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Extreme Heat, Fueled By Climate Change, Leaves More Than 800 Dead In Pakistan

More than 800 have died from heat stroke and thousands more have been hospitalized as a heat wave scorches much of Pakistan with temperatures as high as 113 degrees. While officials have rolled out emergency response efforts, poor infrastructure and the unpredictable patterns of extreme weather have made the crisis particularly devastating.

Increasing heat waves, which are driven by climate change, are likely to cause more and more temperature related deaths around the world — and poor energy and health infrastructure will only deepen the threats faced by developing countries.

India is fraught with such infrastructure issues as well, and it too saw similar patterns of extreme weather — and extreme loss of life — in recent months.

Nearly 1,700 died in a heat wave that swept the India in May. As ThinkProgress previously reported, climate change is responsible for the majority of heatwaves around the world, and has already contributed to an increase in heat waves in India between 1961 and 2010.

The majority of those who have lost their lives due to heatstroke in Pakistan have been elderly or low-income residents of Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city. The impact of the heat wave may be compounded by the fact that many in the Muslim-majority country are abstaining from food and water for Ramadan.

In recent years, Pakistan’s longstanding energy crisis has meant that people across the country face rolling power outages that can last 10 hours in urban areas, and up to 20 in rural ones.

The power outages mean that people are unable to run air-conditioners or even electric fans — and that they have little access to water, which is largely moved through pipes by electric pumps. In Karachi, electricity shortages kept the water supply system from pumping millions of gallons of water, according to the state-run water utility service.

“[T]he blame is squarely on the shoulders of the government for its lackluster performance in providing water and electricity,” according to an editorial in the Pakistani daily, The Nation.

Another editorial read, “A lot of people are going to die as a direct result [of extreme weather] — and our levels of preparedness are exposed as woefully inadequate.”

The city is even running out of room to hold the bodies of those who have died.

“The mortuaries have reached capacity,” a spokesman for the Edhi Foundation, one of the country’s largest welfare organizations said.

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Volunteers arrange the lifeless bodies of heatstroke victims at a morgue of a charity group, in Karachi, Pakistan.

CREDIT: AP

He noted that the two morgues run by the Edhi Foundation had received more than 400 corpses in the last three days.

Kishwar Aftab’s sister-in-law was one of them.

“People don’t have electricity in their homes,” the Karachi resident who went to the morgue to prepare his sister-in-law’s body for burial said. “We didn’t have power for many hours in Moosa Colony. My sister-in-law had a high fever and she died.”

Aftab blamed the local electricity company, in which the government has a stake, for her death.

In a recent Pew survey, 90 percent of Pakistanis cited electricity shortages as a “very big problem” for their country. The issue ranked as a higher concern than unemployment, crime, inequality, health care, corruption, or sectarian violence.

While the government has launched efforts to manage the crisis, many see the government’s efforts to address the heat wave as too little too late. Protesters in Karachi and across Sindh have blocked streets and burned tires to protest the government’s inability to prevent the catastrophic loss of life.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ordered the National Disaster Management Authority to take immediate action, and provincial and local authorities have similarly mobilized

“I want to inform you that a disaster management [system] already exists, not just for rains and storms but for such situations as well,” Syed Qaim Ali Shah, the Chief Minister of the Pakistani province of Sindh said on Tuesday.

He said that he had already directed local authorities to open heatstroke relief centers in the port city of Karachi – which has been the worst affected by the heat wave – as well as in other areas of the province.

“We are closing offices, schools and colleges not just in Karachi but throughout Sindh,” Shah said, noting that “offices that offer essential services like hospitals will remain open.”

These measures bear a stark contrast to ones taken to address the energy crises during the summer in 2013, when an interim government ordered air conditioners to be turned off to save electricity, and suggested that civil workers wear sandals without socks to beat the heat.

Some government officials have taken the energy issue far more seriously. The country’s Power and Water Minister told John Kerry during a visit the Secretary of State made to the Pakistani capital in August 2013 that the country’s energy crisis is “a bigger menace to our economy, to our existence, than the war on terror.”

 “[T]his problem of energy, the shortage of energy in Pakistan, has crippled our economy in the last 10 years,” he said, adding that it may be costing the country’s economy about $10 billion a year.

The scale of the issue is one reason why some experts have suggested Pakistan’s energy crisis could destabilize the country.

“Energy may well be the government’s undoing,” according to Michael Kugelman of the Woodrow Wilson Center. “Pakistan’s government, much like its general population, caught in the crosshairs of an energy crisis that Islamabad cannot control, could be in for some dark days,” he warned in a paper on the topic.

For now, the worst seems to have passed for Karachi, where a thunderstorm is on the forecast for Wednesday night.

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Climate ChangeElectricityHeatwaveIndiaNawaz SharifPakistanSouth ASia

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Pacific Island Chain Gets Renewable Energy Makeover Including Sideways-Hourglass Wind Turbine

Protecting critical habitats is one thing; providing the power they need to maintain scientific and conservation-based operations in a renewable fashion is another. This is especially the case for marine sanctuaries and refuges, which can be located thousands of miles from the nearest electric grid and therefore reliant on fossil fuel imports to power diesel generators. Accessible and affordable renewable energy is addressing this problem one outpost at a time, however, and the recent conversion of the Palmyra Atoll to be 100 percent renewable offers an innovative look into how this can happen.

There’s never been a human settlement on Palmyra.

Known as a haven for seabirds and a stronghold for coral reefs, the sheer remoteness of the small atoll — located some 1,000 miles from Hawaii — enhances its appeal as a conservation zone, but also makes it extremely difficult to bring power to the handful of staff and scientists who work and live on the island for various periods of time. Until recently, those on the island, which was purchased by the Nature Conservancy in 2001, relied on a 21,000-gallon shipment of diesel fuel for their electricity needs. But a recently-completed $1.2 million renewable energy project that brings wind and solar to the atoll will replace this dependence.

“We have basically locked in 20 years of low-cost energy and made the station economically and environmentally sustainable,” said David Sellers, the Conservancy’s acting Palmyra director, in a statement. “Our carbon footprint has been reduced dramatically. And we have mitigated the environmental risk of having to transport and store all that fuel.”

