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A Bill Would Let Miners Dump Waste on Federal Lands Where They Have No Claim

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Saturday, June 1, 2024

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. After the House of Representatives passed legislation that would allow mining companies more legal rights to federal lands by a bipartisan vote of 216-195 earlier this month, a bipartisan group of Senate sponsors are moving it through their chamber. “With the passage of the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, we’re codifying existing precedent and unlocking our rich domestic mineral resources,” said Bruce Westerman (R-AK), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, after the House passed the bill on May 8. Nine Democrats joined with Republicans to pass the legislation, including co-sponsor Mary Peltola (D-AK). Western legislators are leading the effort to pass the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act with the explicit goal of erasing the new legal precedent the 2022 Rosemont decision created. In that decision, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with conservation groups, ruling that the federal government was wrong to assume the Rosemont Copper Company, mining in the Santa Rita mountains in southern Arizona, had a right to dump mining waste on federal land where the company could prove no valid mineral claim. A mining claim is valid when a company discovers a physical mineral deposit, such as lithium, lead or zinc, and the company asserts their right to mine it, according to the Bureau of Land Management.  The Rosemont decision, which the pending bill would undermine, is “a hugely important tool for citizens who are trying to stop bad mines.” The bipartisan support for blocking the Rosemont decision follows the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which incentivized mining companies to take advantage of the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit to develop mining projects for critical minerals included in the law. Many of the critical minerals designated by the Biden administration, such as zinc, manganese, and lithium, are integral to electric vehicle batteries and the transition toward a carbon-free economy. “Everything from lithium-ion batteries to satellites relies on critical minerals, and we should be responsibly mining those right here in the US,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who introduced the Senate bill with Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), said in a press release. “My legislation will undo the damage of the misguided Rosemont decision and protect thousands of jobs across the West.” There were 509 active mining plans of operation and another 806 active mining notices on federal lands in 2023, according to Steve Feldgus, deputy assistant secretary of land and minerals management at the Department of the Interior. The Center for Biological Diversity and Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, nonprofit organizations working in Arizona, led the effort to sue the US Forest Service over its decision to allow the Rosemont Copper Company to use federal lands to dump mining waste. The Tohono O’odham Nation, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Hopi Tribe, among others, consider the area to be sacred, ancestral land, prompting conservation groups to file suit and prevent further development. “What we correctly argued and the court, we think, got it right, was that if you’re going to assert rights against the United States…the agency has to check and the company has to prove that it actually has the rights under the [1872] Mining Law,” said Roger Flynn, an environmental attorney who litigated on behalf of conservation groups against the United States Forest Service in the Rosemont decision.  Flynn and other lawyers argued that the Forest Service must check the validity of mining claims before allowing a company to use federal land. The Mining Law of 1872 states that any nonmineral land next to mines used for “mining, milling, processing, beneficiation, or other operations” shall not exceed five acres, and Flynn successfully argued to the court that the Rosemont Copper Mine violated that part of the Mining Law. Before the 2022 Rosemont decision, as a legal precedent, the Forest Service often did not require proof of valid mining claims. According to Flynn, who teaches courses on mining law at the University of Colorado, the agency has historically greenlit dozens of mining projects on federal land because of its interpretation of the 1872 Mining Law.  Mt. Wrightson, the highest peak in the Santa Rita mountain range, stands at over 9,400 feet tall and looms over the town of Patagonia. Esther Frances/Inside Climate New “I think the [1872] Mining Law automatically gives rights to these companies, the agencies do not have the discretion to say no. The Rosemont mine changed that,” Flynn said. “And that’s what has caused the industry to go to their supporters and basically take away the few guardrails that actually exist in the Mining Law.” The Rosemont decision affirmed the previous Arizona District Court decision requiring the Forest Service to examine claim validity before allowing a mining company to put claims on federal land.  “It’s a hugely important tool for citizens who are trying to stop bad mines. Our group stresses that we’re not against mining,” said Rob Peters, executive director of Save the Scenic Santa Ritas. “But there are some places like the Santa Ritas and Patagonias that are of global biodiversity significance.” Even with the Forest Service now preventing Rosemont from using federal lands to dump waste rock and tailings, the company is still mining the deposit. The passage of the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act in the House and bipartisan support for it in the Senate could force the White House to intervene. The Biden administration released a statement opposing the bill in April. Senate sponsors include Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Murkowski said she co-sponsored the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act because she believes the Rosemont decision gave federal agencies too much authority to deny claims to federal lands. “It’s just yet another example of ensuring that our agencies are held accountable to what we have crafted in the law and don’t take too much discretionary license,” Murkowski told Inside Climate News. “I think what [the Forest Service] did was a determination that was beyond the limits of their authority.”  Cortez Masto’s office told Inside Climate News in a statement that the legislation will not “fundamentally change the permitting process for mining on federal lands.”  But while Congress raced to expand the legal rights of mining companies on federal land, conservation groups raised concerns about the impacts of the bill if it becomes law. “There cannot be a just and equitable transition to a carbon-free future, with legislation like this that sacrifices our lands.” “If the [Rosemont] decision is overturned legislatively, like they are trying to do, I know that many of our key fights would be jeopardized, many of our key wins would be instantly overturned,” said Laiken Jordahl, the Southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. “I mean, it makes no sense on its face, that a mining company can dump toxic waste on areas where they have no claims on public land.” The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act would specifically amend the law to read “a claimant shall have the right to use and occupy to conduct operations on public land, with or without the discovery of a valuable mineral deposit” to ensure mining companies can continue staking mining claims on federal land. In January, more than 90 environmental, climate, and Indigenous groups sent a letter to Congress opposing the law and argued that the bill would allow mining companies to permanently occupy federal public lands without valid proof of mineral deposits and would preclude other types of development on federal lands. “There cannot be a just and equitable transition to a carbon-free future, with legislation like this that sacrifices our lands, waters, public health, sacred sites and communities,” they wrote. Flynn noted that the precedent established in the Rosemont decision forces mining companies to prove the validity of their use of public land, in line with how other companies or groups must prove the validity of their claims. “Mining being subject to the same laws as everybody else, that’s not going to stop mining,” Flynn said. “In some places, the worst places for the worst mines, it might, but that’s the way it should be.” After the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act’s passage in the House, Cortez Masto and Risch urged Senate leadership to take up the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act as soon as possible. The Senate bill was referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on May 9, the day after the bill passed the House. No further action has been taken. With increased interest in mining due to federal incentives, Flynn and other prominent conservationists urged Congress to reform the 1872 Mining Law to pass stronger regulations for how mining companies can operate on public lands. The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act would do the opposite. “It’s just fear mongering, because [mining companies] want to go back to being the top dog on the block, and all Rosemont did was somewhat equalize the playing field and have mining treated like any other use on public lands,” Flynn said.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. After the House of Representatives passed legislation that would allow mining companies more legal rights to federal lands by a bipartisan vote of 216-195 earlier this month, a bipartisan group of Senate sponsors are moving it through their chamber. “With […]

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

After the House of Representatives passed legislation that would allow mining companies more legal rights to federal lands by a bipartisan vote of 216-195 earlier this month, a bipartisan group of Senate sponsors are moving it through their chamber.

“With the passage of the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, we’re codifying existing precedent and unlocking our rich domestic mineral resources,” said Bruce Westerman (R-AK), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, after the House passed the bill on May 8.

Nine Democrats joined with Republicans to pass the legislation, including co-sponsor Mary Peltola (D-AK).

Western legislators are leading the effort to pass the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act with the explicit goal of erasing the new legal precedent the 2022 Rosemont decision created. In that decision, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with conservation groups, ruling that the federal government was wrong to assume the Rosemont Copper Company, mining in the Santa Rita mountains in southern Arizona, had a right to dump mining waste on federal land where the company could prove no valid mineral claim. A mining claim is valid when a company discovers a physical mineral deposit, such as lithium, lead or zinc, and the company asserts their right to mine it, according to the Bureau of Land Management. 

The Rosemont decision, which the pending bill would undermine, is “a hugely important tool for citizens who are trying to stop bad mines.”

The bipartisan support for blocking the Rosemont decision follows the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which incentivized mining companies to take advantage of the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit to develop mining projects for critical minerals included in the law. Many of the critical minerals designated by the Biden administration, such as zinc, manganese, and lithium, are integral to electric vehicle batteries and the transition toward a carbon-free economy.

“Everything from lithium-ion batteries to satellites relies on critical minerals, and we should be responsibly mining those right here in the US,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who introduced the Senate bill with Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), said in a press release. “My legislation will undo the damage of the misguided Rosemont decision and protect thousands of jobs across the West.”

There were 509 active mining plans of operation and another 806 active mining notices on federal lands in 2023, according to Steve Feldgus, deputy assistant secretary of land and minerals management at the Department of the Interior.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, nonprofit organizations working in Arizona, led the effort to sue the US Forest Service over its decision to allow the Rosemont Copper Company to use federal lands to dump mining waste. The Tohono O’odham Nation, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Hopi Tribe, among others, consider the area to be sacred, ancestral land, prompting conservation groups to file suit and prevent further development.

“What we correctly argued and the court, we think, got it right, was that if you’re going to assert rights against the United States…the agency has to check and the company has to prove that it actually has the rights under the [1872] Mining Law,” said Roger Flynn, an environmental attorney who litigated on behalf of conservation groups against the United States Forest Service in the Rosemont decision. 

Flynn and other lawyers argued that the Forest Service must check the validity of mining claims before allowing a company to use federal land. The Mining Law of 1872 states that any nonmineral land next to mines used for “mining, milling, processing, beneficiation, or other operations” shall not exceed five acres, and Flynn successfully argued to the court that the Rosemont Copper Mine violated that part of the Mining Law.

Before the 2022 Rosemont decision, as a legal precedent, the Forest Service often did not require proof of valid mining claims. According to Flynn, who teaches courses on mining law at the University of Colorado, the agency has historically greenlit dozens of mining projects on federal land because of its interpretation of the 1872 Mining Law. 

Mt. Wrightson, the highest peak in the Santa Rita mountain range, stands at over 9,400 feet tall and looms over the town of Patagonia. Esther Frances/Inside Climate New

“I think the [1872] Mining Law automatically gives rights to these companies, the agencies do not have the discretion to say no. The Rosemont mine changed that,” Flynn said. “And that’s what has caused the industry to go to their supporters and basically take away the few guardrails that actually exist in the Mining Law.”

The Rosemont decision affirmed the previous Arizona District Court decision requiring the Forest Service to examine claim validity before allowing a mining company to put claims on federal land. 

“It’s a hugely important tool for citizens who are trying to stop bad mines. Our group stresses that we’re not against mining,” said Rob Peters, executive director of Save the Scenic Santa Ritas. “But there are some places like the Santa Ritas and Patagonias that are of global biodiversity significance.”

