DMT Beauty Transformation

The 2020 Election May Hinge On The “Climate Change Voter”

September 25, 2020BruceDayne

#DMTBeautySpot #beauty

It’s time to wake up. On Global Day of Climate Action, VICE Media Group is solely telling stories about our current climate crisis. Click here to meet young climate leaders from around the globe and learn how you can take action.

There are, of course, many reasons to vote. But as wildfires engulf the West Coast, heat waves and hurricanes devastate entire regions, and rising sea levels threaten cities like Miami, an increasing number of voters are saying climate change is what’s driving them to cast their ballot — and in some cases, even influencing who they support.

“Climate change voters” aren’t yet a reliable voting bloc the way gun-loving NRA voters are for the Republican Party, Alec Tyson of the Pew Research Center told Quartz. But they’re quickly becoming one. In the past few years, more people have started to identify themselves as such, and naming climate change as the primary issue that is motivating them to vote.

“I think that in 2020, this will be the first election where you’re going to see climate come up like healthcare, national security, jobs, and economic security, as a reason people vote and a reason people engage in this election,” Lauren French, senior communications director at Climate Power 2020, told Refinery29.

In fact, climate change is the single most important issue among Democrats during this election cycle, edging out concerns over healthcare and the economy, according to a recently released NPR survey. (For Republicans, it doesn’t even rank as one of their top six concerns.)

Between 2014 and 2019, the number of Americans who are worried about climate change nearly tripled, reports the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. A recent poll conducted by VICE Media Group and several partners found that 78% of voters support retraining former fossil fuel workers into renewable energy jobs, to help rebuild the economy after COVID. And 65% of voters say they want to see Congress and the next president draft a serious and comprehensive bill addressing how the U.S. plans to fight climate change as soon as next year.

Despite the fact that it’s top of mind for voters, climate change is chronically under-discussed in the media and political debates. “The last time a climate question was asked [during a presidential or vice presidential debate] was in 2008, which seems to be fake, but it’s just an absurd amount of time,” French said. The Commission on Presidential Debates recently announced which topics President Donald Trump and former VP Joe Biden will cover in the upcoming debate on September 29, and — once again — climate change is not on the roster. Varshini Prakash, Executive Director of the Sunrise Movement, said it is an “abdication of the media’s role to keep people informed for climate to be completely erased from the docket.”

French said the September 29 roster surprised her, given the push among voters for politicians to talk about the issue during debates. “I recognize that Chris Wallace works for Fox, I’m a pretty pragmatic and realistic human being, but [during the debates, he’s been chosen to] ask on behalf of all American voters, not just the audience that watches Fox News,” she said. “So he has a greater responsibility than to appease folks who watch Fox and don’t want to believe that the climate crisis is here.”

Asked about the debate topic, Biden deputy national press secretary Matt Hill said, “Regardless of what’s happening in the news or on the debate stage, Vice President Biden will continue treating the climate crisis as a front-and-center issue, as he has been throughout the entire campaign.”

Unfortunately, views on climate change — like wearing masks during the pandemic, another life-or-death issue — tend to be divided among party lines. Pew Research Center found that 88% of Democrats consider climate change a major threat, compared to only 31% of Republicans. 78% of Democrats think dealing with global climate change should be a “top priority” this year (up from 46% in 2015), while only 21% of Republicans agree.

This election season, climate change voters are unequivocal about getting rid of Trump — who has withdrawn from the Paris Climate agreement, consistently scaled back environmental protections, expanded Arctic drilling, and denied that climate change even exists.

Joe Biden, to them, presents the best hope for the future. After engaging with communities, including environmental organizations, environmental justice advocates, and labor unions, his campaign has developed an aggressive plan to end carbon emissions from power plants by 2035 with a broad investment in jobs and infrastructure. This includes $2 trillion for clean energy projects, as well as a promise to direct 40% of its climate spending to marginalized communities. “The fact that you have the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the United Auto Workers, IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), and a swath of environmental justice leaders all coming out in support of the same climate plan is unprecedented and speaks to Joe Biden’s ability to bring together all kinds of leaders who we need to be engaging on this issue,” said Hill.

