Eight US lawmakers explain how states can support climate change education in their schools.

By Glenn Branch

So you want to help to improve climate change education. Good for you!

Climate change education is a critical component of any plan for responding to the disruptions caused by a warming climate. Today’s students will spend the rest of their lives on a hotter planet, mainly owing to the actions — and inactions — of their elders, and they need to be prepared with appropriate knowledge and know-how. And yet climate change education in the United States is often far from adequate.

If you think that suitable legislation might be the remedy, you’re not alone. In the last five years, by my count, no fewer than 90 measures aimed at supporting climate change education have been introduced in the legislatures of 21 states across the country. I interviewed eight of their sponsors by phone or email, and here’s what I learned that might help you, as a citizen concerned about the climate crisis, to support the introduction, passage, and enactment of such legislation in your state.

Seek sponsors who recognise the importance of the issue

Two of the legislators, James Talarico in Texas and Christine Palm in Connecticut, are former teachers themselves, so they didn’t have to be convinced of the importance of preparing students.

“Education is the first step in helping create the leaders of tomorrow who will need to tackle this issue head-on,” Talarico told me. “The first step to solving a crisis as complex and existential as climate change is through education.”

Harness the energy and enthusiasm of youth activists

Wendy Thomas in New Hampshire was already concerned about climate change, but it was youth activists from 350nh who convinced her to introduce her resolution supporting climate change education. Youth-led and youth-oriented climate activist groups, including Ten Strands in California, Green Eco Warriors in Connecticut, and Climate Generation in Minnesota, led the support for the measures in their states. 

Emphasise the injustice of not providing climate change education

“Disadvantaged communities throughout the state … are likely to experience the first and worst climate impacts,” even while they have benefited the least from the activities that cause climate change, Andrew Gounardes in New York told me. “We have an obligation to ensure our youngest and most vulnerable community members gain the knowledge and skills to adapt to a rapidly changing world.” 

Remember that politics is the art of the possible

Luz Rivas’s bill, which was enacted in 2023, mandated the teaching of climate change in California’s public schools, but a previous version would also have required climate change to be a mandatory topic of study in high school. Why the retreat from the previous version? Rivas explained that California’s schools were under so much stress owing to the COVID-19 pandemic that she decided not to insist on the more ambitious provision.

Expect political partisanship to be a barrier

Juan Mendez in New Mexico noted, “Political partisanship overrides what needs to be done” to improve climate change education.

Chris Larson in Wisconsin similarly reported, “Even critical issues that should be bipartisan are halted due to partisanship.”

Larson added that he wished that he had worked more with the business community, which might have enabled his climate change education bill “to garner Republican legislative support.”

Communicate with your legislators

All the legislators I interviewed agreed that people who want to support measures like theirs can do a lot to help. Palm in Connecticut emphasised that state government is “the sweet spot” for action on climate change: big enough to make a difference but small enough to be approachable. Simply letting your legislators know that you support climate change education, or a particular measure intended to improve it, can go a long way in motivating them.

Make your support for climate change education visible

Testifying in legislative committee hearings can make a huge difference; even attending hearings without testifying to show your support can be helpful, Nicole Mitchell in Minnesota told me. Mendez in New Mexico stressed the importance of storytelling in any communication with legislators in order to capture their attention and their emotion.

“I can be ignored,” he acknowledged, “but real people who tell their stories are harder to ignore.”

Be persistent

Only two of the legislators I interviewed — Rivas in California and Palm in Connecticut — have enjoyed success with their measures so far, and neither of them succeeded on their first try. Indeed, it took four years and two legislative sessions for Palm’s proposed statutory requirement to teach climate change in Connecticut’s public schools to pass. Talarico in Texas expressed his resolve: “Despite our climate education bill not passing, I’m not giving up — and neither should you.”

Climate change education is popular: about 75% of Americans agree that schools should teach about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming. The challenge is to channel the public’s abstract support for climate change education into specific and implementable legislation that will make a real difference in the classroom. That’s how legislators and their constituents can help to equip today’s students to cope with the challenges of the warmer world they will inherit.

This article by Glenn Branch was originally published on Yale Climate Communications. It is republished here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

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By Kévin Jean, assistant professor in epidemiology, CNAM; Aubrey de Nazella, senior lecturer at Imperial College London; Marion Leroutier, postdoctoral fellow, Institute for Fiscal Studies; Philippe Quirion, research director, CNRS; and Émilie Schwarz, scientific project manager, Santé Publique France

When the French government recently announced a plan to cut state spending by 10 billion euros, the budget for ecology, development and sustainable mobility was first on the chopping block, with cuts totalling 2.2 billion euros. At first glance, health appears to have been relatively spared, facing a cut of 70 million euros in its budget – a big number, but less than 1% of the total. Cutting state funding targeting sustainable mobility will, however, also contribute to deteriorating public health, in addition to increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

In a recent study, we evaluated the benefits for public health and the climate of cycling in France. Here’s what we learned.

The French don’t cycle very much

Our work consisted of analysing data from the decennial personal mobility survey, conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). It aims to describe people’s mobility practices and to assess how and why the French travel, on a daily basis as well as longer trips. The 2019 edition was based on a nationally representative sample of nearly 14,000 people interviewed in 2018 and 2019.

The first finding is that the French don’t cycle very much – just over 2km per week on average for those aged 18 and over. By comparison, Dutch people aged 75 and over cover an average of 13.7km per week, almost seven times more.

We also found that men are responsible for three-quarters of the kilometres travelled by bicycle in France, whereas the practice is much more gender-balanced in the Netherlands.

The health benefits of cycling in 2019

Second, we looked at the chronic diseases and deaths avoided by the levels of cycling in 2019. To do this, we used the quantitative health impact assessment method, which makes it possible to calculate the extent of the health consequences of exposure to a risk factor or, on the other hand, the health benefits of a protective factor within a given population.

In the case of cycling, the summary of epidemiological studies tell us that 100 minutes of cycling per week reduces all-cause mortality by 10% in adults. This relationship between cycling time and mortality risk can then be extrapolated and applied to observed levels of cycling.

In the same way, we selected five chronic diseases for which an association with physical activity had been reported in meta-analyses: cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, breast cancer, cancer of the prostate and dementia.

We were able to demonstrate that, while the levels of cycling observed in 2019 were modest, if they remained constant, they would make it possible to avoid nearly 2,000 deaths and 6,000 cases of chronic disease each year.

Significant costs avoided

These avoided deaths and chronic diseases also result in reduced health spending for the community. The direct medical costs that cycling helps avoid – hospitalisations, medical treatments, paid sickness leave – can be quantified using health insurance data: they amount to nearly 200 million euros each year.

