Climate Change

Free bus fare didn’t yield better air

Anonymous — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Free bus fare didn’t yield better air Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/29/2024 - 00:00

Sarah Kuta

New research by CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Grant Webster finds that the free-fare public transit initiative didn’t reduce ground-level ozone, but may have other benefits

Grant Webster is a big fan of public transit—he takes the bus multiple times a week from his home in east ��«��Ƶ to the CU ��«��Ƶ campus, where he’s working on a PhD in economics.

So, two years ago, when he heard about Colorado’s new “Zero Fare for Better Air” campaign, he was intrigued.

The premise was simple: During the month of August 2022, the state’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) waived fares for all bus and train rides. With this free perk, state leaders hoped to encourage Coloradans to leave their cars at home and take public transit instead. They expected this incentive to reduce ground-level pollution during peak ozone season.

CU ��«��Ƶ economics researcher and PhD student Grant Webster found that the "Zero Fare for Better Air” public transportation campaign did not significantly reduce ozone pollution in Colorado.

As a bus rider, Webster was optimistic, too. But as an economist, he wanted to see the data.

“When they came out with this policy, I was like, ‘Hey, I ride the bus, I think that’s a cool idea,’” he says. “But I was also curious. Has anybody studied whether these policies actually work?”

Now, he has an answer to that question. “Zero Fare for Better Air” did not significantly reduce ozone pollution in Colorado, Webster reports in a new paper published in the journal Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.

Using air pollution, weather, ridership and traffic data, Webster found that public transit ridership did increase during the month of free fares—by roughly 15% to 20%. But even though bus and train travel got a boost, car traffic volumes stayed roughly the same.

“The increase in ridership doesn’t seem to be reducing the number of cars on the roads,” he says. “It might just be transit users taking more rides, or people using RTD that weren’t going to take the ride to begin with.”

Informing policy

Roughly 2% of commuters in the Denver metro area use public transit as their main daily form of transportation—and the proportion is likely even smaller in other parts of the state. So, while public transit ridership saw a sizable bump percentagewise, this bump wasn’t enough to reduce ozone pollution.

For Colorado to see a 1% decrease in ozone pollution, public transit ridership would need to increase by 74% to 192%, Webster finds.

“Even if we had this big increase in ridership, it’s still such a small proportion of commuters, in terms of total pollution contributors, that we wouldn’t expect a huge decrease in ozone pollution overall,” he says.

“The transit infrastructure, the whole environment we live in here in Colorado … people are really reliant on their cars. You’d need a much bigger switch of people’s transit behaviors for this policy to be affecting overall air pollution.”

The findings are a bit of a bummer, but Webster says they’re important nonetheless. They could help policymakers use their limited dollars in different ways—ones that might be more effective at reducing pollution.

The “Zero Fare for Better Air” campaign was funded by Colorado Senate Bill 22-180 and brought back in 2023, but axed in 2024 due to cited budget constraints.

The “Zero Fare for Better Air” campaign was funded by Colorado Senate Bill 22-180 and offered in partnership with the Colorado Energy Office. RTD brought back the campaign for a second year in 2023 and expanded it to include both July and August, while Webster’s research was still underway. But, in 2024, it axed the program, citing state budget constraints.

Webster also points out that, while the campaign didn’t reduce ozone pollution as intended, it may have had other economic benefits, such as making public transit more affordable for low-income individuals or introducing new riders to the system.

Also, his findings only apply to Colorado, where overall ridership is relatively low. The picture might look very different in cities and states with more robust transit infrastructure and a higher proportion of public transit commuters, he adds. So, policymakers elsewhere shouldn’t completely rule out similar initiatives in their locales.

“In places like New York City or Washington, D.C., this type of policy might have completely different implications,” he says.

Consider other incentives

Overall, the findings suggest that, when deciding whether to drive or take public transit, the cost of the fare is not the most important factor in commuters’ decision-making process. And that’s an important takeaway: To change commuters’ behavior, policymakers may need to consider other, more compelling incentives.

You’d need a much bigger switch of people’s transit behaviors for this policy to be affecting overall air pollution.”

“When you talk about getting to work, there are so many factors at play,” Webster says. “What’s traffic going to be like? How far away is the bus station? How long do I have to wait? Can I leave in the middle of the day to go run an errand?”

More broadly, as policymakers look for novel ways to slow or halt human-caused climate change, the study also demonstrates the value of considering possible solutions through an economic lens.

“Economics provides a lot of good tools for studying these types of environmental policies,” Webster says. “Can we incentivize people to change their behavior and, as a result, change an environmental outcome? It’s a super important time to focus on the environment and our human impacts on it. And economics can play a role in studying these issues.”

Top image: Riders board a city bus in Denver. (Photo: RTD)

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New research by CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Grant Webster finds that the free-fare public transit initiative didn’t reduce ground-level ozone, but may have other benefits.

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Scholar has a front-row seat to the global fight against plastic pollution

Anonymous — Tue, 28 May 2024 16:28:05 +0000

Scholar has a front-row seat to the global fight against plastic pollution Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/28/2024 - 10:28

Rachel Sauer

CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Clare Gallagher finds reason for hope amid the complexities of negotiations to craft a U.N. treaty addressing a worldwide crisis

In the past year, Clare Gallagher has gotten very interested in ghost gear, which she admits is “a really depressing Google search” if you’re not already familiar with it.

Ghost gear is the umbrella term for lost, abandoned or discarded fishing gear that contributes to the crisis of plastic pollution in Earth’s oceans and can trap fish and marine mammals, causing them to die by suffocation or exhaustion. In the upper Gulf of California, for example, abandoned gillnetting has contributed to the vaquita porpoise nearing the brink of extinction.

When Gallagher, a PhD student in the ��«��Ƶ Department of Environmental Studies, joined an observer delegation at the fourth session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee on Plastic Pollution April 23-29 in Ottawa, Canada, she learned that fishing gear is included in a proposed international treaty on plastic pollution that would be discussed at the weeklong gathering.

Clare Gallagher, a PhD student in the CU ��«��Ƶ Department of Environmental Studies, by a sculpture outside a U.N. treaty negotiating session in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo: Clare Gallagher)

However, after attending several all-day—and sometimes into the night—negotiating sessions, “I learned that fishing gear is almost like a side note to the greater problem. Single-use plastics are so nefarious, and this is the next climate change fight,” Gallagher says.