Trump’s embrace of fossil fuels and climate denial — he recently dismissively said that it will “start getting cooler” in reference to the West Coast wildfires — have even pushed a considerable number of climate voters to the Democratic party, French said. David Jeffrey Arnot, 22, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, said he changed his registration after seeing “an increasingly worrying denial of science from the Republican party.” According to an April survey by Climate Power 2020, 62% of Republican-leaning “persuadable voters” disapprove of Trump’s handling of climate and 72% think that strong climate action will be good for the economy.

The other major “climate voter” group are “Bernie voters” who are not necessarily sold on Biden, but who are so passionate about stepping up on climate action that they will vote for him, since of the current candidates, he is the only one with solutions to the issue, French said. Then, there are the Democrats who would likely vote for Biden otherwise, and also consider climate change their number-one issue.

Another Climate Power 2020 survey shows that Latinx voters are particularly engaged on climate change: 77% of Latinx voters favor bold government action on climate change, 71% of voters overall support it. Women, millennials, people of color, and those earning under $50,000 a year are all more likely to list this issue as top priority in elections, according to the Environmental Voter Project. This may be because climate change affects these populations more significantly and directly: Reports say climate change will take a disproportionate toll on low-income communities, for instance, as they already have higher rates of adverse health conditions, are more exposed to environmental hazards, and take longer to bounce back from natural disasters.

For many climate change voters, their personal experience has helped inform their attitudes. Ivette Alsina, 49, who lives in Winter Haven, FL, fled from Cayey, Puerto Rico, after Hurricane Maria; scientists say climate change was behind the hurricane’s deadly rainfall. Alsina said she had to leave behind a lot of family and friends. “We need to start paying attention to what is happening, because it’s not only happening in Puerto Rico, but around the world,” she said.

Alejandra Cadiz, 53, in Grayson, GA, says the heatwaves in Georgia have gotten unbearable — she hasn’t experienced anything like it since she moved there in 1996. “Without taking care of this problem, we are not going to be here in 50 more years, we are not going to live on this planet. So nothing else will matter, not healthcare, not economics,” she said.

Heather Toney, 44, lives in Oxford, MS, and has two children ages four and 14. The former mayor of Greenville, MS, she now works with the Biden campaign on climate issues. Mississippi has dealt not only with extensive flooding, but a record number of storms. “Joe understands that we are working now to protect the next generation, but that we always need to have practical solutions,” Toney told Refinery29.

“I’m a Black woman in Mississippi and a mother, so I cannot be anything but a climate change voter,” Toney said, adding that there is a clear connection between climate justice and racial justice. “Voter suppression is directly connected to climate change because to achieve change, we have to have the people voting. But we can’t get the people into office who would make changes because the vote is being suppressed.” Because of redlining policies, the devastating effects of chemical pollution on Black communities are intensified. In “cancer alley” — where people are 50 times as likely to get cancer than the average American — you see the product of redlining at work, with low-income Black people living along an 85-mile-long stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge in Louisiana, which is covered with oil refineries and petrochemical plants. The area has also seen some of the highest COVID-19 death rates in the U.S.

Among some younger voters, attitudes toward Biden’s climate change plan are more mixed. The Green New Deal, written by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed. Markey, is in their view a more ambitious plan than Biden’s. Biden has essentially embraced the framework of the Green New Deal, including its jobs guarantee, but wouldn’t ban natural gas and oil fracking or phase out nuclear power.

“When I vote, especially at the more local level, I vote for representatives who either support the Green New Deal or have similar elements on their platform,” Lourdes Ginart, 27, from Eugene, Oregon, who is registered as an Independent and is voting for Biden, told Refinery29. “I think winning the Senate back will be the best way for climate champions and concerned representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ed Markey to push the legislation we desperately need for a more equitable and sustainable U.S.”

Daniel Jubelirer, 27, said that he volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary, and plans to vote for Biden largely because of his climate plan. “I got involved with the Sunrise Movement a few years ago, and it was through Sunrise that I saw that the Democratic Party is what we push for them to be,” he said, referring to the youth climate justice movement that played a big role in advocating for the Green New Deal to be part of Biden’s plan. “If you push candidates to support very bold policies, they will. I’ve been really impressed with the way that Biden has listened to young leaders. I don’t think he goes far enough, and I’d love to see him do more. But his climate plan is still the most ambitious of any nominee in history. I like that he’s addressing creating jobs. If his climate plan is fully implemented, it’s very good.”

