Women Shouldering The Burden Of Climate Crisis Need Action, Not Speeches

The Guardian - Patricia Scotland

From loss of livelihoods to domestic abuse, women bear the brunt of natural disasters. Without change, progress on gender equality will be undone

A woman wades through flood waters in the aftermath of Cyclone Aila in Harinagar, Satkhira, Bangladesh in 2009. Photograph: Abir Abdullah/EPA

Milikini Failautusi, 30, lives on the Pacific island of Tuvalu. She has become virtually a nomad in her own country after rising tides forced her to leave her ancestral atoll and move to the main island, Funafuti.

She is now a climate activist. She can no longer visit her home island, yet remains committed to her country with a burning desire to prevent her own children from inheriting an underwater ghost town. This is not just Milikini’s story.

While climate change threatens livelihoods and security around the world, it is women who are bearing the brunt. Women predominate in the workforces of many sectors that are most vulnerable to climate change such as agriculture, livestock and fishing.

To make things worse, inequalities mean women are more likely to suffer dislocation to their lives as a result of flooding and drought. According to the UN, about 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. More than 70% of those displaced by the 2010 flooding in Pakistan were women and children.

Among those who lost their lives in India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka as a result of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, three times more women died than men. But why?

Rigid gender roles in the region meant men in the region were more likely to be able to swim than women. Furthermore, women were more likely to be caring for children and family members during the critical evacuation time.

Women who do survive such disasters often end up in unclean evacuation centres where they can be exposed to gender-based violence and cannot access health services. Research by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found climate change and environmental impacts are increasing violence against women and girls including domestic abuse, child marriage and sexual assault.

In many societies, encouraging progress is being made towards gender equality, but climate change can stop or even reverse this progress.

If business-as-usual climate action continues, there are dangers that the gains of gender equality will be lost. There is a risk that as climate change accelerates, gender roles could become more entrenched.

More men may be forced to move in search of better job opportunities, while women are left behind to care for members of their extended families and bear the burden of household responsibilities. Those who have to remain in more disaster-prone or vulnerable locations as a result are then likely to experience greater poverty, have their livelihoods destroyed and suffer increasing health issues.

We know that any attempts to restore environmental degradation and lower the risks posed by global heating are likely to fail if they do not take into account gender inequality.

We know, from a report published last week by WaterAid, that climate finance is still not reaching the poorest and most vulnerable people, who are likely to be most affected by climate change. – about half of all countries receive less than $5 (£3.86) a year for each person.

In 2016, a UN report found that only 0.01% of all worldwide funding went towards projects addressing both climate change and gender, despite specific provisions in the 2015 Paris agreement for women’s empowerment.

Such statistics are sobering, but there are some encouraging signs of progress. Developed countries have pledged $100bn a year in climate finance by 2020 to help developing nations cut emissions and adapt to problems such as worsening droughts, flooding and sea-level rise. The Green Climate Fund, the main channel through which climate finance is dispersed, stipulates that all grants must treat women’s needs as a priority.

The Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub, based in Mauritius, is already making impressive progress in unlocking much-needed resources for countries and communities that would not otherwise have the capacity to lodge successful applications for funding already pledged.

At the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Rwanda in June, we can expect leaders to consider further innovative approaches to tackle environmental priorities, including the strategy proposed by women’s affairs ministers, which focuses on gender and climate change.

The strategy is designed to encourage countries to collect and analyse data disaggregated according to criteria such as sex and age in order to devise improved climate solutions and to target them more accurately.

Women like Milikini need more than speeches, however sincere. They need urgent collective action to tackle all aspects and impacts of the global climate crisis. Women on the frontline must be on an equal footing at all levels so that they, their families, their communities and the nations in which they live and work can survive and thrive. In the Commonwealth, we are working towards just that.

Links

• Climate breakdown 'is increasing violence against women'
• Women Fighting Climate Change Are Targets For Misogynists
• Why The Climate Crisis Is Harming Women More Than Men
• Birth Control And Books Can Slow Down Climate Change
• 'You Need To Act Now': Meet 4 Girls Working To Save The Warming World
• Women In Climate Change Hotspots Face Greater Burdens When Under Environmental Stress
• (US) Her Message About Climate Change: It’s Not Too Late
• Our Young Girls Are Bearing The Burden Of Climate Action. But Should They Be?
• Want To Go For Inclusive Climate Action? Then Start With Integrating Gender Equality Into Climate Finance

While We Self-Isolate, It’s A Good Time To Reflect On The Urgency Of The Climate Crisis

RenewEconomy - Sophie Vorrath

AAP Image/Paul Braven

Sophie Vorrath Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, RenewEconomy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.

