Taking the Power Back in Your Hands: The Impact of Climate Justice on Neighborhoods Like Highland Park, Michigan, When DTE Became Bankrupt
In 2011, DTE Energy Company removed 1,200 streetlights from the city of Highland Park, Michigan. A Black working-class suburb of Detroit that was once a boom town for the automotive industry, Highland Park was on the verge of bankruptcy. The city went dark because it couldn’t pay its debt to DTE.
At RE:WIRED Green this week, Sarah Shanley Hope, vice president of narrative strategies at The Solutions Project, and actress Regina Hall spoke about the importance of stories like Highland Park’s—and why the need for more of them is so critical now.
Hall is a creative partner and donor with The Solutions Project. In times such as ours—with inflation, rising gas prices, many families struggling to pay utility bills—the smallest burdens accrue. “When you have alternatives that are out there, you can reap some of the financial rewards that help,” Hall said. “So often we feel like everything is out of our hands, and it is so empowering and hopeful when you see communities say, ‘This has happened, but we can take the power back in our hands.’ … It’s triumphant.”
A big part of what The Solutions Project works toward is the reframing of stories around climate justice. The organization helps get eyes on the work grassroots change-makers are accomplishing in frontline communities, in neighborhoods like Richmond and Brooklyn, where Black and Latinx residents often feel the brunt of climate inequity.
Hope said that solutions to the problems at the neighborhood level creates pathways to build power and transform state policy like what happened with the Justice 40 Initiative and the Reduction Act.
At the end of her talk, Pichon Battle asked the crowd to do away with the climate projects that reduce emissions but still exploit and extract marginalized communities. She says that the people should embrace more equitable and radical approaches to climate change. Pichon Battle said that they have to stop telling themselves that transition from one form of oppression to another is going to save them. It’s called greenwashing and it’s an injustice. “It is time, my friends, to join us with your hearts and souls and your gut,” she said.
As the Re:WIRED GREEN event on addressing climate change drew to a close yesterday, the weather underlined the urgency in the most horrific way possible.
While climate activist and lawyer Colette Pichan Battle was speaking in San Francisco, Hurricane Ian continued its destructive path across southwest Florida, underscoring her already- urgent call to action. “I want to make sure that you’re paying attention to what’s happening in the gulf of Mexico right now.” She encouraged the audience to be aware of climate events around the world, from rain in Baton Rouge and Houston to deadly floods in Pakistan and Cape Verde.
For Pichon Battle, individual steps like voting for politicians who care about the climate are all well and good—but must be accompanied by hard work on collective action that challenges existing economic and political systems. Access to clean water and healthy food, she said, should not depend on how much money a community has.
Hurricane Ian: When climate change hits Florida, it can never have gone, but instead it’s going to be staggering. And what can the governor of Florida do about it?
As I write this Friday, there are no detailed estimates of damage from Hurricane Ian, which came like a wrecking ball across southwestern Florida, except that they are likely to be, as my colleagues wrote Thursday evening, “staggering.”
The brick-and-mortar costs are nothing compared to the cost of human suffering. That’s almost incomprehensible. For now, it’s also impossible to know. Much of the area is impassable.
Roads and bridges have been laid to waste. On barrier islands, homes and businesses are made of wood and broken concrete.
Protecting Florida from the effects of future storms like Ian calls for more than just resilience. It calls for a retreat from the water and rebuilding where it is safe. But retreat has never been in Governor DeSantis’s plan. There has been no attempt by his administration to stop development in vulnerable coastal areas. As recently as August, Mr. DeSantis and his cabinet approved a high-rise resort development in Fort Myers Beach, where evacuation times already exceeded state regulations.
Expensive resilience projects like the ones the governor has supported can only ever be a temporary fix. As the sea level rises, they will have to be replaced, made higher, built larger. A bridge that has been raised by a foot will have to be raised two more times. For the sea walls and other infrastructure, it’s the same. They don’t address the cause of climate change, only the symptoms, and only for a little while.
If Governor DeSantis ever gets serious about a changing climate, the place to start is with the emissions that are also driving Florida’s other dangerous impacts: the intensifying heat waves that put outdoor workers at risk of dehydration and death, the warmer ocean waters causing rapid intensification of storms like Ian and the toxic algae blooms, which are also exacerbated by pollution.
Climate Change Impact on Rural America: CNN Opinion Series “America’s Future Starts Now” (with an Appendix by Jennifer Keel)
Editor’s Note: This essay is part of the CNN Opinion series “America’s Future Starts Now,” in which people share how they have been affected by the biggest issues facing the nation and experts offer their proposed solutions. A journalism graduate from the University of North Carolina, Keel moved to Colorado shortly after her Division 1 swimming career ended. She is getting ready to be a paramedic. Her views are included in this commentary. CNN has more opinion.
The first time I was evacuated was the summer of 2018. I crammed the last items into the back of the truck and looked across the street. The fire licked the sky and was threatening to descend on the community below. Cars were pulled over on the side of the road to watch a horrible scene because of the strong gusts of wind. It was the 4th of July, but that year no one was celebrating.
Climate change has played a significant role in my daily life since moving to the mountain town of Basalt, Colorado, five years ago. Our town is cut off from the city’s resources because of flooding and mud slides on major roads. Most summers, smoke inhalation is an inevitable part of recreating outdoors, and it’s become commonplace to check the air quality index daily to see if it’s safe.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife advises fly fishermen not to fish when the river temperature gets to 67 degrees, as it will place a high stress on the fish. Tourism is a major source of money for my rural community when the snow totals are low.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/19/opinions/climate-change-impact-colorado-keel/index.html
Climate Change Disasters and Community Support: How a Fork of Firefighting can Change Your Perspective on Rural and Urban Roaring Fork Valley
I remember my eyes were glued to the rearview mirror as I drove away from my house on July 4, 2018. Eerie orange flames seemed to grow taller and taller on the hillside behind me. I had a hard time breathing because of the smoke in the air when I went to the grocery store that morning. Everyone was scared and there was a somber tone in the valley.
