by Matt Rozsa | Dec 12, 2024 | Salon.com
Americans spend more time on average living with diseases compared to people in other countries, according to a recent study from the American Medical Association. Published in the journal JAMA Network Open, the retrospective study found that Americans live with diseases on average for 12.4 years. The main diseases with which individuals live long-term in the United States are mental illness, substance use disorder and musculoskeletal conditions.
To determine this, the authors studied what’s known as the healthspan-lifespan gap, a ratio of the number of years lived with disease or disability, as opposed to simply one’s overall lifespan. It is considered an important metric for measuring the holistic health of individuals members in a society.
Using data from all 183 member states of the World Health Organization, the researchers report that the overall the healthspan-lifespan gap has increased across the world within the last twenty years. . The average healthspan-lifespan gap was 9.6 years, while the United States had a gap of 12.4 years,the largest within any country. This can be explained by a rise in noncommunicable diseases.
The authors also discovered a larger healthspan-lifespan gap in women than men, “associated with a disproportionately larger burden of noncommunicable diseases in women.”
“A sex difference was observed with women presenting a mean healthspan-lifespan gap of 2.4 (0.5) years wider than men,” the authors wrote. “These results underscore that around the world, while people live longer, they live a greater number of years burdened by disease. To identify drivers of the healthspan-lifespan gap, associated demographic, health, and economic characteristics need to be investigated by geography.”
Originally from Salon.com
by Matt Rozsa | Dec 12, 2024 | Salon.com
On Nov. 14, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) — the Republican chair for the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and a longtime climate science denier — sent a letter to the Democrats asking for information about government scientists accused of preventing “views that challenge the existing consensus” from coming out. Less than three weeks later, Comer claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has employees who “hamstring the incoming Trump administration’s ability to implement their own executive agendas.”
Comer didn’t reference Trump by accident. Since his first term, the once-and-future president has attacked environmental science at every opportunity, suppressing information about how human activity causes climate change and opposing scientists’ suggestions on the regulation of common chemicals known as PFAS linked to infertility and cancer. Dr. Kyla Bennett, director of senior policy at the activist group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), saw the writing on the wall almost as soon as Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. She believes this scrutiny of scientists reflects overt anti-science sentiments — and the American public will pay a terrible price.
Bennett heard stories from EPA employees across the country during Trump’s first term, detailing how their contributions to scientific knowledge were politicized and ignored. She warned that “every single employee” at the EPA is “at risk” right now. Having worked at the EPA for almost 10 years as wetlands enforcement coordinator in New England, Bennett understands EPA workers’ plight viscerally as well as intellectually. Perhaps that’s why she is unapologetically frank when speaking on behalf of government scientists, especially about the millions of American voters who share Trump’s hostility to science.
“When 98% of climate scientists say that climate change is human-caused and it’s here, it’s bad. We’ve blown past the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold,” Bennett said, a reference to the carbon emissions cap established in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Those who support Trump’s anti-science views “have no understanding of ecology or science whatsoever, full stop, and they should not be in decision-making positions,” she added.
Bennett compared humanity’s current predicament to famous disaster movies like “The Day After Tomorrow,” a 2004 film in which climate scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are disregarded and threatened with job cuts despite warning of an impending superstorm. She argued that “every disaster movie starts with somebody ignoring a scientist. We are living in a disaster movie, and we are going to get screwed.”
Numerous current and past government scientists spoke with Salon (some only on background to protect themselves from Trump’s promised retribution), expressing similar concerns about the incoming president’s Agenda 47 and Project 2025, policy platforms which call for laying off thousands of government scientists at agencies like the EPA, NOAA, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy. Claiming this will boost America’s business interests, Trump has also justified his agenda largely by promoting the pseudoscientific claim that human-caused climate change is a “hoax.” It is a falsehood that can be traced back to President George W. Bush’s administration, which spurred the resignation of his first EPA head in 2003.
Over the years, an entire cottage industry has emerged, churning out misinformation and alternative explanations for global heating aside from humanity’s burning fossil fuels — all of them variables scientists have established do not cause the current extreme warming temperatures — from natural cycles to volcanic activity.
