[TheClimate.Vote] February 21, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Sun Feb 21 16:18:03 EST 2021

/*February 21, 2021*/

[future concerns]
*Texas Blackouts Point to Coast-to-Coast Crises Waiting to Happen*
Continent-spanning storms triggered blackouts in Oklahoma and 
Mississippi, halted one-third of U.S. oil production and disrupted 
vaccinations in 20 states...
- -
Heightening the cost to society, disruptions can disproportionately 
affect lower-income households and other vulnerable groups, including 
older people or those with limited English.

“All these issues are converging,” said Robert D. Bullard, a professor 
at Texas Southern University who studies wealth and racial disparities 
related to the environment. “And there’s simply no place in this country 
that’s not going to have to deal with climate change.”...
- -
“We should be evaluating whether these facilities or sites actually have 
to be moved or re-secured,” said Lisa Evans, senior counsel at 
Earthjustice, an environmental law organization. Places that “may have 
been OK in 1990,” she said, “may be a disaster waiting to happen in 
2021.”...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/climate/united-states-infrastructure-storms.html 

[The big question]
*Therapy for the End of the World*
Anxiety over the climate crisis is spreading like wildfire. 
Psychologists are just starting to figure out how to help
BY BRITT WRAY - Feb. 10, 2021
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2019, the category five storm Hurricane Dorian slammed 
into the Bahamas with gusts of 354 kilometres per hour and storm surges 
of over six metres. Instead of sweeping up what it could before steadily 
moving on, Dorian was patient, pummelling the islands for over forty 
hours straight. More than 70,000 people were displaced and 13,000 homes 
destroyed. On land, as the morgues filled up, bodies were piled high in 
refrigerated containers. Search-and-rescue dogs sniffed out corpses from 
under the debris; many were buried too deep for anyone to reach. Though 
the official death toll was seventy-four, some—including the Bahamas 
health minister at the time—believe the real number is much, much higher.
Bethuel Nyachienga is a mental health expert who has provided 
psychosocial support to more than 4,000 Hurricane Dorian survivors since 
September 2019. Nyachienga says the most common effects that survivors 
of catastrophes like this one report are insomnia, depression, and 
feeling retraumatized every time the wind is strong. What’s clearer from 
observation is the excessive drinking and drug consumption that many 
survivors don’t want to talk about. A 2017 report from the American 
Psychological Association (APA) titled Mental Health and Our Changing 
Climate details this kind of fallout, describing how PTSD, suicidality, 
depression, compounded stress, domestic abuse, child abuse, and 
substance abuse often spike after climate-linked calamities.

Even far away from these disasters, psychologists are now finding, just 
knowing about the severity of our climate predicament can take its own 
kind of toll. In recent years, the climate and wider ecological crisis 
has led to an explosion of what has been termed eco-anxiety, which the 
APA defines as the “chronic fear of environmental doom.” It is born of 
the barrage of increasingly worse environmental news combined with the 
knowledge that actions taken so far to address the problem have been 
ineffective or insufficient, and it destroys people’s capacity to feel 
safe in the world. The stress of worrying about the future of the 
biosphere, the species, one’s community, and one’s life, as well as 
already occurring environmental disasters, can look more like cycling 
through grief, fear, shame, guilt, resignation, despair, and nihilism 
than just anxiety...
-
Stress levels are on the rise, and young people, who feel betrayed by 
older generations that aren’t cleaning up their own mess, are the most 
susceptible. As one young climate striker’s sign put it: “We won’t die 
from old age. We’ll die from climate change.” Another’s asked: “Why 
Should I Study For a Future I Won’t Have?”...
- -
“I’ve been seeing teens who [felt] suicidal because the pain and 
distress . . . from the coronavirus is finally starting to mirror how 
they’ve been feeling about climate change for a long time, and they’re 
wondering, Why on earth can’t people recognize the scale of the threat 
in the longer term?” says Caroline Hickman, a British clinical 
psychotherapist...
- -
The field is emerging, and the evidence base is not yet firmly 
established for which approaches work best to help people manage their 
environmentally linked distress. That’s partly because eco-anxiety is 
not a pathology. You won’t find it listed as a condition in the 
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and climate-aware 
therapists aren’t rushing to include it. “What you don’t want is for 
people to first and foremost think their eco-anxiety is in itself a 
problem,” Hickman says. It is a natural response to a real and unfolding 
threat, so the only label it deserves is “reasonable.” After all, what’s 
more daunting than realizing we’re all stuck on a cooking rock and have 
wasted the bulwark of precious time we had to cool it off before 
everything changes irreversibly? She typically tells her eco-anxious 
clients that their feelings are “a sign that you’re waking up; there’s 
nothing wrong with you. Welcome to a community that can share and mirror 
your concerns.”...
- -
What traps people in eco-anxiety, Hickman says, is not their difficult 
feelings themselves but the feelings they have about their difficult 
feelings. Often, we resist these feelings because we fear they’ll ruin 
our lives if we give them space. But it is this resistance to feelings 
we’ve been raised to think are negative, like vulnerability and grief, 
that make them frightening. A biomedical approach to therapy would file 
such hopelessness under depression and try to treat it with a pill. But 
several climate-aware therapists use mindfulness as a strategy to help 
their clients bear those painfully barren thoughts and feelings. The key 
lies in embracing complex emotions, Hickman says. This is another 
important aspect of addressing eco-anxiety, Davenport says: after you 
validate the legitimacy of the feelings, you learn not to banish them 
but to live with and, ideally, channel them....
- -
Hogan is Australian. The record-breaking bushfires of the 2019/20 
summer, which burned more than 20 percent of Australia’s forests, marked 
the first time she grieved the loss of a part of her culture along with 
a part of herself. The fires forced her to look at the more than 3 
billion animals that were harmed or killed, and her friends who lost 
their homes, and think, “Okay, I really get that we are fighting for our 
lives; this is do or die.”