“To be able to go sit in conference room for 14 hours a day for nine days straight—and the final meetings went until 3 a.m.—I was pretty in awe of the dedication of the people in these meetings. But then at the same time, it was also incredibly frustrating when there’s not a lot of progress made. It’s just the way of global geopolitics, and I was getting a crash course in this—there will be some countries or blocs of countries that don’t want strong treaties, like oil-producing countries, just as there are countries that have been against strong environmental treaties for the last several decades.”

The gathering Gallagher attended was the fourth session of the U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution and focused on the marine environment. The committee’s stated goal is to have a completed treaty written by the end of the year.

For Gallagher, attending the session not only was eye-opening to the intricacies of global geopolitics, but also brought several other key insights, including:

Abandoned fishing gear is one problem of many in the crisis of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans

“Microplastics were a huge, huge topic at the treaty discussions,” Gallagher says. “From a health standpoint, I was really surprised to see so many endocrinologists there. The endocrine destruction from chemicals that are being added to plastics is linked to the obesity epidemic, to the epidemic of anxiety and depression. It’s actually pretty terrifying.”

Among the discussion topics were plastic pellets, sometimes called nurdles, which are commonly used as a raw material for making plastic products. They are frequently shipped via container, and if pellets ever spill from those containers into a marine environment, the environmental damage and harm to living creatures can be devastating.

“So, some of the discussion was about classifying them as hazardous waste,” Gallagher says.

However, abandoned fishing gear is a big problem

“Ghost gear is the colloquial term,” Gallagher explains. “The more scientific term is abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear, or ALDFG, and it’s just a terrible thing. Let’s say you a have huge vessel that’s fishing tuna in the Pacific and use purse seines, which are these crazy kilometer-wide nets that can cinch up entire schools of tuna.

“Say that net gets lost or is intentionally cut by crew or just gets stuck on something or there’s a full-on accident. That net will continue to fish whales, dolphins, turtles, you name it after it’s lost contact with the vessel. That’s why we get term ‘ghost,’ because fishing continues to happen in a worst-case scenario.”

Gallagher notes that purse seines typically are made of nylon, which sinks in water because of its density, so they’re not a significant contributor to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is now about the size of Alaska. However, lighter density nets and fishing line made of high-denisty polyethylene wash up on shorelines around the world, “so it’s pretty incredible that this treaty is trying to address fishing gear as its own plastic pollution sector because almost all commercial fishing nets and lines are made of plastic polymers, so this treaty could address industrial, global and local fishing economies.”

CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Clare Gallager attended the fourth session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee on Plastic Pollution as an observer. (Photo: Clare Gallagher)

Many perceive plastic pollution as a symptom a bigger issue

“The biggest thing is production,” Gallagher says, “stopping primary plastic production. That’s one of the things that’s so interesting about this treaty process, because it’s almost the same story, it’s the same players, it’s the same perpetrators as the international debate over fossil fuel emissions.”

In fact, Gallagher notes, the Center for International Environmental Law analyzed the affiliations of registered attendees for the session and found almost 200 lobbyists for the fossil fuel and chemical industries were registered.

The problems of plastic pollution are daunting, but there’s room for hope

“I felt, not being a United Nations treaty expert, pretty overwhelmed by the scale at which countries around the world need to compromise and work together to create any international treaty, especially environmental treaties,” Gallagher says. “It’s pretty overwhelming to think this is how humanity governs itself at the top level.

“That being said, I have hope that the most ambitious countries will continue to push for a strong treaty on plastic pollution. I don’t know if remorse is right word, but there is sadness that many of the countries suffering the most from plastic pollution are not producing the plastic. They’re the ones that have to deal with plastic trash and plastic pollution, the ones that have to fight for a strong treaty, and there’s a real power imbalance that I find so disgusting and disturbing.”

Gallagher says one of the most impressive coalitions she observed at the session was the Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS): “There was a woman from Easter Island, which, granted, is part of Chile, and she told a story about how every time her young son goes surfing, which is like every day, she has to wash his hair because there’s so much microplastic in it when he’s done.

“People from some of the smallest, poorest countries repeatedly said, ‘This is not complex. We don’t want your trash; we need to stop this.’ I think that bravery and that fight—these Davids taking on Goliaths, as seen in the Rapa Nui Declaration—is what is going to make the world a better place.”

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CU ��«��Ƶ PhD student Clare Gallagher finds reason for hope amid the complexities of negotiations to craft a U.N. treaty addressing a worldwide crisis.

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Goodbye, El Niño, and hello, La Niña

Anonymous — Fri, 24 May 2024 18:36:15 +0000

Goodbye, El Niño, and hello, La Niña Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/24/2024 - 12:36

Pedro DiNezio

La Niña is coming, raising the chances of a dangerous Atlantic hurricane season–an atmospheric scientist explains this climate phenomenon

One of the big contributors to the record-breaking global temperatures over the past year—El Niño—is nearly gone, and its opposite, La Niña, is on the way.

Whether that’s a relief or not depends in part on where you live. Above-normal temperatures are still forecast across the U.S. in summer 2024. And if you live along the U.S. Atlantic or Gulf coasts, La Niña can contribute to the worst possible combination of climate conditions for fueling hurricanes.

Pedro DiNezio, a ��«��Ƶ associate professor of atmospheric and ocean sciences who studies El Niño and La Niña, explains why and what’s ahead.

Pedro DiNezio is a ��«��Ƶ associate professor of atmospheric and ocean sciences who studies El Niño and La Niña.

What is La Niña?

La Niña and El Niño are the two extremes of a recurring climate pattern that can affect weather around the world.

Forecasters know La Niña has arrived when temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean along the equator west of South America cool by at least half a degree Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit) below normal. During El Niño, the same region warms instead.

Those temperature fluctuations might seem small, but they can affect the atmosphere in ways that ripple across the planet.

The tropics have an atmospheric circulation pattern called the Walker Circulation, named after Sir Gilbert Walker, an English physicist in the early 20th century. The Walker Circulation is basically giant loops of air rising and descending in different parts of the tropics.

Normally, air rises over the Amazon and Indonesia because moisture from the tropical forests makes the air more buoyant there, and it comes down in East Africa and the eastern Pacific. During La Niña, those loops intensify, generating stormier conditions where they rise and drier conditions where they descend. During El Niño, ocean heat in the eastern Pacific instead shifts those loops, so the eastern Pacific gets stormier.

EL Niño and La Niña also affect the jet stream, a strong current of air that blows from west to east across the U.S. and other mid-latitude regions.

During El Niño, the jet stream tends to push storms toward the subtropics, making these typically dry areas wetter. Conversely, mid-latitude regions that normally would get the storms become drier because storms shift away.

