How To Shift Public Attitudes And Win The Global Climate Battle

Yale Environment 360 - Todd Stern*

The world is making progress in decarbonizing economies, but not nearly fast enough, says Todd Stern the former U.S. chief climate negotiator. Here he spells out what forces must come together to marshal the public and political will needed to tackle climate change.

REUTERS/Stephane Mahe

Climate change is on the front pages again. In the space of three weeks, Florida and North Carolina were battered by severe hurricanes whose destructive power was surely intensified by hotter ocean waters and a warmer atmosphere, which holds more moisture. Between those two violent storms, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered a four-alarm warning about the profound dangers of holding global warming even to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius, which not long ago was considered a safe zone. Meanwhile, climate negotiators are currently wrangling with each other to finalize the guidelines and procedures needed to turn the Paris Agreement into an operational regime, a struggle made harder by the absence of U.S. leadership.
These developments serve as a reminder that we are in a race against time. We are making dramatic progress in decarbonizing our economies, but dangerous climate impacts are also coming at us faster than predicted. We need concerted action now, in all major economies, to accelerate the transformation of a world that currently relies on fossil fuels for more than 80 percent of its primary energy and will have to reach net-zero emissions in the next 50 years or less to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
From the perspective of innovation, policy, and cost, we know what to do and can do it. Clean-tech innovation is in full bloom, with an unmatched innovation culture in the United States and progress happening all over the world. We know how to set policy standards, provide incentives, introduce carbon pricing, stoke up research and development. And a clean-energy transformation at full speed and scale would likely be cheaper than continuing our dependence on fossil fuels, even before counting the projected costs of disruptive climate damage.

Major shifts in attitude and behavior have occurred time and again in the social and economic spheres.

But the key ingredients that are in short supply are the human factors: political will and the rapidly evolving norms and attitudes about climate change that can generate that will.
Some may look at the scope of the climate challenge and the obstructive power of the fossil fuel incumbency — with its deeply embedded infrastructure and its political clout around the world — and conclude that a change in people’s thinking won’t be enough. But changing norms and attitudes can move mountains. They are about a sense of what is acceptable, what is right, what is important, what we expect.
Major shifts in attitude and behavior have occurred time and again in the social and economic spheres. Think, for example, of the transformation that occurred with respect to cigarettes, as near-universal social acceptance gave way to smokers being relegated to sidewalks or cordoned-off smoking rooms. Consider the rapid shift in thinking we have seen on same-sex marriage or about what is happening right now in regard to sexual harassment and the #Me Too movement. These are different kinds of issues, to be sure, and decarbonizing the global economy is clearly a challenge on a vastly larger scale. Still, all these issues come down to human attitudes. And when norms change, they can change decisively and drive political action with them. Recall that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both opposed same-sex marriage in their 2008 primary battle. A few years later, that would have been unthinkable, because attitudes and expectations had changed.
Can we expect a similar change in regard to global warming? We don’t know yet, but there is reason to think we can. We are living in a rapidly evolving world when it comes to climate change and clean energy. When our context and surroundings change, new initiatives are launched and the nature of our public discourse shifts, all these things can affect our attitudes and our sense of what seems right and necessary, of what we demand, of what we will no longer countenance. Consider:

The Paris Agreement
The Paris accord was a huge step forward in building up norms and expectations. It sent a powerful signal to the world, from governments to boardrooms to civil society, that leaders had finally made a pivotal decision to tackle climate change, built on strong temperature goals, a system of five-year cycles to ratchet up ambition, and a series of measures to ensure accountability and integrity. Going forward, the Paris regime has the potential to become the symbolic heart of the global climate effort, where countries promote engagement, hold each other to account, take stock of the dangers we face, collaborate in large or small groups, and put their reputations on the line.

With every passing year, the signs from the natural world become starker and more vivid.

Leader engagement
Leader engagement was crucial to getting the Paris Agreement done. We can only make the kind of rapid progress we need with the ongoing involvement of political leaders, which could, for example, take the form of biennial meetings among the heads of key countries, either as a separate gathering or as a day added to an existing summit like the G20. Such meetings could focus on new ways to accelerate the transformation of the global economy and to manage the worldwide impacts of climate change.

Impacts
With every passing year, the signs from the natural world become starker and more vivid. In recent years in the U.S., we have seen mammoth storms and floods, multi-year droughts, and gigantic wildfires scorching California and the West. And this parade of disasters has been matched or surpassed all over the world — in the Philippines, Thailand, China, Japan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, Europe, Colombia, Brazil. People see this more and more. They live through these events, see their family or friends live through them, watch them on smart phones and television. The snide dismissal of a climate link to these phenomena starts to ring hollow. Our context changes.

Clean technology
At the same time that the dangers of climate change become ever-more apparent, so does the reality that solutions are becoming more available and affordable by the day and could come even more quickly with political support. Look at the astonishing progress made in the past decade on clean energy as the costs of wind and solar plummet, and the cost curve for energy storage follows suit. Look at the rapid growth of electric vehicles in countries such as China and Norway, and the announcements from many countries — including China, India, Britain, France, Norway, and the Netherlands — that they intend to end sales of gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2025, 2030, or 2040.

