, imagine his future in a warming world.Scott Z. Burns, a writer and director of Extrapolations, also produced Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. When the film opened, he was confident that its evidence would persuade people to drastically change their ways. “It was like, well, that’ll solve the problem—certainly the world can’t be the same again after this,” Burns told me over Zoom, with a dry laugh. “But I think what we learned is that the problem is so large and so systemic, that obviously a documentary wasn’t going to change the way people saw life on Earth or their own behavior.”Burns started to think about storytelling that, instead of threatening disaster, simply brought the event horizon closer, transforming climate change from an unimaginable eventuality into an immediate and pervasive problem. “I wanted to tell human stories set against a world that had a very different climate,” he said. He found inspiration in World War II–era novels, movies, and shows, and points out that the war, while obviously a historic tragedy, was also a source of great creative energy for people in the middle of the last century. “Climate is sort of our World War II,” he said. “This is the existential moment that this generation faces—and where are the great works of art that help us come to terms with this? I think we’re beginning to see them.”As he finished pitching the show in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic began to lock down the world. Burns had also written Contagion, a movie that turned out to be an eerily accurate portrayal of a pandemic’s spread. He wanted the scientific underpinnings of Extrapolations to be just as solid. But while past pandemics informed his work on Contagion, the human-caused climate change we’re experiencing today has no precedent. “It’s a very reckless gamble,” he told me. “But as a screenwriter, a reckless gamble is also a suspense movie. And that’s what I tried to do, was look at the science and what it suggests may happen, and then look at human beings and think about how they behave.”Burns found the serialized nature of a television show more compelling than a two-hour movie—it allowed for the narrative to unfold as chapters, with overlapping characters and story lines that extended over decades. It allowed a viewer to follow the slow-moving climate crisis as it intensified.When Apple+ bought Burns’s show, he called up Adam McKay, who at the time was working on Don’t Look Up, a satire about climate-change denial that was released in 2021. McKay’s generous response was instructive, Burns said. “It was like, great—there’s more than one cop show. There’s more than one hospital show. There needs to be more than one show about this.”Some people will see climate change as a social-justice story, he said, while others will see it as a parenting story. “Everybody has a different way in which this constellation of issues is going to encroach on your life,” Burns told me. “My first hope is that we maybe crack open the door a little bit to get executives at streamers and platforms to think, Oh, there’s cool work to be done in this area, and artists to think, What stories can we tell in this space that might make a difference?”Burns has heard the old adage that audiences don’t want to watch something that’s not hopeful, but he disagrees. He likes to replace the word hope with courage: “What sort of courageous act can my characters do?” he asked. “What I’m interested in telling is the story that says, right up until the moment we’re going to die, we get to live. What do we do with that life?”This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

If TV can change Americans’ views on gay marriage, why not the environment?

On a warm, windy fall night in Los Angeles, I stood in a conference room at the Warner Bros. Discovery television-production offices, straightened my spine, and stared down my showrunner, preparing to defend my idea for a minor character in our near-future science-fiction series.

“This character needs a backstory, and switching jobs because she wants to work in renewable energy and not for an oil company fits perfectly,” I told the unsmiling head honcho.

His face twisted, as if his assistant had delivered the wrong lunch. “Too complicated. That just feels like a lot of information to cram into a backstory. What if her story is that she wants this job because it’s near where her brother was killed in a terrorist attack? We’d just need to invent a terrorist attack.”

As I tried to come up with a response, I looked at the writers, lawyers, agents, and camera operators surrounding us. I was taking part in a workshop organized by the Climate Ambassadors Network (CAN), a group of young climate activists working in Hollywood. Along with three other workshop participants, I had received a yellow index card with a mission: to convince this pretend showrunner—a documentary filmmaker in real life—that a character in the series needed a climate-related backstory.

Ali Weinstein, a 28-year-old wearing a flowered jumpsuit and a dimpled grin, leaned in to hear my answer. She was all too familiar with this situation: When working as a showrunner’s assistant, she had often suggested climate story lines to her bosses, only to be rebuffed. Now, Weinstein is using that experience to help others make a stronger case for climate stories. The goal of CAN is to “infiltrate every part of the industry with climate knowledge,” Weinstein, who is now a television writer, told the group. “Hollywood is a huge cultural influence, and so if we are starting change within Hollywood, we can change a lot of other industries as well.”