If these direct medical costs have the advantage of being “tangible”, in the sense that they are monetary expenses, they represent only the tip of the iceberg: avoiding illness or death has a value for society, even in the absence of treatment or compensation. Indeed, illnesses and deaths have intangible consequences that affect not only the person concerned, but also those around them and the community. These include emotional damage, loss of well-being, impact on the lives of loved ones (especially caregivers), loss of productivity, and more.

To take this into account and consistently evaluate the costs of avoided diseases and deaths, health economists generally use the notion of “intangible health costs”, in other words, social health costs.

Based on this notion of intangible health costs, the commission – chaired by the economist Émile Quinet – recommended in 2013 to use the value of 3 million euros per death avoided (the equivalent of 3.48 million euros in current money) for the evaluation of public policies.

For our work, we thus estimated that cycling had made it possible to avoid 4.8 billion euros in social health costs in 2019. By taking the number of kilometres travelled by bike in the year of the survey (4.6 billion kilometres), we were able to estimate that each kilometre travelled by bike helps avoid around 1 Euro in social health costs.

What are the consequences of shifting short trips to cycling?

If our analysis provides information on the current health benefits of cycling, it can also tell us more about the benefits to be expected from policies to promote cycling. This is particularly relevant in the French context, since there is significant potential for the development of cycling. In fact, in France, more than half of journeys of less than 5 km are made by car.

Here, the detailed individual data from the personal mobility survey makes it possible to model a scenario in which a portion of journeys of less than 5 km made by car would be made by bicycle. In our study, we simulated the effects of a 25% shift from the car to the bicycle for such journeys. Our results indicate that while quite modest, this switch would make it possible to prevent 1,800 more deaths and avoid an additional 2.6 billion euros in social health costs.

To put this in context, road safety policies over the last 10 years would have prevented around 1,500 deaths per year.

Finally, this simulation allowed us to estimate that such a modal shift scenario would reduce CO₂ emissions by 250 kilotonnes per year. This corresponds more or less to double the emissions avoided by the tax credits granted for energy-saving renovations of housing which were implemented in 2015 and 2016.

A potential that remains to be exploited

Despite long-standing scientifically documented benefits, it is distressing to note that cycling has not benefited from significant investments, at least over the decade 2010-2019.

As a result, between the 2008 and 2019 personal mobility surveys, the proportion of journeys made by bicycle has not increased: instead, it stagnated at around 3%. Local authorities often present investments in cycling infrastructure from a cost perspective, but our study reveals the extent of the benefits that can be expected in terms of health, as do numerous other studies on the advantages of cycling in an urban context.

It can therefore be a valuable ally in reducing air pollution and travel times. Promoting bicycle mobility is also a way of reducing the role of the automobile in the city, the harmful effects of which on health are often underestimated.

Furthermore, most energy-climate scenarios compatible with France’s climate commitments, whether developed by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME) or the non-profit négaWatt, foresee a significant increase in the use of bicycles. In such a context, public authorities would have everything to gain from highlighting the convergence of the climate and health benefits of cycling.

We have shown in other studies that the implementation of the low-carbon transition scenario described in 2021 by négaWatt would make it possible to avoid around 10,000 deaths per year by 2050, which would translate to 40 billion euros in economic benefits. Conversely, achieving carbon neutrality by relying essentially on the electrification of the vehicle fleet would completely miss the health benefits of physical activity linked to active transport.

This would represent a tremendous missed opportunity to mobilise this possible synergy between climate change mitigation and improvement of public health.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Recent lawsuits say Arrowhead, Evian, Poland Spring, and other water bottlers are deceiving customers.

By Joseph Winters

Is bottled water really “natural” if it’s contaminated with microplastics? A series of lawsuits recently filed against six bottled water brands claim that it’s deceptive to use labels like “100 percent mountain spring water” and “natural spring water” — not because of the water’s provenance, but because it is likely tainted with tiny plastic fragments.

Reasonable consumers, the suits allege, would read those labels and assume bottled water to be totally free of contaminants; if they knew the truth, they might not have bought it. “Plaintiff would not have purchased, and/or would not have paid a price premium” for bottled water had they known it contained “dangerous substances,” reads the lawsuit filed against the bottled water company Poland Spring. 

The six lawsuits target the companies that own Arrowhead, Crystal Geyser, Evian, Fiji, Ice Mountain, and Poland Spring.  They are variously seeking damages for lost money, wasted time, and “stress, aggravation, frustration, loss of trust, loss of serenity, and loss of confidence in product labeling.”

Experts aren’t sure it’s a winning legal strategy, but it’s a creative new approach for consumers hoping to protect themselves against the ubiquity of microplastics. Research over the past several years has identified these particles — fragments of plastic less than 5 millimeters in diameter — just about everywhere, in nature and in people’s bodies. Studies have linked them to an array of health concerns, including heart disease, reproductive problems, metabolic disorder, and, in one recent landmark study, an increased risk of death from any cause.

Of the six class-action lawsuits, five were filed earlier this year by the law firm of Todd M. Friedman, a consumer protection and employment firm with locations in California, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The sixth was filed by the firm Ahdoot & Wolfson on behalf of a New York City resident.

All about the percentages

Each lawsuit uses the same general argument to make its case, beginning with research on the prevalence of microplastics in bottled water. Several of them cite a 2018 study from Orb Media and the State University of New York in Fredonia that found microplastic contamination in 93 percent of bottles tested across 11 brands in nine countries. In half of the brands tested, researchers found more than 1,000 pieces of microplastic per liter. (A standard bottle can hold about half a liter of water.) More recent research has found that typical water bottles have far higher levels: 240,000 particles per liter on average, taking into account smaller fragments known as “nanoplastics.”

The complaints then go on to argue that bottled water contaminated with microplastics cannot be “natural,” as implied by product labels like “natural artisan water” (Fiji), “100 percent natural spring water” (Poland Spring), and “natural spring water” (Evian). The suit against Poland Spring cites a dictionary definition of natural as “existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.” That lawsuit and the others also point to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which does not strictly regulate the use of the word “natural” but has “a longstanding policy” of considering the term to mean a food is free from synthetic or artificial additives “that would not normally be expected to be in that food.”.

The lawsuit against Arrowhead bottled water, advertised as “100 percent mountain spring water,” argues that it’s the “100 percent” that’s deceptive. “Reasonable consumers do not understand the term ‘100 percent’ to mean ‘99 percent,’ ‘98 percent,’ ‘97 percent,’ or any other percentage except for ‘100 percent,’” the complaint reads. In other words, consumers expect a product that’s labeled as 100 percent water to contain exactly 0 percent microplastics.