This year, forecasters expect a fast transition to La Niña – likely by late summer. After a strong El Niño, like the world saw in late 2023 and early 2024, conditions tend to swing fairly quickly to La Niña. How long it will stick around is an open question. This cycle tends to swing from extreme to extreme every three to seven years on average, but while El Niños tend to be short-lived, La Niñas can last two years or longer.

How does La Niña affect hurricanes?

Temperatures in the tropical Pacific also control wind shear over large parts of the Atlantic Ocean.

Wind shear is a difference in wind speeds at different heights or direction. Hurricanes have a harder time holding their column structure during strong wind shear because stronger winds higher up push the column apart.

La Niña produces less wind shear, removing a brake on hurricanes. That’s not good news for people living in hurricane-prone regions like Florida. In 2020, during the last La Niña, the Atlantic saw a record 30 tropical storms and 14 hurricanes, and 2021 had 21 tropical storms and seven hurricanes.

Forecasters are already warning that this year’s Atlantic storm season could rival 2021, due in large part to La Niña. The tropical Atlantic has also been exceptionally warm, with sea surface temperature-breaking records for over a year. That warmth affects the atmosphere, causing more atmospheric motion over the Atlantic, fueling hurricanes.

During La Niña, the Walker Circulation intensifies, triggering stronger storms where the air rises. (Graphic: Fiona Martin/NOAA Climate.gov)

Does La Niña mean drought returns to the US Southwest?

The U.S. Southwest’s water supplies will probably be OK for the first year of La Niña because of all the rain over the past winter. But the second year tends to become problematic. A third year, as the region saw in 2022, can lead to severe water shortages.

Drier conditions also fuel more extreme fire seasons in the West, particularly in the fall, when the winds pick up.

What happens in the Southern Hemisphere during La Niña?

The impacts of El Niño and La Niña are almost a mirror image in the Southern Hemisphere.

Chile and Argentina tend to get drought during La Niña, while the same phase leads to more rain in the Amazon. Australia had severe flooding during the last La Niña. La Niña also favors the Indian monsoon, meaning above-average rainfall. The effects aren’t immediate, however. In South Asia, for example, the changes tend to show up a few months after La Niña has officially appeared.

La Niña is quite bad for eastern Africa, where vulnerable communities are already in a long-term drought.

Is climate change affecting La Niña’s impact?

El Niño and La Niña are now happening on top of the effects of global warming. That can exacerbate temperatures, as the world saw in 2023, and precipitation can go off the charts.

Since summer 2023, the world has had 10 straight months of record-breaking global temperatures. A lot of that warmth is coming from the oceans, which are still at record-high temperatures.

La Niña should cool things a bit, but greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming are still rising in the background. So while fluctuations between El Niño and La Niña can cause short-term temperature swings, the overall trend is toward a warming world.

Pedro DiNezio is an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the ��«��Ƶ.

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

La Niña is coming, raising the chances of a dangerous Atlantic hurricane season—an atmospheric scientist explains this climate phenomenon.

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Why the first Earth Day went viral (pre-social media)

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:30:26 +0000

Why the first Earth Day went viral (pre-social media) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/18/2024 - 10:30

Doug McPherson

CU ��«��Ƶ professors explain Earth Day’s history, impact, what it’s become and if it’s still relevant

If you were at the ��«��Ƶ in April 1970, you were likely aware―very aware―of the first Earth Day on April 22. CU ��«��Ƶ was all in and almost stretched the day into a full week, kicking things off on April 18 when the campus was dotted with green flags and abuzz with special events, speeches, films, symposiums, rap sessions and panels.

CU ��«��Ƶ was just one of about 1,500 universities celebrating Earth Day, not to mention 20 million Americans and more than 10,000 cities, churches and other organizations, says Paul Sutter, a CU professor of environmental history.

That first Earth Day went viral long before viral was cool. No social media, no email blasts, no group texts. Just TV, radio, word of mouth and, in ��«��Ƶ, an old-fashioned paper-and-ink brochure listing the scheduled events.

“One of the remarkable things is that Earth Day came out of nowhere and was organized quickly, bringing together large numbers of activists who had worked separately before and had not put a name to their movement yet,” Sutter says.

CU ��«��Ƶ scholars Paul Sutter (left) and Steve Vanderheiden have studied Earth Day's history and impact.

“Earth Day was also decentralized, which meant that it manifested itself in different ways in different places. This was one key to its success. In many ways, we’ve forgotten how powerful and radical these events were. Organizing these events helped to democratize environmentalism.”

So what led to that first Earth Day? And have subsequent Earth Days had the same impact?

Some, including Sutter, say the time was right and argue that even though it sprouted quickly, there were forces at work decades before its birth.

“Americans emerged from WWII concerned about the destructiveness of the war and the state of the global environment―particularly the relationship between population growth and natural resources,” Sutter says. “Early postwar environmental concern was decidedly global.”

And there was worry about the atomic bomb and nuclear technology. “The first detonation of an atomic bomb … was a watershed moment in the nation’s environmental history, and postwar antinuclear activism culminated with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963,” Sutter says.

Many cite Rachel Carson’s book on environmental science, Silent Spring, as an added spark as well.

Another factor: The space program, which allowed humans to view Earth from space for the first time. Sutter says that sight gave people “a sense of the planet’s finitude and limits.”

Still relevant?

As successful as that first Earth Day proved to be, after more than a half century, some question whether it’s still relevant, and ask if there’s something else that could make a bigger difference.

Steve Vanderheiden, a CU ��«��Ƶ professor of political science and environmental studies, says anything that’s been observed annually since 1970 is “bound to have diminishing returns” over time, and that today’s iteration “will be less consequential” than the first one.

One of the remarkable things is that Earth Day came out of nowhere and was organized quickly, bringing together large numbers of activists who had worked separately before and had not put a name to their movement yet.”

“I don't mean to suggest that there isn't still a role for what Earth Day has become―an occasion to teach about environmental issues or hold events where people reaffirm the importance of environmental protection―but rather that we shouldn't expect it to make much of a difference in public opinion or to build momentum for legislation, which we still need,” Vanderheiden says.

“Those goals are now better served by more oppositional forms of political organization and expression that are more willing or able to challenge the status quo.”

While Vanderheiden says that the original Earth Day was “a powerful focusing event” for the U.S. environmental movement, he sees subsequent Earth Days as having made “relatively little difference,” and that any of the past 40 Earth Days have not swayed public opinion on most environmental issues.

“Part of this is a function of the original Earth Day [that was] intended as a consciousness-raising event, for which it was wildly successful. Consciousness now having already been raised about such issues, these later iterations have less potential to accomplish the same objective.”

