Climate solutions are facing a roadblock, due to conspiracy theories
Bright Better: Sustainability in Art Teacher Training and a Climate Solutions Jobs Work for a Chemically-Obscured Banana Fiber
Carolyn: For a lot of my students, it might be a little bit surprising to discuss sustainability or climate justice in an art class. Making art about it helps the process. It has been interesting to see how students can express themselves through art and words, and then articulate that through words as well.
Do students tell you that what you do has helped them change the way they live, the way they consume, or maybe just the way they think about the planet in the future?
The power of collective action is something that I stress through my lessons. The power of art and the way in which it ripples through society. One of the things I want my students to know is that they can plug into larger movements happening in our society today.
A chemical process is used to turn the fibers from straw to hair-like, and our team in St. Louis has gotten good at calming the fibers so that they look like hair.
I realized a couple of summers ago that most plastic synthetic hair is made out of a toxic material that’s hard to recycle and is really harmful to your body. I recognized that if I were going to wear braids, I needed to do so with care and that led me to the creation of our first product, called Bright Better, made out of banana fiber.
How Did You Decide to Become an Electrical Consultant? Any Job Can Be a Climate Solutions Job: Ask This Teacher, Electrical or Beauty CEO
Then Johnson decided to become an electrician, since he was actually a journalist covering climate policy. How did you make a decision to turn your career around?
Nate Johnson: Many, many reasons. But in the context of this conversation, one of them was that I was listening to people talk and talk and talk. To take my two hands and help people get away from fossil fuels was a great feeling.
The man isNate: Well, I think that climate action really just comes in terms of providing good information to people, it’s in that sense, it’s not so different from being a journalist, when someone wants to do something with their home, there’s usually a profound information asymmetry between them and the contractors that they choose. And they’re really relying on those people to tell them what’s going to work and what doesn’t, and what’s cost effective and what’s not. So I see my role is being an honest broker and coming in and really being up to speed and giving them all of the different options.
People are talking and talking. And it felt really satisfying to take my two hands and start solving the problem by helping people electrify and get off fossil fuels.
NJ: Well, I live in Berkeley, California, and so people are generally interested in climate action. And there’s a certain amount of sort of social pressure, you know, people want to get induction stoves to replace their gas stoves, not just because it’s climate action, but because everybody’s doing it. But there are people who oftentimes just come to me and say, like, look, I want to make the right decision in terms of dollars and cents. And I think that’s sort of the most interesting case for me, because the technology is there, it can almost always make sense to electrify, and there’s some cases where you have to do a whole bunch of work to update the electrical system where it doesn’t, but if you’re thinking about the long term, it usually does, so it’s that kind of education process. That’s most interesting to me.
Source: Any job can be a climate solutions job: Ask this teacher, electrician or beauty CEO
What I’ve Learned About Living, and How I’m Trying to Make Sense Out Of It (The Electrician’s Perspective)
Imani is a woman. May: I encourage everyone to start with what you’re already involved in with the way you live your life and a problem that you have that is core to who you are, and see what you can make out of that that can be more sustainable for yourself and other people.
Carolyn McGrath: I just want to reiterate what Ciara said, because she said it so beautifully. It’s not about overhauling your life. It is about plugging into what you are already passionate about and finding the intersection between that and climate action. For some people, it might just take a little bit of imagination, but there’s so many ways that everybody can do it.
Nate Johnson: Dive into the research and the more you’re continuously learning and improving, the less likely you are to end up doing sort of greenwashing type things and actually make a real difference.
The electrician is in California. Carolyn McGrath teaches art to high school students in New Jersey. Rebundle is a Missouri company that makes hair extensions.
Climate Solutions Are Facing a Big Obstacle: The Claims of the Great Reset and a Conversation with Three NPR Reporters
Huo: It is a distraction from the issues we need to work on. If these narratives ring true to you, you might think that climate activists aren’t really talking about climate but about something else, so much so they could be secret agents of the government trying to take away your freedom.
We wanted to know what the current state of climate misinformation was like and checked in with three NPR reporters who have reported on it, including Julia Simon, David Folkenflik and Huo Jingnan.
The professor who created the idea of the 15-minute city was a Franco-Colombian, and he also invented the idea of bikeable neighborhoods that are related to open-air prisons. Moreno says he’s gotten death threats, and so have other scientists and researchers.
Joe Rogan talked about it on his show. Rogan said, “You’ll basically be contained unless you get permission to leave.”
Huo Jingnan: The false narrative surrounding 15-minute cities is just one part of a larger conspiracy theory called the Great Reset. A theory says that a shadowy global elite wants to make us live a life of deprivation. Under this theory, 15-minute cities are a ploy to take away people’s freedom to move around.
Source: People working on climate solutions are facing a big obstacle: conspiracy theories
Climate Solutions Are Facing a Big Obstacle: Confinement, Doubts, and Fact-Checking. What Is Them All About?
The funny thing is they are at once testers and popularizers of things that have gotten some traction online, and then you hear prominent figures on the right picking up the melody.
Tucker Carlson: The government’s off-shore wind projects, which are enriching their [read: Biden] donors, are killing a huge number of whales, right now.
Folkenflik: You hear versions of it from people like Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
One interesting example of a strawman here is one of the subplots of the great reset conspiracy theory, which is that the government wants to force people to eat insects. Including insects in the human diet has been an idea on the edges of climate circles. The mainstream idea is simply to eat less meat. But it attracted more attention over the years because many news outlets — including NPR — are easily intrigued by the idea of eating something seen as exotic.
“In the end, it actually doesn’t matter if 99% of the public believe in climate change,” King says, “if you’re able to embed real fear and seeds of doubt about the solutions that are on the table you end up with the same outcome, which is no legislative agenda, no meaningful policy proposals, no local action.”
Folkenflik: It’s not in the interest of Fox News and others who benefit financially from stoking outrage and, by and large, also have partisan rooting interests. In a few instances, there have been defamation cases against those media outlets — but those all come from specific people and institutions who claim they’ve been knowingly harmed and defamation law isn’t going to solve the wider issue of spreading false claims about climate research and solutions.
It is difficult for other journalists and others to fact-check and address false information. But by fact-checking, you’re also sometimes elevating these ideas that may not get widespread currency. News organizations, including NPR, generally try to balance those imperatives as they plan out coverage.
Source: People working on climate solutions are facing a big obstacle: conspiracy theories
What are the most relevant changes in social media? How do platforms respond to changing user behaviors and preferences? Huo: Theoretical insights on Facebook and Instagram
Huo: When it comes to social media, the platforms can change how they label, recommend and moderate content to change what users see and how they interact with platforms. Studies by researchers who were able to run experiments on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 election showed that changing the algorithm changes user behavior, sometimes leading to less time spent on the platforms.
There’s also a practice called pre-bunking, like a form of inoculation against bad information, which has two strands. One way involves preventatively unraveling specific false claims before they reach a critical mass. Another is essentially news literacy training, to help equip people with tools to evaluate such claims critically. These things have to be done in a way that appeals to the people they’re trying to reach, not patronize them, and also acknowledge that known facts sometimes change, as they have for COVID-19.
While we do not have enough experimental studies on altering platform design to draw conclusions beyond specific interventions, experts in the field place hope in them. A lot of people put their faith in those who they like and trust, as well as those who they don’t. They have to absorb it in the settings where they seek out such content. That said, some major platforms are dialing back how much news they serve up and how much attention they want to spend on moderating. There’s no single easy or widely embraced answer yet.