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

DMTBeautySpot

via https://www.DMTBeautySpot.com

Natalie Gontcharova, Khareem Sudlow

Emily Ruane featured Khareem Sudlow

We Spent $40,000 To Live In A Solar-Powered Van

September 25, 2020BruceDayne

#DMTBeautySpot #beauty

In Refinery29’s Sweet Digs, we take a look inside the sometimes small, sometimes spacious homes of millennial women. Today, #vanlifers Bec Moroney and Eamon Fitzgerald showed us how they carved out a home for themselves on the road.

If you just spent five minutes and 23 seconds with your jaw on the floor, you’re not alone. We also watched in awe as Toronto-based couple Bec Moroney and Eamon Fitzgerald toured us around their (almost) 20-foot-long Sprinter van — which contains more useable and thoroughly comfortable living space than you ever thought you could possibly fit into 80 square feet. With a kitchen, multiple beds, a shower, a compostable toilet, and a roof outfitted with solar panels, the compact mobile home contains everything the couple needs for a nomadic lifestyle. The micro-space isn’t merely convenient, it’s also supremely chic; peppered with bohemian accents and even a little greenery that makes it feel like home on the road.

One crucial comfort hack is the multitude of storage compartments that hide in every nook and cranny of the vehicle. (The couple even built a secret trapdoor to sequester sweaty post-workout sneakers.) The van’s kitchen is equipped with plenty of drawers for stashing everything from dishes to pantry items, and a diesel heating system hides beneath the white-washed bench. Underneath this rustic wood-block countertop is something even more unexpected — the van’s miniature, hyper-efficient bathroom, which includes an eco-friendly composting toilet and a shower setup. (Living in miniature space forces the couple to conserve and economize square footage and resources wherever possible.)

Despite being not much bigger than your average garden shed, the couple’s space is warm and inviting — thanks in part to bright white paneling and their keen eye for nostalgic travel-inspired design details. While the van itself is certainly replete with creature comforts, the appeal of the vehicular lifestyle is really more about what’s outside the car than in it. This is exemplified by the solar-paneled roof: “On a sunny day, we can lounge up here and catch some rays,” explains Bec. “And on a nice clear night, we can watch the stars,” adds Eamon. “It’s actually my favorite part of the van.”

Shop some of their mobile-home-chic aesthetic below.

At Refinery29, we’re here to help you navigate this overwhelming world of stuff. All of our market picks are independently selected and curated by the editorial team. If you buy something we link to on our site, Refinery29 may earn commission.

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

This Minimal-Chic Bed-Stuy Apartment Costs $3,000

The Best At-Home Gel Manicure Kits

DMTBeautySpot

via https://www.DMTBeautySpot.com

Emily Ruane, Khareem Sudlow

featured Khareem Sudlow nospam@example.com (Dianna Baros)

Look for Less: Barefoot Dreams Dupe at Costco + Try-On!

September 25, 2020BruceDayne

featured Khareem Sudlow Whizy Kim

Individuals Can’t Heal The Climate When Capitalism Is The Virus

September 25, 2020BruceDayne

#DMTBeautySpot #beauty

We need to talk about our carbon footprint. Not how much of it comes from driving versus eating meat, but the popular concept of dividing up all the greenhouse gases polluting the atmosphere into the fraction that you personally own. Today we have an abundance of handy online calculators and apps that estimate your individual footprint for you. Everyone’s getting involved in the effort; one newly released app called VYVE is even backed by oil giant BP. The app’s home page succinctly captures the motivation behind calculating your footprint: “Take responsibility for your carbon impact.”

To be sure, we should take responsibility. A carbon footprint calculator can help bring an overwhelming global crisis into your backyard. You can compare the average carbon footprint of an American (around 16 metric tons CO2e) to that of neighboring Mexico (about 4 metric tons) and grasp that a high-consumption American lifestyle has a much heavier impact on the environment than others do. It can also be a good jumping-off point for those who want to take action but are unsure of what changes they can make in their lives.

But we also need to admit that the obsession around personal carbon footprints has been harmful. For too long, the dominant call to action has been encouraging the public to opt-in to a set of different lifestyle habits, through carbon footprint quizzes and by invoking the duty to take charge of your personal contribution. Despite this messaging, 88% of Americans still owned a car in 2015 and car ownership has continued to rise. U.S. airlines carried a record number of passengers in 2019. Even though there’s recently been a lot of coverage on the role of animal products in climate change, as of 2018, only 3% of Americans said they were vegan. In 2018, the U.S. also hit record-high energy consumption.

