Climate and Energy

[Chip]

Coal CEOs are running out of excuses

Coal barons claiming poverty to avoid accountability simply does not match the reality they are sharing with their wealthiest stockholders.

OPINION

Lynne Huskinson
July 19, 2023

The contrast between those who work and live in coal country and those who profit the most off the coal industry is staggering. In coal communities from the Powder River Basin to Navajo Nation to Central Appalachia, we have lands, water and people — like many of my former colleagues in the mines — scarred by decades of extraction methods that put profits before everything else. On the other hand, in the corner offices of the coal industry’s headquarters, we have millionaire coal CEOs who often don’t even live in our communities, backed by armies of lobbyists and accountants paid to protect them from accountability.

So many in our coal communities have fought for years to secure changes that could protect our health, our safety and our environment only to be met with fierce opposition and blatant mistruths by coal industry CEOs. We’ve heard it over and over again — whenever coal barons are asked to invest in miner safety, restoring mine lands they abandoned or in cleaning up their own pollution, they claim poverty. They say they simply don’t have the resources, arguing that actions that would require them to protect their workers from toxic coal dust or to clean up dangerous and hazardous old mines would cost them so much revenue they’d have to close up shop and lay off miners.

But the rhetoric coal barons use to avoid accountability simply does not match the reality they are sharing with their wealthiest stockholders. Rather than scrounging for pennies, the coal industry’s own earnings statements show coal CEOs are rewarding Wall Street investors with huge share buybacks, paying top dollar for stocks while leaving miners and coal communities in the dark. Over the last year and a half, seven publicly traded coal companies repurchased more than $1 billion of their own stock from Wall Street investors, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Why is that significant? Analysts from S&P Global note that companies usually buy back shares when the cash “is not needed to fund operations or new capital projects.” To tell miners and mining communities that $1 billion isn’t needed is a slap in the face. It is clear evidence that these coal CEOs thought it was more important to reward Wall Street than to invest in mine safety or cleaning up the drinking water they’ve polluted.

Think of what this money could have done if invested in curbing the toxic coal and silica dust that miners are breathing in now, or in preventing landslides and erosion caused by countless abandoned mines across the country. Lives could be saved and communities would be protected. This wouldn’t be charity, either — it would be coal CEOs simply paying for the damage they have caused. Instead, a handful of wealthy shareholders will be rewarded while the rest of us pay the price.

This isn’t just an insult — it undermines the arguments that coal CEOs use every time they’re put under pressure. The same pattern of deception is happening right now everywhere there is a push to hold coal CEOs accountable for their actions. Think of the countless times coal CEOs tell politicians they can’t afford to abide by common-sense safety proposals or they strategically declare bankruptcy to shed their obligations to their workers. The fallout from Blackjewel’s collapse in Wyoming is only one recent example. Meanwhile, they’ve pocketed enough cash that they can fork over $1 billion to Wall Street. These coal barons should be laughed out of Congress and our state capitals for making such outlandish claims, and met with strong standards to protect miners and coal communities. Instead, they get a free pass.

Miners and former miners like me are used to getting the runaround from coal bosses. The same companies constantly claiming they care about our safety didn’t even offer trainings about black lung safety, claiming we couldn’t get it where I worked in the Powder River Basin. Now, research shows that those working in surface mines out West are falling ill with black lung just like so many of our colleagues in Central Appalachia.

It’s time to break this vicious cycle. These new share buybacks clearly show where the coal barons’ priorities truly are, and — to nobody’s surprise — it’s their own profits. Congress, our state elected officials, and the public should never forget this reality. These companies are claiming poverty while skimming a billion dollars in profits at the expense of future clean up, miners’ health, and community safety.

The policymakers who consistently say they support coal miners must fight back on our behalf.

Congress and state officials should keep this in mind every time they hear another sad story from a coal company trying to wriggle out of its obligations. They’ve already made their choice to do what is best for their bottom lines — now, it’s time for our elected officials to make the choice that is best for the people.

https://wyofile.com/coal-ceos-are-ru...ut-of-excuses/

[TSherbs]

I get so overwhelmed emotionally by these stories. This is entirely how the system is rigged. It seems impossible to change, other than via massive class-action suits. And I have no idea if one can succeed whn everything is lawful (albeit greedy and selfish).

[dneal]

I get so overwhelmed emotionally by these stories. This is entirely how the system is rigged. It seems impossible to change, other than via massive class-action suits. And I have no idea if one can succeed whn everything is lawful (albeit greedy and selfish).

RFK Jr. might be your guy, if you gave him a listen.

[Chip]

Occasionally, market forces work to better the situation.

Here in Wyoming, several major coal strip mines have shut down in the last couple years and more have plans to do so, based on profitability.

The state government has been pouring money into loony carbon capture schemes, but the power plant operators claim they've not proved practical on a large scale and retrofitting old plants would be too costly. So more coal-fired power plants will be shut down and none are being built.

The state legislators are peeing themselves, declaring allegiance to fossil fuels and trying to pass laws to prohibit the sale of EVs in the state, and force burdensome conditions on wind power development and solar generation, especially residential net metering, which is our setup at home.

There's no income tax (which is why oligarchs take refuge in Jackson Hole) and state government is funded by severance taxes (at ridiculously low rates, since industry owns the place) on coal, oil & gas, and minerals that are shipped out of state. As the market for coal and petroleum fails, so will the present funding model.

The pace of change is slower than I like, but so it goes. . .

[dneal]

I wonder who came up with the notion of "carbon capture schemes"?

I'm sure he doesn't own a private jet, and his wife sold hers off.

[Chip]

Why We Should Politicize the Weather

Opinion

Paul Krugman
July 17, 2023

After officially beginning his presidential campaign, Ron DeSantis was asked about climate change. He brushed the issue aside: “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”

But we absolutely should politicize the weather. In practice, environmental policy probably won’t be a central issue in the 2024 campaign, which will mainly turn on the economy and social issues. Still, we’re living in a time of accelerating climate-related disasters, and the environmental extremism of the Republican Party — it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the advanced world — would, in a more rational political debate, be the biggest election issue of them all.

First, the environmental background: We’re only halfway through 2023, yet we’ve already seen multiple weather events that would have been shocking not long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest June on record. Unprecedented heat waves have been striking one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; Europe is now going through its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China is experiencing its highest temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has been suffering from dangerous levels of heat for weeks, with no end in sight.

Residents of Florida might be tempted to take a cooling dip in the ocean — but ocean temperatures off South Florida have come close to 100 degrees, not much below the temperature in a hot tub. And while the rest of America hasn’t gotten that hot, everyone in the Northeast remembers the way smoke from Canadian wildfires led to days of dangerously bad air quality and orange skies.

