[✔️] April 27, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Tue Apr 27 09:44:01 EDT 2021

/*April 27, 2021*
/

[too bad]
*Bolsonaro Cuts Brazil’s Amazon Protection Budget Immediately After 
Promising to Increase It*
Dharna Noor Yesterday
https://earther.gizmodo.com/bolsonaro-cuts-brazil-s-amazon-protection-budget-immedi-1846767497

[good thing too]
*It's OK to have climate anxiety*
I do. Here's how I'm coping: by helping to create a world of climate 
justice.
Eric Holthaus - Apr 26, 2021

We are in a climate emergency. And you were born at just the right 
moment to help change everything.
Today is a big day for me. For the very first time in my life, I set up 
an appointment with my doctor to start on anti-anxiety medication.

This step comes four years after I first started seeing a therapist for 
climate-related anxiety. Since then, I’ve written about my journey a 
lot, but never thought it would get to this point. After years of trying 
to manage on my own, I realized during the pandemic that I need more help.

I’m currently towards the end of my fourth anxiety episode of the past 
12 months. Each of them have lasted for weeks, where I’ve been unable to 
write, unable to interact with friends, unable to function normally. For 
the past two months, I’ve only opened emails that looked urgent, I 
didn’t have the energy to read anything that felt like it was going to 
increase the chaos in my head, either good or bad. (If you haven’t heard 
from me and needed to, I apologize so much)...

I get that there’s a pandemic going on, that it’s normal to feel 
anxiety, but this has been Too Much.

I also know it’s a privilege to be where I am right now. I can afford 
health insurance. I have access to a good therapist. I have a doctor I 
trust. I have a supportive partner. I have friends who will give me the 
benefit of the doubt after being out of contact for a year. I know that 
not everyone can say the same. And I know that a lot of this privilege 
is because of when and where I was born. And that’s not fair.

Recently, Sarah Jaquette Ray wrote an essay in Scientific American that 
asked why climate anxiety is a mostly-white phenomenon. It’s an absolute 
must-read.

Here’s the most important part for me:

The white response to climate change is literally suffocating to people 
of color. Climate anxiety can operate like white fragility, sucking up 
all the oxygen in the room and devoting resources toward appeasing the 
dominant group. As climate refugees are framed as a climate security 
threat, will the climate-anxious recognize their role in displacing 
people from around the globe? Will they be able to see their own fates 
tied to the fates of the dispossessed? Or will they hoard resources, 
limit the rights of the most affected and seek to save only their own, 
deluded that this xenophobic strategy will save them? How can we make 
sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?

Climate anxiety without climate justice is a gateway to ecofascism. If 
you’re a white person who is scared about climate change – which is a 
completely normal thing given how much our leaders have failed us – just 
imagine how scared you’d be if people wanted you dead because of your 
skin color.

My fear is that what’s happening right now in India – a vaccine 
apartheid with horrific consequences – is a grim preview of what might 
happen in a world where rich countries band together to insulate 
themselves from climate change but don’t share resources with the rest 
of the world. And that is a world I’ll give every day of the rest of my 
life to prevent from coming to pass.

Here’s the bottom line: It’s OK to have climate anxiety. The real 
question is, what will do you do about it?

One of my favorite climate writers (and fellow Substacker) Britt Wray 
talked with Sarah about her essay, and their conversation is fantastic, 
too. (Britt’s Substack, Gen Dread, has also been an enormously important 
resource for me, personally.)

Here’s Sarah’s key response to Britt:

Although I believe anybody can have climate anxiety, the term itself 
seems more applicable to folks who haven’t experienced existential 
threats before. Communities that have experienced existential threats — 
colonialism, slavery, genocide, dispossession, medical injustice, food 
insecurity, pollution, exile — tend to view climate change as just 
another layer of threat, compounding these other long-standing forms of 
oppression, cultural death, and environmental trauma.

While its definitely true that climate change will affect every single 
one of us, it will affect us all differently. Those who have already 
been marginalized by centuries of oppression will be hurt the worst.

Our job, as the climate anxious, is to repair that oppression, repair 
that marginalization, to make sure you’re not offloading your anxiety 
onto someone else in ways that are causing more harm...
Doing all that well is hard. Really, really hard. But it doesn’t mean 
it’s not our job to try.
https://thephoenix.substack.com/p/its-ok-to-have-climate-anxiety

- -

[Scientific American]
*Climate Anxiety Is an Overwhelmingly White Phenomenon*
Is it really just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way 
of life or to get “back to normal?”
By Sarah Jaquette Ray on March 21, 2021
- -
Climate change and its effects—pandemics, pollution, natural 
disasters—are not universally or uniformly felt: the people and 
communities suffering most are disproportionately Black, Indigenous and 
people of color. It is no surprise then that U.S. surveys show that 
these are the communities most concerned about climate change.
- -
  I am deeply concerned about the racial implications of climate 
anxiety. If people of color are more concerned about climate change than 
white people, why is the interest in climate anxiety so white? Is 
climate anxiety a form of white fragility or even racial anxiety? Put 
another way, is climate anxiety just code for white people wishing to 
hold onto their way of life or get “back to normal,” to the comforts of 
their privilege?

The white response to climate change is literally suffocating to people 
of color. Climate anxiety can operate like white fragility, sucking up 
all the oxygen in the room and devoting resources toward appeasing the 
dominant group. As climate refugees are framed as a climate security 
threat, will the climate-anxious recognize their role in displacing 
people from around the globe? Will they be able to see their own fates 
tied to the fates of the dispossessed? Or will they hoard resources, 
limit the rights of the most affected and seek to save only their own, 
deluded that this xenophobic strategy will save them? How can we make 
sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety/

[video explaining how to win the $100 million prize -- interesting, fun 
and useful]
*Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis LIVE on $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal*
Streamed live on Apr 22, 2021
XPRIZE

Join Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis LIVE as they discuss optimistic views 
of the future in wide-ranging topics from energy and communications to 
knowledge and transport, the importance of making humanity an 
interplanetary species plus the duo will announce the $100M XPRIZE 
Carbon Removal competition.

"I don't think we're currently doomed"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN88HPUm6j0

[Yes there was a storm story]
*Hurricanes in the Movies: Hurricane scene from film "Key Largo"*
Sep 9, 2017
James Schrumpf
The great Lionel Barrymore describes the 1935 "Labor Day Hurricane" to 
gangster Edward G. Robinson in the John Huston-directed Warner Brothers 
film "Key Largo."  Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYNp9SW0NYA

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 27, 2014 *

The New York Times editorial page observes:

"At long last, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state 
government have found a new tax they can support. Naturally it’s a tax 
on something the country needs: solar energy panels.

"For the last few months, the Kochs and other big polluters have been 
spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy, which have 
been adopted by most states. They particularly dislike state laws that 
allow homeowners with solar panels to sell power they don’t need back to 
electric utilities. So they’ve been pushing legislatures to impose a 
surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing 
solar panels on houses less attractive."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/opinion/sunday/the-koch-attack-on-solar-energy.html?hp&rref=opinion

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