This coverage is made possible through a partnershipbetweenWBEZandGrist, a nonprofit, environmental media organization.
If you live in the Midwest or the Southeast, you know the cicadas are coming.
And if you live in Chicago, you know the Cicadalypse is coming.
Cicadas, winged buggy noisemakers whose relatives include leaf-hoppers and spittle bugs, come in two varieties: the annual cicadas who, sure enough, appear every year and the periodical cicadas, who appear in 13-year and 17-year cycles.
This year, however, those two periodical broods — known officially as Brood XIX, the Great Southern Brood and Brood XIII, the Northern Illinois Brood — will emerge at the same time, and in some parts of central Illinois, side-by-side.
The double-emergence hasn’t happened since 1803. For a little perspective, consider that in 1803 Chicago was not yet a city, just a fort built at the intersection of what is now Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive.
The cicada emergence will span 16 states that range from Oklahoma to Virginia, and some cicadas have already started emerging in the South. It will probably start in the Midwest in a day or two. In certain parts of Illinois, scientists say the two broods will be close enough to hear each other singing, a noise level that can boom louder than a jet engine.
While much has been made of the noise level of all those chirping cicadas, some scientists are taking a closer look at the timing of their visit. Thanks to climate change, the cicadas are ahead of schedule.
Emergence depends on a key variable: soil temperature. Cicadas are touchy, and will only burst out of the ground once the soil temperatures about 6 inches deep reach around 64 degrees Fahrenheit.
“That’s the magic number,” said Floyd Shockley, an entomologist and collections manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Stephanie Adams, a scientist at the Morton Arboretum in suburban Chicago, displays a cicada in her palm.
Juanpablo Rameriz-Franco / Grist
Brood XIX, the largest brood, and Brood XIII, among the densest of the broods, have spent the past 13 and 17 years respectively burrowing through the soils and feeding on the nutritious fluids from tree roots. Now they’re waiting for a deeply ingrained, instinctual clock to tell them to burrow out of the ground all at once.
But that clock could be ticking faster these days.
“We’re on a gradually warming planet,” and the periodical cicadas know it, according to Shockley. He said the first cicadas to emerge this year crawled out back in February — which isn’t totally out of the norm. There are early birds every year, but this year he said there was an “extraordinarily high number” to come out prematurely.
“It’s happening earlier and earlier,” said Shockley. “And we think that it is totally related to the conditions locally being just right earlier and earlier because of climate change.”
The soil temperatures when cicadas will begin to emerge typically occur sometime in mid- to late-May, according to Scott Lincoln with the National Weather Service’s Chicago office. But, the average date when soil temperature would prompt the cicada emergence has been trending earlier over the last 30 years: approximately six days earlier in one Chicago suburb, and approximately 10 days earlier further northwest in DeKalb, Illinois.
According to scientists at the Morton Arboretum in suburban Chicago, it’s not just the cicada getting ahead of themselves. All kinds of species of trees, shrubs, and perennials bloomed unseasonably early this year. Maples, elms, and magnolia trees bloomed almost a month prematurely in the Chicago region.
There are close to 200 species of cicada in North America, only seven of which exhibit synchronized 13- and 17-year life cycles — otherwise known as periodical cicadas. These cicadas, the longest living of the species, have historically emerged in late spring or early summer, compared to the annual cicadas which come out every year near the end of the summer. The two never overlap. By the time the annual cicadas come out, the periodicals are long dead.
There are currently 15 periodic broods spaced across the eastern United States, 12 of which are synchronized to a 17-year life cycle and three that are synchronized to a 13-year cycle. Every brood contains a minimum of three or a maximum of four of cicada species — each species with its own signature tune.
For a brief several weeks, some residents of central Illinois will be able to hear all seven species of cicada in a single day, according to Shockley.
Some scientists, according to Stephanie Adams with the Morton Arboretum, believe that rare proximity between the two broods could allow species from the neighboring broods to court, mate, and potentially reproduce. “There is curiosity on whether they’re gonna hybridize and maybe produce a whole new species, so that is genuinely unknown,” she said.
A recent study found that the sheer number of cicadas droning around the many forests of the eastern United States will be a can’t-miss feeding frenzy for some 80 bird species. The short-lived bump in cicada calories isn’t just good for birds, it’s also a major boon for the caterpillars that will get a rare break from their predators.
At the Morton Arboretum in suburban Chicago, Rachel White, left, and Rachelle Frosch, on the ladder, swaddle a young tree in tulle to protect it from emerging cicadas. A female cicada can harm small trees and shrubs by cutting into the bark while depositing her eggs. Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / Grist
All told: billions upon billions of cicadas will drone on for four to six weeks, but no one is getting hurt — just potentially irritated.
Cicadas don’t have stingers, they don’t bite, and they pose no real threat to humans. But the insects can damage small trees and shrubs as part of their life cycle. The damage is caused when the female starts laying her eggs: she will cut into the branches of small trees and shrubs to lay up to 600 eggs inside the bark.
The best way to protect vulnerable trees? Run to a fabric store and pick up the nearest bolt of tulle. The idea is to wrap the material typically used for ballet tutus around the tree like a lollipop. The hope is that the fine, lightweight mesh keeps the cicadas off and the sunlight in.
But if the tulle doesn’t make it in time, then it’ll take the eggs six to eight weeks to mature after being deposited into the small branches of young trees, during which time the tips of affected branches will turn brown: “It’s a natural pruning event,” said Shockley. If they survive, those same trees will be bushier and healthier the following year.
Eventually, the cicada nymphs will hatch, fall into the ground, burrow down, and start their 13- and 17-year cycles all over again.
“They’re a great barometer for the impact of humans on a species that was here before humans got here,” said Shockley. “And so watching those patterns tells us a lot about what impact we’re having on the environment.”
Barangay New Zealand’s Rene Molina has interviewed the country’s first Filipino Green MP Francisco Hernandez who was sworn into Parliament yesterday as the party’s latest member.
This is the first interview with Hernandez who replaces former Green Party co-leader James Shaw after his retirement from politics to take up a green investment advisory role.
Hernandez talks about his earlier role as a climate change activist and his role with New Zealand’s Climate Commission, and his life experiences.
The interviewer — educator, digital media producer and community advocate Rene Nonoy Molina — is also a member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).
“I was involved in the New Zealand climate crisis movement as an activist,” Hernandez says.
“I was involved in a group called Generation Zero, which is the youth climate justice group and that’s how I ended up getting involved in the New Zealand youth delegation that went to Paris.
“So that’s separate from my Climate Change Commission work which came after.”
Hernandez is the son of a member of Joseph Estrada’s ruling party in the Philippines before its government changed in 2001, according to the Otago University magazine.
He migrated to New Zealand with his family when he was 12 and is a former president of the Otago University Students’ Association with an honours degree in politics.
Francisco B. Hernandez talks to Rene Molina. Video: Barangay NZ
He has also worked as an advisor at the Climate Commission, reports RNZ News.
He stood for Dunedin in the last election, coming third with more than 8000 votes — not far behind National’s Michael Woodhouse (over 9000) but far behind the more than 17,000 votes of Labour’s Rachel Brooking.
Published in collaboration with Barangay New Zealand.
Journalists in the Pacific region play an important role as the “eyes and ears on the ground” when it comes to reporting the climate crisis, says the European Union’s Pacific Ambassador Barbara Plinkert.
“So, I understand this year’s World Press Freedom Day as a call to action, and a unique opportunity to highlight the role that Pacific journalists can play leading global conversations on issues that impact us all, like climate and the environment,” she said.
“Here in the Pacific, you know better than almost anywhere in the world what climate change looks and feels like and what are the risks that lie ahead.”
Plinkert said reporting stories on climate change were Pacific stories, adding that “with journalists like you sharing these stories with the world, the impact will be amplified.”
“Just imagine how much more powerful the messages for global climate action are when they have real faces and real stories attached to them,” she said.
The European Union’s Pacific Ambassador Barbara Plinkert delivers her opening remarks at the 2024 World Press Freedom Day seminar at USP. Image: Veniana Willy/Wansolwara
Reflecting on the theme, Plinkert recognised that there was an “immense personal risk” for journalists reporting the truth.
99 journalists killed
According to Plinkert, 99 journalists and media workers had been killed last year — the highest death toll since 2015.
Hundreds more were imprisoned worldwide, she said, “just for doing their jobs”.
“Women journalists bear a disproportionate burden,” the ambassador said, with more than 70 percent facing online harassment, threats and gender-based violence.
Plinkert called it “a stain on our collective commitment to human rights and equality”.
“We must vehemently condemn all attacks on those who wield the pen as their only weapon in the battle for truth,” she declared.
The European Union, she said, was strengthening its support for media freedom by adopting the so-called “Anti-SLAPP” directive which stands for “strategic lawsuits against public participation”.
Plinkert said the directive would safeguard journalists from such lawsuits designed to censor reporting on issues of public interest.
Law ‘protecting journalists’
Additionally, the European Parliament had adopted the European Media Freedom Act which, according to Plinkert, would “introduce measures aimed at protecting journalists and media providers from political interference”.
In the Pacific, the EU is funding projects in the Solomon Islands such as the “Building Voices for Accountability”, the ambassador said.
She added that it was “one of many EU-funded projects supporting journalists globally”.
The World Press Freedom event held at USP’s Laucala Campus included a panel discussion by editors and CSO representatives on the theme “Fiji and the Pacific situation”.
The EU ambassador was one of the chief guests at the event, which included Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Secretary-General Henry Puna, and Fiji’s Environment and Climate Change Secretary Dr Sivendra Michael was the keynote speaker.
Plinkert has served as the EU’s Ambassador to Fiji and the Pacific since 2023, replacing Sujiro Seam. Prior to her appointment, Plinkert was the head of the European External Action Service (EEAS), Southeast Asia Division, based in Brussels, Belgium.
Kaneta Naimatau is a third-year student journalist at The University of the South Pacific. Wansolwara News collaborates with Asia Pacific Report.
Fiji’s Environment and Climate Change Secretary Dr Sivendra Michael (from left) and the EU Pacific Ambassador Barbara Plinkert join in the celebrations. Image: Veniana Willy/Wansolwara
Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna stressed the importance of media freedom and its link to the climate and environmental crisis at the 2024 World Press Freedom Day event organised by the University of the South Pacific’s journalism programme.
Under the theme “A Planet for the Press: Journalism in the face of the environment crisis”, Puna underscored the critical role of a free press in addressing the challenges of climate change.
“The challenges confronting the climate crisis and the news profession seem to share a common urgency,” Puna said at the event last Friday.
He highlighted the shared urgency between climate activism and the news profession, noting how both were often perceived as disruptors in contemporary narratives.
Puna drew attention to the alarming death toll of journalists, particularly in conflict zones like Gaza, and the pervasive threats faced by journalists worldwide, including in the Pacific region.
Against this backdrop, he emphasised the vital importance of truth and facts in combating misinformation and disinformation, which pose significant obstacles to addressing climate change effectively.
PIF Secretary General Henry Puna delivers his speech at the 2024 World Press Freedom Day celebration at The University of the South Pacific. Image: Veniana Willy/Wansolwara
The Secretary-General’s address resonated with a sense of urgency, emphasising the need for journalism that informs, educates, and amplifies diverse voices, especially those from vulnerable nations directly impacted by the climate crisis.
‘Frontlines of climate change’
He said the imperative for a press that reported from the “frontlines of climate change”, advocating for a 1.5-degree Celsius, net-zero future as the paramount goal for survival.
“A press for the planet is a press that informs and educates,” Puna said.
“And, of course, for our Blue Continent, it must be a press of inclusive and diverse voices.”
Puna highlighted the Pacific Islands Forum’s commitment to transparency and accountability, noting the crucial role of media in communicating the outcomes and decisions of annual meetings.
He cited instances where the presence of journalists enhanced the Forum’s advocacy efforts on climate, environment, and ocean priorities on the global stage.
Reflecting on past collaborative efforts, such as the launch of the Teieniwa Vision against corruption, Puna underscored the symbiotic relationship between political will and journalistic integrity.
He urged governments and media watchdogs to work hand in hand in upholding shared values of transparency, courage, and ethics.
Guests and Journalism students at the 2024 World Press Freedom Day at The University of the South Pacific. Image: Veniana Willy/Wansolwara
‘Political will’ needed
“It takes political will to enforce the criminalisation of corruption and prompt, impartial investigation, and prosecution,” Puna said.
Looking ahead to 2050, he expressed hope for a resilient Blue Pacific continent, built on the foundations of a robust and resilient press.
He envisioned a future where stories of climate crisis give way to narratives of peace and prosperity, contingent upon achieving the 1.5-degree Celsius, net-zero target.
“In 2050, we will have achieved the 1.5 net zero future that will ensure our stories of the code red for climate in 2024 become the stories of a code blue for peace and prosperity beyond 2050,” Puna said.
