Building communities to end the climate crisis: A keynote speaker at Re:WIRED Green on climate change and the need for sweeping systemic change
The streetlights were removed as part of a deal between city leaders and the DTE. Literally without light, residents were left to find a solution. The organization that promoted “people-powered clean energy” took up the slack after the decision. The organization put up solar-powered street lights in the city with help from local companies and the use of affordable technology.
At RE:WIRED Green this week, Sarah Shanley Hope, vice president of narrative strategies at The Solutions Project, and actress Regina Hall spoke about the importance of stories like Highland Park’s—and why the need for more of them is so critical now.
Hope said that people closest to the issues are the first to find solutions. In our country and the world, when you think of compounding crises, you can end up solving many problems at the same time. In building community, a solar panel or renewable energy as a climate solution is also being seen as a good job creation strategy, as something to bring about more positive health in the community. That’s the opportunity that we have—to see the multi-solving that’s happening at the frontlines of the crisis.”
Climate justice is a big part of what The Solutions Project works towards. The work of grassroots change-makers is seen by the organization in some of the more vulnerable communities, where Black and Hispanic residents are more at risk of climate inequity.
Solving problems at the neighborhood level in seemingly impossible situations, Hope explained, creates pathways to “build power” and “transform state [and] federal policy”—like what happened with the Justice 40 Initiative and the Reduction Act, both of which seek to reduce environmental harm being done in already-struggling neighborhoods.
Pichon Battle, president of climate justice group Taproot Earth, spends her days on the front lines of the climate crisis. She lives in a place where the rising waters of the Louisiana bayou are washing away her community. And she knows her home will be lost to rising seas no matter what she does. Pichon Battle’s goal is to try to save the parts of the world that can still be protected. Her closing speech was a generous but unsparing entreaty to the privileged, asking them not to turn away from the necessity for sweeping systemic change.
As the Re:WIRED GREEN event on addressing climate change drew to a close yesterday, the weather underlined the urgency in the most horrific way possible.
Hurricane Ian continued to wreak havoc in southwest Florida as climate activist and lawyer Colette Pichon Battle spoke from a stage in San Francisco. Pichon Battle said that he wanted to make sure that he was paying attention to the issues happening in the Gulf of Mexico. She encouraged the audience to take notice of climate events around the world, from rain events in Baton Rouge and Houston to deadly floods ravaging Pakistan and Cape Verde.
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. She said it was her job to bring the truth. Even if it isn’t what you want to hear.
When it comes to changing minds, nothing beats an experience. Sylvia Earle sees it in a different way. A scientist has been trying to get people to understand the effects of climate change and he has found that showing them can be the best way to tell them. It’s not possible to take millions of people to the bottom of the ocean and make them read a boring climate report. The solution? It might be TikTok.
Both Kianni and Earle agreed the key factor is having communication between the generations that enables everyone to know what they personally can do about climate change. Get young people excited about green jobs. “That,” Kianni said, “is the most productive way we can have these conversations and actually equip people to build a future we want to inhabit, and have a sense of hope and optimism.”
I need to know from you how to communicate knowledge in a way that people listen to, and I would like to be able to do that with you.
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. Kianni said that TikTok has helped his nonprofit grow because they have reached hundreds of thousands of people through organic, short-form video.
John D. Sutter is a CNN contributor, climate journalist and independent filmmaker whose work has won a number of awards. He recently was appointed the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at The George Washington University. The opinions expressed are his own, not of anyone else. View more opinion at CNN.
There’s also growing outrage this year about the lack of support for communities that have already suffered irreparable damage from climate disasters. Small island nations, for instance, have already had to evacuate entire populations from disappearing islands. They had to pay those costs despite not contributing a lot to the pollution causing climate change.
At that time, the alliance of small island states argued that the people who were emitting pollution should pay for it.
More than 30 years later, this issue of irreversible “loss and damage” from the climate crisis is set to be one of the central issues as diplomats and world leaders convene in Egypt for the COP27 climate negotiations starting next week.
