Climate Change Awareness Campaign in San Francisco: The Case for a Hospitable Planet Without a Plastic Cup: Colette Pichon Battle and Sophia Kianni

The weather underscored the seriousness of the problem yesterday as the Re:WIRED GREEN event on climate change drew to a close.

While climate activist and lawyer Colette Pichon Battle spoke from a stage in blue-skied San Francisco, Hurricane Ian continued its destructive path across southwest Florida, underscoring her already-urgent call to action. “I just want to make sure that you’re paying attention to what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now,” Pichon Battle said. She told the audience to keep an eye out for the climate events around the world and to notice them.

With tears in her eyes, Pichon Battle challenged the audience in San Francisco to be honest with themselves about the actions they should take to fight for a hospitable planet for all—actions that must go far beyond throwing a plastic cup into a recycling bin or buying an electric car. “It’s my job today to bring the truth,” she said. Even if it isn’t what you want to hear.

Nothing beats an experience when it comes to changing minds. That’s how Sylvia Earle sees it. The scientist has spent years trying to get people to understand the impacts of climate change, and has found that showing them can be the best way to tell them about the problems the planet is facing. Problem is, you can’t take millions of people to the bottom of the ocean, or, for that matter, make them read a boring climate report. The solution? It might be a parody of TikTok.

At this week’s edition of RE:WIRED Green, Earle talked with Sophia Kianni, a 20-year-old climate activist, about how she and her mother are working to change the world for the better. As Earle noted, older generations weren’t even convinced climate change was real, and research—the thing that could provide the evidence to prove that it is—”often stays in this nerdy community of scientists and doesn’t get out to the public.” Kianni’s generation, meanwhile, has grown up sharing messages on social media.

“I’d like to know from you,” Earle said, “how to strengthen that bridge between the knowledge that is there and communicating it in a way that people listen.”

For Kianni, that bridge is social media. In 2020 she founded the Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit dedicated to translating information about the environment into as many languages as possible. It started as something she did with her family after seeing the effects of pollution in her parents’ home country of Iran. “The reason my nonprofit now has over 9,000 volunteers is because of TikTok,” Kianni said, “because we’ve been able to reach hundreds of thousands of people through organic, short-form video.”

It seems like a self-evidently ridiculous question that doesn’t correspond to the fact that whales are majestic creatures whose worth surpasses the human impulse to quantify. Yet it is one which has been seriously considered by economists in an effort to convince governments and corporations to value wildlife. In her newest book, The Value of a Whale, she takes a hard look at the logic of capitalist thinking, from putting a dollar value on cetaceans to carbon offsets to financial products.

“The House Oversight Committee report has sought to misrepresent ExxonMobil’s position on climate science, and its support for effective policy solutions, by recasting well intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company disinformation campaign,” Spitler said. “If specific members of the committee are so certain they’re right, why did they have to take so many things out of context to prove their point?”

There are two core tenets of green capitalism I identify. An attempt to solve the climate crisis in a way that does not disrupt existing ways of organizing the economy, to existing distributions of wealth and power is the first. The second tenet is pursuing decarbonization in a way that makes sure that there are still opportunities for profit-making and rent extraction in that decarbonized future. The green capitalist framework is more focused on making sure that electric vehicles can be used when we are moving away from fossil fuel-laden cars so that private companies can keep making money.

I’d been working in the climate and finance civil society space for several years, and I started out at a totally nonpolitical watchdog company that helps financial firms understand how they should align their portfolios with the goals of the Paris Agreement. I came out of that experience feeling cynical about whether that type of approach will deliver any material change. But I found the experience really interesting in terms of crawling inside the heads of people working in finance and getting to grapple with how they understand this problem. That is what the book tries to do.

Positioning climate change as a pollution problem might have bigger consequences than you’d think. Consider the recent Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA at the end of June. The court’s conservative majority ruled that the EPA can’t implement sweeping regulations on carbon dioxide without the explicit approval of Congress. The ruling threatened the Biden administration’s ability to make good on its pledges to tackle climate change. It will be until a month and a half later. The 1970 Clean Air Act was amended to clearly state that greenhouse gas emissions are a form of air pollution under the Inflation Reduction Act. When it comes to the law, definitions mean everything.

According to Susan Joy Hassol, the director of Climate Communication, pollution is a better word to use because everyone knows it is harmful.

It wasn’t always a popular move to link global warming with air quality. They had been treated by most environmental groups as separate problems. Environmental justice advocates have argued that global emissions and local air pollution need to be addressed together. Otherwise, they argued, climate legislation could actually impede efforts to clean up the air in communities saddled with pollution.

The fossil fuel industry has been involved in misleading statements about their commitment to meaningful solutions, as well as on social media, said Naomi Oreskes, who studied the fossil. “Numerous analyses shows that these claims are untrue.”

The committee said documents uncovered also showed the fossil fuel industry has presented natural gas as a so-called “bridge fuel” to transition to cleaner sources of energy, all while doubling down on its long-term reliance on fossil fuels with no clear plan of action to full transition to clean energy.

Legislators reported that the committee found documents showing that the company’s recent plans do not align with the company’s public comments, as well as a goal of being a net zero company by 2050.

The company had “no obligation to minimize greenhouse gas”, as stated by a vice president of engineering in an email exchange during the summer of 2017.

A strategy slide presented to the Chevron Board of Directors from CEO Mike Wirth and obtained by the committee states that while Chevron sees “traditional energy business competitors retreating” from oil and gas, “Chevron’s strategy” is to “continue to invest” in fossil fuels to take advantage of consolidation in the industry.

In a 2016 email from a BP executive to John Mingé, then-Chairman and President of BP America, and others, about climate and emissions, an employee assessed that the company often adopted an obstructionist strategy with regulators, noting, “we wait for the rules to come out, we don’t like what we see, and then try to resist and block.”

The committee’s hearings were to be a replica of the famous “Big Tobacco” hearings where tobacco executives insisted that cigarettes were not addictive and caused accusations of perjury and federal investigations.

The impact of House Oversight’s investigation into Big Oil will not be as immediate, but Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat and the chair of Oversight’s environmental subcommittee, said the findings have added to the historical record for the industry and its role in global warming.

Democratic lawmakers said the oil and gas industry obstructed their investigation throughout the more than year-long process. Many of their requests for internal documents were heavily redacted by the companies, which did not specify reasons for withholding the information.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1988 after scientists raised the alarm about global warming. There is no binding international policy to address climate change after 35 years. In the United States, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses and second-largest polluter today, there have been repeated legislative failures, including the recent Supreme Court ruling limiting the government’s authority to regulate power plant emissions.

The study of doubt or the production of ignorance is on the rise. The Climate Social Science Network launched out of Brown University in the fall of 2020 is dedicated to studying climate policy obstructionism around the world and currently includes approximately 300 scholars, including me. In ten years, universities will establish research units to find ways to preserve scientific knowledge from the interests of government, religion and free enterprise.

A set of standards will be created to combat the creation of ignorant people and to build a mechanism to stop the spread of fake news. Society’s trust in science can mean the difference between life and death: A study of 126 countries found that where trust in science is high, citizens are more confident about vaccination (controlling for the individual’s own trust in science).

In 2023, a deeper understanding of knowledge will help us learn what the powerful don’t want us to know.