Six on History: Climate Crisis
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
1) Biden Scales Down $2 Trillion Climate Plan To Single Reusable Grocery Bag, The Onion
"WASHINGTON—Putting forth a less ambitious legislative package in an effort to secure enough votes for passage in the Senate, President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that his original $2 trillion climate plan would be replaced with a scaled-back proposal to purchase a single reusable grocery bag. “For those members of the Democratic caucus who have demanded a more slimmed-down, manageable approach to the catastrophic effects of climate change, I believe we’ve finally reached a compromise in the form of this handy canvas tote bag, which should hold up through years of regular trips to the supermarket,” Biden told reporters in the White House briefing room as he gestured toward a screen that displayed a cotton bag featuring an illustration of a woman and text that read “Jane Austen Is My Homegirl,” an item administration sources confirmed was available from CafePress. “This proposal brings the cost of the plan down to just under $10 plus shipping. While some of you may be concerned this bill doesn’t go far enough, it’s at least a start, and our hope is that in future congressional sessions we will be able to appropriate funding for even more tote bags. Failing to act on the climate crisis is simply not an option. But I believe that as long as nobody spills inside the bag or forgets it on the bus, this new plan will bring us one step closer to reaching our environmental impact goals.” At press time, sources reported the proposal had been slimmed down once more after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) insisted the reusable bag be dropped and replaced with a more affordable program that would allow for the purchase of a single disposable plastic bag."
"Philippine climate justice activist Mitzi Jonelle Tan pauses briefly before admitting her distress in a video posted on Twitter. “I grew up being afraid of drowning in my own bedroom,” 23-year-old Tan says, “because of the typhoons and the floods that would ravage my home year after year, getting more and more intense”. Above the video is a call to action, a plea to battle climate anxiety.
Recent record-breaking heatwaves, floods and wildfires have caused extensive damage to human livelihoods. Millions of people worldwide are being displaced due to climate change. But the impact this will have on mental health and conversations around psychological consequences have only recently come to the forefront.
The American Psychological Association (APA) defines climate (or eco-) anxiety as a “chronic fear of environmental doom”. It is not a mental health disease but rather a rational response to deep-seated uncertainty and, in the most advanced cases, it can affect a person’s daily functioning. And while anyone can feel anxious about climate change, young people ages 16-25 are particularly vulnerable, according to an investigation recently published in The Lancet medical journal.
That sinking feeling
In the first large-scale observation of climate anxiety in children and young people globally, nine researchers from universities in the US, UK and Finland came together and surveyed 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 in Australia, Brazil, France, Finland, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK and US.
More than half of respondents (54%) said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their functioning on a day-to-day basis. Three-quarters said the future was scary, with anxiety levels at the highest in countries like the Philippines, Brazil and India, where climate change is most visible. Close to 60% of the respondents admitted being extremely worried about climate change, with over 50% saying they felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless – and guilty.
Megan Morgan, who was born and raised in England, remembers dealing with similar emotions prompted by climate change as early as age 7. “I went to quite a progressive primary school … One day, a team came in to talk about climate change, landfills filling up and ice caps melting. I remember asking: ‘What happens when all the landfills are full and all the ice caps melt?’ I don’t remember their response, but that was the moment I became aware of my own mortality. It was an earth-shattering moment for me.”
After that day, Morgan experienced an onset of panic attacks. “Every time it poured rain or flooded I would be inconsolable,” she says. “Of course, it was never about the rain. I couldn’t even hear the words ‘global warming’ without having a sinking feeling.”
Now 24 years old, Morgan still suffers from climate anxiety but she says it feels more like stress. She explains feeling worried about the advancements societies are making while disregarding the changes needed to curb environmental destruction.
What she struggles with the most, though, is feeling helpless. “Sure I can use a metal straw, eat vegan or make ethical choices when shopping. But compared to oil being poured into the oceans, it’s a minuscule effort. There’s no accountability, no change made.”
'Betrayal of generations'
Expanding on the APA’s definition of climate anxiety, psychotherapist and researcher Caroline Hickman adds a sense of betrayal. “It’s not just distress about environmental problems. Climate anxiety is also coupled with despair, disillusionment and betrayal by people in power failing to act,” she says. The lack of accountability that Morgan feels is common among young people struggling with climate anxiety.