But extreme weather events have always been with us. Can we prove that climate change caused any particular disaster? Not exactly. But the burgeoning field of “extreme event attribution” comes close. Climate models say that certain kinds of extreme weather events become more likely on a warming planet — for example, what used to be a heat wave we’d experience on average only once every few decades becomes an almost annual occurrence. Event attribution compares the odds of experiencing an extreme event given global warming with the odds that the same event would have happened without climate change.

Incidentally, I’d argue that extreme event attribution gains credibility from the fact that it doesn’t always tell the same story, that sometimes it says that climate change wasn’t the culprit. For example, preliminary analyses suggest that climate change played a limited role in the extreme flooding that recently struck northeastern Italy.

That was, however, the exception that proves the rule. In general, attribution analysis shows that global warming made the disasters of recent years much more likely. We don’t yet have estimates for the latest, still ongoing series of disasters, but it seems safe to say that this global concatenation of extreme weather events would have been virtually impossible without climate change. And this is almost surely just the leading edge of the crisis, a small foretaste of the many disasters to come.

Which brings me back to the “politicization of the weather.” Worrying about the climate crisis shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But it is, at least in this country. As of last year, only 22 percent of Americans who considered themselves to be on the political right considered climate change a major threat; the left-right gap here was far larger than it was in other countries. And only in America do you see things like Texas Republicans actively trying to undermine their own state’s booming renewable energy sector.

The remarkable thing about climate denial is that the arguments haven’t changed at all over the years: Climate change isn’t happening; OK, it’s happening, but it’s not such a bad thing; besides, doing anything about it would be an economic disaster. And none of these arguments are ever abandoned in the face of evidence. The next time there’s a cold spell somewhere in America, the usual suspects will once again assert that climate change is a hoax. Spectacular technological progress in renewable energy, which now makes the path to greatly reduced emissions look easier than even optimists imagined, hasn’t stopped claims that the costs of the Biden administration’s climate policy will be unsupportable.

So we shouldn’t expect record heat waves around the globe to end assertions that climate change, even if it’s happening, is no big deal. Nor should we expect Republicans to soften their opposition to climate action, no matter what is happening in the world. What this means is that if the G.O.P. wins control of the White House and Congress next year, it will almost surely try to dismantle the array of green energy subsidies enacted by the Biden administration that experts believe will lead to a major reduction in emissions.

Like it or not, then, the weather is a political issue. And Americans should be aware that it’s one of the most important issues they’ll be voting on next November.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/o...e=articleShare

[Chip]

It’s Official: Stores Can No Longer Sell Most Incandescent Lights

New efficiency rules, more than a decade in the making, have taken effect, relegating Edison’s glowing orbs to the history books.

Hiroko Tabuchi
Aug. 1, 2023

It’s the end of an era. In America, the incandescent light is no more (with a few exceptions). Under new energy efficiency rules that took effect Tuesday, shoppers in the United States will no longer be able to purchase most incandescent bulbs, marking the demise of a technology patented by Thomas Edison in the late 1800s. Taking their place are LED lights, which — love them or hate them — have already transformed America’s energy landscape.

They’ve driven down electricity demand in American homes, saving people money. And by using less power, LEDs have also helped lower the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which warm the planet and are a major cause of climate change. LED stands for light emitting diodes. The new efficiency standard announced by the Biden administration requires light bulbs to meet a minimum standard of producing 45 lumens per watt. (A lumen is a measurement of brightness, and incandescents typically produce far less than that per watt.) An accompanying rule change applies the new standards to a wider universe of light bulbs.

Neither rule is an explicit ban on incandescents. And a few specialized kinds of incandescent bulbs — like those that go inside ovens, and bug lights — are exempt. But most if not all other incandescents will struggle to meet the new efficiency standards, and the same goes for a more recent generation of halogen lights.

“Energy-efficient lighting is the big energy story that nobody is talking about,” said Lucas Davis, an energy economist at the Haas School of Business, part of the University of California, Berkeley. “Going from an incandescent to an LED is like replacing a car that gets 25 miles per gallon with another one that gets 130 m.p.g.,” he said. LEDs have other advantages. Consumers can expect less running to the store for new bulbs or teetering on foot ladders to replace them: LED light bulbs last 25 to 50 times longer than their incandescent counterparts.

The new regulations may go over with little fanfare. Over the past year, most retailers have taken inefficient bulbs off their shelves in anticipation of the rule, said Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, which advocates for appliance efficiency rules. “I don’t think most people even noticed,” he said.

The shift from traditional incandescent bulbs to LED lights brings to a close a political debate that once was a Republican rallying point, much like the Trump-era “Make Dishwashers Great Again” partisan fight, and the more recent political sparring over gas stoves. Congress established the first national light bulb efficiency standards in 2007, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush. Starting in 2012, the law required new bulbs to use 28 percent less power than existing incandescent lights, kicking off the beginning of the end for older designs. “The government has no business telling an individual what kind of light bulb to buy,” Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, said in 2012, introducing the “Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act” to repeal the federal requirement.

Those attempts failed. But the Trump administration temporarily stalled a second phase of the 2007 lighting efficiency rules, which were scheduled to go into effect in 2020. In blocking those rules — one of more than 100 environment-related rules rolled back during the Trump presidency — Mr. Trump appeared to heed the concerns of manufacturers, whose trade group argued that a ban would disrupt retail. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association also argued that people were already making the switch. According to NEMA statistics, about 20 percent of light bulb sales were incandescents as of the first quarter of 2022.The association didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Europe is a step ahead, having phased out incandescent lights in 2012. In 2021, the European Union said it would also ban all fluorescent lighting next month. Environmental groups and experts have long pushed for a phaseout of fluorescent lights, which are less efficient than LED lights and also contain mercury, a toxic metal. In the United States, compact fluorescent lights — the bulbs made up of a swirl of fluorescent tubing — meet the new efficiency rules. Few are still sold, however, and separate efficiency standards proposed but not yet enacted by the Biden administration could soon effectively ban those, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/c...e=articleShare

[Chip]

First Scorched, Then Soaked: Weather Whiplash Confounds Farmers

As the war in Ukraine disrupts the global grain market, a volatile climate leaves Kansas on track to harvest its smallest wheat crop in decades.

