Hi friends,
Change is both difficult and unavoidable. The climate is changing and we must also change.
In an interview last spring, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson — author of What if we got it right? Visions of Climate Futures — talked about the prospects of learning to live differently because of climate change.
Johnson pointed out a lot of the unpleasantness that we live with now and the historical decline in human happiness.
[T]here’s a way to frame [climate action] as: This is an opportunity to live a different and better life. . .Often we think about the changes that are needed, and we don’t look at both sides of the coin. We think about, This is going to be expensive, or, This is going to be inconvenient, without thinking about, Do you know how inconvenient and expensive climate change is? It is so much worse.
What has worked so well for fossil fuel companies is to extract and pollute, profiting enormously AND externalizing the costs of fossil fuel pollution onto the same people who already paid to use their products.
This has not worked well for the rest of us. We need the profiteers to pay to clean up the mess they’ve made.
Tell Governor Hochul to sign the Climate Superfund Act to make polluters pay. Fossil Free Media made it easy!
Five years ago, New York City passed a local law (LL97) to reduce emissions from buildings.
Under this groundbreaking law, most buildings over 25,000 square feet are required to meet new energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions limits as of 2024, with stricter limits coming into effect in 2030. The goal is to reduce the emissions produced by the city’s largest buildings 40 percent by 2030 and net zero by 2050.
This law was designed to push building owners to invest in renewable energy options sooner rather than later. It’s good policy and it’s under attack by folks who want to game the system.
A new bill – called Intro 772 – would gut Local Law 97 by including lawns and other “green” space in calculations of a building’s size, falsely making it seem like the pollution per square foot from a building is lower than it actually is.
If you have a landlord or a coop or condo board, you know that it can be tempting to put off investments in the building that will cut into short-term profits. Climate change is happening now, and we have an opportunity to make change now.
Tell the City Council to defend and strengthen Local Law 97. This quick action is from Stand.earth.
On Wednesday, the New York Times is hosting an event they are calling “Climate Forward.” They describe it as
“a day of live journalism, dedicated to understanding our rapidly warming world.”
Incredibly, they are planning to include Kevin Roberts — the President of the Heritage Foundation and a lead author of Project 2025 — as a speaker.
This is the same Kevin Roberts who dismisses what he calls “climate alarmism. Project 2025’s recommendations include
removing federal restrictions on drilling on public lands, moving the EPA away from focusing on and reporting on climate change, dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and privatizing the National Weather Service.
My mission includes educating and activating people about what we can do to address climate change, which the Times has called “the planet’s biggest story.”
It is hard to understand their reason for including Roberts, who has said
“The solutions the average person know based on climate change are far worse and more harmful and cost more human lives than do the problem and the problems themselves.”
Let the Times know that they’re bound to get the planet’s biggest story wrong if they afford Roberts a spot to lie about climate change and climate action.
Tell the New York Times: There’s no Room for Project 2025 at Climate Forward. This quick action is from Climate Hawks Vote. Personalize it!
This week is both Climate Week and HS Voter Registration Week. These are both issues that follow us around every week of the year.
Folks at The City Sponge know that one week is not enough for learning about and preparing for climate change. Click on the link in this paragraph to see archived events and sign up below for an event next week.
Learn why flooding is more frequent and how to prepare. Brooklyn Public Library hosts next Tuesday.
Laura Brill of the Civics Center has a good post today reminding us what we can do to help during high school voter registration week. She includes specific tips for educators and students, as well as parents and other adults.
I want to focus on how those of us in this last group should engage with young people, who too frequently hear negative messages about themselves and their capacity to make change.
Brill highlights the missing messages that we can deliver:
They don’t hear enough that they can make a critical difference, that politicians will see them as more of a force if they are registered, that change can take a long time, that compromises are inevitable and not always a sign of dysfunction. And they don’t hear enough about how voting can impact the issues they care about most.
Image from the Environmental Voter Project
Talk to your late adolescent neighbors and niblings about how their votes can influence what politicians think and do about the climate.
I’m just catching up with the bad news of the day.
Meanwhile, the unrelenting suffering in Gaza continues:
The spread of disease, breakdown of law and order, proliferation of crime, rise of food insecurity and malnutrition, collapse of the health-care system, and continued cycles of displacement from one area to another have completely and utterly broken Gaza’s population.
How we engage with the world matters.
Tell Congress to pass the UNRWA Funding Emergency Restoration Act (H.R. 9649) to stop famine in Gaza. This quick action is from the Friends Committee.
with love,
L