Media’s crucial role in ClimateChange & environment reporting was the focus of @UniSouthPacific JournalismProgram #WPFD event. EU Pacific Ambassador Plinkert, PIFs GS Puna & Fiji Environment Ministry PS Dr Michael delivered powerful addresses followed by panel discussion. pic.twitter.com/fle6h02Oe2
— Dr Shailendra B Singh (@ShailendraBSing) May 6, 2024
He commended the commitments made at the G7 Ministerial in Turin to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, emphasising the pivotal role of media in upholding democratic values and advancing collective aspirations for a secure and free society.
Puna extended his best wishes to journalists and journalism students, acknowledging their vital role in shaping public discourse and driving positive change in the face of the environmental crisis.
His plea served as a rallying cry for journalistic vigilance and solidarity in the pursuit of a sustainable future for all.
Kamna Kumar is a third-year journalism student at The University of the South Pacific. Republished from Wansolwara News in a collaboration with Asia Pacific Report.
More so than any other fossil fuel company, Occidental Petroleum — known as Oxy — has built its climate strategy around innovations that capture carbon before it can be emitted or pull it directly out of the air. The Texas-based oil giant, which made more than $23 billion in revenue last year, says on its website that these “visionary technologies” will help it achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and enable a lower-carbon future.
Scientists agree that such technologies will be necessary to limit global warming. But Oxy’s plans for them appear to be less about sustainability and more about creating a “license to pollute,” according to a new analysis from the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch. The analysis describes Oxy’s focus on carbon capture and removal as a “costly fig leaf for business as usual,” allowing the company to claim emissions reductions while continuing to profit from the sale of fossil fuels — rebranded as “net-zero oil” and “sustainable aviation fuels.”
The company “makes this whole spiel about meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals, but it’s very clearly flying in the face of that,” said Marlène Ramón Hernández, an expert on carbon removal at Carbon Market Watch and a co-author of the report. “What we have to do is phase out fossil fuels, not perpetuate their life.”
Oxy first outlined its net-zero strategy in 2020, making it the first American oil major to do so. Today, Oxy describes that strategy using four R’s: The company says it will “reduce” operational emissions, “revolutionize” carbon management, “remove” carbon from the atmosphere, and “reuse/recycle” it to produce new low-carbon or zero-emissions products. Its overarching goal is to achieve net-zero emissions for its operations and indirect energy use by 2040.
This is where the problems begin, according to Carbon Market Watch. Despite Oxy’s net-zero pledge for its operation and energy use, it is much vaguer about the emissions associated with the oil and gas it sells. These emissions, known as Scope 3 emissions, represented more than 90 percent of Oxy’s greenhouse gas footprint in 2022. The company has asserted an “ambition” to zero them out by 2050.
However, Oxy does not plan to reduce Scope 3 emissions by phasing down the production of oil and gas, but through investments in carbon removal. Direct air capture, or DAC — a technology that uses large fans and chemical reactions to separate carbon dioxide from the air — is a main focus. An Oxy subsidiary called Oxy Low Carbon Ventures announced in 2022 that it would deploy up to 135 DAC plants by 2035, and last year Oxy bought a major DAC technology company for $1.1 billion.
A DAC facility owned by the Swiss company Climeworks.
Halldor Kolbeins / AFP via Getty Images
Some of Oxy’s DAC projects are already in the pipeline. The largest, called Stratos, is under construction in the Permian Basin, a massive oil field, in Texas. If it reaches its nameplate capacity of capturing half a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — which Oxy says it will do by mid-2025 — it will be 14 times larger than the biggest DAC facility in the world. (That facility, owned by the Swiss company Climeworks, began operating in Iceland this week with a nominal capacity of 36,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.)
In order for DAC to result in net removal of carbon dioxide, however, captured carbon has to be kept out of the atmosphere for good. This is usually achieved by locking it up in rock formations. Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub, however, has said this would be a “waste of a valuable product,” and instead plans to use the captured carbon. In one application, it would be converted into synthetic electrofuels — low-carbon fuels produced from their chemical constituents using electricity — and sold to other companies.
The other major application is for a process known as enhanced oil recovery, where CO2 is injected into oil and gas wells in order to extract hard-to-reach reserves of fossil fuels. This forms the basis for Oxy’s “net-zero oil” claims. According to the company’s logic, the atmospheric carbon dioxide injected into the ground cancels out any new emissions from the oil and gas it’s used to pull up. In an interview with NPR last December, Hollub said this approach means that “there’s no reason not to produce oil and gas forever.”
Neither Carbon Market Watch nor the independent experts Grist spoke to look favorably on these approaches. Charles Harvey, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT who was not involved in the report, called it “absurd” to use captured carbon to make so-called sustainable aviation fuels; these fuels will eventually be burned, re-releasing the captured carbon back into the atmosphere.
In fact, the whole process may result in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions, since DAC is an energy-intensive process that is often powered by fossil fuels. Oxy has no publicly announced plans to power its carbon capture and removal facilities with renewable energy. “They’ll be releasing more CO2 than they’re capturing,” Harvey said.
As for “net-zero oil,” Carbon Market Watch calls it an “oxymoron and a logical fallacy.” A 2021 analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory suggests that this application would also result in net-positive emissions — both because it takes so much energy (likely supplied by fossil fuels) just to run a DAC plant, and, because every metric ton of carbon dioxide injected into oil fields extracts two to three barrels of oil. Each barrel of oil generates half a metric ton of carbon dioxide when burned, which means each metric ton of carbon dioxide used for Oxy’s net-zero oil may create 1 to 1.5 tons of CO2 emissions.
Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub speaks at a panel during the World Petroleum Congress conference in 2021.
Brandon Bell / Getty Images
Hernández said she is also concerned about Oxy’s plans to generate carbon credits from its DAC projects. Even though none of its planned DAC facilities has been built yet, Oxy has already pre-sold or is in negotiations to sell DAC-generated carbon credits representing between 1.63 million and 1.98 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to Carbon Market Watch’s calculations. If the company uses the same captured carbon to offset its own emissions and generate credits, which can be used to offset the emissions of another company, “This is a blatant issue of double-counting,” Hernandez told Grist.
Oxy did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Holly Jean Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo, said it’s possible to pursue DAC responsibly. Even a moonshot project like Stratos could be seen as having an important demonstration or research value. “The point is to figure out if the technology is going to work at a real-world level,” she told Grist.
That said, she agreed there are ways Oxy could make its DAC agenda more credible. “They could make a commitment to building renewable power to power it,” she offered, or donate the technology to developing countries.
Buck and some other academics say fossil fuel companies should be doing more of this research — or at least footing the bill for it — in order to take responsibility for their role in the climate crisis. Harvey, however, argues there’s an opportunity cost to such research and deployment, which is expensive. He and other researchers have estimated that it will cost Oxy’s Stratos facility $500 to capture each metric ton of carbon dioxide. (The company predicts costs will fall to around $200 per ton by 2030.)
Every dollar spent on DAC means a dollar not spent on more reliable, immediate emissions reductions. “There’s low-hanging fruit to do before you get there,” he said, like building renewable energy for non-DAC purposes, insulating houses, installing heat pumps, or putting more batteries on the grid with existing renewables.
“Almost anything is better” than DAC, Harvey said.
As an essential first step toward a more credible net-zero strategy, Hernández suggested that Oxy abandon its aggressive plans to extract more oil and gas, since doing so is misaligned with scientists’ call for adramatic cut in production in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). “It’s actually planning to increase its oil production, so there is clearly no intention there to transition to net-zero,” she said.
A former Tuvalu prime minister says while the New Zealand government’s oil and gas plans show it is concerned about its economy, he is more concerned about the livelihoods and survival of the Tuvalu people.
Enele Sopoaga — who still serves as an MP in Tuvalu — says the climate crisis is the “main enemy”.
“There is nothing more serious and more important than that.”
His comments come after New Zealand’s Resources Minister Shane Jones said it was “left wing catastrophisation” to suggest that waters would be lapping at towns in Pacific countries as a result of the New Zealand government’s decision on gas and coal.
NZ’s Resources Minister Shane Jones . . . “[New Zealand] keeping the lights on and the hospitals functioning, you can’t hold that type of thinking responsible for the tide lapping around Tuvalu.” Photo: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Vanuatu Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu called on the New Zealand government not to reverse the ban at last year’s Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Rarotonga.
“We call on them not to do it to be in line with Paris, in line with the 1.5 degree target. The science says you cannot [make] new fossil fuels,” he told RNZ Pacific in 2023.
Despite this, the current New Zealand government has backed its plans, which Tuvalu is not happy about.
‘It’s going to sink Tuvalu’
“Go ahead and drill and open up new coal mining or get new gas stations,” said Sopoaga, “but don’t forget that whatever you are going to do, it’s going to increase greenhouse gas emissions, which are going to sink the islands of Tuvalu and kill the people.
“It’s just as a matter of fact, as simple as that.”
Jones was asked by RNZ’s Morning Report how New Zealand’s Pacific neighbours would feel about restarting exploration of oil and gas, and the associated environmental impact.
Jones said the Pacific understood Aotearoa needed reliable energy to generate an economic dividend to then be able to contribute to the Pacific region.
“[New Zealand] keeping the lights on and the hospitals functioning, you can’t hold that type of thinking responsible for the tide lapping around Tuvalu. Come on, give us a break,” Jones said.
Sopoaga called the comments “daft” and “naive”.
“I think it’s a completely stupid idea,” he said.
‘Early demise, rising sea levels’
“It’s just logical — the more you open up new gases and the more release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will simply cause the early demise and rising of sea levels that will affect the islands of Tuvalu.
“I would appeal to New Zealand to rethink about doing that.”
Sopoaga was prime minister from 2013 to 2019. He was re-elected as an MP in this year’s election and is part of Tuvalu’s 16-member parliament.
He now wants Aotearoa to stick with its ban on fossil fuel exploration, and to also contribute to the cost of adaptation.
Sopoaga said he wanted to remind Jones that “we are working as a global team in the world”.
“Countries cannot just take up their own initiatives, and then go the wrong way.
“[We can not] go with the national interests of countries, we have to discipline ourselves so that we don’t break up and claim that we are doing what the Paris Agreement and Kyoto Protocol are telling us.
“In fact, the Paris Agreement is a legally binding framework, and you cannot just simply say we open up new oil fields in New Zealand and these will not affect the Pacific Island countries.
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has recently spoken about New Zealand’s relationship with China.
“We strongly believe that in a mature relationship like ours it is possible to discuss differences openly, respectfully, and predictably. We will continue to share our concerns with China, where we have them.
“China has a long-standing presence in the Pacific, but we are seriously concerned by increased engagement in Pacific security sectors. We do not want to see developments that destabilise the institutions and arrangements that have long underpinned our region’s security.”
Peters has said he is continuing work started by the previous government to consider partipation in AUKUS Pillar 2, but that New Zealand was a long way from making a decision.
“I think the role of New Zealand is to de-escalate and pacify the situation, talk to China, talk to Australia, talk to the US,” Sopoaga said.
“There is no enemy, their biggest enemy is climate change.
“They are only using this [AUKUS] as a camouflage to move away from responsibility and cause global warming. And they want to ignore their accountability, their responsibility to deal with it,” Sopoaga said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The news media’s crucial role in climate change and environment journalism was the focus of The University of the South Pacific’s Journalism Programme 2024 World Press Freedom Day celebrations.
The European Union Ambassador to the Pacific, Barbara Plinkert, and Pacific Islands Forum Secretary General Henry Puna were the chief guests at the event last week on May 3.
Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Secretary Dr Sivendra Michael was the keynote speaker.
Plinkert reemphasised journalists’ role in being public’s eyes and ears on the ground, verifying facts, scrutinising those in power and amplifying marginalised voices.
Puna’s message was targeted at Pacific leaders in terms of due recognition to the significant role of environmental journalism in sharing the priorities and realities of the resilient Pacific.
Dr Michael highlighted the need for governments and development partners to work with the local and regional media in mitigating environment and climate change challenges.
The event ended with a panel discussion on the theme for the 2024 World Press Freedom Day — A Press for the Planet: Journalism in the face of the environmental crisis: Fiji and the Pacific.
Media ‘poor cousins’
Associate Professor in Pacific Journalism Dr Shailendra Singh said that the WPFD theme was appropriate since environment and climate change news were relegated to “poor cousins” of politics, sports, business, and entertainment news.
He said it was to understand why this situation persisted and how to address it.
Others at the event included USP deputy vice-chancellor Professor Jito Vanualailai, deputy head of the School of Pacific Arts Dr Rosiana Lagi, and the Regional Representative for the Pacific, UN Human Rights Heike Alefsen.