Mitch Smith
Aug. 9, 2023

This single field, just 160 acres of Kansas dirt, tells the story of a torturous wheat season. One side is a drought-scorched graveyard for grain that never made it to harvest. Near the center, combines plod through chest-high weeds and underwhelming patches of beige wheat, just enough of it to make a harvest worthwhile. And over by the tree line, the most tantalizing wheat beckons like a desert mirage. The grain there is flourishing, the beneficiary of a late-season shift from dry to drenching. But it will never be collected: The ground is too waterlogged to support the weight of harvesting equipment.

“It really doesn’t get any crazier than right here, right now,” the farmer of that land, Jason Ochs, said last week as he salvaged what he could from the field.

At a time when the global grain market has been scrambled by a war between two major wheat producers, Ukraine and Russia, farmers in Kansas are bringing in the state’s smallest wheat crop in more than half a century. Drought, weeds, hail and rainfall just before harvest time have plagued the crops of Jason Ochs, a farmer in Syracuse, Kan. The main culprit is the extreme drought that, as recently as late April, had ensnared almost the entire western half of the state, and forced many farmers to abandon their crops. More recently, intense rain has eased the drought, but it came too late for much of Kansas’ winter wheat, which was planted in the fall for harvest in late spring and early summer.

The dueling weather extremes have confounded farmers and raised long-term climate questions about the future of the Great Plains wheat crop.

On the Plains, “precipitation and temperature are projected to trend in opposite directions in the future,” said Xiaomao Lin, the state climatologist of Kansas and a professor at Kansas State University. “Specifically, temperatures are expected to rise while rainfall decreases. Both of these changes are detrimental to wheat crops.” A study Dr. Lin co-wrote last year in the journal Nature Communications linked yield loss in Great Plains winter wheat since the 1980s to periods of intense heat, stiff winds and little moisture, hallmarks of climate change. Dr. Lin said the early part of the 2022-23 wheat-growing season was the driest on the Plains in 128 years — even drier than during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s — though he cautioned that it was too soon to say precisely what role climate change played in this year’s particular conditions.

Wheat is more than just a crop in Kansas, where “The Wheat State” was once stamped on license plates and where University of Kansas sports fans “wave the wheat” to celebrate a score. Though Kansas farmers plant far fewer acres of wheat now than they did a generation ago — they can often make more money growing corn or soybeans — the state remains one of the country’s leading producers of wheat. The crop is sold for flour on the domestic market and exported in large quantities to Latin America, among other places.

The importance of the Plains wheat crop has only become clearer over the last year, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created uncertainty around the global supply of the staple crop, a major source of nutrition in developing countries. Large harvests in other parts of the world have helped limit the instability, but fresh fears of shortages have arisen after Russia stepped up its attacks on key grain-shipping ports and suspended an agreement that had allowed Ukrainian wheat to be transported across the Black Sea.

On the Plains, the war has made for volatile commodity prices, fast-changing market conditions and, among some farmers, a sense that their work matters more than before. Wheat prices have shot up, in part because of the turmoil in Europe, but many American farmers have still struggled because the yields are so small. “We try to remind people that you won’t get that price if you don’t have wheat to sell,” said Aaron Harries, the vice president of research and operations for the Kansas Wheat Commission. Some farmers’ wheat is so scraggly that it is not worth harvesting, leaving them to rely on crop insurance.

About halfway between Kansas City and Denver in west-central Kansas, where Mike McClellan farms, the drought has persisted. And for the first time in the decades he has been farming, Mr. McClellan did not harvest any of his winter wheat. “We had to get the crop adjusters out there to look and it and get it destroyed,” Mr. McClellan said.

In other parts of Kansas, like Mr. Ochs’s land near Syracuse, by the Colorado state line, a wheat crop that once seemed doomed by a lack of rain ended up being challenged by too much moisture. Syracuse had 12 days in June with one-tenth of an inch or more of rain, the most in a single month since 1951, according to federal data. By the end of July, Hamilton County, which includes Syracuse, was completely out of the drought. The rain was a boon for crops that were planted in the spring, like corn and grain sorghum, and in some places it gave a last-minute boost to the wheat. But the showers forced weeks of delays in the wheat harvest, and left some soil so soggy that no crop could be collected on it.

“For me, it’s mind-boggling,” said Mr. Ochs, adding that though his winter wheat withered, his spring crops were as strong as any he had ever grown. “I talked to what I call old-timers and they’re the same way — they’ve never seen anything like this.”

Such intense, rapidly changing weather has not been limited to Kansas. In California, years of drought were washed away this spring with so much water that a long-dormant lake re-emerged over a huge stretch of cropland. In Nebraska, the governor reached out to federal officials for help last week after a brief period of extreme humidity and high temperatures led to widespread cattle deaths. In Georgia, a warm winter followed by a series of hard freezes in March wiped out most of the state’s peach crop.

Globally, July was the earth’s warmest month on record, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Ocean temperatures have soared this year to new highs. The planet has warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century, and will continue to grow hotter until humans essentially stop burning oil, gas and coal, scientists say. The warmer overall temperatures contribute to extreme-weather events and help make periods of extreme heat more frequent, longer and more intense.

Doug Kluck, a regional climate services director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the rapid changes on the Plains this year resulted from “a confusing set of variables” that scientists are still working to understand. But while there might be historical precedent for the local extremes of weather that were seen this year, he said, a broader view suggested something unique was afoot.

“People like to like to look back at the past and say, ‘Oh, you know, it’s just as hot as 1936’ or, ‘It was just as wet,’” said Mr. Kluck, whose work focuses on the Central United States. “It’s the big picture of not just looking at your backyard,” he added, but rather “looking at North America as a whole, looking at the world as a whole, and saying, ‘No, this is not what happened in 1930. We’ve never experienced this.’”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/u...e=articleShare

[Chip]

Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youths in a Landmark Climate Case

The court found that young people have a constitutional right to a healthful environment and that the state
must consider potential climate damage when approving projects.

David Gelles and Mike Baker
Aug. 14, 2023

A group of young people in Montana won a landmark lawsuit on Monday when a judge ruled that the state’s failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects was unconstitutional.The decision in the suit, Held v. Montana, coming during a summer of record heat and deadly wildfires, marks a victory in the expanding fight against government support for oil, gas and coal, the burning of which has rapidly warmed the planet.

“As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos,” said Julia Olson, the founder of Our Children’s Trust, a legal nonprofit group that brought the case on behalf of the young people. “This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate. More rulings like this will certainly come.”

The ruling means that Montana, a major coal and gas producing state that gets one-third of its energy by burning coal, must consider climate change when deciding whether to approve or renew fossil fuel projects. The Montana attorney general’s office said the state would appeal, which would send the case to the state Supreme Court. “This ruling is absurd, but not surprising from a judge who let the plaintiffs’ attorneys put on a weeklong taxpayer-funded publicity stunt that was supposed to be a trial,” Emily Flower, a spokeswoman for the attorney general, Austin Knudsen, said in a statement. “Montanans can’t be blamed for changing the climate.”