Are reasonable consumers really taking labels so literally? Jeff Sovern, a professor of consumer protection law at the University of Maryland, said it’s “plausible” that people would expect bottled water labeled as “natural” to not contain non-natural microplastics, but it’s hard to say without conducting a survey. It will be up to judges to evaluate that argument — if the cases go to trial. One of the lawsuits filed by the firm of Todd M. Friedman against the company that owns Crystal Geyser was withdrawn last month, potentially a sign that the parties reached a settlement.

“A lot of these types of cases get settled,” said Laura Smith, legal director of the nonprofit Truth in Advertising, Inc. This may reflect the strength of the plaintiffs’ arguments, or it could reflect a company’s desire to avoid the expense of going to court.

In response to Grist’s request for comment, Evian — owned by Danone — said it could not comment on active litigation, but that it “denies the allegations and will vigorously defend itself in the lawsuit.” 

“Microplastics and nanoplastics are found throughout the environment in our soil, air, and water, and their presence is a complex and evolving area of science,” a spokesperson told Grist, adding that the FDA has not issued regulations for nano- or microplastic particles in food and beverage products.

The companies named in the other lawsuits — BlueTriton Brands Inc., CG Roxane LLC, and The Wonderful Co. LLC — did not respond to requests for comment.

A long-standing, systemic issue

Erica Cirino, a spokesperson for the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition, said the new lawsuits are part of a longstanding effort to hold bottled water companies accountable not only for microplastic contamination, but also for other misleading claims about their products’ purity. A lawsuit against Nestlé in 2017 said its “Pure Life Purified” brand name and labels misrepresented the purity of its water, in violation of the California Legal Remedies Act. That case was dismissed in 2019 for a “failure to allege a cognizable legal theory”; the latest lawsuits’ “natural” claims represent a different tactic.

Perhaps the best-known legal challenges have involved the origin of so-called “spring water.” In 2017, for example, a class-action lawsuit against Nestlé Waters North America, which owned Poland Spring at the time, said the company was fooling customers into buying “ordinary groundwater.” A U.S. district court judge dismissed that suit in 2018 on the grounds that its allegations improperly cited violations of a state law, rather than a federal one. Nestlé settled a similar lawsuit in 2003 for $10 million, though it denied that its practices had been deceptive.

More recent lawsuits have taken aim at bottled water companies’ claims that their products are “carbon neutral,” or that their bottles are “100 percent recyclable.” Only 9 percent of plastics worldwide ever get recycled. 

Many of these lawsuits have yet to be evaluated by a judge, although a 2021 complaint against Niagara Bottling over “100 percent recyclable” labels was tossed out by a U.S. district court judge in New York in the following year.

According to Smith, one hurdle for these lawsuits is that they’re only able to cite research on the microplastics’ potential to damage people’s health, rather than actual damages that they’ve suffered from drinking contaminated bottled water. Even if the plaintiffs did have health problems linked to microplastics, these particles are ubiquitous; it would be nearly impossible to isolate the effects from drinking microplastics in bottled water from those of microplastics found everywhere else.

“It’s a wider systemic issue with our entire food and beverage supply,” Cirino said.

Keeping microplastics out of people’s bodies would require a similarly systemic approach, potentially involving government rules and incentives for companies to replace single-use plastics with reusables made from glass and aluminum — as well as an overall reduction in the amount of plastic the world makes. In the meantime, one recent article in The Dieline floated the idea of putting microplastics warning labels on plastic water bottles. 

Of course, anyone worried about drinking plastic could turn to tap water, which typically has lower concentrations of microplastics and other contaminants, and is hundreds of times cheaper than water from a plastic bottle. Research suggests that more than 96 percent of the United States’ community water systems meet government standards for portability.

This article by Joseph Winters was originally published on Grist. It is republished here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

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By S Marek Muller, assistant professor of communication studies, Texas State University; and David Rooney, doctoral candidate, University of Texas at Austin

Increasingly, vegans, vegetarians and others looking for meat alternatives are seeing a new option on the menu: patties that look, taste and even appear to bleed like beef hamburgers, but are actually made of soy, pea protein and other ingredients.

Now, a leading plant-based meat company called Impossible Foods plans to rebrand, in order to reach a wider audience.

From now on, Impossible Foods says that all of its green cardboard packaging will be switched to red, in a bid to “appeal to the carnivorous cravings of meat eaters,” according to a March 2024 news release.

Big-name, plant-based meat alternative brands like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are losing revenue at an alarming pace. Multiple brands, like the vegan chicken nugget brand Nowadays, are going out of business. And Impossible Foods’ private share value has dropped 89% since 2021.

Some of the plant-based meat substitute industry’s woes can be attributed to politics. Many consumers associate plant-based meat substitutes with veganism, animal rights activism and left-wing politics.

Impossible’s CEO, Peter McGuinness, said in 2023 that his company has an elitist reputation and that the company’s rebranding is a rejection of “wokeness.” The so-called “wokeness” of Impossible and other plant-based meat substitutes shows the symbolic power that food can have in politics.

As communication scholars, we study and teach our students about the persuasive power of symbols. Even innocuous items like the food we eat are symbols that come with attached meanings and values.

Amid the highly polarized politics in the U.S., plant-based meat substitutes and their analog, “real” meat, have become weapons in a symbol-laden political battle between some conservatives and liberals, sometimes nicknamed the “Meat Culture War.” In other words, while an Impossible burger might literally be a soy patty, it is also a symbolic threat to the right-wing ideological order, a symbolic stand-in for the left-wing “villain of the week.”

Food, politics and culture

While costs vary, products made by the plant-based meat industry can cost two to three times more than animal-based meats.

People who are higher income, younger and live in the suburbs are most likely to have tried plant-based meat substitutes, Gallup polling shows. A rural Mississippi corner store probably won’t sell Impossible sausages, but an urban California Whole Foods probably will.

In some cases, conservatives have attached even more meaning to plant-based meat substitutes. Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, for example, produced a documentary in 2022 featuring the Raw Egg Nationalist, a prominent far-right influencer, who said that Impossible, Beyond and other plant-based companies are part of a “soy globalist” conspiracy to criminalize meat consumption and weaken citizens through poisoned food. The Raw Egg Nationalist also wrote in 2022 that plant-based meat substitutes and eggs are “perverted” products pushed by elites to bring civilization to “the brink of madness.”

Food’s political symbolism is not new. Depicting East Asian men as “effeminate rice eaters” was used as a justification for European colonial rule in Asia in the 1800s and for later stoking anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. And during the Iraq War in the mid-2000s, some U.S. restaurants renamed french fries as “freedom fries” to protest France’s refusal to join the war.

