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They’re often people of color, young, and from the Northeast.
We are living in the Age of the Big Yikes.
Climate change is widely accepted as both real and happening now. Many Americans hear news about global warming at least once a week and though projections aren’t as dire as they once were, they’re still extremely not great. Half of Americans have been “personally affected” by climate change, and of those, 54% say they have experienced a “reduced quality of life due to weather extremes,” a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by Heatmap and Benenson Strategy Group found. Overall, two-thirds of Americans (65%) worry about what climate change will mean for them personally — a common anxiety that the Los Angeles Times has deemed “a normal response to an abnormal situation.”
A smaller but still substantial subset of Americans — around 15% — further self-identifies as having mental health problems stemming from the effects of climate change, including “anxiety and stress” about current and future events, PTSD, depression, substance abuse, and loneliness and isolation, the Heatmap Climate Poll shows. The distress, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, isn’t strongly determined by education level, income, or even ideology: A full quarter of those who say they have mental health problems due to climate change are Republicans (25%, compared to 31% of Democrats and 34% of independents).
The effects of climate change on mental health have historically been studied with a focus on young people, and it’s true that younger adults in Heatmap’s survey were also the ones more likely to describe mental health problems from climate effects. But what else can we learn about those who suffer mental and emotional ramifications from our changing world?
Unsurprisingly, and consistent with prior research, young adults are overwhelmingly the ones most anxious about climate change. Nearly half of 18-to-34-year-olds who’ve experienced climate change firsthand described having mental health problems as a result — a response that was much smaller in the 65+ population (10%). However, of that small number of people in the 65+ population who have reported suffering mental health problems due to climate change, there was a universal (100%) experience of having “anxiety and stress over future effects of climate change,” Heatmap found. Ninety percent also had anxiety and stress over the current effects.
Among young people who self-reported having mental health issues around climate change, “stress and anxiety” about current (69%) and future (66%) climate events was the most often cited mental health impact. Over half also cited depression (53%) and loneliness and isolation (46%).
Despite the “unbearable whiteness” of the conversation around climate anxiety, Heatmap’s polling was consistent with earlier surveys that found people of color are more likely to be alarmed about global warming than white people. White Americans were actually the least likely to report having experienced climate change-related mental health problems, at 28%, compared to African-Americans and Hispanics (36% each) and Asian American and Pacific Islanders (33%). Though white Americans reported the highest instances of depression (60% compared to 36% among all people of color), minority groups lead self-reports of anxiety and stress over the present (71% to white Americans’ 64%); anxiety and stress over the future (65% to white Americans’ 61%); and loneliness and isolation (45% to white Americans’ 35%).
That result isn’t as surprising when you look at who has been personally affected by climate change: just 44% of white people say they have been, compared to more than half of African-Americans (55%), one in six Hispanics (60%), and three-quarters of Asian American and Pacific Islanders (75%). Of the people who said climate change caused them mental health problems, the lowest rate (28%) was among white Americans.
Heatmap also asked all the respondents if climate change makes them worried about their children’s future. Though this question included answers from non-parents and people planning never to have children (and thus could be skewed by the fact that white respondents were also the least likely to have children under 18 living at home), 78% of people of color voiced general concerns about the future of their children due to climate change compared to 64% of white Americans.
Particularly of note was that nearly all (94%) of Asian American and Pacific Islanders described themselves as worrying about their children’s future due to climate change, despite having roughly the same number of children living at home as white Americans (34% to white American's 31%). There were also high levels of concern among Hispanics, at 81%, and African-Americans, at 70%, though those respondents were somewhat more likely to be parents or guardians than white Americans.
Mothers were significantly more likely to suffer from the mental health effects of climate change (49%) compared to dads (33%).
Fathers, on the other hand — and hilariously — were likely to say they've experienced climate-related property damage (51% to moms’ 39%).
It might seem intuitive that people living under the wildfire-orange skies of California or on the eroding coastlines of Florida would be the most concerned about climate change, but that certainly isn’t the rule. The Northeastern United States is technically among the “safest” places in the country with regards to meteorological upheavals — just 11% of respondents in the region described themselves as having been “very affected” by climate change. Nevertheless, of the people self-reporting mental health problems related to climate, 40% were in the Northeast compared to 22% in the West.
