Author: Evan Rose

When Will We Have The Last Oil Spill?

Posted on October 12, 2021

Perhaps the first serious shadow to fall on the oil age came in the winter of 1969, after a blowout on a well, six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara. At least two million gallons of crude coated beaches and killed everything, from gulls to sea lions, and the resulting uproar fuelled the first Earth Day, in 1970, and also the first broad environmental laws in the United States, which were soon copied around the world.

Half a century later, oil has again coated the beaches of Southern California, this time from a ruptured pipeline near Newport Beach. Fortunately, the quantities aren’t as large—current estimates are some hundred thousand gallons—but beaches have been shut to millions of people, and a wetland conservancy that is a refuge for dozens of bird species may take decades to recover. (And the inability of the oil industry to monitor its equipment is maddening—the damage may have been caused as long as a year ago by an anchor hitting the pipe.) The response is less shock than resignation, since we’ve seen so many of these debacles in the past fifty years, including the Exxon Valdez spill and the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But there’s a difference this time: the spill comes as the oil industry heads into a terminal decline, its reputation wrecked and its power starting to wane. Responding to a call from indigenous groups, environmentalists from around the country are descending on Washington, D.C., this week for a series of “People vs. Fossil Fuels” civil-disobedience actions outside the White House, Congress, and the Army Corps of Engineers; for the moment they’re being arrested, but in the long run they clearly have momentum on their side. The only questions now are how long the industry can hang on and how much more damage it will do.

As events of the past few weeks have made clear, long-term investors are running away from the fossil-fuel sector. So far, institutions have divested nearly fifteen trillion dollars’ worth of portfolios and endowments away from fossil fuels. Last month, Harvard announced that it will wind down its remaining investments. Other prestigious parts of the establishment followed. The MacArthur Foundation announced that it would move its $8.2-billion endowment away from fossil fuels. On Friday, Dartmouth University joined the list, leaving only three of eight Ivies—Yale, Princeton, and Penn—to make the move. More will follow; divestment campaigners are planning big announcements for October 26th, in the lead-up to the 2021 Glasgow climate summit. (I have helped with the divestment effort.) Those talks can’t come soon enough, because the existential climate threat gets more apparent every day. Earlier this month, Genoa saw the heaviest rainfall ever measured in Europe, with around thirty-five inches—a typical yearly total for Seattle—falling in a single day. The rain came down twice as fast as September’s epic and terrifying deluge in New York.

Meanwhile, scientists have been zeroing in on the health hazards that fossil fuels pose to humans. As Sammy Roth points out in the Los Angeles Times, the economic benefits of getting off fossil fuels in the U.S. alone, “in terms of lives saved, hospital visits avoided and workdays not lost due to illness or deaths—would exceed $700 billion per year, higher than published estimates of the costs of weaning the economy off fossil fuels.” And a spate of data has been making it increasingly clear that there’s no long-term cost to leaving fossil fuels behind. Indeed, the latest research indicates that the faster you transition the more money you save. If the first famous California oil spill was a Greek tragedy fated by our dependence on fossil fuels, this most recent one—and the endless daily spill of carbon and smoke into the air—is a tragedy of a different, more venal kind.

Along the way, there will be transitional bumps of all kinds. At the moment, the price of oil is rising, because there’s a worldwide commodity boom and the pandemic depressed drilling. But if that helps oil companies for a quarter, or three, it hurts it in the long term: gas is about $3.25 a gallon right now, and that means that anyone thinking about, say, a new pickup truck has one more reason to choose the electric Ford F-150, with the car company already taking preorders for spring delivery. Got solar panels on your roof and an E.V. in the garage? You’re your own filling station, insulated from oil’s decline.

Really, the only asset the fossil-fuel industry has left is political clout, and that, too, is waning. Joe Biden, in the last debate of the 2020 campaign, said that it was time to “transition away from the oil industry,” and his Build Back Better plan does precisely that, with serious money behind a push to use penalties and tax credits to spur utilities toward clean energy. He’s got forty-eight Democratic senators—representing well more than half of the American population—lined up behind it. Only the oil industry’s death grip on the G.O.P. and the craven opportunism of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema hold back the future. On Friday, Sinema (who began her political life in the misbegotten adventure of Ralph Nader’s 2000 Green Party run) enigmatically demanded that a hundred billion dollars be cut from the climate funding in the Build Back Better bill.

