Reporting on climate change isn’t exactly uplifting. After all, the climate crisis is one of the scariest existential issues of our time.
But there I was at a recent soccer game in Burlington, to see a team called the Vermont Green, in the middle of an ebullient scene that showed that climate awareness could actually be really fun. Kids squirted one another with water at the stadium’s water-bottle refill station, learned about local environmental causes at nearby information tables and raced about in team jerseys made of recycled fabric and T-shirts reading “Climate Action Now.”
The Vermont Green has a mission of promoting environmental justice and climate action, and I wrote about them this week for our 50 States, 50 Fixes series, which highlights an environmental success story in every state. For our latest batch of articles, Catrin Einhorn profiled a social media influencer from Alabama who consistently goes viral by enthusiastically championing biodiversity and native plants.
The notion that joy is integral to fomenting action or shifting behavior isn’t a new one, but it’s one that, on its face, seems intensely at odds with the grim reality of climate change.
Several Vermont Green fans told me that finding joy was essential to climate action because it helped build resilience.
“We’ve been doing climate work for a long time, and finger-wagging and guilting and shaming really doesn’t work,” said Celina Barton, a Vermont Green fan and grass-roots environmental organizer who also works to decarbonize buildings and homes. “When you bring together people in these team-oriented, joyful kinds of gatherings, I find we make a lot more headway in shifting human behavior.”
The benefits of pulling people together, even in a virtual space, underpin the work of Kyle Lybarger, the Alabamian social media influencer, who has amassed half a million followers on TikTok with posts about conservation and the ecological value of native plants. The passion and wonder Lybarger feels about the natural world are evident in his posts, and have helped him raise money for conservation.
“One person, one yard, one-tenth of an acre can make a bigger difference than you think,” he said.
Of course many, perhaps even most, of the people at the Vermont Green game were probably there primarily out of a love for soccer. But another fan, Eli Scheer, said that fans’ energy could be harnessed to advance the club’s climate mission.
Vermont has a population of about 648,000, and Burlington is home to roughly 44,400 people. Having 2,500 fans, the usual turnout for Vermont Green games, show up in one place is a big deal, they said, and an opportunity.
“Soccer is the conduit to building this community, and the community is what allows the climate, and antiracist social mission, to speak to all these people who will show up because of soccer,” Scheer said.
“I don’t think people come here for the climate mission,” they continued. “I think they come for the community and the fun and the game and the event. I think that’s the Trojan horse for the climate mission.”
Read more from our 50 States, 50 Fixes series:
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In Florida, ‘Powerful Little Plants’ That Protect From Big Storms
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Streams Were Dying in West Virginia. Here’s How They’re Coming Back
Global warming
The world is warming up. And it’s happening faster.
This week, while an intense heat dome covered much of the United States, Claire Brown, Mira Rojanasakul and I teamed up to talk to scientists about something they have predicted and observed for a long time: The Earth has been warming faster and faster since the 1970s.
You may be wondering, did something change in the past 50 years to make things speed up? After all, human emissions of greenhouse gasses have been seriously warming the planet for well over a century.
But surprisingly, atmospheric heat got even worse when, over the past few decades, humans started polluting less, not more.
The primary cause of global warming is the burning of fossil fuels, which release gasses like carbon dioxide and methane. But these energy sources also emit aerosols, a category of pollutants, like sulfur dioxide, that can cause acid rain and serious respiratory issues. These tiny particles can linger in the atmosphere and encourage more reflective clouds to form, which can help cool the planet by bouncing sunlight back into space.
In the 1970s, the United States began cleaning up its air pollution with regulations like the Clean Air Act. By the mid-2000s, other major polluters, like China, were following suit. And as pollution fell, so did the cooling influence of aerosols.
The reduction of aerosols in the atmosphere is one of the main reasons scientists think the planet has started heating faster in recent decades.
“It is a really big amount of progress on public health,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, told us. But, Hausfather cautioned, the aerosol pollution never actually reduced warming, it merely hid it. As long as fossil fuels are burning, the world will keep getting hotter. — Sachi Mulkey
Read more about why the planet is getting hotter faster.
Climate policy
Trump’s OSHA nominee has a history with heat and UPS drivers
For years, UPS truck drivers asked the delivery giant to install air-conditioning in its ubiquitous brown vans. The company resisted, even as temperatures climbed and drivers suffered from heatstroke.
Now, David Keeling, a former health and safety executive at UPS who some workers blame for the inaction, is President Trump’s pick to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency that regulates workplace safety. A Senate committee is scheduled to vote Thursday on his confirmation.
Keeling, who spent nearly four decades at UPS before moving to Amazon in 2021, would be taking the helm at the agency just as it considered the first federal rule designed to protect as many as 36 million workers from extreme heat. — Hiroko Tabuchi
Wildfires
‘Unsafe to inhabit’: the toxic homes of Los Angeles
As wildfires become more frequent, researchers are looking harder at what happens when smoke infiltrates a home. What does it do to the people who move back in?
Everyday items become poisons when they are set on fire. A plastic shower rod releases formaldehyde. Burning rubber, whether from a garden hose or a car tire, emits benzene. Polyester, found in fleece jackets and upholstered chairs, unleashes carcinogenic gases. Printers, plasma TVs and LED lights melt into a cloud of cyanide.
More than 500 people who survived the recent fires in California responded to a New York Times questionnaire. A majority of those whose homes were still standing reported that their insurance companies had declined to pay for testing.
Dozens of respondents whose homes were damaged by smoke agreed to share the lab results, allowing The Times to review the toxicology studies for 56 homes — a total of 122 reports conducted by 64 different companies. Nearly all showed some level of contamination. — Blacki Migliozzi, Rukmini Callimachi and K.K. Rebecca Lai
More climate news from around the web:
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“Americans’ support for green energy tax credits and renewable energies like wind and solar power has decreased in recent years, according to a new poll, driven by a softening in support from Democrats and independents,” according to data from a new poll by The Associated Press.
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Tesla’s sales fell in Europe for the fifth straight month, Reuters reports.
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The oil giant Shell denied a Wall Street Journal report that it was planning to buy its rival BP, according to Reuters.
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Inside Climate News reports that Chicago’s plan to replace the lead service lines in its water system won’t be finished until 2076, 30 years past the federal deadline.
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Cara Buckley is a reporter on the climate team at The Times who focuses on people working toward climate solutions.
The post An Ode to Joy, in Climate Action appeared first on New York Times.
