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A conversation with Danielle Arigoni, author of the new book Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation
When we talk about climate solutions, we often hear the word resilience. It’s the catch-all term for all the things we’re doing to prepare for the impacts of climate change — things like building seawalls and hardening homes and switching to renewable energy sources. But planning for the future is a tricky thing, and, argues Danielle Arigoni, author of the new bookClimate Resilience for an Aging Nation (Island Press), there’s one section of American society that is left out of resilience as we think of it today: older adults.
Arigoni spent much of her career working as an urban planner for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but it was only once she started working at the AARP that she came to see how aging populations were often left out of urban design considerations. Now the managing director for policy and solutions at National Housing Trust, Arigoni spends her time working on climate-friendly affordable housing solutions.
Resilience, she writes in her book, is not just a matter of hardening physical infrastructure to keep the natural world out, but should incorporate the social connections that shape our days. As the country’s population ages, designing climate solutions that take older adults into account will be crucial not only for saving the lives of older adults, but for creating a more just future for everyone.
I spoke with Arigoni about her research, and what a more aging-friendly form of resiliency looks like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How does climate change affect older populations in particular?
I mean, in a lot of ways. Certainly in disasters, we see that for a whole bunch of reasons, whether it’s mobility, or frailty, or cognitive decline, older adults are not able to respond in the same ways that younger people do. I think that’s partly a failure of emergency management to anticipate those conditions.
But even outside of disasters, we see that older adults oftentimes are living from a precarious financial standpoint. Fifteen percent of older adults live at or below the poverty line, which means they just do not have any available funds to decamp for a few days to safer ground or to weatherize their home or to stockpile resources.
And all of those things compile to a set of circumstances where older adults are either living in homes that they can’t afford to heat and cool in response to changing conditions, or they’re living in places where their homes are deteriorating because of climate impacts and they’re unable to fix them, which then sets off a kind of snowball effect of health problems as well. Something like 80% of all people over 65 have two or more chronic conditions, and when that gets layered on top of extreme heat and wildfire smoke and indoor mold and all of these other things, that multiplies the effects.
Does heat affect older adults in a different way from the larger population?
Heat is the deadliest extreme weather phenomenon in our country, and 80% of the casualties are older adults. And that is for a lot of reasons. To begin, older adults can’t process heat in the way that young bodies can; our ability to sweat changes as we age. So that’s part of it.
But heat also complicates and sits on top of underlying medical conditions and prescriptions. So there might be symptoms of heat illness that get masked because they resemble the effects of things like heart disease, or COPD, or respiratory challenges, or the effect of the medication, so it goes untreated.
And then when you layer on top of that the number of older adults who live alone, who may not even have someone to recognize that they’re starting to be disoriented and lose their balance, or that they are sitting in a house that’s 80 degrees when it really needs to be set at 72 because that person is too afraid of what their utility bills are going to cost that month.
All those factors compile and really just accelerate the risk for older adults in extreme heat. Extreme heat also isolates people further; they can’t go and knock on a neighbor’s door to ask for help if it’s 110 degrees out.
In your book you pointed out that there’s a link between where older adults live and climate risk.
Yeah, something like 50% of the older adults in the country live in about nine states. And those nine states are, for the most part, the states where climate risks are the greatest. So it’s places like California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona, the last of which just saw six straight weeks of 100 degree temperatures this summer. And yet Phoenix is one of the fastest growing areas for older adults. So you have to, at some point, stop and kind of scratch your head and wonder how we can better inform people so that they aren’t moving into areas where they are taking on greater risk.
Phoenix, to its credit, has already said they’re stopping new development because they’re running out of water. That was a recognition of the intersection between resources and habitability and development patterns. I don’t think we’ve necessarily done that, for the most part, in many communities. I think that’s a decision no local official wants to make. They don’t want to say they’re anti-growth.
There’s an interesting political conundrum here. Some of these places, like Florida and Texas and Louisiana, are places with legislatures that aren’t, shall we say, very climate-forward. And these older adults you’re concerned about might not care much for it either. So how do you navigate that?