That political cloud and the delay it can produce present an enormous challenge; if we haven’t cut emissions in half by 2030, climatologists warn, we’ll miss our chance to hit the climate targets we set in Paris, with all the attendant chaos that will follow. On that long list of things at stake in the fight, the sands of California are perhaps not the most vital, but they make clear the possible outcomes. Those beaches—and Hollywood’s depiction of them—came to help define the image of an idyll. If the sea level keeps rising, however, two-thirds of Southern California’s beaches could vanish. And if we keep pumping oil, some of it will inevitably keep spilling. On the other hand, solar spills hit Santa Barbara two hundred and eighty-three days in an average year. That could be the future.

The Democrats’ One Chance To Cut Child Poverty In Half

Posted on October 7, 2021

The Biden administration has a plan that is estimated to cut child poverty in half. And it’s already in place.

It’s called the Child Tax Credit.

Here’s how it works. Parents of children aged 6 and younger across the country are receiving direct payments of up to $300 per month per child, or $3,600 per year per child. The payments drop to $250 a month for children between the ages of 6 and 17, and phase out for families with higher incomes.

It’s an historic expansion of the original credit that’s already helping millions of working families.

The direct payments are coming because the Child Tax Credit is a refundable tax credit. Normal, non-refundable tax credits simply cut your taxes. But a refundable tax credit, like the Child Tax Credit, helps you even if you don’t earn enough for it to reduce your taxes — so it’s a direct payment to you.

Say you owe $3,000 in taxes. A non-refundable tax credit of $3,600 won’t be worth $3,600 to you. It would just reduce your taxes to zero. So you wouldn’t get the full benefit. And if you don’t owe any taxes to begin with, a non-refundable tax credit wouldn’t do you any good at all since you can’t reduce your taxes to less than zero dollars.

But a refundable tax credit would help you. You’d get the money no matter what, the full $3,600. That’s why this expansion is such a big deal: it ensures that the money gets to lower-income families.

The early results show that this policy is a game-changer. Over 3 million more households with children now report having enough to eat  after just the first two payments. More report being able to make rent, stay in their homes, and afford basic necessities. And 3 million children have been lifted out of poverty.

It’s reduced racial disparities, as well. Hunger has fallen by one-third among Latinx families and by one-quarter among Black families.

It bears repeating that if the credit is made permanent, and reaches everyone it should, it could cut child poverty in half.

Yet the Republican Party — the so-called “party of family values” — is dead set against it. That’s because the program works.

Every single Republican in Congress voted against the American Rescue Plan, which contained the initial expansion of the Child Tax Credit. You can bet they’re all going to vote against making that expansion permanent as part of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget plan. It’s obvious: they do not care about helping working families.

 

 

Democrats must get this done, no matter how staunch the Republican opposition. In the richest country in the world, it is inexcusable that millions of our children are living in poverty.

For decades, almost all economic gains have gone to the top, leaving working families behind. This historic expansion of the Child Tax Credit is a crucial step towards righting this wrong.

Poverty is a policy choice. Congress must make the Child Tax Credit permanent.

Starving The Beast

Posted on September 29, 2021

With massive new wins, divestment pushes ever harder on the fossil fuel industry.

Willie Sutton robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” But if he was still alive, he’d probably be studying pension funds.

Chances are you’ve heard of Harvard, which is why it was big news when after a ten-year campaign the school finally relented, divesting its $40 billion endowment from fossil fuel. And in the weeks that followed, many others took the chance to follow: Boston University (whose president said the school wanted to be “on the right side of history,”), the University of Minnesota, the MacArthur Foundation. Ten of the twenty richest colleges in America have now divested, the result of countless hours of work by activists; they’ve helped rob the oil industry of its social license, tarring its once-good name. The students and others who have done this work are heroes of the first order.

Taken together, those 20 richest schools have a total worth of $322 billion-with-a-b, absolutely nothing to sneeze at. But earlier this week a single pension fund that you’ve probably never heard of unless you’re a Canadian retiree, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, announced that it too would divest from fossil fuels. And with that one announcement, it took $315 billion out of play for the fossil fuel industry. It’s Canada’s second-biggest pension fund and the world’s twelfth biggest (its other giants are under pressure to divest as well). It joins other massive pension funds—New York City and New York State, for instance, each of them over $200 billion. Others are following suit: the Maine legislature, for instance, recently instructed the state pension fund to divest—it’s “only” $17 billion, but that’s the biggest pool of capital in the state by far. (The fact that long-term fossil fuels are the worst investment you can make has helped).

