January 2023 Networker: Holding Fast to Our Commitment to Future Generations |
| Volume 28 (1), January 2023 |
| On NPR’s recent 1A program addressing the electric grid and climate change, Amy Harder, executive editor of Cipher, spoke plainly but chillingly about the “baked-in” decades of climate warming we now face, even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow.
We can and must work to drastically reduce emissions now, even as we and our communities begin to experience the climate calamities that are occurring daily and will persist throughout the lives of multiple generations. Over the past couple years, I’ve noticed with awe as climate action groups take on mutual aid projects during and after climate catastrophes, while continuing their large-picture, future-oriented work. Talk about multi-tasking…
SEHN Science Director Ted Schettler and I just experienced, hundreds of miles apart, the seven recent climate-change influenced “atmospheric rivers” that dumped record rainfall on the state of California. Up north in Marin County, Ted experienced multiple power outages and needed to clear fallen trees in between efforts to do his good work. Further south, while en route home to the location where I was temporarily doing my work, I wondered where three fire engines and an emergency vehicle were heading fast in the driving rain. The next day I found out the personnel aboard had moments later begun a dangerous operation to rescue a mother and daughter who tumbled while in their car into a massive rain-induced sinkhole in Chatsworth.
SEHN’s vision is to fulfill our responsibility to govern ourselves and our communities wisely so that we can create and sustain a just and healthy world now and for future generations.
Although difficult to compare the challenges between eras, this commitment to a just and healthy world for future generations becomes increasingly more difficult to hold and feel confident about, as climate disasters now occur at a brisk pace.
Nevertheless, we persist without hesitation. When I joined SEHN and began routinely hearing its seasoned staff members discuss their work—and collaborating with them!—it became crystal clear to me that this vision informs every SEHN endeavor. Our projects may involve some of the world’s most formidable challenges, but SEHN does not ever turn its back on future generations.
SEHN Fellow Peter Montague, who contributes a future-concerned piece to this edition of the Networker, is a fierce advocate for younger generations (and he applauds and follows the lead of their commitments and actions as they address a grim reality they had no part in creating). Peter explores and uncovers the dark details of current policies, with a focus on one of the newer, and terribly misguided, centerpieces of U.S. climate policy: carbon capture and storage (CCS). “Like radioactive waste,” Peter writes, “CCS and [enhanced oil recovery] will create dangerous, expensive problems for young people to manage and pay for, essentially forever.” Peter discusses the “outrageous” actions we might consider—maybe a general strike—to force the changes that need to take place now, for future generations. And of course, nothing much really seems outrageous when compared to what can happen if we don’t pull the plug on fossil fuels. Sandra Steingraber’s column addresses one specific plug that must be pulled in order for today’s kids to literally breathe easier, as well as to stop the terrifying levels of methane emissions from fracking operations that have grave implications for the climate: the ordinary gas stove. As Sandra writes, “The burner tip of a gas stove—the literal terminus of a pipeline that begins at a fracking well—serves as the anchor for new fossil fuel-dependent building construction. The continued desirability of a clicking blue flame in the kitchen helps guarantee the whoosh of a gas furnace kicking on in the basement—and the persistence of a gas distribution pipeline system snaking under the sidewalks of the whole neighborhood.” As the research on the harms of gas stoves accumulate and wise policymakers speak up, all kinds of pushback is flaring (led, of course, by the fossil fuel industry and its legions of paid spokespeople). SEHN and its program, Concerned Heath Professionals of New York, will hold steady with clear, science-based messaging and action. It is not, after all, outrageous to work for large-scale transition away from a cooking method that has reasonable and even impressive substitutes. That familiar blue flame is cooking future generations, and we can do something about it. Thank you for being part of our dedicated readership and for your own dedication to future generations. Happy New Year, Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN P.S. As part of our embrace of a new year, we are beginning a regular feature, celebrating some of the extraordinary colleagues from other organizations with whom we work in vibrant coalition. We begin with Jim Walsh, Policy Director for Food and Water Watch. Enjoy! |
Celebrating our Colleagues, January 2023: Jim Walsh |
| By Carolyn Raffensperger, Executive Director |
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Jim Walsh, Policy Director for Food and Water Watch
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| SEHN has an unwritten by-law that guides much of our work: we have a moral obligation to pass on compliments. Since we primarily work in coalitions, we get to see brilliant colleagues bring extraordinary skills to the table and make extraordinary contributions to the common good. We want to fulfill our joyous obligation and celebrate our friends and allies with this new feature in the Networker. The first person we honor is Jim Walsh, Policy Director for Food and Water Watch.