Even with the Forest Service now preventing Rosemont from using federal lands to dump waste rock and tailings, the company is still mining the deposit.

The passage of the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act in the House and bipartisan support for it in the Senate could force the White House to intervene. The Biden administration released a statement opposing the bill in April. Senate sponsors include Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Murkowski said she co-sponsored the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act because she believes the Rosemont decision gave federal agencies too much authority to deny claims to federal lands.

“It’s just yet another example of ensuring that our agencies are held accountable to what we have crafted in the law and don’t take too much discretionary license,” Murkowski told Inside Climate News. “I think what [the Forest Service] did was a determination that was beyond the limits of their authority.” 

Cortez Masto’s office told Inside Climate News in a statement that the legislation will not “fundamentally change the permitting process for mining on federal lands.” 

But while Congress raced to expand the legal rights of mining companies on federal land, conservation groups raised concerns about the impacts of the bill if it becomes law.

“There cannot be a just and equitable transition to a carbon-free future, with legislation like this that sacrifices our lands.”

“If the [Rosemont] decision is overturned legislatively, like they are trying to do, I know that many of our key fights would be jeopardized, many of our key wins would be instantly overturned,” said Laiken Jordahl, the Southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. “I mean, it makes no sense on its face, that a mining company can dump toxic waste on areas where they have no claims on public land.”

The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act would specifically amend the law to read “a claimant shall have the right to use and occupy to conduct operations on public land, with or without the discovery of a valuable mineral deposit” to ensure mining companies can continue staking mining claims on federal land.

In January, more than 90 environmental, climate, and Indigenous groups sent a letter to Congress opposing the law and argued that the bill would allow mining companies to permanently occupy federal public lands without valid proof of mineral deposits and would preclude other types of development on federal lands.

“There cannot be a just and equitable transition to a carbon-free future, with legislation like this that sacrifices our lands, waters, public health, sacred sites and communities,” they wrote.

Flynn noted that the precedent established in the Rosemont decision forces mining companies to prove the validity of their use of public land, in line with how other companies or groups must prove the validity of their claims.

“Mining being subject to the same laws as everybody else, that’s not going to stop mining,” Flynn said. “In some places, the worst places for the worst mines, it might, but that’s the way it should be.”

After the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act’s passage in the House, Cortez Masto and Risch urged Senate leadership to take up the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act as soon as possible. The Senate bill was referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on May 9, the day after the bill passed the House. No further action has been taken.

With increased interest in mining due to federal incentives, Flynn and other prominent conservationists urged Congress to reform the 1872 Mining Law to pass stronger regulations for how mining companies can operate on public lands. The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act would do the opposite.

“It’s just fear mongering, because [mining companies] want to go back to being the top dog on the block, and all Rosemont did was somewhat equalize the playing field and have mining treated like any other use on public lands,” Flynn said.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Western North Carolina was hailed as a ‘climate haven.’ Hurricane Helene shows it’s not so simple.

Western North Carolina, and specifically the Asheville area, had been considered a possible refuge from the impacts of climate change, but it is now suffering some of the worst devastation from Hurricane Helene. The area was dubbed a potential “climate haven” due to its elevation and temperate climates as recently as 2022. The storm and its...

Western North Carolina, and specifically the Asheville area, had been considered a possible refuge from the impacts of climate change, but it is now suffering some of the worst devastation from Hurricane Helene. The area was dubbed a potential “climate haven” due to its elevation and temperate climates as recently as 2022.  The storm and its aftermath illustrate the damage that can be wrought by just one of the unusually extreme weather events that are becoming more common as a result of climate change, however — and make clear that elevation will sometimes not be enough to protect the region against such events. “Some of these places, especially at higher elevation, it’s not too hot, you’re far from the coast … places like Asheville have a lot of appeal” as climate refuges, said Margaret Walls, an environmental economist and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future. However, she said, in the mountains “the terrain makes it such that flooding is a problem,” and particularly in poverty-stricken areas, “there are a limited number of places people can live so they tend to live in flood prone places.” “From a rainfall perspective, the Appalachian Mountains are woefully unprepared — at the community level, the household level, our infrastructure is not prepared,” said Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Severe flooding and mudslides brought on by Helene have left dozens of people in the region dead and displaced or stranded many others amid the wreckage of buildings and roads. Hundreds of thousands of households in North Carolina remain without power days after the storm hit, according to PowerOutage.us. Search and rescue operations are still ongoing. Much of the rain fell on mountain communities with only one or two roads leading in or out, meaning that once they were washed out, it became all but impossible to deliver supplies and relief through overland routes. Zegre noted the region has been hit with the aftereffects of heavy Gulf or Atlantic hurricanes before, notably in the early 1990s. Since then, however, the effects of climate change have likely made hurricanes more intense and denser with moisture, which made the aftermath of Helene “unprecedented” in the region, he said.  Much of what has made the storm's impact so extreme, he added, comes down to a combination of the mountainous terrain and simple gravity. “When you drop that amount of rain in mountain topography, it’s hard to avoid being impacted by the flood.” In the mountains, “the water doesn't linger like on a flat flood plain … it kind of is concentrated, and it moves at high velocity,” said Philip Berke, director of the Center for Resilient Communities and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Additionally, Berke said, the region had already seen heavy rain in the days before the Helene remnants moved north, and due to the elevation, “cold air goes up, the dew points get reached, and the hurricane was just pumping in all that warm, moist air on top of a highly saturated situation.” An area doesn't have to be regularly impacted by extreme weather events to be devastated by one, experts said. Even if a storm like Helene is a far rarer occurrence for western North Carolina than wildfires are for the western U.S. or tropical storms are for Florida, a single catastrophic event can be enough. “When you look at property damages or damages per capita and you look at the top counties in the U.S., in many counties one single event will shoot them up to the top of the list,” Walls said. “There’s a county in New Jersey that’s very high on the list purely because 99 percent of those damages came from Hurricane Sandy.” “The lesson here is trends matter and there are certain locations that get hit repeatedly, but no place is really immune — every place needs to prepare,” she added. And when an area has limited resources — and a limited tax base — to begin with, a disaster at this level makes the rebuilding process even more difficult and complex. “It’s easier for the city of Atlanta than it is for one of these small counties in North Carolina,” she said. Berke noted that the devastation of the storm comes at a time when much of the region was experiencing the beginning of a resurgence that made it an attractive target for development. “They want to build. They want to expand. They want their tax bases,” he said.  Places like the town of Chimney Rock, which floodwaters all but swept away, were seeing new economic growth in areas like tourism, rafting and vacation rentals that weren’t part of their economies a decade ago. “At the same time, the climate and the heat has been building up and accelerating, so you have these converging forces,” he said. 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Agriculture
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How the ‘Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics’ is lighting a fire under big oil

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She is one of the biggest opponents of fossil fuel on the world stage – but Susana Muhamad’s political career was sparked in the halls of an oil company. It began when she resigned as a sustainability consultant with Shell in 2009 and returned home to Colombia. She was 32 and disillusioned, a far cry from the heights she would later reach as the country’s environment minister, and one of the most high-profile progressive leaders in global environmental politics.Muhamad joined Shell an idealistic 26-year-old. “I really thought that you could make a huge impact within an energy company on the climate issue, especially because all their publicity was saying that they were going to become an energy company, meaning they will not be only a fossil fuel company,” she says, when we meet in the Colombian embassy in London.“I resigned the date that they decided to put their innovation money on fracking.”Muhamad, centre, speaks at a press conference in 2022 on the introduction of a fracking prohibition bill to the country’s parliament. 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For many, she is a rising star of the environmental movement, joining voices such as the Barbadian prime minister, Mia Mottley, in putting forward an alternative vision of how the world could be, and demanding the developed world finance a just transition.“Susana is the Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics,” says activist Oscar Soria. “Like Kahlo, whose art challenged cultural norms and spoke of resilience, Muhamad paints a vision of ecological justice that goes beyond traditional environmentalism … an environmental agenda that is … reshaping the narrative around climate justice and biodiversity restitution.”Muhamad during a visit to the Colombian embassy in London. Photograph: undefined/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo SostenibleColombia’s embassy is sandwiched between Harrods and its Ecuadorian counterpart, and the room we meet in has a front row seat to the UK capital’s wealthiest extremes. 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Despite the warnings, the UN’s biodiversity convention has long been overshadowed by its climate counterpart, and governments have never met a single target they have set for themselves on biodiversity.Cali will be the host city for the biodiversity Cop16 to be held from 21 October to 1 November 2024. Photograph: Courtesy of Convention on Biological DiversityThe summit also has important domestic significance. Since Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla, announced at the climate change Cop28 in Dubai last year that Colombia would host the biodiversity conference, he and Muhamad have put Cop16 at the heart of the domestic agenda, hoping to use it as a chance to bring lasting peace with hold-out rebel groups in forest areas. In July, Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla faction that rejected the country’s 2016 peace agreement, threatened the summit after a series of bombings and shootings that were blamed on the group, but it has since backed down on the threat. Even so, 12,000 soldiers and police offers will be in Cali to guard the conference.“It was a very strange situation, and we are also hoping to use Cop as a way to promote peace within the country,” Muhamad says.At home, her ministerial brief ranges from eliminating deforestation across the country, which has fallen to its lowest level in 23 years, to managing Pablo Escobar’s hippos, which have thrived east of Medellín since the drug lord’s death in 1993. Muhamad bursts into laughter when I ask about the hippos and what it is like managing them, before settling into a ministerial answer. She says the African mammals are being phased out with a mixture of euthanasia, sterilisation and hippo transportation: “For us, it’s very straightforward, they are an invasive species that have been declared [as such] officially, not even by this government, by the last government. I agree with that assessment. We have already adopted in April this year the plan to manage the hippo problem,” she says.Muhamad during a 2023 press conference to announce that some of the 166 hippopotamuses belonging to former cocaine baron Pablo Escobar will be euthanized. Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty ImagesMuhamad has lived in an eco-village in South Africa with miners, worked in human rights in Denmark and lived with campesinos in Colombia when she was a student before her first “formal” job with Shell. Now, she is preparing to be a Cop president for the first time, a role that requires her to focus on consensus and make good on her decision to leave Shell. 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Climate
Energy
Business

Is climate anxiety a pressing problem, or a luxury?

Concerns about our future are valid — but they aren't always shared by those who are fighting to survive in the present.

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A man divulged his guilt over not being able to pay for air conditioning to keep his disabled son comfortable at home. A young woman complained that her roommate used so many plastic bottles “she had her own gyre in the ocean,” referring to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A former student described his fear of a future in which “everything’s melted and burnt.”  Schapira never intended the booth to be a permanent fixture in her life; she did it the first time, she explains now, as a way to lift herself out of a fog — to hear and be heard. Because everything she read about climate change had made her feel depressed and desperate. And worse, when she attempted to talk to friends and colleagues and loved ones about it, they mostly suggested she was overreacting. It was also a way to right a wrong, she says now, one for which she felt substantial guilt. Around 2013, a friend with whom Schapira exchanged letters had started to express more and more distress over the cascading evidence of climate change, and her helplessness in the face of it. Schapira felt herself growing increasingly depressed and anxious by her friend’s concerns, and wrote back to assert what we might call, in contemporary therapy parlance, a boundary: “I can’t hear about this anymore.” “I did someone wrong by saying, ‘I don’t have a place for this for you — there’s no place for this feeling,’” she said. “And then I was like, ‘No, there has to be a place for this feeling.’” (Schapira apologized to her friend for “rejecting an opportunity to listen,” and they continued to talk.) Schapira ended up spending the next 10 years — minus a couple during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic — hauling her booth around New England and the mid-Atlantic. Over time, Schapira observed a pattern to the worries she took in — namely, that the ways in which our world is changing puts a strain on us and our relationships. It dictates how we feel, and then those feelings dictate how we behave. “Whatever the name for that is, I see it in everybody who talks to me,” she said. By 2019, Schapira noticed that those who approached her counseling booth no longer discussed climate change as a future phenomenon, a problem for grandchildren. It was real, it was present, and they were worried about it now. Many of them were afraid of what they would lose, she said. Something had shifted, and climate anxiety had become a mainstream experience. Kate Schapira sits at her climate anxiety counseling booth in 2017. Courtesty of Kate Schapira / Lara Henderson In the information age, awareness spreads very, very fast. In the past 15 or so years, climate change has gone from a niche issue within environmental circles to a widespread public concern. The rise in awareness could be due to any number of factors: decades of grassroots organizing that has pushed major politicians to address carbon emissions; savvier communications from environmental groups and scientists; or the exponential platform growth that youth climate activists like Greta Thunberg found with social media. But perhaps the simplest and most obvious reason is that extreme weather patterns due to climate change have become impossible to ignore. Or rather, they’ve become impossible to ignore for the rich. Hurricane Sandy brought death to the Hamptons. Much of Miami’s priciest oceanfront property will be partially submerged by the middle of the century. The Woolsey Fire burned down Miley Cyrus’ Malibu mansion. Drake’s Toronto home flooded spectacularly in a supercell storm this summer. (The ocher floodwaters, he observed, looked like an espresso martini.) It’s easy to disparage the uber-wealthy for the insulation they enjoy from many of life’s challenges. But the more uncomfortable reality is that until quite recently, the same could be said for the average American relative to other people around the world, especially in the Global South. That, too, is no longer the case. Our planet is transforming in a way that will make life much harder for most people. It already has brought suffering to millions and millions of people. And in the United States, most of us are learning about the scale and significance of this crisis at a point when there is not a whole lot of time to shift course. That realization carries both a mental toll and an emotional reckoning. The mainstreaming of therapy culture, the explosion of the self-care industrial complex, and the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic have all laid the groundwork for a very self-focused, individualistic framework for understanding our place on an altered planet. Is it ethical to focus on ourselves and our feelings, when the real harms of climate change are very much upon people with no time to worry about it? In 2019, Rebecca Weston, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance, was invited to a summit to address what climate change would bring to Montana, where she lived at the time. The conference brought together experts with different skill sets, and as a mental health professional, it was the first time she had thought about the emotional toll that climate change would have on communities, mostly around displacement from one’s home. There had been massive flooding in the state that year, followed by wildfires that turned the sky red and poured ash onto neighborhoods.  A few years later, right around the start of the pandemic, Weston began seeing references to “climate anxiety” everywhere. You couldn’t open a newsfeed without seeing a reference to an epidemic of mental health crises about climate change. Read Next It’s not just you: Everyone is Googling ‘climate anxiety’ Kate Yoder “It was in the very typical way that the media frames a particular kind of phenomenon as very white, very upper-middle class, very consumerist-oriented and individualist-oriented,” said Weston, highlighting one New York Times article in particular that she found “deeply offensive.” “And so when we think about climate anxiety, that’s the stereotype that emerges, and it’s a real problem. Because not only do I think that’s real and valid for the person [who experiences it], and she needs empathy, but it also really misidentifies a whole host of experiences that people feel.” That host of experiences encompasses both existential fear and acute trauma. Can we say that a mother in suburban Illinois stuck in a cycle of consuming news about climate catastrophe is having the same emotional response to climate change as a Yup’ik resident of the Alaskan village of Newtok, which is slowly relocating as chunks of its land are sucked into the Bering Sea? Probably not — the difference is an anticipatory fear of what could be lost versus mourning what already has been lost. That distinction, of course, is defined by privilege. The backlash to climate anxiety didn’t take long to emerge. In early 2019, the writer Mary Annaïse Heglar published a famous essay that chided white climate activists who deemed climate change “the first existential threat,” failing to recognize that communities of color have always had to reckon with threats to their safety and survival in a racist society. Jade Sasser, a professor of gender studies and sexuality at the University of California, Riverside, has spent the past five years interviewing predominantly young climate activists of color about their perceptions of the future, specifically with regard to having children. She found that most did not identify with the concept of climate anxiety. It was more: “Climate change makes me feel overwhelmed when I consider it in the context of everything else I’m already grappling with.” “A lot of the dominant narrative around climate anxiety assumes that people who experience it don’t have other serious pressing anxieties,” she said. “That’s what, I think, leads to it being perceived as a privileged narrative that some people really want to reject.” The sun rises behind a ridge of trees in 2019 near Missoula, Montana. The state has faced destructive flooding and wildfires in recent years. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images In April 2020, Sarah Jaquette Ray — a professor at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt — published A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, an amalgamation of research and actionable advice largely directed toward young people overwhelmed by their fear of a warming future. But over the course of writing and then promoting her book, Ray encountered pushback, largely from young people of color.  