The case is part of a wave of litigation related to climate change that is targeting companies and governments around the globe. States and cities are suing companies like Exxon, Chevron and Shell, seeking damages from climate disasters and claiming that the companies have known for decades that their products were responsible for global warming. And individuals are now suing state and federal governments, claiming that they have enabled the fossil fuel industry and failed to protect their citizenry.

Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Litigation at Columbia University, said the Montana case would reverberate around the country. “This was climate science on trial, and what the court has found as a matter of fact is that the science is right,” Mr. Burger said. “Emissions contribute to climate change, climate harms are real, people can experience climate harms individually, and every ton of greenhouse gas emissions matters. These are important factual findings, and other courts in the U.S. and around the world will look to this decision.”

The Montana case revolved around language in the state Constitution that guarantees residents “the right to a clean and healthful environment,” and stipulates that the state and individuals are responsible for maintaining and improving the environment “for present and future generations.” A handful of other states have similar guarantees, and young people in Hawaii, Utah and Virginia have filed lawsuits that are slowly winding their way through courts. A federal case brought by young people, which had been stalled for years, is once again moving, heading toward a June trial in Oregon.

“It’s monumental,” said Badge Busse, 15, one of the Montana plaintiffs. “It’s a completely beautiful thing. Hopefully this will continue this upward trend of positivity.”

The Montana case, brought by plaintiffs ranging in age from 5 to 22, was the first of its kind to go to trial in the United States. While the state contended that Montana’s emissions are minuscule when considered against the rest of the globe’s, the plaintiffs argued that the state must do more to consider how emissions are contributing to droughts, wildfires and other growing risks to a state that cherishes a pristine outdoors. Since 2011, state law has prevented officials from weighing “actual or potential impacts that are regional, national, or global in nature” when conducting environmental reviews of large projects. In May, while the case was pending, the Legislature updated the law to be even more explicit, blocking the state from “an evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions and corresponding impacts to the climate in the state or beyond the state’s borders” when deciding whether to approve new projects.

Montana has 5,000 gas wells, 4,000 oil wells, four oil refineries and six coal mines. The state is a “major emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, in absolute terms, in per person terms, and historically,” Judge Kathy Seeley of Montana District Court wrote. Adding up the amount of fossil fuels extracted, burned, processed and exported by the state, the court found that Montana is responsible for as much carbon dioxide as produced by Argentina, the Netherlands or Pakistan. In her ruling, the judge found that the state’s emissions “have been proven to be a substantial factor” in affecting the climate. Laws that limited the ability of regulators to consider climate effects were unconstitutional, she ruled. She added that Montanans “have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate as part of the environmental life-support system.”

The trial, which took place in June, involved testimony from climate scientists who detailed how increases in greenhouse gas emissions as a result of human activity were already causing health and environmental damage, and how those effects were likely to accelerate unless action was taken. Many of the young plaintiffs testified about effects they had witnessed — extreme weather events that threaten family ranching, warmed rivers and streams that harm fish, wildfire smoke that worsens asthma and disruptions to nature that interfere with Indigenous traditions. They also spoke of the toll on their mental health, and the anguish they felt as they considered a future dimmed by environmental collapse.

The government, which was given one week to present its defense, rested after just one day and did not call its main expert witness, surprising many legal experts.

While Montana has a long history of mining and oil, gas and coal interests carry sway in Helena, the state also has deep environmental traditions. In 1972, with widespread popular support for more protection of the state’s lands, the state Constitution was amended to say that the state should “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” The origins of the case stretch back nearly a decade. In 2011, Our Children’s Trust petitioned the Montana Supreme Court to rule that the state has a duty to address climate change. The court declined to weigh in, effectively telling the group to start in the lower courts. The lawyers at Our Children’s Trust identified potential plaintiffs, cataloged the ways in which Montana was being impacted by climate change and documented the state’s extensive support for the fossil fuel industry, which includes permitting, subsidies and favorable regulations.

“The legal community has been fearful that judges won’t understand these cases, and she blew that out of the water,” Ms. Olson said of Judge Seeley’s decision. “It was digestible, she understood it, and the findings were beautiful.”
[/SIZE]
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/14/u...e=articleShare

[Chip]

For a Trendy Night Out in Paris, How About a Climate Change Workshop?

More than a million people in France have attended a “Climate Fresk” class to understand the process of global warming. The project is now spreading abroad.

Constant Méheut
Reporting from Paris
Aug. 19, 2023

On a recent summer evening in central Paris, a handful of people trickled into a trendy Brazilian bar blasting bossa nova, passed customers toasting with caipirinhas and headed for a wooden staircase in the back. They emerged into a small room featuring a table strewn with large printed cards that showed charts explaining the science behind climate change. “Welcome,” a young man said. “We’re going to have fun.”

For the next three hours, the group used the cards to recreate the chain of global warming, frowning as they tried to understand phenomena such as radiative forcing and ocean acidification. Then, they debated limiting energy-hungry air travel and developing nuclear power. The group was taking part in a “Climate Fresk,” a workshop run by a nonprofit of the same name, that teaches the basics of global warming and highlights possible solutions. The events have become a trendy night out in France, with more than a million participants. The popularity of the Climate Fresks, named for the “fresco” that participants create with the cards, comes as much of Europe faces hotter summers associated with climate change. (France is expected to experience its strongest heat wave of the summer this weekend.)

Since they began in 2018, Climate Fresks have increasingly been adopted by public and private organizations to spur people to take environmental action. As France has committed to reduce carbon emissions and drastically cut waste, major universities, companies and even some government departments are sending more and more students, employees and civil servants to the workshops. The workshops are also expanding beyond France. They has been translated into some 50 languages, and about 200,000 people abroad have participated, including in the United States.

Some green activists and environmental experts criticize the workshop for not going far enough and for not questioning the political and economic decisions that have accelerated climate change. Cédric Ringenbach, creator of the Climate Fresk, said the workshop focused on the science behind climate change and let participants make up their minds. “It’s not the fresco that challenges the political-economic paradigm,” he said, “It’s the participants themselves who come to these conclusions.”

“We’re here to pave the way,” he added. An engineer by training and a longtime lecturer on climate change, Mr. Ringenbach said that he had imagined the workshop as a way to better engage his students.

“I wanted them to piece together the climate change chain by themselves,” he said. “It’s much more powerful from an educational point of view, because you’re not just passively listening to a lecture — you’re an actor.”

