[TheClimate.Vote] February 17, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*February 17, 2021*/

[girding the grid - on the NYT]
*A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for Power 
Grids*
Systems are designed to handle spikes in demand, but the wild and 
unpredictable weather linked to global warming will very likely push 
grids beyond their limits.
Feb. 16, 2021

Huge winter storms plunged large parts of the central and southern 
United States into an energy crisis this week, with frigid blasts of 
Arctic weather crippling electric grids and leaving millions of 
Americans without power amid dangerously cold temperatures.

The grid failures were most severe in Texas, where more than four 
million people woke up Tuesday morning to rolling blackouts. Separate 
regional grids in the Southwest and Midwest also faced serious strain. 
As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 23 people nationwide had died in the 
storm or its aftermath.

Analysts have begun to identify key factors behind the grid failures in 
Texas. Record-breaking cold weather spurred residents to crank up their 
electric heaters and pushed power demand beyond the worst-case scenarios 
that grid operators had planned for. At the same time, a large fraction 
of the state’s gas-fired power plants were knocked offline amid icy 
conditions, with some plants suffering fuel shortages as natural gas 
demand spiked. Many of Texas’ wind turbines also froze and stopped working.

The crisis sounded an alarm for power systems throughout the country. 
Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe 
conditions — as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers 
ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face 
extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions 
those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic 
failure.
While scientists are still analyzing what role human-caused climate 
change may have played in this week’s winter storms, it is clear that 
global warming poses a barrage of additional threats to power systems 
nationwide, including fiercer heat waves and water shortages.

Measures that could help make electric grids more robust — such as 
fortifying power plants against extreme weather, or installing more 
backup power sources — could prove expensive. But as Texas shows, 
blackouts can be extremely costly, too. And, experts said, unless grid 
planners start planning for increasingly wild and unpredictable climate 
conditions, grid failures will happen again and again.

“It’s essentially a question of how much insurance you want to buy,” 
said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University. 
“What makes this problem even harder is that we’re now in a world where, 
especially with climate change, the past is no longer a good guide to 
the future. We have to get much better at preparing for the unexpected.”

A System Pushed to the Limit
Texas’ main electric grid, which largely operates independently from the 
rest of the country, has been built with the state’s most common weather 
extremes in mind: soaring summer temperatures that cause millions of 
Texans to turn up their air-conditioners all at once.
While freezing weather is rarer, grid operators in Texas have also long 
known that electricity demand can spike in the winter, particularly 
after damaging cold snaps in 2011 and 2018. But this week’s winter 
storms, which buried the state in snow and ice, and led to record-cold 
temperatures, surpassed all expectations — and pushed the grid to its 
breaking point...
Texas’ grid operators had anticipated that, in the worst case, the state 
would use 67 gigawatts of electricity during the winter peak. But by 
Sunday evening, power demand had surged past that level. As temperatures 
dropped, many homes were relying on older, inefficient electric heaters 
that consume more power.

The problems compounded from there, with frigid weather on Monday 
disabling power plants with capacity totaling more than 30 gigawatts. 
The vast majority of those failures occurred at thermal power plants, 
like natural gas generators, as plummeting temperatures paralyzed plant 
equipment and soaring demand for natural gas left some plants struggling 
to obtain sufficient fuel. A number of the state’s power plants were 
also offline for scheduled maintenance in preparation for the summer peak...
- -
But some climate scientists have also suggested that global warming 
could, paradoxically, bring more unusually fierce winter storms. Some 
research indicates that Arctic warming is weakening the jet stream, the 
high-level air current that circles the northern latitudes and usually 
holds back the frigid polar vortex. This can allow cold air to 
periodically escape to the South, resulting in episodes of bitter cold 
in places that rarely get nipped by frost.
But this remains an active area of debate among climate scientists, with 
some experts less certain that polar vortex disruptions are becoming 
more frequent, making it even trickier for electricity planners to 
anticipate the dangers ahead.

All over the country, utilities and grid operators are confronting 
similar questions, as climate change threatens to intensify heat waves, 
floods, water shortages and other calamities, all of which could create 
novel risks for the nation’s electricity systems. Adapting to those 
risks could carry a hefty price tag: One recent study found that the 
Southeast alone may need 35 percent more electric capacity by 2050 
simply to deal with the known hazards of climate change.