After decades of deflection, it’s overdue for high-polluting countries like the United States to take this question seriously. The losses to territory, culture, life, and property should be punished by the polluter.
Those efforts should be supported, but the fair and proactive thing is for rich countries to impose taxes on fossil fuel profits. That can be done as part of UN climate negotiations.
The less carbon we put into the atmosphere, the less risk we put into the climate system — with important consequences for sea levels, storms, drought, biodiversity and so-on.
The “no go” campaign against fossil fuel pollution: the case of Tuvalu and the Cayley-Jacobi region in Central Guyana
Over the decades there have been many different arguments against action. The most laughable, in retrospect, is that this was a problem for the future rather than the present.
The heat waves, droughts, wildfires and storms can feel very frightening and numbing. As long as humans have been burning fossil fuels, we have been making the planet more dangerous.
That may feel like a new phenomenon, but it’s been decades in the making. There was a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that was linked to human-caused warming. There were an estimated 20,000 deaths from that heat wave.
The fossil fuel industry is getting a lot of money in subsidies and windfall profits as household budgets shrink and the planet burns.
The courts are being used to fund loss-and-damage cases because there are no international efforts to fund them. A farmer in the southern part of the world is trying to stop a company from using fossil fuel on a melting glacier. The suit, filed in 2015, according to news reports, claims the German company, RWE, should be liable for its proportion of the damages, in line with the proportion of global fossil fuel pollution it has created. RWE says it should not be held responsible for the damage.
In addition to forming the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law, Tuvalu and many other small island states formed a similar group. The aim is to explore claims in international courts.
“Litigation is the only way we will be taken seriously while the leaders of big countries are dillydallying,” Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said last year, according to The New York Times. “We want to force them to respond in a court of law.”
The UN Climate Conference 2018 elephant in the room: How Government will invest in climate action and the rise of greenhouse gas emissions in the United Arab States and Latin America
The conference is being held in Egypt. This year’s UN Climate Conference will have one more elephant in the room. Egypt’s crackdown on climate protests — and dissenting voices more broadly. Dozens of people have been arrested in the days leading up to the climate conference in an effort to quell demonstrations, which have resulted in tens of thousands of political prisoners being imprisoned in Egypt.
This is a raging debate, even within the conference. Last year’s media sensation, a young climate activist called “Frida”, said this week that the COPs are not working and that she won’t attend this year’s conference. “The COPs are mainly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention, using many different kinds of greenwashing,” Thunberg said.
The world will be hotter by the end of this century than it is now. The sixth assessment report of the IpC predicted a scenario with either unabated emissions rise or immediate climate action. But unless you’ve pored over climate models and understand the intricacy of tipping points to a tee, it’s unlikely that you can visualize this outcome and truly imagine the severity of what’s to come.
All of this will help rapidly decarbonize the economy and boost climate adaptation, as buildings in the US account for a quarter of total emissions. Better-insulated homes use less energy and keep people more comfortable as temperatures get more extreme. Billions of dollars will come from state governments, and that’s just the beginning. “This landmark policy is going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars, if not a trillion dollars, of government money in climate action, and that’s going to just be leveraged many times over with private investment,” says Stokes. Billions of dollars have already been put forward by private companies for everything from battery manufacturing to electric vehicles and heat pumps. So that investment is going to be really transformative.”
There have been some bright spots. Australia will cut its planned cut by 43 percent compared to 2005 levels by the year 2030. A handful of other countries, including Chile, which is working to enshrine the rights of nature into its constitution, have already promised more cuts or say they will soon. Most of the updates come from smaller polluters like Australia that are playing catch-up after previously submitting goals that were woefully lacking in detail. A lot of fruit has already been picked.