While Weinstein’s “infiltration” is hardly sinister, her mission is still a provocative one. The world urgently needs to slow the destructive march of climate change, but using entertainment to send social messages can be a fraught endeavor (as well as the source of a lot of cringe television). And the industry has little experience with climate stories: A collaboration between USC’s Media Impact Project and a nonprofit story consultancy called Good Energy found that 2.8 percent of the 37,453 film and television scripts that aired in the United States and were written between 2016 and 2020 used any climate change key words. Ten percent of stories that depicted “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes and wildfires tied them to any form of climate change.

Weinstein and her allies argue that it’s time for the industry to tell more—and more varied—climate stories, not only to nudge societal attitudes but to create better, more believable entertainment. Television, with its ability to tell stories on a human scale, might have an especially important role to play: Recent research by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that while 65 percent of American adults said they were worried about the climate crisis, only 35 percent reported discussing the topic even occasionally. Could the stories we see on-screen, in the intimacy of our homes, get us talking about the realities of life in an altered climate?

Anna Jane Joyner, who founded the Good Energy story agency, says climate stories are infinitely more varied than writers and audiences might assume. When researchers from her agency and USC asked 2,000 people for examples of climate-themed movies or television shows, the most frequent answers were The Day After Tomorrow, which is almost 20 years old, and 2012, which is about the end of the world, not climate change.

In an effort to expand Hollywood’s definition of a climate story, Joyner’s group created the Good Energy Playbook, a guide for writers who want to integrate climate change into their scripts. The playbook encourages writers to think beyond apocalypse, and instead approach climate change, in all its awful manifestations, as an opportunity for more inventive scriptwriting. What would a climate story look like as a Hallmark holiday movie? Could a rom-com be set at a ski resort that can no longer depend on snow and has to pivot to another business model? How might a hotter summer impact the Mafia’s waste-disposal work—and would Tony Soprano talk about it in his therapy sessions?

In October 2021, the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy aired an episode called “Hotter than Hell” that depicted a heat wave in Seattle. It was a story proverbially ripped from the headlines: The previous summer, a record-shattering heat dome had enveloped the Pacific Northwest, causing ecological turmoil and human misery. Zoanne Clack, a former ER physician who is an executive producer of Grey’s Anatomy and Station Eleven, wanted to feature a disease caused by climate change, but none of the possibilities were acute enough to work within the show. She opted for a failing HVAC system that created dangerously high temperatures in the hospital’s operating rooms.

Clack says climate change is now so familiar to viewers that it can serve as a convenient cheat code for scriptwriters. While Grey’s Anatomy strained viewers’ credulity in its fifth season, in 2008, with an episode about a freak ice storm—an unusual occurrence in Seattle, where the show is set—Clack says now she can attribute all kinds of wild, injury-inducing weather to climate change. “You don’t have to explain anything or go into big discussions about it, how weird it is. If you say those two words, people get it.”

Dorothy Fortenberry, a writer and producer on The Handmaid’s Tale and the upcoming climate-themed anthology Extrapolations, says writers are only beginning to explore the creative possibilities. “If all the climate stories are the same, and the same type of view, it will be boring and bad,” she says. “My hope is every creative person takes this in the direction that is fruitful for the narrative and we end up with a real panoply of narratives.”

Faced with the realities of climate change, some people switch abruptly from complacency to doomerism—perhaps because certainty of any kind feels safer than the muddle of a looming crisis. Joyner says climate-themed stories can help audiences navigate between these extremes, by either offering examples of courage and creativity or providing opportunities to process grief. There’s nothing wrong with apocalypse narratives, she says, but other approaches offer more hope: “Stories help create a world that isn’t the apocalypse, but shows us something more positive or somewhere in between—a vision for something we’re working towards.”

Screenwriters have reason to believe that even passing mentions of climate change can transform public attitudes. Americans watch an average of three hours of television every day, meaning that they spend almost a fifth of their waking lives in the worlds it creates. History shows that issues raised on television can lead to real-world change—for better, and for worse.