Vanderheiden adds that Earth Day has also not evolved to reflect activism or resistance. “That might make it too threatening to the status quo to continue enjoying the wide but shallow support that it now receives. In a way, Earth Day has … maintained its popularity because it doesn't really challenge anything anymore. It’s somewhat like how we still celebrate May Day but almost never with much of its original critical content.”

Interested in learning more about Earth Day? Sutter recommends Adam Rome’s The Genius of Earth Day.

Top image: The partly-illuminated Earth rising over the lunar horizon as recorded by Apolo 11; the Earth is approximately 400,000 km away. (Photo: NASA)

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CU ��«��Ƶ professors explain Earth Day’s history, impact, what it’s become and if it’s still relevant.

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The climate crisis is a market failure, noted expert says

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 23:45:06 +0000

The climate crisis is a market failure, noted expert says Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/15/2024 - 17:45

Rachel Sauer

Harvard scholar Naomi Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in Environmental Studies, highlights how free market fundamentalism has thwarted the science of climate change

The best way to define market fundamentalism is in terms of what Ronald Reagan called “the magic of the marketplace.”

“It’s the idea that ‘the free market’ is powerful, efficient, effective, rational and that most problems can best be solved by allowing the market to do its thing,” explained Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and an affiliated professor of earth and planetary science. She added that market fundamentalism also must be understood as a force that has long blocked, and continues to block, climate action.

Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in the Department of Environmental Studies, presented some of the findings from her research at a lecture April 4. In it, she detailed a decades-long campaign to cast doubt on science and block political action on climate change—buoyed by the argument that the free market is best poised to tackle the issue.

However, “there is not such a thing as the free market,” Oreskes said. “Markets can be very effective for many kinds of things, but our argument is not all things.”

Naomi Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in the Department of Environmental Studies, presented some of the findings from her research at a lecture April 4.

In her 2023 book, written with Eric Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, Oreskes began with the “very notion of the free market—this idea that the market exists, it’s a thing, it exists unto itself, it has agency and even wisdom. I think of the metaphor of the invisible hand of the marketplace, which is often talked about as if it’s not a metaphor, as if there actually is an invisible hand,” she said.

“The reality is that we make markets. They have been around since biblical times and are associated with the rise in capitalism, and people have been studying them for just as long—you can find rules for how markets should operate in Leviticus. But there is no such thing as ‘the free market’ and never has been. The reality is that government has always been involved in markets, in protective tariffs … in many cases, governments have created markets.”

In the headlines in the ‘80s

Oreskes began her presentation by displaying a story that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on June 24, 1988, headlined “Global warming has begun, expert tells Senate.” The expert was James E. Hansen of NASA, described in the story as a leading expert on climate change, who said “that there was no ‘magic number’ that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But he added, ‘It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’”

Oreskes further noted that in 1992, George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which he described as “the first step in crucial long-term international efforts to address climate change.”

“So, a few years ago, I got interested in the question ‘What the heck happened?’” Oreskes said. “We had a Republican president and Democratic leaders in Congress, so why didn’t we take those concrete steps that Bush promised us?

“The answer is not a lack of scientific communication. Lots of people at the time thought that scientists just weren’t doing a good enough job explaining the science, but what (Conway and I) showed … was a politically motivated campaign to cast doubt on that science and block political action.”

This has been exacerbated, she said, by negative belief in government and hostility to government action, especially government regulations: “Market fundamentalists will tell you that government needs to get out of the way and let markets do their magic.”

For more than 100 years, she said, organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers have partnered with scientists and economists to stoke hostility toward government regulation, framing it as a backdoor to communism and antithetical their definition of freedom.

We’ve had conservative physicists who made common cause with the fossil-fuel industry and libertarian think tanks. Why would educated, intelligent people deny basic scientific findings—especially about things as established as the harms of tobacco use or as big as the hole in the ozone layer? The answer is politics.”

“We’ve had conservative physicists who made common cause with the fossil-fuel industry and libertarian think tanks,” Oreskes said. “Why would educated, intelligent people deny basic scientific findings—especially about things as established as the harms of tobacco use or as big as the hole in the ozone layer? The answer is politics.”

Together, politics and business have framed “free enterprise” as one of the United States’ founding principles, but it “appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, nowhere in the Constitution, and if you know anything about the history of America in the 19th century, governments at the federal and state level were massively involved in developing the economy.”

American capitalism has not protected freedom, Oreskes said, and “freedom is not protected by our systems of distributing goods and services, but by our forms of government. If you think about it in terms of the political economy, there’s the political part and the economic part. The political part has to be supported by governance; freedom is supported by our laws and also by our civic norms, what we accept as legitimate and what we reject as not legitimate.

“A common American error is the belief that freedom is the absence of state authority. One part of the reason why so many Americans have made this error is because this is what we’ve been told for more than a century by powerful people, powerful organizations and some powerful academics.”

She said that the climate crisis can be seen as a market failure and that free-market fundamentalism has triggered “a race to the bottom.”

Quoting the author Kim Stanely Robinson, Oreskes said, “The invisible hand never picks up the check.”

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Harvard scholar Naomi Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in Environmental Studies, highlights how free market fundamentalism has thwarted the science of climate change.

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But seriously, folks, climate change is a laughing matter

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 18:30:24 +0000

But seriously, folks, climate change is a laughing matter Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/05/2024 - 12:30

Rachel Sauer

‘Stand Up for Climate Comedy’ unites CU ��«��Ƶ student performers and professional comedians in a show that encourages the audience to laugh together and then work together

The Green Bachelor was not impressed with Oceana Sea and her 2 million followers—despite her name, she hates the water and doesn’t know how to swim. Nor was he impressed with Petrolina Exxon and her daddy’s helicopter. They clearly weren’t there for the right reasons.

Not to spoil the true-eco-love ending, but the Green Bachelor, a marine biologist, was smitten with the contestant who rode her bike to the Green Bachelor mansion and knows the flow of her local watershed.

Pause scene.

"Stand Up for Climate Comedy" is at 7 p.m. April 15 at ��«��Ƶ Theater, 2032 14th St. Admission is free.

“I think we should say, ‘What is your local watershed and what are you doing to support it, hmm?’” says Elizabeth Smith, a junior majoring in environmental studies.

This followed discussion of defining Oceana as someone who obviously doesn’t know her bodies of water, and advice from Beth Osnes to remember that the sketch is “a physicality thing, so get it up on its feet as soon as you can.”

It was a Tuesday morning in the Climate Change Communication class, and students were laughing at climate change.