And the task of building resilience is becoming increasingly urgent. 
Many policymakers are promoting electric cars and electric heating as a 
way of curbing greenhouse gas emissions. But as more of the nation’s 
economy depends on reliable flows of electricity, the cost of blackouts 
will become ever more dire.

“This is going to be a significant challenge,” said Emily Grubert, an 
infrastructure expert at Georgia Tech. “We need to decarbonize our power 
systems so that climate change doesn’t keep getting worse, but we also 
need to adapt to changing conditions at the same time. And the latter 
alone is going to be very costly. We can already see that the systems we 
have today aren’t handling this very well.”

John Schwartz, Dave Montgomery and Ivan Penn contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/climate/texas-power-grid-failures.html



[ Maps and data]
*Climate Reanalyzer*
https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2
- -
*Earth Null School*
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-94.30,41.12,397
-  -
*WonderMap*
https://www.wunderground.com/wundermap



[Cold video]
*Brutal Cold Rocks United States from Coast to Coast to Coast due to our 
destabilized Climate System*
Feb 16, 2021
Paul Beckwith
Why is most of the United States in a deep freeze? How is this connected 
to climate change? The answer, like many answers to abrupt climate 
change questions, lies in the Jet Stream changes.

The Jet Stream is a ribbon of air, analogous to a rapidly moving water 
stream, that circumvents the planet. With a cold Arctic (old climate), 
there is a large temperature difference to the much warmer lower 
latitudes, and thus the Jet stream is very fast and moves primarily from 
West to East with few meanders north or south. Now that the Arctic 
region is much warmer, due to abruptly climate change, the temperature 
difference to lower latitudes is greatly reduced. Thus, the Jet Stream 
has slowed down greatly and has very pronounced waves in the northward 
direction (called ridges) and in the southward direction (called troughs).

The brutal cold, snow, and ice in the present winter storm in the US is 
occurring due to a massively deep and wide Jet Stream trough that 
extents down to the Gulf of Mexico and the Mexican border, and crosses 
the breadth of the USA, almost from the Pacific to Atlantic coasts. It 
is very persistent, lasting for many days. The Deep South of the USA is 
completely at the mercy of this brutal cold, lacking snow clearing 
equipment, adequate home heating, and with a severely strained power 
grid that has lost about one third of its capacity. Over 4 million 
people are without power in Texas alone, and over 150 million people in 
the entire country are bearing some consequences of this event. We are 
in an age of consequences as we lose the coldness of the Arctic and 
experience a destabilized climate system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeYZOVu0uUU



[Jacobin]
*Joe Biden’s Climate Policies Are a Step Back From “Death Wish.” But We 
Need More Than That.*
AN INTERVIEW WITH KATE ARONOFF
So far the Biden administration's stated climate policies have shifted 
the US government from a stance of death-wish climate nihilism to one 
that resembles a typical center-right European government. But without a 
sharp move to the left on the economic aspects of climate transition, 
even that much progress won't materialize.
- -
The other reason is that, so long as there are still all of the tax 
breaks in place, all of the bailouts that were delivered to the fossil 
fuel industry, things like the bond buying program the Fed set up, 
capitalism is just very weighted toward fossil fuels. As long as it’s 
the case that a stimulus or recovery measure is looking to generally 
improve the economy without taking that on, it will be a big gain to 
fossil fuels just because of our tax law. If you don’t really tackle 
that, I don’t think tax credits for green things or even good public 
investments in infrastructure — those don’t outcompete that necessarily.

It’s good that Biden is talking about climate as a jobs program. I think 
it’s a big improvement on 2008 that the two are being talked about 
together, but there’s a lot that needs to be done in a recovery to make 
sure that it doesn’t just fuel business as usual with some green 
initiatives tacked on...
- -
*You have a book coming out in April called Overheated: How Capitalism 
Broke the Planet — and How We Fight Back. It’s obviously a pretty big 
question, but for those who haven’t been following the book, what’s its 
basic thrust?*

KA
The basic argument of the book is that when climate politics comes into 
popular consciousness in the United States — in 1988, when James Hanson 
gives his testimony on global warming to the Senate — that happens at 
the zenith of neoliberalism. That happens at this moment where the most 
reasonable solutions for dealing with this crisis have been taken off 
the table by neoliberalism but also centuries of anti-democratic 
thinking in the United States and a long-standing push for minority rule 
across the right, which bleeds into the Democratic Party.