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Overwhelming scientific evidence points to the reason planet is overheating is primarily because humans are burning fossil fuels at an unsustainable rate, and to a lesser extent because of other commercial activities like agriculture and industry. As these actions release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor and fluorinated gases into the atmosphere, trapping excess heat, which in turns leads to extreme weather events like wildfires, hurricanes and droughts, as well as rising sea levels. Trump and his supporters reject this damning evidence, and have openly planned to further suppress the gathering and presentation of this scientific data.
That is why federal workers at places like the EPA, NOAA, the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior are bracing for the worst. Indeed, government employees are already seeing this anti-science philosophy trickle down into official policy, and Trump has not even taken office yet.
“There’s already talk within NASA of a pivot toward not saying ‘climate’ in public messaging, and it will remain to be seen whether we’ll be able to say the blindingly obvious scientific truth that fossil fuels are the main cause of irreversible planetary overheating,” Dr. Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist who speaks only for himself, told Salon. “As a scientist, this hurts my soul.”
Bennett said the type of science that the Republicans are pushing “isn’t science.”
“Like Kellyanne Conway’s ‘alternative facts’ [claiming] climate change is a hoax or PFAS are not toxic or we don’t need endangered species or wetlands are not important,” she said. “Science is not the type of thing where you have alternative facts and opinions on both sides.”
The thousands of scientists who work for the government, whether at the EPA and NOAA or at the Department of Interior or Corps of Engineers, “don’t do it for the glory. They don’t do it for the money. They do it because they care,” Bennett said, recalling how they were “traumatized” during Trump’s first term. It will likely be no different under his second term, given how Trump has hired anti-science promulgators like Twitter CEO Elon Musk, anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to fire thousands more and lead the rest, she reflects that “it’s horrific that our country has reached a place where science is no longer respected or valued, and that we are a country run by corporations. Corporations have infiltrated the EPA and under the new Trump administration, they are going to take it over.”
Marie Owens Powell, the president of the Council 238 chapter of American Federation of Government Employees (a union that includes EPA members nationwide), told Salon that their union plans on fighting back.
“Our contract has a new article that protects against an administration that is hostile to sound scientific principles,” Powell said. “It allows an independent arbiter to hear a case if an employee feels they’ve been retaliated against for insisting on scientific integrity. So if the agency is captured by an administration that does not value science, there is still a way for employees to remain protected for using scientific principles in their work.”
While these rules may provide some protection, many at the EPA remain apprehensive about how effective these rules will be in practice, especially as Republicans become more assertive in pushing their agenda. These scientists survived the first Trump Administration and are bracing themselves for many of the methods used on that occasion to be intensified.
Take Dan Costa, who left his career as a government scientist precisely because of those tactics. He had been a lead research scientist for 20 years in cardiopulmonary toxicology, focusing on the health effects of air pollution. Within less than a year of the start of Trump’s first term, though, Costa had left, despite having planned to retire years later. He says he experienced too much pushback from business-oriented Trump appointees who didn’t like his calls for stricter air quality controls.
“I felt we had a bullseye on us because, obviously, the national air quality standards were constantly challenged,” Costa said. “People objected when I felt that this administration coming in would number one, go after that regulatory program, and number two, because climate was in there, that it was just going to paper over the whole situation.”
Even though Costa provided the government with detailed research to perform his duties to the best of his ability, it quickly became apparent that his worst fears were well-founded. Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, Scott Pruitt, “really had no interest whatsoever in the mission of the agency,” Costa said, which is in theory (if not always in practice) to protect the environment.
Over time, the problem was not just getting the current scientists to stay; it was also finding reputable scientists who would willingly replace the originals, given the incumbent’s apparent hostility to their occupation. Meanwhile things did not improve at the top, even when Pruitt resigned amidst ethics scandals. Pruitt’s replacement Andrew R. Wheeler still shared Trump’s and Pruitt’s apparent hostility to environmental science.
Another EPA official who left during Trump’s first term, who requested to remain anonymous, experienced this hostility directly. The official explains that a lot of their work “pretty much stalled” during all four years when Trump was in office. Even though Trump, Musk, Kennedy and others in the MAGA camp characterize themselves as champions of free speech, this official noted a chilling effect against all references to climate change being caused by the fossil fuel industry.