The event was organised by The University of the South Pacific School of Journalism in partnership with the Delegation of the European Union to the Pacific.
Republished from Wansolwara News in collaboration.
This Earth Month, Environmental Defence celebrated its 40th Anniversary. Our Executive Director, Tim Gray, marked the occasion with a speech underscored with a message of hope—a message we’d like to share with all of you now. Four decades of creating meaningful change is no small feat and perseverance often requires hope. But, as you’ll read in Tim’s message below, there’s a certain type of hope that promises a better future, and it’s one rooted in grit, not blind optimism.
Hope is a gift that all of us share. We can tap into it to make our lives richer and more productive.
So how does the scale of the challenges that face our world mesh with our hope for a better future at Environmental Defence?
I like to think we take something from former Czech President Václav Havel who said: “Hope…is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Tim Gray, Executive Director of Environmental Defence speaking at our 40th Anniversary Gala
As a result, Environmental Defence focuses our efforts squarely on the key threats to our world and we design programs that target the root of identified problems. We do this because science and evidence tells us that is the right course.
Let’s start with the fight against toxic chemicals.
We have known for decades that novel toxic chemicals are introduced into our food and consumer products with almost no testing of their impacts. Our laws actually allow for this and so, as a society, we wait for bad things to happen to our bodies or in the environment before remedial action is taken.
This makes no sense and we have long sought to reform these laws.
We have also known that the chemical industry would grind us down with lobbyists and propaganda if we talked only about reforming the law. So we haven’t.
Instead we picked key high profile chemicals, such as BPA and phthalates, that have proven risks to our health.
And we worked to get them banned.
And that worked. BPA and phthalates are now known by most Canadians to be bad … and now they are mostly gone from baby bottles, toys and many other consumer products.
That is hope made tangible through fewer toxic chemicals in our world.
We have all seen that throw-away plastics clog and poison our oceans, rivers and cities. For decades, we have been told that the only way to fix this problem was to improve recycling. Unfortunately, evidence shows that recycling doesn’t work. The plastics industry knew this long ago but have doubled down on pushing “better recycling” so people would feel the plastic mess was their fault…and not the very companies that produced more and more plastic every year.
So, we worked with experts to develop a plan to fix the plastic waste problem. And when the plastics industry pushed back, we decided to get key single use plastics banned outright. We did this because bans were easier for people to understand and made it clearer to the plastics industry the consequences of their continued efforts to block progress to fix the entire waste system.
Fast forward and now Canada has banned six single use plastics including plastic cutlery and take out containers. And now we are working to get more banned and the system fixed.
This is hope for naturally abundant ecosystems instead of abundant plastic trash.
Data tells us that a key way of solving climate change is to reduce pollution from our transportation systems. Fortunately, new electric cars can help with that problem, but only if they are available when people want to buy them. Evidence has long shown that car makers are not making enough of them available when people are ready to buy. So customers are choosing a new gas car instead.
This work shows hope pursued together leads to wins and more opportunities.
You have probably heard that the Canadian government has a long history of providing subsidies to oil and gas companies to produce more oil in other countries. These need to stop if we are to slow and reverse climate change.
Our team worked with others around the world to secure commitments to ending these subsidies and we won. Canada has stopped funding these projects and many new carbon spewing oil projects are no longer economically viable.
This is hope for a better future, one that can save you money.
Many of us live within the Greater Toronto and Hamilton region and we hope for a future with livable cities and healthy farms and forests.
That’s why 20 years ago, Environmental Defence worked with the people of Ontario to stop the sprawl and highways were eating farmland, forests, and wetlands at a glutinous rate. And we worked to do something about the gridlock and car dependency that were ruining communities and making people’s lives more expensive and unhealthy.
Together, we created the 2 million acre Greenbelt to be permanently protected forever.
Seventeen years later, on a day I will never forget, Premier Doug Ford announced he was breaking his promise to keep his hands off the Greenbelt by opening large areas of it to developers, many of which he called his friends.
And so began the largest exercise of hope in Ontario’s environmental history.
In this effort, we all faced an Ontario government with a large legislative majority. We also faced a government that had shown a shocking willingness to run roughshod over past promises, long standing legislation and even the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to pursue its agenda.
Fighting back did not make any sense, and winning seemed impossible.
At Environmental Defence, we took about 30 seconds to decide what we would do. And in our first media interviews after the government’s shocking announcement we said the Greenbelt lands would never be developed.
The effort required to get that reversal was monumental and represented a complete leap of faith by everyone who participated. We all decided the consequences of the loss of the Greenbelt was too terrible to contemplate, so we decided to do whatever it took to win.
This once cancelled highway is emblematic of an approach to transportation, city building, and environmental protection that has failed dramatically for decades.
That is the hope that we will bring to workers to ensure our governments put in place programs and systems to protect them as we go through the massive, industrial transition necessary to fight climate change.
And that is the hope that we will bring to ensure that all of us have a healthy environment in which to build a prosperous and healthy future full of natural abundance, fairness and justice.
I want to end this overview of recent successes and plans for the future with a quote from T.D. Williams. One, that to me, really summarizes the type of hope that infuses together our work at Environmental Defence:
“People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”
Thank you so much to those who have helped us achieve so much over the last four decades. We hope you will continue with us on our journey forward!
This blog is based on the speech given by Tim Gray, Executive Director at Environmental Defence’s 40th Anniversary Gala on April 4, 2024.
Hundreds of climate activists gathered at the global headquarters of Citigroup in New York on Wednesday to demand the banking giant stop financing fossil fuel companies. The protests come on the heels of a first-of-its-kind Earth Day hearing where environmental activists from around the world gathered in New York this week to condemn what they call Citigroup’s environmental racism. Citibank is the world’s second-largest funder of coal, oil and gas. “They always say, 'We care about the planet.' … But actions speak louder than words,” says Alice Hu, climate campaigner for New York Communities for Change. “Citibank has poured over $332 billion into fossil fuels since the Paris Agreements were signed in 2015.” We also speak with Roishetta Ozane, a Black environmental leader from Sulphur, Louisiana, who has been leading the fight against the expansion of Citigroup-funded liquified natural gas projects in her community. She says she has seen the health impacts of such projects on her own family. “I’m fighting not only for myself and my community, but for my children. And by fighting for my children, I’m fighting for everyone’s children,” says Ozane.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
The reality of climate change came home for Dr. Samantha Ahdoot one summer day in 2011 when her son was 9 years old.
She and her family were living in Charlottesville, where Ahdoot is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. There was a heat wave. Morning temperatures hovered in the high 80s, and her son had to walk up a steep hill to get to his day camp.
About an hour after he left for camp, she received a call from a nearby emergency room. Her son had collapsed from the heat and needed IV fluids to recover.
“It was after that event that I realized that I had to do something,” she said. “That, as a pediatrician and a mother, this was something that I had to learn about and get involved in.”
Dr. Ahdoot made good on that vow. She is the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ newly updated policy statement on climate change, which appeared earlier this year. The statement urges pediatricians to talk about climate change to their patients. But research suggests that’s not happening very much yet, and there are practical barriers in the way.
Back in 2007, the AAP was the first national physicians’ group to make a public statement about climate change. The updated statement covers the growing research on the many ways climate disproportionately affects children in particular. Heat raises the risk of preterm birth; infants are among the most likely to die in heat waves. Because their bodies cool themselves less efficiently than adults, children remain more susceptible to heat-related illness as they grow. Children breathe more air per pound of body weight, making them up to 10 times more affected by toxins in wildfire smoke. Excess heat hurts children’s performance in school, especially low-income children with less access to air conditioning. And research suggests that teens and youth are feeling more climate anxiety than older adults.
The new policy statement’s number one recommendation is that its members “incorporate climate change counseling into clinical practice.” This may seem like a tall order, considering the average pediatrician visit is 15 minutes. A 2021 study found that 80 percent of parents agreed that the impact of global warming on their child’s health should be discussed during their routine visits. But, only 4 percent said that it had actually happened in the past year.
“How do you talk about climate change in a visit where you have to talk about x,y, z, do all the vaccines, answer every concern?” said Dr. Charles Moon, chief resident at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York. A member of the AAP Council on Environmental Health and Climate Change, he has been working to build a curriculum at his hospital to start teaching pediatricians and other doctors about this.
“I don’t think we have all the answers to that yet,” he said. “I do a lot of work teaching other pediatricians, and it requires a little bit of a mindset shift.”
Dr. Moon sees patients in the South Bronx, nicknamed “Asthma Alley” for its air pollution. Part of his challenge is putting environmental threats in perspective for families who face many different obstacles in their lives, in a way that doesn’t lead to despair or disempowerment.
Or, as he put it: “If you can’t put food on the table, who wants to hear about climate change?”
In Oakland, California, Dr. Cierra Gromoff has a lot of experience with families on Medicaid, and she says the pressure on them and their healthcare providers is real “There are these already incredibly marginalized groups of kids facing other insurmountable things,” she said. “These providers have so little time, they have to focus on the biggest burning fire — whatever systemic problem is going on.”
A clinical child psychologist, Gromoff has been concerned about the environment since her childhood as an Alaskan Native in the remote Aleutian Islands. She thinks that to overcome these obstacles, state and federal insurance providers should require or reward doctors for taking the time to include environmental health in their assessments.
She is the co-founder of a telehealth startup, Kismet Health, which is building a tool that could show local environmental threats that are indexed to a patient’s home or school address.
The tool could help doctors recognize climate risks, by showing if a patient lives near a green space, an urban heat island, or a polluting chemical plant.
Gromoff said she would like to see free resources that pediatricians can give families on everything from the signs of heatstroke in a baby to eco-anxiety..
“We should have a screening question,” she said. “‘’Are you worried about what’s happening to our earth? ’And if they say yes, we should be able to provide some type of handout: What you’re feeling is real. These are small steps you can take.”
The good news, say Moon and Ahdoot, is that interest in the topic is picking up in the medical community. Over half of medical schools are covering climate change in the curriculum, a number that’s more than doubled since 2019. And there are state research consortiums on climate and health in 24 states, Ahdoot said. The American Academy of Pediatrics has been creating continuing education materials on the topic as well.
Incorporating climate change into clinical practice is not about adding another item to an already long checklist, Ahdoot said. It’s also not about transforming pediatricians into activists, or talking about factors that families can’t do anything about.
“Pediatricians never want to be proselytizing,” she added. “It always has to be valuable to the individual patient.”
The goal of the new climate policy for pediatricians is to help doctors translate their climate knowledge into solutions and helpful advice for their patients. A few examples from Ahdoot include: running a test for Lyme disease for patients in Maine, which used to be too cold for ticks; beginning allergy medication in February because pollen arrives earlier in the year; or teaching athletes the warning signs for heat exhaustion.
For Ahdoot, it’s also important to be aware of how climate affects a child’s mental health. Part of the answer, she said, is talking about actions that families can take that benefit both people’s health and the planet, like eating more plant-based diets, and walking or biking instead of driving.
“What’s good for climate,” she said, “is generally good for kids.”
Tech giant Apple Inc. has a duty to call out Vietnam’s targeting of climate activists in line with its own policies after making the southeast Asian nation its primary manufacturing hub outside of China, a group of 61 environmental and human rights organizations said in an open letter on Thursday.
Apple must publicly condemn Hanoi’s use of “ambiguous laws” to arrest Vietnam’s climate activists on “trumped-up” tax evasion charges or risk “violating your own environmental and human rights policies and delegitimizing Apple’s positive work in these areas,” said the letter from the Members of the Vietnam Climate Defenders Coalition, addressed to the company’s leadership and board of directors.
“Since Vietnam is now Apple’s most important production hub outside of China and you have committed to human rights and ‘equity and justice in climate solutions,’ we believe you have a responsibility to weigh in on the systematic persecution and imprisonment of climate leaders in the country,” it said.
This handout photo released on October 24, 2023 by Hoang Vinh Nam shows his wife Vietnamese environment activist Hoang Thi Minh Hong posing with a motorbike in Lam Dong province on March 2, 2023. (Handout/Hoang Vinh Nam/AFP)
The letter referenced the imprisonment of Nguy Thi Khanh, who served 16 months behind bars after working to reduce the government’s coal expansion plans; environmental lawyer Dang Dinh Bach, who is serving a five-year sentence after representing communities impacted by pollution; and Hoang Thi Minh Hong, who is serving three years in prison after founding environmental group CHANGE Vietnam.
The group also called attention to authorities’ recent arrest of Ngo Thi To Nhien, the former executive director of Vietnam Initiative for Energy Transition, for “appropriation of information or documents,” which it said suggested efforts by the government to “criminalize access to information about Vietnam’s clean energy transition.”
The 61 organizations said Apple had failed to uphold its commitment to equity and justice in climate solutions, as well as transitioning its suppliers to renewable energy and a net-zero carbon impact from all of its products by 2030 by building manufacturing capacity in Vietnam.