As Australian governments scramble to formulate the appropriate response to the pandemic proportions of the Coronavirus, a new report from the Climate Council has reminded us of the burningly urgent need to address that other global crisis, climate change.
The report, titled Summer of Crisis, says – unequivocally – that Australia’s devastating and unprecedented 2019-2020 bushfire season was fuelled by the climate impacts that are, in turn, being fuelled by the burning of coal, oil and gas.
The Climate Council says the horror bushfire season, which in some parts of Australia started in winter, not only cost lives, wiped out livelihoods and decimated Australia’s native animal, bird and insect populations, but will also leave a serious dent in the economy.
The tourism sector alone, the report says, is set to lose at least $4.5 billion because of the bushfires, and is estimated to have led to a 10-20 per cent drop in international visitors booking holidays to Australia.
The smoke that blanketed Sydney, meanwhile, is estimated to have cost that city $12-50 million per day, while more than 23,000 bushfire-related insurance claims lodged nation-wide have been totted up to an estimated total value of $1.9 billion.
As for the carbon budget, that was blown out of the water with the fires estimated to have contributed between 650 million and 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere – equivalent to the annual emissions from commercial aircraft worldwide and far higher than Australia’s annual emissions of around 531 million tonnes.



In light of all this, the report says, Australia’s continued shirking of its international responsibility to take actual action to drive down its greenhouse gas emissions is morally and economically reprehensible – particularly as the world braces for a new hit from the novel Coronavirus.
“Australia urgently needs a plan to cut our domestic greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and to phase out fossil fuel exports, because we are one of the world’s largest polluters,” the report says.
“We are the 14th largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally and emit more per person than any other developed country.
“We are also the third largest exporter of fossil fuels … Clearly, what Australia does matters and the longer we delay, the harder the problem will be to solve.
“We cannot call on other countries to take action if we fail to do so. We simply cannot leave this mess for our children to try to fix.”
The report is particularly scathing about the federal Coalition government, which it says has ignored repeated warnings from scientists over at least a decade, and more recently from fire and emergency experts about impending bushfire disaster.
“Simplistic arguments about arson, hazard reduction and ‘green tape’ do not stand up to scrutiny, and are not responsible for what was clearly a series of weather-driven disasters,” the report says.
“Worsening extreme weather is clearly driven by a warming climate. Further denial and delay in taking action on emissions guarantees a worsening of disasters into the future.
“Taking action now will provide a chance to stabilise, then eventually reduce disaster risks for future generations.”
This week, the public and policy focus is almost entirely trained upon the spread of COVID-19, and how to keep this at bay, without bringing the economy to its knees.
As we wait for further advice from health minister Greg Hunt – who in his previous role as environment minister gave the green light to the Adani Group’s massive Carmichael coal mine in northern Queensland – we must not forget about one of the biggest threats to the health of humankind.
While we humans obsessively check our body temperatures, scientists have been checking the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere and waters for decades now, and warning that these are rising to levels that will not support life.



As the Bureau of Meteorology has told us, 2019 was the hottest year on record across Australia with mean temperature 1.52°C above average and mean maximum temperature 2.09°C above average. It was also the driest year on record, with rainfall 40 per cent below average.
Setting a clear pathway to end fossil fuel production and generation, and a more ambitious and longer-term target for emissions reduction, is the least Australia can do.

Links

• (AU) Summer Of Crisis
• Government Must Fund Ongoing Bushfire Research
• How does climate change affect bushfires?
• Dangerous Summer
• International Women’s Day: Inspirational Women of the Climate Council
• 12 Climate Actions to Make an Impact

Climate Change: The State Of Our Atmosphere

Al Jazeera News

Last seen three million years ago, the amount of the Earth's warming will get greater, even if it falls again.

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The "Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019" has been issued by the World Meteorological Office.

It stated 2019 ended with a global average temperature of 1.1 degree Celsius above estimated pre-industrial levels, second only to the record set in 2016, a year influenced by a strong El Nino event.

In 2018, greenhouse gas ratios reached new highs with carbon dioxide (CO2) at 407 parts per million (ppm). Preliminary data indicates that greenhouse gas concentrations continued to increase in 2019.

The usefulness of greenhouse gases
This needs some context to understand. The reason we can live on this planet is because greenhouse gases keep it warmer than an atmosphere without them would provide.

 However, if the amount of the most effective heat-trapping greenhouse gases is increased too much, we will simply overheat, in an out-of-control manner.

Since the dawn of humanity, we have never seen such a high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. At the start of the industrial revolution, it was at 275ppm. In prehistory, there have been higher levels.