It’s not that shrinking your own carbon footprint isn’t necessary to avoiding climate catastrophe. It is. It’s that, given the state of things, dedicating so much space to the concept clearly hasn’t worked on a wide enough scale. We don’t just need to shave emissions here and there; we need to make them disappear at incredible speed. But according to a Washington Post poll from 2019, most Americans still believe small personal sacrifices will be enough. We have until 2030 before much of the climate damage becomes irreversible due to the triggering of tipping points that can collapse entire ecosystems. The damage is already enormous; more people are being harmed by the climate crisis every year. We’re not on track to keep temperature rise below 2°C of the pre-industrial era, the target set by the Paris Agreement in 2015. More likely, we’ll see a global rise of at least 3°C. Affluent countries like the U.S. need a revolution in the way we live, and that requires systems, not just individual lifestyles, to transform.

Even the most commonly recommended lifestyle changes often require people to swim against strong currents. The fact that most Americans rely on personal vehicles over public transportation might lead you to write us off as hopelessly obsessed with gas-guzzling cars — but cultural fixations don’t arise from nowhere. The post-WWII era was dizzy with incentives, policies, and mass infrastructure projects that made owning a car much more feasible and attractive than in other nations. To this day, a stunning variety of laws help maintain a landscape where having your own car is either the safer, cheaper option, or the only option. U.S. cities with well-connected, affordable public transportation remain extremely rare, partly because public works in general are underfunded, but also because groups that have a stake in the auto or fossil fuel industry use their piles of money to help ensure they don’t get built.

Even when it comes to reducing energy use in your home, there are larger factors at play that can outweigh the good you’re trying to do. A recent University of Michigan study found that in some states, the climate benefit from households consuming less energy than the national average was erased by their grid’s method of producing electricity being carbon-intensive. In Florida, for example, there’s less need to heat homes in winter, leading to energy savings, but its electricity production is more intensive in producing greenhouse gases than average. Power companies in Florida, as in many other places, have also been fighting wider adoption of renewable energy. The sunshine state only generated 1% of its electricity from solar energy last year.

Or take recycling. Americans recycle or compost about 35% of waste. Is the rate so low because of laziness? Maybe partly. But considering that over 90% of the plastic we were told to recycle wasn’t actually recycled — which Pepsi, Coca Cola, Nestle, and others are being sued for right now — it’s not fair to blame individuals.

Obsessing about reducing our individual footprints, then, is an exercise in missing the burning forest for the trees. It’s based on the hope that, by pointing it out, an enormous wave of people will be swayed to live differently — and that massive systems and corporations will also support that goal. Maybe this messaging convinces you to shrink your footprint down from 16 metric tons CO2e to 5 metric tons. Annual global greenhouse gas emissions are around 50 billion tons CO2e; only 49,999,999,989 to go. The climate crisis is a problem of mind-breaking scale.

And this discourse didn’t come about by accident. Even though scientists began loudly calling for climate action back in 1988, “carbon footprint” wasn’t a well-known concept until BP helped popularize it in the mid-2000s. The premise of a carbon footprint is that we’re all contributing to the emergency — so deal with your share. But what if we aren’t all equally to blame? What would the solution look like then?

The fact is, climate crisis denial is thriving. Attacks on the science of it may not be as fashionable as they once were, but the footprint of disinformation remains: many Americans are still fuzzy on whether scientists have formed a consensus (there never wasn’t a consensus), and whether climate change is mainly caused by human activity (it is). In 2015, an investigative report by InsideClimate News uncovered evidence that ExxonMobil knew about the climate crisis as early as the late 1970s, thanks to research conducted by its own scientists. Oil companies then spent decades spilling money into the effort of confusing the public. They didn’t need to provide air-tight proof that temperatures weren’t rising, or that it wouldn’t impact the Earth very much. All they had to do was nudge some doubt into the discussion.

These days, more of us accept that global warming is happening than in the past. Oil companies have changed their tack too, taking a public stance on how they intend to fight climate change. Instead of poking holes in the science, denial today increasingly takes the form of greenwashing — crafting an image that makes corporations seem more environmentally conscious than their business practices would indicate. But this kind of denial still works by spreading confusion; confusion over the best strategy to combat climate change, confusion over the degree of fossil fuel culpability, confusion over what “environmentally conscious” even means in our late-stage capitalist world.