These divestments are so large that they’re starting to have deep effects on the ability of the fossil fuel industry to expand. As an executive at the investment giant Morningstar explained to the Toronto Star, the “slowdown in funding for new projects means that oil companies will instead need to focus on squeezing every last drop of profit out of older ones while keeping a closer eye on environmental concerns. ‘They’re not going to be focussed on growth,’ he said. ‘They’ll be more in a holding situation, and focussing on cost efficiencies, and reducing their carbon footprint.’”

“Energy companies rely heavily on large, institutional investors such as pension funds because the oil and gas industry is one of the most capital-intensive industries around, said Adam Freneth, an assistant professor at Western University’s Ivey School of Business, who specializes in the energy sector. “When you’re going to the market for billions of dollars year after year, it’s not good when pools of capital get cut off,” Freneth said. “There are limited numbers of places where you can access that amount of capital.”

As early as 2016, it was clear that divestment campaigns were damaging the coal industry’s ability to raise capital—industry giant Peabody cited it as a cause of its bankruptcy. The oil giants are much larger, with massive cash flows, but even Shell, in a recent annual report, called divestment campaigns a ‘material risk’ to its business. All you really need to know is that the fossil fuel industry maintains a website entirely devoted to moaning about divestment and begging universities and pension funds to continue “engaging” with them instead. Remember: their only strategy is delay. There’s nothing they’d enjoy more than a few more decades of parrying back and forth with investors.

Which is why it’s such good news that the pressure on pension funds just keeps growing. The world’s biggest pension funds are often in “blue” cities, states, and countries, because that’s where most of the world’s money gets made. And from the New York State Teachers Retirement Fund to the California Public Employees pension scheme to the giant TIAA fund that provides the pension for most American academics, the pressure for divestment just keeps mounting.

It’s taken ten years to get to this point: the world’s first fossil fuel divestment came in 2012, when tiny Unity College in Maine pulled its $8 million out of coal, oil and gas. (And you should have heard us cheering). It’s also taken ten years for engineers to drop the cost of renewable energy 90 percent. In both cases that’s decades too long. Would that we’d started the divestment campaign much earlier; would that America had embraced Jimmy Carter’s 1979 plan to get 20% of our energy from the sun by 2020.

But we are where we are—in a world badly damaged by climate change, but with a chance still to avert the very worst. Reining in the fossil fuel industry is absolutely essential: please keep the pressure on colleges, on churches—and on pension funds. Because it makes no sense to invest retirement funds in companies that insure there won’t be a world to retire on.

Why Are House Democrats So Reluctant To Tax Wealth?

Posted on September 21, 2021

There’s an asymmetry at the heart of American politics

I have to get this off my chest. Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee released its proposed tax increases to fund President Biden’s $3.5 trillion social policy plan.

Here’s the big thing that hit me: Democrats didn’t go after the huge accumulations of wealth at the top – representing the largest share of the economy in more than a century.

You might have thought they’d be eager to tax America’s 660 billionaires whose fortunes have increased $1.8 trillion since the start of the pandemic – an amount that could fund half of Biden’s plan and still leave the billionaires as rich as they were before the pandemic began.

I mean, Elon Musk’s $138 billion in pandemic gains could cover the cost of tuition for 5.5 million community college students and feed 29 million low-income public-school kids, while still leaving Musk $4 billion richer than he was before Covid.

But House Democrats on Ways and Means decided to raise revenue the traditional way, taxing annual income rather than immense wealth. They aim to raise the highest income tax rate and apply a 3 percent surtax to incomes over $5 million.

Yet the dirty little secret – which House Democrats certainly know — is the ultra-rich don’t live off their paychecks.

Jeff Bezos’s salary from Amazon was $81,840 last year, yet he rakes in some $149,353 every minute from the soaring value of his Amazon stocks – which is how he affords five mansions, including one in Washington D.C. with 25 bathrooms.

House Democrats won’t even close the gaping “stepped-up basis at death” loophole, which allows the heirs of the ultra-rich to value their stocks, bonds, mansions, and other assets at current market prices — avoiding capital gains taxes on the entire increase in value from when they were initially purchased.

This loophole allows family dynasties to transfer ever larger amounts of wealth to future generations without it ever being taxed. Talk about an American aristocracy. We’re on the cusp of the largest inter-generational transfer of wealth in American history, as rich boomers pass it on to their millennial heirs. Closing this loophole may be our one big opportunity to stop this new aristocracy in its literal tracks.

Biden wanted to close this loophole, but House Democrats balked.