“We kind of had to talk about the work differently,” they told Salon. “No one used the word ‘climate.’ Everybody kind of just talked about, ‘What are the outcomes of climate work?’ and not necessarily name ‘climate’ just as it is, if that makes sense.”
On a practical level, this made it essentially impossible for scientists to do their jobs, all of which require dispassionate analysis of empirical data without regard to any special interest groups their conclusions might offend. Many scientists, who entered the field out of passion for knowledge and a desire to protect nature, became demoralized and quit. Others were determined to do what good they could in the newly-restrained working conditions, whether saving the environment to the best of their ability or preserving research that would otherwise be purged. Things somewhat improved after President Joe Biden took office and attempted to rebuild what his predecessor had attempted to destroy, but much of the damage had already been done. Now this ex-official expects Trump to finish in his second term what he started in his first.
“You don’t feel like you can do your job,” the official said. Similarly an anonymous EPA scientist recalled a Trump official asking during his first term where in the Clean Water Act it stated that the government was required to use the best available science. In preparation for his second term, scientists are expected to go through increasingly arduous working conditions, from being forced to work in-office when it is unrealistic to being potentially relocated to a red state like Texas or Oklahoma.
“Most of the 7,000 employees that work [in the EPA and NOAA] will not move because they have spouses, they have children, they have lives and they don’t want to pick up and move to Oklahoma or Texas,” Bennett said. “We are going to lose expertise. We are going to lose the true scientists who work there and who care deeply about the environment, and we are going to lose the guardrails of the laws that we have.”
Lilas Soukup, the president of AFGE 1916, which represents union members at the Department of Energy, discussed the high stress being felt by government employees because of the rhetoric used by Trump, Musk and their supporters.
“I think just anxiety amongst the employees of the various agencies that are being targeted strategically, those associated with research and environmental issues, whether they will be employed or not,” Soukup explained, pointing specifically to Schedule F being implemented, which is a provision in the code for the United States civil service that Trump says he will exploit to fire scientists who do not agree with him.
They worry about what PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse described as a “very dangerous” anti-science rhetoric that makes these scientists despair for the survival of our species. Their only hope is that ordinary citizens pick up where they are leaving off.
“I think ordinary people that are concerned about climate change need to stay heavily engaged at the federal level,” Whitehouse said. “They cannot give up. They can never give up. This is the most important issue of our time, and they need to also engage at the state and local level.”
Bennett also urged citizens to be involved at the level of state and local government, as well as with nonprofits.
“The EPA contracts are going to go away,” Bennett said. “They’re talking about slashing their budget by up to 75%, so the EPA is no longer going to be a player. What scientists around the country have to do is start working at the local and the state level to at least preserve whatever we can in the states that are willing to do that.”
Experts and citizens everywhere must salvage the research that they can to help future generations, Bennett said. She returned to the disaster movie analogy, adding that if Trump and his supporters have their way, agencies like the one which employs the protagonists of those films will no longer exist. Most notably the heroes played by Dennis Quaid, Dash Mihok and Jay O. Sanders in “The Day After Tomorrow” (the only Hollywood blockbuster to focus on climate change, although scientists acknowledge its high rate of inaccuracies) are all NOAA climatologists, and Trump has put NOAA on the chopping block. According to the tropes of the disaster movie genre, people suffer terribly for disregarding scientific expertise. Bennett expects much the same thing in our world.
“Life is imitating art,” Bennett said. “People who are applauding the upcoming slashing of government employees and government regulations have no idea how these employees and these regulations protect them in their daily lives. Zero idea. The ‘find out’ phase of FAFO is going to be pretty stunning to a lot of people.”
Originally from Salon.com
by Matt Rozsa | Dec 9, 2024 | Salon.com
A pair of satellites astronomers hope can create an artificial eclipse were launched from a site in India last week. Beginning in 2025, each satellite will cause a periodic eclipse that lasts for six hours, much longer than the few minutes caused by natural eclipses.
In addition to conducting this experimental maneuver, the so-called ESA’s Proba-3 mission will observe a slice of the Sun’s ethereal corona difficult to perceive from Earth. The pair of satellites are currently orbiting Earth in lockstep with each other, but eventually will separate in a highly precise and technical procedure. Each satellite is smaller than a compact car but stuffed full of probes and other sensors. The larger one, known as the Coronagraph spacecraft, will explore the Sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, while the smaller spacecraft Occulter will take a voyage through the same region with special navigation sensors and low-impulse thrusters that will allow the Coronagraph to do its job.