Producers of the show Cheers, which aired from 1982 to 1993, helped to popularize the concept of a “designated driver” by showing the patrons of the show’s eponymous bar calling cabs or getting a ride home after drinking. The term, which Harvard’s Center for Health Communication began promoting in 1988 in an effort to prevent alcohol-related deaths, became so common after appearing in the show’s dialogue that in 1991, it was listed in the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary. Seven years later, a poll showed that a majority of adults who drank had either been a designated driver or been driven home by one—and the uptake of the practice was strongest among the youngest drinkers. Between 1988 and 1992, alcohol-related traffic fatalities dropped by 25 percent, a decrease researchers attributed in part to the messages of shows like Cheers.

Will & Grace, which first appeared on NBC in 1998, was the first popular sitcom with two gay lead characters. At the height of the show’s popularity, 17.3 million people tuned in each week to watch two successful men living openly as a couple. In 2006, the final year of the show’s original run, a study analyzed attitudes around homosexuality. “For those viewers with the fewest direct gay contacts, exposure to Will & Grace appears to have the strongest potential influence on reducing sexual prejudice,” the authors wrote, “while for those with many gay friends, there is no significant relationship between levels of prejudice and their exposure to the show.” In 2012, then Vice President Joe Biden cited the show as one reason for Americans’ support of marriage equality—cementing the show’s legacy as a landmark influence.

The power of television isn’t always harnessed for health and equity. A recent study that compared tobacco use in cities that had access to TV in the 1940s, when it first appeared, with those that didn’t concluded that television increased the share of smokers in the population by 5 to 15 percent, creating 11 million additional smokers in the U.S. In 2023, the industry-funded Propane Education and Research Council plans to spend $13 million on its anti-electrification campaign, including $600,000 in fees to “influencers” such as cable-TV home-makeover stars who extol the virtues of propane as they remodel houses. Meanwhile, shows ranging from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to The Kardashians glamorize private planes, huge homes, and ways of living that are far from sustainable.

When I asked Weinstein about the frequent characterization of climate content as a form of propaganda, she shrugged. Every detail in a TV show is a choice, and in her view, show creators can use those details, and the stories that surround them, to address climate change and its potential solutions—or they can choose not to. Those who choose not to, Weinstein and her allies argue, risk being left behind by their audiences. Most viewers surveyed by the USC and Good Energy researchers believed that they care more about climate change than the characters they see on television and in film. Half of the respondents wanted to see more climate-related stories in scripted entertainment, and another quarter were open to them.

Joyner acknowledges that major studios are still wary of being perceived as environmental activists, and that writers, and their bosses, have long avoided touchy political and cultural issues out of fear of alienating audiences: “Historically, there were two things you couldn’t talk about in a writer’s room: abortion and climate.” But resistance from the top might be softening. At COP 26, the international climate meeting held in Glasgow, Scotland, in late 2021, 12 of the U.K. and Ireland’s biggest entertainment CEOs signed a Climate Content Pledge, and representatives of major U.S. studios now meet regularly to discuss how to better represent sustainability on-screen.  

This winter, as rain flooded the streets of Los Angeles and hillsides started to liquefy in Northern California, I logged on to a restricted website to watch a few episodes of a new experiment in climate storytelling: the drama series Extrapolations, which begins streaming tomorrow on Apple+. The show begins in the near future, in 2037, and follows a mix of characters into the 2040s and beyond.

In the world of the show, the science is familiar: Oceans are so acidified that biodiversity has dropped precipitously, wildfires rage everywhere, and companies race to bank species’ genomes before they go extinct for a future zoo. Yet the dramatic tension in Extrapolations is less about whether the characters will die from climate change than about how they can live through it, and with it: A rabbi in Miami tries to convince the city that his temple is worth saving from rising seas; a mother struggles to help her young son, who suffers from a genetic heat-related health condition, imagine his future in a warming world.

Scott Z. Burns, a writer and director of Extrapolations, also produced Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. When the film opened, he was confident that its evidence would persuade people to drastically change their ways. “It was like, well, that’ll solve the problem—certainly the world can’t be the same again after this,” Burns told me over Zoom, with a dry laugh. “But I think what we learned is that the problem is so large and so systemic, that obviously a documentary wasn’t going to change the way people saw life on Earth or their own behavior.”