The book tries to look at just how badly we’ve been set up to deal with 
this problem. But, then also what are the solutions for this problem 
that can be put back on the table? Things like nationalizing the fossil 
fuel industry, bringing utilities under public ownership, a jobs 
guarantee, climate reparations, and a four-day workweek. So it will also 
be looking at the big, macro solutions we need to address climate change.
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/joe-biden-climate-change-fossil-fuels



[set history straight]
*Climate Deniers Backed Violence and Spread Pro-Insurrection Messages 
Before, During, and After January 6*
By Sharon Kelly - February 16, 2021
On the evening of January 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection at the 
U.S. Capitol, former coal mining executive Don Blankenship, who ran 
against Donald Trump as a third-party candidate in the 2020 election, 
began an all-caps Twitter thread.

“Why is it that American politicians and the American media support 
citizen uprisings in China, Poland, South Africa, and throughout the 
world, but when an American citizen is killed during an uprising against 
a corrupt American government the citizens are at fault?” 
@DonBlankenship posted on Twitter.

“Members of the media and the government are all saying what we saw 
today doesn’t work — but that is only because they don’t want it to 
work,” the thread continues. “What we saw today is what freed Americans 
from King George and England.”

Blankenship at one time served as the CEO of Massey Energy Company, a 
coal mining company that at one time was Appalachia’s largest coal 
producer. He later served a one-year prison sentence after he was 
convicted of conspiracy to violate mine safety standards, causing the 
2010 deaths of 29 coal miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia.

The former coal CEO is, to be sure, no stranger to Twitter controversy. 
In 2013, for example, Rolling Stone ranked one of Blankenship’s tweets 
number three on its list of the top 10 “dumbest things ever said about 
global warming.”

Blankenship was also hardly alone among white-collar climate science 
deniers in expressing support for the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. 
Capitol.

A review of social media posts and online publications by DeSmog found 
dozens of prominent climate deniers — both individuals and organizations 
— posted messages supporting the insurrectionists, spread debunked 
claims about election fraud, hinted at civil war, or, in one case, 
suggested that Twitter’s effort to remove online disinformation about 
the election should be viewed as “worse than 9-11.”

Not all of those profiled in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database 
supported the insurrection on January 6. A significant number of 
organizations, like the Cato Institute and the National Association of 
Manufacturers, immediately condemned mob violence.

But the events on January 6 and its aftermath appear to have created 
sharp divisions among those opposed to climate action, with many 
individuals (and a small number of organizations) posting 
pro-insurrection messaging before, during, and after the failed storming 
of the Capitol as Congress was preparing to certify the presidential 
election results. Some disavowed the violence that day, while others 
markedly did not.

DeSmog collected insurrection-related messaging from dozens of those 
profiled in our Climate Disinformation Database. Those profiles have 
been updated to include their statements surrounding the insurrection, 
including a number of posts that have since been deleted or removed.

“Be a Shame if They Misplaced Him”
A number of the more striking social media posts and comments collected 
came from individuals affiliated with the pro-fossil fuel Heartland 
Institute, which calls itself an “'action tank' as well as a 'think tank.'”

One American Petroleum Institute consultant and Heartland Institute 
policy advisor, Tom Tanton, wrote on Facebook on the morning of January 
6 that he wished he was in D.C. for the coming march...
- -
That evening, after the insurrection was over, Tanton’s social media 
account circulated an article claiming “antifa” had “infiltrated” the 
Capitol insurrection. “In fact, many of the Trump supporters who stormed 
into the Capitol openly boasted about their participation, 
live-streaming as they forced their way past police and bashed the 
building’s doors and windows,” The Washington Post reported on January 
7, 2021, in response to similar claims.

Steve Milloy, who posts under the Twitter handle @JunkScience and who 
joined the Heartland Institute’s board of directors in 2020, gave a 
January 13 interview on the OAN Network in which he suggested that 
perhaps the police and military “just let this happen so that they could 
set President Trump up for this impeachment.”

“People laugh when you say ‘Deep State,’” he added. “No, it's real. 
There's something going on here.”

On January 7, Milloy used the hashtag #CharlottesvilleHoax in a tweet 
about the insurrection (an apparent reference to the Charlottesville, 
Virginia, Unite the Right rally where James Alex Fields, Jr. drove a car 
into a crowd of counter-protesters, injuring dozens and killing one 
person, Heather Heyer).
On January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol insurrection in the U.S., 
William Briggs, a Heartland Institute policy advisor, posted “Now is the 
time Mr. President,” adding that there were 100,000 to 200,000 
“patriots” in the Capitol.