It has to be education, right? There’s something in the lived experience of seeing that hurricane season is becoming longer and more frequent. That is testing even the presumptions of people who’ve been in Florida for a long time thinking they can live through it. When you’re experiencing more and more disasters to the point that it’s truly interfering with your well-being or maybe your financial viability —, like if all of your money is tied up in your home and your home is now in a floodplain, for example —, it prompts some very real and very timely conversations about what to do. So it’s just a matter of time before the real cost of being in some of these places becomes hard to ignore.
There’s a section in your book titled “Climate Planning and Disaster Resilience Tools Generally Fail The Age-Friendly Test.” What does resilience look like today, and how is it falling short for the elderly?
I think one arm of resiliency is the energy efficiency and carbon reduction set of activities, which is where we’re striving to reduce our carbon emissions. And we’re going to put in place a whole bunch of policies and programs to drive down the cost of that initiative. Another pillar is in hazard mitigation planning. FEMA unlocks a lot of hazard mitigation dollars for states and communities that have completed a plan before disaster strikes.
So those are kind of two disparate pillars: One is climate mitigation, and the other is risk mitigation. Neither of those think about age in a concerted way right now. In the requirements that FEMA just updated for state hazard mitigation plans that had been in place for like nine years, there’s one mention of considering demographic change when you’re writing your plan, but they don’t say you should project who your population is and what their needs are.
I think it’s a real missed opportunity, because those mitigation plans set the course for all the FEMA funds that follow. Oftentimes they become a vessel which other public resources are poured into as well. If you’re not identifying the needs of older adults right at the outset, you’re really missing that nuance in terms of what risk mitigation looks like for them.
Similarly, on the climate mitigation side, there’s a whole set of activities around, for example, making New York state a great place to age, but they don’t tie into the climate plan that New York state has put in place. Wouldn’t it make sense if we focus those investments in bringing utility costs down, in incorporating renewable energy and making energy efficiency investments, in those same places where we know older adults are already paying too much for their housing and are unable to afford to keep their utilities running or upgrade their homes? That would reduce their risk too.
I’m curious about the shortfalls of the solutions that we do build. I think a lot about how in places that are hurricane-prone, for example, you see a lot of houses on stilts. And I’m wondering if there’s just a simple mobility problem here.
I think that there’s sometimes a failure to acknowledge mobility challenges, certainly with elevating homes, but also just in terms of accessing transportation options, and relocation or evacuation options. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t accessible elevated homes, I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t seen any with my own two eyes. But I don’t necessarily know that that’s a really thoughtful solution. Even when we think about cooling centers that are being established for heat waves, it’s great that those exist, but I’m not sure that planners are always thinking about how people are getting to them. Those kinds of breakdowns that are part of the problem.
The harder conversation, frankly, is how do we relocate people out of harm’s way when elevating maybe is not going to be a very sustainable solution? Relocating is such a thorny topic, I think particularly so for older adults who may have lived their entire lives in one location. The notion of moving and being displaced because of climate change is a very, very difficult kind of identity crisis. It’s a pretty philosophical challenge, in addition to all the logistical challenges of moving your home, your community, and your livelihood.
What does climate resilience geared towards older populations look like? It sounds like you’re advocating for essentially an overhaul of a lot of things, because there are all these interconnected systems.
Yeah, it’s not a simple solution. When I think about what a climate-resilient community looks like, it certainly includes all the hard infrastructure that you would want — sea walls or levees, the sort of infrastructure that we think could mitigate risk. But it would also include a lot more thoughtfulness about how we’re designing our communities to live in every day. So thinking about different ways of designing housing, for example: how do we create communities where there’s more housing choice, so people can live in smaller units that will consume less energy and encourage more organic interaction than you see in suburbs? Hopefully they’ll be fueled by renewable energy as well so you’re eliminating that utility cost burden that is really problematic for low-income older adults.
There’s also making sure we have a robust transportation system so that you have not just a public transit system that works and gets people where they need to go every day of the year, but is also designed in ways that allow people to still use it when it’s hot. That means shade and seating, maybe even cooling factors at bus stops. Because otherwise, this transit system will not serve people if it is too hot outside. So you really have to think holistically about all of the elements that it takes to make a more climate resilient place.
I would also say communication and social connectedness is a huge part of it too. A good number of older adults do not have in-home internet or smartphones, so they don’t access the internet on a daily basis. So if you’re relying upon these systems to notify people or to get them to sign up for things that are going to reduce their risks, then you’re probably missing a whole bunch of people. So how do you cultivate a multi-pronged approach where you’re using all the levers you have available to you, including people like home health aides, or service organizations like Meals on Wheels, to get information to people in ways that they can access and utilize it?