Historic warming
A paper published by Yale University in 2017 lays out the following points: The last time the atmosphere contained 400ppm of CO2 was about three million years ago, the mid-Pliocene, recently enough for the planet to be not radically different than it is today.

Back then, temperatures were 2 to 3C (3.6 to 5.4F) above pre-industrial temperatures. The Arctic was more than 10C hotter, and sea levels were 15-25 metres higher.

Homo habilis (aka "handy man"), the first species in the Homo line and probably the first stone-tool users, got a taste of this climate as he arrived on the scene 2.8 million years ago (Homo sapiens didn't show up until 400,000 years ago at the earliest).

Record reliability
There's a lot of debate about both temperatures and CO2 levels from millions of years ago. But the evidence is much firmer for the last 800,000 years, when ice cores show that CO2 concentrations stayed between 180 and 290 ppm. There have been eight glacial cycles over these past 800,000 years, mostly driven by regular and understood wobbles in the Earth's orbit. This is the benchmark against which scientists usually note the unprecedented modern rise of CO2. 

Beyond just the concentration of greenhouse gases, the rate of increase in concentration appears to be unprecedented. Dana Royer, a climatologist at Wesleyan University said during the end-Triassic extinction, 200 million years ago, CO2 values jumped from about 1,300ppm to 3,500ppm. That took somewhere between 1,000 to 20,000 years and was caused by massive volcanic eruptions in what is now the central Atlantic.

Current risk
Today, we could conceivably change our atmosphere by thousands of parts per million in just 200 years. There is nothing anywhere near that in the ice core records. Though 400 seems a big number now, CO2 concentrations could easily pass 500ppm in the coming decades, and even reach 2,000 by 2250 if emissions are not brought under control.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from 2013 shows the projected outcome depending on our actions:

• In the most pessimistic scenario, where the population booms, technology stagnates, and emissions keep rising, the atmosphere gets to a startling 2,000 ppm by about 2250. That gives us an atmosphere last seen during the Jurassic when dinosaurs roamed, and causes an apocalyptic temperature rise of perhaps 9C (16F).
• In the most optimistic scenario, where emissions peak now (2010-2020) and start to decline, with humans actually removing carbon from the air by 2070, the atmosphere dips back down below 400ppm somewhere between 2100 and 2200.

Even assuming a scenario of zero emissions from very soon, getting back to pre-industrial levels of 280ppm is "sort of a 10,000-year proposition", said Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's CO2 programme in San Diego. It was Ralph's father who set up the Mauna Loa CO2 well-positioned measuring site in Hawaii in 1958. At that time, the concentration of CO2was 316ppm.

"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted ... CO2 will need to be reduced ... to at most 350 ppm," Columbia University climate guru James Hansen has said.

We sailed past that target in about 1990, and it will take a gargantuan effort to turn back the clock.

Links

• WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019 (pdf)
• Eight glacial cycles from an Antarctic ice core
• Are we heading into a new Ice Age?
• Climate Sensitivity in the Geologic Past
• Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis
• Greenhouse Gas Levels Have Hit A Record High And There's No Sign Of A Slowdown
• Climate Change Is Accelerating, According To A New UN Report
• Ahead Of UN Summit, Leading Scientists Warn Climate Change ‘Hitting Harder And Sooner’ Than Forecast
• Climate Change: Global Impacts 'Accelerating' - WMO
• 'Great Concern': World Meteorology Agency Reports Bad Climate Tidings
• State of the Climate: Record Heat and Weather Extremes
• World Meteorological Day: Hotter, Drier, Wetter. Face the Future

(AU) Summer Of Crisis

Climate Council

Australia’s Black Summer of 2019-2020 was characterised by catastrophic bushfires. The bushfire season started in winter and was the worst on record for New South Wales in terms of its intensity, the area burned, and the number of properties lost. It was also the worst season on record for properties lost in Queensland.
The Summer of Crisis report is the first comprehensive overview of the devastating climate impacts Australians experienced this summer. It focuses on New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, because the effects of the bushfires were most severe in these areas, but we acknowledge that the bushfires affected Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.

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KEY FINDINGS

1. Climate change fuelled Australia’s devastating Black Summer

• Extremely hot, dry conditions, underpinned by years of reduced rainfall and a severe drought, set the scene for this summer’s unprecedented fires.
• Cool season rainfall has declined in southeast Australia over the last two to three decades, while temperature records have been broken over and over. 2019 was Australia’s hottest, driest year on record. 2018-2019 was southeast Australia’s driest two-year period on record.
• The Australian fire season has lengthened in NSW, decreasing the ability of land managers to conduct hazard reduction burns and increasing the number of fire danger days.

2. Australia’s Black Summer was unprecedented in scale and harm. The bushfire season was the worst on record for New South Wales in terms of the scale of the bushfires, the number of properties lost and the amount of area burned.