Not the reality of it, of course—it’s the defining issue of their generation and there’s nothing funny about it—but in preparation for Stand Up for Climate Comedy April 15 at the ��«��Ƶ Theater. The show, which is in its ninth year, will feature comedians and science communicators Chuck Nice, Rollie Williams and Kasha Patel, as well as students from the Climate Change Communication class, who write and perform either solo stand-up or group sketches that they create together with support from Osnes and Ben Stasny, a PhD candidate in theater and teaching assistant for the class.

“Comedy has always taken on serious, heavy, depressing social issues,” explains Osnes, a ��«��Ƶ professor of theatre and dance who teaches the class. “Instead of people just yelling at each other about these issues, approaching them through comedy makes engagement with the issues not only positive, but helps us process them in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming or hopeless.

“Comedy relies on double meaning. I think it’s easy for us to get stuck in binary thinking, things are one way or the other, and once you get locked into one thought, you’re stuck. Comedy can help us get unstuck, and the gorgeous thing about it is when it works, our response is involuntary, that burst of laughter, and all of a sudden everybody’s having that same response and we’re having it together. It’s golden. When we’re talking about climate change, we need things that are going to help us burst through our set ways of thinking and that we do together.”

Laughing together

Stand Up for Climate Comedy is the brainchild of Osnes and Max Boykoff, a CU ��«��Ƶ professor of environmental studies, who also are two of the project leaders for Inside the Greenhouse, a collective effort that aims to creatively frame and tell the stories surrounding climate change through video, theatre, dance and writing.

Osnes and Boykoff figured that people might have a better time carrying or reframing the burdens of guilt and despair that shadow climate change if they were laughing together rather than shouting at each other. It’s not so much “laugh to keep from crying,” she says, but more “laugh and get moving.”

The first year of Stand Up for Climate Comedy “was basically Max and me downstairs (in the Theatre Building) with a $250 budget,” Osnes says.

Not long after, however, they were approached by representatives from the Argosy Foundation “who came to us and said, ‘We’re so sick of people screaming at each other; if we gave you $25,000, what would you do with it?’” Osnes recalls.

Beth Osnes (center) works with Lief Jordan (left), Jayden Simisky and Taylor Gutt as they prepare their stand-up comedy performances. (Photos: Rachel Sauer)

They would make the show bigger, they would organize events across the country, they would bring in luminaries of comedy who also know their science and they would integrate students as a key part of the show. That last part—student involvement—is especially key, Osnes says, because students have deep knowledge of the issues of climate change and are demanding action.

Hence the environmental hostility.

‘The seas are rising, and so are tensions!’

“My best bit is, ‘I’m sick of all this environmentally friendly shit. I’m environmentally hostile now,’” says Taylor Gutt, a senior in environmental studies.

“That’s a good bit,” says Lief Jordon, also a senior in environmental studies. “Environmental hostility is funny.”

They’re sitting with Jayden Simisky, a senior in environmental studies, and Cate Billings, a senior majoring in creative technology and design, at the top of a staircase in the Loft Theatre, workshopping the stand-up routines they’re writing.

None of them has performed stand-up before, “but why not, right?” Jordan says with a laugh. “If you’re going to go down, go down big.”

Billings is taking her stand-up in a multimedia direction, complete with a PowerPoint presentation “so it’s a little educational,” she explains. “I have a slide of coral bleaching and I say, ‘Up here on the surface we bleach our assholes, but coral is way ahead of the trend.’”

That earns an appreciative laugh from her classmates. Meanwhile, Simisky is thinking out loud about how to make carbon dioxide funny.

“The biggest thing for me with CO2 is they’re always saying, like, ‘7,000 tons of CO2,’” he says. “So, there’s this whole-ass neighborhood of carbon dioxide in the sky. Maybe something like, ‘There’s so much CO2 in the air that they’re starting to weigh it in terms of cruise ships. I’ve started to live in fear of a boat falling out of the sky.’”

Skyler Behrens (foreground) times her group's comedy sketch on a practice run-through.

That’s good, his classmates agree.

Elsewhere in the theater, Skyler Behrens, a sophomore studying engineering and education, and Claire Grossman, a junior in creative technology and design, are considering what contestants on a climate change-informed “Love Island” would say.

“What if he just says, ‘Wow, that’s hot’?” Behrens suggests.

“That’s perfect,” Grossman says, and soon Behrens is running through the sketch introduction again: “Welcome back, everyone, to the most exciting season of ‘Love Island’ yet! The seas are rising, and so are tensions!”

Nearby, Marcus Witter and Jake Mendelssohn, both seniors in environmental studies, and Austin Villarreal, a junior studying environmental design, are working with Osnes on their sketch involving three guys on a chairlift deciding who has to jump off.

“I don’t really like murder,” Osnes observes. “I think it’s funnier if an act of God knocks you off.”

Many of the students have not done this kind of performance before, and certainly not on a stage the size of ��«��Ƶ Theater’s. They admit to nerves and to thinking about jokes so much that they stop being funny, but they’re excited, too.

“It helps that we’re doing it together,” notes Danielle Harris, a senior in environmental studies who plays Oceana Sea on “The Green Bachelor,” and her comedy partners nod in agreement.

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‘Stand Up for Climate Comedy’ unites CU ��«��Ƶ student performers and professional comedians in a show that encourages the audience to laugh together and then work together.

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Following fire ants on the march

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 17:58:09 +0000

Following fire ants on the march Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/27/2024 - 11:58

Bradley Worrell

Landscape corridors can aid in fire ant spread, but the effects are transient, CU ��«��Ƶ researcher Julian Resasco shows

As habitat loss and fragmentation continues, many in the scientific community view landscape corridors as important for connecting habitat fragments to maintain biodiversity.

And yet, might those same landscape corridors make it easier for invasive species to spread and cause greater harm to biodiversity?

It’s a question Julian Resasco, an assistant professor in the University of Colorado Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has been investigating for more than a decade. He now has an answer for one particular invasive species.

CU ��«��Ƶ researcher Julian Resasco has studied invasive fire ants for more than a decade.

When Resasco first began researching the issue while working on his PhD, he found the perfect setting with the Savannah River Site Corridor Experiment in South Carolina, which is the largest corridor experiment site in the world. He also found an excellent test subject in Solenopsis invicta, more commonly known as fire ants.

Fire ants are considered one of the most problematic invasive species in the United States, to the detriment of native ant species, Resasco notes. Fire ants are native to South America, but have made themselves at home in the United States since the 1930s and today can be found in many southern states.

“The idea behind this experiment was to design an experiment to see how habitat fragmentation, and conversely, corridors, affect the movement of organisms and biodiversity,” Resasco says. “And the Savannah River Site is an 80,000-hectare site owned by the U.S. Department of Energy and administered by the Forest Service, so it’s one of the few places where large-scale experiments like this can happen.”

