[✔️] March 21, 2024 Global Warming News | Ease anxiety, Light sarcasm cartoon, Battery prices fall, Opera for climate, Ballet Shell Trial, 2007 Couric and Gore

[Richard Pauli]

/*March*//*21, 2024*/

/[  Seek relief via the Internet ]/
*Can Climate Cafes Help Ease the Anxiety of Planetary Crisis?*
The groups, which are springing up across the country, allow people to 
talk through their emotions around environmental change.
By Lola Fadulu and Emily Schmall
Lola Fadulu reported from New York, and Emily Schmall from Chicago.
March 20, 2024
In a small room in Lower Manhattan, a group of eight New Yorkers sat in 
a circle sharing kombucha and their climate fears against the background 
of pattering rain and wailing sirens.

In Champaign, Ill., a psychotherapist facilitating a meeting for other 
therapists held up a branch of goldenrod, asking the half-dozen 
participants online to consider their connection to nature.

And in Kansas City, Mo., a nonprofit that runs a weekly discussion on 
Zoom began its session with a spiritual reading and a guided meditation 
before breaking into groups to discuss topics like the ethics of 
childbearing amid a fast-rising global population and concerns of 
resource scarcity.

All were examples of a new grass-roots movement called climate cafes. 
These in-person and online groups are places for people to discuss their 
grief, fears, anxiety and other emotions about the climate crisis.
They are springing up in cities across the United States — including Los 
Angeles, Seattle and Boston — and around the world. It isn’t clear how 
many exist, but Rebecca Nestor of the Climate Psychology Alliance, a 
nonprofit that trains facilitators, said the number of cafes had greatly 
increased in the past three years. The group has trained about 350 
people to run climate cafes in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and its 
North American branch lists 300 clinicians in its climate-aware 
therapist directory.

The alliance examines how mental health is affected by ecosystems — 
extreme weather and disasters; tainted air and water — and how that 
intersects with other forces, like racism and income inequality. 
Psychologists say that such groups help people face the unsettling 
realities of the climate crisis.

Ms. Nestor first hosted a climate cafe in Oxford in Britain in 2018. She 
said the idea was modeled after the death cafe, a concept created by a 
Swiss sociologist, through which people gather to talk openly about 
death in order to better appreciate their lives.

Many of the climate cafes are free and open to the public, but some have 
been convened especially for librarians, therapists and other professionals.

*‘I can’t buy into the narrative anymore that there’s no choice in how 
this ends.’*
Since June 2023, Olivia Ferraro, 24, who works in finance, has hosted 
more than 20 intimate climate cafes in New York City that have had 
between five and 20 attendees. She has also trained people online from 
all over the U.S. and the world — Puerto Rico, Vancouver, England and 
Australia — who want to facilitate such meetings in their own communities.

On a recent drizzly, unseasonably warm January evening — the temperature 
was 51 degrees and the high was 56 degrees — Ms. Ferraro prepped for her 
meeting. She lit her Brooklyn Candle Company Fern + Moss candle, which 
she has lit for every meeting, and turned on Khruangbin’s chill melodies.
She arranged 10 chairs into a circle near a brick wall, and set out 
grapes, sparkling water, plantain chips and other snacks on a table, and 
brought out reusable cups from her mother’s 2016 wedding.

Slowly, people from every part of the city trickled in. The crowd skewed 
young, with a few older adults in the mix. Each was attending a climate 
cafe for the first time.

After some small talk, Ms. Ferraro shared the rules for the evening. She 
explained that it was not intended as a substitute for clinical care.
The attendees, over the course of an hour, described worrying for their 
future children and future generations more broadly. They described 
feeling overwhelmed, not only by climate change but also by the 
political climate. They described oscillating between feeling hopeless 
and empowered about the planet’s future.

At times, long pauses punctuated the comments, as the attendees took in 
what had been said, staring simply at each other or into their laps.

“I can’t buy into the narrative anymore that there’s no choice in how 
this ends and that major corporations have complete control over my 
future,” said Sheila McMenamin, 32, who lives in Brooklyn.

“They do not have total control, and I refuse to cede that,” she said, 
as other participants hummed in agreement.

One Black woman wept, saying it was difficult to know that people of 
color would be disproportionately affected by climate change, but many 
did not have the time to participate in groups like these.

“I’m enraged about the fact that more Black and brown people are not in 
these rooms,” said the woman, Syrah Scott, a mother in her 40s who lives 
in Queens. She said that many people of color were just focused on 
survival. “They don’t have the money to be concerned about these 
things,” she said.

*‘I find myself struggling to enjoy the outdoors.’*
The online climate cafe for therapists in Illinois began with Kate Mauer 
rubbing the dried stalk of goldenrod in her hand that she had plucked 
from her backyard. The object connected her to the climate crisis, she 
said, because it was one of the many flowers native to Illinois that she 
had planted in an effort to restore the natural environment.