What Hogan finds hardest is accepting that all the action in the world 
may not be enough to save humanity and so many other species. Instead of 
advising her to banish that upsetting thought from her consciousness, 
climate-aware therapist Hickman (who has also served as a bit of a 
mentor) has helped her tap into it in order to keep going without 
expectation of what fruits her efforts will bear. Hogan will continue 
with her coaching work regardless of the outcomes. “Now that I’ve gone 
to the dark place of grief I was afraid of and come out the other side, 
I see I’m okay,” she says, “and it makes me feel more authentic in my 
hope for the future.” 

https://thewalrus.ca/therapy-for-the-end-of-the-world/

- -

[video by author Britt Wray]

*Why Emotionally Intelligent Climate Work Matters*
Oct 15, 2020
Project InsideOut
50 subscribers
In the closing remarks of our Summit, Dr. Britt Wray explains why 
emotional intelligence is essential for the survival of our planet. 
Visit https://projectinsideout.net/ - for more information.
- -
[How to handle it all]
*Project InsideOut* A new world is emerging.
As individuals, organizations, and changemakers, we have committed 
ourselves to transformational change. However, our work is often caught 
in a cycle between hope and despair, action and inaction, connection and 
disconnection. To break that cycle, we need to find a new way.
A way of leading while the world wakes up.
We face a pivot point.
As a global community, we navigate climate and environmental crises 
together—enormous changes that require us all to level up.
It’s up to each of us how we respond. Will we default to our usual 
strategies, or will we choose differently?
Guiding Principles

    Attune: Understand your people.
    Reveal: This is hard stuff. That’s OK.
    Convene: Less talking at. More talking with.
    Sustain: Go beyond the pledge.

Download the Guide 
https://projectinsideout.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Be-a-Guide.pdf
https://projectinsideout.net/

[Scientist warning on CNBC]
*U.S. must go ‘well beyond Paris commitments’ to avert catastrophic 
global warming, warns scientist*
- The U.S. officially rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change.
- “We have to ratchet up the commitments now if we are to stay on course 
to averting a catastrophic three degree Fahrenheit warming,” said 
scientist Michael Mann.
- “The world has moved on from American leadership on climate and will 
be skeptical of our commitment to stay engaged,” said Joel Rubin, a 
former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama-Biden 
Administration.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/19/us-must-go-well-beyond-paris-commitments-to-avert-global-warming.html

[Meanwhile, why do we attack ourselves?]
*Climate Deniers Backed Violence and Spread Pro-Insurrection Messages 
Before, During, and After January 6*
By Sharon Kelly • Tuesday, 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.”...
- -
Several prominent opponents of climate action also circulated false or 
unsupported claims about the 2020 elections before or after January 6.

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.”...
- -
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.”...
- -
A “Mass Radicalization” Wave on the Right
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....
https://www.desmogblog.com/2021/02/16/climate-deniers-messages-support-capitol-insurrection

[Inside Climate News - economic]
*How Much Does Climate Change Cost? Biden Expected to Raise Carbon’s 
Dollar Value*
The administration is expected to temporarily increase the “social cost” 
of carbon, at least to the level set by Obama, but climate-concerned 
economists say that's not high enough.
By Marianne Lavelle
February 19, 2021
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19022021/carbon-cost-biden-climate-change/

[Digging back into the internet news archive]

*On this day in the history of global warming - February 21, 2012 *
February 21, 2012: Conservative blogger Steven L. Taylor calls out GOP 
presidential candidate Rick Santorum for his repeated denials of climate 
change:

    "[C]onservatives ultimately see any attempt at environment
    regulation as really not about the environment anyway, but about an
    excuse for increased government control.  Not only does this pay
    into general concerns about 'big government' but this strand of the
    argument asserts that all this researchy/sciencey talk is just a
    ruse:  those guys aren’t really scientists interested in
    understanding the environment.  No!  They are Marxists in lab coats
    looking to fool you all into socialism!

    "Now, understand:  I do not consider myself an expert on climate
    change.  I do not even have especially strong views on the subject,
    although I do accept the rather overwhelming scientific consensus
    that we have a climate change problem.  What this means in terms of
    policy is another issue. However, I find it problematic when
    politicians hand-wave over serious issues [due to] some inherent
    belief that they understand topics that would otherwise require a
    lifetime of study to understand...Further, while I understand
    concerns over taxes and regulations, that doesn’t make issues like
    pollution go away.

    "In short:  if one is going to make arguments on this topic (and
    seek to influence policy in this arena) I would like to see more
    than appeals to the Biblical creation story and fear mongering about
    government control."

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/santorum-and-climate-change-theology/

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