A Chinese worker installs solar panels at a solar farm in Yantai, Shandong Province. VCG/VCG via Getty Images

And consider the pivotal moment coming soon, whether in 5 years or 10, when electric vehicles cost no more than conventional cars, are far cheaper to operate and maintain, and can be charged almost anywhere in five minutes. And beyond these marquee elements of the clean revolution, major new research efforts are underway around the world on promising new low-carbon technologies. In addition, surveys show that clean energy is hugely popular both in the U.S. and with a wide swath of the global population.

The market context
Carbon Tracker’s recent 2020 Vision report makes a compelling case that a downturn in fossil fuel markets is coming much faster than most people realize. Carbon Tracker argues that a moment is approaching when demand for fossil fuel products will peak, and that this is likely to happen when alternatives achieve just 5 to 10 percent of total supply. Solar PV and wind already accounted for 6 percent of global electricity supply in 2017 and for 45 percent of the growth in supply. After the peak, the impacts on fossil fuels will start to be felt in financial markets in the form of lower prices, disruptions, and stranded financial assets as investors realize that the days of the industry’s supremacy are numbered.

The business context
Major companies across a broad range of sectors are moving to embrace clean and green solutions, and many are collaborating with each other in a range of initiatives dedicated to climate action and sustainable development. Businesses are increasingly acquiring large amounts of their energy needs from renewable sources, setting voluntary targets to reduce their carbon footprints, and marketing their green bona fides to consumers. They are taking these actions for many reasons: because they see the danger climate change poses to their supply chains, markets, and infrastructure, and because they realize that younger generations — which will bear the brunt of climate change’s impacts — strongly support the clean-energy revolution.
There is also room for more direct efforts at persuasion. For example, in the U.S., many Republicans in Congress know climate change is a real and important issue but see it as a third rail they can’t touch because of their political base. But, at least to some extent, there may be a kind of odd feedback loop at work. An article in The New York Times this summer argued that Republican voters are not so much skeptical about climate change as they are skeptical about Democrats, and they see climate as a Democratic issue. The authors conducted an experiment in which Republicans supported climate policies when told that Republican lawmakers or other notables favored the given policy. These respondents were then ready to follow the party line. So, we may have lawmakers afraid to buck a base that in fact would be willing to follow their leaders in more constructive directions — if their leaders had the nerve.

We cannot treat this existential threat as the environmental issue you glance at occasionally before going back to the essential stuff.

Recent polling by the Pew Research Center demonstrates a distinct generational divide in the GOP, with millennial Republicans (22 to 37 years old) much more inclined than older Republicans to believe that climate change is happening and that government should take action.
If trusted leaders and spokespersons raise their voices and make the case to people in their own communities and “tribes,” it could make a difference. Initiatives should be funded and launched that could hasten the change of norms and attitudes. Plenty of Republicans outside Congress understand that climate change is real and getting worse, and they believe the stance of their party’s leadership is untenable. Of course, all of this is more difficult with a president who beats the anti-climate drum. But he won’t be there forever, and work done now to open minds will pay off.
Outside the U.S., the public is not so divided over the urgency of combating climate change. While there are significant differences in views about climate change and its risks among different regions, a 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that climate change was nevertheless identified by respondents from 38 countries as one of two leading global threats, just behind ISIS.
Another important area is educating opinion makers in places such as companies, think tanks, and universities who believe in the issue but don’t understand the speed and scale of action required and don’t grasp that climate has to be lifted to the top tier of domestic and foreign policy concerns. We cannot treat this existential threat as the environmental issue you glance at occasionally before going back to the essential stuff. Climate, now, is the essential stuff.
The fact is that we have only one home and are subjecting it to extraordinary stress. As Jared Diamond demonstrated in his book Collapse, humans don’t always muddle through. Civilizations have disappeared because they lacked the wherewithal to both recognize and address looming environmental crises. Yet the solutions we need are at hand. We can be defeated by the greed of those who know better but can’t walk away from the next dollar; by apathy; by the demagogues whose only objective is to score points, get ratings, get paid. Or we can recognize the stakes, we can learn and discuss, we can vote, and march, and rise to meet this challenge. 

*Todd Stern is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a distinguished fellow at the World Resources Institute. He served from January 2009 until April 2016 as the Special Envoy for Climate Change at the State Department, leading the U.S. effort in negotiating the Paris Agreement and in all climate negotiations in the seven years leading up to Paris. Mr. Stern was a visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School in the fall of 2016. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Links

• Climate Change and the Human Mind: A Noted Psychiatrist Weighs In
• Redrawing the Map: How the world's climate zones are shifting
• With Norway in Lead, Europe Set for Surge in Electric Vehicles
• 2020 Vision: why you should see the fossil fuel peak coming