“In Vietnam … those who would have facilitated net-zero carbon impact by supporting the transition to clean energy and other climate solutions are either in jail or have been silenced due to fear that they could be next,” they said. “Environmental organizations are shutting down, and there is currently no transparency or safe way for civil society to participate in this vital clean energy transition.”
The executive director of Green ID (Green Innovation and Development Centre), Nguy Thi Khanh, at the NGO’s headquarters in Hanoi, February 6, 2020. (Lillian Suwanrumpha/AFP)
The letter urged Apple to publicly pressure Vietnam’s government to release its imprisoned climate activists and ensure that civil society is free to participate in the country’s transition to clean energy without fear of persecution.
It noted that Apple’s own commitment to human rights champions “an open society in which information flows freely” and states “the best way we can continue to promote openness is to remain engaged, even where we may disagree with a country’s laws.”
Avoid ‘same mistakes’
Ben Swanton, co-director of environmental watchdog Project88, among the letter’s signatories, told RFA Vietnamese that Apple “should not make additional investments in intensive manufacturing in Vietnam while the country lacks clean energy sources and the government continues to imprison climate activists on false criminal charges.”
Michael Caster, Asia digital program manager for ARTICLE 19, another of the signatories, said Apple has a corporate responsibility “not to make the same mistakes” in Vietnam as it has in China, where he said “human rights abuses have been rampant, including with Apple’s complicity in areas of censorship and surveillance.”
“This requires robust human rights due diligence across its supply chain,” he told RFA. “As part of this process, Apple should seriously take into account Vietnam’s persecution of climate activists, independent journalists, and others, and consider using its potential economic leverage to publicly condemn such actions.”
Novelist Vo Thi Hao, right, marchs during a gathering to mark the 35th anniversary of the border war between Vietnam and China, in Hanoi, in a file photo. (Kham/Reuters)
Members of the Vietnam Climate Defenders Coalition noted that it had written a letter outlining similar concerns to Apple on May 31, 2023, one day after which Hoang Thi Minh Hong was arrested and Dang Dinh Bach declared a hunger strike in prison.
It said it met virtually with members of Apple’s staff to discuss the concerns in November, but has yet to receive a response regarding the company’s next steps.
“Apple, a company of growing significance to Vietnam’s economy, is in a unique position to bring this issue to the forefront,” the group said. “Simply stating that you are in support of equitable and just climate solutions and human rights is not enough. Your commitments require action, and now is the time to take it.”
Responsibility ‘wherever it operates’
Germany-based writer Vo Thi Hao, a frequent critic of Vietnam’s persecution of environmental activists, called their arrests “ridiculous and unjustified” in an interview with RFA.
“These activists, who had been protecting the common environment for the entire country, including those who arrested them, are now facing unjust sentences,” she said, calling for their immediate and unconditional release.
She noted that Apple’s ability to take action to protect activists in Vietnam “would be a challenge,” as it would need to “choose between democracy and human rights values and economic benefits brought about by the Vietnamese market.”
Activist Dang Dinh Bach in an undated image. (Provided by standwithbach.org)
But she called on the company to do more to protect freedom and democracy, not only in the United States, but “wherever it operates.”
Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Apple and other major Western manufacturers “who are de-risking their supply chains” by moving from China to Vietnam “need to realize just how bad the human rights situation is in Vietnam.”
“Climate change activists and NGO leaders are in jail, workers are prohibited from forming independent unions, and the human rights and democracy movement has effectively been wiped out,” he told RFA. “If Apple doesn’t speak out against this, then they are complicit and need to face repercussions from US and European consumers.”
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.
We want to thank you all for being a part of this community. Whether you’ve been a subscriber since day one or this is the very first newsletter to hit your inbox, we are glad you’re here!
To celebrate 100 issues of Looking Forward, we’re rounding up some superlatives — senior yearbook style. My editor challenged me to pick a winning story in several categories: most surprising, most actionable, most fun … you get the idea. So take a look back (or a look for the first time!) at some of the topics that have stuck with me, and resonated with your fellow readers.
And, to honor our persisting love for the drabble form, we’re also excited to announce a special opportunity. We’re launching a mini drabble contest, dedicated to Looking Forward’s mission of envisioning a clean, green, just future. Find the deets below!
Climate change is a global problem. But its impacts — and, often, its solutions — happen locally. In the very first issue of Looking Forward, we explored how the simple act of making friends with your neighbors can be part of a crucial infrastructure for climate resilience. I still think back to this newsletter as setting the tone for how we view and discuss what makes a climate solution, because of how it changed my perspective.
Puerto Rico-based climate activist Christine Nieves Rodriguez told me about her experience weathering the disaster of Hurricane Maria — and how the bonds between neighbors and friends made all the difference in the aftermath of the storm. “The people who are closest to you physically will become the most important people of your life when everything collapses,” Nieves said. Read the story here.
In this first-person feature, former Grist fellow Marigo Farr wrote about her experience transitioning to climate-friendly banking and investment options — and offered a range of avenues through which readers might begin to do the same. (Ando, the bank Marigo was using at the time, has since closed. But the other companies and resources she explored are still active.) Inspired in part by Marigo’s inclusive, approachable advice, I tried this myself. I had already been using a sustainability-oriented bank called Aspiration, which offers a pretty low-key investment fund (the minimum is $10). I decided to start with $100, just to get a feel for doing something international with my dollars, instead of stashing them in a cardboard box in my attic (I’m kidding, of course. But barely). Read the story here.
In March of 2023, an organization called Third Act staged a nationwide day of marches, rallies, and sit-ins outside of big banks to protest their continued funding of fossil fuels. The twist: These activists were sitting in rocking chairs. The organization, founded by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, is specifically for those older than 60.
For this newsletter, I interviewed Lani Ritter Hall, who was a first-time protestor when she joined the Third Act demonstrations. Our conversation was both fun and thought-provoking — I could tell how galvanizing the experience had been for her, and how meaningful it was to do it with a group that proudly emphasized their advanced age. “For the first time in 76 years, I was out on the street with a sign in front of a bank in Cleveland, Ohio,” she told me. “It was like, Oh, my gosh, am I really doing this? Yes, you are!” As a youngish person myself, I was fascinated to hear how being closer to the end of life has in some ways been a driver to activism for her and other Third Actors — “all of a sudden there’s so much more urgency about trying to really make a difference so that the world will be better for future generations.” Read the Q&A here.
This piece by Syris Valentine explored the concept of deconstruction — taking buildings apart and reusing or recycling the materials, rather than demolishing them and sending the waste to landfills — and how a growing number of cities are beginning to mandate the practice. The topic seemed to hit home — this newsletter holds the record for most reader replies!
This note from Brian Hart has particularly stayed with me:
“I would first point out that those of us who were forming households in the late ’60s and early ’70s, were building with tons of recycled materials. (More extreme versions were labeled “hippie,” by some.) When my late wife and I bought a shack on the edge of the Fraser River, in 1971, we had a minuscule budget for making it habitable. Recycled material made it possible; to wit: All of the doors and windows in our home were originally the suite entry doors from a 1930s office building, complete with frames and transoms and hardware, that were already on a truck to the dump; I paid the driver to dump them at my place. (A unique feature, at the time, was every window and door in our house had a mail slot.)”
The list went on, from the bathroom sink to the kitchen cabinets. And several other readers responded to share about local initiatives in their cities, their interest in ReStores, and some of the secondhand or upcycled items most near and dear to them. Read the story here.
This might be my all-time personal favorite newsletter. Although I have since moved to Seattle, I was a proud Baltimorean in the spring of 2023, and keen to celebrate (and share with all of you) a weird and delightful local phenomenon: It was the ninth birthday of Mr. Trash Wheel, the googly-eyed, mouthlike machine who sits in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, gobbling up trash before it can make it out to sea — and he was having a party. Mr. Trash Wheel now has a family of look-alikes in different parts of Baltimore, and the concept has even spread to other cities. And, in addition to directly removing trash, the wheels’ celebrity has turned into an advocacy tool for the end of single-use plastics. Read the story here.
In honor of 100 issues of Looking Forward, we are excited to launch a mini drabble contest.
Drabbles, little 100-word pieces of fiction, have been a mainstay of Looking Forward since the beginning. We’ve always aimed to document the work being done today to address the causes and impacts of the climate crisis, while also envisioning what the future could look like if we get it right. That’s where drabbles come in. So, we’re going to celebrate 100 issues with an ode to the 100-word form. Send us a drabble imagining the world in 100 years for a chance to win presents!
Here’s the prompt: Choose one climate solution that excites you, and show us how you hope it will evolve over the next 100 years to contribute to building a clean, green, just future.
We’ve covered a boatload of solutions you could draw from (100, to be exact!) — so if you need some inspiration, peruse the full Looking Forward archive here, or check out some of the issues linked above.
Drabbles offer a little glimpse of the future we dream about, so paint us a compelling picture of how you hope the world, and our lives on it, will evolve.
Here’s what we’ll be looking for:
Descriptive writing that makes us feel immersed in the scene and setting.
A sense of time. You don’t have to put a specific timestamp on your piece, but give us some clue that we are in the future (not an alternate reality), approximately 100 years from now, and that certain things have changed.
A sense of feeling. Is this vignette about joy? Frustration? Excitement? Nervousness? The mundane pleasure of living in a world where needs are met? Make us feel something!
100 words on the dot.
The winning drabbleswill be published in Looking Forward in May, and the winners will receive presents! Some Grist-y swag, and a book of your choice lovingly packaged and mailed to you by Claire.
To submit: Send your drabble to lookingforward@grist.org with “Drabble contest” in the subject line, by the end of Friday, April 26.
We look forward to reading your visions for a clean, green, just future!
A parting shot
For our 100th parting shot, we’re sharing a reflection from Mia Torres, the editorial designer responsible for Looking Forward’s look and feel:
“I scrolled through our archive and pulled this illustration from November 2022. It was for our issue on sustainable holiday gifting, and marked the transition from the collage style we launched the newsletter with to the bright, poppy hand-drawn approach I use today. It’s sweet taking a moment to reflect on how much our art has evolved over the past two-and-a-half years. Cheers to the next 100 issues!”
IMAGE CREDITS
Vision: Grist
Spotlight: Grist / Getty Images; Grist / Adam Lindquist
From Whangārei in the north to Invercargill in the south, thousands took to the streets of Aotearoa New Zealand in today’s climate strike, RNZ News reports.
Hundreds march on Parliament in Wellngton.
But it was not just about the climate crisis — the day’s event was led by a coalition including Toitū Te Tiriti, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, and School Strike 4 Climate.
Protesters in the climate strike near the Beehive in Wellington today. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Palestine solidarity protesters called on the New Zealand government to expel the Israeli ambassador in protest over Tel Aviv’s conduct of the devastating Gaza war.
The UN Human Rights Council today adopted a resolution calling for Israel to be held accountable for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza Strip.
It was a decisive vote with 28 in favour, 14 abstentions and six voting against, including Germany and the US.
An ACT New Zealand post on X stated that the School Strike 4 Climate was “encouraging kids across the country to wag school”.
‘Raise awareness’
School Strike 4 Climate organisers said their aim was to “raise awareness about the urgent need for climate action and to demand meaningful policy changes to combat the climate crisis”.
1News reports that one protester said she was attending today’s march in Auckland because she had a problem with the government’s approach to conservation.
“They’re dismantling previous rules that have been in place, they are picking up projects that have been previously turned down by the Environment Court . . . and they’re doing it behind our back and the public has nothing to say, so they have become the predators,” she said.
Another protester said: “I’m terrified, because I know I’m going to die from climate change and the government is doing absolutely zero for it.”
“Dinos thought they had time too” . . . school protesters march on Parliament in Wellington. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
An indigenous flag waving response on climate and Gaza action . . . the Aboriginal flag of Australia, the Tino Rangatiratanga flag of Aotearoa New Zealand, a Palestinian activists’ ensign and various Pacific flags. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
This report is drawn from RNZ News reports and photographs under a community partnership and other sources.
From Whangārei in the north to Invercargill in the south, thousands took to the streets of Aotearoa New Zealand in today’s climate strike, RNZ News reports.
Hundreds march on Parliament in Wellngton.
But it was not just about the climate crisis — the day’s event was led by a coalition including Toitū Te Tiriti, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, and School Strike 4 Climate.
Protesters in the climate strike near the Beehive in Wellington today. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Palestine solidarity protesters called on the New Zealand government to expel the Israeli ambassador in protest over Tel Aviv’s conduct of the devastating Gaza war.
The UN Human Rights Council today adopted a resolution calling for Israel to be held accountable for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza Strip.
It was a decisive vote with 28 in favour, 14 abstentions and six voting against, including Germany and the US.