The workshop, which is based on reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, uses 42 cards representing the various stages of climate change, from the use of fossil fuels to the melting of glaciers. With the help of a facilitator, participants are asked to arrange the cards on a large sheet of paper to represent the causes and consequences of climate change.

“Not easy!” said Ariane Prin, who took part in the workshop in the Brazilian bar, as she looked at a card on little-known greenhouse gases that warm the planet. Around her, participants debated the process of disruption of the water cycle, their faces contorting with concern as they placed cards showing chilling pictures of flooding and droughts. They drew arrows between the cards to illustrate the links between deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions and called their fresco “The Map of Awareness.”

“We feel so small in front of this map,” Ms. Prin said. “And yet we also feel empowered, because we’ve learned so much.”

The popularity of the Climate Fresk workshops echoes a growing interest in France in understanding the environmental changes affecting the country, whether raging wildfires in the south or rising waters eroding D-Day’s beaches in Normandy. The best-selling book in France last year was a comic book about the climate crisis, “Le Monde Sans Fin” — or “World Without End” — which sold over half a million copies. Several participants said the workshop had prompted them to take action, such as cutting down on their consumption of meat, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and lobbying their employers to institute greener practices.

The Climate Fresk workshop has grown so quickly thanks also to its relative ease and accessibility: Card templates are available free online, and training to become a facilitator takes just a few hours. Interest in the workshops has been such that it is now a fixture of introductory courses at several elite French universities and is taught at major companies such as the bank BNP Paribas. The French government is also considering including it in a plan to train the country’s 25,000 most senior civil servants in the green transition by the end of next year.

Claire Landais, who as the government’s secretary general is one of France’s top civil servants, said the stakes were high in training her colleagues, because they were the ones who would be putting climate policies in place. She underwent an initial training last year that included a Climate Fresk, which she described as “a very rich and dense” workshop. “Until then,” Ms. Landais said, “I had never been trained in these topics.”

Mr. Ringenbach said his goal was to “reach the winning triangle” — citizens, businesspeople and politicians — to create enough momentum to speed up the fight against climate change.

Critics warn that the workshop could be used by companies for greenwashing, offering an easy way to profess concern for climate change while actually doing little to address it. BNP Paribas, for example, has boasted of using the workshop to train thousands of employees but remains one of the world’s biggest funders of fossil fuel projects, according to a 2022 report by nongovernmental groups.

“The Climate Fresk has become a bit of a simplistic way of tackling these environmental issues,” said Eric Guilyardi, a climate scientist and president of the Office for Climate Education, a United Nations-linked group that promotes climate education in schools around the world. “It’s like saying, ‘OK, I’m aware of the issue, I’ve done my part,’” he added. Stéphane Lambert, a Climate Fresk development officer at BNP Paribas, said the accusations were unfounded, arguing that the workshop had helped the bank’s plans to move away from fossil fuels. BNP Paribas said in May that it would reduce its financing of oil exploration and production 80 percent by 2030.

As the workshop in the Brazilian bar in Paris drew to an end, the group gathered for a photo. They stood behind their fresco, a colorful poster covered with drawings that expressed both hope and fear: lush forests and flooded buildings, seas teeming with fish, and a tornado.

“Should we smile?” Ms. Prin asked. “Or should we cry?”


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/w...e=articleShare

[Chip]

Rich countries ‘trap’ poor nations into relying on fossil fuels

Campaigners criticise ‘new form of colonialism’, where countries in the global south are forced to invest in fossil fuel projects to repay debts

Kaamil Ahmed
21 Aug 2023

Richer countries and private lenders are trapping heavily indebted countries into reliance on fossil fuels, according to a new report. The pressure to repay debts is forcing poor nations to continue investing in fossil fuel projects to make their repayments on what are usually loans from richer nations and financial institutions, according to new analysis from the anti-debt campaigners Debt Justice and partners in affected countries.

The group is calling for creditors to cancel all debts for countries facing crisis – and especially those linked to fossil fuel projects. “High debt levels are a major barrier to phasing out fossil fuels for many global south countries,” said Tess Woolfenden, a senior policy officer at Debt Justice. “Many countries are trapped exploiting fossil fuels to generate revenue to repay debt while, at the same time, fossil fuel projects often do not generate the revenues expected and can leave countries further indebted than when they started. This toxic trap must end.”

According to the report, the debt owed by global south countries has increased by 150% since 2011 and 54 countries are in a debt crisis, having to spend five times more on repayments than on addressing the climate crisis.

Daniel Ribeiro, a programme coordinator for the Mozambican environmental campaign Justiça Ambiental, said the country’s debt burden had been doubled by loans taken without parliament’s permission from London-based banks in 2013, based on projections of earnings from its gas field discoveries. Mozambique was plunged into a debt crisis when oil and gas prices fell in 2014-16, Ribeiro said, but the solutions from international lenders to bail out the country have relied on loans being repaid through future gas revenues. “The debt caused by fossil fuels are being structured to be paid back by fossil fuels, solidifying a vicious cycle of having to move forward and having very severe consequences of not wanting to continue with fossil fuels,” Ribeiro said.

Suriname faced a similar situation after defaulting on its debt, when in 2020 it agreed a deal that would give creditors the right to almost 30% of Suriname’s oil revenue until 2050. Sharda Ganga, the director of the Surinamese civil society group Projekta, said they had hoped the deal would have remained within the country’s climate commitments. Ganga said: “As our debt has grown unsustainable, it dominates all policy decisions and impacts the lives of our citizens in every possible way. Earning money as quickly as possible in order to pay back the creditors is therefore priority number one. It means there is no more room for patience and such pesky things like sustainability or climate justice.

“The reality is that this is the new form of colonialism – we have exchanged one ruler for the rule of our creditors who basically already own what is ours. The difference is this time we signed the deal ourselves.”

Leandro Gómez, a campaigner on investment and rights at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (Farn) in Argentina, said the country has been stripped of sovereignty to transition away from fossil fuels, and was having to subsidise fossil fuel companies, encourage fracking projects and cancel renewable energy projects.