A Difference Of Degrees: The Looming Climate Catastrophe

Australian Strategic Policy Institute - Robert Glasser*

Image courtesy of DVIDSHUB on Flickr

The release earlier this month of a major UN-sponsored scientific report on the significant impacts expected from 1.5°C of global warming—the aspirational limit countries adopted in the Paris climate agreement—generated widespread media interest. Much of the commentary has rightly focused on the rapidly closing window of opportunity to achieve the aspiration and the huge scale of the societal changes required.
But the recent coverage has largely overlooked an equally important aspect of the study. Based on the most recent scientific evidence, researchers have now determined that extremely harmful climate impacts will strike at much lower temperature thresholds than previously projected.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C, which was produced at the request of countries adopting the Paris agreement, is an authoritative and cautious document. It’s the culmination of the efforts of 133 contributing authors who analysed more than 6,000 scientific studies and incorporated comments from over 40,000 expert and government reviews.
The report highlights the enormous challenge of limiting global warming to 1.5°. Annual emissions of CO₂ will need to be halved by 2030 relative to 2016 levels and renewable energy will need to supply 70–85% of global electricity demand (with coal’s contribution essentially ceasing) by 2050. It notes that systemic changes on this scale would be historically unprecedented and require ‘deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options’.
A key objective of the report is to describe how the climate-related risks at 1.5° would differ from those at 2° of warming (the upper limit agreed in Paris). Not surprisingly, the report concludes that the risks for human and natural systems are higher at 2°, but it is the scale of the difference that is most worrying—particularly given that without further ambition to reduce greenhouse gases, we can expect between 3° and 4° of warming.
For example, that 0.5° difference would, according to the report, result in several hundred million additional people falling into poverty; a 50% increase in the proportion of the global population experiencing water stress; 420 million more people frequently exposed to extreme heatwaves; 184 to 270 million more people exposed to an increase in water scarcity; and a 10-fold increase (from 8 million to 81 million) in the number of vulnerable people affected by changes to crop yields (jumping to a 50-fold increase at 3° of warming).
As distressing as these projections may be, they probably underestimate the actual harm because they don’t generally take account of the cascading impacts of disasters, which can often be more severe than the proximate impacts. The report in effect acknowledges this, noting that ‘The literature on compound as well as interacting risk at warming of 1.5°C and 2.0°C is limited.’ It observes that ‘Multi-sector risks are projected to overlap spatially and temporally, creating new (and exacerbating current) hazards, exposures, and vulnerabilities that will affect increasing numbers of people and regions with additional warming.’
Media coverage of one of the report’s most important findings has been relatively low-key. Recent research has now determined that global warming will trigger highly harmful societal impacts at significantly lower temperatures than was previously assumed.
The IPCC’s 2014 Fifth Assessment Report identified five categories of impacts and determined for each the implications at various levels of warming for people, economies and ecosystems. The categories are: unique and threatened systems; extreme weather events; distribution of impacts; global aggregate impacts; and large-scale singular impacts (so-called climate tipping points). The current study, drawing on the most up-to-date scientific evidence, has determined that the 2014 assessment significantly underestimated the risks in four of the five categories.
For example, in the case of ‘unique and threatened systems’, the threshold for the transition from ‘high’ to ‘very high’ risk has been lowered from 2.6° to between 1.5° and 2° of warming. The change reflects recent research that, among other things, has now determined with ‘very high confidence’ that 2° of warming will result in the total loss of coral reefs from the world’s tropical and subtropical regions.
‘Extreme weather’ is the only category of impacts for which the report’s finding is relatively unchanged from 2014. However, that is largely because, as the authors point out, ‘The impact literature contains very limited information about the potential for human society to adapt to extreme weather events and hence it has not been possible to locate the transition from “high” … to “very high” risk within the context of assessing impacts at 1.5°C versus 2°C global warming.’
Given the hugely disproportionate effect climate change will have on less developed countries and the likelihood of cascading impacts, there is good reason to suspect that plugging this research gap will reveal a significantly lower threshold in this major category as well.
As the scientific uncertainty diminishes, it is becoming increasingly clear that we have greatly underestimated the impacts of climate change. The IPCC report’s findings make it urgent for nations, including Australia, to scale up rapidly their national commitments under the Paris agreement.

*Robert Glasser is an ASPI visiting fellow. His past roles include Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction

Links

• The case against climate despair
• Climate and cash rule a crowded Pacific Islands Forum
• Fostering a culture of disaster preparedness
• The Paris Agreement
• Report: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C
• 'Next decade critical': Perils mount at 1.5 degrees of warming, says IPCC
• Mining sector, Morrison government on the defensive over IPCC report
• States' Climate Risks Are Rising, Led By Health Impacts: Moody's
• Climate Change Leading To 'Solastalgia', The Feeling You Get When Your Home Is Wrecked
• The Divisive Issue Australia Can No Longer Ignore
• Climate Change Could Affect Human Evolution. Here's How.
• Scientists Are Finally Linking Extreme Weather To Climate Change
• Halfway To Boiling: The City At 50c
• Heatwave-Related Deaths Influenced By Prior Acclimatisation To Warmth

Sweden’s Sustainable Cities A Lesson For Australia

Government News - Georgia Clark

Växjö, a city in southern Sweden, achieved a 17% emissions reduction in 2016-17.

The involvement of local government has been essential to Swedish city’s remarkable carbon emissions reduction success, experts say.
It calls itself “the greenest city in Europe.”
Växjö, a city in southern Sweden’s Kronoberg County, achieved a stunning 17 per cent emissions reduction in just one year, and since implementing a suite of policies in the early 1990s has slashed its carbon emissions by more than half.
A local district heating system that replaces fossil fuels with biomass energy like food waste and waste wood makes up 90 per cent of the city’s energy, while a key scheme taxes emissions and funds carbon-reduction projects.
The promotion of sustainable transport options like cycling has contributed to the city’s carbon reductions, while 25 per cent of the energy for transport and work machinery comes from renewable energy.
The municipality’s energy supply is now 67 per cent renewable, with a goal of going completely fossil-fuel free by 2020.