Burns started to think about storytelling that, instead of threatening disaster, simply brought the event horizon closer, transforming climate change from an unimaginable eventuality into an immediate and pervasive problem. “I wanted to tell human stories set against a world that had a very different climate,” he said. He found inspiration in World War II–era novels, movies, and shows, and points out that the war, while obviously a historic tragedy, was also a source of great creative energy for people in the middle of the last century. “Climate is sort of our World War II,” he said. “This is the existential moment that this generation faces—and where are the great works of art that help us come to terms with this? I think we’re beginning to see them.”

As he finished pitching the show in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic began to lock down the world. Burns had also written Contagion, a movie that turned out to be an eerily accurate portrayal of a pandemic’s spread. He wanted the scientific underpinnings of Extrapolations to be just as solid. But while past pandemics informed his work on Contagion, the human-caused climate change we’re experiencing today has no precedent. “It’s a very reckless gamble,” he told me. “But as a screenwriter, a reckless gamble is also a suspense movie. And that’s what I tried to do, was look at the science and what it suggests may happen, and then look at human beings and think about how they behave.”

Burns found the serialized nature of a television show more compelling than a two-hour movie—it allowed for the narrative to unfold as chapters, with overlapping characters and story lines that extended over decades. It allowed a viewer to follow the slow-moving climate crisis as it intensified.

When Apple+ bought Burns’s show, he called up Adam McKay, who at the time was working on Don’t Look Up, a satire about climate-change denial that was released in 2021. McKay’s generous response was instructive, Burns said. “It was like, great—there’s more than one cop show. There’s more than one hospital show. There needs to be more than one show about this.”

Some people will see climate change as a social-justice story, he said, while others will see it as a parenting story. “Everybody has a different way in which this constellation of issues is going to encroach on your life,” Burns told me. “My first hope is that we maybe crack open the door a little bit to get executives at streamers and platforms to think, Oh, there’s cool work to be done in this area, and artists to think, What stories can we tell in this space that might make a difference?

Burns has heard the old adage that audiences don’t want to watch something that’s not hopeful, but he disagrees. He likes to replace the word hope with courage: “What sort of courageous act can my characters do?” he asked. “What I’m interested in telling is the story that says, right up until the moment we’re going to die, we get to live. What do we do with that life?”


This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Atlanta City Council Approves Funding for “Cop City”

“I’m begging and pleading that you stand with the people of Atlanta.”  “The wrong direction is Cop City and you can’t whitewash it away.” “We need to spend our money on public funds and not our destruction. Stop Cop City.” After more than thirteen hours of testimony from hundreds of protesters, Atlanta’s City Council on Tuesday […]

“I’m begging and pleading that you stand with the people of Atlanta.”  “The wrong direction is Cop City and you can’t whitewash it away.” “We need to spend our money on public funds and not our destruction. Stop Cop City.” After more than thirteen hours of testimony from hundreds of protesters, Atlanta’s City Council on Tuesday approved public funding to build the controversial Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, or as its opponents have dubbed it, Cop City. The 11-4 vote greenlights at least $31 million of taxpayer money into the construction of what is expected to be the country’s largest law enforcement training facilities, carving out a significant portion of a forest that once belonged to a local indigenous tribe.  The highly anticipated vote followed years of fierce opposition to the $90 million police training complex that will be built on nearly 100 acres of land. The project united activists of all stripes, including environmentalists, proponents of police reform, and indigenous leaders, many of whom warned that the facility would further militarize the police and destroy the city’s unique tree canopy, with predominantly Black neighborhoods bearing the brunt of the environmental damage. “This project is being done without the consent and against the will of the people of Atlanta,” Rukia Rogers, a member of the Weelaunee Coalition, said during the public comment portion before the vote. Rogers was one of the hundreds of protesters who trekked out to City Hall this week, waiting in line for hours for a chance to speak out against Cop City’s development.  So moved by this turnout. #StopCopCity pic.twitter.com/Fe5YAa4mBY — #StopCopCity (@micahinATL) June 5, 2023 In January, protests turned deadly after police killed 26-year-old environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who went by the nickname “Tortuguita.” As my colleague, Eamon Whalen reported, Terán’s death is the first known example of someone killed by law enforcement while engaged in environmental “land defense” activism: The confrontational tactics of “Cop City” opponents —which range from nonviolent tree-sits to destroying a work crew’s truck—aren’t exactly new in the history of radical environmental activism. But this protest is singular because of its target: the same police who will be called on to repress future environmental movements. “What makes this campaign pretty ominous to law enforcement and people like Governor Kemp in Georgia, is [opponents of Cop City are] uniting and connecting all of these threads,” Potter explains. Unlike protesters who sit in trees in endangered forests throughout North America, he says, the Atlanta forest defenders are combining that environmentalist ethos with a critique of the policing apparatus in the US. In addition, the history of the area informs their actions because it “is connected to a prison plantation that has also been part of this land. And it’s connected to a war on indigenous people, that stretches back for hundreds of years. It isn’t just an environmental campaign.” Several people who knew Tortuguita spoke at City Hall on Monday, describing them as a gentle person who was passionate about the environment. Lisa Baker, an ER nurse who first met Terán at a community first aid training event, said they were interested in hosting a workshop to teach demonstrators how to treat gunshot wounds. Terán was killed four days before the workshop’s scheduled date.  “I want to be clear, Tort did not want to teach forest defenders how to survive gunshot wounds because they were out playing with guns,” Baker told to council members. “They’re not the ones who had the firing range in the forest. Tort wanted to teach these skills because police were coming into the forest with their guns already drawn, pointing them at unarmed protesters, laughing about how they couldn’t wait to murder them.” 