You might also have assumed they’d target America’s biggest corporations, awash in cash but paying a pittance in taxes. But remarkably, House Democrats have decided to set corporate tax rates below the level they were at when Barack Obama was in the White House. Hell, Democrats even kept a scaled-back version of private equity’s “carried interest.” And listen to this: they retained special tax breaks for oil and gas companies.

What’s going on here? It’s not that House Democrats lack the legislative power. They’re in one of those rare trifectas when they hold a majority of the House plus a bare majority of the Senate and the presidency.

It’s not the economics. Americans have been subject to decades of Republican “trickle-down” nonsense and know full well nothing trickles down. Billionaires hardly need to have their fortunes grow $100,000 a minute to be innovative. And as I’ve stressed, there’s more money at the top, relative to anywhere else, than at any time in the last century.

Besides, Democrats need the revenue to finance their ambitious plan to invest in childcare, education, paid family leave, health care, and the climate.

So what’s holding them back?

Put simply, Democrats are reluctant to tax the record-breaking wealth of the rich and big corporations because of … the wealth of the rich and big corporations.

Many Democrats rely on that wealth to bankroll their campaigns. They also dread becoming targets of well-financed ad campaigns accusing them of voting for “job killing” taxes. (For the record, there’s no evidence that tax increases have “killed” jobs, especially when those tax increases have been targeted at higher incomes.)

Republicans have been in the pockets of moneyed interests at least since they championed Reagan’s tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and dismantling of labor protections. But the timidity of House Democrats shows just how loudly big money speaks these days even in the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

That’s partly because there’s so much less money on the other side. Through the first half of 2021, business groups and corporations spent nearly $1.5 billion on lobbying, compared to roughly $22 million spent by labor unions, and $81 million by public interest groups, according to OpenSecrets.org. Plus, the anti-taxers are well-organized. Thousands of industry groups, platoons of trade associations, every large corporation in America, along with small business associations — all are marching in step against corporate tax increases. There’s no similar pressure on the other side. How many pro-corporate-tax organizations can you name?

Progressive House Democrats will still have their say (AOC and other progressives will demand something more from the super-rich) and Senate Democrats haven’t yet weighed in (I’m sure Elizabeth Warren will continue to push her wealth tax).

But so far, the House Ways and Means Committee is where it all begins.

Let me step back a bit. The looming debate over taxes is really a debate over the allocation of wealth and power in America. As that allocation becomes ever more grotesquely imbalanced, this debate over wealth and power will loom ever larger over American politics.

Behind it will be this simple but important question: Which party stands up for average working people?

Democrats, take note.

The $3.5 Trillion Bill Corporate America Is Terrified Of

Posted on September 14, 2021

Right now, Democrats are working to pass a $3.5 trillion package that will provide long overdue help for working Americans.

The final bill hasn’t yet been determined, so we don’t know the exact dollar amounts for all its policies. We’ll probably find that out in late September or early October. For now, the Democrats’ budget resolution frames what’s in the bill.

First, on families:

The bill would make permanent key benefits for working families, including the expanded child tax credit in the pandemic relief plan that sends families up to $300 per child each month but is now set to expire in December, and is estimated to cut child poverty by half.

It would also establish universal child care, for which low- and middle-income households would pay no more than 7 percent of their incomes.

And provide a national program of paid leave — worth up to $4,000 a month — for workers who take time off because they are ill or caring for a relative.

Next, on education:

The bill would reduce educational inequality by establishing universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, benefiting an estimated 5 million children, and providing tuition-free community college – essentially expanding free public education from 12 years to 16 years.

It will also invest in historically Black colleges and universities and increase the maximum amount of Pell grants for students from lower-income families.

 

 

On health care:

The bill expands Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing benefits and lowers the eligibility age. It also expands Medicaid to cover people living in the 12 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid, and makes critical investments to improve healthcare for people of color.

The big question is how far it will go to reduce prescription drug prices by, for example, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. That could reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and free up more money for other parts of the bill. But Big Pharma is dead-set against this.

Big corporations and the rich picking up the tab:

In another step toward fairness, all of these are to be financed by higher taxes on the rich and big corporations.

The bill would also increase the Internal Revenue Service’s funding so the agency can properly audit wealthy tax cheats, who fail to report about a fifth of their income every year, thereby costing the government $105 billion annually.

In addition, the bill tackles the climate crisis, which also especially burdens lower-income Americans:

There are a range of solutions – subsidizing the use of solar, wind, nuclear and other forms of clean energy while financially penalizing the use of dirty energy like coal; helping families pay for electric cars and energy-efficient homes.