Your point about home health aides reminds me that you drew a connection between climate and COVID-19 in your book. What lessons can we learn from the pandemic that can be applied to climate change?
Tragically, what we learned is that older adults are viewed as expendable. I think we somehow accepted the fact that a wildly disproportionate number of people who die from COVID-19 were older adults. It didn’t cause the kind of outrage that I think it should have. And I think some of that same thing is happening here with climate-fueled disasters.
COVID taught us the importance of getting information and support to people in their homes. I think there’s this presumption that when we plan for nursing homes we’ve checked the box, we’ve covered older adults’ needs. But that’s only true for a very small number of older adults — the vast majority live in their homes, often alone, particularly older women. And so how do you get services and information to folks in their home in ways that understand and appreciate their mobility challenges?
It’s interesting that so much of what you’re talking about is communication. I feel like when people hear the word resilience, they think of these big plans to transform the built environment.
I think communication is a huge part of why we’re here. And by that I mean the inability of these different siloed technical fields to communicate with one another. Emergency management and hazard mitigation people use a very different language than aging advocates do, who use a very different language than sustainability advocates do. They speak different languages, and they report in different structures, and they’re funded by different agencies. And never the twain shall meet. There are not a lot of opportunities where those things come together like they should.
My hope is that by communicating more effectively with aging advocates in terms that they understand, using programs that they are responsible for administering, they then see climate change as part of their mission. It needs to be the same way when talking to emergency managers about hazard mitigation plans: We can begin to unpack the unique needs of older adults that might be falling through the cracks in terms of their existing planning efforts. We really need to create this middle ground of understanding.
Do you have a favorite solution? Or maybe a favorite place that has implemented these solutions well?
The one that comes to mind — and I’m a little biased because I went to school there — is Portland, Oregon.
During COVID, they developed a framework to get supplies into the homes of an array of people in the city, to ensure they had what they needed, whether it’s food or diapers or adult incontinence supplies. These are things that were really important to get to people. Then they layered that with really effective community-based organizations that could reach committees that were hard to reach. So they had a Latino group reaching Spanish speakers, they had an Asian American group reaching Asian immigrants, and so on.
After the pandemic, Portland was able to use their relationships with those groups during two summers in which terrible heat waves hit the region. They quickly deployed those same organizations to get portable heat pumps into people’s homes, and they prioritized low-income older adults. They were able to do that because they’d already cultivated that tradition of serving people in that community through trusted organizations. And I can’t help but think that it saved lives.
What do you think the federal government should be doing differently around climate resiliency and aging? Are there particular policies you’d like to see that target aging populations?
I think it needs to happen at all levels, from the local to the regional and state levels. And that can be accelerated by work at the federal level. So for example they could require that hazard mitigation plans, and applications for HUD programs, or BRIC, which is a FEMA program, have to include an analysis of demographic change, and what that means for people over 65.
That’s a step forward, because then you’ve got state planners and local leaders thinking about what their aging population needs, because the share of older adults is only going to grow, it’s not going to diminish.
Similarly, the Older Americans Act is going to be reauthorized soon, and that funds all kinds of agency work that supports home and community-based services so that people can age in place. There’s a real need there to acknowledge the fact that climate change is going to interfere with some people’s ability to do that. And that might mean that they need more utility assistance, because now they have to run the air conditioner longer or put the heater on more frequently. Or it might mean that they need different kinds of supports, like making sure these folks can evacuate during a flood.
Is there something you found in your research that people seem to constantly get wrong?
There’s a general impression that older adults are living their best lives, they’ve got their retirement savings and are going on cruises and playing golf. But it’s just not the case for so many older adults. Something like half of all people who are unhoused right now are single people over 50. There’s a whole set of upstream financial challenges many older adults face, including paying way too much of their income for housing because rents have skyrocketed and they often have fixed incomes. Not to mention all the other expenses that go along with getting older, such as prescriptions. So climate Is a risk magnifier financially as well.
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His new book, Terrible Beauty, argues that “fighting losing battles is a worthy cause.”
When I scheduled this interview with Auden Schendler back in August, I’d picked what at the time felt like an arbitrary time closer to his book’s publication date. It wasn’t until much later that I realized we’d agreed to speak exactly one week after the results of the U.S. presidential election.