In 2020, you can hardly find a company that hasn’t made a commitment to social and environmental responsibility, whether it’s by partnering with environmental groups across the globe or helping developing nations grow their economy sustainably. Keywords like “innovation” and “growth” get thrown around a lot. In 2000, BP unveiled the slogan “beyond petroleum” and soon launched an ad campaign around the theme that included TV commercials asking people about their carbon footprint and portraying the company as a beacon of progress. But do these amount to real efforts to address the climate crisis?

The answer is no, at least according to a recent analysis on the activities of ten major oil companies between 2008 to 2019, including U.S.-owned Chevron and ExxonMobil. The researchers found that none have been moving away from fossil fuels. At best, companies increased their share of natural gas production, which has been extolled as a temporary “bridge” to carbon-free energy because it emits 50% less CO2 than coal. But natural gas is not clean energy. It’s mostly made up of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps heat 86 times more effectively than CO2. Scientists now believe the amount of methane released by extracting natural gas has been underestimated by up to 40%. Currently, millions of abandoned, uncapped gas wells are leaking methane.

The 2008-2019 analysis found that “not a single major oil and gas firm has invested more than 0.1% of revenues into renewable energy” during this period. In 2011, BP sold off its solar assets, facing financial difficulties in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It recently announced a commitment to more renewables investment — but whether it pans out remains to be seen.

Oil companies haven’t just continued to extract fossil fuels; they’ve been busy constructing new pipelines and developments, which has major implications for future carbon emissions — once a new development is built, it’s likely to be extracting for at least the time it takes to recoup the cost of building it. All ten companies analyzed by researchers “are planning significant expansion of oil and gas assets, totalling some USD$1.4 trillion in the period 2020-2024.”

The podcast Drilled, which describes itself as “a true-crime podcast about climate change,” lays out how the deception of the fossil fuel industry is an obstacle to the systemic change we need. In its first season, it references a 2018 issue of the New York Times Magazine that was wholly dedicated to climate change as a case study in diffusing blame. “The story makes the problem of climate change global,” notes Drilled host and producer Amy Westervelt. “We all failed to act, not just the handful of men in power. The solution, or lack thereof? Individual. It’s human nature. We make short-sighted decisions and there’s nothing we can do to change that.”

The fact is that since 1988, just 100 fossil fuel companies have produced roughly 70% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. We know that burning fossil fuels is incompatible with having a future. Yet today, about 80% of energy demand in the U.S. is still met through fossil fuels. To be fair, it’s not solely the fault of oil companies. In 2015 alone, the U.S. government gave the industry $649 billion in subsidies. In 2018, we got the dubious honor of becoming the largest producer of crude oil in the world, thanks to the modern fracking boom. At least 82,000 fracking wells have popped up across the country since 2005.

And yet too often, we nod along with blaming the climate crisis vaguely on “human nature.” This fatalistic view isn’t just a dead end, it suggests we apologize for existing at all, especially when coupled with the myth that overpopulation is a leading cause of rising temperatures. Man-made climate change is a modern emergency representing a sliver of the 6,000 years human civilizations have existed. The start of man-made warming coincides with the explosion of industrial capitalism in just a handful of wealthy countries — whose incredible riches were accumulated through the systematic looting of labor and resources from around the world. While we all have to act, the idea that we all shoulder the blame for a crisis spurred by deregulated capitalism doesn’t create solidarity. It’s not showing humility or personal integrity. It only upholds the people and systems that have perpetuated climate change, and creates fog around those who have been most violated by it.

By seeing climate as a human rights problem, not just an environmental one, a clearer path opens up. For environmental group 350.org, the goal is simple: no more fossil fuels. “The climate change is a systemic crisis, so we need systemic solutions,” says Thanu Yakupitiyage, head of U.S. communications at 350.org.

“Ultimately we’re talking about capitalism, right?” she says. “When we talk about consumption, we’re talking about the level at which we consume and the level at which we’re engaged in these capitalist forces.” It’s another reason why corporate greenwashing is dangerous; promoting your product as being “greener” than another one perpetuates the idea that the solution is to consume differently, not consume less.