Miguel, a 22-year-old in Scotland, feels the same. “I learnt about environmental problems at school but always understood it as something scientists would fix. As time passed, I found it increasingly worrying that, despite the availability of significant knowledge on the problem, no action was being taken,” he says.
What Miguel and Morgan are referring to is what Greta Thunberg has called the “betrayal of generations”. Climate change is no longer a theoretical or distant threat. The world is becoming increasingly aware and informed of the consequences, which will disproportionally affect young people.
“It’s older generations failing to do the right thing by younger generations, and that is felt as a form of betrayal and abandonment,” Hickman says. “Some of the young people that I’m working with are suicidal because of this betrayal. Not because of environmental problems, but because they feel so devastated by being horrendously abandoned by people in power who are supposed to take care of us.”
Hickman explains that this betrayal can cause moral injury. It begins to erode trust in all structures within society that are supposed to take care of a person, causing great distress in young people. While older adults may have had more experiences and become “hardened” by life’s betrayals, young people are only now transitioning from early childhood’s needs for attachment, trust and safety.
“I feel a mix of emotions,” Miguel says. “Sometimes it’s a sadness for what we’ve lost and are losing, sometimes it’s a sense of abandonment as the people who are supposed to be ensuring a habitable future completely fail at providing the bare minimum for current and future generations to just survive.”
'Sorry' seems to be the hardest word
Elouise Mayall, researcher and ecologist at the University of East Anglia, believes that it is vital for people in power to show forms of emotional intelligence when it comes to climate change. “Having leaders who are cold and rational doesn’t help with a situation that is largely psychological and emotional. We’re dealing with feelings like grief or fear in young people, those are not robotic things,” she explains. Acknowledging past errors and apologising may be symbolic, but she believes it will help young people feel seen.
In her workshops with young people suffering from climate anxiety, Hickman often apologises. “I may not be Shell or a government, but I’m an adult acknowledging that it is my generation’s fault and that brings them immense relief. They feel validated and seen.”
While the obvious solution to ending climate anxiety is to take immediate action and stop harming the planet, nations are still trying to play down the need to move away from fossil fuels ahead of COP26. This is why finding a community and working with young people to transform anxiety into action – as the youth-run NGO Force Of Nature does – is crucial, according to Hickman and Mayall.
For Miguel, “action is the antidote to climate anxiety”. He wants to see leaders, governments and other vested interests like fossil-fuel companies held accountable for their decisions.
As for Megan, she wants the betrayal to end as well. “I want to feel confident that those in power really care about our home [and finding solutions] to saving it and acting [upon them] immediately,” she says. “I want them to act now. Not in 2025, not in 2030. Now.”
climate change is poisoning the land and emptying the village
HADDAM, Iraq
"No one lives here anymore. The mud-brick buildings are empty, just husks of the human life that became impossible on this land. Wind whips through bone-dry reeds. For miles, there’s no water to be seen.
Carved from an ancient land once known as Mesopotamia, Iraq is home to the cradle of civilization — the expanse between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where the first complex human communities emerged.
But as climate change produces extreme warming and water grows scarcer around the Middle East, the land here is drying up. Across Iraq’s south, there is a sense of an ending.
Dozens of farming villages are abandoned, but for an isolated family here and there. The intrusion of saltwater is poisoning lands that have been passed for generations from fathers to sons. The United Nations recently estimated that more than 100 square miles of farmland a year are being lost to desert.
Years of below-average rainfall have left Iraqi farmers more dependent than ever on the dwindling waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. But upstream, Turkey and Iran have dammed their own waterways in the past two years, further weakening the southern flow, so a salty current from the Persian Gulf now pushes northward and into Iraq’s rivers. The salt has reached as far as the northern edge of Basra, some 85 miles inland.
In the historic marshes, meanwhile, men are clinging to what remains of life as they knew it as their buffaloes die and their wives and children scatter across nearby cities, no longer able to stand the summer heat.
Temperatures in Iraq topped a record 125 degrees this summer with aid groups warning that drought was limiting access to food, water and electricity for 12 million people here and in neighboring Syria. With Iraq warming faster than much of the globe, this is a glimpse of the world’s future.