At our last staff meeting I shared how Jim had helped get a letter to the federal agency that regulates pipelines. We needed to issue a press release, get the letter into the hands of the agency and members of Congress. A lot of what had to be done was outside of my area of expertise. Jim stepped in and with no fuss no muss got it all done. At our meeting, Sandra Steingraber chimed in with how Jim had expedited a scientists’ letter to the president. We have so many stories about Jim’s unstinting kindness and spot-on competence. Sandra wrote this about Jim: |
| “A curious fact about me is that I learned embroidery from my father, a World War II veteran with PTSD. My dad’s unspoken suffering was assuaged by creating, with skeins of thread, safe, comforting images of flowering trees and dancing children. The sewing skills I picked up from him went on to serve me well as a biologist who developed a knack for dissection and animal surgery.
If you knew a rat who needed a tracheotomy, I was your girl.
Later, as a scientist who works in the public interest on the climate crisis, I began to think of scientific papers and reports as piles of embroidery thread. All by itself, science is just bundles of vibrant colors. To create the world we want to live in—a safe, comforting place—all that scientific data needs to be threaded through the needle of the law. The act of creating a picture with needle and thread is the work of policymaking. Jim Walsh is one of the most inspired policy influencers I know. His vision for what the picture of our world should look like—a climate-stable world of healthy children and flowering trees undestroyed by pipelines and fracking wells, a world where fossil fuels are just fossils again, unexhumed from their stony graveyards—is also my vision. As a biologist, I have an intimate knowledge of the data but don’t always know what colors to thread the legal needle with at any one particular political moment or what part of the picture we need to be working on first. Jim always does. All this is to say, I am so lucky to have enjoyed a years-long collaboration, over several campaigns, with Jim Walsh. He continuously shows me how the science can be brought to the law to create the world we want to inhabit.” |
Old White Men Are Sacrificing the Future of Young People |
| by Peter Montague, SEHN Fellow |
| Moderate Democrats got very excited in August when President Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). On paper, the new law provides some real benefits for the general public: slightly higher taxes on corporations, money to cut pollution and improve health in overburdened communities of color or of low income, subsidies for solar and wind power, and more.
Unfortunately, the new law also contains a major poison pill that can undermine U.S. efforts to control climate change. And, if climate change continues uncontrolled, no one will be safe or secure from the climate chaos now unfolding all around us. Young people’s future is at stake. |
| To avert climate catastrophe, authoritative agencies and scientific institutions have issued stark warnings: to keep the climate emergency manageable, no new oil, gas or coal projects can be developed. None. In April 2022 United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said, “This is a climate emergency…. Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” And he accused fossil executives of “lying” about their intentions. Of course, Mr. Guterres was right about those executives. While claiming to address the climate emergency, they are planning massive expansions.
Oil executives—who have been lying openly about climate change for 50 years—now say their increasing carbon emissions will be eliminated by a Rube Goldberg plan to capture carbon dioxide gas (CO2) from a thousand smokestacks, send it through 66 thousand miles of not-yet-built pipeline, then pump the CO2 a mile below ground into salt-water (“saline”) aquifers, hoping it will stay there forever. This is called “carbon capture and storage” or CCS for short. |
Gas Stoves: The Fracking Tailpipe in Your Kitchen |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN Senior Scientist |
| This is an essay about the long-standing evidence that gas stoves harm children and why so many of us persist in liking them anyway. But it begins with pesticides.