But being in her garden had begun to trigger complex emotions, she said. 
While nature had always given her solace, it now also made her sad.

“I find myself struggling to enjoy the outdoors because of the constant 
reminders” of environmental degradation, she said.

That paradox reminded Lauren Bondy, a cafe participant, of that 
morning’s fresh snow, and of a black rhino. Ms. Bondy and her son, then 
19, had glimpsed one of the last of the critically endangered species on 
vacation in Tanzania years ago.
“Appreciating the beauty of it, but also appreciating the rarity and the 
loss,” said Ms. Bondy, a therapist on Chicago’s North Shore. “We’re 
holding it all.”

This wasn’t psychotherapy, the climate cafe’s facilitators had said, but 
rather group catharsis.

Colleen Aziz, a therapist who runs a virtual practice across Illinois, 
said that she felt a responsibility to bring her professional training 
to bear, but that few patients brought climate concerns to their sessions.

“It’s really wonderful to meet clients who are stable enough that 
they’re ready and able to look directly at climate,” Ms. Aziz said after 
the cafe, “but it usually amounts to privilege.”

*‘It’s an intergenerational fight.’*
Other groups have more of a focus on action.

Around the same time Ms. Ferraro’s group sprang up, Jonathan Kirsch, 32, 
who works in law and lives in Brooklyn, founded his climate cafe in 
November 2022. His group started as a private, informal gathering in his 
apartment but is now open to the public, and the group is more focused 
on translating feelings into action.
On another recent rainy day in January, more than 30 people crammed into 
Mr. Kirsch’s apartment in Brooklyn for a climate cafe. The doorbell rang 
almost without interruption as people slogged up the stairs to the 
apartment and peeled off their wet coats and piled up their umbrellas.

Many at the meeting worked in climate fields, including one man who 
worked with Extinction Rebellion, the group that disrupted both the U.S. 
Open and the Met Opera in an attempt to shed more light on the climate 
crisis.

The attendees broke into small groups. Though they were frustrated by 
local, state and national policies, they felt hopeful. They were flush 
with ideas on how to channel their energy: composting, gardening, 
propagating, clothing swaps and mending circles, pushing for certain 
legislation, joining book clubs and writing groups, and even going back 
to school to further their education.

“The truth is that like this is such a long fight, it’s an 
intergenerational fight,” one attendee told the large group after the 
smaller discussion groups reconvened. “We have to come with a resilient 
mind-set, where we’re ready to lose a lot of battles and just know that 
our presence in the greatest struggle will be worth it.”

Do climate cafes work?
Convening to share climate worries isn’t new. Environmental activists 
have organized meetings since the 1970s to discuss how to respond to 
climate threats. Native American communities have long gathered to 
grieve the loss of land, according to Sherrie Bedonie, a social worker 
and co-founder of the Native American Counseling and Healing Collective.

But it seems the practice is becoming more mainstream. Last year was the 
hottest year ever recorded, and 2024 is expected to be warmer. Canada 
was ravaged by destructive fires in 2023 because of hot, dry, and windy 
conditions fueled by climate change, and the smoke from those fires 
brought hazy conditions to New York and other regions. Climate change 
already appears to have contributed to less snow this winter.
Participants have said that gathering to talk openly about their fears 
provides a kind of lightness.

Sami Aaron, 71, a retired software developer, founded the Resilient 
Activist in Kansas City after her son, a climate activist and urban 
studies graduate student at Berkeley, died by suicide, citing feelings 
of hopelessness over the changing climate.

Her group’s cafes try to instill hope, she said.

“The dread, the hopelessness is getting exiled in all of us, and that’s 
why we’re not talking about it, because it’s too painful,” Ms. Bondy 
said. “If we can’t heal what we’re all feeling,” she added, “we can’t 
heal our planet either.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 
Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for 
a list of additional resources.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/climate/climate-change-anxiety-fear.html



[ Light sarcasm ]
*Ella Baron on Banksy, Rishi Sunak and restrictions on climate protest – 
cartoon*
Tue 19 Mar 2024
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/edeb813afdbbf33a7a4826e12f404edcad8775da/5_0_8555_5134/master/8555.jpg?width=1900&dpr=2&s=none 




/[   A very positive PR video -- techno fides ]/
*Battery prices just fell off a cliff!*
Just Have a Think
  Mar 17, 2024
Lithium-ion batteries often get a bad rap in the media these days, 
blamed for high cost, unwanted fires and poor working conditions in the 
supply chain. But the fact remains that this chemistry provides the 
power for billions of devices around the world, from the tiniest 
pacemakers to the largest utility scale stationary energy storage, and 
the manufacturers are making great strides to improve their systems. So 
can they do enough to stay at the top of the pile?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cbm9Cz6OdQ