What’s in the debt ceiling deal, and why it matters, explained

US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy speaks to members of the media at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on May 30, 2023. Republican and Democratic leaders scrambled on May 29 to secure congressional support for a bill aimed at avoiding a US debt default. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images How the legislation to avert an economic crisis would affect student loans, food aid, the IRS, and more. House Republicans took the debt ceiling hostage — but now Speaker Kevin McCarthy has agreed to set the hostage free for a relatively small ransom payment. The deal struck by negotiators for President Biden and McCarthy on Saturday night is no major overhaul of American public policy. The White House managed to avert sweeping cuts to domestic spending, which will instead effectively be held at something close to the status quo (though a cut when accounting for inflation). And on a set of other policy issues where Republicans made big demands, Democrats granted only some limited concessions. The deal certainly includes some policy changes progressives do not like — they’d prefer domestic spending not be cut at all, and they dislike new work requirements for food stamp beneficiaries ages 50 to 54, among other things. But if you keep in mind that Democrats and Republicans were always going to have to negotiate over spending levels at some point this year (to avert a government shutdown this fall), it’s not clear that Republicans’ use of the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip even got them anything they wouldn’t have won later anyway. Rather than an extremist GOP’s attempt to force Democrats into unthinkable concessions or else trigger an economic crisis, the outcome here looks a whole lot like an ordinary congressional deal reached with the help of an imminent deadline. Can such a deal pass the GOP-controlled House? There has been some grumbling from the right, though few are talking about an outright revolt against McCarthy. The bill could face a challenge in getting to the House floor because of the House Rules Committee, where McCarthy granted some seats to the far right. But there are ways around that, and if the bill does make it to the House floor, it will likely pass with a combination of Democratic and Republican votes, and Senate passage is a sure thing. If House Republicans can get to yes, it will signify a shift in the party compared to the last major debt ceiling showdown in 2011. Back then, the GOP majority brought to power in the Tea Party wave sought extreme spending cuts, including big changes to Medicare and Social Security. That GOP conference also proved chaotic and nearly ungovernable by its leaders. Yet true-believing anti-spending ideologues have seen their influence dwindle in the Trump and post-Trump eras. GOP leaders decided early on not to demand any Medicare and Social Security cuts in these talks, and the eventual deal leaves Medicaid untouched, too. Most in the party would still like to be seen as spending cutters, but in practice the energy is around culture war fights. That made the current deal — which uses various gimmicks and accounting tricks that will let Republicans claim they made substantial cuts to domestic spending, while letting Democrats avert many of the actual consequences of those cuts — possible. The Biden White House, meanwhile, deflated liberal commentators’ and activists’ pleas that the president use executive authority in some way to effectively raise the debt ceiling on his own. Officials saw various practical, legal, and political drawbacks that made them very reluctant to go down that road. Instead — after climbing down from an initial stance that they wouldn’t negotiate at all — Biden’s team engaged with Republicans in hopes they could get a reasonable deal. And they think they’ve succeeded. Here’s what’s in the deal. —Andrew Prokop How big are the budget cuts? The deal negotiated by the Biden White House and House Republicans cuts some domestic programs in 2024 and limits spending growth to 1 percent in fiscal year 2025. That will still amount to a cut, after accounting for inflation. Almost two-thirds of the $6 trillion federal budget is mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that will happen without any action by Congress. The rest is determined by Congress, and that is the bucket that will be affected by the debt limit deal. The cuts are going to land disproportionately on programs that help the poor and on administration, which also affects the people who rely on government programs. Some discretionary spending — on the military and for veterans — is actually going to increase. But the rest, including funding for child care, low-income housing, the national parks, and more, will be subject to a cut for the next two years. The exact cuts are supposed to be set by legislation that Congress will pass later this year. Should lawmakers fail to pass those spending bills, automatic spending cuts of 1 percent across the board would occur instead. (The incentive for Congress to pass the spending