When wildlife biologist Rachel Carson wrote about the dangers of DDT and 18 other synthetic pesticides in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, the chemicals she had in her sights were, commercially speaking, less than two decades old.
Organochlorine pesticides had been developed under wartime secrecy for purposes that included halting epidemics of typhus and malaria among our troops in both European and Pacific theaters of operation. Also included: a plan to destroy the Japanese rice crop. (We dropped the atom bomb instead; Agent Orange would have to wait until Vietnam.)
After World War II ended, these chemicals received a heroes’ welcome—orchestrated by a chemical industry-sponsored marketing campaign—and were deployed commercially in civilian life, forever changing the way food was grown, kitchens disinfected, children de-loused, and suburban lawns freed from crabgrass.
The rapid transformation of chemical pesticides from obscure weapons of war to ubiquitous household helpers was not an easy lift for advertisers. On the one hand, DDT needed to be marketed as a ruthless assassin, far more effective at killing insect pests than any earlier concoction. On the other hand, since it was going to be stored in the kitchen pantry and sprayed on baby blankets, DDT needed to be seen as a harmless pal.
Thus, in one vintage magazine ad, an aproned housewife in a pith helmet and stiletto heels aims a spray gun at two cockroaches on her kitchen counter. The caption reads, “Super Ammunition for the Continued Battle on the Home Front.” In another, the aproned woman appears in a chorus line of dancing farm produce singing “DDT is good for me!” |
| In deconstructing the myth of the deadly-yet-benign chemicals known as organochlorine pesticides, Carson’s first task was to remind to her readers that dangerous things, when they become popular enough, can assume what she called “the harmless aspect of the familiar” simply by virtue of appearing everywhere.
By the time she published the book, a full-on backlash against the evidence she’d compiled was underway with chemical industry trade organizations speaking in the voice of science. They dressed up propaganda as objective reports. They issued statements under the banners of scientific societies to which they donated as “sustaining members.” They sent their talking points to physicians who might well be receiving questions about the harms of pesticides from concerned patients. In her many public speeches, Carson called them all out. Continue Reading |
Carbon Capture Pipeline Opponents Want Permits Paused Until New Safety Regulations Are Done
“We know PHMSA says its existing rules are not adequate… And yet, we have three pipelines rushing to site the projects, before those safety measures are even.” SEHN Executive Director Carolyn Raffensperger is quoted in the Des Moines Register, following the release of a coalition letter she facilitated to the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Namibia Libre de Fracking: La Lucha de las Comunidades Marginadas u el Aval del Gobierno a ReconAfrica
The contributed article that appeared in the October edition of the Networker, “Frack Free Namibia: Advocating for the Most Marginalized as Government Welcomes Canadian Oil and Gas Exploration in the Kavango Regions,” was translated into Spanish by the feminist translation collective, Territorio de Ideas, and published on the Argentine website, Observatorio Petrolero. Douglas Brinkley Would Like to Invite Thoreau to Dinner
“Sandra Steingraber has done a marvelous job of editing the trilogy into a single volume for the Library of America, and together they constitute the finest writing we have on ocean life.” The New York Times’ “By the Book” column includes a recommendation for the Library of America’s “Rachel Carson: the Sea Trilogy,” edited by Dr. Steingraber, SEHN Senior Scientist. The Sea, the Sea
Global Plastic Treaty Should Address Chemicals
'The System' Is Ruining Our Present and Collective Future
“With youth choosing the path and leading the way, we elders could join The Future to serve as volunteer benefactors, fundraisers, cheer leaders, publicists, social-media posters, recruiters, and more.” SEHN Fellow Peter Montague describes an “unprecedented opportunity for progressive change,” on Common Dreams. |
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