• People and animals affected:
• Nearly 80 percent of Australians were affected either directly or indirectly by the bushfires. – One billion animals were killed by the bushfires, 800 million in NSW.

• Area burnt:
• The Gospers Mountain fire was the largest forest fire ever recorded in Australia, burning more than 500,000 hectares.
• This season’s fires were incredibly large in area, even compared to forests all around the world. Around 21 percent of Australian temperate broadleaf and mixed forests was burnt. The average annual area burnt for most continents, including Australia, is well below 5%, except for Africa and Asia, which have average annual areas burnt of 8-9%.

• Record breaking weather:
• Catastrophic fire danger ratings were experienced at locations and times of the year never before recorded.
• For the first time ever catastrophic fire conditions were forecast for Greater Sydney.

3. The bushfires are estimated to have spewed between 650 million and 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is equivalent to the annual emissions from commercial aircraft worldwide and is far higher than Australia’s annual emissions of around 531 million tonnes.

• The amount of carbon dioxide released by the bushfires is also more than the annual emissions of Germany.

4. Climate change events are becoming increasingly economically devastating.

• The tourism sector alone is set to lose at least $4.5 billion because of the bushfires. It is estimated that there was a 10-20 percent drop in international visitors booking holidays to Australia.
• The bushfire smoke that blanketed Sydney is estimated to have cost the city $12-50 million per day.
• More than 23,000 bushfire related insurance claims were lodged across New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria between November and February, totalling an estimated value of $1.9 billion.

5. The summer of 2019-20 saw unprecedented climate impacts fuelled by the burning of coal, oil and gas.

• The hot, dry conditions that fuelled these fires will continue to worsen without substantial, concerted action to rapidly phase out coal, oil and gas.
• Australia urgently needs a plan to cut our domestic greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and to phase out fossil fuel exports because we are one of the world’s largest polluters.
• Taking action now will provide a chance to stabilise, then eventually reduce disaster risks for future generations.
• Clearly, what Australia does matters and the longer we delay, the harder the problem will be to solve. We simply cannot leave this mess for our children to try to fix.

Links

• Government Must Fund Ongoing Bushfire Research
• How does climate change affect bushfires?
• Dangerous Summer
• International Women’s Day: Inspirational Women of the Climate Council
• 12 Climate Actions to Make an Impact
• Scott Morrison’s gas transition plan is a dangerous road to nowhere
• Gas: Dangerous, Expensive and Unnecessary

Coronavirus Should Give Us Hope That We Are Able To Tackle The Climate Crisis

The Conversation - David Comerford

EPA-EFE/Ritchie B Tongo

David Comerford David Comerford is Program Director, MSc Behavioural Science, University of Stirling

Coronavirus has disrupted everyday life throughout the world through travel bans, flight restrictions and the cancellation of sporting and cultural events.

More than 10 million Italians have been banned from travelling, and all public events cancelled. In China, 30 million people are still under lockdown, allowed to leave their homes only every two days. The Japanese prime minister has requested that all schools close for the entire month of March, while the Italian and Iranian authorities have closed all schools and universities. Despite the costs and inconveniences these actions impose, the general public is generally quiescent, even approving.
But coronavirus is not the only global crisis we face: the climate crisis, as others have noted, is expected to be more devastating. Some have observed that the response to the two crises is starkly different. As an expert in behavioural sciences, I have been giving some thought to what explains this difference.

The entrance of a former military hospital in Milan, Italy, 6 March 2020, to which COVID-19 patients are being transferred. Andrea Fasani/EPA-EFE

At first glance the difference is surprising, because the climate crisis is structurally very similar to the coronavirus crisis for a number of reasons:

1. Both are characterised by an escalating probability of disaster. In the case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, this is due to the nature of contagion: each patient can pass the disease on to more than one person and so rates of infection tend to accelerate. In the case of climate change, the increased risk of initiating feedback loops (processes which amplify the warming trend) and crossing tipping points as global temperatures rise have the same effect.
2. Tackling either problem will dusrupt our lifestyles in a number of ways, some of which are quite similar – consider the drastic rise in staycations elicited by the coronavirus crisis.
3. In both cases there is a coordination problem: the efforts of any one individual will achieve nothing to mitigate the risk unless accompanied by efforts from many others.
4. And in both cases, authorities acknowledge the urgency of acting. Governing administrations in 28 countries have declared a climate emergency.

Close to home
Given these similarities, one might think that both would evoke similar responses. But the response to the coronavirus crisis has arguably been far greater than the response to the climate crisis. Why?
Coronavirus is a recent, self-evident and rapidly escalating threat. It feels like a shock to the status quo, and the unease that shock engenders motivates action. Each day brings new evidence of the direct consequences of the outbreak, and these consequences are rapidly moving closer to home. It impresses as a clear and present danger that requires action now.
The threat of climate change, on the other hand, has been suggested for decades, and hard evidence has accumulated only gradually. Consequently, it does not evoke the same kind of unease. While there is no doubt that present and past activities by humans have generated emissions that will have consequences for the climate, it is not wholly possible to ascribe any specific event to climate change. The impression it makes is of a vague problem that will be encountered in the future, not something immediate.

Antarctica is becoming a popular tourist destination – but the continent’s delicate ecosystems are already suffering due to global warming. Federico Anfitti/EPA-EFE

There is also a sense in which the future is going to be bad regardless what steps we take now to address climate change. This can beget feelings of helplessness. With coronavirus, it feels as though today’s actions will have real and demonstrable consequences.
People are more supportive of policies if they can explain the mechanism through which the policy operates. There is a simple and intuitive mental model of how COVID-19 spreads (through people) and how we can stop its spread (keep infected people isolated).
Though we have been taught that heating our homes, driving our cars and so on contributes towards climate change, the causal chain through which this actually occurs is not intuitive. It feels as though we are dealing with coronavirus effectively when we quarantine infected people, but it does not feel as though we are taking a concrete step towards dealing with climate change by, for instance, banning the burning of unseasoned wood.

Some hope
So, what lessons can we learn from this?
Communication appears to be key. Creating intuitive mental models and apt metaphors to explain the link between our consumer behaviour, carbon emissions and a changing climate is a tall order. But if advocacy and lobby groups can do so, it might facilitate a sense of responsibility and agency. Also, it seems that the current communication around the risks and negative outcomes of climate change may be too diffuse and varied to be easily assimilated by the general public. If media outlets and governments could coordinate to clarify the nature of climate risk, coronavirus shows us that the public are more than capable of responding appropriately.

Celebrating Holi festival in medical face masks in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 9 March 2020. Monirul Alam/EPA-EFE

In the meantime, it might be heartening to consider some features of the coronavirus outbreak that would have been expected to inhibit action, but haven’t. The fact that most healthy adults recover from COVID-19 would be expected to induce complacency. And we know that people are generally prone to an optimism bias: the fact that I can engage in behaviours that protect against COVID-19 makes me over-optimistic regarding my personal risk. By contrast, climate change is universal; the healthy and wealthy do not inhabit a separate climate to the rest of us. If we get the messaging right, this universality should motivate even greater coordination than we have seen in response to coronavirus.
Also, taking steps to reduce the risk of coronavirus is always costly (such as cancelling events). By contrast, climate change mitigation still offers opportunities to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and simultaneously gain via lower energy bills, better air quality and so on.
In my research, I have focused on finding these win-wins, for instance in commuting behaviour and residential energy use. But the commitment I have observed over the past weeks in tackling the coronavirus outbreak makes me ambitious. Instead of applying behavioural science to change individual behaviour, let’s apply it to change hearts, minds and government policies.
One final lesson that the response to coronavirus teaches is that people can still work together to do the right thing. We need hope, and trust in each other, to tackle the climate crisis. Perhaps, counter-intuitively, coronavirus will help us with this.

Links

• The coronavirus pandemic shows how governments could respond to climate change
• Greta Thunberg urges climate protests to move online because of coronavirus outbreaks
• Why COVID-19 gets more government attention than the climate catastrophe
• Can COVID-19 create a turning point in the fight against climate change?
• Richer countries must do more to help those already experiencing the climate crisis

Coronavirus And Climate Change

New York Times - Brad Plumer

An international departure zone at John F. Kennedy Airport this month. Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

On Monday, oil prices saw their biggest one-day drop since 1991, driven down by coronavirus fears and a price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia. If we’re entering an era of really cheap oil, it’s worth asking what that could mean for climate change.

The traditional view is that a plunge in oil prices hurts efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as people use more oil and disregard alternatives like electric cars. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, has warned that cheap oil may slow the transition to cleaner energy worldwide.

But there are also reasons to think the old rules may not apply this time, and that the climate impact of cheap oil doesn’t have to be so stark.

Cheap oil, for instance, has often depressed sales of electric cars. But nowadays, a large share of electric vehicle sales is being driven by regulations in places like China, Europe and California. Those aren’t going away. What’s more, battery prices have been quickly falling over time, which means that electric cars are steadily becoming more competitive with conventional cars, even if you ignore fuel costs.

“For most consumers, high upfront prices are the biggest thing holding electric vehicles back,” Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said in an email. “Battery prices matter more than oil prices. If those keep falling, electric vehicle adoption will keep going up.”