According to Sellers, buying and shipping the diesel fuel for the Palmyra Atoll research station costs between $11 and $13 per gallon, which translated to about 93 cents per kilowatt hour — nearly nine times what it costs on average in the mainland United States. The money saved on energy bills will be put towards conservation and science efforts.

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A red-footed booby peers out of the foliage at Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific.

CREDIT: Laura Beauregard/USFWS

According to Grady Timmons, communications director at the Nature Conservancy of Hawaii, Palmyra is surrounded by 16,000 acres of lagoons, submerged lands, and reefs that are home to 125 species of coral — three times the number around Hawaii. The entire area has that uninhabited desert island feeling.

“There’s never been a human settlement on Palmyra, so there aren’t many human stressors,” Timmons told ThinkProgress. “The only time there was a structure was when it was used as a Navy refueling station during WWII.”

Smack-dab in the middle of the Pacific, the atoll became part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument — a protected area which was was expanded into the largest marine reserve in the world in 2014 by President Obama — in 2009. Commercial fishing and resource extraction are banned within the monument’s 490,00 square-mile boundary, which is home to a wealth of biodiversity. The nine miles of Palmyra’s coastline and 50 or so rock and coral islets are co-owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy and The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

While the cost-saving and environmentally protective elements of the renewable energy conversion are impressive, the innovative technology used to deploy the system is even more eye-catching. Standard wind turbines have the unfortunate quality of interfering with birds’ flight patterns, and can often lead to bird fatalities. On Palmyra, which is home to more than a million nesting seabirds, this was not an externality that could be tolerated.

Out of this concern for bird safety, the Conservancy tracked down Minnesota-based wind technology company SheerWind, which has developed a bladeless wind turbine called INVELOX. Resembling a giant gramophone that sucks in wind instead of blurting out sound, SheerWind tailored its design for the atoll to resemble more of a sideways hourglass. At 83 feet in length, the apparatus takes in wind at both ends and funnels it into much higher speeds using something called the Venturi Effect. Nets over the intake and covered blades prevent birds from getting caught.

“The wind turbine gives us a diversity of power sources, which is really important in a remote location,” said Sellers. “We cannot rely on just one system.”

In case the wind- and solar-power systems come up short, the Conservancy is keeping a three-year supply of biodiesel from recycled vegetable oil on the island to operate the generators if need be. On average, the solar power will account for about 85 percent of the needs of the 25 structures, including 17 small cabins.

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CREDIT: Cindy Coker, The Nature Conservancy

According to Carla Scholz, VP of marketing & communications for SheerWind, the Nature Conservancy also favored the wind turbines for their ability to generate power from slower winds at low heights.

Scholz told ThinkProgress that not only have they not had any bird incidents to date but that they’ve seen birds nest on the top of their funnel in Minnesota. Scholz said that while the Nature Conservancy project is the company’s largest commercially installed unit to date, SheerWind has five 200-kilowatt projects in production for this year and is designing a two-megawatt model for 2016 and a five-megawatt model shortly thereafter. She said the majority of SheerWind’s customers are located in low-wind areas where traditional turbines can’t operate.

On the Palmyra Atoll, the combined power from the 185 solar panels and the SheerWind system will be around 100 kilowatts — enough to power more than a dozen American homes. Over the course of six weeks this spring some 30 volunteers joined the Nature Conservancy crew to install the solar panels and wind turbine. They also put in a solar hot water heater and a battery system for storing sunlight for nighttime use.

Susan White, project leader on the Pacific reefs for the Fish and Wildlife Service, told ThinkProgress that activities on Palmyra will include on-the-ground restoration projects such as restoring seabirds’ nesting habitat and removing invasive plants and animals.

“The successful work at Palmyra is a model to be replicated by the global conservation and scientific communities,” she said.

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HawaiiNational Wildlife RefugeNature ConservancyPalmyra AtollRenewable EnergySolar PowerWind Power

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Why Climate Change Is A Women’s Rights Issue

This week, governments from around the world are convening at the United Nations headquarters to negotiate important pieces of the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda, a plan that builds on preexisting anti-poverty targets adopted by countries around the world. With negotiations underway, more than 600 organizations are taking to social media and sending representatives to the halls of the UN to remind delegates of an issue often overlooked in sustainable development: the role of women’s rights, especially when it comes to climate change.

“A lot of people do not understand the links between women’s rights and climate change,” Eleanor Blomstrom, program director at the Women’s Environment & Development Organization, told ThinkProgress. “We often talk about it in terms of gender gaps and climate change impacts, and those [climate] impacts exacerbate existing [gender] inequalities.”

We think that you can’t attain sustainable development without gender equality

In 2009, the United Nations Population Fund took a deep look at the relationship between women and climate change in its annual report, concluding that women “are among the most vulnerable to climate change, partly because in many countries

they make up the larger share of the agricultural work force and partly because they tend to have access to fewer income-earning opportunities.” Moreover, the brunt of housework and family-care often falls on women, limiting their ability to quickly adapt to extreme and sudden weather-related disasters — statistically, the report said, natural disasters tend to kill more women than men.

In poor and developing countries, women are often charged with the task of providing critical resources — mainly food and water — for their family. On average, 63 percent of rural households depend on women to obtain drinking water for the home. According to the UN, women in Sub-Saharan Africa spend an average of about 40 billion hours a year collecting water. As climate change decreases water availability, the amount of time dedicated to collecting water might increase, leaving girls with less time to go to school and reinforcing the cycle of poverty.

Women also make up the majority of the agricultural workforce in many developing countries, leaving them especially vulnerable to climate impacts like soil degradation and extreme weather. In Sub-Saharan Africa, women are responsible for 60 to 80 percent of food that is grown, while in Asia, they are responsible for around 50 percent, including 50 to 90 percent of rice cultivation.

Access to land and land ownership is another issue that bridges both women’s rights and sustainable development, according to Blomstrom. Globally, women tend to own far less land than men — but even when women do own land, some development projects still favor corporate interests over women’s rights.

“In many places women have access to land, but sometimes sustainable development projects that don’t take a gender perspective will take women off of that land and remove their rights to use it, or discriminatory laws will be brought to bear, which then impacts their ability to raise food for their families,” Blomstrom said. “There may be a sustainable development project that is a big sustainable fix, and instead of supporting women in their work it will make the land more valuable to a corporation.”