STAY OR GO?The impact of rising temperatures started slowly, people recall. Year after year, the summers got hotter. Days on the water felt more difficult, and cases of heat stroke increased, according to residents. Buffaloes fell sick. Fish were found dead on the shore.
Ghali’s hair had grayed at his temples, framing wrinkles deepened by the sun. The 40-year-old looked exhausted.
Could he sell the animals and move, too? He shook his head. “No one would buy them now.”
He looked out across the mud flats where his black buffaloes stood sweating.
“We never thought things would reach this point,” he said.
MIGRATION INCREASINGIraq’s average temperature has risen by 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit since the end of the 19th century, according to Berkeley Earth, double the speed of the Earth as a whole. Climate scientists warn that the extreme temperatures facing places like southern Iraq are a small taste of what will follow elsewhere.
Iraq’s climate woes have exacerbated shortages in everything from food to electricity generation. Fisheries have been depleted. In the country’s north, wheat production is expected to decline by 70 percent, aid groups say. In provinces without access to rivers, families are spending ever larger portions of their monthly income on drinking water.
The result, increasingly, is migration. According to the International Organization of Migration, more than 20,000 Iraqis were displaced by lack of access to clean water in 2019, most of them in the country’s south.
But as they flee to towns and cities, they’re further straining services already hollowed out by widespread corruption and weak job markets where unemployment is high.
Researchers say migration has sparked tensions with longtime residents, who blame the newcomers for shortages of water and electricity. Summer blackouts are already frequent.
And politicians use migration to deflect from their own failures. “There’s now a narrative that says people who are emigrated to the cities and living in unofficial neighborhoods are overburdening the local water and power supplies,” said Maha Yassin, a researcher at the Clingendael Institute’s Planetary Security Initiative.
‘THERE’S NO WORK’In Majer, a run-down town where the summer heat forces residents indoors for much of the day, Ghali’s brothers described the new life they had found there. The lights flickered, and a weak fan whirred.
“I’m just sitting here. There’s no work,” said Tahseen Mohamed, 25, dressed in a dark galabeya with his black hair brushed neatly upward.
The house was packed with relatives, all dependent on an uncle who earned a salary serving with a militia in the country’s north. Another brother, they said, was trying to sell the family’s buffalo milk but with little luck. “The salt made their milk fattier,” he said.
All agreed that life was more tolerable in the city. The children were happier; the houses had fans. But anxiety still abounded. Ghali, they said, had been taken to the hospital days earlier with heatstroke. An infant niece had died in the hot car when they tried to take her to the doctor. “The heat makes life so difficult. We know this only gets worse,” said Hussein Mohsen, 24.
Mohamed said that his wife had left him once they moved to Majer, because he couldn’t afford a house. “Look, I want to make it happen, but where does the money come from?” the young man asked.
In the corner of the room, an old woman nodded sympathetically. “We’re not ourselves here,” she said.
‘CAN’T AFFORD TO LEAVE’Some villagers can’t even afford to flee the tendrils of climate change. In the pockets of Iraq’s rural south that have largely emptied of people, some families fret they have been left behind.
As night fell in the remote border town of Faw on a recent day, Jamila Mohamed, 55, and her brother Hussein were worrying about their animals.
The family was squatting in a government building, because they could not afford to pay rent, and relying on their livestock for food. But the rising heat and salty water have made the land they live on almost useless. Several cows have died. Others are rail thin.
“We need to sell them because we can’t feed them,” Hussein said, patting a black and white calf on the head. “But what happens after that? We can’t afford to leave this place.”
Standing in the twilight as the cows grazed on dirty hay, the air felt still and silent.
Crossing her arms, Jamila exhaled sadly.
Ida put an exclamation point on realities that New York was already grappling with. Like other parts of the world, the report notes, the city is confronting not just calamitous extreme events like the inundations of Ida. It’s the drip, drip of “the chronic worsening of average conditions.”
Protection Commissioner Vincent Sapienza said at a briefing after the storm. “Anything over two inches an hour we’re going to have trouble with.”
Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College, Vermont, and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org