This is especially notable because while people in the Northeast might have a reputation for being more high strung than other parts of the U.S., the region actually features the lowest levels of general anxiety, behind the Midwest, South, and West, according to
a pre-pandemic U.S. Census Bureau study. (The Northeast surpassed the Midwest by fall 2020, though that could potentially be attributed to the region being hard-hit by COVID-19).
The higher rate of self-reported mental health problems could be political: the Northeast is the most liberal region in the U.S., and residents are perhaps more inclined to trust scientific warnings about climate change and/or read news about the severity of the crisis, resulting in higher levels of concern.
It’s revealing to look at specifically what kinds of mental health problems Northeasterners describe, too. Most (82%) who were experiencing mental health problems specified having anxiety and stress from current climate change effects — a rate almost 10 points higher than the next-most-anxious region, the South.
“Depression” was the most commonly cited mental health impact in the West (66%) and Midwest (69%), the
Heatmap poll found. Suburbanites also specifically experienced “anxiety and stress” from current climate change in high numbers, at 74% compared to rural Americans’ 66% and urbanites’ 58%.
Climate-linked mental health problems more broadly occur at the highest rates in rural communities, which are also uniquely vulnerable to weather-related impacts. Among those who said they have mental health problems stemming from climate change, 36% lived in rural locations, compared to 29% in the suburbs and 27% in urban environments.
Anxiety only scratches the surface of the mental health issues that result from climate change, Heatmap also found.
Nearly a third of Americans (30%) who reported experiencing climate change said it resulted in mental health problems. While 63% of that group further specified that meant suffering from anxiety and stress, 49% also reported depression, 22% reported post-traumatic stress disorder, and 18% reported taking to coping mechanisms like substance abuse.
The fourth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program published in 2018,
warns that these responses are normal and will continue to result from climate disasters going forward. People who experience a flood or the risk of flood, for example, “report higher levels of depression and anxiety, and these impacts can persist several years after the event.” Droughts commonly result in “increased use of alcohol and tobacco.” High temperatures can “lead to an increase in aggressive behaviors, including homicide.” Children displaced by climate-related disasters experience a “heavy burden” on their mental health. Separately, a 2018 study published in Nature predicted up to 40,000 additional suicides in the United States and Mexico by 2050 due to higher temperatures.
“Climate anxiety” (sometimes interchangeably called “eco-anxiety”) is not technically classified as a medical condition by the all-powerful DSM-5, the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals in the United States — which makes sense, because “the last thing we want is to pathologize this moral emotion, which stems from an accurate understanding of the severity of our planetary health crisis,” Britt Wray writes in her 2022 book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. Many in the medical community agree; as one psychotherapist and researcher told the BBC on the subject in 2019, “I’d kind of wonder why somebody wasn’t feeling anxious.”
Within reason, a certain amount of climate anxiety can be a good thing. (It will perhaps be productive to track climate “worry” in the coming years to see if, or as, it changes as guarded climate optimism grows in popularity). But experiencing climate change can also produce mental health problems that, like physical health problems, need to be anticipated and treated as weather-related crises increase, intensify, and expand. That is particularly true as it pertains to underserved communities, whose mental health struggles already frequently go unrecognized or untreated.
The overriding takeaway, though, is that it is wrong to look at climate change as only a danger to property and physical safety, the two human impacts that dominate headlines. Even if just 15% of Americans who experience climate change personally end up with self-described mental health problems as a result, that would potentially mean almost 18 million Americans will be suffering from the mental effects of climate change by 2050.
As Gary Belkin, the former deputy health commissioner for New York City and founder of the Billion Minds Institute, wrote for Psychiatric News in 2021, “We are all psychologically unprepared to face the accelerating existential crisis of climate and ecological change that will further deepen other destructive fault lines in our society ... We must sound that alarm and put our own house in order.”
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted via online panels by Benenson Strategy Group from Feb. 15 to 20, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.02 percentage points. You can read more about the topline results here.
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.