To combat gender inequality and climate change, Blomstrom said, it’s important that proposed sustainable technologies — and proposed energy systems — be both “gender responsive and environmentally sound.”

A lot of people do not understand the links between women’s rights and climate change

“What is often most valuable are decentralized systems that are community based, as opposed to something like nuclear power,” Blomstrom said. And while it’s helpful for sustainable technology to be designed by women formally educated in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), Blomstrom also explained that women without formal education, who have worked in a community their entire lives, can be useful resources because they often have unique knowledge about the community and local ecosystem.

“We think that you can’t attain sustainable development without gender equality,” Blomstrom said. “But action needs to be taken toward both at the same time — you can’t wait for one before working on the other.”

Blomstrom admits that women’s rights and the environment aren’t issues that are typically linked in policy discussions, but notes that forward progress is being made.

“In terms of climate policy making, there is certainly not parity,” she said. “At the same time, in developed countries there is a growing number of women entering STEM fields, but the question is, are those women also entering fields like sustainable energy? As it stands, women still tend to be underrepresented.”

Recently, there has been a small but steady increase in the representation of women that participate — as delegates and in leading roles — at climate negotiations. From 2008 to 2014, women delegates representing nations at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change rose from 33 percent to 38 percent, while women’s participation as Heads of Delegations increased from 18 percent to 26 percent.

“You can’t guarantee that a woman in a leadership position will make a decision based on gender-equality or low-carbon pathways, but it is still important to have women in decision-making positions when we’re talking about something as important as sustainable development in the next 15 or 20 years,” Blomstrom said.

While much of the international community is looking ahead to the UN climate talks that will take place in Paris later this year, Blomstrom and other women’s organizations are also focusing on the current Post-2015 talks, which are set to be finalized in September. The Post-2015 plan will go into effect in 2016, while the legal agreements of the Paris talks won’t begin to be implemented until 2020 — meaning that the Post-2015 agenda could have a more immediate impact on how women’s rights and the environment are handled moving forward.

As it stands, Blomstrom says that the Post-2015 Development Agenda doesn’t include strong links between women’s rights and climate change, something that she hopes the negotiators amend before finalizing the agenda.

“There are a lot of opportunities to jump start national action plans and have a global plan that can see how we’re progressing in terms of women’s rights and gender equality and on the issue of climate change,” Blomstrom said.

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Climate ChangeFeminismUnited Nations

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Catholic And Evangelical Leaders Call On Lawmakers To Fight Climate Change

Close to 100 faith leaders are calling for lawmakers to act on climate change, urging elected officials to heed the words of Pope Francis and pass legislation that can help slow the advance of global warming.

On Tuesday, a group of religious leaders took out a full-page advertisement on the back page of Politico to offer resounding support for Pope Francis and his recently-released encyclical on the environment, a landmark work of Catholic teaching which argued that governments have a moral obligation to address human-caused climate change.

“As Catholic and evangelical leaders, we are deeply inspired by Pope Francis’ encyclical addressing our shared responsibility to be prudent stewards of creation,” the ad reads. “As citizens of the most powerful nation in human history, we have a unique responsibility to promote sustainable development, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and build a thriving culture of life that protects human dignity.”

In @Politico:
Nearly 100 Catholic and Evangelical leaders agree–We have a moral obligation to act on climate change. pic.twitter.com/9Jpcqes9cC

— Faith in Public Life (@BoldFaithType) June 23, 2015

The advertisement listed around 90 prominent faith leaders, particularly Catholic college presidents such as Villanova University President Rev. Peter M. Donohue, as well as two former heads of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic nun and leader of the Catholic social justice lobby NETWORK. People from other faiths were also listed, such as Rev. Mitchell C. Hescox, President & CEO Evangelical Environmental Network, Brian McLaren, prominent Christian author, Jim Wallis, an evangelical pastor who heads up the faith-based advocacy organization Sojourners, and famed protestant theologian Walter Brugemann.

“We urge elected officials to reflect on the pope’s words and recognize that climate change, poverty and extreme inequality –- interconnected issues that can’t be understood in isolation –- are defining challenges of our day,” the leaders argued. “In a spirit of solidarity, we encourage presidential candidates, Members of Congress and governors who have raised doubts about the seriousness of climate change to consider the moral dimensions of this issue.”

Although the religious leaders claim inspiration from Francis’ encyclical, faith-based environmentalism is anything but new. Catholics have been working for years to protect the earth, as have other religious organizations such as Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, Interfaith Power and Light, and Evangelical Environmental Network. Various Christian denominations have also taken environmental stances, such as the Church of England, which divested from fossil fuels and tar sands earlier this year.

Still, the move appears to be geared toward riding the energy sparked by Francis’ encyclical, a nearly 184-page document that made a robust, faith-based case for protecting the earth and taking action on climate change. In addition to surprisingly vigorous discussions of climate science and environmental issues, the letter specifically refuted old conservative religious arguments that God gave humanity the earth to exploit at will. Instead, Francis encouraged his fellow Catholics and other Christians to be good stewards of the earth, especially since the people most impacted by climate change are the poor and dispossessed.

“It is important to read the biblical texts in their context, with the right hermeneutics, and remember that these invite us to ‘cultivate and care for’ (Gen. 2:15) the garden of the world,” the encyclical reads. “While ‘cultivate’ means to plow or work a plot, ‘to care for’ means to protect, heal, preserve, conserve, to watch over.”

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Creation CareEncyclicalPope Francis

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How Do You Get People To Care About Climate Change? Talk About Public Health

“Numbers numb, stories sell.”

That was the message that Edward Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, championed before a crowd of public health experts during the White House Public Health and Climate Change Summit Tuesday.

“We don’t deal well with numbers, it tends to suspend our sense of emotion, but we respond very, very well to stories,” Maibach continued. “Individual stories will almost always trump a litany of statistics.”

Maibach was trying to answer a difficult question posed to a panel of public health, business and climate communication experts: How do we use the vast amount of data and tools that already exist to get people to care about climate change?