The climate justice movement isn’t new, but it has gained more attention in the past few years. It points to the perpetrators of the crisis, and also demands restitution. At the 2009 U.N. climate change conference, several nations in Latin America and the Caribbean began calling for wealthy nations like the U.S. to pay their climate debt. The logic is that the economic growth of the U.S. has been achieved at the expense of global wellbeing. When we say modern climate change is caused by human activity, we mean economic activity. In its rush to grow fast and never stop growing, the U.S. has single-handedly released a quarter of all the greenhouse gas pollution since 1750. “350 really believes in climate reparations,” says Yakupitiyage. “The fossil fuel industry must pay for the damage they’ve caused to our communities and climate.”

Climate change is also entangled with racism and structural violence. In the U.S., people of color are more likely to live in polluted places. An area along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, which has a majority Black population, is known as “Cancer Alley” due to soaring cancer rates connected to the abundance of petrochemical factories. In order to extract resources to be consumed by wealthy economies, indigenous homes and livelihoods are ripped apart. Later, they are often among the earliest to face the consequences of global warming.

Then there’s the violence that comes from resistance. According to environmental rights NGO Global Witness, at least 212 environmental activists were killed around the world last year, a vast proportion of them indigenous people defending their land. One of the most infamous acts of environmental violence was committed against the Ogoni Nine in 1995. The nine men were members of the Ogoni ethnic group in southeastern Nigeria and involved in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which demanded reparations from the oil industry for polluting their community until they could no longer farm or fish. The government brutally cracked down on protestors, allegedly encouraged by Shell. When four local Ogoni chiefs were killed by a mob, the nine activists, including MOSOP leader Ken Saro-Wiwa, were put on trial and executed by the Nigerian government. Shell has been accused by Amnesty International of helping frame the activists, and according to the testimony of their widows, prosecution witnesses later admitted they had been bribed with money and job offers at Shell.

“We really must see the climate crisis as inherently linked to all forms of injustice, from racism to anti-immigrant sentiment,” says Yakupitiyage. Immigration is a lens that Yakupitiyage has particular expertise in. Before she became involved in the climate justice movement around the time of the 2014 People’s Climate March, she was working in immigrant rights. “It’s really important that the climate movement is both calling for the protection and safety of people, and also advocating for people’s right to migrate,” she says. “You see within nations like Bangladesh or India, in places in South America, people moving because of drought or because of floods. It’s estimated that up to 1 billion people will be displaced because of climate change by the year 2050.”

Anti-immigration policies deny the reality that a great climate migration has already begun, as well as the cause of it. “Why is it that people are moving in the first place? They’re moving because of the fossil fuel industry and companies in the Global North who’ve made conditions in the Global South even worse,” says Yakupitiyage.

Of course, transforming political ideology and holding corporate power accountable isn’t easy. In 1993, 30,000 locals of Lago Agrio, Ecuador filed a landmark class-action suit against Chevron, accusing the company of dumping 18 billion gallons of wastewater and 17 billion gallons of oil into their community. An Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion to the plaintiffs in 2011, later reduced to $9.5 billion. That same year, Chevron filed a fraud case against Steven Donziger, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, claiming he had bribed the judge. According to documents obtained by The Intercept, Chevron sought to demonize Donziger. He was charged with criminal contempt for refusing to hand over his electronic devices, he’s been disbarred, his bank accounts have been frozen, and he was put under house arrest in August 2019. Since the class-action suit, Chevron has withdrawn all its business from Ecuador, which has made it difficult for the plaintiffs to collect on the $9.5 billion.

Saving the planet will clearly be a herculean effort, but it’s the fight of our lifetime. That’s exactly why the climate justice movement has to grow. The best way to lower your carbon footprint is to stop being an individual and become a part of a movement. It requires demanding more from elected leaders — refusing to settle for “at least it’s better than nothing” — and ensuring that, at the very least, the Green New Deal passes. It means clashing with institutions, recognizing that reducing your individual consumption is important but not the same thing as justice.

“It can be intimidating to take on these huge industries,” Yakupitiyage says. “But I think where I found security is in being part of a movement. A movement that has each other’s backs.” When she feels defeated, she finds strength in activists who’ve helped pave the way for a more equitable society, against incredible odds. “Folks like Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde,” she says. “I look at their teachings in terms of what it means to be intimidated, and to be jailed, and to be told that you’re crazy.”