He added: “Automakers are unlikely to change their long-term plans as a result of fluctuations in the oil market. Electrification is here to stay.”

Generally, a drop in oil prices also leads to an increase in travel, as people take advantage of low prices at the pump or cheaper airfares. But that’s less likely to happen this time, since worries about the coronavirus outbreak are keeping many people at home.

One big question, said Amy Myers Jaffe, an oil expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, is whether the coronavirus outbreak could permanently alter people’s work and transportation habits as companies get more comfortable with remote work and videoconferencing, reducing oil demand over time. “It will be interesting to see if we see big structural changes once this crisis subsides,” she said.

Another dynamic to watch: The oil crash, which is putting a financial strain on drilling companies, could cause some companies to reconsider their plans to invest in low-carbon technology. Alternatively, some companies may decide that renewable sources like wind and solar are actually a safer investment in a world of unstable oil prices.

But the biggest wild card is how policymakers react to the economic slowdown that’s being driven by coronavirus fears. If countries like China try to revitalize their economy by subsidizing polluting industries like steel and cement, emissions could soar in the coming months. During a period of economic crisis, climate concerns often fade, many analysts have noted.

But there’s another scenario: Governments could seize this moment to enact new climate policies. Low oil prices are often a good opportunity to remove subsidies for fossil fuels, which have been increasing in recent years, or raise taxes on carbon dioxide emissions, since consumers are less likely to feel the impact.

“Policymakers may try to bail out the conventional energy system and continue on as usual,” said Michael Webber, chief science and technology officer at Engie, a French energy company. “Or they could try to scale back subsidies for fossil fuels, help retrain workers into cleaner sectors, and take the moment to try to address the climate problem.”

In other words, it’s really up to us.

Links

• Coronavirus Could Slow Efforts to Cut Airlines’ Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• The Climate Changes Before Your Eyes
• E.P.A. Updates Plan to Limit Science Used in Environmental Rules
• The coronavirus pandemic shows how governments could respond to climate change
• Greta Thunberg urges climate protests to move online because of coronavirus outbreaks
• Why COVID-19 gets more government attention than the climate catastrophe
• Can COVID-19 create a turning point in the fight against climate change?

Women Fighting Climate Change Are Targets For Misogynists

Chatelaine - Chris Turner

Rude jokes, hate mail and violent threats—for climate experts, it’s all part of the job. That’s especially true for the women.

Illustration: Alex Nabaum c/o THEISPOT

Just months after the Alberta NDP’s surprise 2015 election win, Shannon Phillips, the province’s new environment minister, travelled to Paris for what would turn out to be a historic round of global climate change negotiations.

Alberta had long been a climate laggard, but Phillips was an ambitious and relatively young force in the province’s politics—39 years old at the time—and she was part of a wave of fresh faces in leadership. Phillips landed in Paris alongside Alberta’s new premier, Rachel Notley, and Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who were both committed to taking big steps after a decade of foot-dragging under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

It was an exciting time to be a cabinet minister working on climate change—the meeting produced what’s known as the Paris Agreement, the first major international pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions since the Kyoto Protocol nearly 20 years earlier. And right away, Phillips noticed a remarkable detail about the negotiations: the number of women present. At every meeting, the tables were crowded with female ministers, female negotiators, female scientists and activists.

“A massive amount of the heavy lifting around the world on this matter is being done by women,” says Phillips, who still represents her Lethbridge-West riding in the Alberta legislature. “You see more women on panels. You see more women in the negotiating spaces. You see more women in leadership positions on climate.”

But, as Phillips learned, that prominence came saddled with an added burden. As her government rolled out its climate change plan, she became a target for misogynistic abuse. There was no communications channel immune to the attacks. Social media platforms provided the greatest volume of vitriol, but occasional hateful messages also arrived via email, written letters and phone calls.

For Phillips, Facebook was the worst. Staff at her Lethbridge constituency office took on the work of scrolling through her feed, deleting enraged, expletive-laden posts and deciding if any represented sufficiently serious threats to alert local police. Lethbridge is a small city and its political circles smaller still, and Phillips’ staff could sometimes trace threatening posts to someone only one or two degrees of separation away from the politician’s family, friends and inner circle.

Lethbridge West politician Shannon Phillips

As a cabinet minister, Phillips couldn’t spend her days engaging in online shouting matches. “You have some constraints that are real,” she says. “It’s hard to fight back. So you just retreat.” The cacophony of abusive language simply became part of the background noise of her job.

That’s a ubiquitous experience for women leading the global climate change effort. From climate scientists who explain scientific facts to the public, to politicians unveiling climate legislation, to teenagers taking to the streets to demand a better future, women have formed the front line in this pitched political battle.