The bill might include something known as a carbon border adjustment tax — a tax on imports whose production was carbon-intensive, like many from China.

The bill would also establish a Civilian Climate Corps, and invest in communities that bear the brunt of the climate crisis.

And the bill helps American workers:

It will hopefully contain much of the PRO Act, the toughest labor law reform in a generation.

Finally, the bill includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. This is all about making America fairer.

Remember: we won’t know the exact details of the bill for at least a month, but these are the main areas that it will focus on. The big challenge will be ensuring Senate Democrats remain united to get it passed. All of us will need to fight like hell.

Don’t listen to spending hawks who claim it’s too expensive or too radical. For far too long, our government has ignored the needs of everyday Americans, catering instead to the demands of corporations and the super-rich. No more.

It’s time to get this landmark bill passed and build a fairer America.

The Big Myth Of Government Deficits

Posted on September 10, 2021

Government deficits have gotten a bad rap, says economist Stephanie Kelton. In this groundbreaking talk, she makes the case to stop looking at government spending as a path towards frightening piles of debt, but rather as a financial contribution to the things that matter — like health care, education, infrastructure and beyond. “We have the resources we need to begin repairing our broken systems,” Kelton says. “But we have to believe it’s possible.”

 

Civil Rights, Immigration, & Human Dignity

Posted on April 2, 2019

At The Sanders Institute Gathering, Dr. Jim Zogby moderated a panel on civil rights, immigration, and human dignity with Dr. Radhika Balakrishnan, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Susan Sarandon, and Ben Jealous. The panelists talked about how climate change and economic injustice are creating conflicts across the world and contributing to mass migration. And they talked about the history of the United States and how genocide against indigenous peoples, indentured servitude, slavery, and disenfranchisement defined the United States’ beginning and still shapes our social and our political realities. Civil rights, immigration, climate change, and the economy – all are connected and tied directly to the issues of justice and human rights.

The Climate Crisis And The Green New Deal

Posted on February 27, 2019

At The Sanders Institute Gathering, we set out to have  conversations with some exceptional people that have made studying issues like the climate crisis their life’s work. Sanders Institute founding fellow, author and climate expert Bill McKibben, author and activist Naomi Klein, Executive Director of Presente Matt Nelson, Sanders Institute founding fellow and leading economist Stephanie Kelton, and physician and former Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, spoke in depth about the climate crisis and how it intersects with each and every issue that our progressive movement is fighting for.

The Sanders Institute Gathering 2018

Posted on December 14, 2018

 

 
Press Release:

The Sanders Institute has announced their inaugural conference, The Sanders Institute Gathering. Scheduled to be held in Burlington Vermont, from Thursday, November 29th through Saturday, December 1st, 2018, the array of speakers comes from both the national and international progressive communities.

Founded in 2017 on the belief that a vital democracy requires an informed electorate, civil discourse and bold ideas, The Sanders Institute focuses on progressive solutions to economic, environmental, racial and social justice issues.

The event will host elected officials, organizers, educators, economists, writers, artists and emerging leaders from a full spectrum of experience and expertise and will be live streamed through The Sanders Institute social media.

Mayors Carmen Yulin Cruz (San Juan, Puerto Rico), Bill deBlasio (New York, NY), Ada Colau (Barcelona, Spain) and Michael Tubbs (Stockton, CA) will be on a Mayor’s Roundtable. Labor leaders such as UE President Peter Knowlton, APWU President Mark Dimondstein, NNU Co-President Jean Ross and former NNU Executive Director RoseAnn Demoro will be speaking. Yanis Varoufakis (former Finance Minister of Greece), Niki Ashton (Member of Canadian Parliament), Bernie Sanders (Vermont Senator), David McWilliams (Irish author/economist) and others will discuss international cooperation and the need for a Progressive International movement. Other speakers include well-known names like Danny Glover, Stephanie Kelton, Shaun King, Naomi Klein, Ben Jealous, Tulsi Gabbard, Winona LaDuke, Bill McKibben, Nina Turner, Simon Sinek, Cenk Uygur and James Zogby. Other exemplary researchers and policy developers like Jane Kim, Robert Pollin, Chirlane McCray, Michael Weinstein, Radhika Balakrishnan, Matt Nelson, Brenda Torpy, Joseph Geevargese, Karin Ryan, Jo Beardsmore, Diane Archer and John Davis and many more will be part of the program – which includes fifteen of the Institute’s eighteen fellows. More information on the conference and speakers can be found at sandersinstitutegathering.org.