Resasco says he initially contemplated focusing his research on small mammals, but eventually decided to study fire ants because they are so invasive. They worked well with the idea of potential negative effects related to corridors, and they also worked well for the scale of the experiment.

“Also, it’s very easy to collect data on ants,” he adds. “So, very quickly I had a cool question and lots of data. Because fire ants are very detrimental to co-occurring ants, I could look at how the fire ants respond to the corridors, and what the effect is on the native ants that live with them.”

In some cases, fire ants will raid the nests of native ants, while in others they will simply monopolize the food and resources in areas they share with native ants and crowding them out, Resasco says, noting fire ants are more aggressive than their native counterparts.

Creating a large-scale testing area

To test whether corridors aided the spread of fire ants, the U.S. Forest Service created experimental landscapes called blocks. One block consists of a central patch created by clearing plantation forest, making a better habitat for fire ants, surrounded by three randomly assigned patch types: connected and rectangular or winged. (Rectangular and winged patches were unconnected to the central patch.)

Researchers used pitfall traps to capture ant workers over a period of years, including 2008 and annually from 2014 to 2019, to estimate the density of fire ants and native ants.

Resasco says research he published in 2014 in Ecology showed that fire ant biology played an important role in their degree of spread. Specifically, trait differences between monogyne (single egg-laying queen) and polygyne (multiple egg-laying queen) colonies were important predictors of fire ant population densities, their impact on local ants and the effects of corridors.

The Corridor Experiment at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina is an 80,000-hectare site owned by the U.S. Department of Energy and administered by the U.S. Forest Service; it was designed to test the efficacy of corridors for conservation of biodiversity. (Photo: Ellen Damschen)

Notably, monogyne queens taking part in large aerial mating flights will establish new colonies as far as several kilometers away from their natal homes, while polygyne queens disperse over shorter distances.

“When there is only one queen per colony (monogyne), the behavior of the ants is very different,” Resasco explains. “They defend a big territory to keep other fire ants away, whereas in the polygyne social form there are many egg-laying queens per colony and they will not be aggressive toward non-nestmates. Instead of spreading out, they intermingle with each other and establish really high densities, which has more negative effects on the native ants.”

As a result of their respective mating dispersal patterns, Resasco says his 2014 published research showed polygyne fire ants benefitted from land corridors, while monogyne fire ants—aided by their ability to fly above the tree canopy and for longer distances—were readily able to establish new colonies in patches regardless of whether they were connected with corridors.

However, Resasco says he theorized in 2014 that the effects of corridors on polygne fire ants were transient, meaning fire ant density differences between connected and non-connected patches would dimmish over time, as polygyne fire ants fully established themselves in patches. Now, with testing done over the past decade, research shows that is the case, says Resasco, who recently published his latest findings in Ecological Entomology.

“Oftentimes, invasive species are invasive because they’re really good at getting around, so corridors might not make a big difference one way or another if the species can readily colonize,” he says. At the same time, fire ants are just one example of invasive species, so there may be cases in which the benefits of land corridors should be carefully weighed against drawbacks.

While meta-analysis articles published in Current Landscape Ecology Reports and Conservation Biology by Resasco and his colleagues found much evidence of positive effects of corridors and limited evidence of negative effects, Resasco notes that “there could potentially be times when connecting corridors could have some negative effects we should consider,” adding negative effects of landscape corridors are much less studied than positive effects. Study by other researchers on aspects landscape corridors related to fauna, insects and animals is ongoing, he adds.

“The value of research sites like the Corridor Experiment at Savannah River Site is we can develop theories of how things work and test them out on larger-scale models,” Resasco concludes. “That was the value of the study here.”

Top image: a fire ant queen (Photo: Nash Turley)

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Landscape corridors can aid in fire ant spread, but the effects are transient, CU ��«��Ƶ researcher Julian Resasco shows.

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Putting climate on the ballot

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 21:04:27 +0000

Putting climate on the ballot Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/19/2024 - 15:04

Matt Burgess

Climate change matters to more and more people–and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election

If you ask American voters what their top issues are, most will point to kitchen-table issues like the economy, inflation, crime, health care or education.

Fewer than 5% of respondents in 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys said that climate change was the most important problem facing the country.

Despite this, research that I conducted with my colleages suggests that concern about climate change has had a significant effect on voters’ choices in the past two presidential elections. Climate change opinions may even have had a large enough effect to change the 2020 election outcome in President Joe Biden’s favor. This was the conclusion of an analysis of polling data that we published on Jan. 17, 2024, through the University of Colorado’s Center for Social and Environmental Futures.

Matt Burgess is a CU ��«��Ƶ assistant professor of environmental studies and institute fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

What explains these results, and what effect might climate change have on the 2024 election?

Measuring climate change’s effect on elections

We used 2016 and 2020 survey data from the nonpartisan organization Voter Study Group to analyze the relationships between thousands of voters’ presidential picks in the past two elections with their demographics and their opinions on 22 different issues, including climate change.

The survey asked voters to rate climate change’s importance with four options: “unimportant,” “not very important,” “somewhat important” or “very important.”

In 2020, 67% of voters rated climate change as “somewhat important” or “very important,” up from 62% in 2016. Of these voters rating climate change as important, 77% supported Biden in 2020, up from 69% who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. This suggests that climate change opinion has been providing the Democrats with a growing electoral advantage.

Using two different statistical models, we estimated that climate change opinion could have shifted the 2020 national popular vote margin (Democratic vote share minus Republican vote share) by 3% or more toward Biden. Using an Electoral College model, we estimated that a 3% shift would have been large enough to change the election outcome in his favor.

These patterns echo the results of a November 2023 poll. This poll found that more voters trust the Democrats’ approach to climate change, compared to Republicans’ approach to the issue.

What might explain the effect of climate change on voting

So, if most voters–even Democrats–do not rank climate change as their top issue, how could climate change opinion have tipped the 2020 presidential election?

Our analysis could not answer this question directly, but here are three educated guesses:

First, recent presidential elections have been extremely close. This means that climate change opinion would not need to have a very large effect on voting to change election outcomes. In 2020, Biden won Georgia by about 10,000 votes–0.2% of the votes cast–and he won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes, 0.6% of votes cast.

Second, candidates who deny that climate change is real or a problem might turn off some moderate swing voters, even if climate change was not those voters’ top issue. The scientific evidence for climate change being real is so strong that if a candidate were to deny the basic science of climate change, some moderate voters might wonder whether to trust that candidate in general.

