Renewables’ Increased Energy Share | A Win For Caribou Conservation | Breakaway Antarctic Ice Shelf

Plus: How To Communicate The Urgency Of Climate Change Effectively

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Current Climate.

For a president whose key climate legislation was stalled by a member of his own party, the next best opportunity to show progress toward halving emissions by 2030 may be the budget for the next fiscal year. President Joe Biden’s $5.8 trillion budget proposal invests $44.9 billion to tackle climate change, $16.7 billion more than was enacted in 2021. The proposal would allocate funding across government entities such as the Environmental Protection Agency, which would see the largest year-on-year boost to its budget in more than a decade, and earmarks $11 billion to help other countries reduce their emissions and adapt to the results of higher temperatures worldwide.

The budget’s provisions are no substitute for the $1.9 trillion Build Back Better bill, but it shows a comprehensive approach to funding a clean energy transition that involves multiple areas of government. And it can serve as an example for the corporate world, where the sustainability space can feel lonely or isolated—too often seen by leaders as separate from rather than integral to the rest of the organization. Breaking out from that silo is one of the issues I’ve discussed with Alice Bell, nonprofit leader, journalist and author, in this week’s Climate Talks.

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The Progress

Farmers don’t have to dedicate the entirety of their land to growing crops to maximize profitability. Identifying less productive areas and using that space to restore pollinator and bird habitat can be an efficient way to improve productivity and lower agricultural emissions.

Canadian caribou populations are largely in decline, having dropped to nearly half their historic levels. One herd in British Columbia, however, is prospering due to Indigenous conservation efforts, according to a new study.

The Challenges

The health effects of wildfire smoke are expected to become drastically worse in the coming decades, especially for the Pacific Northwest region and parts of Northern California, according to a new study.

An ice shelf the size of New York collapsed in Antarctica earlier this month, an unprecedented event for the region that follows a period of extremely high temperatures.

Climate Talks

Alice Bell is co-director at the U.K. climate charity Possible, working on a range of projects from community tree-planting events to solar-powered railways. She formerly worked in academia and journalism and is the author of Can We Save the Planet? (Thames and Hudson, 2020) and Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2021).

When your focus is sustainability within other sectors, such as media or finance, you may come across colleagues or higher-ups who don't fully get it. Are there any tips that people should keep in mind when trying to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis?

There’s no one simple solution to how to deal with that, but as with any communication, it's about thinking about the audience—there will be approaches that will work better for different audiences. Think about where they're coming from and what might engage them. Some people will find that they will respond to images of terrifying disaster. Something will be completely turned off by that.

You can have a great line that you give to someone and really stay with them and have meaning in their life. Later, they can then take this message into other parts of their lives—talking about it with their friends in a cafe the next day or seeing it on television, in an advert, just seeing it enough for it to be meaningful and promote it, recognize it. That’s probably more important than just one message.

Is it going to be harder to forget about or ignore climate change now that we’re constantly confronted with the impact of extreme weather events?

People still think of climate change as a problem for the future, even though it's actually been present for decades now. When we talk about climate change, we often talk about inequality between countries and some parts of the world being richer than others. This is a big part of the story—but it's increasingly important for us to think about inequality within those countries.

The U.S. is a very, very good example of that, because on average, it's very rich. But there are lots of people in the U.S. who do not contribute to the problem who are very badly affected by climate change. It’s about making sure we listen to the people who are being impacted and remember that testimony.

Disproven ideas about fracking, and the cost and reliability of renewables, keep emerging despite overwhelming evidence against them. Is the resurgence of these myths a sign that we’re doing something wrong?

There are lots of people in the U.K. who believe in climate change, who want to see action on climate change, but they feel uncomfortable about the speed of change, because we've left it so long. We need to change very, very rapidly, and they're justifiably worried about who's going to be driving that change to tackle climate change seriously. [Some politicians are] using the political opportunity of people who haven't felt included in the debate about climate change. Good policies must involve the public. That's how we can have fair action that people feel comfortable with.

From your research, is there any evidence of politicians being punished by the public for pursuing unpopular measures that increase carbon emissions?

Politicians have a slightly odd view of what the public thinks that's not always accurate. There was a report [last week] about how there was apparently a split in the U.K. cabinet about whether to allow [more] onshore wind turbines or not. And apparently some of those who are against them think they're expensive and unpopular, and neither of those is true. Onshore wind is the cheapest way of making energy. It’s half the price of gas. It's much quicker to get it up running than drilling for gas in the North Sea, and it's incredibly popular. Politicians would kill for that popularity rating!

We need a better standard of public debate about energy so that journalists, members of the public and politicians themselves challenge each other, because statements like those should not be allowed to be said by a politician without a huge amount of challenge.

How do you stay optimistic and motivated?

Ultimately, it is a very depressing issue, and humanity has already caused a huge amount of damage to the Earth, and people are suffering and will continue to suffer. And you can't just ignore that. In our organization, if one of us is having a moment of the climate heebie-jeebies, then other people lift them up—you can't just bury it.

The thing that generally gives me strength is seeing people take action. I was giving a talk to a company [last week], a big national company, and they were talking about becoming an environmental leader. It’s heartening to see mainstream companies thinking about what they're going to do about carbon emissions and being part of the solution.

We also know that more and more people want to work for a company that's taking action on climate change or has a sustainability policy. We know the oil and gas industry is struggling to recruit people in their 20s and 30s. We’re living in a golden age of greenwash—but at the same time, we’re also living in an age where lots of companies understand they need to take this seriously and are aware that customers will check on them, because people don't want to be ripped off by companies pretending that they're green.

Alice Bell’s answers were condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

On The Horizon

A nationwide transition to zero-emission transportation and electricity in the U.S. could generate $1.2 trillion in public health benefits by 2050, according to the American Lung Foundation report.