More recently, some people have derisively called men who consume soy-based proteins “soy boys.” In response to calls for meat reduction, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst has proposed banning the trend of Meatless Mondays to combat “the Left’s War on Meat.”

Impossible’s appeal to the political right likely won’t be solved with a quick repackage. That’s because their issue is related to a deep-seated conspiratorial ideology embraced by some people in far-right political circles.

Sure, some studies in consumer psychology suggest that brand color impacts consumer preferences. For plant-based meats in particular, consumers’ perceptions of the product’s eco-friendliness and tastiness is somewhat affected by packaging color – in this case, typically green. A color shift may “nudge” a wayward carnivore to take a taste of an Impossible brat, but that’s a bandage, not a solution.

You are what you eat

The symbolic connection between consuming the “right” foods and U.S. political identity is strong.

During the 2012 election, political analyst Dave Wasserman argued that who controls the Senate would come down to Cracker Barrel diners, who tend to favor options like chicken and dumplings, country fried steak and meatloaf, versus Whole Foods shoppers.

He correctly noted that electoral districts that are also home to a Whole Foods were more likely to vote “blue,” while districts with Cracker Barrels were more likely to vote “red.” Ten years later, in the summer of 2022, social media went wild when Cracker Barrel offered an Impossible sausage patty on its menu.

Some people then posted on Cracker Barrel’s Facebook page, lambasting the restaurant chain. As one person wrote, “We don’t eat in an old country store for woke burgers.”

Plant-based meat substitutes are often used by conservative commentators as a symbolic stand-in for “Big Government” and are seen as a threat to individual liberty.

At the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz declared his wish “to see PETA supporting the Republican Party now that the Democrats want to kill all the cows.” At a 2020 rally in Des Moines, Iowa, then-President Donald Trump cast the anti-meat conspiracy in even more nefarious and illogical terms, saying that “they want to kill our cows! You know why, right? … That means you’re next.”

In 2021, a survey found that 44% of Republicans actively believe that there is a “movement in the U.S. to ban red meat.”

A larger conspiracy

These fears overlap with the populist right-wing conspiracy theory of “The Great Reset,” meaning the belief that wealthy “elites” are weakening citizens – particularly white men – to subject them to tyrannical control and subjugation.

A 2023 article in The American Conservative argued that Impossible was at the forefront of a “collective vegan madness that has seized our media and political classes … not to convince people but to compel them.” In the online backlash to Cracker Barrel’s new Impossible sausage item, some commentators similarly suggested that Cracker Barrel’s “5G sausages” were controlled by Bill Gates.

Psychology and gender scholarship has found that “traditional” forms of masculinity associated with right-wing ideologies correlate with high meat consumption. Right-wing males consume red meats at higher volumes and with greater frequency than other demographics.

As communication scholars, we’re confident that what Impossible can’t do is repackage in a way that will attract right-wing carnivores. The Meat Culture Wars won’t end because of red wrappers or meaty descriptors. They’ll only end when, collectively, other items become perceived as an identity threat and globalist conspiracy and people forget about fake meat.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Facts aren’t enough to combat false and misleading messaging. Experts suggest an additional strategy.

By Stella Levantesi

“The climate crisis is a hoax,” “climate action is too costly,” “the climate has already changed in the past”: Misinformation about climate change is everywhere, coming at us from multiple directions. 

Fake news circulates online. Political leaders make denier and delayer arguments. Companies with a vested interest in the status quo put out greenwashing and obstructionist messaging, as the May 1 U.S. congressional report about fossil-fuel disinformation underscores. 

Misinformation sways minds and confuses the public, which is what climate-obstructing actors like fossil fuel companies want. If you’re confused, you’re less likely to think about their responsibility for the climate crisis and more likely to believe their lies. 

“A number of empirical studies have measured a whole bunch of negative effects of climate misinformation. I found that it was polarizing and it reduced climate literacy. Other studies have found that it reduces policy support,” said John Cook, senior research fellow at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne and founder of Skeptical Science, one of the first websites to fight climate change denial myths.  

“It also reduces trust in scientists. It has a chilling effect on scientists, making them even downplay their own results because they’re afraid of being stereotyped as alarmists,” he added. 

The good news: There’s a strategy that makes us less susceptible to being misled and manipulated. Researchers call it psychological inoculation. It works like a vaccine. 

“The general principle of inoculation is you build people’s immunity to misinformation by exposing them to a weakened version of the misinformation,” Cook said. “First, warn people of the threat of being misled, and secondly, explain the techniques that the misinformation uses to mislead. And this is what my work is mostly concentrated on, explaining the techniques of misinformation, the fallacies and rhetorical techniques.” 

This strategy “activates” people’s intellectual and psychological immune system, according to Sander van der Linden, a social psychology professor who directs the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. He has said that “some epidemiology models can be used to predict the spread of viral information just like the spread of a biological pathogen.” 

Another parallel with vaccines: disinformation inoculation “fades over time, so you need booster shots,” Cook said. “If you could inoculate enough of the public, even if you can’t change the minds of [everyone], you can achieve herd immunity and for all practical purposes not eradicate climate denial, but make it politically irrelevant.” 

Dealing with your Cranky Uncle

Inoculation has some advantages over “debunking,” dealing with misinformation after the fact. According to a 2022 study co-authored by van der Linden, University of Bristol cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky, and others, “correcting misinformation does not always nullify its effects entirely.” 

This is known as “continued influence effect”: People continue to rely on and remember the inaccurate information even after seeing a correction. 

With a total of nearly 30,000 participants, the 2022 study also found that watching short inoculation videos improved people’s ability to identify the manipulation techniques used in online misinformation. The research focused on five techniques of misinformation: excessively emotional language, incoherent or mutually exclusive arguments, false dichotomies or dilemmas, scapegoating individuals or groups, and attacking the messenger rather than the message. 

Giving people the tools to recognize how misinformation works, rather than just correcting it by presenting facts, is the more effective strategy. 

“The technique-based approach can convey immunity across topics. So you can convey immunity against a technique used in climate misinformation, and if that technique is also used in vaccine misinformation, then it can give people immunity against the same technique across topics,” Cook said. “Whereas if you’re trying to just communicate the facts to people, that doesn’t always work. Sometimes the misinformation can cancel out the facts.”

Cook has also developed “Cranky Uncle” games that use cartoons and critical thinking to fight misinformation. 

“While Cranky Uncle is purely technique-based, Cranky Uncle Vaccine is a combination of fact-based and technique-based,” Cook said. “The beauty of the first is you can do it across topics. So that’s quite powerful. But the advantage of doing a more specific thing, whether it’s vaccines or climate, is that by combining facts and techniques you can both increase their understanding of facts about the issue as well as increase their understanding of critical thinking.”