The panel, which in addition to Maibach included Ruth Etzel of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lance Pierce of CDP North America, and Joe Romm of Climate Progress, explored various ways to strengthen the national conversation about climate change. The main takeaways, the panelists said time and time again, was to make the message as personal as possible.

“At the end of the day, it does come down to people. It does come down to being able to make that connection to the fact that it’s about, in many ways, the children, the people that are vulnerable, and the impact on them,” Pierce, whose organization works with businesses to combat climate change, said. “It’s a big challenge, just like there may be no one climate solution silver bullet, there may be no one messaging bullet either.”

Both Maibach and Etzel underscored the importance of using the lens of public health when communicating the potential impacts of climate change.

“We care deeply about our health, all Americans do. We care about our own health, or children’s health, our parents’ health,” Maibach said, noting that public health can help avoid the political polarization that often plagues conversations about climate change.

“Unlike the issue of climate change, which quite regrettably has become highly polarized in America, the issue of health is not polarized,” he said.

The panel’s discussion comes on the heels of two reports linking climate change to public health. The first, a comprehensive report published Monday from the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, said that “tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.” A different report, released Monday by the EPA, found that the United States could avoid 57,000 deaths in 2100 if the world limited global warming to 2°C.

Maibach called communicating climate change through public health issues “a huge opportunity.”

“My hope is that today is an important milestone in public health communication,” he said, “to help people understand that climate change is a major threat to our health and a major opportunity for us to build a better america and build a better world where we can all live more healthfully.”

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Climate ChangeHealthWhite House

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A ‘Bunch Of Whores': One Punk Band’s Uncensored Campaign Against Fracking

As the lead guitarist and singer of punk band Anti-Flag, Justin Sane is known for advocating against war overseas. But in the band’s latest release, the war Sane wants to stop is happening on the borders of his own hometown.

“They sit inside the kitchen, broken, in despair, their livestock sick or dead, their water a toxic cocktail,” Sane sings on “Gasland Terror,” his depiction of the fracking boom in Western Pennsylvania. A Pittsburgh native, Sane sees the sudden influx of natural gas drilling as poison, an infiltration of what he calls “criminal corporations.”

“When they’ve made the money and there’s nothing else to take, they’re going to leave,” he said, drawing a parallel to the fall of Pittsburgh’s steel industry in the early 1980s. “They’re going to leave us with broken communities, with pollution, with all the kinds of problems that fracking brings in.”

Gasland Terror is not a new song, but it is part of a new album called Buy This Fracking Album, an anti-fracking compilation featuring tracks from wildly unsimilar artists like Bonnie Raitt, Michael Franti, and Natalie Merchant. Released Tuesday, the album also features the last-known live recording of Pete Seeger before his death in 2014.

In a phone interview with ThinkProgress, Anti-Flag’s Sane talked about the new album, along with his personal experiences with the fracking boom; his opinion on Pennsylvania politicians and President Obama; and, naturally, his views on the Confederate flag.

EA: You guys have been playing music for 20 years. But for the un-initiated ClimateProgress reader, could you tell me a little bit about Anti-Flag and the political statements you’ve made in the past?

JS: We came out of a punk rock scene and community that really stresses empathy, really stresses caring about more than just yourself. That includes people, that includes the planet — from my perspective that includes all living things.

Part of that point of view is looking around and seeing that the economic system of capitalism is completely unjust. It seems pretty obvious that we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a corporatocracy. We have corporations and a billionaire class that have pretty much bought our government. And that’s something that, particularly with this record, we were really rallying against.

EA: There are a ton of environmental issues out there. There’s vegetarianism, climate change, Arctic drilling — fracking seems to be the one that’s got celebrities up in arms. Why do you think that is?

JS: Fracking for me is a no-brainer. It’s another dirty source of energy. Our oceans are becoming acidic because of human-made environmental waste. It’s so obvious that we have alternatives out there that are clean. That’s the direction we need to move in. And fracking is just taking us from one dirty source of energy to another source. That is the polar opposite direction that humans need to be moving.

For me, that’s the main reason. Let’s get away from this dirty source of energy. It’s literally destroying our planet. There will come a time when the planet will not be able to take any more pollution, and people are going to have to decide: Do we want future generations to actually be able to live? Or are we okay with having this toxic world where eventually we’re going to kill off all the life out of it?

EA: To play devil’s advocate, there are people who say that, at least fracking helps us get away from dirtier sources of energy like coal. It’s lower carbon emitting. It’s a way to transition away from dirtier fuels.

JS: But it’s not clean. Whether it’s global warming, or polluting our water sources, or the oceans: There is a negative that comes out of oil, out of fracking, out of burning coal. There’s always going to be a negative with these dirty sources. Fracking is just a different negative. We’re stealing from Peter to pay Paul.

We don’t need any more transitional dirty fuels — we just need to go clean. Germany is a great example of a company that’s doing that. It’s a huge country. The United States has more resources than any other country in the world. It’s incredible what we could do — there just has to be a political will. And it has to be a will that comes from the people.

EA: There are a bunch of different tones on the album. For example, Michael Franti’s song talks about wanting to see the “flowers blooming” and “boom boxes booming” …

JS: I have to interrupt and say Michael Franti is the coolest dude in the world. I have such a man crush on Michael Franti. He is so cool. And he is a huge human being. He’s a giant guy! He’s got these big feet and his personality is massive, and he’s got this incredible, radiant glow about the guy. He’s just so posi-core. I want to hang out around that guy all day. Like, man, we need more Michael Frantis in the world.

EA: That’s awesome! I loved him when I was in college. Anyway, his song: Flowers blooming. Boombox booming. Yours, the tone is a little more … damning. Why?

JS: Well, we’re from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We’re located in the heart of the Marcellus Shale world. And I’ve just seen it — I’ve seen the environmental devastation that [fracking] creates. And I’ve seen how it harms people. And it’s completely unnecessary.

Anti-Flag started as an anti-war band more than anything. We get a lot of veterans come to our shows who served overseas, and they’re disillusioned. They realize that the people they were sent to fight and kill have much more in common with them than the politicians who sent them to do the fighting and killing. They feel like suckers.