The report also said many climate-affected countries needed more access to grants to pay for the effects of changing climate, as many are forced further into debt to pay for repairs after cyclones and floods. Most of the $10bn (£7bn) in financial assistance provided to Pakistan after last year’s floods was in the form of loans, while the share of Dominica’s debt of its gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 68% to 78% after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Mae Buenaventura, from the Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development, said: “The climate and debt crises emerged from the same system that is based on the global north’s relentless extraction of human, economic and environmental resources to feed the drive for profit and greed.” She said debt cancellation was the least that rich countries and lenders could do.


https://www.theguardian.com/global-d...e_iOSApp_Other

[Chip]

US coal plant closure emphasises health benefits of cleaner air

Decrease in hospital visits for heart problems shows impact could be greater than previously thought

Gary Fuller
25 Aug 2023

A study suggests the benefits from cleaner air could be even greater than previous data had indicated. Researchers investigated the closure of a coal processing plant in 2016. Located on Neville Island in the Ohio River, near Pittsburgh in the US, the site had been used to produce coal-coke for steelmaking for about 100 years. Closure of the plant resulted in an immediate reduction in air pollution for the local communities. Sulphur dioxide decreased by 90%, arsenic by 66% and particle pollution also improved.

There was an immediate 42% decrease in emergency room visits for heart problems and further declines in the three years that followed, until the end of study, showing that the closure led to long-term health improvements. A similar pattern was seen in stroke cases. These changes were not seen in two communities away from the plant that were used as experimental controls.

When looking at medical statistics it is possible to overlook the real-world experience of the people affected. Testimony from the local community reveals what it was like to live with the air pollution, dust and odour from the plant. Some people explained how they struggled to manage their asthma and others said their breathing problems got worse when they first moved into the area. It was routine to close windows at night as pollution settled over the community. Air pollution is often invisible in our everyday lives. Reminiscent of the Covid lockdowns, the plant closure brought immediate changes, with people suddenly noticing crystal-blue skies, instead of haze, and the smells of nature along with improvements to their health.

Prof George Thurston, of New York University Grossman School of Medicine, who led the study said: “We found much larger cardiac health benefits from the plant’s closure than expected. This provides solid confirmation that fossil fuel-related air pollution is far more toxic than other types of air pollution. Policymakers have been greatly underestimating the local and immediate human health benefits that will occur as we phase out fossil fuel processing and combustion in our cities and towns.”

Prof Dan Greenbaum, of the US Health Effects Institute, who was not involved in the Pittsburgh study, said: “This type of study is one of the best ways to test whether exposure to air pollution actually causes ill health. Simply put, if you reduce the air pollution someone is breathing, can you measure improved health? That clearly is the case for the citizens near Pittsburgh.”

Policies to improve air pollution are often gradual and can lack the ambition to make big changes that occurred near Pittsburgh. This makes it harder to detect the health benefits. Despite this, a 17% reduction in deaths from breathing problems followed a ban on the sale of smoky types of coal in Dublin in 1990. In Launceston, Tasmania, a scheme to incentivise homeowners to switch away from wood heating reduced winter respiratory deaths by 28% and heart deaths by 20%, and improvements in air pollution in Sweden were found to help children’s lung growth.

Five out of eight studies of low emission zones (LEZs) found a clear reduction in heart and circulatory problems. These included fewer admissions to hospital, fewer deaths from heart attacks and strokes, and fewer people with blood pressure problems. One of the German studies that analysed hospital data from 69 cities with LEZs found a 2-3% reduction in heart problems and 7-12% reduction in stroke. These improvements were greatest for older people and resulted in estimated health cost savings of €4.4bn (£3.8bn).


https://www.theguardian.com/environm...e_iOSApp_Other

[Chip]

Orkney islands to trial electric ferries to cut carbon emissions

Battery-powered hydrofoils to start in March 2024, aimed at replacing ageing and highly polluting inter-island ferries




Severin Carrell Scotland editor
11 Sep 2023

The Orkney islands are to test two electric ferries for commuting between its outlying islands as part of efforts to cut carbon emissions from shipping. The battery-powered hydrofoil ferries, whose hulls are raised above the water, are part of a three-year, £15.5m demonstration project funded by the UK government, due to start in March 2024.

The smaller of the two ferries will carry up to 12 passengers between Kirkwall, Orkney’s main town, and the islands of Shapinsay, Rousay, Egilsay and Wyre on a year-round daily service. The larger vessel will take up to 50 passengers and light cargo between Kirkwall and the outer islands of Westray, Eday, Sanday and Stronsay in a circuit up to five times a day. It is expected to start service in 2025.

Councillors and MSPs in Orkney and Shetland, the archipelago north of Orkney, have been pressing the UK and Scottish governments for help in replacing their ageing and highly polluting inter-island ferries. Unlike the state-owned ferry service CalMac, which serves the Hebrides, their inter-island ferries are council-owned and operated. Scottish ministers have rejected their pleas for support to replace them.

James Stockan, Orkney’s council leader, said the islands were already leaders in zero-carbon technologies. Orkney is home to a major marine energy research centre, known as Emec, and has one of the UK’s highest number of electric vehicle chargers in relation to population. “This work is about looking at how we can, in the future, decarbonise our fleet,” he said. “Whilst this is tremendous news, this latest development must not be confused with our drive to secure funding for replacement ferries.”

Orkney’s vessels, which are being supplied by Artemis Technologies in Belfast, are part of a package of measures aimed at removing or heavily reducing carbon emissions and pollution from shipping. The industry, which is often excluded from climate warming policies worldwide, has faced increasingly vocal demands to reduce its carbon emissions and to cut air pollutants such as sulphur oxides (SOx) and nitrogen oxides (NOx).

The UK government funding package, unveiled on Monday, includes £90m for an ultra-low emission boat to service offshore windfarms, powered by electricity with a methanol range extender, based in Aberdeen. A further £20m will be spent on retrofitting an offshore crew transfer vessel that is already in service with electric propulsion.

On the Thames in London, £9.2m has been allocated to help build a 40-metre electrically powered catamaran, and install special chargers, to carry freight down the river. The Department for Transport said the vessel would be expected to carry 54,000 parcels a day between Dartford and Tower Bridge Quay. At Portsmouth international port, a new electrical power system will be installed at three berths to give cruise ships and ferries clean power so they can switch off their marine diesel-powered engines, and also to charge Brittany Ferries’ fleet of hybrid battery and liquid natural gas vessels.

Similar schemes are being funded in Falmouth, in Cornwall, and in Aberdeen. The technology is also needed for the UK’s large trawler fleets: many trawlers run their diesel engines permanently while in port.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...e_iOSApp_Other

[TSherbs]

It's pretty cold up there. Batteries not so good in the cold. Same issue here in Maine in the winter.

[Chip]

"In fact, Orkney never gets brutally cold. Average winter temperatures hover around 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius)."

Colder here (Wyoming at 8000 ft.) than in Maine. Occasional -40° nights in winter. Over the years, I've converted to battery power tools and we just bought a charge-at-home EV for everyday transportation.