In a pilot study conducted for the vaccine game, “we found that agreement with vaccine facts went up while agreement with vaccine myths went down,” he added. “That’s really what you want to see in these kind of interventions — you don’t want to see belief in the facts go down as well because then what you’re doing is you’re just making people distrustful of all information. And that’s not an outcome you want from a misinformation intervention.” 

Another advantage of this approach is that it can sidestep ideological, political and cultural biases tied to climate issues. 

“We found that when we explained the fake expert strategy in tobacco and misinformation, that conveyed immunity against climate misinformation without us having to mention climate change and potentially trigger people because of any cultural barrier,” Cook said. 

But what makes people susceptible to climate misinformation in the first place? 

Cook said that while he was working on his doctorate, around 2017, his answer to this question would have been a certain type of political ideology — that people who don’t like government regulation, or who support free markets, don’t like the solutions to climate change. Today, his answer is a little different. 

“Since 2017 and particularly living in the U.S. from 2017 to 2021, I came to realize that tribalism is even deeper,” he said. “People have beliefs and they can be pretty strong and hard to shift, but even stronger and harder to shift is people’s tribalism and their social identity. And that’s why meta-analyses that look at what drives climate denial find that political affiliation is even stronger than political beliefs.” 

Multiple approaches for different audiences 

A team of researchers from the University of Geneva in Switzerland have developed and tested six psychological interventions on participants based in 12 countries, ranging from the United States to South Africa. 

These interventions included addressing trust in scientific sources, for example, and people’s moral convictions about climate action. 

“People are moved by facts, but they’re also moved by other things like emotions, like their own morality, and the trust that they have in science,” said Tobia Spampatti, co-author of the study and a doctoral candidate at the University of Geneva. “What we wanted to do is try to develop new strategies that tap into these other components of how people think and change their minds to see if through them, we could make them more protected against climate disinformation.”

The research, published in Nature Human Behaviour last fall, also underscored the pervasive and persistent nature of misinformation. 

Of the six interventions, participants inoculated to reflect on the accuracy of climate-change-related misinformation significantly increased their capacity to distinguish between true and false statements. According to the study, “accuracy prompts” not only decreased the influence of misinformation on political belief but also on the sharing of fake news. 

“Climate disinformation actually affects people, it affects people’s beliefs, it affects support [for climate action], it affects their ability to discriminate between true and false, and even their behavior, so people tend to behave less pro-environmentally when they receive misinformation,” Spampatti said. 

Some people are harder to inoculate than others. Cook sees three potential audiences and offers different goals for each. 

“With the first type, the ‘convinced,’ your goal is to activate them to get them moving, acting, or just even talking about climate change in order to build social momentum, and inoculation can help do that,” Cook said. “The second type of audience is the ‘undecided’ — for them inoculation is about improving their immunity and reducing their vulnerability to misinformation. The same intervention can have these two different effects.”

The third category is the hardest to convince. Inoculation for “dismissive” audiences can work, but “it’s a hard sell,” Cook added. 

Because misinformation is so complex, inoculation can’t stand alone. 

“I think that we do need to have a scattershot approach. We do need to be coming at misinformation from lots of different angles and using lots of different techniques,” Cook said. “We should be doing debunking and accuracy nudges and looking at all the tools that you can use in social media and any regulation tools you can use through government and legal avenues.”

In April, for example, the European Union started action against 20 airlines that authorities say have made misleading greenwashing claims. 

“We should be throwing everything at it because misinformation is so ubiquitous and complicated,” Cook added.

This article by Stella Levantesi was originally published on DeSmog. It is republished here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

The post A Climate Vaccine: A New Way to Battle Climate Misinformation appeared first on Green Queen.

By David Fechner, research fellow, social marketing, Griffith University; Bettina Grün, associate professor, Institute for Statistics and Mathematics, Vienna University of Economics and Business; Sara Dolnicar, research professor in Tourism, School of Business, University of Queensland

Imagine having dinner at a restaurant. The menu offers plant-based meat alternatives made mostly from vegetables, mushrooms, legumes and wheat that mimic meat in taste, texture and smell. Despite being given that choice, you decide to order a traditional meat or vegetable dish. That’s a common decision.

The Australian plant-based meat industry has grown significantly in recent years and has been projected to become a A$3 billion industry by 2030. Yet most consumers still hesitate to order a plant-based meat dish in restaurants.

In our new study, we asked 647 Australians why they don’t order plant-based meat dishes when dining out.

It turns out not everyone shares the same reasons. We found six types of diner who avoided these dishes.

Type 1: environmentally conscious, plant-based meat eater

The environmentally conscious plant-based meat eater doesn’t have any issues with meat alternatives. In fact, they enjoy experimenting with plant-based meat products at home. They have their favourite brands but also dislike certain products.

To avoid eating a product they don’t like, they prefer ordering traditional vegetable dishes when dining out. They are more concerned about protecting the planet than their own health.

Type 2: health-conscious, plant-based meat supporter

Type 2 is similar to type 1, except type 2 diners care about being fit and healthy. They prefer to “just eat the vegetables they use to make the fake meat”, as one study participant told us, because they think meat alternatives contain too much sodium, soy, fat, sugar and genetically modified ingredients.

Type 3: curious plant-based meat avoider

The curious plant-based meat avoider typically orders a meat dish and occasionally a vegetable option. They sit on the fence when it comes to plant-based meat.

While they are curious to try it, they aren’t familiar with it and don’t want to risk disappointment. As a type 3 diner told us: “If I were offered a sample, I would be more inclined to try it but […] the risk of it being disappointing doesn’t justify the cost.”

Type 4: sceptical plant-based meat avoider

Like the curious plant-based meat avoider, type 4 diners order more meat than vegetable dishes. They believe meat alternatives are unhealthy because “reading the back of plant-based meat packages will typically reveal a plethora of chemicals”. They don’t trust the technology used to create plant-based meat.

They also do not support the idea of mimicking meat with plants and giving these products names similar to animal meat such as burger or steak.

Type 5: indifferent meat lover

The indifferent meat lover doesn’t have any issues with plant-based meat. Yet they wouldn’t consider ordering a plant-based meat dish. Eating meat is an integral part of their restaurant experience and they “wouldn’t know how you’d mimic meat sliding off a bone”.

Although most of their family and friends also order meat dishes, they have no problem with restaurants offering meat alternatives if they are clearly labelled and don’t limit meat options. They believe eating meat is natural, summed up by one who said: “There is a nutritional requirement for animal meat inherent in humans.”

Type 6: critical meat lover

The critical meat lover dislikes everything about plant-based meat. They don’t understand why anyone would replace meat with a plant-based alternative, nor why it is important.

