COMBATTING DISEASE
Warmer air holds more water vapor, allowing storms to pick up more moisture. This increases the risk of heavy rain events and exacerbates floods. Floods pick up even more unpleasant stuff and it all gets washed along—into our streets, our homes, our water supply, and our drinking water. It’s not only happening in Chicago. It’s even worse in the developing world, where floods can lead to outbreaks of deadly waterborne illnesses like cholera and typhoid fever, thanks to sewage overflow and contaminated drinking water supplies. Every year, some 3 million people across the globe already die due to waterborne illness, which can be caused by bacteria, viruses, or parasites. Diarrhea alone kills 2 million people, a quarter of whom are children under five, according to the WHO.
Then there’s the fact that hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones are getting bigger and stronger, with a lot more rainfall. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey powered up from a tropical depression to a category 4 storm in a mere forty-eight hours, thanks to record high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. It was likely responsible for nearly 40 percent more rainfall and four times the economic damage compared to what would have happened without climate change. The storm is estimated to have caused sixty-eight deaths directly—but it also flooded dozens of wastewater treatment plants across southeast Texas, releasing over 30 million gallons of sewage into streets and waterways. The sludge increased everything from skin infections to diarrheal disease and left many homes with nightmarish mold problems.
The year before, in 2016, Hurricane Matthew caused forty-three deaths and billions of dollars of damages across many Southeast U.S. communities, including Princeville, N.C. But when the same hurricane hit Haiti, a poor country that already suffered from lack of infrastructure, it was orders of magnitude more devastating. Hurricane-related flooding caused a significant jump in cholera cases as floodwater contaminated wells and drinking water. Crops in some areas were nearly completely destroyed, along with over two hundred thousand homes, creating a humanitarian crisis. WHO flew in a million doses of anti-cholera vaccines, but for many it was already too late.
We often take for granted that we have a tap to turn on, let alone that when we do, clean drinkable water will come out. Around the world, 2.2 billion people (that’s almost 30 percent of the world) lack safe drinking water, and 4.5 billion—over half the world—don’t have access to safe sanitation that prevents their excrement from contaminating their local environment. Ensuring clean water and sanitation for all is one of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. “Water can help fight climate change,” the goals remind us, and “everyone has a role to play. There are sustainable, affordable and scalable solutions” available today. Like what?
Sanergy is an organization that builds toilets in Kenya’s urban slums and schools. They carefully and safely collect the waste, so it doesn’t get into people’s food or water and make them sick. Then they turn the waste into fertilizer and animal feed that increases crop yields and can replace commercial fertilizers that produce nitrous oxide, a powerful heat-trapping gas. Others are even turning waste into fuel: Sulabh International, the largest nonprofit organization in India, has built nearly two hundred plants that use the waste from public toilets to create renewable natural gas, or biogas. It can replace fossil fuels in cooking and electricity-generation. And in Grand Junction, Colorado, they’re doing the same: turning human waste into biogas that fuels the city’s garbage trucks, street sweepers, and buses.
Biogas isn’t the only way hurricanes and flooding can spur clean energy investments. In 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico. It’s estimated to have caused several thousand deaths, while also destroying more than 80 percent of the territory’s utility poles and transmission lines. Storm damage caused the longest blackout in U.S. history—in some places, over eleven months without power. For many hospitals and senior citizen residences, this was a key contributor to the mounting death toll. In 2020 the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau issued its first order to start building the solar and battery capacity that will ultimately transition the island to 100 percent clean energy. This slashes its carbon emissions, cuts its electricity costs,II and makes its energy grid more resilient and better prepared to weather the impacts of stronger, climate change–fueled hurricanes. Again, it’s a win-win-win.
PREVENTING REFUGEE CRISES
Then there’s the fact that climate change has the potential to exacerbate existing conflicts and refugee crises, and even spark new ones. These can have devastating impacts on human health and well-being. Without access to food, water, and health care, things we take for granted like feeding our family or dealing with an infection can rapidly become life-threatening situations.
The United Nation’s Global Compact on Refugees, adopted in 2018, states plainly that “climate, environmental degradation and natural disasters increasingly interact with the drivers of refugee movements.” It’s not that climate change is causing most of these events: rather it is taking already precarious situations fraught with resource scarcity, civil or political conflict and instability, poverty, and hunger, and making them worse. An Oxfam report estimates that climate-fueled disasters are already displacing some 20 million people each year, the majority of whom live in Asia. For countries already nearing the brink of disaster thanks to social, economic, political, and cultural stresses, climate change impacts could be the final straw.