One Chicana student referenced offhand, in a class presentation, “the white fragility of worrying about the future,” an observation that hit Ray like a “bolt of lightning.” At a talk Ray gave in South Africa to University of Cape Town students about her book, her discussion of the mental health impacts of confronting climate change was met with dismissal, even indignation: This is just not an issue for my community. We are dealing with drought, starvation, disease, much bigger things than what you are talking about. “And I remember feeling embarrassed — that I was talking about something like climate anxiety when they were dealing with [issues of] survival,” she said. In 2021, Ray wrote an essay of her own exploring the “overwhelmingly white phenomenon of climate anxiety” for the magazine Scientific American. AA number of climate psychologists and activists have expressed that the rise of climate anxiety is a normal, even logical reaction to a global existential threat. It’s entirely reasonable to feel worried or sad or enraged about the degradation of ecosystems that have supported human life for eons, especially when humans’ economic progress and development is directly responsible for that degradation.  Which leads to the question: How should we deal with feeling anxious and depressed about climate change? Worrying about the effects of too much carbon in the atmosphere is not an illness to be cured by medical treatment or antidepressants, but it does influence how we behave, which is a key element of climate action.  The field of psychology tells us that human brains try to protect themselves from emotions that hurt us, leading to disengagement and retreat. Psychoanalysis goes a step further, arguing that much of our behavior is dictated by unconscious emotions buried deep within — and to change that behavior, we need to unearth those feelings and deal with them. In 1972, the psychoanalyst Howard Searles wrote that our unconscious psychological defense against anxieties around ecosystem deterioration contributed to a sort of paralysis of action, which was culturally perceived as apathy.  “If we don’t go deeply into those feelings, we become really scared of them, and we then make it much, much harder to stay engaged with the problem,” said Weston, with the Climate Psychology Alliance. She also said that unexamined emotions can lead to burnout: “If [you move] too fast from those feelings to action, it’s not actually processed feelings — it’s push them away, push them away — and invariably that model burns out.” The premise of the Climate Café, an international initiative to engage people to share their emotions about climate change, originated in the United Kingdom in 2015 and started gaining traction virtually during the pandemic. It’s a gathering where people can simply talk “without feeling pressure to find solutions or take action.”  Weston, as a clinician, has run several of the events, and she describes them taking a “pretty predictable arc”: tentative quiet, followed by a brave participant’s admission of guilt for the future their children would inherit. Then someone else chimes in to express helplessness, or overwhelm, or fear. And then another person gets so uncomfortable with naming those feelings that they interrupt to suggest a petition to sign, and someone else recommends an organization to get involved with. “And immediately,” Weston said, “those feelings are lost,” meaning they’ve been pushed back down and left unprocessed. A new book edited by the psychotherapist Steffi Bednarek, called Climate, Psychology, and Change, includes a chapter that addresses the question of whether Climate Cafés are “a function of privilege.” The answer the authors arrive at is, essentially, that ignoring or pushing aside feelings of distress about climate change risks “the creation of a fortress mindset and prevents those in the Global North from taking action that is needed.” In other words, people shut down to protect themselves. A group of young climate protesters, part of the Fridays for Future movement, gathers in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., in May 2019. Eric Baradat / AFP via Getty Images Sasser, in her research with young climate activists of color, encountered a lot of rejection of the idea that we need to process our feelings about the climate crisis. “The rationale was, we don’t have time to sit around feeling sad and worried about climate change because we have to do the work,” she said. “For so many members of marginalized communities, paralysis is not an option. If you’re paralyzed to the point of not taking action to fight for the conditions that you require for survival, then you won’t survive, right?” That’s compounded, she added, by the fact that marginalized communities face many barriers to mental health care. Then there is the question of whether feelings drive action at all. When climate anxiety became a mainstream concept around 2019, the neuroscientist Kris de Meyer remembered “having debates with people from the therapeutic side, who said that everyone had to go through that emotional quagmire to come out in a place where they could act.” But he argues that it’s the other way around: that emotions are much more predictably the consequence of an action than the driver of one.  His research shows that the complexity of individual response to emotions means that you cannot reliably expect someone to take up arms against fossil fuel companies when they feel fear or rage or despair about climate change. What you can expect is that once that person exercises some sort of action, they’ll lose that feeling of powerlessness. Another critique of the mental health profession, articulated in Bednarek’s book, is that it has been too shaped by the “capitalist values of individualism, materialism, anthropocentrism, and progress,” with little focus on our collective well-being. Read Next The UN report is scaring people. But what if fear isn’t enough? Kate Yoder To that end, after a decade of running the climate anxiety booth, Schapira observed that what people expressed to her wasn’t necessarily climate anxiety, but a sense of unease and powerlessness that undergirded all their troubles. That they were so small in the face of massive political, societal, and ecological dysfunction, and had no sense of what they could do to make any of it better. “Mental health and mental illness themselves are community questions,” she said. “How does a community take care of someone who is in profound distress, but how do communities and societies also create distress? And then, what is their responsibility in addressing and alleviating that distress, even if that distress appears to be internal?” People told her they began to feel better, she said, when they got involved with something — a group, a campaign, a movement — and found their place as part of something bigger. In 2018, during Nikayla Jefferson’s last year of undergrad at the University of California, San Diego, she became deeply involved with the youth climate group Sunrise Movement as an organizer. She participated in a hunger strike at the White House. She helped lead the 266-mile protest march from Paradise, California, to Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in San Francisco to demand stronger federal climate legislation. She published op-eds in national outlets demanding action on a Green New Deal and mobilizing voters for candidates who she felt really understood the gravity of the climate crisis. Jefferson felt extremely anxious about climate change, but she also felt that that was the “fuel of her climate work” — a special pill she could take to push herself to the extremes of productivity. She had internalized popular messaging of that era of climate activism, specifically that there were 12 years left to stop catastrophic climate change, according to an IPCC projection of a need to curb emissions drastically by the year 2030. “And if we didn’t do this thing, then the world was going to end, and we would fall over some time horizon cliff, and [the Earth] would be completely inhabitable in my lifetime.” By the end of 2020, she was in the hospital with a debilitating panic attack, and something had to change. She started a meditation practice, got involved in the Buddhist community, and ended her involvement with the Sunrise Movement. I asked Jefferson about how fellow activists in her generation had related to the idea of climate anxiety, as it was clearly pervasive among its members. There was resistance to using the term, she said, for fear that it would alienate marginalized communities that were important to the movement’s success. “But I don’t think I agree,” she said. “I think we are all human beings, and we are all experiencing this pretty catastrophic crisis together. And yes, we are all going to be anxious about the future. And if we’re not feeling anxiety about the future, either we have made great strides in our journey of climate acceptance, or we’re in denial.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is climate anxiety a pressing problem, or a luxury? on Oct 3, 2024.