Lessons for Australian councils 

Mikael Granberg

The secret to Vaxjo’s remarkable carbon reductions is the involvement of local government in driving sustainable development, says Professor Mikael Granberg, director of the Centre for Climate & Safety at the Karlstads University in Sweden.
In Sweden, local government has “substantial financial, constitutional, legal, political and professional resources” and an instrumental role in driving sustainability, Professor Granberg tells Government News.
“Looking at eco-governance, local government has quite wide responsibilities, including sewerage, waste-treatment, recycling, green public purchase, green consumption and green accounts. Swedish local government are crucial actors with a potential to contribute and drive sustainable development,” he said.
Since 1948, Swedish local governments have had responsibility for spatial planning within their own territory – a responsibility which Professor Granberg says plays an immense role in the nation’s overall climate targets.
“Spatial planning is expected to deliver both climate change risk reduction and adaptation, and to balance other societal interests and priorities,” he said.

Australian councils need to ‘step up’ 

Brendan Gleeson

Professor Brendan Gleeson, director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, says Australian councils can learn a lot from Swedish local governments’ success in driving down emissions.
It highlights the value of council leadership in driving sustainable power generation and distribution – a leadership that needs to be reasserted by councils in Australia, Professor Gleeson said.
“Växjö shows that local governments need not be constrained by poor national leadership on sustainability issues and can assert themselves to drive impressive sustainability transitions,” he told Government News.
Växjö illustrates the potential for concerted local action to drive per capita emissions down to very low levels, Professor Gleeson says. “Local action is feasible and potentially powerful even in the context of national inertia on sustainability action.”

Re-establish local ownership 
Many Australian councils once owned important forms of infrastructure including energy and need to consider re-establishing municipal ownership of key assets, such as power generation and transport, as a means to drive change and enhance local economies, Professor Gleeson argues.
Professor Granberg, who collaborates with Australian researchers in the area, agreed that Australian councils could play a key role in helping drive down the country’s emissions.
“Local government is able to deal directly with households and small businesses in ways not possible for state or federal government. Local government has also proved to be an important source of program innovation,” he says.
However, greater local government involvement in sustainable development and carbon reductions would necessitate more resource-allocation to councils, Professor Granberg said.
He added:

“In Australia, environmental protection is a largely unfunded mandate for local government and, accordingly, financial resources are scarce, which ties to the challenge of employing trained and expert staff. So, there are challenges, but I still cannot see how local government can be avoided if we want to mitigate emissions and adapt to climate impacts.”

Professor Granberg says local government needs to “step up and take on this challenge” and perhaps challenge other levels of government on sustainable development and climate change mitigation.
But while local governments are a “key frontline player” in promoting carbon reductions, Professor Gleeson says that strong federal leadership is still needed.
It’s this national leadership in Sweden that has also contributed to the nation’s carbon reductions, he says.

Links

• Climate change a challenge to infrastructure, assets
• Climate change adaptation: lessons from leading local governments
• Councils are “leading action” on climate change
• Councils feel the pinch on climate change

Climate Change Is No Joking Matter. Except, This Week, It Was.

New York Times - John Schwartz

Late night is heating up. That is, shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” have been focusing on global warming in the past week.
Beer jokes. Al Gore with some startlingly profane rappers. And, of course, digs at President Trump.
We don’t usually get a lot of laughs out of climate change, a topic that gets precious little airtime, even on the broadcast news shows. But comedy shows riff off the news, and there has been a lot of climate science in the news recently, especially the grim report from a United Nations science panel predicting enormous weather disasters by 2040, well ahead of previous estimates.
And then there was Mr. Trump, who gave an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday in which he again expressed his doubts about climate change, even suggesting that it may reverse itself. (Not going to happen, Mr. President.)
He came back to the topic on Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press, explaining that “I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.” (For the record: The percentage of scientists whose work supports the overwhelming evidence for climate change is itself overwhelming.)
Last Saturday’s episode of “SNL” had not one but two segments that dealt with climate change, including that rap number about trees (with a cameo by Mr. Gore).



The program also devoted a “Weekend Update” report to the United Nations climate findings.
Michael Che described the problem of climate change communication this way: If people see it as being about losing everything, “Nobody cares about everything,” he said. “People only care about something.” His example: If Fox News said that climate change would take away “all the flags and Confederate statues, there’d be recycling bins outside of every Cracker Barrel and Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
Mr. Che had similarly pointed suggestions about building interest in climate change among black people and women. For those, you’ll have to watch the video.



Stephen Colbert jumped on Mr. Trump’s statements about climate change, saying: “After a year of massive storms causing untold damage, and our glaciers just shrinking in every direction, Trump was still ambivalent on the concept of climate change. He told the reporter, ‘You have scientists on both sides of the issue.’ That is true, there are scientists on both sides. On one side, all the scientists. On the other, one guy who runs a blog called RealTrueAmericanScienceEagle.jesus.”
He also cited a study that we wrote about in The New York Times that suggests climate change could raise the cost of beer as it shrinks barley harvests. “Or as the brothers at Sigma Phi Epsilon put it, ‘Climate change just got real.’”