Schendler, of course, didn’t write Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul knowing that President Trump would win reelection, but his book feels all the more vital given the new context of climate policy in America.
Terrible Beauty is a memoir, but it also functions as a practical roadmap to attaining climate consciousness, both for companies and for consumers — an unusual blend. In it, Schendler draws on his more than two decades of sustainability work at the Aspen Skiing Company, which owns one of the most iconic ski resorts in the world, to urge by example that we need to get uncomfortable with the big upheavals necessary to combat climate change. The modern environmental movement has failed, he argues, by focusing on the kinds of small-scale changes that have businesses touting flawed carbon credit programs and paper straws — pursuits that are complicit with fossil fuel interests.
Schendler insists that instead, we should be swinging for the fences: Companies that are serious about climate and sustainability ought to use their lobbying powers and legal teams to put pressure on the government, and parents who want a better future for their children should be getting involved in local politics, no experience required. It might be lead to awkward conversations at the water cooler or in the cereal aisle — what Schendler calls the “supermarket problem” — but when everything is at stake, you have to try, even if it means losing.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you think the stakes of your book have changed between when you began writing it and now, when it’s finally hitting shelves?
On one hand, the stakes have changed because it’s even harder to get to the climate fix than before. A major theme of the book is the idea that we’re not playing a uniquely American game of winning and losing; we’re involved in a practice and trying to make things better. We’re not going to “solve” climate change. We’ve already, you could argue, failed because it’s beyond 1.5 [degrees] Celsius warming. The stakes have changed, but the methodology is the same — and possibly more important now because we are in a long struggle that we might not see the end of in our lifetime.
Something I’ve been hearing since the election is that climate advocates need to play small ball during the Trump administration — keep moving progress forward, even in inches. This is an idea you grapple with quite directly in the book. From your perspective, what is the highest-value target an average person can take on?
To be clear, I’m not advocating for small ball — my book is a critique of modern environmentalism going all-in on small ball. It didn’t work, and that’s not surprising.
Historically, we say, I care about climate and I'm going to plug in on all the things everyone has said I’m supposed to do: recycle, drive a Prius, insulate my house, take the blame for the problem myself. And what I’m saying in Terrible Beauty is, all that hasn’t worked, and it’s actually complicit with a fossil fuel economy.
The thing you need to do is get a six-pack of beer and say, Where am I powerful? What is my power? When people do that, people who don’t appear to have power show that they do. Greta Thunberg is a great example because she was just a high school girl, and look what she did. But if you’re a business, your power is different than you think it is — it’s not cutting your carbon footprint and buying offsets. It’s wielding political power.
I’m asking people to become citizens. Being a citizen is difficult — it’s messy, it’s tricky, you get in trouble.
If somebody wants to get involved interacting with their local government, how do they get past the discomfort of what you call the supermarket problem?
The supermarket problem is one of my favorite illustrations: It’s that if a person is given a choice between being a material part of saving civilization — speaking out publicly on climate, that’s one side of the balance — then you’re going to have a really awkward encounter in the cereal aisle in the supermarket with someone who disagrees with you. Most people will say, Yeah, I really do want to save civilization, but I’d rather not have that awkward encounter.
I don’t think that’s actually the problem in public office. I think what keeps people out is the perception that they don’t know enough — that there’s some secret to being a town council person. Speaking as an ex-town council person, we had no skills at all. It was shocking how bottom of the barrel we were. There’s this mystique, and people have to get over it. The United States was created to enable citizens to govern the country, and so as a citizen, you have an obligation. People shouldn’t be scared off by that.
What is your suggestion for someone who has a corporate sustainability role and reads your book and feels inspired to pursue meaningful, large-scale change, but then runs into resistance or skepticism? How do you get the bigwigs on your side?
My experience was years and years of spoon feeding, and spoon feeding in a way that is not righteous. One approach would be, Hey, I’ve been doing these carbon footprints for five years. Obviously, we care about climate. Have we talked to the Government Affairs Department about how this company can wield power?
You have to become a trusted employee by doing your work well. Corporations are made up of human beings that have great loves and epic tragedies and they care about the world. You have to think that if you bring a reasonable offer to do something next level — and by the way, it also helps the brand — then you’re going to get some traction. Another message of the book is, you might not win, but you try again. And you try again. You try again.