Writing in response to a tweet that read “CSPAN (via HuffPost) reports 
that Nancy Pelosi is safe,” Briggs commented, “Win some and lose some.”
- -
Briggs, whose Twitter bio indicates that all of his tweets “DIE FROM 
CORONAVIRUS AFTER 7 DAYS,” has since removed those messages from Twitter.

As of press time, the Heartland Institute had not responded to questions 
from DeSmog.

Angela Logomasini is listed as a senior fellow by the Competitive 
Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative policy group that opposes 
climate action and has received fossil fuel industry funding. She was a 
co-author of a 2016 CEI report urging the incoming Trump administration 
to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the international climate 
accord. Her Twitter account — now removed — posted multiple times about 
the 2020 election, including a retweet of a January 5 call to “FIGHT 
BACK w @RealDonaldTrump.”

January 5 retweet by Logomasini.
After the insurrection, @alogomasini also tweeted out a call to move 
away from “big tech” social media. “Don’t trust Congress! Don’t trust 
bureaucracies! They will shut down free speech permanently. Don’t fall 
for it,” her January 9 tweet reads.

As of press time, Logomasini had not responded to questions from DeSmog 
about the posts.

Others in DeSmog’s database circulated false or incendiary claims about 
election fraud, both before and after Joe Biden's inauguration.

John Droz, founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions, published 
a two-page report on February 5 claiming that Trump, who lost 61 of the 
62 lawsuits he and his allies filed seeking to overturn the results of 
the 2020 election, had actually “WON the majority of 2020 election cases 
fully heard, and then decided on the merits.” His report, signed “John 
Droz, physicist, North Carolina,” was covered in articles by 
Christianity Daily and the Epoch Times.

The headline-driving claim made in the report, however, utterly fails to 
withstand scrutiny. “Trump and his allies have won one lawsuit related 
to the results of the 2020 election, and that case did not prove that 
widespread voter fraud affected the outcome,” PolitiFact wrote in a 
piece rating the claim false. “Judges across the political spectrum have 
rejected dozens of other cases filed after November 3 that sought to 
overturn the election. Just because a case is dismissed on procedural 
grounds does not mean it wasn’t duly considered.”

Violence “Too Profitable to be Ignored”
On January 7, one day after the Capitol insurrection, the trade group 
Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association, which, according to its Twitter 
bio, has been “representing the manufacturing sector in Pennsylvania 
public policy since 1909,” retweeted a thread by a Breitbart author on 
the topic of political violence. The retweeted series of messages begins 
by saying that “political violence is always wrong” but ends with the 
message that “if we decide the tolerance level for political violence 
will not be 0.0, then all that remains is for our armies to meet in the 
streets. Violence is too powerful, too USEFUL, and too profitable to be 
ignored when it is indulged. /end”

On January 7, 2021, the trade group Pennsylvania Manufacturers retweeted 
a thread by Breitbart writer John Hayward on the topic of political 
violence.
“The only acceptable level of political violence is zero,” David Taylor, 
president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association said on 
February 12 in response to questions from DeSmog about the retweet. 
“That was the essence of the author’s message as I understood it at the 
time, which I thought was worthy of further consideration by readers.”

Pro-violence social media posts by Marc Morano, communications director 
for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, 
D.C.-based think tank, were previously reported by DeSmog. “Striking 
fear in politicians is not a bad thing,” Morano’s @ClimateDepot account 
tweeted on the afternoon of January 6 in a message describing the 
Capitol as then “under siege.” He added a quote from Thomas Jefferson 
that has been cited in support of other violent rebellions (including, 
for instance, Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh): “The tree of 
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots 
and tyrants.”

On January 20, podcaster Brian Sussman suggested that his audience 
consider arming themselves in anticipation of more political violence to 
come. He warned his listeners that Biden's inauguration would bring a 
wide arrange of calamities over the next two years in a podcast titled 
“Inauguration Day: Predictions, Final Warning and Advice.”

“Hopefully Red states will rise in defiance and challenge the new 
federal mandates,” he said as he described events he expected to happen 
under the Biden administration. “The question is how long will they be 
able to hold out. I don't know what that looks like. Are we talking 
civil war? I don't know what that looks like.”