Trevor Noah jumped on the beer news, too. “Climate change: Sometimes it feels so hopeless, all you want to do is get drunk and forget about it,” he said. “Well, sadly, that won’t be an option, because of climate change.”
To his credit, Mr. Noah talks about climate change fairly often.
Does joking about climate change blunt the message that it is a threat, even a crisis?
Hardly, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He noted that broadcast media rarely talks about the topic, and it barely came up during the 2016 presidential debates. So for many television viewers, he said, seeing a segment on “Weekend Update” or “The Late Show” means “millions of people just had a conversation or watched on television discussions about climate change that they otherwise never get exposed to.”
What’s more, his center’s own research, he said, shows that “comedy is a really effective means to engage people,” and especially young people, in what he called “a sideways way.” He said that “through humor, people can deal with very difficult and scary topics that people will tend to ignore or avoid.”
The challenge, he suggested, is making any of this funny. “God knows, it’s pretty hard to laugh about most of the things that are going on today.”
Late-night television has long been topical, said Bill Carter, who used to cover the industry and has written two books about the struggle for dominance. But the rapidly spinning news cycle of the Trump administration has focused the comics’ attention on news out of Washington more than ever before, he said. And that fills a need.
“The audience is in a state of anxiety. The country is in a state of anxiety,” he said. “They’re watching the shows to get some relief.”
It helps, he added, that “this administration produces more risible material than any one in history.”

Links

• Talking to young people about climate change? Try to make them laugh
• The Science of Satire: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as Sources of Public Attention to Science and the Environment
• For Clinton and Trump, There’s Little Debating a Climate Change Divide
• Scientific consensus: Earth's climate is warming
• ‘I Don’t Know That It’s Man-Made,’ Trump Says of Climate Change. It Is.
• Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

How To Ignore Climate Change

Psychology Today - Grant Hilary Brenner*

Disturbing research on how climate change is hurting our emotional well-being.

DurkTalsma via Getty Images

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.                 — John Muir

Climate change is a major stressor in contemporary life. There is not a single day that we don’t read about the hazards of climate change, learn about a horrible disaster plausible connected with climate change. For those of us who accept the science, we often feel outrage at people — especially those in power — who not only refute climate change, but roll-back efforts intended to address the hazards facing our planet and species. In addition to outrage, shame, sorrow, helplessness, fear, disgust, resilience eroding cynicism, and the like... nothing good for emotional wellness.
What kind of animal are we to continue down this path, faced with what we now know? We know that the bystander effect is powerful. Crowds of people will walk by someone dying on the sidewalk, and do nothing. We tell ourselves that someone else will do something, absolving ourselves from having to act, a deadly human characteristic called "diffusion of responsibility" which comes out in groups. The more the merrier, one might darkly quip.
We also fail to act because we go along with the herd. If no one else is addressing the issue, perhaps most importantly our leaders, why should I risk separating myself from the group? Being exiled is, evolutionarily speaking, tantamount to a death sentence more often than not. That's part of why rejection feels so bad, why social exclusion lights up pain centers in the brain. Social conformity is a powerful and lethal force, as much as it shapes society in positive ways as well.

How do weather factors affect our health?
Numerous studies have provided evidence that climate change is associated with poor mental and emotional well-being. Many of these studies have been smaller scale or focused on specific populations. That is, until now.
Researchers from MIT, Harvard, UCSD, the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, and the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital (2018) published the results of a large-scale study providing empirical evidence of the mental health risks threatened by climate change. Working from a broad framework for mental health, they recognize that “[s]ocial, economic and physical systems are critical determinants of psychological well-being.” They note that mental health disorders exact a high price, with close to 50 percent of Americans experiencing some mental health issue in their lifetime, affecting productivity, general health and quality of life. The WHO has identified mental health issues such as depressive and anxiety disorders as tantamount to an epidemic, a public and global health crisis which will take a massive toll on all of human society if left unchecked.
The authors note that while many studies have shown the negative impact of specific events, including increased depression and posttraumatic stress disorder after hurricanes and floods, increased suicide rates during heat waves and drought, and increased psychiatric hospitalization when the temperature rises, well-designed studies of the large-scale effects of climate change on population mental health have been harder to conduct.

New research on mental health and climate change.

To look at the question of the effects of climate change on population mental health, researchers tapped a database of 2 million US residents between the years of 2002 and 2012, using data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System. People answered the question, “Now thinking about your mental health, which includes stress, depression, and problems with emotions, for how many days during the past 30 days was your mental health not good?” This one question was chosen by the CDC because it has been shown to be a simple, reliable indicator of mental health with statistical validity comparable to other accepted measures.

They took this data and related it to meteorological information using research methodologies from “climate econometrics” to look at relationships between facets of climate change and mental health, over time. The focused in on three high-impact types of stressor: short-run weather exposure, warming over a span of years, and the near-term effects of natural disaster.
They posed several questions:

• Do recent meteorological stressors affect mental health?
• Are more vulnerable groups affected more severely by meteorological stressors?
• Does longer-term warming adversely affect mental health over a span of years?
• Does direct impact from tropical storms worsen mental health?