bills is that these automatic cuts would include the military, which all parties involved want to exempt.) Assorted accounting tricks could also reduce the actual spending cuts and hold federal spending effectively flat — though in a time of inflation, flat spending is really a cut when considering the purchasing power of each dollar. This might sound familiar: In 2011, an earlier debt limit crisis led to the Budget Control Act of 2011, which set spending caps for the rest of the decade. In this case, the spending limits apply only for two years. And while this cut is shallower than the automatic cuts of the last decade, it applies to programs that already have been feeling the squeeze: According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, spending for discretionary domestic programs (excluding veterans’ health care) is 10 percent below 2010 levels when adjusted for inflation and increases in the US population. The long-running neglect has led to shortages in the services they provide. Child care assistance has fallen for the better part of two decades. The primary grant program served 373,000 more children in 2006, even though now there are an additional 1 million American children living in poverty. Likewise, 3 out of 4 US families that should be eligible for federal housing assistance don’t actually receive any aid because there is no funding available. Cuts to the Social Security Administration have been going on for years, while wait times for assistance have been increasing. Investments in water infrastructure have been stagnant, even after clean water crises in Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi. Cuts were inevitable — even to social programs that were already underfunded — once Republicans took control of the House and therefore the appropriations process. The question was always how much of the major programs Democrats could protect given Republican threats to hold the debt ceiling hostage. —Dylan Scott What are the new work requirements, and what are they likely to do? The debt ceiling deal includes increased work requirements for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly known as food stamps) and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF, or cash welfare), both of which already include substantial work requirements. One thing notably missing? Work requirements for Medicaid, which had been a key demand of House Republicans. SNAP has a set of general work requirements, and a narrower set of requirements for nondisabled adults without dependents. The changes in the new deal concern the latter. Currently, childless adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who do not have a physical or mental condition affecting their ability to work are generally required to work or volunteer for 80 hours a month. If they fail to, they face a time limit: They can only receive SNAP benefits for a maximum of three months over a three-year period. The debt ceiling deal expands the age range for these rules to apply to 50- to 54-year-olds. While that change may not seem significant, it could have a major impact on people applying for disability support unable to work. People get sicker in their 50s, and SNAP has historically been a major source of support for applicants during the long process of applying for disability benefits. Possibly offsetting these changes are new exemptions from work requirements for houseless people, veterans, and former foster children. A White House official told CNN that because of these exemptions, the total number of people subject to work requirements will be roughly the same after the bill. Advocates for SNAP counter that many houseless people and veterans should have already been exempt from work requirements under current law, which is being misapplied. TANF, meanwhile, was created by the 1996 welfare reform law, replacing a program that offered guaranteed cash for low-income parents with a block grant giving $16.5 billion annually to states to spend on anti-poverty programs (though in practice the money is used for all manner of things). Because its appropriation has never been adjusted for inflation over its 27 years of existence, the program has effectively been cut in half over time, and now only about 21 percent of poor families with children get help from it. States getting money from TANF have to meet a work-participation standard, requiring that 50 percent of families and 90 percent of two-parent families receiving benefits are working. However, these percentages can be reduced if the state has seen its TANF caseload fall over time (or if the state reports spending more of its own funds than is required by federal law), which is known as a “caseload reduction credit.” Thirty-two states have used these credits to reduce the work participation percentage they have to hit on TANF to 0 percent, as of fiscal year 2021. Currently, these credits are calculated by seeing how much caseloads have fallen relative to fiscal year 2005, meaning states can get credit for nearly two decades of reductions. The debt ceiling deal changes this baseline to fiscal year 2015, which is laxer than what Republicans