An ACT New Zealand post on X stated that the School Strike 4 Climate was “encouraging kids across the country to wag school”.
‘Raise awareness’
School Strike 4 Climate organisers said their aim was to “raise awareness about the urgent need for climate action and to demand meaningful policy changes to combat the climate crisis”.
1News reports that one protester said she was attending today’s march in Auckland because she had a problem with the government’s approach to conservation.
“They’re dismantling previous rules that have been in place, they are picking up projects that have been previously turned down by the Environment Court . . . and they’re doing it behind our back and the public has nothing to say, so they have become the predators,” she said.
Another protester said: “I’m terrified, because I know I’m going to die from climate change and the government is doing absolutely zero for it.”
“Dinos thought they had time too” . . . school protesters march on Parliament in Wellington. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
An indigenous flag waving response on climate and Gaza action . . . the Aboriginal flag of Australia, the Tino Rangatiratanga flag of Aotearoa New Zealand, a Palestinian activists’ ensign and various Pacific flags. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
This report is drawn from RNZ News reports and photographs under a community partnership and other sources.
There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s combined. Within walking distance of the Grist office in downtown Seattle, there’s a pinball museum, an NFT museum, a Jimi Hendrix-inspired museum of pop culture, and Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, just to name a few. From tiny mom-and-pop museums dedicated to niche topics to massive institutions like The Met and The Smithsonian, museums are widely viewed as some of the most trustworthy sources of information, and also as trusted stewards of cultural artifacts.
But, in part because of the treasured objects they house, museums often have outsize carbon footprints — and they are also uniquely vulnerable to climate impacts.
“It’s because we have these really strict regulations on keeping temperature and relative humidity at certain levels in the name of preserving the collections,” said Caitlin Southwick, a former art conservator who now runs an organization called Ki Culture that helps museums transition to more sustainable practices.
As purveyors of a public good, museums, galleries, and other cultural entities have often been excused from the climate conversation, she said, and in some cases even from regulation. But, she added, museums can actually be some of the most carbon-intensive buildings in cities.
The field of cultural preservation has other environmental issues as well, like the use of toxic chemicals to clean or restore artworks. But climate control represents a particularly bedeviling problem, since more energy use contributes to climate change, which in turn causes greater temperature extremes that necessitate even more energy use to maintain a controlled indoor environment (sometimes known as the “doom loop” of AC).
As climate change increasingly leaves no city untouched, museums are confronting the reality that rising temperatures and volatile weather threaten their conservation efforts — and they’re turning to new technologies, and, in some cases, challenging conventional conservation wisdom, to stay ahead and minimize their impact.
A view of the outside of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. Charles H. Wright Museum
When Leslie Tom first came to The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, nearly a decade ago, there was relatively little funding for sustainability efforts. She became the museum’s chief sustainability officer in 2015, as a Detroit Revitalization Fellow through Wayne State University. And, with her background in architecture and design, one of the first things she noticed was that the museum didn’t have blueprints. “The architect’s office had a fire,” Tom said, and a few other record-keeping issues meant that “there was just no accurate documentation.”
In 2019, the museum’s leaders secured funding to begin a project of digitally mapping the 125,000 square-foot space, to answer the question of documentation with modern tools. They wanted to make The Wright a “smart museum” — and Tom saw an opportunity to help lead this effort and bring sustainability goals into it.
They began with 3D laser scans of the building, which fed into a digital building information model. Then, about a year ago, using software called Tandem from the company Autodesk, The Wright created what’s known as a digital twin — a detailed replica of the building that draws on near real-time data from sensors installed around the facility.
“Being in a museum, for me, it’s like a small city,” Tom said. “And so now, to have a representation of that, it really helps us to design the visitor experience, vendor experience, volunteer experience, as we start to all work together to think about how we can layer environmental sustainability into all of our processes.”
The Wright used laser scanners to create a detailed map of the facility, shown here in the museum’s central rotunda. Autodesk
Although the team is just at the start of this digitization journey, Tom is excited about what the data can do for energy efficiency — for instance, gradually pre-heating and cooling spaces, based on models of how many people will be in the space at a given time. And while digital infrastructure does create additional energy needs for things like running servers, for Tom and the rest of the team at The Wright, the need for comprehensive data about their building, and the appeal of doing it digitally, outweighed the energy cost of the technology.
Some museums, including the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, have reduced energy use by simply broadening the range of temperature and humidity fluctuations they’ll allow in their buildings. “They just made a decision,” Southwick said. “They said, ‘We’re gonna go from plus or minus 2 [degrees Celsius] to plus or minus 5.’ They saved 20,000 euro a month on their energy bill.” Now, the museum is recalibrating its systems to allow plus or minus 10 degree C swings, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine has done the same, Southwick said.
It’s a somewhat radical challenge to the orthodoxy around conservation, and in the case of the Guggenheim, the changes have made at least one institution hesitant to lend its work for special exhibits — although other lenders have been supportive of the shift, one of the museum’s deputy directors told The New York Times. “The changes might result in a lengthier conversation [about lending], but the more people do it, the more widely accepted the practice is,” Southwick said. “In my opinion, It will be the standard within the next year.”
She also sees an opportunity for museums to begin acclimatizing artifacts to shifting temperatures. While some truly sensitive objects do need to be kept under very precise conditions, other materials can actually adapt, Southwick said. She offers wood as an example — when it’s kept in warm, humid environments, it expands, and then if it gets dry, it will crack. “But if you gradually increase or decrease the relative humidity over a certain amount of time, then the material has time to react to it without damaging it,” she said. This approach is already used in the course of museum loans between institutions in different climates.
The same strategy “may also be a way that we can preemptively and controllably prepare our objects for the effects of climate change,” Southwick said. While it’s difficult to predict the climate conditions of the future with absolute certainty, she sees this as an important area of exploration for conservation science. “I think that it’s really important for us to make sure we never get into a situation where we regress and we’re increasing our HVACs, or we’re increasing our climate-control programs, because that’s not going to do anybody any good.”
At The Wright, the new sensors are gathering data on temperature and humidity, and monitoring things like potential leaks, which will help the team be more responsive to environmental shifts that could pose a risk to the 35,000 artifacts The Wright has in its care.
“For any museum or cultural institution, the objects are the most sacred,” Tom said.
Although Michigan is something of a climate refuge, The Wright has already had to contend with extreme weather impacts, like the intense storms that caused flooding throughout the Midwest in the summer of 2021. “Those floods hampered and did damage to every cultural institution in this district,” said Jeffrey J. Anderson, the museum’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. He made a decision to move The Wright’s entire collection off-site — and it was only last week that the last few items were returned.
Other cultural institutions are facing similar challenges, and figuring out how best to confront them. “Over a third of museums in the U.S. are cited within a hundred kilometers [62 miles] of the coast,” said Elizabeth Merritt, the “in-house futurist” at the American Alliance of Museums and the founding director of the organization’s Center for the Future of Museums. “And a quarter are in zones that are highly vulnerable to sea level rise and severe storms,” she added.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. is building flood gates and stormwater systems even as it evacuates the basement collection of its American History museum. In a more extreme example, the island nation of Tuvalu announced plans to create a digital replica in the metaverse to ensure its culture lives on if the physical country is subsumed by rising seas.
The Wright currently has no plans to use its digital twin as a backup for the museum itself. But it is reckoning in other ways with the role of a museum during the climate crisis — driven in part by the understanding that Black Americans and other communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change and targeted by environmental racism. “From our perspective, we look at this as an opportunity for us to be a leader in racial justice, sustainability, climate justice,” particularly for the Detroit community, Anderson said.
In 2020, The Wright’s board of directors officially adopted sustainability into the institution’s strategic goals. And, building on existing climate-themed exhibitions and programs, Tom said, she’s eager to explore how data from the digital twin system can be used to communicate with the public about the museum’s sustainability efforts and goals.
“Museums are among the most trusted sources of information in the U.S.,” Merritt said. Among the general public, they rank second, only behind friends and family. “So they can use that power to help communicate to the public what’s going on and what the public can do about it.” She argues that steps like revisiting policies on air conditioning are just one piece of how museums should think about a multifaceted commitment to their communities, which could also include climate-themed exhibits and even serving as public cooling centers.
Southwick agrees. Through her organization’s work, she’s seen firsthand a growing interest in sustainability, but some hesitation to project that interest outward. “Can you imagine the impact if every museum had an exhibition about climate?” she said. “It’s just extraordinary, what the power of the museum sector is.”
The Climate Museum in New York City is the first museum in the U.S. dedicated to the climate crisis. The organization first launched in 2014; it currently has a pop-up space in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, while the team continues to look for a permanent home. In this photo, director Miranda Massie stands in front of an installation called “Someday, all this,” by artist David Opdyke — a collage of vintage postcards with a somewhat apocalyptic message.
Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Evlondo Cooper about climate coverage for the March 22, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Climate disruption is, of course, one of the most disastrous phenomena of today’s life, affecting every corner of the globe. It’s also one of the most addressable. We know what causes it, we know what meaningful intervention would entail. So it’s a human-made tragedy unfolding in real time before our eyes.
To understate wildly, we need to be talking about it, learning about it, hearing about it urgently, which is why the results of our next guest’s research are so alarming. I’ll just spoil it: Broadcast news coverage of the climate crisis is going down.
Evlondo Cooper is a senior writer with the Climate and Energy Program at Media Matters for America. He joins us now by phone from Washington state. Welcome to CounterSpin, Evlondo Cooper.
Evlondo Cooper: Thank you for having me. I’m excited about our conversation today.
JJ: We’re talking about the latest of Media Matters’ annual studies of climate crisis coverage. First of all, just tell us briefly what media you are looking at in these studies.
EC: So we’re looking at corporate broadcast network coverage. That’s ABC, CBS and NBC. And for the Sunday morning shows, we also include Fox Broadcasting—Fox News Sunday.
JJ: All right. And then, for context, this decline in coverage that you found in the most recent study, that’s down from very little to even less.
EC: Yeah, so a little context: 2021 and 2022 were both record years for climate coverage, and that coverage was a little bit more than 1%. This year, we saw a 25% decrease from 2022, which brought coverage to a little bit less than 1%. We want to encourage more coverage, but even in the years where they were doing phenomenal, it was only about 1% of total coverage. And so this retrenchment by approximately 25% in 2023 is not a welcome sign, especially in a year where we saw record catastrophic extreme weather events, and scientists are predicting that 2024 might be even worse than ’23.
JJ: Let’s break out some of the things that you found. We’re talking about such small numbers—when you say 1%, that’s 1% of all of the broadcast coverage; of their stories, 1% were devoted to the climate crisis. But we’ve seen, there’s little things within it. For example, we are hearing more from actual climate scientists?
EC: That was a very encouraging sign, where this year we saw 41 climate scientists appeared, which was 10% of the featured guests in 2023, and that’s up from 4% in 2022. So in terms of quality of coverage, I think we’re seeing improvements. We’re seeing a lot of the work being done by dedicated climate correspondents, and meteorologists who are including climate coverage as part of their weather reports and their own correspondents’ segments, a bigger part of their reporting.
So there are some encouraging signs. I think what concerns us is that these improvements, while important and necessary and appreciated, are not keeping up with the escalating scale of climate change.
JJ: It’s just not appropriate to the seriousness of the topic. And then another thing is, you could say the dominance of white men in the conversation, which I know is another finding, that’s just kind of par for the elite media course; when folks are talked to, they are overwhelmingly white men. But it might bear some relation to what you’re seeing as an underrepresentation of climate-impacted populations, looking at folks at the sharp end of climate disruption. That’s something you also consider.
EC: Yeah, we look at coverage of, broadly, climate justice. I think a lot of people believe it’s representation for representation’s sake, but I think when people most impacted by climate change—and we’re talking about communities of color, we’re talking about low-income communities, we’re talking about low-wealth rural communities—when these folks are left out of the conversation, you’re missing important context about how climate change is impacting them, in many cases, first and worse. And you’re missing important context about the solutions that these communities are trying to employ to deal with it. And I think you’re missing an opportunity to humanize and broaden support for climate solutions at the public policy level.
So these aren’t communities where these random acts of God are occurring; these are policy decisions, or indecisions, that have created an environment where these communities are being most harmed, but least talked about, and they’re receiving the least redress to their challenges. And so those voices are necessary to tell those stories to a broad audience on the corporate broadcast networks.
Another finding that I thought was very interesting was that extreme weather seemed to be the biggest driver of climate coverage, and that, to me, suggests that the way corporate broadcast media are coming at climate disruption is reactive: “Look at what happened.”
EC: Totally.
JJ: And even when they say, “Look at what’s happening,” and you know what, folks pretty much agree that this is due to climate disruption, these houses sliding into the river, it’s still not saying, “While you look at this disaster, know that this is preventable, and here is who is keeping us from acting on it and why.”