Specifically, the Occulter spacecraft will be positioned at the exact correct distance for a 4.6-foot (1.4-meter) disk mounted to Proba-3’s Occulter spacecraft to obscure the surface of the Sun, blocking the star’s glare and casting a shadow 3 inches (8 centimeters) onto the Coronagraph satellite. By doing this, the scientists hope to learn more about the super-heated gases that comprise the solar corona.
The mission has two objectives: Take photographic images of the corona once every two seconds, which will help scientists search for small-scale fast-moving plasma waves that could be super-fueling the corona’s hellish temperatures; and also seek evidence of plasma jets which could play a role in accelerating the solar wind, or a cloud of solar particles emitted by the Sun at speeds of up to 1.2 million mph (2 million km/hr).
Originally from Salon.com
by Matt Rozsa | Dec 6, 2024 | Donald Trump, Free Trade, Presidential History, Reason.com, State of the Union, Tariffs
Donald Trump will soon become the second president to serve non-consecutive terms. Naturally, this invites comparison between Trump and the first president to serve non-consecutive terms, Grover Cleveland. In one crucial respect that juxtaposition is both instructive and cruelly ironic.
Trump has made raising tariffs a centerpiece of his economic agenda. Cleveland, by contrast, devoted his career to warning that high tariffs bring a specific and dangerous type of communism to America—a communism of pelf.
“Pelf” is a term for money acquired in a dishonest or dishonorable way, and while it may seem anachronistic, it is the perfect word to capture Cleveland’s ideas. As he explained in a frustrated 1894 letter to Mississippi Rep. Thomas Catchings, “The trusts and combinations—the communism of pelf—whose machinations have prevented us from reaching the success we deserved, should not be forgotten nor forgiven.” Yet his most consequential statement on tariff reform was a State of the Union message submitted to Congress on Dec. 6, 1887—exactly 137 years from the date of this article’s publication.
Cleveland believed so strongly in tariff reform that, because of that State of the Union, he was able to dedicate his entire 1888 reelection campaign to the cause of lowering them. He lost that election in a controversial squeaker, but was decisively reelected in 1892 in no small part because economic events had vindicated his warnings.
When tariffs are too high, Cleveland argued, it means that corrupt politicians and businessmen are able to exploit consumers, often imposing severe hardships through price increases. Just as bad, it means that the government is failing to treat all citizens as equal before the law, instead picking winners and losers in the aforementioned “communism of pelf.”
This was the situation that existed in America during and after the Civil War, when politicians imposed weighty tariffs under the pretext of supporting the nation’s burgeoning business community. While American consumers initially accepted the additional taxation as a wartime necessity, the high rates persisted even after the nascent military-industrial complex had been wound down.
The problem was both simple and intractable: There were thousands of manufacturing, industrial, agricultural, and other business interests that profited from high tariffs. Each special interest group disregarded the national welfare to protect themselves, and as a result, the government accumulated massive surpluses—$113 million in 1886–1887 alone.
Despite this growing crisis, initially, Cleveland did not prioritize tariff reform. For the first two-and-a-half years after taking office in 1885, Cleveland concentrated on rooting out government corruption, which had reached such a nadir that in 1873 Mark Twain dubbed the post-Civil War era as a “Gilded Age.” To the extent that Cleveland’s anti-corruption agenda involved vetoing legislation he deemed financially wasteful, he indirectly picked off some of the rotten fruits that grew from the protectionist tree. However, it was not until 1887 that he shifted his attention to a need for sweeping tariff reform. When he did, he transformed the presidency and America in the process.
“Our progress toward a wise conclusion will not be improved by dwelling upon the theories of protection and free trade,” Cleveland wrote in his message to Congress, alluding to the various nationalistic arguments made by the protectionists. “It is a condition which confronts us, not a theory.” From there, Cleveland proposed moderate tariff reductions, focusing on increasing access to raw materials for ordinary consumers and adding the federal government’s financial obligations could be met through internal revenue taxes levied on luxury items (particularly “tobacco and spirituous and malt liquors”).
In the long term, the message was good news for America, as the 1887 State of the Union completely dominated national politics for the next year. In the process, Cleveland strengthened the office of the presidency, which had become weak in shaping policy in the more than two decades since the Civil War. Of equal importance, he raised awareness about a grave economic injustice. Finally, Cleveland gave the Democratic Party a new sense of identity after nearly a quarter-century of post-Civil War ennui. Democrats who did not support tariff reform were no longer viewed as proper Democrats; the same was true for Republicans but in reverse, as practically overnight they redefined themselves around the cause of protectionism.
In the short term, though, the message had negative results. Cleveland’s tariff reform proposals passed the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives but failed in the Republican-controlled Senate. Even worse, despite winning the popular vote, Cleveland lost the 1888 election to Republican nominee Benjamin Harrison amid Electoral College disputes in the key states of New York and Indiana. (Unlike Trump, Cleveland accepted his defeat with grace and peacefully ended his term in 1889.) The Republicans took office and passed a high tariff law (framed by future president William McKinley, then an Ohio congressman). The McKinley tariffs raised the average duty on imports by almost 50 percent, and as Dartmouth University economist Douglas Irwin demonstrated in 1998, these tariffs did little to stimulate the economy even as they imposed considerable suffering on low-income Americans.
This is why, just like Trump, Cleveland was able to comfortably get elected to a non-consecutive term by promising to lower prices. The key difference is that, unlike Trump, Cleveland proposed an intelligent solution to the problem—lowering tariffs, not raising them.
Unfortunately for both Cleveland and the Americans of his time, he would not live to see his vision for tariff reform realized. America plunged into an economic depression shortly after he took office in 1893, compelling Cleveland to confront a number of unrelated crises before he could get to tariff reform. By the time a tariff bill did reach his desk in 1894, special interest groups in both parties had diluted it almost to meaninglessness. Cleveland couldn’t bring himself to veto the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894, and he only allowed it to become law without his signature. Adding insult to injury, McKinley and the Republicans politically benefited from the economic misery they’d helped cause, with Democrats getting blamed for the depression because of their incumbency and McKinley winning the 1896 presidential election in a major realignment.
Tariff reform along the lines Cleveland advocated would not become the law of the land until the Underwood-Simmons Act of 1913, which was promoted with far more political effectiveness by Woodrow Wilson, the first Democratic president to serve after Cleveland’s administration. By then, Cleveland had been dead for five years.
Yet, Cleveland’s tariff reform message was not a failure. In addition to putting himself on the right side of history, Cleveland offered a potent and timeless warning about the dangers of protectionism.
“When we consider that the theory of our institutions guarantees to every citizen the full enjoyment of all the fruits of his industry and enterprise, with only such deduction as may be his share toward the careful and economical maintenance of the Government which protects him, it is plain that the exaction of more than this is indefensible extortion and a culpable betrayal of American fairness and justice,” Cleveland wrote. “This wrong inflicted upon those who bear the burden of national taxation, like other wrongs, multiplies a brood of evil consequences.”
The post Trump vs. Cleveland: A Tale of Two Tariff Strategies appeared first on Reason.com.
Originally from Reason.com
by Matt Rozsa | Dec 6, 2024 | Salon.com
Earlier last month, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that Earth’s average temperature in 2024 had been on average 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. This was the major threshold established in the 2015 Paris climate accord as a dangerous milestone for our species, in which temperatures are so hot, that collapse of major ocean and atmospheric systems and mass extinctions follow. Was this headline news? The biggest story of the year? The source of mass protests?
Quite to the contrary, it has already been swept under the rug in the public’s consciousness.
Yet the EU’s announcement did not occur in a vacuum: Scientists have warned of rising temperatures for decades, and 2024 alone saw climate change-fueled natural disasters from unprecedented heat waves in the Southwest to powerful hurricanes in the Southeast. Yet despite these calamities, millions of people voted for a president whose policies experts warn will worsen climate change. It raises a provocative question: Why do people find it so difficult to psychologically grasp the reality of human-caused climate change?
According to Dr. Debra J. Davidson, a professor of environmental sociology at the University of Alberta, it has to do with a feeling of psychological distance from the problem.