When asked whether the fossil fuel industry is intimidated by the climate justice movement, Yakupitiyage’s answer is immediate. “Absolutely.”

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

DMTBeautySpot

via https://www.DMTBeautySpot.com

Whizy Kim, Khareem Sudlow

Elizabeth Gulino featured Khareem Sudlow

Should We Be Bringing Children Into Our Dying World?

September 25, 2020BruceDayne

#DMTBeautySpot #beauty

It was a 2018 New York Times article that would change Allie Seroussi’s life forever. The piece, titled Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, was a historical narrative about the decade — 1979 to 1989 — when scientists first came to understand the climate emergency. What she read scared her; scarred her, even. So much so that she decided she’d never try to have a child of her own.

The NYT piece wasn’t about parenthood, per se, but it painted a grim picture of what lays ahead if we continue on our current path: famine, war, environmental disasters.

“I completely shut down. I really did not realize this was so severe,” the 28-year-old tells Refinery29 over the phone. She’d always “kind of wanted to be a mother,” she says, and imagined teaching her kids how to leave the world a better place. “But after educating myself, I began to think more about, wow, if I have kids they are not going to grow up with a sense of environmental stability.”

Seroussi isn’t alone. More than one in three Americans aged 18 to 29 believe climate change could be a top factor in deciding whether to have kids, according to a 2019 poll conducted by Business Insider. Seroussi weighed the odds and decided she didn’t feel right bringing a child into a work teetering on the edge of environmental disaster — though she’s open to fostering in the future.

Keya Chatterjee faced the same decision, but ultimately chose to try to have a child. She describes leafing through a science magazine in 2010, when she was pregnant with her now-fifth-grader: “I was reading about all these projections for 2050 about a lack of food supply, about the scale of fires being much larger than anything anyone could have imagined, about heavy downpours and floods,” she says. “I was reading all this stuff about 2050, and I’m sitting there pregnant in 2010. So my kid is going to be 40 when this stuff is all going to be playing out.”

Chatterjee says that she had known all of this before she became pregnant. She was, in fact, deeply involved in climate activism: In an attempt to reduce her carbon footprint, she lived without a refrigerator or a car, and she was a vocal advocate for environmental causes. But in that moment, her dedication reached a new level. “It just hit me differently in terms of my own processing. Something changed in me,” she explains. “It’s my job as a human being — my purpose for being on Earth — to turn this around. And it is within our capability to do that.”

Ultimately, Chatterjee channeled her fear over the future of the world her child was set to inherit into action. She’s now the executive director of the U.S. Climate Action Network and author of The Zero Footprint Baby: How to Save the Planet While Raising a Healthy Baby.

In addition to wondering about the safety of a future child in a world already being severely affected by climate change, there’s another dilemma regarding procreating and the climate crisis: The question of whether having children is unethical because of the child’s impact on the planet’s health.

In 2017, a study was published in Environmental Research Letters stating that the most impactful thing a human could do for our planet was to have one fewer child. Having one child instead of two, for example, would save 58 tons of CO2 for each year of the parent’s life. That figure was calculated by combining the emissions of the child and all their descendants, then dividing this total by the parent’s lifespan, The Guardian reported: “Each parent was ascribed 50% of the child’s emissions, 25% of their grandchildren’s emissions and so on.” Another study, from Oregon State University, found that each child adds an even 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of each parent.

These studies, and others like them, have spawned dozens of think-pieces, all centered on the idea of how big an impact one person really has on the planet’s wellbeing.

Though they received some backlash, the study authors stand by their findings. “Creating a new person is a huge life decision. You don’t need a scientist to tell you that,” Kimberly Nicholas, PhD, an associate professor of sustainability science at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, and a member of the study’s research team, tells Refinery29. “What our study showed was it makes a big difference in terms of climate pollution as well. If you create a new person who leads the same lifestyle and has the same consumption patterns that we do today, then yes, you’re leaving a big carbon legacy and creating a lot of climate pollution.”

Of course, some might say that you can choose to have a child and reduce your family’s consumption patterns, which in theory would reduce your carbon legacy. Chatterjee falls into that camp. “For me, if I was going to have a child — and of course I did — it was incredibly important to me that I find a way to not be adding to the climate crisis,” she tells Refinery29. “You can’t make that many great choices because society is set up to force you to have only bad choices,” she acknowledges. “But you can really affect the outcome of the impact of having a child by being engaged in organizing, by being engaged in advocacy.”