They are among the fiercest advocates for action, and a relentless barrage of abuse is unleashed upon them in response. There is no more important political arena in the world today than addressing climate change, and few as ugly and openly misogynistic. There is real heroism simply in persevering.

The intensity of the hate endured by women working on climate issues is partially due to the overall tenor of the conversation—deeply divisive, freighted with highly technical terminology and thrown off course for decades by ferocious and well-funded efforts to obscure the basic scientific facts of the crisis.

Men working on climate change action, whether as politicians, scientists or activists, also become objects of hate. Michael Mann, an outspoken climate scientist at Penn State University, once received an envelope full of mysterious white powder in the mail (it turned out to be corn starch), among other abuses. He is far from alone.

For women, though, the scale and intensity are orders of magnitude greater. Women exercising authority of any sort endure a certain amount of gender-based vilification, and climate change advocacy inevitably amplifies it. Several recent studies have noted that climate change represents a particularly sharp challenge to traditional ideas about masculinity.

A 2014 Swedish study, for example, found that climate change was seen as a threat to what researcher Martin Hultman has called the male “industrial breadwinner” identity, causing many men “to perceive climate activism as inherently feminine.”

Another study found that men were more likely than women to view acts of environmental stewardship in general as threats to masculinity. A British market research firm has dubbed this the “eco gender gap,” noting that products branded as “green” were much more likely to be purchased by women than by men. Climate change blends all these factors together, creating a uniquely powerful catalyst for gendered abuse.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks to an audience in Germany in February 2020. Photo: Christian Charisius/DPA via ZUMA Press

Every female climate scientist who achieves any prominence has seen her social media mentions fill with schoolyard insults, disparaging descriptions of her appearance and threats of sexual violence.

Every politician in the spotlight on the climate front becomes a target for partisan attacks. Young women who take on leadership roles are met with condescension regarding their abilities and contempt regarding their motives. And once such abuse reaches a particular volume and pitch, it spills over from the online world to real life.

Last October, Swedish student activist Greta Thunberg landed in Alberta to participate in one of the climate strikes her leadership has inspired around the world. While she was there, a camera-wielding contributor to the right-wing outlet Rebel Media tracked her to her Edmonton hotel. In a video that’s still up on YouTube, he follows her down a hallway and clearly identifies her location—a shocking intrusion on the safety of a 16-year-old girl. In climate politics, nothing appears to be out of bounds.

In Canada, Rebel Media has loomed large in the deterioration of the discourse around climate change. If there was an initial flashpoint for climate misogyny in this country, it was early 2016, when the outlet began using the term “Climate Barbie” to refer to then federal environment minister Catherine McKenna.

The phrase, alongside the usual load of misogynistic abuse hurled at female cabinet ministers, had burbled in the background during the first months of McKenna’s tenure. On the advice of her staff, McKenna had largely ignored the taunts and the condescending name. But once Rebel Media began popularizing it, usage rapidly amped up. And one particular day in September 2017, McKenna decided she’d had enough.

“I was at the UN,” McKenna says, “and it was late. We had had a day of meetings with international leaders on climate change and I came back [to my hotel] and I saw my Twitter feed had exploded.” The reason? The Conservative MP Gerry Ritz had replied to a news story about the Paris emissions cuts with a tweet reading, “Has anyone told our climate Barbie!”

Photo: Courtesy Catherine McKenna

In the lingo of social media, McKenna decided to clap back. “Do you use that sexist language about your daughter, mother, sister?” she wrote. “We need more women in politics. Your sexist comments won’t stop us.” In the face of a barrage of criticism, Ritz deleted the tweet and apologized for using a term that “is not reflective of the role the Minister plays.”

From then on, McKenna took on her critics from time to time. In a press scrum a few weeks after Ritz’s tweet, she confronted a Rebel Media contributor directly. In response to a question about Canada’s electricity mix, she replied, “So you’re the Rebel Media that happens to call me ‘Climate Barbie.’ I certainly hope that you will no longer use that hashtag.”

“I realized that calling these things out every once in awhile is actually good,” she says now. “Because I felt that I had to bite my tongue a lot, and I didn’t think it was okay. And it’s not that it’s all about me . . . It’s about girls and women who want to get into politics who would see these horrible things.” McKenna says pushing back makes her feel “empowered,” but the consequences of the abuse could not be so readily contained.

After several encounters with angry strangers—including having profanities hurled at her from a passing car as she walked with her children—she was required to take on a security detail for her public appearances as environment minister.