EC: Yeah, that is so insightful, because that’s a core critique of even the best coverage we see, that there is no accountability for the fossil fuel industry and other industries that are driving the crisis. And then there’s no real—solutions are mentioned in about 20% of climate segments this year. But the solutions are siloed, like there are solution “segments.”
But to your point, when we’re talking about extreme weather, when you have the most eyeballs hearing about climate change, to me, it would be very impactful to connect what’s happening in that moment—these wildfires, these droughts, these heat waves, these hurricanes and storms and flooding—to connect that to a key driver, fossil fuel industry, and talk about some potential solutions to mitigate these impacts while people are actually paying the most attention.
JJ: And then take it to your next story about Congress, or your next story about funding, and connect those dots.
EC: Exactly. I mean, climate is too often siloed. So you could see a really great segment, for instance, on the Willow Project, at the top of the hour—and this is on cable, but the example remains—and then later in the hour, you saw a story about an extreme weather event. But those things aren’t connected, they’re siloed.
And so a key to improving coverage in an immediate way would be to understand that the climate crisis is the background for a range of issues, socioeconomic, political. Begin incorporating climate coverage in a much broader swath of stories that, whether you know it or not, indirectly or directly, are being impacted by global warming.
JJ: It’s almost as though corporate media have decided that another horrible disaster due to climate change, while it’s a story, it’s basically now like a dog-bites-man story. And if they aren’t going to explore these other angles, well, then there really isn’t anything to report until the next drought or the next mudslide. And that’s just a world away from what appropriate, fearless, future-believing journalism would be doing right now.
Evlondo Cooper: “It doesn’t have to be about just showing the destruction and carnage. There are ways that you can empower people to take action.”
EC: It’s out of step, right? Pull up the poll showing bipartisan support for government climate action, because, whether people know it or not, as far as the science, —and there’s some deniers out there, but anecdotally, people know something is happening, something is changing in their lives. We’re seeing record-breaking things that no one’s ever experienced, and they want the government to do something about it.
And so it’s important to cover extreme weather and to cover these catastrophes. And I know there’s a range of thought out there that says if you’re just focusing on devastating impacts, it could dampen public action. But to me, to your point, report on it and connect it to solutions, empower people to call their congressperson, their representative, their senator, to vote in ways that have local impacts to deal with the local climate impacts.
It doesn’t have to be about just showing the destruction and carnage. There are ways that you can empower people to take action in their own lives, and to galvanize public support.
And the public wants it. The public is asking for this. So I think just being responsive to what these polls are showing would be a way to immediately improve the way that they cover climate change right now.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Evlondo Cooper of Media Matters for America. You can find this work and much else at MediaMatters.org. Evlondo Cooper, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This week on CounterSpin: 2023 was the warmest year on record. The World Meteorological Organization announced records once again broken, “in some cases smashed” (their words), for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea-level rise, Antarctic sea ice and glacier retreat.
Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. At the same time, we’re told that basic journalism says that when it comes to problems that people need solved, yet somehow aren’t solved, rule No. 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis they still…can’t… quite…connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies.
Narrating the nightmare is not enough. We’ll talk about the latest research on climate coverage with Evlondo Cooper, senior writer at Media Matters.
Also on the show: Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986—when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both—is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about “fear and favor”—the ways corporate owners and sponsors influence the content of coverage. It’s more bare-knuckled now: Mass layoffs and takeoversforce us to see how what you may think of as your local newspaper is really just an “asset” in a megacorporation’s portfolio, and will be treated that way—with zero evidence that a source of vital news and information is any different from a soap factory.
Rick Goldsmith’s new film is called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. We’ll hear from him about the film and the change it hopes to part of.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Israel’s flour massacre.
Earthwise presenters Lois and Martin Griffiths on Plains FM 96.9 community radio talk to Dr David Robie, a New Zealand author, independent journalist and media educator with a passion for the Asia-Pacific region.
David talks about the struggle to raise awareness of critical Pacific issues such as West Papuan self-determination and the fight for an independent “Pacific voice” in New Zealand media.
He outlines some of the challenges in the region and what motivated him to work on Pacific issues.
Listen to the Earthwise interview on Plains FM 96.9 radio.
Interviewee: Dr David Robie, deputy chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and a semiretired professor of Pacific journalism. He founded Pacific Journalism Review and the Pacific Media Centre.
Interviewers: Lois and Martin Griffiths, Earthwise programme
Outspoken MP Chlöe Swarbrick will be the Green Party’s new co-leader alongside Marama Davidson, as climate change specialist James Shaw steps down.
Last month, Shaw said he would be stepping down from his duties as co-leader in March.
Dunedin-based activist and conservationist Alex Foulkes had put his hand up too for the role but announced on Sunday that he had conceded defeat. Swarbrick received 169 votes from party delegates, Foulkes received no votes.
Speaking to media today, Swarbrick, the MP for Auckland Central, thanked both Davidson — who could not be at the conference because she had covid-19 — and Shaw.
She said the Greens were a party that would speak for all voices in New Zealand, and believed it could make changes for the better of all in New Zealand, sharing finite resources “justly and equitably” as well as protecting the environment.
“We know our environment is not an endless resource to keep drawing from — we know there is enough to go around.”
She said the Green Party “care a lot about whakapapa”, and described Shaw as a “giant” whose shoulders the Green Party stands upon.
‘No-one stands alone’
“We know as the late great Efeso Collins put it, that: ‘No-one stands alone, no-one succeeds alone, and no-one suffers alone’.
“James Shaw is one of those giants who have contributed decades to our movement, his enduring legacy of the Zero Carbon Act and establishing the Independent Climate Change Commission will hold this and all future governments to account on the scientific non-negotiables of a liveable planet.
Greens elect Chloë Swarbrick as new co-leader. Video: RNZ News
“We can take world-leading climate action that also improves people’s lives. We can provide a guaranteed minimum income for all, we can protect our oceans, we can have functional public transport, we can invest properly in our public services and housing, education and health-care, if we have the political courage to implement the tax system to do so.
“And the Greens have that political courage.”
Swarbrick also praised Davidson: “I have been inspired by her strength, the clarity of her conviction and her embodiment of our Green values every single day . . . ”
Chlöe Swarbrick praises co-leader Marama Davidson (pictured0, who could not attend today’s conference due to covid-19, and outgoing co-leader James Shaw. Image: RNZ/Angus Dreaver
Swarbrick criticised the government’s 100-day plan and said, as Green co-leader, she was equally as comfortable marching in the streets as she was in Parliament.
“The Greens’ see you, we hear you and we will represent you in the halls of power.”
Democracy can work better
Change would “require human cooperation on a scale we have never seen before”, she said: “Democracy can work better for all of us.
“Politics belongs to those who show up, and we need everyday people to not leave politics to the politicians or we’ll get what we’ve got”.
The Greens were concerned about a drift to the right side of politics in New Zealand, she said.
Change would not come “from top down vested interest”, she said.
“Legacy politics is not working to serve people and the planet.”
Swarbrick said both the “red and blue” parties were tying up votes in a duopoly, and not serving voters effectively: “I believe we are the leading voice on the left.”
In a statement earlier today, Swarbrick thanked the party’s members and reiterated the Greens’ vision for the future.
Decent life for all
“Aotearoa can be a place where everyone has what they need to live a decent life, and our natural world is restored and protected, on a foundation honouring te Tiriti o Waitangi. That is the Greens’ vision, and one we work to see realised every single day.”
Shaw said there was no-one else he would rather take his place as co-leader than Swarbrick.
“Ever since I first sat down to coffee with her after her mayoral campaign in 2016 she has struck me as a remarkable leader with an extraordinary belief in the power of people to make a difference.
“Her passion and strength is second to none, and alongside Marama, will lead the Greens to make even more of a difference in the future.”
Davidson said it was fantastic to be have Swarbrick by her side, leading their biggest caucus.
“Chlöe is an incredible MP, colleague, and friend. She has proven time and time again her unique ability to mobilise communities to push for the change Aotearoa needs,” Davidson said in a statement.
“It has never been more important for there to be a strong voice for an Aotearoa that works for everyone, where everyone is supported to live good lives, in warm dry homes, and where we take bold action to cut pollution and protect native wildlife,” she said.
‘Fighting for the future’
“Chlöe and I will be in communities up and down Aotearoa working with people to build an unprecedented grassroots movement fighting for the future Aotearoa deserves.”
Dunedin-based activist and conservationist Alex Foulkes . . . only challenger. Image: RNZ News
Foulkes, who admitted defeat in the co-leadership race, congratulated Swarbrick and said she would do an incredible job.
“I am confident Chlöe and Marama will lead the party from strength to strength.
“I have enjoyed the debate with Chlöe and the party members and would like to commend and thank the party staff for the efficient organisation of the election and the members for their engagement and respectful, intelligent, and thoughtful questions throughout this process.”
He described her as “one of the most talented politicians in Aotearoa New Zealand”, and said he never expected to win against her.
“Indeed, someone suggested to me that I had more chance of spotting the fabled South-Island kokako than winning this election.”
However, he said his goal in contesting was to discuss and debate policies. Last month, he put forward a radical manifesto, outlining his vision.
Who is Chlöe Swarbrick? Ranked third on the party list, the Auckland Central MP appeared to be the popular choice from when Shaw made his announcement.
After losing the mayoral race in 2016, she joined the Green Party.
Winning the Auckland Central seat in 2020 and becoming the country’s youngest MP in 42 years, she has proven her popularity from early on.
She is the first Green MP ever to hold on to a seat for more than one term after winning again in the 2023 elections.
Swarbrick denied leadership ambitions in 2022, when more than 25 percent of delegates at the party’s annual general meeting voted to reopen Shaw’s position.
She has regularly registered in preferred prime minister polls ahead of the party’s co-leaders.
After two years of drafting, public comments, and delays, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, finally approved its highly-anticipated climate disclosure rules on Wednesday, laying out new requirements for companies to divulge their climate risks and some of their greenhouse emissions in public filings submitted annually to the agency
The new rules require publicly traded companies to analyze and publish how climate change threatens their business — whether through physical risks like floods and other extreme weather or through “transition risks” like regulation. This is in line with the SEC’s mission to protect investors and maintain “fair, orderly, and efficient markets.”
Environmental advocates have welcomed the rules, but with a major caveat. Between the first draft of the SEC’s climate disclosure rules — published in 2022 — and now, the regulator scrapped requirements for companies to reveal greenhouse emissions that stem from the products they sell. These so-called “Scope 3” emissions are often the most significant source of a company’s climate pollution. According to the nonprofit CDP, which runs the world’s most widely used emissions disclosure platform, they make up an average of 75 percent all companies’ emissions.
For fossil fuel companies — whose products are the primary driver of climate change — those Scope 3 emissions can make up to 95 percent of their carbon footprint.
By excluding Scope 3 emissions from disclosure, “regulators are failing to accurately reflect the best available scientific evidence and heed the risks at hand to the economy,” Laura Peterson, a corporate analyst for the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. Charles Slidders, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, said that the SEC’s approach was “an abdication of the agency’s authority and responsibility to address significant financial risks.”
The SEC has been talking about climate disclosure for more than a decade. In 2010, the agency’s five-member board of commissioners voted to provide companies with “interpretive guidance” on existing disclosure rules that might be affected by new climate-related legal and business developments. It started looking into more concrete requirements in 2020 and released the first draft of its disclosure rules in March 2022.
Proponents of the new rules point to escalating financial risks from climate change — just last year, the U.S. logged a record-breaking number of climate- and weather-related disasters that cost the county at least $92 billion — and say the SEC must protect investors through more rigorous disclosure requirements, including of Scope 3 emissions. According to the nonprofit Ceres, which advocates for corporate environmental sustainability, 97 percent of investor comments submitted to the SEC favored corporate Scope 3 disclosure as part of the agency’s rules for public companies.
Those opposed to stringent disclosure rules, however, say they represent a regulatory overreach by the SEC, and that issues related to climate policy should be left to Congress or to federal environmental agencies. “If Congress meant for the SEC to broadly regulate registrants’ climate change policy, then it would have clearly authorized the Commission to do so,” as the American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying group, said in its 2022 comments to the SEC.
There is discord even within the SEC. While the panel’s three Democrats voted to approve the new rules, its two Republican members excoriated them, with commissioner Mark Uyeda calling them an effort by climate activists to “hijack and use the securities laws for their climate-related goals.”
The rules are likely to be challenged in court, where their fate remains uncertain — especially in light of recent Supreme Court decisions limiting the federal government’s power to pass ambitious climate-related regulations, like a proposed policy from the Environmental Protection Agency to curb emissions from power plants.