Third, some voters may be starting to see the connections between climate change and the kitchen-table issues that they consider to be higher priorities than climate change. For example, there is strong evidence that climate change affects health, national security, the economy and immigration patterns in the U.S. and around the world.

People march from the U.S. Capitol to the White House protesting former President Donald Trump’s environmental policies in April 2017. (Photo: Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

Where the candidates stand

Biden and former President Donald Trump have very different records on climate change and approaches to the environment.

Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax.”

In 2017, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty that legally commits countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Biden reversed that decision in 2021.

While in office, Trump rolled back 125 environmental rules and policies aimed at protecting the country’s air, water, land and wildlife, arguing that these regulations hurt businesses.

Biden has restored many of these regulations. He has also added several new rules and regulations, including a requirement for businesses to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.

Biden has also signed three major laws that each provides tens of billions in annual spending to address climate change. Two of those laws were bipartisan.

On the other hand, the U.S. has also become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, and the largest exporter of natural gas, during Biden’s term.

In the current campaign, Trump has promised to eliminate subsidies for renewable energy and electric vehicles, to increase domestic fossil fuel production and to roll back environmental regulations. In practice, some of these efforts could face opposition from congressional Republicans, in addition to Democrats.

Public opinion varies on particular climate policies that Biden has enacted.

President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s work to combat climate change on Nov. 14, 2023. (Photo: Susan Walsh/Associated Press)

Nonetheless, doing something about climate change remains much more popular than doing nothing. For example, a November 2023 Yale survey found 57% of voters would prefer a candidate who supports action on global warming over a candidate who opposes action.

What this means for 2024

Our study found that between the 2016 and the 2020 presidential elections, climate change became increasingly important to voters, and the importance voters assign to climate change became increasingly predictive of voting for the Democrats. If these trends continue, then climate change could provide the Democrats with an even larger electoral advantage in 2024.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that the Democrats will win the 2024 election. For example, our study estimated that climate change gave the Democrats an advantage in 2016, and yet Trump still won that election because of other issues. Immigration is currently the top issue for a plurality of voters, and recent national polls suggest that Trump currently leads the 2024 presidential race over Biden.

Although a majority of voters currently prefer the Democrats’ climate stances, this need not always be true. For example, Democrats risk losing voters when their policies impose economic costs, or when they are framed as anti-capitalist, racial, or overly pessimistic. Some Republican-backed climate policies, like trying to speed up renewable energy projects, are popular.

Nonetheless, if the election were held today, the totality of evidence suggests that most voters would prefer a climate-conscious candidate, and that most climate-conscious voters currently prefer a Democrat.

Matt Burgess is an assistant professor of environmental studies at the ��«��Ƶ.

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

Climate change matters to more and more people–and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election.

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In an interconnected world, managing and perceiving risk is key, experts say

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 17:08:10 +0000

In an interconnected world, managing and perceiving risk is key, experts say Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/26/2024 - 10:08

Sarah Kuta

CU ��«��Ƶ researcher Steve Miller argues for deeper insight into how people understand risk before shocks, especially those related to climate change, happen in global systems

The world is becoming increasingly interconnected, which has many benefits. Shoppers in Colorado, for instance, can enjoy tropical fruits in the dead of winter, thanks to vast and complex trade networks.

But this interconnectivity is also risky. A war or drought in one country can have devastating consequences on the availability and affordability of food thousands of miles away. People and governments typically react to these shocks after the fact, such as by implementing trade bans or adjusting crop production, to help mitigate the harm locally.

However, people and governments also try to manage risks proactively, before such shocks occur, which can then affect the broader system. For example, a coastal fishing community worried about the risk of fish-stock collapse because of climate change might diversify its economy by expanding into ecotourism. Their decision to export fewer fish could, in turn, affect the global fish market.

In a recent publication, Steve Miller, a CU ��«��Ƶ assistant professor of environmental studies, argues for researching people's perceptions of risk before shocks occur, especially those related to climate change.

In this way, risk is not only a byproduct of a globally interconnected system—it’s also a force that acts upon it, a group of interdisciplinary researchers argues in a new paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

“If we want to understand the effects of a risk like climate change, we can't just look at how connections like trade can help us buffer the effects of shocks—for example, droughts and wildfires—after they happen,” says lead author Steve Miller, an assistant professor in the ��«��Ƶ Department of Environmental Studies. “We also have to look at how risks of those events might change where people, goods and information go even before shocks occur.”

The idea that an increasingly interconnected global system creates new sets of risks is widely accepted and serves as the backdrop for many studies and policy decisions. However, the reverse—that risk can change the system itself—often gets overlooked.

To truly understand and assess risks—such as those posed by climate change—the world needs to be paying attention to both, the researchers argue.

“If we don't account for those feedbacks, we're not going to get the costs of climate change right, and we might make some mistakes in how or how much we choose to invest in mitigation and adaptation,” says Miller.

Perceiving and managing risk

Consider the effects of climate change on food availability, for example. Researchers need to understand how crop failure in one nation might ripple through the global trade network and cause severe food shortages elsewhere in the world.

But they also need to back up, long before the crop failure occurs, and look at how governments, farmers, distributors and consumers perceive the risk of climate change-related crop failure—and what they choose to do about it, says Miller. Their efforts to manage risk—such as planting more fail-safe crops or buying more protective insurance policies—ultimately feed back into and alter the broader system.

Beyond that, changes made because of perceived risk may have consequences for both people and the environment—and these downstream effects are not well understood. For instance, the coastal fishing community that begins to rely more heavily on ecotourism must now grapple with new types of risks, such as an economic downturn that dampens tourism.

Risks are an outcome of a global, complex system—but they also play a role in shaping it.

“It's a simple point, but there's lots to do,” says Miller.

Future research

The new paper stemmed from a series of backyard chats between Miller and co-authors Laura Dee, a CU ��«��Ƶ assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Eréndira Aceves-Bueno, an assistant professor in the University of Washington’s School of Marine & Environmental Affairs.

Members of a commercial fishing cooperative in Mazatlán, Mexico, pull their nets. (Photo: Eduardo Esparza/Mexico News Daily)

The conversation centered around how some lobster fishers and fishing cooperatives in Mexico, Australia and New Zealand primarily sell their catch to markets in China. Each fishery faces many risks, from fluctuations in local lobster populations to changing consumer tastes in China to global supply chain issues.

“How these people understand and respond to those risks got us thinking about the more general challenge of perceiving and managing risks in globally linked systems like our food systems,” says Miller.