Even for women with platforms much less prominent, talking about climate change in public is a powerful magnet for misogynistic abuse. Leah Stokes, a Canadian-born professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, began making media appearances in early 2019 to discuss how to transform the energy sector. She noticed a distinct shift as her social media following grew. “When you get to 10,000,” she says, “things start to get crazy for women on Twitter.”

Her response has been to put hours of conscious effort into building community and encouraging civility on social media. Stokes thanks colleagues for mentioning her work, goes out of her way to post praise of theirs and makes regular recommendations of other scientists to follow.

“I see so many women advocates doing that,” says Stokes, adding it’s partly an effort to share the spotlight, and ensure a diversity of voices. “I think the darker side of it is that it’s a way of protecting ourselves. It’s the kind of extra emotional labour we have to do . . . that I just don’t think men have to do at all.”

University of California at Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes. Photo: Courtesy Leah Stokes

Even with that extra labour, Stokes sometimes finds the climate battlefield more than she wants to take on.

In the fall of 2019, a New York Times reporter contacted Stokes for an analysis of the climate and energy policies being floated by Democratic leadership candidates. She decided not to go on the record with her thoughts.

“If I took a position different from some of the activists…I would get attacked,” Stokes says. The Times reporter spoke to several other women for the story, but none agreed to be quoted. When the piece ran, it was criticized for failing to include the voices of female experts.

Stokes, like many women working in climate advocacy today, points to another Canadian climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, as a role model. Hayhoe has become a widely cited voice on how to talk to a reluctant public about climate change—in part because she is an unabashed Christian and political moderate in a field whose most prominent spokespeople tend to be neither of those things. Hayhoe also has an extraordinary gift for delivering calm, clear messages in the midst of the climate crossfire.

“What’s at the bottom of all of this is fear,” Hayhoe says. “Fear that the world is changing really fast. And it’s changing in ways that make a lot of people uncomfortable, because they feel like they’re being left behind.” All those fears have triggered a multivalent storm of toxic, reactionary politics—nationalism, sexism, racism and hostility toward expertise of all sorts.

As Hayhoe notes, a female scientist talking about a need for dramatic socio-economic changes in order to address an issue associated with progressive causes becomes a lightning rod for virtually the entire turbulent mess of grievances.

Hayhoe has come in for constant abuse and threats. She has removed personal information from her online bios because she was receiving strange packages and letters both at work and at home. The less frightening sexism takes a toll, too. In June 2019, when Hayhoe was called to give testimony before the United States Congress, congressmen who had addressed her male colleagues as “doctor” condescendingly referred to her as “young lady.”

“When I’m the second oldest person on the panel, and I am an expert with 25 years of experience testifying in my field, to address me in that manner is frankly unprofessional and inappropriate,” says Hayhoe, who has a PhD, more than 100 peer-reviewed climate science publications and is the director of Texas Tech’s Climate Center, among other things. “Yet, it’s common.”

She’s stopped trying to defend her expertise. “I had to consciously give up the right to be respected and correctly represented,” Hayhoe says. “I don’t like it, but that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to reach the people who can engage in respectful dialogue.”

Katharine Hayhoe. Photo: Ashley Rodgers, Texas Tech University

The task is admirable, and it is bearing fruit—climate change has moved firmly into the centre of the political arena across North America and support for action is building.

At the same time, the greater visibility of both the issue and the women who carry on the fight almost certainly means that misogynistic blowback will get worse before it gets better. And it continues to transpire in a rapidly evolving social media environment in which there are still no established norms, let alone government protocols or law-enforcement strategies.

McKenna says her office and her government have brought up the abuse directly with social media companies. The response has been rote expressions of regret and suggestions to report every transgression—which, she notes ruefully, would’ve occupied her entire staff all day, every day, at the peak of her visibility as environment minister.

Otherwise, there is no promise of action on the horizon, and police are often no more help. Phillips says nothing was done to investigate the threatening messages her office reported, which she calls “a form of intimidating people who are duly elected.” She wonders—without much hope—if CSIS or the RCMP will ever see it that way.

In the meantime, there is the everyday heroism of the women engaged in the climate change battle—who are all quick to insist the duty to act and the opportunity to carve out an even larger space for female leadership balances out the abuse. “Change is worth it,” says Phillips. “And from my perspective of being a partisan politician, being the boss is worth it.”

Links

• Why The Climate Crisis Is Harming Women More Than Men
• Birth Control And Books Can Slow Down Climate Change
• 'You Need To Act Now': Meet 4 Girls Working To Save The Warming World
• Women In Climate Change Hotspots Face Greater Burdens When Under Environmental Stress
• (US) Her Message About Climate Change: It’s Not Too Late
• Our Young Girls Are Bearing The Burden Of Climate Action. But Should They Be?