Like what you’ve done with including an appendix on how to sue ExxonMobil. You couldn’t put that lawsuit into motion at Aspen Skiing Company, but now you’ve put it out into the world for someone else to try.
Right. The idea is that fighting losing battles is a worthy cause. That is how humans make progress, whether it’s a fight or an invention or a business model. You try, and it doesn’t work, and then the next person learns from your mistakes and tries, and then the next and the next. And this was true of all the great movements, like civil rights. It was a series of attempts and a series of bad losses over many, many years, and then we won more and more and more.
What, if anything, do you think corporations owe the environment?
One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is that, historically, corporations have opposed regulations. The reality I think we’re coming into is that business is starting to say, Oh my gosh, climate actually is threatening us. It’s threatening our supply chain, our factories, our customers, everything. I’m inclined to think that businesses will start to say, actually, we need to fix this problem because it’s getting worse and worse.
What does business owe the environment? There is a long history of thought and writing that says the source of all wealth comes from the environment. I think the real question is, is business capable of acknowledging that? Can we count on business as designed to help us solve these problems?
My answer is that we don’t have a lot of tools for climate. We have the vote, we have the legal system, we have NGOs, we have government, we have faith groups, we have philanthropy. Business is pretty powerful. We should at least try to use this lever versus just saying, huh, we can’t do it.
The Aspen Skiing Company, as you acknowledge, often ends up serving the kind of clientele who disproportionately contribute to carbon emissions. How do you square that with the work that you do? Why is corporate sustainability at a luxury level still — or perhaps especially — important?
There are two ways to look at that question, which is ultimately an accusation of hypocrisy. I think one response is, if we are trying to wield power and drive change, where are the powerful people? They’re right here. Those are the rich people spraying champagne on each other. If you said, We’re just going to change our light bulbs and reduce our carbon footprint, then you’d be missing the opportunity to access power. So from one perspective, we have the obligation to see if we can lean on those people and get them conscripted into the movement. I would accept criticism that said, you’re not doing that well enough. That’s fair, but we should be trying.
But then the second piece of that is this: Should they — or we — be guilty for using fossil fuels? The short answer to that is that American citizens asked for the affordably provided services that energy gives us: mobility, heat, cold beer, hot showers. We didn’t say, can you provide that in a way that will destroy civilization? We shouldn’t feel guilty for living in a fossil fuel system we didn’t create.
If you want to donate to fight climate change, what’s the best way to spend your money?
For the past five years, Giving Green has been trying to find out. Each year, the nonprofit recommends a set of nonprofits that are trying to solve the climate problem effectively and efficiently, and get the world closer to decarbonization.
Giving Green, in other words, is somewhat like the climate-specific version of Givewell, an uber-utilitarian group that identifies which global charities maximize the number of lives saved per dollar spent. But it’s much more difficult— or at least much less clear — to identify which nonprofits might best fight climate change than it is which nonprofits might save the most lives through targeted interventions.
Climate change is a globe-spanning sociotechnical problem, a political quandary baked into humanity’s largest-scale engineering systems. Even when a government or technology has seemingly pushed the world forward, it can be unclear why the improvement happened, or whether, in the long run, it will make a meaningful difference. The Paris Agreement, after all, has been around for nearly a decade, the European Union’s cap-and-trade scheme for nearly two. Yet academics, experts, and politicians can (and do) disagree about whether either policy has ultimately helped — and even why they happened in the first place.
To resolve this problem, Giving Green reviews the historical record to identify philanthropic strategies that seem like they have a good shot of leading to emissions reductions. This year, it has focused on eight, including next-generation geothermal, decarbonizing aviation and marine shipping, advancing nuclear energy, and speeding the energy transition in low- and middle-income countries. Then it looks for groups that are working on those problems in time-proven ways. This year, it also started a grant fund so that it could support some of these groups itself.
I spoke with Daniel Stein, Giving Green’s director, earlier this week. Our interview has been edited and condensed for readability.
What is Giving Green’s goal with these recommendations?
The main goal — the problem we are trying to solve — is that we believe that there are lots of people who want to do something about climate, and there’s a lot of money that’s paralyzed by indecision and sits on the sidelines. So we provide a comprehensively researched guide with a systematic approach to try and determine where the high leverage points are in climate philanthropy — and by high-leverage, I’m thinking most greenhouse gas reductions per dollar.