The wins have put the emitters on the path to make good on last year’s promises. Fransen points to the United States, where the recent Inflation Reduction Act represented a massive step toward meeting its pledge of a 50 percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels. But the US still isn’t on track to reach that commitment. She says higher goals this year would be a waste because of the nation’s politics.
Fransen keeps a record of all those emissions plans, and whether or not the country is sticking to them. It is difficult to take stock. For one thing, it means actually measuring how much carbon nations emit. It also involves showing the effects those emissions will have on the climate 10, 20, or 100 years from now.
Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to determine how much CO2 humanity is producing—or to prove that nations are holding to their pledges. The origin of each signal is muddyed by the gas in the atmosphere. Natural processes also release carbon, like decaying vegetation and thawing permafrost, further complicating matters. If you try to find a leak in a pool, think of it as a swimming pool. Researchers have tried pointing satellites at the Earth to track CO2 emissions, but “if you see CO2 from space, it is not always guaranteed that it came from the nearest human emissions,” says Gavin McCormick, cofounder of Climate Trace, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s why we need more sophisticated methods.” Climate trace can use steam from power plants as a proxy for emissions if they are beinglched. Scientists are trying to understand local emissions using weather stations.
International climate negotiations got underway today with dire warnings about climate-driven disasters, pleas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a plan for a new global weather early warning system.
The U.N. secretary general warned about climate hell earlier in the week, and we are racing to do our part to avert it.
The estimate of the global population hitting 8 billion people during this climate meeting was mentioned by him. When baby 8-billion is old enough to ask, what do you do for our world and for our planet, how will we answer?
Extreme storms and floods are some of the climate-related disasters that will be warned by the United Nations. It’s called Early Warning for All.
The new plan calls for $3.1 billion to set up early-warning systems over the next five years in places that don’t already have them, beginning with the poorest and most vulnerable countries and regions. The warning systems will need a lot of money in the future.
The 26th Congress of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (CCC) endorsed by the Prime Minister of Barbados, Sr. Irael Biden
The prime minister of Barbados went a step further in her speech to her fellow leaders. She pointed out that oil and gas companies were profitable in the fossil fuel intensive economy.
Those corporations should help pay for the costs associated with sea level rise, stronger hurricanes, heat waves and droughts around the world, she argued, and especially in places like her nation that are extremely vulnerable to climate change and don’t have the money to protect themselves.
“We want other organizations and communities to see where they’re potentially vulnerable to climate change and take steps to become resilient,” Charlene Lake, AT&T’s chief sustainability officer, said in a news release.
The Climate Risk and Resilience portal is an online portal that provides information about weather. Additional risks such as wildfire and flooding will be added in the coming months.
More than two dozen countries have agreed to work together to prevent and reverse land degradation by the year 2030.
26 countries and the European Union are members of the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership, which account for over one-third of world’s forests.
More than 140 countries agreed to protect forests at the 26th congress of the United Nations. The UN said that not enough money is being spent to preserve forests that capture and store carbon.
Few US presidents can claim to have had environmental accomplishments when arriving at the United Nations climate talks on Friday. He muscled through a landmark climate law that is pouring $370 billion into the effort to speed the American economy away from fossil fuels. He’s seeding climate policies in the federal government. His administration plans to enact the strongest regulation to date to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Mr. Biden is also buoyed by a surprisingly strong showing of his party in Tuesday’s midterm elections, a performance that bucked historical trends and may allow the Democrats to retain control of Congress.
On the Responsibility of the U.N. to Address Climate Change Issues: The Case of a Hunger Strike in Egypt, during the COP27 Summit
Wanjira Mathai, a environmentalist from Africa, believes there is more than enough money in the economy. $17 trillion showed up when Covid happened, so there was a lot of it. There is money. We have a crisis in empathy.”
Paul Bledsoe, a climate adviser under President Bill Clinton who now lectures at American University, said there was no way Mr. Biden would embrace the idea of loss and damage payments.