“Several times I have eaten this garbage […] and thoroughly regretted it.”

Why does this matter?

As David Attenborough says: “We must change our diet. The planet can’t support billions of meat-eaters.”

Occasionally ordering a plant-based meal instead of a meat dish can greatly reduce the environmental footprint of the global food system. Animal agriculture accounts for 56% of food-related greenhouse gas emissions but produces only 18% of calories and 37% of protein.

Plant-based alternatives to chicken, pork and beef emit, on average, 43%, 63% and 93% less greenhouse gas emissions.

This means a family of four ordering plant-based meat burgers instead of beef patties saves carbon emissions equal to driving from Brisbane to the Gold Coast.

5 ways restaurants can promote plant-based meat dishes

Restaurants are the perfect tasting ground to introduce diners (especially curious and sceptical plant-based meat avoiders) to meat alternatives. Here are five simple things restaurants can do to promote plant-based meat dishes:

1. hand out free samples to reduce the fear of disappointment
2. serve plant-based meat by default to break meat-ordering habits, as a Brisbane pub has done
3. describe plant-based meat with indulgent words and avoid using unappealing language, such as the word vegan
4. provide health information to overcome the belief that meat alternatives are unhealthier than meat, which is often not true
5. integrate plant-based meat dishes into the full menu rather than listing them in a separate vegetarian section.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Acidifying oceans are leading to sensory loss in fish. Scientists fear people might be next.

By Clayton Aldern

Imagine you are a clown fish. A juvenile clown fish, specifically, in the year 2100. You live near a coral reef. You are orange and white, which doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you have these little ear stones called otoliths in your inner ear, and when sound waves pass through the water and then through your body, these otoliths move and displace tiny hair cells, which trigger electrochemical signals in your auditory nerve. Nemo, you are hearing.

But you are not hearing well. In this version of century’s end, humankind has managed to pump the climate brakes a smidge, but it has not reversed the trends that were apparent a hundred years earlier. In this 2100, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 400 parts per million at the turn of the millennium to 600 parts per million — a middle‑of‑the-road forecast. For you and your otoliths, this increase in carbon dioxide is significant, because your ear stones are made of calcium carbonate, a carbon-based salt, and ocean acidification makes them grow larger. Your ear stones are big and clunky, and the clicks and chirps of resident crustaceans and all the larger reef fish have gone all screwy. Normally, you would avoid these noises, because they suggest predatory danger. Instead, you swim toward them, as a person wearing headphones might walk into an intersection, oblivious to the honking truck with the faulty brakes. Nobody will make a movie about your life, Nemo, because nobody will find you.

It’s not a toy example. In 2011, an international team of researchers led by Hong Young Yan at the Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, simulated these kinds of future acidic conditions in seawater tanks. A previous study had found that ocean acidification could compromise young fishes’ abilities to distinguish between odors of friends and foes, leaving them attracted to smells they’d usually avoid. At the highest levels of acidification, the fish failed to respond to olfactory signals at all. Hong and his colleagues suspected the same phenomenon might apply to fish ears. Rearing dozens of clown fish in tanks of varying carbon dioxide concentrations, the researchers tested their hypothesis by placing waterproof speakers in the water, playing recordings from predator-rich reefs, and assessing whether the fish avoided the source of the sounds. In all but the present-day control conditions, the fish failed to swim away. It was like they couldn’t hear the danger.

In Hong’s study, though, it’s not exactly clear if the whole story is a story of otolith inflation. Other experiments had indeed found that high ocean acidity could spur growth in fish ear stones, but Hong and his colleagues hadn’t actually noticed any in theirs. Besides, marine biologists who later mathematically modeled the effects of oversize otoliths concluded that bigger stones would likely increase the sensitivity of fish ears — which, who knows, “could prove to be beneficial or detrimental, depending on how a fish perceives this increased sensitivity.” The ability to attune to distant sounds could be useful for navigation. On the other hand, maybe ear stones would just pick up more background noise from the sea, and the din of this marine cocktail party would drown out useful vibrations. The researchers didn’t know.

The uncertainty with the otoliths led Hong and his colleagues to conclude that perhaps the carbon dioxide was doing something else — something more sinister in its subtlety. Perhaps, instead, the gas was directly interfering with the fishes’ nervous systems: Perhaps the trouble with their hearing wasn’t exclusively a problem of sensory organs, but rather a manifestation of something more fundamental. Perhaps the fish brains couldn’t process the auditory signals they were receiving from their inner ears.

The following year, a colleague of Hong’s, one Philip Munday at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, appeared to confirm this suspicion. His theory had the look of a hijacking.

A neuron is like a house: insulated, occasionally permeable, maybe a little leaky. Just as one might open a window during a stuffy party to let in a bit of cool air, brain cells take advantage of physical differences across their walls in order to keep the neural conversation flowing. In the case of nervous systems, the differentials don’t come with respect to temperature, though; they’re electrical. Within living bodies float various ions — potassium, sodium, chloride, and the like — and because they’ve gained or lost an electron here or there, they’re all electrically charged. The relative balance of these atoms inside and outside a given neuron induces a voltage difference across the cell’s membrane: Compared to the outside, the inside of most neurons is more negatively charged. But a brain cell’s walls have windows too, and when you open them, ions can flow through, spurring electrical changes.

In practice, a neuron’s windows are proteins spanning their membranes. Like a house’s, they come in a cornucopia of shapes and sizes, and while you can’t fit a couch through a

porthole, a window is still a window when it comes to those physical differentials. If it’s hot inside and cold outside, opening one will always cool you down.

Until it doesn’t.

Here is the clown fish neural hijacking proposed by Philip Munday. What he and his colleagues hypothesized was that excess carbon dioxide in seawater leads to an irregular accumulation of bicarbonate molecules inside fish neurons. The problem for neuronal signaling is that this bicarbonate also carries an electrical charge, and too much of it inside the cells ultimately causes a reversal of the normal electrical conditions. At the neural house party, now it’s colder inside than out. When you open the windows — the ion channels — atoms flow in the opposite direction.

Munday’s theory applied to a particular type of ion channel: one responsible for inhibiting neural activity. One of the things all nervous systems do is balance excitation and inhibition. Too much of the former and you get something like a seizure; too much of the latter and you get something like a coma — it’s in the balance we find the richness of experience. But with a reversal of electrical conditions, Munday’s inhibitory channels become excitatory. And then? All bets are off. For a brain, it would be like pressing a bunch of random buttons in a cockpit and hoping the plane stays in the air. In clown fish, if Munday is right, the acidic seawater appears to short-circuit the fishes’ sense of smell and hearing, and they swim toward peril. It is difficult to ignore the question of what the rest of us might be swimming toward.