Another thing to consider, Nicholas says: At this point, this whole side of the debate is kind of moot. “The people already alive today, with our fossil fuel consumption and patterns, will use up our remaining carbon budget in less than 10 years,” she says. “So it’s not going to save the planet if you choose not to have a kid.”

Already, in the past several years, we’ve seen some of the consequences Chatterjee described reading about play out in real time: unprecedented wildfires, devastating hurricanes.

“We have this really limited window,” she adds. “From now until 2030 is the only chance humanity will ever have to stabilize the climate below 1.5 degrees of warming. And we know that that’s a really critical marker for human civilization and for the rest of life on Earth.”

To do that, we have to cut climate pollution — carbon pollution specifically — about in half by 2030, she explains. Not having kids won’t get us to where we need to go in that time frame: Reducing consumption, stepping away from fossil fuels, and redefining our relationship with agriculture are the key things we should be focusing on right now.

“We need politicians who understand the severity of the urgency of the climate crisis and are prepared to act on it,” Nicholas says. “But we also need citizens who are already demonstrating that we can make this work.”

So, given the current climate emergency, is it ethical to have kids? Ultimately, the answer to that is personal — but the fact that we’re asking at all is a pretty huge deal.

“It’s in a UN declaration that parents have the right to freely decide the number and spacing of their children. It’s not a guaranteed right, it doesn’t always work out that way. But that choice is really fundamental and important,” says Nicholas.

That choice is often a privilege. Being able to decide whether or not to have kids can be dependent on factors such as economic stability and access to contraceptives, abortion, and adequate healthcare — rights that not everyone has equal access to the in U.S. What’s more, historically, movements to limit reproduction have been driven by classist and racist motives.

Certainly, individuals should be aware of the current climate crisis. If they’re thinking about having kids, it’s only natural that they may find themselves asking what kind of world they’re bringing their child into. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram livestream last year: “Basically, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children?”

Some people, like Chatterjee, may decide that it is, and use their decision as motivation, dedicating themselves to changing our course. Others, like Seroussi, may choose to not have kids, or to prioritize fostering or adoption. Others may choose to have fewer children than they would have otherwise. The arguments for and against each strategy are multi-layered and complex.

But the fact that adults even feel compelled to consider the realities of climate change in their decision about procreating is a strong demonstration of how dire the problem really is, and how urgently action needs to be taken.

“It’s a red flag,” says Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo, PhD, who teaches political science and environmental policy at Christopher Newport University. “There are age groups that are feeling like this is a doomsday situation and feeling like we have very little time. The feelings of despair are terrible, and the fact that we’re having this conversation about whether people should have children is definitely an indicator of how serious the climate crisis is and how worried people feel about it.”

Bromley-Trujillo points out that this debate has come up on-and-off for the last 50 years. “In the end, having children has to come down to personal choice. Many young people, especially right now, are choosing not to have children or have fewer children because of the climate crisis and I can see that point of view,” she says. “It’s a rational argument that they’re making because sure, having children leads to higher emissions levels, but I would say that there are bigger fish to fry.” Which brings us to voting.

Right now, voting is one of the most critical and impactful things individuals can do to advocate for policies that target climate change. Vote for candidates who understand we’re in a climate emergency and who have a plan of action, in local elections as well as in national ones.

Taking a look at your personal carbon footprint, and living a lifestyle that’s good for the Earth, can make a difference too, Chatterjee and Nicholas say. But, warns Bromley-Trujillo, we shouldn’t get too bogged down in the discussion of individual responsibility.

“We talk about eating hamburgers and driving SUVs… These things are relevant, but in the grand scope of things, dealing with the electricity sector and the transportation sector at a larger scale will be much more effective in dealing with these problems,” she explains. “If we’re trying to reduce emissions, the focus should be on clean electricity standards and big corporations. If we did this at a massive scale, or if we had federal laws that require clean energy, these are the sorts of things that are going to have a big impact.”

As Nicholas says, “It’s not going to save the planet if you choose not to have a kid. What we have to do is actually stop using fossil fuel.” And that’s going to take the support of the government and major companies, not just individual action.