How climate change affects mental illness rates for 2 million people.
They found that all three climate change experiences — the immediate effects of weather, warming over several years, and tropical storm exposure — significantly worsened mental health. They found that shifts in average monthly temperatures from 25 to 30 degrees centigrade to over 30 degrees worsened mental health in a dose-dependent manner. For each degree of average temperature increase, mental health worsened by a 2 percent increase in the rate of reported mental health issues. They found that in acute cyclone disaster zones, using Hurricane Katrina data, rates of mental health difficulties were 4 percent higher than in unaffected areas.  For short-term weather changes, both increased heat and increased rain worsened mental health in a dose-dependent relationship.
Based on the short-term effects of warmer and more rainy months alone, extending their findings to the whole US population translates into nearly 2 million extra people with mental health difficulties in any given month when the weather is worse. We all know how tough it can be to struggle through a heat-wave, or a period of prolonged bad weather — these numbers tell the story of our personal experiences writ large.

The chilling implications for spiraling mental illness with unchecked climate change.
These are disturbing findings, and would, for any rational creatures, be a wake-up call. The number of people expected to have significantly worsening mental health, when extended to the population of the US, let alone the world, means millions and millions more people with increase suffering, physical health problems, and impairment in function. Our current mental health systems are already grossly inadequate to meet the current demand for care, as rates of depression, anxiety disorders, and other illnesses continue to rise, and healthcare costs along with them. And these numbers are for a relatively well-resourced, first-world country. Climate change may have more profound effects in regions already under great strain, close to the tipping point.
The broad-brush strokes of this study show that on the population level, climate change has a major negative impact on our well-being, and future work will be more granular, looking at specific mental health and related issues. Areas of interest include the effects on mental health from different meteorological stressors for different groups, including psychiatric illness, behavioral changes, and impact on substance use. In addition to clinical outcomes, distress which does not reach diagnostic significance nevertheless can have major negative effects on individual well-being, family, and culture which we have yet to envision.

The future is uncertain.
Moreover, if we don’t get ahead of the mental health impact of climate change and do something about it, we are likely to get caught off guard and have difficulty responding effectively, compounding the problem further. As with many other anxiety-provoking issues for which there is no clear, good solution, we tend to use denial and avoidance to manage our emotional states, at our own peril.
This research, in some ways, represents a turning-point in understanding the effects of climate change on mental health. We need to better understand the causal relationships among weather-related factors and mental health outcomes. Underlying factors could include, authors note, changes in inflammation as a direct effect of climate, or could be due to factors such changes in level of exercise or eating habits.
Other factors not included in this study, harder to measure at this time, may also be important — such as a rise in sea-level. The study authors note that worry about climate change may itself be a primary factor. There's no question, that at least subjectively the day-in-day-out barrage of terrifying news causes massive amounts of anxiety, whether you are someone who numbs out, worries actively, and/or is trying to do something about climate change. This is truly the stuff of nightmares, as anyone afflicted with apocalyptic nightmares can tell you.
Ongoing research can start to look at these factors so we can understand what is happening when climate change impairs emotional well-being and identify areas of intervention to make us more resilient. If climate change continues to escalate as scientists predict, and the United Nations stridently warns, and we fail to heed these warnings, we open ourselves up to unfathomable, preventable horrors which will affect everyone. Understanding why people refute climate change will help to develop ways to educate, and persuade.

*Grant Hilary Brenner, M.D. is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who helps adults with mood and anxiety conditions.

Links

• Why Do People Want to Refute Climate Change?
• Environment
• Bystander Effect
• Conformity
• Climate Econometrics

We Have So Many Ways To Pursue A Healthy Climate – It’s Insane To Wait Any Longer

The Conversation - Peter C. Doherty

Opportunities to help drive the energy transition are everywhere - even in Western Australia’s remote salt pans. Peter C. Doherty, Author provided

As a broadly trained life scientist, my concern about climate change isn’t the health of the planet. The rocks will be just fine! What worries me is a whole spectrum of “wicked” challenges, from sustaining food production, to providing clean water, to maintaining wildlife diversity and the green environments that ensure the survival of complex life on Earth.
What’s more, as a disease and death researcher, I think of climate change as equivalent to lead poisoning: slow, cumulative, progressive and initially silent but, if not treated in time, causing irreversible, catastrophic damage.
The link between climate change and human health is obvious. The likely success of Dr Kerryn Phelps in the Wentworth byelection also suggests the informed public gets it. More broadly, Doctors for the Environment Australia has campaigned vigorously against Adani’s proposed Queensland coal mine, and has very strong student chapters. Young people are energised and, as they mature and take power, the political and legal situation regarding energy generation could change very quickly.
The world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet, has a high-profile commission that will report every two years until 2030 on the broad-ranging issue of climate and human health. The journal has just published a letter from just about every leading Australian medical scientist working in a relevant area that protests the federal government’s contemptuous dismissal of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Astronauts have shown us how incredibly fragile the atmosphere looks from space. The idea that we should wait for things to get worse before taking action to protect it seems insane.