We focus in on what we call philanthropic strategies, specific things that people could be doing. Then we find organizations working on those strategies that are doing a great job and promote them.
Can you tell me about a few of the organizations that you have chosen?
We have some that we’ve recommended for a few years, such as Clean Air Task Force. Last year, one of our big pushes was geothermal energy, and so we’ve recommended Project Innerspace, who are a big advocate for geothermal and work a lot with both private industry and the government.
Another big area of focus for us over the past few years has been heavy industry. The case for philanthropic support for heavy industry is really, really clear. Depending on what estimate you use, heavy industry accounts for roughly a quarter of carbon emissions, but something like less than 5% of philanthropic spending. There’s very little policy teeth almost anywhere in the world on industry, and basically nothing in the U.S., but there are pathways to solving it. We kind of know how to make green steel and green aluminum, and at least have ideas on concrete and plastic. There’s a lot nonprofits can do to pave the way forward in terms of: What does policy look like? How do we get from where we are today — where we kind of know the technology but no one’s using it — to a place where there’s actually supply and demand in the future? So our top recommendations for that is an organization called Industrious Labs in the U.S. and an organization called Future Cleantech Architects in Europe.
Over the past five years, I feel like I’ve seen your mission evolve and your strategies evolve. At the beginning, you recommended giving to a mix of high-end research and policy-development groups, and then also to more grassroots, movement-type groups. But over time, your set of recommendations have become much more focused on groups that are like CATF, that are providing nonpartisan, highly expert information and analysis.
I think that’s right, but it is not necessarily that we have just changed our mind on what works. I think different moments in time call for different approaches. And in those heady years leading up to the Inflation Reduction Act — where there was hope for a Democratic trifecta, and then it happened — there was a major opportunity for a left-driven, all-of-government push on climate. That was what we thought these grassroots groups were in a good position to push forward.
I think when you look back, you see groups like Sunrise having a really powerful influence. Obviously people disagree on what forces got the IRA to happen. But I really do think that you can draw a direct line from this progressive advocacy to the Democrats believing that they had to do something about climate to please their base.
But our view is that that moment has passed. Especially post-IRA, this opportunity for a more progressive-led legislative process has ended. Even if the Democrats were still in control, I think you weren’t going to get big bills like the IRA. We moved to a point where we need to focus on the wonky details of implementing these bills and then passing more technical, focused policy in the future. Our view is that in the U.S., the big opportunities have shifted to what we would call the “insider” groups. But I think that could change again, and it could change based on geography.
Are there any big climate strategies nobody is working on right now — where you identified a place where money could be spent, but you couldn’t find a nonprofit focused on it?
One of our high-level strategies is solar radiation management. That was something that was new for us this year. And within that, we would look at very specific substrategies. Should we be funding research? Should we be funding governance? And within those little sub-elements, we occasionally found stuff where we were like, wow, we really wish there was a group working on this, but we didn’t find anything.
But one of the nice things about having a [grant-making] fund this year, for the first time ever, is that we could help get things started that didn’t exist before. We’re super excited about industry, and so much industry is happening in developing countries. But when you ask, Who is focused on reducing steel emissions in Indonesia?, there were very few organizations. We made a grant to an organization called Climate Catalyst — they were already working on steel in India, and we helped them expand into emissions reduction in Indonesia.
I think some people might see your list and go, Wow, these are a bunch of high-end research and elite advocacy organizations, but what’s actually going to solve the climate crisis is local organizing.How would you reply to that?
I think that’s a reasonable point. We are open to all of these things, and we have considered them, and I think there is a time and place for grassroots approaches and activism. But looking at the historical research and our own research, I believe that the approaches that work on this are ones where the activism is tied to clear policy demands — that are good policies, that can have big, systematic decreases in emissions and seem to have some sort of feasible pathway to success.
What I’ve seen in a lot of grassroots movements in recent years are things like throwing soup at paintings, or blocking streets, which have not had this direct policy connection, and we are pretty skeptical of those approaches. But if grassroots approaches came on our radar that have a super viable theory of change to altering policy, we are very open.
This is the fifth year you’ve put out recommendations like this, right? What have you learned or changed your mind about during that time?