I feel the same way about the issue of fracking, and that’s why the song is damning. I consider these corporations who pollute our planet, who literally ruin people’s lives, I consider them criminal. And that’s why the song has a feel of condemnation. Because I really believe that these people are criminals. I’m really hopeful that someday there will be a day when corporations and CEOs will be held criminally responsible for the actions they’ve taken that knowingly destroy the planet.

EA: Can you talk a little more about being from an area where fracking is prolific?

JS: Because I live in that area, I know guys who are welders working on the rigs. I know guys who operate heavy machinery, manufacturing the pads that they put the wells on.

Those people are just average working class people trying to put a dime in their pocket. I know some of them struggle with the fact that the work they do has the potential to lead to some environmental damage that could harm human life. I think a lot of people care about that.

But they’re living in the reality of the world, where they’re trying to feed their kids and put a roof over their heads. I’m not talking about those people [in the song]. The people I’m talking about are those who have the capacity to put enough resources in place that the whole industry can exist. The reality is, those same workers could be in the green industry. They could be working out in solar fields.

EA: The oil industry makes the morality and empathy arguments too, though. That fracking in Western Pennsylvania is helping farming communities that previously hadn’t been able to make money.

JS: I think you could make the same argument by saying they would much more welcome green energy on their land. They would more welcome a well that is not going to catch on fire, or pollute their water table and effectively destroy their home.

And again, that could be possible. That’s why we have to look, especially in Pennsylvania, at people like Ed Rendell, the former governor. We have to look at Tom Corbett, the former governor. We have to look at our current governor, Tom Wolf.

These people are owned by the fracking industry. They’re just a bunch of whores.

EA: Even Wolf?

JS: He supports it. He’s not against it. In New York state, the governor outlawed fracking. In Pennsylvania, Wolf’s not talking about that. He’s talking about maybe putting a little more of a tax on them. So, from my perspective, if they’re not against it, they’re for it.

You can’t only look at industry executives. You have to look at the politicians who support them as well. You know how I talked about the idea that some of these people I believe should be brought up on criminal charges — I would include those politicians right along with them.

EA: How do you feel President Obama has been handling these issues?

JS: It’s pretty painful. I don’t know if President Obama is well-intentioned or not. He might be. But I think he’s in the pockets of the corporations, and that’s who he represents. Look at this trade negotiation — what he wants, what’s in that.

When I look at Obama, I just see a corporate whore. What else can I say. He’s another corporate-bought politician, put into office by bankers on Wall Street and big money donors.

EA: Last thing. I just figured since I was talking to a founding member of Anti-Flag, I should ask you about the Confederate flag, since it’s such a big topic right now. Are you anti- … flag?

JS: Badum-ching! I’m anti-every flag. Especially a flag that represented a racist patriarchy and the Confederate south. Get over it, people.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Scathing Review Says Nicaraguan Canal Project Could Offer ‘Severe Threat To Water Quality’

Incomplete and implausible. Scientifically indefensible. Not realistic or feasible. Of insufficient quantity and quality.

These are some of the phrases used by a group of scientists to describe the environmental impact assessment (EIS) for a massive proposed canal through Nicaragua.

The independent panel of scientists had wide-ranging concerns about the validity of the EIS and the environmental safety of the canal, which would run from the Caribbean through Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific. The canal is being developed by the Hong Kong Nicaraguan Canal Development Group (HKND). HKND, which commissioned the EIS, began preliminary construction on the $50-billion project late last year.

“This is an unprecedented project,” Todd Crowl, director of Florida International University’s Southeastern Environmental Research Center and one of the reviewers of the EIS, told ThinkProgress. “I felt like I had an ethical responsibility to get the data out.”

Once it’s completed, the canal will serve to connect the Atlantic and Pacific for shipping lanes. Some critics have argued that the recently expanded Panama Canal is sufficient and that the northern version will not be economically viable.

This is an unprecedented project. I felt like I had an ethical responsibility to get the data out

Among the 15 different environmental issues the group identified, it was, of course, water — lack of water, quality of water, salination of water — that will bear the brunt of the impact. But the canal might also threaten rare, local wildlife — such as jaguars and spider monkeys — raise public health issues, and jeopardize the food chain. Practically no component of the environment was fully addressed by the EIS, the scientists found.

For example, the eastern coast of Nicaragua, which the canal would cut through, is a migratory corridor.

“You can’t put a bridge over it,” Crowl said. “There is no way to mitigate for stuff like that.” The firm responsible for the EIS, Environmental Resources Management, did not consider the corridor in its evaluation.

“There were a whole bunch of red flags,” Crowl said. “There is probably not enough water. If you couple that with droughts, which we’ve been having, and you couple that with climate change… that’s a really big issue.”

Nicaragua has been struggling with droughts in the past few years. As of earlier this month, much of the western part of the country was in a state of abnormal dryness.

Lake Nicaragua, as the name suggests, is a critical part of the country’s economic and environmental profile. Nearly 100 miles long and up to 45 miles across, the lake provides for food, transportation, and recreation in Nicaragua. It is one of the largest fresh water reservoirs in the Americas. The proposed canal will link the lake with two oceans, via a series of locks dredged out through existing rivers. Water is needed for the canal to work, so if water tables are down, the canal could stop functioning — or salt water from the oceans could infiltrate the system.

How the canal company plans to address these potential issues remains unknown. Beyond a project description document, which refers to the environment only 18 times over 46 pages (i.e.: “Treated effluent would meet international and Nicaragua standards and would be discharged in an environmentally acceptable manner”), information surrounding the proposed canal has been slim. In fact, the project has been widely criticized for its secrecy, with one spokesperson quitting in frustration. It’s unclear what, if any, environmental mitigation will be conducted, when the project will be fully underway, or what compensation displaced locals can expect.

Neither the Nicaraguan government nor the development company, HKND, wanted a review of the EIS, Crowl said. In fact, his is the only group that has been able to review the environmental components, and they didn’t have access to EIS chapters on social or economic impacts.

Crowl didn’t blame Environmental Resources Management for the insufficient study. The consultants were given only a year and a half to complete their work. According to guidelines by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, flood assessments should incorporate data taken over a number of years.

“The whole thing got truncated,” Crowl said. “There was no certainty at all in the data, as far as we can tell.”