From THE WEIGHT OF NATURE: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains by Clayton Page Aldern, to be published on April 9, 2024, by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Clayton Page Aldern.

This excerpt was originally published in Grist and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

The post Climate Change is Rewiring Fish Brains and Human Brains May Be Next appeared first on Green Queen.

This year, organizers of Earth Day are calling for widespread climate education as a critical step in the fight against climate change.

By Preety Sharma and Ayeshah Haque

A new report, released in time for global attention for Earth Day on April 22, highlights the impact of climate education on promoting behaviour change in the next generation.

Despite people’s deep connection to their local environment — whether it’s blackouts in Toronto caused by raccoons, communities gearing up for a total solar eclipse lasting only minutes, chasing northern lights, or hundreds of Manitoba kids excited about ice fishing — there remains inertia in climate action.

Sparking global momentum and energy in young people can go a long way to addressing climate change now and in the near future, says Bryce Coon, author of the report and Earth Day’s director of education.

How knowledge becomes ingrained

Educators aspire to prepare learners for the global challenges of the times. Teachers have become increasingly concerned about best practices for supporting their charges as young people express anxiety about environmental futures.

In his report, Coon outlines the benefits of climate education, starting with supporting educators to impart “green muscle memory” — habits, routines, and attitudes young people develop to perform eco-friendly actions repetitively and consistently. This, he notes, contributes to alleviating climate-related despair and anxiety.

Similarly, Finnish researchers use biking as an analogy to describe the process by which knowledge becomes ingrained in people’s memory. Just as all of the parts of a bike need to work together for the bike to ride smoothly, so does climate education need to draw upon many different components for climate education to effectively influence new habits. The bike model advocates ways of learning that consider knowledge, identity, emotions, and world views.

Young people have come to flex their green muscle memory when they load reusable water bottles each day. That small action has become a part of the daily routine for millions of families, and when added together reduces plastic litter.

According to a 2022 survey by the Canadian charity Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF) and Leger Research Intelligence Group, Canadians have increased awareness of climate change and have become concerned about climate action.

Many believe governments should do more, including making climate education a priority. The survey received responses from 4,035 people including educators, students and parents. More than half of the survey respondents were from Ontario (25 percent) and Québec (29 percent).

Challenges with climate education

However, the inclusion of climate education in formal school curricula has come with its own set of challenges.

In the survey, 50 per cent of educators nationally agreed that a lack of time in their course or grade to teach the topic of climate change is a barrier. Educators in Ontario reported a lack of classroom resources as a barrier when integrating climate change education within the curriculum.

Evidence is building about the benefits of implementing and expanding climate education. A 2020 American study documented how students enrolled in a year-long university environmental education course reported pro-environmental behaviours after completing the course.

Extrapolating the impact on learners to a wider scale, the researchers argued scaling climate education had the potential to be as effective as other large-scale mitigation strategies for reducing carbon emissions, like solar panels or electric vehicles.

More recently, research has demonstrated the value of how learning in climate education can lead youth to seek green choices, take green action and make green decisions. The United Nations has declared climate education “a critical agent in addressing the issue of climate change” as climate education increases across different settings and for various age groups.

Educators finding ways

More and more educators are taking steps to find ways to teach climate education in schools. Emily Olsen, an educator and now a doctoral candidate at Penn State University, began to explore climate education in greater depth after surviving the Almeda wildfire in Oregon that claimed her fiancé’s family home.

This wildfire’s severity can most likely be attributed to drier-than-normal conditions brought on by climate change in her then-town of residence.

Due to Olsen’s lived experience, developing community resilience to the effects of climate change influences her approach to studying climate education. As an instructor for several undergraduate-level courses, Olsen focuses on equipping budding educators with the skills and knowledge to incorporate climate education in their classrooms.

All aspects of curricula

Embedding climate education into all aspects of curricula can take a variety of approaches in and outside of the classroom.

In mainstream public education, climate education is becoming more common in Canada, but there is variation across provinces and territories. Environmental education has been packaged in different forms, including broadening school curricula with inclusion in science, but also subjects including English, math, and art.

Teacher training as well as complementary programming is also being offered to meet demand.

Integrated education that taps into the “heart, head and hands” of young people can spread behaviour change at a broader level. Educators might find other opportunities, such as with climate-related challenges, experiential learning and project-based learning, all of which can have lasting impacts and promote behaviour change.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A new report documents the banking industry’s investments in the meat and dairy industry and its climate pollution.

Three of the largest banks in the United States are also some of industrial agriculture’s biggest funders, according to a new report from the nonprofit Friends of the Earth and Profundo, a research firm. Despite setting net zero climate goals — a pledge to bring greenhouse gas emissions to a balance of zero by 2050 — Citigroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase handed $74 billion in financing to meat, dairy and feed corporations between 2016 and 2023.

The billions they loan to industrial agriculture companies represent a quarter of a percent of their financing portfolios. But even though that amount is only a drop in the bucket of the banks’ investments, the top three banks’ funding is tied to 24.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents — roughly the same amount spewed by burning 27.3 billion pounds of coal — and, in the case of Bank of America, 14 percent of their financed emissions.

Commitments to Net Zero

All three banks are members of the United Nations Net Zero Banking Alliance, an agreement in which banks pledged to accomplish net zero emissions in their lending and investments by 2050. Among the industries the banks must set goals for is agriculture — a sector that contributes around a quarter of all emissions and which the alliance recognizes as “carbon-intensive.”

“They will not meet [their net zero] targets if they don’t actually effectively address the sector of industrial livestock,” says Monique Mikhail, who heads some of Friends of the Earth’s campaigns and contributed heavily to the report.

The impacts of global warming pose a threat to the financial industry. As temperatures rise and extreme weather events become more common and severe, banks risk their assets dropping in value, as well as a potential increase in loan defaults from businesses hit by or experiencing fallout from hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and other environmental pressures. The industry passes on that risk to consumers and business borrowers to pay the price when banks offer smaller loan amounts or approve fewer loans.

Food Sector Emissions Are High, but Likely Underreported

The meat and dairy industries have a track record of misrepresenting their emissions when self-reporting. This new report highlights how the meat and dairy industries do this, by omitting the largest sources of their emissions. These sources are what climate scientists call “Scope 3 emissions,” emissions that are “indirect” because they happen within the supply chain but are not produced by the self-reporting company. For example, a corporation like Tyson Foods or JBS that processes and sells meat often does not include emissions from actual cattle farms, which are where the land use and cattle burps, the largest drivers of emissions from food, actually happen.