One of the things that’s really crystallized in our mind is that we really think the big levers are in systems. And that can mean a lot of things, but to us, it really means three things — it means policy, technology, and markets.
To solve the climate crisis, you need to change the rules of the game, such that everyday actors — people making decisions, businesses — everybody changes their behavior because some technology got cheaper, or some policy changed. We really use that to focus ourselves to think about, What are the big changes that need to happen, and how do we work backward to the actions that get us there?
So I think that might be why you see some of these more insider, techno-analysis-driven approaches. Because when you step back and you think, alright, we need this market to change in this way, or we need this technology to develop that doesn’t currently exist, and you think about how you get there, a lot of times you need advocacy to change policy, and you need research to make that policy change possible.
This year, Giving Green has recommended six top groups fighting climate change. They are:
On conditional loans, China’s emissions, and primary care clinics
Current conditions: Storm Conall brought more heavy rain and flooding to sodden England • Flash floods killed at least 20 people on Indonesia’s Sumatra island • The northern Plains will be hit with an “arctic outbreak” on Thanksgiving day.
The Department of Energy yesterday agreed to loan Rivian $6.6 billion to resume construction on its factory in Georgia, where the company will produce the upcoming R2 and R3 electric pickups. The loan is conditional, meaning it hasn’t been finalized just yet. “If finalized, the loan will support construction of a 9 million square foot facility to manufacture up to 400,000 mass-market electric sport utility vehicles and crossover vehicles,” the DOE said in a statement. “At full capacity, the EVs manufactured at the facility are expected to yield an annual fuel consumption savings of approximately 146 million gallons of petroleum.” Whether the loan will be completed before the incoming Trump administration takes over – or whether Trump would try to axe the loan – remains to be seen. The Biden administration set a goal for zero-emission vehicles to make up half of new U.S. car sales by 2030.
China’s CO2 emissions will rise slightly this year due to a surge in energy demand, according to new research published today from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. “The growth in energy consumption and electricity consumption is faster than in the transition pathways,” the report said. Even as China rapidly rolls out renewables and EVs, emissions will rise by 0.4% in 2024. Less than half – 44% – of the experts polled by CREA said China’s emissions have already peaked, or will peak next year. Two years ago, just 15% of experts believed that to be the case. And 36% of experts said China’s coal consumption has peaked, up from 20% who said that last year. China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and coal is its main source of emissions.
Porsche this week joined a growing list of car manufacturers that are pumping the brakes on the shift to EVs. Instead of rolling out new EV models to accompany the luxury Taycan and Macan, Porsche now plans to produce new gas and hybrid models instead as it feels the effects of a slowdown in EV sales. “We are currently looking at the possibility of the originally planned all-electric vehicles having a hybrid drive or a combustion engine,” the company’s CFO said. “What is clear is that we are sticking with the combustion engine for much longer.” Earlier this year Porsche watered down its goal for 80% of sales to be electric by 2030.
Maine is suing oil giants Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, Sunoco, and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing them of knowingly deceiving the public about the role of fossil fuels in the climate crisis. It becomes the ninth state to do so. The new lawsuit claims the oil companies have long known that fossil fuels cause climate change, and that the resulting rising sea levels are especially harmful in Maine because so many of the state’s communities and industries are located near the coastline. The state wants unspecified damages from the companies as well as funds for adaptation and mitigation.
A recent study published in the journal BMC Primary Care examines how climate change is affecting primary care clinics serving “low-income and socially disadvantaged communities.” Surveys were sent to more than 400 staff members at clinics across 43 states. Nearly 85% of the staffers who responded reported that climate change – and especially extreme heat – is affecting their patients’ health. Many said extreme weather events were harming their clinic’s ability to provide care due to effects like power outages and staff shortages. About 16% of respondents said extreme weather contributed to loss or spoilage of vaccines. But just one-third of respondents said they’d spoken to patients about the increasing health risks associated with climate change, saying they had more important topics to discuss in the limited amount of time available during consultations. And 61% cited their own lack of knowledge about the connection between climate change and health. Interestingly, just 34% said politics or polarization were stopping them from bringing up climate change when discussing health risks.
BMC Primary Care
Renewables accounted for 24% of electricity generation in the first three quarters of 2024, up from 22.8% in the same period last year.