Apollo 8 gave us a valuable perspective on our planet. NASA

We need legislators who can think and act for the long term. This issue is simply too big for individuals or volunteer groups. Unless politicians are prepared to put a substantial price on greenhouse emissions, it’s difficult to see how a capitalist economic system can move us forward. Clean coal? The US 45Q tax reform, which offers credits for carbon capture and storage projects, suggests we would need a carbon price of at least US$50 a tonne to make this technology economically feasible.
Australia’s governments at every level could be acting now to promote the planting of vegetation, including less readily combustible tree species. We could be embracing, and funding, energy efficiency while constructing all new buildings – especially hospitals and large apartment complexes – in ways that protect their inhabitants. A realistic carbon tax could pay for some of that, while also stimulating jobs and growth and providing investment certainty.
Some moves are already being made in the right direction. The Gorgon gas project is planning to extend its strategy to inject carbon dioxide into the ground rather than releasing it to the atmosphere. CSIRO’s new hydrogen economy roadmap shows how (with the endorsement of Chief Scientist Alan Finkel) we can develop gas exports based on hydrogen rather than natural gas, to supply emerging markets in countries such as Japan.
A more familiar export product is wood. Planting and harvesting trees mimics nature’s mechanism for storing carbon. Perhaps it’s time for CSIRO and the universities to reinvest in developing wood technologies that displace concrete for at least some forms of construction. Modular wooden houses could also easily be moved away from low-lying areas hit by river flooding and sea level rise.
My wife Penny and I recently joined a small organised tour that took us more than 5,000km around Western Australia. That made us very aware of competing realities. On one hand, we have the human constructs of community, politics and economy. On the other is the reality of nature, imposed by the laws of physics and the fact that all life systems have evolved to live within defined environmental “envelopes”.
Apart from the glorious WA wildflowers and extensive wheat fields, the prominence of mining was very clear. Metals are essential for just about any renewable energy strategy, although the massive amounts of diesel burned in the extraction process are clearly an issue. Could that transition to carbon-neutral biodiesel?
WA also has extensive coastal salt pans: might they be used, perhaps with pumped seawater, to cultivate algae for biofuel production? And, in the face of a global obesity pandemic, the best thing we could do with sugar cane is to convert it to biofuels.
If ethanol is bad for internal combustion engines, perhaps we should revisit external combustion? In WA, we went to the HMAS Sydney memorial in Geraldton. Like all big ships of her time, the Sydney was powered by steam turbines. Turbine power generation could be part of a mix driving electric/wind ships of the future.
Our WA trip also made us very conscious of the complex ecosystems that, in the end analysis, sustain all life. Plants use chemical signals (plant pheromones) to “talk” among themselves, to other species, and to the insects they attract for pollination. Some plants rely for reproduction on a single insect species. If the insects die, they die. We’re currently in the sixth mass extinction – this one caused by humans. As temperatures ramp up, rainfall patterns change, and firestorms grow stronger and more frequent, the effects will be terminal for many species.
With much of our land unsuited to agriculture, Australia is the biggest solar collector on Earth. Visiting WA also made us very aware of the enormous, untapped wind potential on the west coast. Apart from battery storage, making hydrogen from seawater offers an obvious strategy for dealing with both the remoteness of generation sites and the variability of supply from renewables, while also returning oxygen to the atmosphere. We could be the clean energy giants!
None of this will happen without the help of major corporations that have the wealth and power to influence governments, along with the globalised structure that facilitates the development and implementation of solutions. What’s very encouraging is that many of the multinationals are now moving forward to develop strategies for supplying global energy needs while minimising greenhouse gas emissions. There’s no way they want to be the “tobacco villains” of the 21st century!

Links

• Infographic: here's exactly what Adani's Carmichael mine means for Queensland
• The UN's 1.5°C special climate report at a glance
• The science is clear: we have to start creating our low-carbon future today
• Earth's sixth mass extinction has begun, new study confirms

New York Sues Exxon Mobil, Saying It Deceived Shareholders On Climate Change

New York Times - John Schwartz

The lawsuit says Exxon engaged in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” to deceive investors and analysts. Credit Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg, via Getty Images

New York’s attorney general sued Exxon Mobil on Wednesday, claiming the company defrauded shareholders by downplaying the expected risks of climate change to its business.
The litigation, which follows more than three years of investigation, represents the most significant legal effort yet to establish that a fossil fuel company misled the public on climate change and to hold it responsible.
Not only does it pose a financial threat to Exxon that could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars or more, but it could also strike a blow to the reputation of a company that has worked to rehabilitate its image, framing itself as a leader on global warming.
The suit does not charge Exxon with playing a role in creating climate change, though the burning of fossil fuels is a major contributor to human-driven warming. Rather, it is a fairly straightforward shareholder fraud suit, the kind that New York attorneys general have long brought and successfully prosecuted under state law.
It says the company engaged in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” to deceive investors, analysts and underwriters “concerning the company’s management of the risks posed to its business by climate change regulation.”