In the case of many meat, dairy and feed industry giants, these Scope 3 emissions account for 90 percent or more of their total emissions. Yet the researchers found that less than a quarter of the agricultural companies they reviewed reported their Scope 3 emissions, and more than half of them didn’t report emissions at all. Based on the research team’s calculations in fact, the meat and dairy companies’ actual emissions could be four times greater than what they self-report.

Addressing Gaps in Climate Action

Given their outsized emissions, the banking industry’s decision to maintain funding for meat, dairy and feed companies contributes to ongoing climate pollution. While the industry represents only 0.28 percent of Bank of America’s portfolio, 0.36 percent of Citigroup’s and 0.17 percent of JP Morgan Chase’s, these investments are responsible for 14 percent, 10 percent and 9.5 percent of their respective funded emissions, respectively.

It’s not surprising that the banking industry isn’t addressing food-related emissions, as it’s often a blind spot for most consumers, and is under-reported by climate news media. “They’ve been focusing more on the fossil fuel industry than they have been focusing on agriculture,” says Friends of the Earth’s Mikhail. “I think a lot of them just are not as aware [of] food and agriculture and its impact on the climate as they are the fossil fuel industry.”

In its most recent climate report, Citigroup cites food security, industry complexity and existing methods of managing carbon emissions as reasons why they “do not plan to set emissions reduction targets for [the] sector.” Sentient reached out to Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase for a comment on the report. A media relations representative for Bank of America said, in an email, “We will not be commenting on this one,” while a representative for Citigroup emailed in response, “We don’t have a comment on this report.” JP Morgan Chase did not respond to Sentient’s request.

“Food insecurity is not an issue of production,” argues Mikhai, adding “it’s actually an issue of distribution.” The dairy and meat industries are increasingly investing in technological solutions for emissions from production, like feed additives and methane digesters. While for investors — including Citigroup — these fixes may be enough of an effort to maintain their financing, Mikhail argues that they’re not enough. 

“A lot of these techno fixes that have been proposed aren’t really going to get at the core of the problem,” she says, which is just how much meat people in the U.S. and other global north countries consume as compared to the global average. A recent letter signed by 200 climate researchers echoed this warning, urging that significant emissions reductions from factory farms need to take place in the next five years in order to limit global warming and avoid its worst impacts on a global scale.

This story was originally published in Sentient and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

The post Your Bank Is Probably Fueling Meat Industry Climate Emissions appeared first on Green Queen.

The state is spending big on adapting to sea level rise, but Republicans don’t want to name the cause.

By Kate Yoder

In Florida, the effects of climate change are hard to ignore, no matter your politics. It’s the hottest state — Miami spent a record 46 days above a heat index of 100 degrees last summer — and many homes and businesses are clustered along beachfront areas threatened by rising seas and hurricanes. The Republican-led legislature has responded with more than $640 million for resilience projects to adapt to coastal threats. 

But the same politicians don’t seem ready to acknowledge the root cause of these problems. A bill awaiting signature from Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, relax regulations on natural gas pipelines, and delete the majority of mentions of climate change from existing state laws. 

“Florida is on the front lines of the warming climate crisis, and the fact that we’re going to erase that sends the wrong message,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of the CLEO Institute, a climate education and advocacy nonprofit in Florida. “It sends the message, at least to me and to a good majority of Floridians, that this is not a priority for the state.”

As climate change has been swept into the country’s culture wars, it’s created a particularly sticky situation in Florida. Republicans associate “climate change” with Democrats — and see it as a pretext for pushing a progressive agenda — so they generally try to distance themselves from the issue. When a reporter asked DeSantis what he was doing to address the climate crisis in 2021, DeSantis dodged the question, replying, “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.” In practice, this approach has consisted of trying to manage the effects of climate change while ignoring what’s behind them.

A history of avoiding climate change references

The bill, sponsored by state Representative Bobby Payne, a Republican from Palatka in north-central Florida, would strike eight references to climate change in current state laws, leaving just seven references untouched, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Some of the bill’s proposed language tweaks are minor, but others repeal whole sections of laws.

For example, it would eliminate a “green government grant” program that helps cities and school districts cut their carbon emissions. A 2008 policy stating that Florida is at the front lines of climate change and can reduce those impacts by cutting emissions would be replaced with a new goal: providing “an adequate, reliable, and cost-effective supply of energy for the state in a manner that promotes the health and welfare of the public and economic growth.”

Florida politicians have a history of attempting to silence conversations about the fossil fuel emissions driving sea level rise, heavier floods, and worsening toxic algae blooms. When Rick Scott was the Republican governor of the state between 2011 and 2019, state officials were ordered to avoid using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” in communications, emails, and reports, according to the Miami Herald. 

It foreshadowed what would happen at the federal level after President Donald Trump took office in 2017. The phrase “climate change” started disappearing from the websites of federal environmental agencies, with the term’s use going down 38 percent between 2016 and 2020. “Sorry, but this web page is not available for viewing right now,” the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change site said during Trump’s term.

Concerns about Florida’s fossil fuel dependence

Red states have demonstrated that politicians don’t necessarily need to acknowledge climate change to adapt to it, but Florida appears poised to take the strategy to the extreme, expunging climate goals from state laws while focusing more and more money on addressing its effects. In 2019, DeSantis appointed Florida’s first “chief resilience officer,” Julia Nesheiwat, tasked with preparing Florida for rising sea levels. Last year, he awarded the Florida Department of Environmental Protection more than $28 million to conduct and update flooding vulnerability studies for every county in Florida.

“Why would you address the symptoms and not the cause?” Arditi-Rocha said. “Fundamentally, I think it’s political maneuvering that enables them [Republicans] to continue to set themselves apart from the opposite party.” 

She’s concerned that the bill will increase the state’s dependence on natural gas. The fossil fuel provides three-quarters of Florida’s electricity, leaving residents subject to volatile prices and energy insecurity, according to a recent Environmental Defense Fund report. As Florida isn’t a particularly windy state, she sees the proposed ban on offshore wind energy as mostly symbolic. “I think it’s more of a political kind of tactic to distinguish themselves.” Solar power is already a thriving industry that’s taking off in Florida — it’s called the Sunshine State for a reason.

Greg Knecht, the executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Florida, thinks that the removal of climate-related language from state laws could discourage green industries from coming to the state. (And he’s not ready to give up on wind power.) “I just think it puts us at a disadvantage to other states,” Knecht said. Prospective cleantech investors might see it as a signal that they’re not welcome. 

The bill is also out of step with what most Floridians want, Knecht said. According to a recent survey from Florida Atlantic University, 90 percent of the state’s residents accept that climate change is happening. “When you talk to the citizens of Florida, the majority of them recognize that the climate is changing and want something to be done above and beyond just trying to build our way out of it.”

This article by Kate Yoder was originally published on Grist. It is republished here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

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