While many countries have opened their borders to refugees, a better solution would be for them not to have to flee in the first place. Programs designed to alleviate poverty can increase people’s resilience to climate impacts. Subsistence agriculture often involves clearing and burning tropical forests. These contain massive amounts of carbon that are released into the atmosphere when they’re burned, between twelve and thirty-five thousand tons per square kilometer or from thirty to ninety thousand tons per square mile. So it was very good news when researchers found that a poverty alleviation program in Indonesia unintentionally reduced deforestation by 30 percent at the same time. Other programs in Nepal, China, and India allow communities to manage their forests, which also reduces poverty and deforestation while protecting the resources the community depends on for food and fuel. And intact forests provide safe habitat for animals, which in turn decreases the risk of zoonosis, the process by which viruses like SARS-CoV-2 jump from animal to human populations. Yet another win-win.
MAINTAINING OUR MENTAL HEALTH
Finally, climate change doesn’t only affect us physically; it affects our mental health, too. The Oxford Dictionary defines eco-anxiety as “extreme worry about current and future harm to the environment caused by human activity and climate change.” It adds that it is not considered to be a mental disorder since it is a “rational response to current climate science reporting.” I understand; I don’t read “cli-fi” (fiction based on apocalyptic climate scenarios) for the same reason. Reality is bad enough; I don’t need more of it.
Use of the word “eco-anxiety” jumped a stunning 4,000 percent in 2019 as many young people reported increasing feelings of anxiety, panic, and fear related to climate change. “If you’ve heard about the grim climate research,” psychologist Britt Wray says, “you’ve probably felt bouts of fear, fatalism or hopelessness. If you’ve been impacted by climate disaster, these feelings can set in much deeper, leading to shock, trauma, strained relationships, substance abuse and the loss of personal identity and control.”
Yet when I’m talking to students and young people, and hearing from psychologists who study despair, a common theme emerges: acknowledging these emotions is the first step to action. People often tell psychologist Renée Lertzman, “I care very deeply about what’s happening, but I feel like my actions are insignificant. And I don’t know where to start.” But accepting who you are and what you feel is a first step. The next is to connect with others, support one another, and raise your voices together. Many young people say it’s their anxiety that led them to look for, participate in, and even lead advocacy campaigns, f
rom Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future climate strikes to Jamie Margolin’s Zero Hour. Again, impacts and solutions go hand in hand.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS OUR BOTTOM LINE
Climate change touches every single one of the issues that fill the headlines: public health concerns, food security, humanitarian crises, resource scarcity, the economy, and the impact of disasters on our cities and infrastructure. I’ve only described the very basics of how climate change affects our health, and how many inspiring, positive solutions there are that can better people’s lives today and ameliorate climate change tomorrow. But there’s one more important point to make.
What do all these impacts have in common? While they affect every single one of us, it’s the most vulnerable, most marginalized, and most disempowered people who tend to be hurt first and worst. This is true whether it’s heat waves in New Delhi or the South Side of Chicago, air pollution in Shanghai or Los Angeles, floods in London, or Bangladesh. Those most at risk are those who have already lost the most. And it’s no accident that these are the same people who were most harmed by the coronavirus pandemic and by its economic impacts. The 2020 Lancet Countdown, which tracked the connections between climate change and public health, concludes, “We don’t have the luxury of tackling one crisis at a time. COVID-19, climate change, and systematic racism represent converging crises that need to be tackled in unison.”
Here’s the good news, though. Through his research, Ed Maibach and his colleagues have found that people’s awareness of the health risks of climate change has increased significantly. Back in 2014, only around 30 percent of Americans thought the health impacts of climate change would increase. By 2020, well over 50 percent of people surveyed in the U.S. agreed that the impacts of extreme heat, harm from stronger storms and hurricanes and more dangerous wildfires, and impacts on our lungs from air pollution, allergies, wildfire smoke, and pollen were on the increase.
The bottom line is this: climate change is not only a science issue. It is not “just” an environmental issue. It is a health issue, a food issue, a water issue, and an economic issue. It’s an issue of hunger, and of poverty, and of justice. It’s a human issue.
By following this train of thought, we arrive at a simple yet potentially revolutionary realization: getting people to care about a changing climate doesn’t require them to adopt “new” values. Gone is the burden of inspiring people to “care” about deforestation and melting ice caps. No need to teach them to hug a tree, respect a polar bear (hugging not advisable), or throw themselves into recycling. And good-bye to partisan divides. As Ronald Reagan stated in 1984, “Preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it’s common sense. Our physical health, our social happiness, and our economic well-being will be sustained only by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards of our natural resources.”
We humans are the reason why climate is changing, but that also means our future is in our hands. This is why Steve Amstrup and his team of polar bear scientists are so focused on telling people about the threats posed by global warming and what we can do about it. This is why Steve Schneider, who died in 2010, fought so fiercely for the planet we all call home.III And this is why I’m so focused on communicating the risks of a changing climate myself.
Together, we confront both a challenge and a hope. Although some impacts are already here today, the future is yet to come. It’s still possible to save the polar bears—and ourselves. As Christiana Figueres says, “The full story has not been written. We still hold the pen.”
So let’s talk about how we might do that next.
I. Having lived with from motor neuron disease throughout his adult life, Stephen Hawking died in 2018 aged seventy-six.
II. Before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans were already paying twice as much for their electricity, on average, than the average American living in the lower forty-eight states.