Climate
Activism
Crisis

Brazilian State to Host COP30 Climate Summit Defends Gold Mining Rules

By Ricardo BritoBRASILIA (Reuters) - The Brazilian state of Pará, which will host the COP30 global climate talks next year in the Amazon, is...

BRASILIA (Reuters) - The Brazilian state of Pará, which will host the COP30 global climate talks next year in the Amazon, is defending local regulations that encourage illegal gold mining, according to documents in the case before the Supreme Court seen by Reuters.Brazil's Green Party has challenged the regulations allowing municipal authorities to license gold prospects of up to 500 hectares. The Green Party argues the rules encourage wildcat mining in the state where most illegal gold is produced.The federal government through the environmental protection agency Ibama, its solicitor general and the country's top public prosecutor are backing the lawsuit calling for the abolition of Pará's mining rules.A Federal Police forensic report added to the case said wildcat miners use chemicals that are poisoning rivers that are vital for Indigenous communities. For instance, mercury is used to separate gold from ore and cyanide is used in gold leeching.The state government said the regulations have been in force for a decade and predate the administration of Governor Helder Barbalho, which told Reuters in May it was studying a revision of the rules.The Pará government currently opposes the lawsuit in the Supreme Court. A request for comment from Reuters went unanswered.Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva asked to host COP30 in Pará's state capital Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon River, to showcase his efforts to stop deforestation of the rainforest, which acts as one of the world's largest carbon sinks to slow global warming. He has also pledged to end illegal gold mining, much of which takes place on protected Indigenous lands.The police report said water samples gathered by inspectors showed mercury contamination on the Tapajos River was "above tolerable limits" in areas inhabited by Munduruku Indigenous people and riverine communities.(Reporting by Ricardo Brito, writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by David Gregorio)Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters.

Climate
Chemicals
Government

Hurricanes Kill People for Years after the Initial Disaster

The average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths, new research finds