“For too long now, scientific and media communications have presented the subject of climate change in ways that have failed to trigger an adequate threat warning among readers and viewers, and have also failed to motivate a sense of personal responsibility to respond,” Davidson explained. Instead climate change is frequently depicted in the abstract, as an extremely complicated scientific process, and this causes many readers to feel remote from the consequences.
University of South Africa psychologist Dr. Monika dos Santos turns to evolutionary psychology for an explanation on humanity’s difficulty grasping the magnitude of the problem.
“Homo sapiens is a unique species in that our vastly superior intelligence does not seem, in the majority of individuals at least, to inhibit irrational destruction of its own species,” dos Santos told Salon. “In fact, the still largely untapped and evolving intelligence of our kind renders this destructiveness more and more horribly dangerous, not only to our own species, but to all other species, and to our entire environment and ability to survive in it.”
The rest of the planet is paying a steep price for humanity’s psychological myopia. Recent studies have shown that humans caused so many extinctions over the last 500 years that it would have taken 18,000 years for that same number of species to have naturally vanished had humans never existed. The average predicted extinction rate for freshwater animals and plants today is three orders of magnitude higher than it was during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when an asteroid likely killed the dinosaurs. Humans are ultimately on track to cause one million extinctions just through climate change.
Even if humans choose to be collectively indifferent to the suffering of other life forms, practically it is unwise for us to destroy our own ecosystem. We will not long survive as a civilization if that happens, which is not in our self-interest.
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“Evolution has been compared to a labyrinth of blind alleyways and there is nothing entirely peculiar or implausible in the assumption that the human innate equipment, though superior to that of any other living species, nonetheless contains some built-in error or deficiency that predisposes us toward self-destruction,” dos Santos argued.
Davidson also blamed humanity’s failure to grasp the problem on political tribalism. Because the fossil fuel industry has trillions of dollars and is ideologically aligned with both of America’s two major parties, though clearly more with Republicans, there is an ecosystem of falsehoods in the public sphere that distort general understanding of the issue.
“The ready availability of disinformation, and the tendency for people, facilitated by social media, to find themselves in echo chambers … offers many people a way out of contemplating the very serious existential threat that climate change poses,” Davidson said. “Who wouldn’t prefer to believe everything is going to be fine? Furthermore, in our busy lives filled with multi-stressors, there are inevitably more pressing issues, whether it is the invasion of Palestine or paying the rent.”
More frustratingly for people who want to address the problem of climate change, scientific evidence shows that individuals who embrace denier myths develop an emotional, political attachment to those opinions. Because denying the science becomes a part of their identity, they develop a personal investment in disagreeing with the facts. This is a phenomenon known as “motivated reasoning” and means that, effectively, people who are motivated to dispute climate change are inclined to be stubborn for the same political reasons that inspired their initial anti-science attitude.
Further complicating matters for humanity, though, is the fact that even people who understand climate science often feel demoralized by a sense of powerlessness.
“Even for those who recognize the threat and are consequently highly concerned, many lack the sense of efficacy required to motivate engagement,” Davidson explained. That can mean either personal efficacy (i.e. my actions won’t make a difference) or collective efficacy or cynicism (i.e.other people, and our institutions just don’t have what it takes to respond, therefore there’s no point in trying.
There are still ways individuals can make a difference — and when they do these things, it helps them feel better. A 2023 study in the journal PLOS Global Public Health of over 500 British young adults (between the ages of 16 and 24) found respondents who harbored negative thoughts about the future had better mental health when they also felt motivated to change the world.
“Our work suggests that emotions linked to climate change may inspire action-taking, which has implications for how we communicate about climate change,” the authors write after pointing out that, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, respondents remained “distressed about climate change.” They added, “Our findings also highlight the need for targeted, climate-aware psychosocial support to sustain young people’s climate engagement and mental health simultaneously.”
NASA climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus told Salon in January, emphasizing that he was only speaking for himself, advised concerned citizens to start at the local level, be willing to take risks and not “be afraid of your climate grief.”
He added, “It’s actually a powerful form of connection.”
Dos Santos underscored that there is a path forward, that “the only viable solution for humankind is an ecological revolution, which requires a continuous process of switching from technology that contributes to pollution and climate change, to technology that is effective and clean. It comes after previous technical revolutions including the Industrial and Digital Revolutions.”
Originally from Salon.com