III. His memoir is called, appropriately, Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate.
SECTION 4: WE CAN FIX IT
12 WHY WE FEAR SOLUTIONS
“Denialism… keeps at bay what might be fears, guilt, and a sense of shame, not to mention all that lurks behind a need for CO2-belching markers of identity such as wait out in the car park.”
ALASTAIR McINTOSH, RIDERS ON THE STORM
“I know the EPA is just making all of this up to take away my wood-burning stove.”
COLLEGE INSTRUCTOR TO KATHARINE
Fear of government encroachment in people’s lives is rampant across much of the U.S. and particularly in Texas. Where I live, when they have a primary election, there’s a Republican candidate and then a conservative Republican candidate who campaigns on the premise that the first candidate is just a government shill. During the coronavirus lockdown, a Texas hairdresser made national news in the U.S. by reopening her salon in defiance of state and county orders. When the county judge sent her to jail, the governor amended his own lockdown order to get her released. A statewide mask order wasn’t put in place until long after the state repeatedly struck down local ordinances. This fear of any kind of regulation is a major obstacle to taking action on climate change as well.
When I was speaking to a group of water managers in southeast Texas a few years ago, I put everything I’d learned about avoiding science overload, decreasing psychological distance, and communicating urgency into practice. I didn’t start by rattling off ice core data: I began by talking about our shared value—water, in this case, how here in Texas we either have way too much of it or not enough.I
They’d had to cope with a number of challenges in recent years, including a severe drought and multiple floods. I carefully connected water and climate, then climate and carbon, using simple analogies that made the information clear and relevant. But I couldn’t avoid the conclusion that the more carbon we pump into our atmosphere, the greater the risk of serious and even potentially dangerous consequences—consequences that will become increasingly impossible to prepare for and adapt to.
At the end of my talk, an older man raised his hand. He cleared his throat. And then, in a reasonable and genuinely concerned tone, he stated:
“Everything you’ve said makes sense. But I don’t want the government telling me how to set my thermostat.”II
He seemed accepting of the science, and even concerned about the impacts—but allergic to what he perceived to be the solutions.
WE DON’T THINK WE MATTER
This man is not alone in feeling this way. My home country of Canada has the reputation of taking its climate commitments seriously. It supports the lower 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement, it has a price on carbon, and in the last election every major political party had a climate plan.III I’ve spoken with ministers whose portfolios range from senior citizens to infrastructure. They’re all concerned about how climate change is affecting their responsibilities and their constituents. Yet the number one objection I regularly hear from fellow Canadians is “We’re responsible for just 2 percent of global emissions. Why should we have to fix this? It won’t make a difference anyways and it will just harm our natural resource–based economy.”IV The Liberal government that put a price on carbon partially agrees: they’ve funded a controversial oil pipeline to take the oil from Alberta’s tar sands to ports on the west coast, with the goal of shoring up that province’s economy and placating its industry while providing funds to accelerate a green transition and a just transition for energy workers.
Back in 2000, Oregon sociologist Kari Norgaard decided to study why and how people reject climate action. She didn’t head down to Texas or up to Alberta, though. Instead, she moved to Norway, another northern country with a similarly climate-friendly reputation.
Norway leads the world in electric vehicle usage; more than 10 percent of cars on the road there today are electric or plug-in hybrids and this number is growing every year. More than half the cars sold there in 2020 were zero-emission vehicles. Thanks to i
ts oil and gas resources, its sovereign wealth fund is the largest in the world, currently estimated at around $1.2 trillion dollars. In 2019, the Norwegian parliament voted to divest $13 billion dollars’ worth of their investments in coal, oil, and gas companies that weren’t taking action on climate change.
The winter Kari spent in the community she gave the alias “Bygdaby” was unusually warm. People were unable to cross-country ski or ice fish like they normally would. The Norwegian media very clearly linked the warm winter to human-caused climate change. During her time there, Kari interviewed dozens of Norwegians. As she chronicles in her book Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, she found that people knew a lot about the issue: lack of information or facts wasn’t the problem. But to her surprise, rather than engaging with solutions, they avoided thinking or talking about climate change. And when asked why, they’d reply, similar to what I’ve heard from so many of my fellow Canadians, “Norway is such a little country. Why would anything we do make a difference?” They perceived solutions to be onerous, personally harmful, and accomplishing little. So even during an unusually warm winter, their fear of solutions outweighed their fear of the impacts.
WE THINK THE CURE IS WORSE THAN THE DISEASE
Our collective threat meter is unbalanced. In fact, sometimes it’s tipped all the way in the wrong direction. Even people who agree that climate is changing due to human causes still see the impacts as distant and far off. But that’s only half the problem. The other half is that they view the threat from potential climate solutions as imminent. They believe government’s and society’s attempts to address climate change will decrease their quality of life, pummel the economy, and compromise their personal rights.
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