A few minutes later, he advised his listeners: “Additionally, consider 
your Second Amendment rights while they remain intact,” referring to the 
Constitutional amendment establishing the right to bear arms. “And if 
you do, please be well-trained.”

“Worse than 9-11”
For some of those who reject mainstream climate science, the most 
ominous events linked to the Capitol insurrection seem to have been the 
moves made by tech giants to reduce the amount of disinformation and 
calls to violence that their sites publish.

Economist Robert P. Murphy has worked for the Pacific Research Institute 
and the Institute for Energy Research — two organizations that have 
received considerable funding from the fossil fuel billionaire Koch 
family — and appeared as a speaker at the Heartland Institute’s First 
International Conference on Climate Change in 2008.

On the morning of January 7, 2021, Murphy posted a reply to a tweet by 
Anang Mittal, a former “creative director” for Sen. Mitch McConnell of 
Kentucky. Murphy wrote, “The reasons yesterday's events were tragic is 
that one person was shot, and it will be used as an excuse to further 
erode people's rights. Not because the headquarters of professional 
liars and war criminals was desecrated.”

In reply to an announcement that Citibank would “pause contributions” to 
Republicans who had objected to the electoral college results, Murphy 
wrote, “Sooner rather than later, those of you saying ‘omg you 
crybabies, this is just about banning actual terrorists’ will be saying 
'alex jones was an optimist.'”

Some, including Heartland Institute co-founder Joseph Bast, Turning 
Point USA founder and Stop the Steal rally organizer Charlie Kirk, and 
Ben Pile, the UK-based co-founder of the Climate Resistance blog, 
indicated that they planned to move to social media sites associated 
with the far right, like Parler and Gab. (Although Amazon later knocked 
Parler offline after removing it from its web servers.)

One of those who decried Twitter's crackdown was Canadian Patrick Moore 
— whose Heartland Institute bio claims that he “is a co-founder” of 
Greenpeace (a claim that Greenpeace denies, adding that Moore has been 
“a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 
years.”)

The social media giant had, by January 9, ejected thousands of accounts 
linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory and other disinformation.

“@Twitter has sent > 5,000 of my Followers to the Gulag in the past 28 
days,” Moore tweeted on January 9. “It’s worse than Pearl Harbour or 9-11.”
- -
The U.S. has recently experienced a wave of so-called “mass 
radicalization” that security experts say has blurred the lines between 
what's considered mainstream and fringe on the right, a wave whose 
high-water mark to date was the January 6 insurrection.

Climate denial, a fringe view among scientists, remained remarkably 
popular on the right in the U.S. in recent years, even as most of the 
rest of the world has increasingly rejected it as unsupported by 
evidence. (Researchers have also separately linked conspiratorial 
thinking to both climate denial and to U.S. right-wing politics.)

As the mass radicalization wave surged, some individual opponents of 
climate action may have been swept along by its broad rightward push, 
propelling them closer to endorsing political violence.

On Saturday, February 13, the Senate voted to acquit Donald Trump in his 
second impeachment trial, falling 10 votes short of the 67 necessary for 
Congress to convict the now-former president of inciting the 
insurrection. Criminal and civil trials and other fallout over the 
events of January 6, however, are only just beginning.

“It’s also really important to recognize that while many people were 
emboldened by what happened on January 6, many were demoralized and 
demobilized,” Michael Jensen of the National Consortium for the Study of 
Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism told Politico recently.

Jensen cautioned that there are not a lot of recent historical 
precedents for easy or simple shifts away from mass radicalization — but 
added that he saw some hope in looking to the methods of science, with 
its insistence on demonstrable evidence and facts.

“I hope that we elevate science and evidence and fact to the position 
that it used to have,” he added, as he reflected on what could promote 
mass de-radicalization, “and that these narratives are not as prevalent, 
because it is bad for our democracy and our communities.”
https://www.desmogblog.com/2021/02/16/climate-deniers-messages-support-capitol-insurrection



[The Nation]
*How a Climate-Justice Champion Won Office in Rural, Working-Class Maine*
State Senator Chloe Maxmin, a progressive activist who unseated the GOP 
minority leader in November, talks about social-movement organizing.
By Wen StephensonTwitter - February 16, 2021
- -
WS: So you think a conversation about more ambitious climate policy can 
take place in your district, and people will listen?