October 2, 20244 min readHurricanes Kill People for Years after the Initial DisasterThe average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths, new research findsBy Andrea ThompsonThe Rocky Broad River flows into Lake Lure and overflows the town with debris from Chimney Rock, N.C., after heavy rains from Hurricane Helene on September 28, 2024. Approximately six feet of debris piled on the bridge from Lake Lure to Chimney Rock, blocking access. Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty ImagesMore than 160 people have lost their lives to the ferocious winds and catastrophic flooding wrought by Hurricane Helene. But the true death toll will take years—likely more than a decade—to unfold.A new study published on Wednesday in Nature found that the average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths (those beyond what would typically be expected), compared with the average of 24 direct deaths reported in official statistics. The study’s authors estimated that, between 1950 and 2015, tropical storms and hurricanes caused between 3.6 million and 5.2 million excess deaths—more than those caused by traffic deaths or infectious diseases. And such storm-related deaths involve people from some groups more than others, marking an “important and understudied contributor to health in the United States, particularly for young or Black populations,” the authors wrote.“These are individuals who are dying years before they would have otherwise,” says study co-author Rachel Young, an environmental economist at the University of California, Berkeley.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.This study is part of a burgeoning trend: assessing the full health consequences of the growing number of disasters fueled by climate change. Epidemiologists and other experts have increasingly been emphasizing that heat wave deaths are significantly underestimated, and recent research has found that wildfire smoke kills thousands of people in California—many more than the actual flames. “We thought that there was something similar with hurricanes,” Young says.So she and Stanford University economist Solomon Hsiang looked at hurricanes that hit the U.S. from 1930 to 2015, as well as mortality data and used statistical methods to compare a state’s deaths before a storm with those that occurred over the course of 20 years after from 1950 to 2015. “We thought we’d see maybe six months or a year of a delayed effect,” Young says, but data showed excess deaths occurring for 15 years after a storm. “We were so stunned,” she says, that the researchers spent years testing and retesting to make sure the effect was real.Zane Wolf; Source: “Mortality Caused by Tropical Cyclones in the United States,” by Rachel Young and Solomon Hsiang, in Nature. Published online October 2, 2024Thinking beyond the data, the duration of the effect makes sense because “these are huge events,” Young says. “Look at what’s going on with Helene.” Families may have to spend months in damaged or mold-riddled homes before repairs are made. People may have to use their savings for repairs, leaving less money for their health care for years. People may be forced to move and live farther away from crucial social support networks. And these events exert a considerable mental health burden. “It’s devastating to the individuals, and it's devastating to the local and state governments, too,” Young says, noting that other research shows these governments experience budget declines for many years after a hurricane. For those affected, she adds, “you’re in a version of the world where you have less money, you have less resources, you have more pollution exposure”—a bad combination when it comes to staying healthy.When breaking out the data by age groups, the study found that people aged 65 and older had the largest number of storm-related excess deaths. But when the higher general probability of death in this age range was factored in, this group’s storm death risk was smaller than that of others. The biggest risk was found to be for infants under the age of one, with almost all of these deaths occurring within less than two years after a storm. Young says that this effect could be influenced by people’s inability to afford prenatal care in a storm’s wake, as well as stress or other factors.The risk of death was also higher among Black people than it was among white people, even though the white population that was exposed to storms was much larger than the exposed Black population.Zane Wolf; Source:“Mortality Caused by Tropical Cyclones in the United States,” by Rachel Young and Solomon Hsiang, in Nature. Published online October 2, 2024 (data and reference figure)The analysis further showed that “the mortality response isn’t going down over time,” Young says, meaning storms today have the same long-tail mortality impact as they did decades ago. Young and Hsiang don’t know exactly why this is the case and say it will take more research to dig into the reasons.That mortality finding particularly struck Eugenio Paglino, a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki Institute of Demography and Population Health, who was not involved with the new study. He says that on first reading the paper’s abstract, he thought the numbers of excess deaths the authors found “seemed pretty large,” but he felt they did a thorough job of checking the robustness of the results. He would like to see additional research examine what might actually be causing these excess deaths and further bolster the findings.Young and Hsiang also want to see this kind of follow-up research—and hope to do some themselves. It’s a necessary step toward the ultimate goal of informing policymakers of what is needed to safeguard communities in the face of the growing climate disaster. As Helene shows, “local and state governments and first responders are doing heroic work to help people after disasters,” Young says. “We don’t want their efforts to be in vain.”

Climate
Government
Health

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Reboot

Humans have exploited Earth to the point where it is no longer possible to live on it. Their only option is to relocate to Mars. When the last group of people has boarded the spaceship for the red planet, the Earth can finally breathe easy. Like an expressionist painting, Reboot depicts a world in which the absence of our species is the only chance nature has to recover its lushness and flourish once more.

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THE SPRAYER

In the land occupied with the sprayers army, no one has the right to grow any kind of plants either in public or private. So many of the people and soldiers do not even know how a plant grows or looks like, until one day one of the soldiers finds a seed buried deep down in the dust and his curiosity is just the beginning of something extraordinary, something big, something revolutionary.

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Silent Skies - The First Electric Plane Flyover

Silent Skies follows the groundbreaking journey of three Pennsylvania college students who orchestrated and piloted the first ever fully electric airplane stadium flyover. Stunning fans with a whisper-quiet show, this event signaled the dawn of America's transition to electric aviation. The students completed a record breaking trip flying the airplane from its base in Hartford, CT to the stadium in Easton, PA, recharging at enroute airports directly from a fleet of electric F-150 trucks. The air travel industry faces an unprecedented challenge: decarbonization. Historically, new aviation technologies are met with consumer skepticism. Demonstrating electric aircraft today, ahead of widespread adoption, is key for building consumer trust, political support, and sustained investment. The flyover was witnessed by 10,000+ attendees, thousands more on ESPN+ and created a precedent for the FAA to approve manned electric aircraft demonstrations over populated areas. Textron eAviation and Ford amplified the event through their social media channels and the film premiered at San Francisco Climate Week.

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Saving Jaguars and Ourselves

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Solutions
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Sounding the Alarm ~ America's Climate Crisis

"It's really hard being a fire family. Every day it's getting worse." -Brett, wife of Marin County Battalion Chief in California.Every day, Americans who live close to the land and sea face the dangers of climate change—from a firefighter in California, to a beekeeper in Arizona, to a climate refugee losing her home in Florida. The changing climate affects our food systems, water and way of life. These American families are in the trenches sacrificing everything while facing depression, PTSD, and suicide—collateral damage of a crisis unchecked. Award-winning filmmaker, Peter Goetz, captures America's faces and voices, shot in 2020 leading up to the presidential election. Goetz and the Biden campaign made history, producing the first national climate spot to run during a presidential election. But this film dives deeper into the American climate crisis to explore the lives of the people who are sounding the alarm, worried about their grandchildren’s future, asking, "If not us, then who?" This is a story of the resilience, perseverance, and ingenuity of the American people. Ever hopeful, they collectively take on a common enemy. As the young, Navajo solar visionary Brett Issac insists, "We've got to turn this train around before it's too late."

Climate
Crisis
Government

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