Still, what the SEC is proposing is much weaker than what has already been put in place by other regulators, including the European Union and California. That means companies doing business in those jurisdictions may defer to their stronger rules, the consulting firm Business for Social Responsibility noted in a statement. By not embracing Scope 3 disclosure, the SEC “has marginalized its own significance.”
By Alex Bainbridge, Peter Boyle, Isaac Nellist, Jacob Andrewartha, Jordan Ellis, Alex Salmon, Stephen W Enciso and Khaled Ghannam of Green Left
Thousands marched for Palestine across Australia at the weekend in the wake of Israel’s massacre of more than 100 starving Palestinians who were trying to get flour from an aid truck southwest of Gaza City.
Israel’s siege on Gaza has stopped Palestinians from accessing food, medical supplies and other crucial aid. A United Nations report found that more than 90 percent of the population, more than 2 million people, are facing starvation and malnutrition.
This is made worse by the cutting of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) by Western governments, the main organisation providing aid to Gaza, after Israel alleged that 12 of its 30,000 staff were involved in the October 7 incursion.
“Our government has suspended funding to UNRWA when instead it should be restoring it and increasing it,” Greens senator Larissa Waters told the Meanjin/Brisbane rally on March 3, reported Alex Bainbridge.
Waters said that Foreign Minister Penny Wong was right to condemn Israel’s attack on food vans but that she was “not bowled over by the strength of response because Senator Wong has said she’s going to get her department to have a little word to the Israeli ambassador”.
“That’s all she’s going to do after we saw desperate parents getting slaughtered [while getting] food for their children.”
‘Solidarity with Palestinian women’
The rally had a “Solidarity with Palestinian women” theme in recognition of International Women’s Day on March 8.
Call on global Jewish community to rise up against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Video: Green Left
Protesters held a minute’s silence in recognition of United States Air Force serviceperson Aaron Bushnell who self-immolated on February 25 in protest against the US government’s participation in genocide.
Israel has begun its bombardment offensive against Rafah, the small city in southern Gaza where 1.4 million people are sheltering. More than 30,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7.
A YouGov survey found that more than 80 percent of Australians support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, showing the Palestine solidarity movement has cut through the establishment media pro-Israel messaging.
Edie Shepherd, from the Tzedek Collective, an anti-Zionist Jewish group told thousands at the rally in Gadigal/Sydney on March 3 that the global Jewish community must “rise up against the dominant Zionist frameworks that wield hate, power militarism to carry out atrocities against Palestinians”, reported Peter Boyle.
“The greatest shame is that our survival of genocide has been weaponised to commit genocide against Palestinians now.”
Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN), told the March 3 rally in Garramilla/Darwin that “Israelis and Zionists want to kill Palestinians”, reported Stephen W Enciso.
Israel’s massacre of starving Palestinians has been dubbed the “flour massacre”. Image: Alex Bainbridge/Green Left
‘They want decolonisation’
“Palestinians do not want to kill Israels. Indigenous folk do not want to kill their colonisers. They just want to be acknowledged. They want [a] treaty. They want their rights. They want restitution. They want racism to stop and decolonisation to start,” he said.
Kulumbirigin Danggalaba Tiwi woman Mililma May drew links between the colonial violence faced by Indigenous people in Australia and Palestine.
She pointed to the coronial inquest into the killing of Kumanjayi Walker by former constable Zachary Rolfe, in which Rolfe gave evidence about widespread racism in the Northern Territory Police Force.
“We are witnessing in plain evidence the racism and the deep horror that exists in the NT police, as across the colony,” May said.
“We live in the same states and under the same violence as Palestine. It just manifests itself in different ways.”
Kites flying for Gaza
A kite-flying for Gaza event was organised by Pilbara for Palestine in Karratha, Western Australia on March 3.
Children made and flew kites decorated with Palestinian flags, watermelons and “Free Palestine” in solidarity with the children on Gaza.
Organiser Chris Jenkins told Green Left that the action “demonstrated once again that support for Palestine exists from the CBD to the bush”.
The community also raised money for UNRWA.
In Muloobinba/Newcastle a “Hands off Rafah” rally and kite-flying event was held on March 2 at Nobby’s Beach, reported Khaled Ghannam.
Former Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon, who visited Palestine in June last year, said the Israeli occupation impacts on everything Palestinians do.
“One of the common things that people we interviewed said was, ‘please take our voice to the world’,” she said.
“We are part of a massive global movement, millions of people are on the move around the world in so many countries, with a similar message to us:
Ceasefire now,
Restore UNRWA funding, and
End the occupation.”
She said the UN had called on Australia and other countries to stop arming Israel.
The University of the South Pacific will host a major Pacific International Media conference in July to address critical issues in the regional news media sector in the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic and digital disruption.
The conference, in Suva, Fiji, on July 4-6 is the first of its kind in the region in two decades.
With the theme “Navigating challenges and shaping futures in Pacific media research and practice”, the event seeks to respond to some entrenched challenges in the small and micro news media systems of the Pacific.
Associate Professor Shailendra Singh . . . the Pacific has among the highest attrition rate of journalists in the world. Image: USP
Organised in partnership with the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia-Pacific Media Network (APMN), the conference is a gathering of academics, media professionals, policymakers and civil society organisation representatives to engage in critical discussions on news media topics.
Conference chair Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, head of the USP journalism programme, some of these challenges are due to the small population base in many island countries, limited advertising revenue, and marginal profits.
This makes it difficult for media organisations to reinvest, or pay competitive salaries to retain good staff.
Dr Singh said their research indicated that the Pacific region had among the highest rate of journalist attrition in the world, with mostly a young, inexperienced and under-qualified journalist cohort in the forefront of reporting complex issues.
Media rights, free speech important
He said that issues relating to media rights and freedom of speech were also still important in the region.
Big power competition between China and the United States playing out in the Pacific was another complexity for the Pacific media sector to negotiate, added Dr Singh.
PINA president Kora Nou . . . timely as “we consider measures to improve our media landscape post-covid”. Image: NBC
PINA president and CEO of Papua New Guinea’s national broadcaster NBC Kora Nou said the conference was timely as “we consider measures to improve our media landscape post-covid”.
Nou said it was important for journalism practitioners, leaders, academia, and key stakeholders to discuss issues that directly impacted on the media industry in the Pacific.
“Not all Pacific Island countries are the same, nor do we have the same challenges, but by networking and discussing shared challenges in our media industry will help address them meaningfully,” he said.
Nou added that journalism schools in the Pacific needed more attention in terms of public funding, new and improved curricula that were consistent with technological advances.
He said that research collaboration between journalism schools and established newsrooms across the region should be encouraged.
Better learning facilities
According to Nou, funding and technical assistance for journalism schools like USP in Fiji, and Divine Word and UPNG in Papua New Guinea, would translate into better learning facilities and tools to prepare student journalists for newsrooms in the Pacific.
Dr Heather Devere . . . “the Pacific is having to deal with numerous conflicts where journalists are not only incidental casualties but are even being deliberately targeted.” Image: ResearchGate
APMN chair Dr Heather Devere believes this is a vital time for journalism, and crucial for academics and media professionals and practitioners to unite to address global and local issues and the specific impacts on the Pacific region.
“Often neglected on the world stage, the Pacific is itself having to deal with numerous conflicts where journalists are not only incidental casualties but are even being deliberately targeted in vicious attacks,” she said.
“Humanity, the environment, our living spaces and other species are in imminent danger.
“APMN supports the initiative presented by the University of the South Pacific for us all to unify, stand firm and uphold the values that characterise the best in our people,” said Dr Devere.
Critical time for global journalism
According to Asia Pacific Report editor and founder of the Pacific Media Centre, Professor David Robie, this conference comes at a critical time for the future and viability of journalism globally.
Professor David Robie . . . “climate crisis reportage . . . is now an urgent existential challenge for Pacific countries.” Image: APMN
Dr Robie said it was a “tremendous initiative” by USP’s School of Pacific Arts, Communication and Education to partner with the media industry and to help chart new pathways for journalism methodologies and media freedom in the face of growing geopolitical rivalries over Pacific politics and economic resources.
“We need to examine the role of news media in Pacific democracies today, how to report and analyse conflict independently without being sucked in by major power agendas, and how to improve our climate crisis reportage, given this is now an urgent existential challenge for Pacific countries.
“In a sense, the Pacific is a laboratory for the entire world, and journalism and media are at the climate crisis frontline.”
Dr Robie, who was the recipient of the 2015 AMIC Asia Communication Award, highlighted that many human rights issues were at stake, such as the future of West Papua self-determination, that needed media debate and research.
Organisers are calling for abstracts and conference papers, and panel proposals on the following topics and related themes in the Asia-Pacific:
Media, Democracy, Human Rights and Governance:
Media and Geopolitics
Digital Disruption and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Media Law and Ethics
Media, Climate Change and Environmental Journalism
Indigenous and Vernacular Media
Social Cohesion, Peacebuilding and Conflict-Prevention
Covid-19 Pandemic and Health Reporting
Media Entrepreneurship and Sustainability
Abstracts can be submitted to the conference chair, Dr Singh, by April 5, 2024 and panel and full paper submissions by May 5 and July 4 respectively.
Monika Singhis editor-in-chief of Wansolwara, the online and print publication of the USP Journalism Programme. Republished in partnership with Wansolwara.
For nearly 200 years, two transformative global forces have grown in tandem: economic activity and carbon emissions. The two have long been paired together, or, in economist-speak, “coupled.” When the economy has gotten bigger, so has our climate footprint.
This pairing has been disastrous for the planet. Economic growth has helped bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations all the way up to 420 parts per million. The last time they were this high was during the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were 65 feet higher.
Most mainstream economists would say there’s an obvious antidote: decoupling. This refers to a situation where the economy keeps growing, but without the concomitant rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Many economists and international organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development celebrate evidence that decoupling is already occurring in many countries.
“Let me be clear, economic growth coupled with decarbonization is not only realistic, it has already been happening,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, in a commentary published in 2020.
It’s an alluring prospect — that we can reach our climate goals without fundamentally changing the structure of the global economy, just by swapping clean energy in for fossil fuels. But a band of rogue economists has begun poking holes in the prevailing narrative around decoupling. They’re publishing papers showing that the decoupling that’s been observed so far in most cases has been short term, or it’s happened at a pace that’s nowhere near quick enough to reach international climate targets. These heterodox economists call decoupling a “neoliberal fantasy.”
The stakes of this academic debate are high: If decoupling is a mirage, then addressing the climate crisis may require letting go of the pursuit of economic growth altogether and instead embracing a radically different vision of a thriving society. That would involve figuring out “how to design future livelihoods that provide people with a good quality of life,” said Helmut Haberl, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Rather than fixating on growth, he argued, “We should engage more in the question of, ‘What future do we want to build?’”
The basic idea behind decoupling has been ingrained in mainstream environmental thought for decades. The 1987 Brundtland Report — a landmark publication of the United Nations designed to simultaneously address social and environmental problems — helped establish it through the framework of sustainable development. It argued for “producing more with less,” using technological advances to continue economic growth while decreasing the release of pollutants and the use of raw materials.
Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, addresses a crowd in 2022.
John Thys / AFP via Getty Images
Decoupling continues to underlie most global climate policies today. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, has spent nearly two decades promoting it under its “green growth” agenda, urging world leaders to “achieve economic growth and development while at the same time combating climate change and preventing costly environmental degradation.” Decoupling is also baked into the IEA’s influential Net Zero Emissions by 2050 policy roadmap, which assumes that full decarbonization can take place alongside a doubling of the global economy by 2050.
That economic growth should continue is simply assumed by virtually every international institution and government. Policymakers connect growth with more jobs and better living standards, and use it as the primary measure of societal well-being. They also point to growth as a way to keep pace with the rising energy demands and economic needs of a growing global population.
“The prospects for reversing inequality in all countries will be far greater when the overall economy is growing,” writes Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The good news is that at least some decoupling has been happening on a global scale for decades. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, but not quite as fast as gross domestic product, or GDP — the value of all goods and services produced in a given area. This type of decoupling is described as “relative” or “weak.” As the IEA has noted, the tight link between climate pollution and economic activity “has loosened” in every region of the world except for parts of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
But the kind of decoupling needed to achieve international climate targets is called “absolute” decoupling, when economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions veer in opposite directions: GDP up, emissions down. More recent research has documented this in a number of high-income countries. The U.S., for example, saw a 32 percent increase in GDP between 2005 and 2021, while its overall CO2 emissions fell by about 17 percent.
Something similar appears to have happened in other developed economies like France, Sweden, and Germany — even when you account for so-called “consumption-based” emissions, which include emissions from the production of goods that are imported or exported. In other words, these countries seem to really be reducing climate pollution and not just offshoring it to the developing world. Since 2016, reports from the World Resources Institute, the Breakthrough Institute, and independent researchers have shown more and more countries achieving periods of absolute decoupling, including their consumption-based emissions. Perhaps the splashiest analysis came in 2022, when a Financial Times data columnist reported that 70 countries — one in three worldwide — had experienced at least five consecutive years of absolute decoupling between 1990 and 2020.