The marine architects likely will include a preheating feature with the charging station, to run off shore power. Batteries large enough to drive a ferry will have a considerable thermal mass. Given insulated compartments, they should do fine for the duration of a trip.

[Chip]

Saltwater in the Mississippi Threatens Water Supply in New Orleans

Extreme heat and low rainfall in the Midwest this summer caused the river level to plummet, making it vulnerable to a saltwater “wedge” from the Gulf of Mexico.

Colbi Edmonds
Sept. 23, 2023



Drought-like conditions in the Midwest over the summer have created a growing water problem in the New Orleans area this fall.

Water levels of the Mississippi River have dropped low enough to make the river less resistant to a mass of saltwater flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico. This circumstance, known as saltwater intrusion, is endangering the drinking water systems in and around the city, as well as smaller municipalities to the south.

Officials in Louisiana and with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say that a “saltwater wedge” could reach water treatment plants near New Orleans in October and are working to slow the influx while also bringing in more fresh water to the region. Many water treatment facilities cannot handle water with high salinity levels, which corrode pipes and cause metals in the pipes to leach into the water.

“This is a serious situation,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said at a news conference on Friday. He said he was requesting a federal emergency declaration, and Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans signed an emergency declaration for the city on Friday. But Mr. Edwards urged people to stay calm, and state officials advised against overstocking on water.

In July, the Army Corps of Engineers built an underwater sill, or levee, in the Mississippi aimed at impeding the flow of the saltwater, which moves beneath fresh water, closer to the bottom of the river. Officials said on Friday that within days, they will begin work to make the sill 25 feet higher.

But even that will only delay the progression of the saltwater wedge by 10 to 15 days, they said. Unless there is significant rainfall soon — and forecasts say there is not — the sill will eventually be topped, Col. Cullen Jones of the Army Corps said. The Corps of Engineers is also getting barges to transport water that can be combined with water at the treatment facilities for safe drinking. Colonel Jones said about 15 million gallons will be delivered in the coming days, but the demand at treatment facilities could ultimately rise to at least 36 million gallons per day. Colonel Jones said that the Army Corps was working to get access to more barges but that he was confident that figure could be met.

Many coastal communities, like parts of the Jersey Shore, Long Island and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, are no stranger to saltwater intrusion, which also occurs when storm surges or high tides top areas that are low in elevation. As sea levels rise along the coasts, the threat of saltwater intrusion does, too. Other countries like Bangladesh are grappling with that reality. Saltwater intrusion also affected Louisiana in 1988, when the levels of the Mississippi, whose mouth is below sea level, reached historic lows. An earlier than expected increase in water flow helped ease the problem then. But this is the second straight year in which water levels in the river have dropped drastically because of extreme heat and drought linked to climate change.

Chris Anderson, a professor of wetland and coastal ecology at Auburn University, said it was normal for there to be upriver movement of saltwater. But the more intense the drought, the higher up the river the saltwater could go.

Though the issue has gained heightened attention in recent days as the saltwater heads toward more populous areas, officials have been aware of the problem since the early summer. The lower portion of Plaquemines Parish, on the southern edge of the state, has had drinking advisories in place since June and has been working with the state to provide bottled drinking water for residents. But a spokesman with the state’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said there was no reason for the public to stockpile bottled water.

Ms. Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans, also sought to ease people’s fears. “The most important thing for residents at this time is to stay informed and remain calm,” she said in a statement. Mr. Edwards on Friday took a similar stance, though he said that the challenge was daunting and that the problem could last longer than it did in 1988. “We don’t experience this all that often, at least not up this far of the river,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/23/u...e=articleShare

[Chip]

How do we raise trillions of dollars to fight the climate crisis? The answer is staring us in the face

Petrostates like Saudi Arabia and Norway have made staggering oil and gas profits. A simple levy could funnel money to the countries that need it

Gordon Brown

25 Sep 2023

After a summer of ever-more deadly floods, droughts and firestorms, two autumn summits – the G20 and the UN general assembly – have come and gone. Both failed to deliver the long-promised global plan to finance climate mitigation and adaptation. But as political leaders issue toothless and easily forgettable communiques, a potential breakthrough is staring the world in the face. It could finally end the cycle of broken promises to the global south and rescue the next summit, Cop28 in November and December.

Last year, the oil and gas industry across the world banked about $4tn, according to the head of the International Energy Agency. This represents one of the biggest redistributions of wealth from the world’s poor to the richest petrostates. The record energy prices that have produced these unearned gains have not only caused dramatically rising poverty and debt in the global south, but have also stymied decades of progress in extending power into homes, villages and towns that were previously without electricity.

Let’s put this in perspective: $4tn is a bigger sum than the entire UK economy and about 20 times all the international aid budgets of the world. It is 40 times the $100bn-a-year target for the global south that was pledged in 2009 for 2020 but never reached. The windfall has given energy exporters, including the Gulf states and Norway, nearly $1tn of earnings from their foreign sales alone, and the failure to recycle a fraction of these gains to the world’s poorest countries is one of the great scandals of our times.

It is this lottery-style bonanza, amassed by petrostates, that is the backdrop to the Cop28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates. The summit will be chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, which is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the windfall. He has called on the wealthiest countries to “show me the money” to meet “long overdue” financing pledges. But with the conference on a pathway to failure due to a lack of finance, it is Al Jaber’s country that now has the responsibility and opportunity to be the first mover in delivering to the global south.

A $25bn global windfall levy on oil and gas profits, paid by the richest petrostates, would amount to less than 1% of global oil and gas revenues and only 3% of the export earnings of these major producers. Each of the richest petrostates can easily afford to pay. The UAE has seen its export earnings rise from $76bn to $119bn; it can afford to contribute $3bn without any impact on the energy prices paid by its domestic consumers. And it is not alone: with Qatar’s export earnings, mainly from gas, rising from $53bn to $86bn it too could easily afford $3bn, as could Kuwait with its export earnings increasing from $63bn to $98bn.

Norway has benefited even more, its export earnings dramatically rising to around $174bn ; it can afford a $5.2bn levy. But the biggest contributor of all must be Saudi Arabia, which has amassed a windfall gain of $120bn as export earnings have risen to $311bn. The $10.35bn it should be asked to contribute is less than what it is spending on buying up football, boxing and golf.

The $25bn global windfall levy could also be the trigger for historical and current emitters to contribute their share of the $1tn a year now required to meet the climate and development needs of the global south. Countries with triple AAA or double AA+ credit ratings can offer guarantees to multilateral development banks which, on the strength of those guarantees, can borrow on attractive terms from the financial markets. If some of the global windfall levy is used as collateral, Europe and North America could provide $25bn in guarantees which can be leveraged by the multilateral institutions four times over – thus creating $100bn of resources that could fund the exit from coal and expand solar and other renewables in sub-Saharan Africa. An even more ambitious offer – $100bn of guarantees – could create $400bn in fresh investment so that Africa can receive more than the meagre 3% of climate finance on offer.