/[ NYT  - now opera is the new medium  ]/
*Review: ‘The Shell Trial’ Seeks a Guilty Party in Climate Change*
Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s new opera, about events still in 
progress, finds fault and complicity in every player of a global blame game.
By Joshua Barone
Reporting from Amsterdam
March 18, 2024
*The Shell Trial*
The climate activist was tired. Protests at the house of Shell’s chief 
executive had led to little more than free cookies and the police being 
called to break things up. The same thing had happened the week before. 
And the week before that. And the week before that...
- -
Finding new ways to make old points, and powerfully laying out a vision 
for a future in which the world changes but we do not, “The Shell Trial” 
has much to admire. Remarkable, too, is the effort of the Dutch National 
Opera, which has taken a major step toward operating as a carbon-neutral 
house with this staging and its Green Deal, an initiative to weave 
sustainability into its productions, limit travel and calculate ways to 
offset its carbon footprint.
Opera in the past century has become globalized in a way that, 
unsurprisingly, has made it a target of activists. The Dutch National 
Opera, like the creators of “The Shell Trial,” views climate change as 
an ethical issue as well as a political one. And as the company does its 
part to help, the wider industry should take note...
- -
Reid is at her best when she conjures consumerism and online shopping by 
turning thoughts and the sight of ads into a fractured, manic ostinato, 
repeating a cycle of desire and commerce. Similarly, “Doom Scroll” 
passages unfurl so quickly and chaotically that the busy orchestra 
flattens, brilliantly, into a kind of white noise.
While the score may be uneven, what seems more important is its 
effectiveness. And it achieves that in its haunting final scene. A 
chorus of singing children process from the back of the auditorium, 
arriving at a sadly beautiful lament as they step onstage.

That alone could induce a pang of guilt, but then they begin to resemble 
the adults from earlier. And when they yell words like “deny,” it’s 
inherently more unsettling, and moving. More disturbing still is the 
closing tableau, as the children become a vision of the future. The 
C.E.O. is now played by a girl who may look different from the white, 
adult male executive, but who behaves exactly like him.

The score ends on a silent measure and with these directions: “Before we 
reach any conclusion, the light goes out. The future is uncertain. And 
that’s hopeful. For now.” But on Saturday, the children gathered at the 
front of the stage and lay down in sleeping bags, like a new generation 
of climate refugees. There were not enough sleeping bags to go around, 
though, and the future C.E.O. had the last one. She held it high while a 
little girl repeatedly jumped and failed to grab it.

By then, I had stopped paying attention to the music.

The Shell Trial
Through March 21 at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam; operaballet.nl.

Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the 
Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/arts/music/shell-trial-dutch-national-opera-review.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/arts/music/shell-trial-dutch-national-opera-review.html?unlocked_article_code=1.eE0.vi2H.0q8XQBkIy7Rn&smid=url-share

- -


/[  World Premier National Opera and Ballet ]/
*THE SHELL TRIAL*
Ellen Reid (1983)
A crisis of responsibility
In 2021, a Dutch court ruled that Shell was legally responsible for its 
contribution to climate change. In The Shell Trial, the various voices 
in the climate debate are heard and it becomes increasingly clear that 
we will not make any progress by endlessly pointing the finger at one 
another. The message of this topical opera is that the climate crisis is 
above all a crisis of responsibility.

*Opera Forward Festival*
Inspiring, challenging and innovative. Immerse yourself in the 8th 
edition of the Opera Forward Festival (OFF) from 8 to 17 March. With 
musical performances by both established names and a new generation of 
creatives, OFF embraces innovation and ventures into uncharted territory 
with inventive and pioneering music theatre shows. Discover The Shell 
Trial and more at OFF!

Based on the prizewinning play "De zaak Shell"
https://www.operaballet.nl/en/dutch-national-opera/2023-2024/shell-trial/
/


/[The news archive -  Katie Couric on Al Gore ]/
/*March 21, 2007 */
March 21, 2007:
In her CBSNews.com "Notebook" segment, Katie Couric observes:

"The last time Al Gore came to Capitol Hill--six years ago--he was there 
to certify the electoral college results that made George Bush president.

"But today it was a triumphant return, this time as a private citizen, 
to declare that the world faces a 'planetary emergency' over climate 
change. And now, a lot of his skeptics agree that Gore makes a powerful 
point.

"The scientific consensus is clear, and Gore urged Congress to listen to 
scientists, not special interests. He pushed for an immediate freeze on 
greenhouse gases, as well as cleaner power plants, more efficient cars, 
and stronger conservation efforts.

"Gore said 'a few years from now...the kinds of proposals we're talking 
about today are going to seem so small compared to the scale of the 
challenge.'

"Here's hoping Congress puts partisanship aside, and comes together to 
act boldly on global warming."

http://youtu.be/sYpj2ZYfS3M


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