CM: I do, but it might be couched in different terms or in different 
ways than we’re used to. I remember, at one point, I thought that was a 
kind of climate denial. Why are we talking about this problem without 
actually talking about it? But now I see it more as a way of actually 
getting broad-based support for really important policies. So we’re 
talking about, for example, property taxes. If we’re going to start 
regulating fossil fuel usage, will that impact school budgets? And if 
so, it’s really important that schools have access to affordable 
renewable energy options. Or we’re talking about the fact that lots of 
students are struggling with student debt, and what’s one way you can 
have an amazing career in a rural place without going into debt? You can 
go through an apprenticeship program.

There are just so many ways to talk about this, and I think we’ve been a 
little bit ideological and evangelical about the numbers and climate 
change—it just leaves a lot of people behind. As we know, it’s such a 
privileged way of talking about an issue, when people can’t feed their 
children today.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/climate-maine-elections-maxmin/



[video connections by Margaret Klein-Salomon]
*Let's break the silence.*
Share your climate terror, grief, and rage with people who understand.
Join a Climate Emotions Conversation - a small group sharing & listening 
session about the climate emergency.
  SIGN UP FOR A SESSION
https://climateawakening.org/



[article in Grist]
*Do we need more scary climate change articles? Maybe.*
Kate Yoder - Feb 16, 2021

Fires blaze across continents, seas submerge cities, deserts swallow up 
farmland — there’s no shortage of terrifying things about climate 
change. But does forcing people to confront all these horrible scenes 
(and worse, the unknowables to come) actually get people to do something 
about it? It’s become a hotly debated issue among those who care about 
climate change.

Every time a bleak, adrenaline-inducing article goes viral, the 
so-called “hope vs. fear” dispute rages on Twitter. The most recent 
conversation starter was Elizabeth Weil’s intimate profile in ProPublica 
of Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist whose death-spiraling dread was 
taking over his life — his whole family’s life, really.

With the title “The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s 
What Happens If You Try,” the piece was bound to get attention — and 
criticism. Why not highlight a more productive way to cope with the 
climate crisis? people asked. Weil seemed to anticipate this debate, 
which has remained contentious at least since David Wallace-Wells’ “The 
Uninhabitable Earth” made a splash in 2017. Near the end of the piece, 
Weil asks, “How do you describe an intolerable problem in a way that 
listeners — even you, dear reader — will truly let in?”

It’s a tough question, and experts are split over the right response. 
“Some people believe that we should emphasize the risks and generate 
fear and that many people are not scared enough yet,” said Jennifer 
Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change 
Communication. “And then other people think we really need to just focus 
on solutions.”

The debate is about more than just rhetoric; it’s about how people 
should feel about climate change. “When we’re specifically trying to 
promote action on climate, we know that one of the best ways to do that 
is to emotionally engage people in it,” Marlon said. The problem is, 
reading lots of scary articles might make one person take to the streets 
in protest, but lead someone else to disengage and shut down. There are 
an infinite variety of ways to respond to and talk about the climate crisis.

Studies have come to wildly different conclusions. One paper will 
proclaim that “Fear Won’t Do It” for motivating action on climate 
change; another will say the exact opposite. The research about hope is 
similarly mixed. Some studies have suggested that optimistic messages 
could prod people to behave in more climate-friendly ways and increase 
support for climate policies, but others found that hopeful appeals 
actually lowered people’s motivation to reduce emissions.

“It’s really cut down the middle,” said Joshua Ettinger, a PhD student 
studying public support for climate action at the University of Oxford. 
“You have study after study finding conflicting results.”

Ettinger’s new research, published in the journal Climatic Change, 
suggests that the whole “hope vs. fear” argument might be overblown. For 
the experiment, 500 Americans were shown different videos meant to evoke 
either hopeful or fearful reactions to climate change. (One group got a 
message along the lines of “Humanity can stop climate change and create 
a better world for all!”; the others heard, “Unless we take major 
action, humanity is doomed.”) While both videos evoked the intended 
emotions, in the end, neither one altered people’s willingness to change 
their behavior or participate in climate activism.

“We’re so caught up in how a single message captures the narrative,” 
Ettinger said, but “we shouldn’t necessarily assume that a single piece 
of content is going to dramatically influence people.”