Once we add the money released by the ambitious Bridgetown Agenda (devised by the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley) and the Summers-Singh plan (which would radically refinance the multilateral development banks), the total funding for development kickstarted by the global windfall levy could reach $1tn. And with oil and gas profits remaining high not as an accident but because of a deliberate OPEC Organisation decision to continue to restrict production, there is no reason why the levy should not be paid on an annual basis.

Next year is the 80th anniversary of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, when a new international financial architecture was put in place to manage the global economic system. With the notable exception of paying for UN peacekeeping, no one then or since has ever agreed how the costs of funding global public goods would be shared. As a result, 14 years have gone by without the west delivering the $100bn per year promised for mitigation and adaptation, or the Loss and Damage fund agreed a year ago. There are now doubts as to whether a separate $100bn of international money, known as special drawing rights, will ever fully materialise. Initiatives that pass the begging bowl round in a time of crisis are no substitute for an equitable system of burden-sharing, based on historical and current emissions and countries’ capacity to pay.

And so, if future summits are to enjoy any credibility in the global south, the deadlock on finance has to be broken. A breakthrough at Cop28 will elude us without intense public pressure on the host country to produce a plan. To speed that up, Brazil’s President Lula, the new chair of the G20, is the right person to convene a joint G20-Opec summit to push change through. At last, we would be offering crisis-torn countries the thing that has been absent this summer and missing from the conclusions of recent summits: hope. The money is there – world leaders must have the courage to call on it. Now.

Gordon Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010. His new book, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, co-authored with Mohammed el-Erian and Michael Spence, is out on 28 September.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...e_iOSApp_Other

[Chip]

‘Whatever it takes’: students at 50 US high schools launch climate initiative

Green New Deal for Schools demands districts teach climate justice, update buildings and plan for extreme weather



Maanvi Singh
25 Sep 2023

Students at more than 50 high schools across the US are proposing a Green New Deal for Schools, demanding that their districts teach climate justice, create pathways to green jobs after graduation and plan for climate disasters, among other policies. The campaign, coordinated by the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate justice collective, is a reaction to rightwing efforts to ban or suppress climate education and activism at schools. The national effort could include teach-ins and walkouts, as well as targeted petitions to school boards and districts in the coming weeks, organizers with Sunrise told the Guardian, ahead of the Monday launch.

“We are prepared to do whatever it takes,” said Adah Crandall, 17, an organiser for the Sunrise Movement based in Portland, Oregon. “The far right has waged this battle against school boards and against public education, and they put a lot of time and money into trying to do things like ban books and prevent us from learning the truth about the climate crisis,” said Crandall. “And all of these things, all of these things are happening while the climate crisis is raging outside of our windows.”

The Green New Deal for Schools includes demands to update school buildings, buses and other infrastructure to make them more climate resilient. They are also asking that administrators develop climate disaster plans to keep students safe during extreme weather, and free and ideally locally sourced lunches.

After living through the hottest summer on record, students returned to campuses this year as searing heatwaves overtook the central US, a deadly wildfire scorched Maui, a rare tropical storm threatened the west coast and another pummelled southern Texas. Students across the US are painfully aware that many of these weather extremes have been aggravated by the burning of fossil fuels, even as conservative politicians and educators refuse to engage with the topic, said Summer Mathis, a 16-year-old student at North Cobb high school in Kennesaw, Georgia.

But at school, most teachers have avoided or discouraged the discussion of any topics that could be considered political, including climate justice, said Mathis. “We don’t learn about climate change at all,” she said.
Inside a wood-panelled room, students in pairs stand across a table from each other painting signs. In the foreground a Black teenage boy wearing all olive green with a white bandana holding back his black hair paints with a white-presenting girl wearing a brightly colored Keith Haring tank top and black shorts, her medium-length brown hair pulled back in two short pigtails.

Under Georgia’s vaguely worded “divisive concepts” law, aimed at suppressing education about race and racial inequities, teachers are unable to talk about climate justice and the unequal toll of global heating. In other Republican-led states, factual climate education is being targeted directly. Earlier this year, the Texas state board of education altered its guidance to schools to encourage emphasising the “positive” aspects of fossil fuels in science textbooks. Florida’s education board approved the dissemination of animated videos, developed by the conservative group PragerU, that compare climate activists to Nazis and misconstrue human-caused global heating as part of natural long-term cycles. In Idaho, students and educators are still fighting a years-long battle over the inclusion of the climate crisis in Idaho’s academic standards, after conservative lawmakers stripped mentions of it from the state’s science guidelines.

“Being a youth right now is really scary,” said Aster Chau, a 15-year-old student at Philadelphia’s Academy at Palumbo. “It’s really scary knowing that I’m underage, and can’t vote to elect the people making these big decisions about our futures, not having a say in that.” Chau, too, returned to class this year amid a late-summer heatwave – to a campus which, like many schools in Philadelphia, lacked air-conditioning throughout the building. Some of the district’s schools were dismissed early, and sports practices and games were cancelled. “It’s terrifying to be faced with this,” they said, knowing that cycles of extreme weather are predicted to become even more severe by the time they graduate.

To prepare for the fight ahead, about 150 high schoolers from across the US gathered in Illinois to attend a summer camp where they honed their activism, learning advocacy and escalation tactics.
A large circle of students of many races, all wearing T-shirts and shorts, stand on a grassy lawn, facing a young man in the middle - who could be one of them or perhaps a young adult, such as a camp leader - wearing a white T-shirt and bright blue shorts, pointing with his right hand and smiling as he speaks.

Later this week, hundreds of students will join Jamaal Bowman, a New York representative, and Ed Markey, the Massachusetts senator, in Washington DC, as the lawmakers reintroduce their Green New Deal for Public Schools Act. The legislation would provide funding to help schools expand and develop curricula, hire staff and retrofit campuses.

“We are definitely feeling the weight of the climate crisis,” Chau said. “I have had times when I was just overwhelmed with climate anxiety. But I guess being with one another is really helpful, knowing that I’m not just the only one who is feeling this pressure, but also extreme passion in fighting it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...e_iOSApp_Other

[dneal]

Screenshot 2023-09-26 at 3.12.57 PM.png

[Chip]

Right-wing bullshit.

Not their words.

Do you believe climate change is a hoax? A plot by the elite?

I don't expect an answer that makes sense.