The project description predicts the canal will be complete in 2020. But, for now, there is no certainty in that, either.

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CanalCentral AmericaEcologyFlorida International UniversityLake NicaraguaNicaraguaPacificSedimentSoutheastern Environmental Research CenterWater

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The Hidden Mental Health Impacts Of Climate Change

The last few months have been unnerving for Laurie Nadel, who lost her Long Beach, New York home in 2012 during the violent onslaught of Superstorm Sandy.

“Although I was calm during the storm itself, in recent months I have had several flashback dreams in which I am standing in my old house as the water breaks in through the floors and the walls,’’ she said. “I wake up screaming or crying.’’

As a professional psychotherapist — and one who runs support groups for survivors of Sandy — Nadel recognizes what is happening as a delayed anxiety reaction not uncommon among those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

“It can take three to five years for the psyche to metabolize the overwhelming horror and helplessness of a catastrophic event,’’ she said. “Heavy wind shrieking outside my window triggers gastrointestinal spasms,’’ she said, adding: “I wish my psyche was done metabolizing it by now.”

We expect that over 200 million Americans will have some mental health problem because of climate change

What Nadel has been experiencing is a thus far little-acknowledged but serious consequence of climate change, the emotional toll carried by survivors in the aftermath of extreme weather events and other natural disasters. These destructive and often deadly events can prompt persistent and often debilitating mental anguish among their victims.

If the planet keeps warming at its current pace, experts predict a steep increase in the number of Americans — and others around the world — who will suffer mental anguish as a result of climate-induced events, such as hurricanes, heat waves, drought, and flooding.

“It will get very bad,’’ said Elizabeth Haase, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who is working on a documentary about the mental health impact of climate change. In this country alone, “we expect that over 200 million Americans will have some mental health problem because of climate change.”

The authors of a new landmark report in the Lancet described mental health disorders as among the most dangerous of the “indirect” health effects of global warming.

The report, which was published Tuesday by the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, said that victims of natural disasters often suffer elevated levels of anxiety, depression and PTSD, as well as “a distressing sense of loss, known as solastalgia, that people experience when their land is damaged and they lose amenity and opportunity.’’ Moreover, “these effects will fall disproportionately on those who are already vulnerable, especially for indigenous peoples and those living in low resource settings,’’ the authors wrote. These effects not only include the emotional reaction to physical illness and destruction of property, but involuntary “displacement” that forces people to move elsewhere in order to survive.

The Lancet report said that experts already have identified such reactions in people who have experienced floods, and even among those suffering from slow-developing events, such as prolonged droughts. The report noted that emotional impacts include chronic distress and even increased incidence of suicide. “Even in high-income regions where the humanitarian crisis might be less, the impact on the local economy, damaged homes and economic losses may persist for years after,’’ the Lancet report said.

Similarly, an earlier report released in 2012 by the National Wildlife Federation’s Climate Education Program and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — which focused only on the mental health effects of climate change in the United States — predicted a sharp rise in mental and social disorders resulting from climate change-related events in the coming years. These effects included depression and anxiety, PTSD, substance abuse, suicide, and widespread outbreaks of violence.

The NWF report said the elderly, the poor, members of the military, and children were among the most vulnerable. It compared the climate anxiety children are experiencing today to the stress suffered by American and Russian children over the nuclear bomb threat of the 1950s Cold War era. Moreover, it said that the nation’s counselors, trauma specialists, and first responders currently are ill-equipped to cope.

“When you have an environmental insult, the burden of mental health disease is far greater than the physical,” said Steven Shapiro, a Baltimore psychologist and former chair of the program on climate change for Psychologists for Social Responsibility. “I am truly dissatisfied with the role mental health professionals of all ilks have been playing in climate change issues in our nation, and beyond. If we don’t develop collectivist means to deter the harmful processes stemming from how our minds operate, we are in trouble,” he added.

Right now, we are all living with the dread that something bad could come randomly, suddenly, or insidiously

Compounding the problem is the fact that many Americans also are in denial about the health consequences of global warming. A national survey conducted in October, 2014 by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that seven in 10 respondents said they had given the issue little or no thought. Moreover, with the exception of respiratory problems and extreme weather-related injuries and death, fewer than 5 percent identified any of the other health consequences of climate change, including mental health.

“We don’t like to talk about mental health in general,’’ Haase said. “We don’t like losers. When we see someone suffering, no matter how unjust the cause, we tend to think ‘they must have done something to contribute.'” Hasse added, however, that this is beginning to change as people start to have “direct experiences of climate change.”

Experts have paid considerable attention to the physical results of climate-related events, but “we must not forget that people who are physically affected by climate change will also be suffering from the emotional fallout of what has happened to them,’’ said Lise Van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist who co-authored the NWF report. “And the psychological damage is not only over what is happening now, but what is likely to happen in the future.’’

To be sure, many people already are feeling some pre-traumatic climate anxiety, according to Haase.

“Right now, we are all living with the dread that something bad could come randomly, suddenly, or insidiously,’’ she said. “We have many models for this kind of anxiety: things like living under a military dictatorship or with domestic violence, living with the risk of a cancer relapse or the outbreak of a disease like the Ebola virus, or living close to a nuclear reactor, a wildfire area, or, as in the case of Iceland, chronic volcanic activity. With chronic pre-traumatic anxiety, there are things you could do, but you feel powerless and there are forces defeating you. It causes helplessness, depression, and is more likely to pit people against each other than join them in common purpose.”

As a result, some people engage in self-protection, such as hoarding money or living for the moment, or unproductive or obsessive behaviors, Haase said.

“One of my patients compulsively reads about climate change, stays up late with intrusive thoughts of climate events that could hurt him or his loved ones, enacting obsessive-compulsive rituals, such as making to-do lists to try to plan for this future,’’ she said. “Another sabotages one relationship after another by refusing his lovers children because he could not bear to bring children into a life of such suffering.”

A healthier response to pre-climate anxiety — any anxiety, really — is to suppress excess fear, yet feel enough of it to be vigilant, Haase said. “In Iceland, every citizen lives with the daily risk of a major volcanic eruption,” she said. “It frightens them enough to monitor volcanic activity every day, but they suppress enough fear to take this information the way we take the weather report.”