“America is culturally incapable of meaningful reparations,” he said. “Having not made them to Native Americans or African Americans, there is little to no chance they will be seriously considered regarding climate impacts to foreign nations. It’s a complete nonstarter in our domestic politics.”
John Kerry wants to let corporations invest in renewable-energy projects in developing countries that will allow them to claim the results of their own climate goals. Those so-called carbon offset initiatives are viewed skeptically by many climate scientists and activists, who see them as simply allowing companies to continue polluting.
The case of a hunger strike in an Egyptian prison is expected to be raised byMr. Biden when he meets with the Egyptian President. Mr. Abd El Fattah had said he would stop drinking water last Sunday, at the start of the COP27 summit. Representatives from non-governmental groups threatened to leave the conference if he died.
The protesters at the U.N. climate summits have been quiet this week due to restrictions imposed by Mr. SRA’s government. On Friday morning, about 100 people from Fridays for Future, a youth-led and organized climate movement, as well asProtesters urging a vegan diet, made their presence known inside the area at the summit that is under the control of the United.
“It’s fundamentally about who is most responsible,” said Fatima Denton, a Gambian scholar, longtime U.N. official and member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. As the crisis grows, there is going to be a solidarity issue here. Support for that idea is needed now.”
The United States is acting. Mr. Biden said everyone had to act. “It’s a duty and responsibility of global leadership. Countries that are in a position to help should be supporting developing countries so they can make decisive climate decisions.”
He reiterated a 2021 pledge to provide $11.4 billion annually by 2024 to help developing countries transition to wind, solar and other renewable energy. The money was promised by rich nations under the Paris agreement. Mr. Biden secured a little more than $1 billion from Congress last year.
Detecting Methane Leaks before releasing it into the Atmosphere: An Environmental Climate Change Storytelling Statement by Mr. Biden
The US government will require oil and gas producers to detect methane leaks, a greenhouse gas that traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, according to the announcement by Mr. Biden. Methane is the biggest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States and many gas producers deliberately release gas into the air if it’s odorless. Stopping methane from escaping into the atmosphere is critical to slowing global warming, scientists say.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/environment-climate-change-storytelling/
Why Notre Dame burned and the Amazon forest burned: A personal story of a man on Walande Island, South Malaita, Solomon Islands
Now picture Timothy, who lives on Walande Island, a small dot of land off the east coast of South Malaita Island, part of the Solomon Islands. Since 2002, the 1,200 inhabitants of Walande have abandoned their homes and moved away from the island. Only one house remains: Timothy’s. When his former neighbors are asked about Timothy’s motives they shrug indifferently. “He’s stubborn,” one says. One says that he wouldn’t listen to them. Every morning his four young grandchildren take the canoe to the mainland, where they go to school, while Timothy spends the day adding rocks to the wall around his house, trying to hold off the water for a bit longer. I can not see through the trees if I move to the mainland. The water will not be seen by me. I want to have this spot where I can look around me. He says that he is a part of the place. The loneliness and loss that 1.1 degrees of warming is already causing is conveyed in his story.
Unlike numbers or facts, stories can trigger an emotional response, harnessing the power of motivation, imagination, and personal values, which drive the most powerful and permanent forms of social change. The images of Notre Dame cathedral went up in flames in 2019. Three minutes after the fire began, images of the incident were being broadcast around the world and the response from world leaders was immediate. That same year, the Amazon forest also burned, spewing smoke that spread over 2,000 miles and burning over one and a half football fields of rain forest every minute of every day—it took three weeks for the mainstream media to report that story. The burning of Notre Dame warrants rapid responses globally, when the Amazon fires don’t. Although it is just a beautiful assortment of limestone, lead, and wood, we attach personal significance to Notre Dame, because it has a story we know and can relate to. TheAmazon was on fire, but the people reacted in the way that they did.
