Bright Better: A Climate Solutions Jobs Teacher-Electrician-Family-Employee Collaboration (Extended Abstract)
Carolyn: Yes. For a lot of my students, it might be a little bit surprising to discuss sustainability or climate justice in an art class. So making art about it helps that process. And it’s been interesting to see the ways that students evolve to feeling comfortable expressing their concerns, both through art and then to articulate that through words as well.
Do students tell you that what you do has changed the way they eat or think about the planet in the future?
CM: One of the things that I try and stress through my lessons is the power of collective action. The power of art to communicate and the way in which that ripples through society. One of the things I want to show my students is how they can plug into bigger movements that are happening in our society today.
Ciara: Essentially, we use a chemical process to turn the fibers from straw-like to hair-like, and our team that’s based in St. Louis has gotten really good at refining and calming the fibers so that they have as much motion in them that resembles hair as much as possible.
I realized a couple of summers ago that the majority of plastic synthetic hair is made from polyvinylchloride orPVC, which is a really toxic material to wear on your body and hard to recycle. So with those two factors combined, I recognize that if I was going to continue to wear braids, I would need to do so both comfortably and sustainably, which led to the creation of our first product which is called Bright Better, and is made out of banana fiber.
Source: Any job can be a climate solutions job: Ask this teacher, electrician or beauty CEO
What did you learn when you were an electrician: How to get off fossil fuels? Nate Johnson: Remaking your job to help climate solutions
Nate Johnson was actually a journalist covering climate policy, and then he decided to become an electrician. What was it about your career that you decided to remake it?
Nate Johnson: Many, many reasons. But in the context of this conversation, one of them was that I was listening to people talk and talk and talk. And it felt really satisfying to take my two hands and start solving the problem by helping people electrify and get off fossil fuels.
What’s the situation? Well, I think that climate action really just comes in terms of providing good information to people, it’s in that sense, it’s not so different from being a journalist, when someone wants to do something with their home, there’s usually a profound information asymmetry between them and the contractors that they choose. They rely on those people to tell them what will work and what will not, and what is cost effective and what is not. I see my role as being a honest broker who comes in and gives them all of the different options that are available, so they can make an informed decision.
I was listening to people talk and talk and talk. It felt great to help people get off fossil fuels by taking my two hands and doing something.
NJ: Well, I live in Berkeley, California, and so people are generally interested in climate action. There’s a certain amount, you know, of social pressure that people want to replace their gas stove with an Insulated stove, not just because it is climate action but because everybody is doing it. But there are people who oftentimes just come to me and say, like, look, I want to make the right decision in terms of dollars and cents. I think that’s the most interesting case for me because, even though the technology is there, it can sometimes be difficult to update a system where it doesn’t work. It’s intriguing to me.
Source: Any job can be a climate solutions job: Ask this teacher, electrician or beauty CEO
How do you live, and what can you do about it? Ciara Imani May: What are you doing? Carolyn McGrath: Making a difference
Ciara Imani May: I encourage everybody to start with the way you live your life and the issue at hand that is a core to who you are and then see what you can make out of that for yourself and other people.
Carolyn McGrath: I just want to reiterate what Ciara said, because she said it so beautifully. It’s not about overhauling your life. It’s about plugging into what you already do, where you’re already passionate about, and finding an intersection between that and climate action. For some people, it might just take a little bit of imagination, but there’s so many ways that everybody can do it.
Nate Johnson: Dive into the research and the more you’re continuously learning and improving, the less likely you are to end up doing sort of greenwashing type things and actually make a real difference.
Nate Johnson is an electrician in California. Carolyn McGrath teaches art to high school students in New Jersey. And Ciara Imani May founded Rebundle, a Missouri company that makes biodegradable hair extensions.
Climate solutions are facing a big obstacle: conspiracy theories and the media: NPR’s Huo Jingnan, Julia Simon, David Folkenflik, and Mark Harper
Huo: It is a distraction from the issues we need to work on. Climate activists might be secretly trying to take away your freedom if the stories ring true, because they say that they are not talking about climate but about something else.
To talk about the current state of climate disinformation, we checked in with three NPR reporters who have reported on climate, disinformation and the media — and they can answer our questions: Climate solutions reporter Julia Simon, media correspondent David Folkenflik, and reporter Huo Jingnan, who writes about conspiracy theories among other things.
Earlier this week the U.K. transport minister Mark Harper used some of the language of conspiracy theories when talking about 15-minute cities at the conservative Tory party conference. “What is sinister and what we shouldn’t tolerate,” Harper said, “is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops.”
Joe Rogan talked about it on his show. Rogan said, “That’s the idea they’re starting to roll out in Europe and that you’ll be contained unless you get permission to leave.”
Huo Jingnan: The myth of 15-minute cities is one part of a larger conspiracy theory called the Great Reset. The theory goes that a shadowy global elite — often Jewish — wants to strip away ordinary people’s freedoms and make us live a life of deprivation. The 15-minute cities are a ploy to take people’s freedom away.
Source: People working on climate solutions are facing a big obstacle: conspiracy theories
Climate Solutions Are Facing a Big Obstacle: Conspiracies Diracies Disinformation: Tucker Carlson’s Example
The funny thing is they are at once testers and popularizers of things that have gotten some traction online, and then you hear prominent figures on the right picking up the melody.
Tucker Carlson is an American comedian. Right now, there are a lot of whales that are being killed by the government’s offshore wind projects.
Folkenflik: Once it passes a test and makes the rounds, you hear versions of it from people like Donald Trump.
One interesting example of a strawman here is one of the subplots of the great reset conspiracy theory, which is that the government wants to force people to eat insects. Including insects in the human diet has been an idea on the edges of climate circles. The idea is to reduce your meat intake. But it attracted more attention over the years because many news outlets — including NPR — are easily intrigued by the idea of eating something seen as exotic.
If you put fear and doubt into the solution to climate change, you end up with the same outcome, which is not a legislative agenda, says King.
Folkenflik: It’s not in the interest of Fox News and others who benefit financially from stoking outrage and, by and large, also have partisan rooting interests. There have been some defamation cases against media outlets, but they come from specific people and institutions who claim they were harmed by making false claims about climate research and solutions.
For other journalists and others, it’s tricky — you do need to address falsehoods and fact-check them. But by fact-checking, you’re also sometimes elevating these ideas that may not get widespread currency. News organizations, including NPR, generally try to balance those imperatives as they plan out coverage.
Source: People working on climate solutions are facing a big obstacle: conspiracy theories
What Do Social Media Platforms Really Need to Moderate? A Survey by Huo and Kristina Meissner Toward the 2020 Election
Huo: When it comes to social media, the platforms can change how they label, recommend and moderate content to change what users see and how they interact with platforms. Studies by researchers who were able to run experiments on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 election showed that changing the algorithm changes user behavior, sometimes leading to less time spent on the platforms.
There’s also a practice called pre-bunking, like a form of inoculation against bad information, which has two strands. One way involves preventatively unraveling specific false claims before they reach a critical mass. To help equip people with tools to evaluate claims critically, there is news literacy training. These things have to be done in a way that appeals to the people they’re trying to reach, not patronizing them, as well as acknowledging that known facts sometimes change.
While we don’t have enough experimentation on altering platform design, experts in the field think that they can come up with some conclusions. A lot of people put stock in hearing from those they trust (like friends) and those they admire (like influencers and celebrities). And they need to absorb it in settings where they seek such content out. Some major platforms are trying to figure out which news they should serve up and how much attention they should give to moderating. There’s no single easy or widely embraced answer yet.