wanted (fiscal year 2022). While in theory this could incentivize states to push TANF recipients toward work, the last time a change like this was tried in 2005, it did not result in a higher share of recipients due to states exploiting other loopholes. In other words, while the new policy undoubtedly tries to chip away at the welfare state, its actual impact may be a bit muted. —Dylan Matthews What does the student loan provision mean for borrowers? Here’s the bottom line: You’re probably going to need to start paying back your student loans again at the end of this summer. The pause on loan payments, and the hold on interest accruing on that debt, is set to end after August 29, with interest on loans beginning to accrue again on August 30, if the current proposal becomes law. That’s 60 days after June 30 — the same deadline that the president and the Education Department had set for repayments to begin, if the Supreme Court had not made a final decision on the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan by then. The court still hasn’t made a pronouncement on that plan, though a decision is expected in June — and it’s not likely to be positive for the nearly 43 million Americans who owe some kind of student debt. Should they rule against the plan, the debt ceiling deal would prevent the president from issuing a ninth extension of the payment pause, which began in March 2020. —Christian Paz What actually changes about energy permitting? The biggest surprise of the deal might be its approval of the 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will carry natural gas from West Virginia to southern Virginia. The pipeline, held up for years by federal lawsuits, has long been a top priority for Sen. Joe Manchin. But the pipeline’s role in debt ceiling talks largely flew under the radar. The deal would give a green light to outstanding permits for the pipeline and shields its construction from court intervention, to the frustration of environmentalists worried about the pipeline’s impact on rural and low-income areas and the 1,000 streams and wetlands along its way. There are a few other modest changes to permitting for energy projects in the deal, mostly affecting the bedrock 1970s-era environmental protection law, the National Environmental Policy Act. It sets a one-year deadline for agencies to complete an environmental assessment, and a two-year deadline for the more thorough environmental impact statement, an expensive review requiring community input. (Progressives argue that, rather than time limits, federal agencies need more staffing to complete reviews quickly.) Neither Democrats nor Republicans are going to walk away from the debt ceiling compromise feeling satisfied. House Republicans didn’t get a majority of their demands, such as fast-tracking fossil fuel infrastructure and repealing clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Democrats didn’t get any major wins in expanding transmission lines, an important piece of infrastructure for the clean energy grid. Instead, the deal agrees to a study on transmission, punting the bigger issues holding back transmission lines to another time. —Rebecca Leber What’s up with unspent Covid aid? Republicans have been fixated for a while on clawing back money that Congress authorized during the pandemic but that has not yet been spent. They secured a win in the debt-limit deal, with the White House agreeing to reclaim some of that funding in the name of reducing spending. The deal exempts some of remaining Covid funding, including money set aside to fund a next generation of vaccine development as well as funding that pays for Covid vaccines and treatment for uninsured Americans. “It is really important that these were protected,” said Jennifer Kates, director of global health at KFF. Obviously, billions of dollars have been spent over the past three years on assistance to people and businesses, as well as funding for vaccines and other public health efforts. So what’s left? There has not been a thorough public accounting for what money is left for specific projects, according to Kates. But with the pandemic winding down and important funding streams unaffected, public health experts don’t sound too worried about this aspect of the deal. —DS Are the IRS cuts symbolic or significant? The scope of the IRS funding cuts in the debt ceiling deal was notable: Roughly $20 billion of $80 billion that Congress previously approved will be repurposed for other programs in 2024 and 2025. This will help Democrats offset some of the deal’s cuts to domestic spending. White House officials have told Reuters that the short-term impact could actually be minimal, however, since the funding for the agency was approved over 10 years. Effectively, that means that the IRS might not feel these funding cuts in the near term, and that lawmakers could put in more requests for agency funding when needed in the future. Making these cuts, though, allows Republicans to claim a win on the issue: They’ve long targeted the IRS and argued that its resources should be clawed back. —Li Zhou

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