“Green growth is already here,” the columnist wrote.
Some experts have raised questions about the data used to make these claims — GDP, for instance, can be measured in different ways that affect decoupling calculations, and country-level emissions data typically excludes major pollution sources like aviation and methane leaks from uncapped oil wells. Research led by Haberl — the largest literature review to date on the empirical evidence for absolute decoupling — suggests that only countries experiencing an economic crisis have successfully reduced their emissions, and that evidence for an inverse relationship between GDP and CO2 emissions is “seldom found.” But there’s a general consensus among economists that at least some amount of absolute decoupling has occurred in a handful of countries. In a study published last year in The Lancet Planetary Health, even green growth skeptics found evidence of absolute decoupling in 11 of the world’s highest-income countries.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during afternoon trading.
Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images
“Everyone should be cheering about this,” Kate Raworth, a heterodox economist and professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, told Grist.
This leads to more nuanced questions, not about whether decoupling is possible — at least for individual countries — but whether currently observed trends can be extrapolated out to create a climate-safe future for the entire planet. In other words, can decoupling happen fast enough to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the target laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement?
One simple way to look at it is to take the rate of emissions reductions achieved in countries that have successfully decoupled, and see how long it would take for them to fully decarbonize. That’s essentially what Jefim Vogel and Jason Hickel — researchers at the University of Leeds and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, respectively — did in the Lancet Planetary Health study. They found that, if 11 high-income countries continued their achieved rates of emissions reduction, it would take them more than 220 years to cut emissions by 95 percent — far longer than the net-zero-by-2050 timeline called for by climate experts.
“The decoupling rates achieved in high-income countries are inadequate for meeting the climate and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement and cannot legitimately be considered green,” the authors wrote. In an interview with Grist, Vogel likened optimism around gradual decoupling to saying, “Don’t worry, we’re slowing down,” while the Titanic races toward an iceberg.
Some economists argue that just because decoupling at the scale and speed necessary hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t. With enough investment in renewable energy and efficient clean technologies, they argue, economic growth can continue without the rise in emissions that has historically accompanied it. As noted by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, carbon-intensive sectors like electricity generation actually contribute relatively little to the world economy, compared to high-value but lower-emitting sectors like IT, real estate, and social work.
According to Pollin, the University of Massachusetts economics professor, faster decoupling is simply a matter of money and political will. If policymakers invest 2.5 percent of global GDP each year, he said — about $4.5 trillion — then the world economy can completely decarbonize within 40 to 50 years, all while boosting GDP through the creation of tens of millions of new jobs in the clean energy industry.
Successful decoupling would require a massive buildout of renewable energy technologies. Andrew Aitchison / In Pictures via Getty Images
This plan would likely involve new policies to address renewable energy permitting challenges, boost energy efficiency for appliances and housing, and rein in global methane emissions — not to mention the urgent need to curtail the lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry. Economic growth will be a natural byproduct of huge new investments in clean energy infrastructure, according to Pollin, and it will also be essential for creating new jobs for displaced fossil fuel workers and improving living conditions in developing countries. “There is simply no alternative,” he said.
Economists like Vogel and Hickel, however, draw a different conclusion. They don’t believe countries will ever be able to drive emissions down to zero while keeping up current rates of economic growth, or those projected by international institutions. According to their research, doing so would require, on average, a 10-fold increase in currently observed decoupling rates, which they consider to be “empirically out of reach.” They note that their conclusions are conservative because their data does not take into account emissions from agriculture, forestry, other land use, aviation, and shipping, and their projections assume that countries began adequate climate mitigation in 2023, which does not appear to have happened.
Other researchers have found that, even under aggressive climate mitigation policies, emissions relative to constant GDP growth can only decrease at a maximum rate of 3 percent per year. That’s only about a third of the decoupling rates that some experts say would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees C (2.7 or 3.6 degrees F).
“Absolute decoupling is not sufficient to avoid consuming the remaining CO2 emission budget under the global warming limit of 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C and to avoid climate breakdown,” concluded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent assessment.
Instead of making growth greener, some economists call for a whole new economic paradigm to address converging social and ecological crises. They call it “post-growth,” referring to a reorientation away from GDP growth and toward other metrics, like human well-being and ecological sustainability. Essentially, they want to prioritize people and the planet and not care so much what the stock market is doing. This would more or less free countries from the decoupling dilemma, since it eliminates the growth imperative altogether.
Raworth, the professor at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, calls her version of the post-growth agenda “doughnut economics.” In this visual model, the inner ring of the doughnut represents the minimum amount of economic activity needed to satisfy basic needs like access to food, water, and shelter. The outer ring signifies the upper limits of natural resource use that the Earth can sustain. The goal, she argues, is for economies to exist between the inner and outer rings of the doughnut, maintaining adequate living standards without surpassing planetary limits.
“Our economies need to bring us into the doughnut,” Raworth told Grist. “Whether GDP grows needs to be a secondary concern.”
The advocacy group Extinction Rebellion calls for a ban on private jets during a demonstration in February 2024.
Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images
Vogel and Hickel go a little further. They call for a planned, deliberate reduction of economic activity in high-income countries, a concept known as “degrowth.” The rationale is that much of the energy and resources used in high-income countries goes toward carbon-intensive products that don’t contribute to human welfare, like industrial meat and dairy, fast fashion, weapons, and private jets. Tamping down this “less necessary” consumption could slash greenhouse gas emissions, while lower energy demand could make it more feasible to build and maintain enough energy infrastructure. Some research suggests that reducing energy demand could limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C without relying on unproven technologies to draw carbon out of the atmosphere.
Degrowth advocates say that deprioritizing growth could allow countries to redirect their attention to policies that actually boost people’s quality of life: shorter working hours, for example, as well as minimum income requirements, guaranteed affordable housing and health care, free internet and electricity, and more widespread public transit.
“Degrowth is as much oriented toward human well-being and social justice as it is toward preventing ecological crises,” Vogel said.
Crucially, degrowth advocates mainly promote the concept in high-income countries, which are historically responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. They acknowledge that many developing countries still need to grow their economies in order to raise populations out of poverty. Those existing inequities, they argue, put even more onus on developed countries to shrink polluting industries and cut their consumption, in order to balance out other countries’ necessary growth.
Several experts told Grist it was a “distraction” to ask whether decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth is possible, as this question elides many areas of agreement between green growth and degrowth advocates. Both sides agree that moving off fossil fuels will require a massive buildout of renewable energy infrastructure, and that countries need to urgently improve living standards and reduce inequality.
“The goal is to get to zero emissions and climate stabilization” while improving people’s well-being, said Pollin, the University of Massachusetts Amherst professor. “Those are the metrics I care about.”
They also broadly agree that it’s time to move past GDP as a primary indicator of societal progress. But that’s easier said than done. We are “structurally dependent” on GDP growth, as Raworth put it. Publicly traded companies, for example, prioritize growth because they’re legally obligated to act in the best interest of shareholders. Commercial banks fuel growth by issuing interest-bearing loans, and national governments face pressure to grow the economy in order to reduce the burden of public and private debt.
Making any meaningful shift away from focusing on GDP would require dismantling these structural dependencies. “It’s massively challenging, there’s no doubt about that,” Vogel told Grist. “But I think they’re necessary changes … if we want to avert a real risk of catastrophic environmental changes and tackle long-standing social issues.”
Today is Remembrance Day — marking the 70th anniversary of the largest US nuclear test detonation, Castle Bravo, which took place over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 March 1954.
As one Marshallese resident noted: “It’s not the middle of nowhere to those who call it home.”
When Castle Bravo was detonated over Bikini Atoll, the immediate radioactive fallout spread to Rongelap and Utrik atolls and beyond.
“The impacts of that test, and the 66 others which were carried out above ground and underwater in Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958, left a legacy of devastating environmental and health consequences across the Marshall Islands,” said World Council of Churches (WCC) programme executive for human rights and disarmament Jennifer Philpot-Nissen.
“The UK and France followed the US and also began a programme of testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific, the final such test taking place as recently as 1996.”
Philpot-Nissen noted that the consequences of the testing across the Pacific had largely remained invisible and unaddressed.
“Very few people have received compensation or adequate assistance for the consequences they have suffered,” she said.
Advocated against nuclear weapons
The WCC has consistently advocated against nuclear weapons.
In 1950, the WCC executive committee declared that
“[t]he hydrogen bomb is the latest and most terrible step in the crescendo of warfare which has changed war from a fight between men and nations to a mass murder of human life.
Man’s rebellion against his Creator has reached such a point that, unless staved, it will bring self-destruction upon him.”
The WCC has continued to call for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons since that time, through its governing bodies, functional commissions, and member churches.
At the WCC 6th Assembly in Vancouver in 1983, Marshallese activist Darlene Keju made a speech during the Pacific Plenary, sharing that the radioactive fallout from the 67 nuclear tests was more widespread than the US had admitted, and spoke of the many unrecognised health issues in the Marshall Islands.
During a WCC visit in 2023, this speech was referred to as the moment in which the Marshallese found their voice to speak out about the continuing suffering in their communities due to the nuclear testing legacy.
Climate change link
Philpot-Nissen also noted the nexus with climate change and the environment.
“When the US ended the 12 years of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, they buried approximately 80,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste under a concrete dome on Runit island, Enewetak Atoll,” she said.
“In addition, 130 tons of soil from an irradiated Nevada testing site were also deposited in the dome.”
Scientists and environmental activists around the world are concerned that, due to rising sea levels, the dome is starting to crack, releasing its contents into the Pacific Ocean.
“In the Marshall Islands, the human-caused disasters on climate change and nuclear-testing converge and compound each other,” said Philpot-Nissen.
“While the Pacific islanders are faced with the remnants of a vast and sobering nuclear legacy — they have faced this with great resilience and dignity.
“The young people of the Pacific particularly are now leading the calls for an apology, for reparations, compensation, and for measures to be taken to address the damage which was done to their lands, their waters, and their people.”
Today is Remembrance Day — marking the 70th anniversary of the largest US nuclear test detonation, Castle Bravo, which took place over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 March 1954.
As one Marshallese resident noted: “It’s not the middle of nowhere to those who call it home.”
When Castle Bravo was detonated over Bikini Atoll, the immediate radioactive fallout spread to Rongelap and Utrik atolls and beyond.
“The impacts of that test, and the 66 others which were carried out above ground and underwater in Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958, left a legacy of devastating environmental and health consequences across the Marshall Islands,” said World Council of Churches (WCC) programme executive for human rights and disarmament Jennifer Philpot-Nissen.
“The UK and France followed the US and also began a programme of testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific, the final such test taking place as recently as 1996.”
Philpot-Nissen noted that the consequences of the testing across the Pacific had largely remained invisible and unaddressed.
“Very few people have received compensation or adequate assistance for the consequences they have suffered,” she said.
Advocated against nuclear weapons
The WCC has consistently advocated against nuclear weapons.
In 1950, the WCC executive committee declared that
“[t]he hydrogen bomb is the latest and most terrible step in the crescendo of warfare which has changed war from a fight between men and nations to a mass murder of human life.
Man’s rebellion against his Creator has reached such a point that, unless staved, it will bring self-destruction upon him.”
The WCC has continued to call for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons since that time, through its governing bodies, functional commissions, and member churches.
At the WCC 6th Assembly in Vancouver in 1983, Marshallese activist Darlene Keju made a speech during the Pacific Plenary, sharing that the radioactive fallout from the 67 nuclear tests was more widespread than the US had admitted, and spoke of the many unrecognised health issues in the Marshall Islands.
During a WCC visit in 2023, this speech was referred to as the moment in which the Marshallese found their voice to speak out about the continuing suffering in their communities due to the nuclear testing legacy.
Climate change link
Philpot-Nissen also noted the nexus with climate change and the environment.
“When the US ended the 12 years of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, they buried approximately 80,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste under a concrete dome on Runit island, Enewetak Atoll,” she said.
“In addition, 130 tons of soil from an irradiated Nevada testing site were also deposited in the dome.”
Scientists and environmental activists around the world are concerned that, due to rising sea levels, the dome is starting to crack, releasing its contents into the Pacific Ocean.
“In the Marshall Islands, the human-caused disasters on climate change and nuclear-testing converge and compound each other,” said Philpot-Nissen.
“While the Pacific islanders are faced with the remnants of a vast and sobering nuclear legacy — they have faced this with great resilience and dignity.
“The young people of the Pacific particularly are now leading the calls for an apology, for reparations, compensation, and for measures to be taken to address the damage which was done to their lands, their waters, and their people.”
Also on the show: Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986—when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both—is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about 
