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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>February 17, 2021</b></font></i></p>
[girding the grid - on the NYT]<br>
<b>A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for
Power Grids</b><br>
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.<br>
Feb. 16, 2021<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
A System Pushed to the Limit<br>
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.<br>
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...<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
John Schwartz, Dave Montgomery and Ivan Penn contributed reporting.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/climate/texas-power-grid-failures.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/climate/texas-power-grid-failures.html</a><br>
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</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[ Maps and data]<br>
<b>Climate Reanalyzer</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2">https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2</a><br>
- - <br>
<b>Earth Null School</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-94.30,41.12,397">https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-94.30,41.12,397</a><br>
- -<br>
<b>WonderMap</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.wunderground.com/wundermap">https://www.wunderground.com/wundermap</a><br>
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[Cold video]<br>
<b>Brutal Cold Rocks United States from Coast to Coast to Coast due
to our destabilized Climate System</b><br>
Feb 16, 2021<br>
Paul Beckwith<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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). <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeYZOVu0uUU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeYZOVu0uUU</a><br>
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[Jacobin]<br>
<b>Joe Biden’s Climate Policies Are a Step Back From “Death Wish.”
But We Need More Than That.</b><br>
AN INTERVIEW WITH KATE ARONOFF<br>
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.<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
<b>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?</b><br>
<br>
KA<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/joe-biden-climate-change-fossil-fuels">https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/joe-biden-climate-change-fossil-fuels</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[set history straight]<br>
<b>Climate Deniers Backed Violence and Spread Pro-Insurrection
Messages Before, During, and After January 6</b><br>
By Sharon Kelly - February 16, 2021<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
Blankenship was also hardly alone among white-collar climate science
deniers in expressing support for the January 6 insurrection at the
U.S. Capitol.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“Be a Shame if They Misplaced Him”<br>
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.'”<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
“People laugh when you say ‘Deep State,’” he added. “No, it's real.
There's something going on here.”<br>
<br>
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).<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Writing in response to a tweet that read “CSPAN (via HuffPost)
reports that Nancy Pelosi is safe,” Briggs commented, “Win some and
lose some.”<br>
- -<br>
Briggs, whose Twitter bio indicates that all of his tweets “DIE FROM
CORONAVIRUS AFTER 7 DAYS,” has since removed those messages from
Twitter.<br>
<br>
As of press time, the Heartland Institute had not responded to
questions from DeSmog.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
January 5 retweet by Logomasini.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
As of press time, Logomasini had not responded to questions from
DeSmog about the posts.<br>
<br>
Others in DeSmog’s database circulated false or incendiary claims
about election fraud, both before and after Joe Biden's
inauguration.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
Violence “Too Profitable to be Ignored”<br>
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”<br>
<br>
On January 7, 2021, the trade group Pennsylvania Manufacturers
retweeted a thread by Breitbart writer John Hayward on the topic of
political violence.<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
“Worse than 9-11”<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.'”<br>
<br>
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.)<br>
<br>
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.”)<br>
<br>
The social media giant had, by January 9, ejected thousands of
accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory and other
disinformation.<br>
<br>
“@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.”<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.)<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2021/02/16/climate-deniers-messages-support-capitol-insurrection">https://www.desmogblog.com/2021/02/16/climate-deniers-messages-support-capitol-insurrection</a><br>
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[The Nation]<br>
<b>How a Climate-Justice Champion Won Office in Rural, Working-Class
Maine</b><br>
State Senator Chloe Maxmin, a progressive activist who unseated the
GOP minority leader in November, talks about social-movement
organizing.<br>
By Wen StephensonTwitter - February 16, 2021<br>
- -<br>
WS: So you think a conversation about more ambitious climate policy
can take place in your district, and people will listen?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/climate-maine-elections-maxmin/">https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/climate-maine-elections-maxmin/</a><br>
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[video connections by Margaret Klein-Salomon]<br>
<b>Let's break the silence.</b><br>
Share your climate terror, grief, and rage with people who
understand.<br>
Join a Climate Emotions Conversation - a small group sharing &
listening session about the climate emergency.<br>
SIGN UP FOR A SESSION<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://climateawakening.org/">https://climateawakening.org/</a><br>
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[article in Grist]<br>
<b>Do we need more scary climate change articles? Maybe.</b><br>
Kate Yoder - Feb 16, 2021<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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?”<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://grist.org/climate/do-we-need-more-scary-climate-change-articles-maybe/">https://grist.org/climate/do-we-need-more-scary-climate-change-articles-maybe/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
February 17, 1993 </b></font><br>
<p>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."<br>
<br>
(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.)<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=840MahAgJh0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=840MahAgJh0</a> <br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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