Jane Sanders, Co-Founder & Fellow, said “the selection of topics and speakers will ensure that the conference is insightful and relevant, as we discuss some of our nation’s most pressing issues and share innovative solutions. Medicare for All, the climate crisis, housing issues, criminal justice, workers’ rights, international cooperation, civil rights and austerity in Puerto Rico are some of the issues that will be addressed.”

“Social justice, economic justice and human dignity will be focuses threaded throughout the conference,” said Driscoll, concluding, “The core intent of The Sanders Institute Gathering is to share replicable policies, develop actionable steps, establish ongoing networks and articulate a progressive vision.”

How We Talk About Climate Change

Posted on August 2, 2018

How we talk about climate change has the power to shape the discussion and overall perception of this important issue. A few ideas to consider:

Increase the media coverage and cover the science

The mainstream media rarely covers the important facts about climate change – even when they are directly relevant to issues or events that they are addressing.

Despite the near-continual stream of weather-related disasters and temperature records, Nexus Media reports that “fewer than half of Americans say they hear global warming discussed on the media once a month or more often.” A study by Public Citizen concludes that:

“For the public to be well-informed about climate change, it is critical that the media connect everyday coverage to climate where it is relevant, as well as cover the climate crisis directly, including developments on how we can mitigate it. On both scores, the media performed poorly in 2017. When discussing even the most clearly climate-connected topics, like record heat waves, the media mentioned climate change just 33 percent of the time. Regarding most other subjects, including hurricanes and the spread of mosquitoes, ticks, and the illnesses they carry, the coverage was far worse. One of the most important lacking pieces — a subject that appeared in just nine percent of coverage that mentioned climate change — is solutions.”

The media coverage following Hurricane Maria, with a substantial focus on President Trump throwing paper towels, is a clear example of this failure. The Guardian analyzed the media coverage of Hurricane Maria and hurricane season overall and found that “about 60% of the stories included the word Trump, and only about 5% mentioned climate change.” Coverage of the science was virtually non-existent.

“Equal” representation between climate deniers and the majority of scientists is misrepresentation

There is overwhelming consensus about climate change in the scientific community. In fact, 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by human activity. NASA points out that “most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.”

It is disingenuous and misleading to give climate deniers equal time when the stakes are so high. A balanced equal-time approach between a 97% consensus about climate change against the opposing views of a few extremists, misinforms the public by giving the appearance that both positions are equally credible.

Media representation of climate change must convey the actual science. It must inform the public about how and why climate change is happening, and what options we have to address it.

The terms “uncertainty” and “theory” mean two very different things to the scientific world and the layman. The Union of Concerned Scientists describes that while to most people, the term “uncertainty” means not knowing, to scientists, “uncertainty is how well something is known. And, therein lies an important difference, especially when trying to understand what is known about climate change… climate change deniers have linked less than complete certainty with not knowing anything.”

In light of this, it is vitally important for the media to lead with the scientific findings and imperatives and to structure cogent arguments in ways that can accurately represent the scientific facts, data, and ultimately the dire need to act.

Link climate change to the shared human experience

One of the most important things we can do is to communicate the data around climate change in human terms, in a way that doesn’t require an advanced degree in climate science to understand. Some of the most important numbers and terms can also be the most confusing. The seemingly miniscule 2 degree goal in the Paris Climate Agreement, the incomprehensibly large notion of 5 quadrillion tons of air in the atmosphere, and other terminology such as the current 400 parts per million of CO2 are foreign to many people.

Climate researcher Craig Lee suggests “Simply publishing a piece that presents facts doesn’t give its audience the story behind them. When putting climate change into discussion, this ignores a very human aspect, like the cities affected by rising sea levels. Journalists and researchers alike should strive to frame climate change as a human issue, because in the end, it’s humans who will pay the price.”

The media cannot continue citing numbers without giving context for the average person to understand what those numbers mean and how those numbers and climate change broadly will have an effect on their lives.

According to 350.org, the five hottest years on record are 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2010. Scientists have predicted that unless climate change is addressed, by the end of the century Europe will suffer 150,000 heat-related deaths a year. Global grain yields have declined by 10%, which will impact the food chain and migration. Climate change related storms have caused billions of dollars of damage and incalculable human suffering. Despite all this evidence, there is a clear disconnect between what is happening and the concern of the American public. According to Gallup, less than half (45%) of Americans think that global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime and fewer (43%) worry a great deal about global warming.

Communication about climate change must convey the seriousness of the situation by putting it into terms that people can understand, internalize, and act upon. People need to understand that it will affect them.