However, if the world’s nations fail to mitigate the growing dangers of a warming planet, “we will have to deal with the reality that we are living in unpredictable, unstable and volatile times when it comes to climate change,’’ Nadel said.

Otherwise, “with climate change comes everything else that leads to depression and anxiety,’’ Haase said. “This means possible loss of your home, change of your job…health issues. People have trouble thinking through the…steps to get to the awareness of this: ‘I will lose things.’ ‘I will struggle to replace things.’ ‘Other systems in my life will fail.’ ‘And my stress level will rise.'”

Marlene Cimons, a former Los Angeles Times Washington reporter, is a freelance writer who specializes in science, health, and the environment.

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Climate ChangeHurricane SandyMental Health

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New Research Warns Of Catastrophic Food Shortages Due To Unchecked Climate Change

New research supported by the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office and insurer Lloyd’s of London finds that, absent major changes, humanity risks a catastrophic collapse in its ability to feed itself by mid-century, due in significant part to human-caused climate change.

Last year, the United Nations’ “highly conservative” IPCC climate panel warned that humanity is risking a “breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes” on its current path of unrestricted carbon pollution. Many studies in the last 12 months have strengthened the scientific case (see this, for instance).

The new research is from the Global Resource Observatory, a project of Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) partnering with the UK government’s Foreign Office; Lloyds of London; a “coalition of leaders from business, politics and civil society”; the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries; and both the Africa and Asian Development Banks.

The GSI group does business-as-usual forecasting using system dynamics modeling — arguably the only type of modeling that treats feedbacks and time delays well enough to even approximate what is coming. GSI Director Aled Jones explains that the group “ran the model forward to the year 2040.” The results were stunning:

“The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”

The “good” news: That only happens if humanity doesn’t actually do any serious planning for this outcome — and doesn’t do any serious reacting as it plays out. But homo sapiens isn’t a “brainless frog,” are we?

The GSI group also does the scenario planning underpinning a new Lloyd’s of London report “Food System Shock: The insurance impacts of acute disruption to global food supply.”

Lloyd’s notes that “we must more than double global agricultural production by 2050,” according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. The global insurer further notes, “As the pressure on our global food supply rises, so too does its vulnerability to sudden acute disruptions.” Lloyd’s cites research concluding the food problem “is further exacerbated by the growing issue of water scarcity, which is accelerating at such a pace that two-thirds of the world’s population could live under water stress conditions by 2025.” And it notes that climate change makes everything more challenging, especially because of “increases in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and wildfires, coupled with a rise in conditions amenable to the spread and persistence of agricultural pests and diseases.”

In the scenario Lloyd’s examines, extreme weather shocks around the world cause a 10 percent production decline in maize, 11 percent decline in soybeans, and 7 percent in both wheat and rice. The report notes, “These magnitudes are within the boundaries of historical production shocks for these crops, but the concurrent and global nature of these losses has not occurred in modern history.” It is the increased likelihood of concurrent or simultaneous disasters that makes human-caused climate change so potentially catastrophic and difficult to deal with.

Here is Lloyd’s summary of the impact of this shock:

Wheat, maize and soybean prices increase to quadruple the levels seen around 2000. Rice prices increase 500% as India starts to try to buy from smaller exporters following restrictions imposed by Thailand. Public agricultural commodity stocks increase 100% in share value, agricultural chemical stocks rise 500% and agriculture engineering supply chain stocks rise 150%. Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose 10% of their value; US stock markets follow and lose 5% of their value.

These food price hikes are in line with a 2012 Oxfam study, which projected that global warming and related extreme weather will combine to create devastating food price shocks in the coming decades, with the potential for corn prices to increase a staggering 500 percent by 2030.

As for the political impacts, those are a straightforward extension of what has already happened. As The Economist explained back in February 2011 during Arab Spring, “The high cost of food is one reason that protesters took to the streets in Tunisia and Egypt.”

So how likely is this scenario to play out? Lloyd’s of London doesn’t give a specific probability, but notes chillingly:

“What is striking about the scenario is that the probability of occurrence is estimated as significantly higher than the benchmark return period of 1:200 years applied for assessing insurers’ ability to pay claims against extreme events.”

So we can sit on our hands waiting for this scenario to play out in real life — or we can act strongly and swiftly with the foresight science gives us to 1) slash carbon pollution ASAP to minimize its chances of occurring and 2) start doing serious adaptation to minimize its impact when it does. It isn’t really that hard a choice.

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Climate ChangeFood Insecurity

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Why Researchers Are Sounding The Alarm About Climate Change’s Health Impacts

Climate change and air pollution make a dangerous pair.

That’s one of the findings of a report published Monday from the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, a group that represents a collaboration between European and Chinese climate scientists and geographers, social and environmental scientists, biodiversity experts, energy policy and health experts, and other professionals. The report, which laid out the health risks of climate change and makes policy recommendations, called air pollution among the most serious of the indirect health effects of global warming.

Here’s why that is: gases that result from the burning of fossil fuels pollute the air, and cause global warming. At the same time, rising temperatures worsen air pollution by increasing ground level ozone, a chemical reaction between sunlight and emissions and the main component of smog.

We are seeing the impacts of climate on lung health, and that is a huge concern

The resulting dirty air — a combination of ozone and fine particles — is very bad for humans, especially children whose lungs are still developing, as well as for the elderly and people with asthma, heart disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD). Experts even believe it hurts healthy people as well.

“Exposure to air pollution has been directly linked to worsening respiratory disease, and not just in asthmatics,’’ said Jeffrey Demain, director of the Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Center of Alaska. “Pollution has a direct impact, there is no question. We’re seeing a rise in childhood asthma and adult onset asthma too, and increases in COPD, which is becoming a tremendous problem in this country. People are developing it who never smoked, or never had family members who smoked.’’

Society already is familiar with the direct health impacts of climate change through extreme weather events like heat waves, drought, floods, and extreme storms, which can cause death and injury. But indirect effects like air pollution can be just as risky, and will worsen in years to come if nothing is done.

“We are seeing the impacts of climate on lung health, and that is a huge concern,’’ said Janice E. Nolen, assistant vice president for national policy at the American Lung Association. “We are very worried about the threat it poses today, and will pose in the future.’’