---

New York Attorney General’s
Lawsuit Against Exxon Mobil

“Exxon provided false and misleading assurances that it is effectively managing the economic risks posed to its business by the increasingly stringent policies and regulations that it expects governments to adopt to address climate change.” (96 pages, 0.79 MB)

---

Exxon essentially kept two sets of books when accounting for the effects of climate change, prosecutors said. The company told the world that it was prepared for the more stringent regulations that would inevitably be required to combat global warming. But in reality, according to the complaint, Exxon’s internal estimates discounted the potential future costs of climate policies, even though the threat of government action “exposed the company to greater risk from climate change regulation than investors were led to believe.”
The investigation has spanned the tenures of two New York attorneys general and has also involved attorneys general from other states. Exxon has attempted to block the inquiry in courts in three states, and has painted it as an attempt by bullies to restrict the company’s First Amendment rights and as part of an anti-fossil-fuel conspiracy backed by, among others, the Rockefeller family.
Scott J. Silvestri, an Exxon Mobil spokesman, said Wednesday that the New York attorney general’s office had “doubled down on its tainted, meritless investigation by filing a complaint against Exxon Mobil.”
The “baseless allegations,” Mr. Silvestri said, “are a product of closed-door lobbying by special interests, political opportunism and the attorney general’s inability to admit that a three-year investigation has uncovered no wrongdoing. The company looks forward to refuting these claims as soon as possible and getting this meritless civil lawsuit dismissed.”
Barbara D. Underwood, the New York attorney general, brought the lawsuit under the Martin Act, a state law that gives her sweeping powers to investigate and prosecute securities fraud. The suit demands that Exxon turn over all the money it made through the alleged fraud and make restitution to investors.

Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood of New York. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“Investors put their money and their trust in Exxon, which assured them of the long-term value of their shares, as the company claimed to be factoring the risk of increasing climate change regulation into its business decisions,” Ms. Underwood said. “Yet as our investigation found, Exxon often did no such thing.”
The investigation first came to light in November 2015, about a year after it was begun by former Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman. Before long, other state attorneys general announced their support for Mr. Schneiderman’s efforts; some, notably Maura Healey of Massachusetts, started investigations of their own.
The lawsuit says that Exxon told investors that when it was planning for its oil and gas reserves, its investments and its estimates of demand for its products, it applied an added cost, or “proxy cost,” that represented the likely effects of future climate regulations. But in many cases, the suit says, the company “applied much lower proxy costs than it represented or no proxy costs at all,” which exposed Exxon to greater regulatory risk.
Prosecutors added that “Exxon’s fraud was sanctioned at the highest levels of the company,” including by its former chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson. Mr. Tillerson, who went on to serve as President Trump’s first secretary of state, “knew for years that the company’s representations concerning proxy costs were misleading,” according to the complaint.
Exxon has been the focus of other legal actions and inquiries over its past statements and its role in the public debate over climate change. Echoing the New York case, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation in 2016 over the company’s practice of not writing down the value of oil reserves in light of the risk of climate change regulations, as other energy companies do. The commission dropped that inquiry in August.
Also, several cities, counties and the state of Rhode Island have sued the fossil fuel industry to recoup the costs of dealing with sea level rise and other effects of a warming world. Those cases rely on creative and relatively untested legal theories, however, and some of the suits, including one filed by New York City, have been dismissed, though the plaintiffs have said they will appeal.
Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family fund, which supports holding fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damages, said of Ms. Underwood’s lawsuit: “Apparently, Exxon has deceived the investing public about the economic consequences of climate change, just as they deceived the general public about the ‘catastrophic’ harm they knew their products would cause. It’s past time for Exxon to make their investors whole and to pay its fair share of the massive damages communities across the nation now face.”
Internally, Exxon has acknowledged climate change’s effects on its operations and planned accordingly. The company has long conducted research into climate change, much of it published in the scientific literature. In 2015, Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times reported that Exxon was well aware of the risks of climate change and used that research in its long-term planning for activities like drilling in the Arctic, even as it funded groups from the 1990s to the mid-2000s that denied serious climate risks.
The company pledged to stop funding groups that directly challenged the science of climate change in the mid-2000s, and says today that it accepts the science and the need for action to blunt the worst effects. The company supported the Paris climate deal and opposed the decision by Mr. Trump to withdraw from the agreement. It also publicizes its development of renewable energy technologies such as biofuels.
In addition, Exxon recently announced it would spend $1 million over the next two years to finance a group promoting “carbon dividend” legislation that would tax carbon dioxide emissions and then return the money that is collected back to taxpayers. (The proposal that the company supports would also protect companies that emit fossil fuels from lawsuits over the effects of climate change.)
The New York lawsuit poses “a real risk to Exxon’s reputation,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. He said it was especially concerning for investors, who rely on the company’s statements.
“If Exxon has been misleading on this,” Mr. Burger said, “what else has it been misleading about?”

Links

• Exxon Mobil Investigated for Possible Climate Change Lies by New York Attorney General
• New York Attorney General’s Lawsuit Against Exxon Mobil (pdf)
• Climate Lawsuits, Once Limited to the Coasts, Jump Inland
• What Exxon knew about the Earth's melting Arctic
• The Public Trust Doctrine in Environmental and Natural Resources Law
• A Case For The Future 21 Youths Challenge U.S. Energy Policy In Court
• Juliana vs. U.S.: The six plaintiffs from Eugene
• Securing The Legal Right To A Safe Climate
• “No Ordinary Lawsuit”: Climate Change, Due Process, and the Public Trust Doctrine