Americans are not a monolithic mass; they respond to global warming with 
alarm, concern, caution, denial, and everything in between, sometimes 
all in the same day. A 2017 article argued against making broad, 
simplistic assertions about how specific emotions will change people’s 
response to the climate crisis. Emotions are powerful, but they’re not 
“simple levers to be pulled,” the authors argued. Still, Marlon said, 
there are patterns in how people respond.

Some research suggests that while fear can prompt us to spring into 
action, hope actually gives us something to do. In other words, alarming 
and optimistic messages could simply be two sides of the same coin.

Margaret Klein Salamon, the founder of The Climate Mobilization, argues 
that “telling the whole, frightening truth” is a powerful asset for the 
climate movement that could unlock “tremendous potential for 
transformation” — provided that it’s paired with an ambitious, heroic 
solution. Her organization calls for “an all-hands-on-deck effort to 
eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and safely draw down excess carbon 
from the atmosphere at emergency speed.”

This attitude is reflected in different ways across the spectrum of 
activist groups: While Extinction Rebellion focuses on doom, groups like 
the Sunrise Movement, inspired by the Green New Deal, emphasize an 
optimistic narrative about jobs and justice. What they share is a 
driving sense of urgency.

Salamon sees fear as a useful tool, an innate, protective mechanism that 
demands a response. The terror you feel when someone yells “snake!” 
shakes you out of complacency and primes you to spring into action … 
even if that action is simply running away.

“I don’t see how we could possibly achieve the scale of transformation 
we need if there’s not a shared national understanding that this is an 
existential threat, that this is a terrible danger,” Salamon said. “If 
people don’t think that, why would they change their lives? Why would 
they be part of a political movement? It’s always struck me as kind of 
an odd position, that somehow we can accomplish huge-scale change but 
without ever really telling the public the truth.”

Too much doom and gloom, however, can backfire, leading people to deny 
threats and ignore distressing facts. People are rightfully concerned 
about exaggeration and “the kind of doomism that says there’s nothing we 
can do to stop climate change,” Ettinger said. According to a recent 
survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 14 percent 
of Americans think it’s too late to do anything about climate change 
(for the record, it isn’t).

A number of studies suggest that fear-based messages are persuasive and 
can change people’s behavior, particularly when they’re paired with 
messages that empower people to take action rather than wallow in 
misery. Marlon has found that what gives people hope around climate 
change is seeing others take action. That could be a neighbor putting up 
solar panels, a friend talking about climate change, or Swedish activist 
Greta Thunberg skipping school in protest of government inaction.

One recent study found that people who had heard of Thunberg said they 
were more likely to participate in activism, a phenomenon called the 
“Greta effect.” “You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come,” 
Thunberg told European leaders in 2019. “Then you are acting like 
spoiled irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope 
is something that you have to earn.”

Despite all the debate over hope and fear, the mix of messages people 
are hearing about the climate crisis seems to be resonating with a 
growing share of the public.

Watching a single video or reading a single article isn’t likely to have 
a lasting effect on people, Marlon said, but “the slow and steady drip, 
drip, drip of messages” is, along with people seeing change with their 
own eyes. Today, more than a quarter of Americans are alarmed about the 
climate crisis, twice as high as it was five years ago. “The messaging 
is working,” Marlon said. “And there are lots of emotions mixed up in 
there, but we’re going in the right direction.”
https://grist.org/climate/do-we-need-more-scary-climate-change-articles-maybe/



[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - February 17, 1993 *

In an address to a joint session of Congress, President Clinton, noting 
the "challenges to the health of our global environment," declares, "Our 
plan does include a broad-based tax on energy, and I want to tell you 
why I selected this and why I think it's a good idea. I recommend that 
we adopt a BTU tax on the heat content of energy as the best way to 
provide us with revenue to lower the deficit because it also combats 
pollution, promotes energy efficiency, promotes the independence, 
economically, of this country as well as helping to reduce the debt, and 
because it does not discriminate against any area. Unlike a carbon tax, 
that's not too hard on the coal States; unlike a gas tax, that's not too 
tough on people who drive a long way to work; unlike an ad valorem tax, 
it doesn't increase just when the price of an energy source goes up. And 
it is environmentally responsible. It will help us in the future as well 
as in the present with the deficit."

(The effort to implement the BTU tax would ultimately fail, thanks to 
aggressive attacks on the concept by fossil-fuel-industry front groups 
such as the Koch Industries-funded Citizens for a Sound Ecnomy, the 
forerunner to Americans for Prosperity.)

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=840MahAgJh0


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