Climate-related flooding also creates mold, another serious trigger that can impair breathing. And climate-induced drought increases the risk of wildfires, which produce a staggering amount of fine air particles from smoke and ash that damage human lungs.

“A changing climate will increase heat waves and air pollution such as from forest fires and tropospheric ozone,” said Michelle Bell, professor of environmental health at the Yale University school of forestry and environmental studies. “These are not new problems but an exacerbation of existing public health challenges. For instance, over 100 million people in the United States live in areas exceeding EPA’s health-based standards for ozone today.’’

Dangers For The Most Vulnerable
[image error]

In this Tuesday, March 31, 2015 photo, an elderly Indian woman cooks using firewood at her home at Gobhali village on the outskirts of Gauhati, India.

CREDIT: AP Photo/ Anupam Nath

Abroad, particularly in low-income countries, an estimated three billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and simple stoves burning biomass — wood, animal dung and crop waste — and coal. These cooking methods contribute to household air pollution and an estimated 4 million premature deaths, according to the World Health Organization.

Children, both in the United States and abroad, are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of air pollution, since their young lungs are still developing, according to W. James Gauderman, professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. “Children are outdoors more than adults, they are more physically active and they breathe more per unit size of their bodies, so the impact on them will be greater than on adults,’’ he said.

Gauderman is co-author of a landmark 2004 study showing that children raised in parts of Los Angeles with poor air quality suffered significant losses in lung function. More recently in March, he authored a follow-up study that showed health improvements among children exposed to better air quality.

“Growing up in a polluted area is worse than growing up in a non-polluted area,’’ Gauderman said. “But if the air gets cleaner, lung health improves, although even those who move to less polluted areas during childhood don’t entirely recover. Flash forward: if the air quality gets worse over time, we have sound scientific evidence that you can expect increases in chronic respiratory conditions for kids, including asthma, bronchitis, reduced lung development – and in all children, not just those with existing respiratory conditions. Asthmatic kids would be particularly hard hit. If it gets worse, children’s health will suffer.’’

To be sure, air quality has improved dramatically in many American cities due to the Clean Air Act of 1970. Nevertheless, the effects of climate are impairing continued progress, according to Nolen.

“Climate change is creating conditions making it harder for us to clean up the air and reduce pollution,” she said.

Every year the American Lung Association compiles a “State of the Air’’ report, ranking cities and evaluating whether their air is improving or worsening.

“We found great improvement in year-round particles and ozone, but this year saw an enormous spike of days with high levels,’’ Nolen said. “We had six cities with the worst that we have ever seen, and that is an indicator of high particle levels, especially out West, suffering from heat, drought and wildfires — extreme weather events.’’

Climate change is creating conditions making it harder for us to clean up the air and reduce pollution

While the United States still faces clean air challenges, the situation for other countries is far more daunting, experts say. “We’ve still got a problem, but other countries have a much larger problem,’’ said Norman Edelman, senior consultant for scientific affairs at the American Lung Association. “The big ones are China and India, all of Southeast Asia, in fact, where the health burden of air pollution is absolutely enormous. Air pollution throughout the world is far greater than in the United States and is taking a far greater total on health.’’

Higher pollen levels — another result of climate change, as some pollen-producing plants thrive in increased carbon dioxide — intense storms and flooding that create damp moldy homes, drought that causes wildfires, and the urban heat island effect, in which cities are hotter than surrounding rural areas, “are all playing significant roles in the development of respiratory diseases,’’ Demain said.

An estimated 18.7 million American adults and 6.8 million children suffer from asthma, a number that is steadily increasing, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which says cases of asthma grew by 4.3 million people between 2001 and 2009. If there are no changes in regulatory controls, the CDC predicts up to 4,300 additional premature deaths annually in the United States by the year 2050 from combined ozone and particle health effects.

‘Immediate Gains For Society’

In the United Kingdom, air pollution from the power sector accounts for an estimated 3,800 respiratory deaths annually, while air pollution in China results in 7.4 times greater premature deaths from easily inhalable fine particles than in the European Union, according to the Lancet Commission report, which was published in the British medical journal the Lancet. Also, the current concentrations of particulate matter in the air have cut about 40 months from average life expectancy in China, but “this loss could be cut by half by 2050 if climate mitigation strategies were implemented,’’ the Lancet authors write.

Emissions from coal burning power plants, in particular older plants that have not undergone emission-curbing retrofitting, “are the major source of particulate pollution, which is the big killer,’’ Edelman said. “They cause more deaths than any other form of air pollution. They are very, very fine particles that come out of the smokestacks of coal burning power plants, and they cause heart attacks and deaths.’’

The Lancet report calls for a rapid phase out of coal from the global energy mix in order to protect respiratory and cardiovascular health, urging that society replace the 1,200 coal-fired plants currently proposed for construction globally with healthier, cleaner energy alternatives. Targeting air pollution from the transport, agriculture, and energy sectors, with the aim of reducing the health burden of particulate matter and short-lived climate pollutants, would yield “immediate gains for society,’’ according to The Lancet commission.

“Actions that seek to mitigate climate change have the potential to be beneficial to health, both directly and indirectly,’’ The Lancet authors write. “The potential health benefits of switching to low-carbon technologies include a reduction in carbon emissions from power generation, improved indoor air quality through clean household cooking technologies …and lowered particulate matter exposure from low-emission transport.’’

Many lung experts believe climate change already is having an adverse impact on human health. The American Thoracic Society recently conducted a survey among its members, asking about climate change and its effects on their patients. Seventy-seven percent of those responding reported increases in the severity of chronic respiratory disease as a result of climate change-related air pollution.

“How much does climate change make air pollution worse? We believe it does so to a substantial degree,’’ said the American Lung Association’s Edelman. “It’s still conjecture. But it’s rational conjecture. And it’s worth talking about. Climate change is like this huge aircraft carrier. Once you decide to turn it around, it may be too large and too long to be able to do so.’’

Marlene Cimons, a former Los Angeles Times Washington reporter, is a freelance writer who specializes in science, health, and the environment.

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Air PollutionClimate ChangeHealth

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