To think through this complex topic, the trio looped in other researchers at CU ��«��Ƶ—Meghan Hayden in ecology and evolutionary biology and Amanda Carrico in environmental studies—as well as experts at other institutions: Uchechukwu Jarrett, an associate professor of practice in economics at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and Kate Brauman, deputy director of the Global Water Security Center at the University of Alabama.

Together, the collaborators produced a “Perspective,” a type of peer-reviewed paper that’s intended to stimulate discussion and inspire new approaches. More specifically, the co-authors hope their paper leads to more research on how people perceive and react to risks in systems that are connected by both environmental and socioeconomic links across the globe.

To that end, they suggest some possible research opportunities for theorists, empiricists, behavioral scientists and experts in particular types of connectivity, such as markets or species migration. For example, they propose lab or field experiments that involve presenting farmers with various risk scenarios, then asking them to explain their thought-processes as they assess each one.

“We need a lot more research,” says Miller. “It's a clear case where we need lots of expertise from many disciplines, and folks with transdisciplinary skills to bring it all together.”

‘Make better decisions’

More broadly, the co-authors hope to draw attention to the push-pull relationship between complex systems and risk. Each can affect the other, and their interactions are far from straightforward.

In the future, they say, those working in research, industry, government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) must focus on both if they hope to tackle complex global challenges like climate change.

“If we get better at embedding risk in our models of how these systems work—like food systems, trade in primary resources like timber, or ecotourism—I think we'll get more credible predictions of how things like climate change will impact us and the ecosystems on which we depend,” says Miller. “With those better predictions, we can make better decisions.”

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CU ��«��Ƶ researcher Steve Miller argues for deeper insight into how people understand risk before shocks, especially those related to climate change, happen in global systems.

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‘Climate contrarianism’ is down but not out, expert says

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 18:31:11 +0000

‘Climate contrarianism’ is down but not out, expert says Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/22/2024 - 11:31

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU ��«��Ƶ’s Max Boykoff documents how the industry-funded Heartland Institute has morphed in the past decade

In 2011, Max Boykoff attended the 2011 Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C., to better understand how the prominent conservative think tank was influencing the climate debate.

The institute was founded in 1984 to “discover, develop and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems,” rejecting the consensus of relevant experts on issues such as climate change, healthcare and tobacco regulation.

In his 2013 paper (co-authored with Shawn Olson-Hazboun), “’‘Wise contrarians’: a keystone species in contemporary climate science, politics and policy,” Boykoff examined the motivations, drive and exhilaration among attendees “that prop up these contrarian stances, such as ideological or evidentiary disagreement to the orthodox views of science.”

Max Boykoff, a CU ��«��Ƶ professor of environmental studies, conducts research to better understand climate contrarianism.

Ten years later, Boykoff ventured back into contrarian country to interview attendees of the Heartland Institute’s 14^th climate-change conference and examine how it compares with the earlier conference.

In his recent peer-reviewed article in the journal Climatic Change, Boykoff identified “ten key themes—five comparisons and five contrasts—that point to adaptive strategies deployed in ongoing and wider CCM (climate-change countermovement) efforts that effectively shape sustainability technology and climate policy.”

While in some ways the organization has declined in visibility, Boykoff says it maintains a $6 million budget, largely funded by conservative contrarian entities such as the American Petroleum Institute, the Charles G. Koch Foundation, ExxonMobil, Philip Morris International and the Walton Family Foundation.

“There is a tendency to dismiss them as a bunch of goofballs, aging, largely white men who chip away at people doing good work through (the organization’s) efforts online and elsewhere,” says Boykoff, professor of environmental studies and fellow at CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, at the ��«��Ƶ. “But it is a mistake to dismiss them because of their ongoing activities that they are continuing to pursue often behind the public scenes.”

Understanding climate contrarianism

Through interviews with 21 speakers in the 2021 conference, Boykoff identified five continuities with the 2011 gathering:

Ongoing rhetoric of freedom, appeals to liberty and support for free-market capitalism
Attacks on science, scientists and purported climate “alarmism”
Self-perception as “embattled underdogs”
Righteousness and confidence that their views trump those of relevant experts
A proud “us vs. them” stance and nostalgia for past fights that garnered public attention

“(W)hile they may have viewed themselves as benevolently motivated and careful, critical thinkers, in their prepared remarks, self-assurance, appearances of bold conviction, poor listening skills, sensitivity to criticism, and a lack of empathy were evident … throughout the (2021) conference,” Boykoff writes.

He also identified five key contrasts that have developed over the past decade:

Instances of paranoia—such as doubting Boykoff’s credentials—in the face of shrinking prestige
Waning public-facing influence
“A penchant to feed climate contrarianism into ‘culture wars,’ including anti-vaccination and anti-mask movements”
Reflection on their individual legacies
A shift in focus from federal- to state-level sites of resistance and increased undermining of environmental, social and governmental (ESG) actions to influence climate change

Of those, Boykoff finds the shift to state-level action and influence, the attack on ESG principles and the conflation of climate change with seemingly unrelated “culture war” issues the most concerning.

Through the freedom and liberty tropes, alarmism and attacks on science, many feel like they are embattled underdogs who think they know better than those who dedicate their lives to this issue.”

“Hitching their wagon to culture wars … helps give them a purpose, some semblance of notoriety that some of them seemingly crave,” says Boykoff, adding he was careful to “stick with observation” rather than speculation in writing the paper.

A potent disrupter

Boykoff personally experienced the intensity of Covid-related contrarianism, with one man demanding that he remove his mask.

“Anti-masking rhetoric pervaded my conversations,” he says. “It helps them feel as if they are fighting some heroic, just cause.”

Attacking ESG principles gave participants a “hook to talk about the ‘woke left,’ the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and the Fed (Federal Reserve). … Through the freedom and liberty tropes, alarmism and attacks on science, many feel like they are embattled underdogs who think they know better than those who dedicate their lives to this issue,” he says.

Despite the vigorous contrarianism he encountered, the 2021 conference struck Boykoff as further evidence of the conference sponsor’s fading public-facing influence.

“While this research finds persistent animosity and division fed by Heartland Institute speakers and participants,” he writes, “there are emergent signals that these rhetorical strategies are increasingly being viewed as ossified and fossilized in a decarbonizing world.”

Even so, Boykoff warns that the institute remains a potent disrupter, supporting such efforts as mailing climate-contrarian school materials to teachers who may not have time to fully vet the information.

“These are dated perspectives, and the world is moving on,” he says. “But they are persistent, and they are still getting a lot of funding.”

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CU ��«��Ƶ’s Max Boykoff documents how the industry-funded Heartland Institute has morphed in the past decade.

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