Category: Drought_MN Politics_MN TalkingClimate_MN TEXAS_CN

Climate change is helping fuel the drought, but the state’s political leaders won’t take global warming into account in their water management. “Climate change has become politicized,” says Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.

On September 24, as Hurricane Ian strengthened, Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency for the entirety of Florida. Late afternoon on September 28, the hurricane made landfall on the west coast of the state, bringing historic storm surge and catastrophic flooding and at least six storm-related fatalities. The hurricane has garnered sustained TV news coverage since September 24, elevating to wall-to-wall coverage by September 28.

When it comes to changing minds, nothing beats an experience. That’s how Sylvia Earle sees it. The scientist has spent years trying to get people to understand the impacts of climate change, and has found that showing them can be the best way to tell them about the problems the planet is facing. Problem is, you can’t take millions of people to the bottom of the ocean, or, for that matter, make them read a boring climate report. The solution? Actually, it might be TikTok.

Climate change is being fueled by the release of greenhouse gas emissions and those emissions are coming from every sector of the global economy: Electricity, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, industrial processes. Collectively, greenhouse gas emissions have generally been climbing for decades. Activists often advocate using less and consuming less as one potential solution to climate change — degrowth, it’s often called.

hat is salient is not important. What is important is not salient. Most of the time, most of the media obsess over issues of mind-numbing triviality. Much of the world’s political journalism is little more than court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. At the same time, issues of immense, even existential importance are largely or entirely ignored.

As net zero commitments reshape the world economy, and as the impacts of climate change accelerate, climate politics is getting existential. Vulnerable communities are fighting to survive. This month, one-third of Pakistan, a country of 220 million people, was flooded. At the same time, fossil fuel interest groups – coal, in particular – are trying every tactic to delay the inevitable.

It’s well established that individuals can suffer lasting consequences from traumatic experiences, whether they be a child who survived abuse or a soldier returning from combat. But there is now a growing movement of practitioners working to unravel how communal experiences of war, slavery, racism, genocide, colonialism, gender violence and other forms of oppression can cause shared trauma on a collective scale. Leaders in this emerging field argue that the impact of events that took place decades or even centuries ago, can cascade through generations, silently shaping the destiny of communities, cultures, and nations — and perhaps the planet itself.

Since the 1960s, fighting for the environment has frequently meant fighting against corporations. To curb pollution, activists have worked to thwart new oil drilling, coal-fired power plants, fracking for natural gas, and fuel pipelines. But today, Americans face a climate challenge that can’t be solved by just saying no again and again.

While some Russian soldiers in Ukraine are voting with their feet against Vladimir Putin’s shameful war, their hasty retreat doesn’t mean that Putin is surrendering. Last week, in fact, he opened a whole new front — on energy. Putin thinks he’s found a cold war that he can win. He’s going to try to literally freeze the European Union this winter by choking off supplies of Russian gas and oil to pressure the E.U. into abandoning Ukraine.

Most Americans support climate action, but you wouldn’t know it from Congress or the courts – or from most of the media. A recent study found that a majority of people significantly underestimated the extent to which their fellow Americans are concerned about climate disruption, as well as public support for policies to address it. That misperception can affect our ability to work collectively on climate action.