We are able to make sense of the world through storytelling. There is research that says story structures match human neural maps. There is a story, a hug, and a mother breastfeeding in common. They all release oxytocin, also known as the love drug. And it is powerful. In a study by neuroscientist Paul Zak, participants who were given synthetic oxytocin donated 57 percent more to charity, and donated 56 percent more money than participants given a placebo. Similarly, hearing information in narrative form results in a higher likelihood of pro-social behavior.
The power of stories can be harnessed for good. The International Rice Research Institute was able to persuade a lot of rice farmers in Vietnam to stop spraying their crops with harmful insecticides after using a radio soap opera called Homeland Story. Farmers who listened to the series were less likely to spray their crops than they were simply told not to.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/environment-climate-change-storytelling/
The Dark Arts of Denial and Disinformation on Climate Issues: When 2021 and 2022 Comes to a Heading Crunch
In 2017 a viral and gruesome video detailing the story of a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nose compelled the US city of Seattle, Washington, British prime minister Theresa May, and multiple airlines and global companies such as Starbucks to pledge to eliminate plastic straws.
Increased global connections will increase the circulation of stories of people and animals on the frontier of the environmental crisis. Through various forms of art and media it will be these stories that will convince us that the climate emergency is not a crisis affecting future generations but a problem that all of us need to act on now.
A political scientist who studies climate and energy policy at UC Santa Barbara agrees that the year has proven to be a landmark for climate action. “We really, I think, are at a tipping point when it comes to climate action.”
Agnotologists will investigate and teach the dark arts of denial and disinformation—how big data, graphs and figures, and digital communication technologies can all be used to challenge independent scientific research findings. Students will learn how various tools (such as academic experts, public relations firms, and lawyers) and arguments (such as “the problem is too complex” or “there are bigger contributors to the problem”) are used across industries (including by pharmaceutical, tobacco, and fossil fuel companies) and understand how to recognize common patterns of denial. The pro-genetic modification groups that these students come across are often created by public relations firms, and may be an example of astroturf.
A set of standards will be created by the agnotologists to ensure that there is no spread of misinformation, and also to put more pressure on social media to prevent spread of misinformation. The study found that citizens are more likely to get a vaccine if they have high trust in science.
As knowledge remains our best hope to save the planet and ourselves, in 2023 a deeper understanding of ignorance will help us learn what the powerful do not want us to know.
If 2021 was a huge missed opportunity, 2022 was a huge turnaround. “I feel a lot more heartened about climate change now than I ever have,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of the nonprofit Project Drawdown, which advocates for climate action. “We’re a lot less screwed than we would have been. I’ll take that as encouragement because there will be more wind in the sails. Like, Hey, wait a minute, things are really starting to pivot.”
My fellow Americans, meet the new approach to climate action in the US: the carrot. The Inflation Reduction Act rewards taxpayers for making greener choices than previous proposals, which used a stick. It allocates nearly $400 billion in rebates and tax breaks for people to buy electric vehicles and solar panels, or outfit their homes with heat pumps or better insulation. “If you electrify your life, you can save $1,800 a year on your energy bills,” says Stokes. “That’s really the promise here, to get people onto clean, efficient, and affordable electric machines.”
(If you’re not sure exactly what this entails in terms of home upgrades, updating insulation typically requires plugging leaks that let in outdoor air, then spraying either an expanding foam or pulverized newspaper into walls and attic surfaces. A heat pump extracts heat from outdoor air to warm a home, then reverses in the summer to act like an air conditioner. The appliance runs on electricity, not gas, so it can be powered with renewable energy like rooftop solar. They are so efficient that even if you had to run them on energy generated with fossil fuels, you’d still be way better off emissions-wise than with a traditional furnace.)
A Conversation with Carole Cohn-Adams on the Climate Crisis: A Tale of Two Paradigms, One Life, One Fire
By the time she spoke at Davos that January, excoriating the world — “I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is” — she had become the face of the global climate movement, giving it an entirely new generational life and scale. She led weekly marches across the globe that drew millions of people through the year and made the world’s most powerful people aware of the severity of the climate crisis.