While my home was spared, there have been wildfires in the area nearly every summer since 2018 that remind me just how treacherous climate change can be.
I lived in an urban area for most of my life, and had an immune system to climate change. I was protected from the impact while I knew it was happening. I’d turn on the TV and see climate disasters happening all over the world, and yet my daily life was largely uninterrupted.
That changed pretty soon after I moved to the mountains and had to evacuate from the Lake Christine Fire. The town was experiencing severe drought conditions that caused the fire to spread across 12,000 acres with dried grass, brush and trees as kindling.
As a community, we rallied. We made sandwiches, provided housing and other things when we supported the firefighters and first responders. I’d only lived in the Roaring Fork Valley for a year but felt deeply connected to my community in a way that was surprising. Tragedy will create bonds, regardless of background, ethnicity or political affiliation. We want to make sure we demand more from our elected officials before speaking up.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Climate Change in the 1980s: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the pedal”
Extreme weather events cost the country billions of dollars in the 1980s, according to the draft report. “Now, there is one every three weeks, on average.”
Hurricane Fiona ravaged Puerto Rico before it made landfall in Canada as a severe tropical storm. Historic floods in Pakistan affected 33 million people and left a third of the country underwater. In terms of structures lost, the Marshall Fire in Boulder was the most destructive in Colorado history.
Moving to a small town has given me an insight into what is happening in the world. The burn scar from the Lake Christine Fire is still visible on the landscape more than four years later.
The global economy is in dire straits. Global warming is expected to “reduce midcentury global economic output by 11% to 14%,” or about $23 trillion, according to the report.
International climate negotiations got underway today with dire warnings about climate-driven disasters, pleas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a plan for a new global weather early warning system.
The United Nations, which organizes annual climate negotiations, says about 44,000 people are attending this year’s meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. That includes leaders from hundreds of nations. They have two weeks to figure out how to cut greenhouse gas emissions and find a way to pay for the effects of climate change.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres did not mince words in his opening remarks. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the pedal,” he warned.
He also referenced the fact that the global population is expected to officially hit 8 billion people during this climate meeting. When baby 8-billion is old enough to ask, what did you do for our world, and for our planet, when you had the chance, how will we answer?
The UN is planning to warn people about climate-related disasters like floods and storms. It’s called Early Warning for All.
Over the next five years, a new plan calls for $3.1 billion to be set up to set up early-warning systems in places that don’t already have them. The warning systems will need more money in the future.
Those corporations should help pay for the costs associated with sea level rise, stronger hurricanes, heat waves and droughts around the world, she argued, and especially in places like her nation that are extremely vulnerable to climate change and don’t have the money to protect themselves.
The Prime Minister of Barbados went further in her opening speech than before. She stated that oil and gas companies profit from the fossil fuel economy.
“We want other organizations and communities to see where they’re potentially vulnerable to climate change and take steps to become resilient,” Charlene Lake, AT&T’s chief sustainability officer, said in a news release.
The Climate Risk and Resilience Portal will initially provide information about temperature, precipitation, wind and drought conditions. Additional risks such as wildfire and flooding will be added in the coming months.
The U.N.’s Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership: The Status of Climate Change in the Global Low-Energy Carbon Economy
More than two dozen countries say they’ll work together to stop and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030 in order to fight climate change.
The European Union and 26 other countries are part of the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership, which together account for one third of the world’s forests.
More than 140 countries agreed at a meeting in Glasgow last year to protect forests and other areas. According to the U.N., there isn’t enough money spent to preserve forests that capture and store carbon.
John D. Sutter is a CNN contributor, climate journalist and independent film maker who has won awards for his work. He was named the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media at George Washington University.
Every four or five years the federal government releases a report called the National Climate Assessment, which summarizes the latest science on climate change in the United States. The new draft of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is going through a long period of public review before it is publicly published next year, provides an important context about how far we can go to create a world safe for future generations.
The COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, along with recent advances in US climate policy, may give the impression the world is doing something about an existential crisis, and we’re taking it seriously. The truth is, global emissions continue to rise, and will continue to do so for at least the next several years, even as scientists warn fossil fuel use must be slashed immediately.
For the United States to reach net-zero by 2050, the country’s emissions need to fall by a whopping 6% per year. US emissions fell just 12% over the course of nearly two decades between 2007 and 2019.
Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples: Implications for the Future of the United States and for the Global Warming Crisis in the arid Southwest
“The effects of climate change are felt most strongly by communities that are already overburdened, including Indigenous peoples, people of color, and low-income communities,” the report says.
The rampant burning of fossil fuels is contributing to a worsening US water crisis. The report shows how the arid Southwest will experience more frequent and intense dry spells.
The report’s authors highlight the threat to the country’s aquifers — massive reservoirs of underground water built up over thousands of years — which are “particularly vulnerable to over-pumping.”
There are several factors that could lead to future migration within the US, according to the report.
There is a 50-50 chance the world will at least temporarily hit 1.5 degrees in the next five years, according to a recent report by the World Meteorological Organization. To prevent it from happening, global leaders and private industry would need to move at the scale and intensity of the mobilization of resources for World War II, said Daniel Schrag, director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment.