Consider This from NPR - Kids Born Today Could Face Up To 7 Times More Climate Disasters

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Children being born now will experience extreme climate events at a rate that is two to seven times higher than people born in 1960, according to a new study in the journal Science. The researchers compared a person born in 1960 with a child who was six years old in 2020. That six-year-old will experience twice as many cyclones and wildfires, three times as many river floods, four times as many crop failures and five times as many droughts. Read more about the study here. These extreme changes not only endanger the environment, they take a toll on our mental health. KNAU reporter Melissa Sevigny spoke with residents in Flagstaff, Arizona who are reeling from a summer rife with fires and floods. And NPR's Michel Martin spoke with two climate activists of different generations — Jasmine Butler and Denis Hayes — about their outlook on the planet's future amid new climate change reports. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

When Anissa Doughton picks up her kids from school, they ask her where they're going. I say home, meaning their grandparents. And they say, are we going to Nani's or are we going to Flood House, is what they call this now. The Flood House. Doughton told KNAU reporter Melissa Sevigny that's what her kids call their family home after torrential rain made it unlivable. Just this week I made my third mortgage payment on a house that I no longer live in. It's hard to do that and not feel angry about the situation. One of Doughton's kids has special needs and can't safely climb over the six-foot-high walls of sandbags and cement barriers that now surround her house. So they had to move out.

The family lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, an area where massive flooding, like they experienced this summer, is not typical. The side room where you saw the construction, it's a total loss. A few blocks from where Doughton's house stands, Dawn Rodriguez is also worried about losing her home. It flooded three times this summer. She always planned to leave her house for her children. Her family three times this summer. She always planned to leave her house for her children. Her family bought it the day her first daughter was born. Now, she's thinking about selling it, but wonders if anyone will buy it. We did everything right. We did everything right. We did the sandbags. We were here. We weren't neglectful.

And so I don't, a future, I don't see much of a future. Flagstaff also experienced devastating wildfires this past summer. Kat Edgley was among the more than 1,000 people told to prepare to evacuate. She packed her car and drove away amid flurries of falling ash. And I was really taken aback by how emotional I was. So looking at all my things and videoing it for my insurance company, just in case it really hit home how real it is. She's a social scientist.

She studies the emotions that arise during wildfires. And now she's experiencing them herself. Edgley says her research has found that for some, anxiety lingers, even years later. She says it's easy to measure recovery by rebuilt houses or repaired roads. It's a lot harder to measure how many people are still feeling down about it, how many people are still worried or scared six months, a year, ten years later, and what does that do to their connection to a place? Do they still want to live there? Do they still feel safe?

These are the questions people will have to continue asking themselves as more climate disasters occur. And the generation that will bear the brunt of those disasters, well, they're the children that are born right now. A new study in the journal Science shows that kids today will live on an earth with up to seven times more extreme climate events as someone born 150 years ago. A lot of folks my age are really, really falling into this place of like, what's the point of anything?

What's the point of working or trying or having kids or planning for a future that is so uncertain and so likely to look so different than we could have previously thought. Consider this. Climate change isn't just destroying homes and communities. It's causing grief and uncertainty over what the future holds. Coming up, we'll hear from two generations of climate activists about their outlook on the planet's future. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Tuesday, October 5th. Support for this podcast and the following message come from TrackPhone Wireless, giving you control over your wireless plan. There's no contract and unlimited talk and

text smartphone plans start at just $20 a month, all in America's largest and most dependable networks. Learn more at trackphone.com. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. All right, a little more on that study. The researchers compared a person born in 1960 with a child who was six years old in 2020. Now that six-year-old will experience twice as many cyclones and wildfires, three times as many river floods, four times as

many crop failures, and five times as many droughts. Heat waves will be the climate event children experience the most, and extreme heat is one of the leading causes of weather-related deaths in the United States. The study also shows stark intergenerational inequities across the board. But researchers said climate change will affect younger generations in developing countries more acutely. Now, all this information and data was released just as youth climate activists gathered at a summit last week in Milan, Italy. You cannot adapt to extinction. The climate crisis is pushing many communities beyond their ability to adapt. Vanessa Nakate from Uganda was one of the activists who gave a speech, and she called on world leaders to address the loss and damage caused by climate

change. Why is it so easy for leaders to open up new coal power plants, construct oil pipelines and frack gas, which are all destroying our planet and harming the present and future of their children, but so hard for them to acknowledge that loss and damage is here with us now. The impact of loss and damage from climate change is something many activists have been thinking about for years. How environmental activists of different generations think about the future and what upcoming generations will endure,

well, that's a different question. Dennis Hayes is one of the founders of Earth Day. He's now CEO of the Bullet Foundation. It promotes sustainable communities in the Pacific Northwest. You still think, hey, I've still got it. I've got a lot of youth here. But you turn 77 and you suddenly realize, you know, not so much. I just turned 22 this past Wednesday, actually.

Jasmine Butler is an organizer with Power Shift Network, a group mobilizing young people and climate and environmental justice issues. Very new to this world, but we'll be in it for a long time, fight the same fight. Now they both spoke to NPR's Michelle Martin. I just wanted to get each of your reactions to the study that I just mentioned. It found that children born today will, on average, live through three times as many disasters as their grandparents, with the impacts, as you might imagine, most pronounced in some of the world's poorest regions. Dennis, when you read this kind of information, what comes to mind? I suppose a profound sense of failure. I mean, my generation has known about this stuff for a long time, and we've tried

everything that we could and had remarkably little success, in part because of the formidable opposition from the fossil fuels industry, but I'm sure in part because we weren't sufficiently strategic, sufficiently creative, sufficiently something to avoid the mess that we've left for Jasmine and her friends. So you said a sense of failure. Well, you know, when you were younger, Dennis, the actual air quality and water quality were much worse than today. That doesn't bring you any sense of accomplishment? You know, every generation has its own challenges. And with mine, there was the overall threat of thermonuclear war. We had air pollution so bad that a two-year-old baby breathing air in Los

Angeles was having the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Water pollution was rife. We were losing a great many species. And we did a wonderful job of passing a Clean Air Act, a Clean Water Act, a Safe Drinking Water Act, an Endangered Species Act, Superfund, Toxic Substances Control Act. Bam, bam, bam, bam. But that was the 1970s. And in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president, and a great many of things just changed dramatically with that election. I see. Jasmine, what about you? This study that I just mentioned, what does that bring up for you? Truly, for me, it immediately kind of brings up a, tell us something we don't know. You know, I think it's kind of like, well, you know, to our politicians and to folks who are

still having so much pushback against this idea that, oh, we don't know the future and, oh, we can't, you know, make any big changes now because we don't know, you know, what's really in store for us. It's like, what else do the folks in power need to hear to really want to do something? And Jasmine, you know, one thing that I think we've started talking about that we didn't talk about earlier was climate anxiety. I mean, is that something you talk about, your friends, your peer group? Absolutely. There are even orgs that I'm, you know, in community with who are starting to have whole events to try to help folks my age learn to deal with it. Climate anxiety is super real. And kind of the way I describe it is this overwhelming sense of,

on the one hand, we know there's a problem. And also we're seeing the folks who are in power and the folks who are supposed to be protecting us not doing anything about it. A lot of folks my age are really, really falling into this place of like, what's the point of anything? What's the point of working or trying or having kids or planning for a future that is so uncertain and so likely to look so different than we could have previously thought? You know, I wanted to ask about that because there was a study published in The Lancet last month that polled young people and found that 39% of them were hesitant to have children because of the climate crisis. So Dennis, I wanted to ask you, do you remember feeling that way? Well, population was a really big issue when I was young. So I made a decision early on that

I would have only one child and I would be encouraging my friends and family to only have one. Not with enormous success, I should add, with regard to that. But no, I didn't. The thermonuclear thing, which is the equivalent threat, it's not neighborhoods having air pollution, it's a threat to all life on the planet. That was something that was so far beyond our control that there was almost no way that we could wrestle with it. So

let's find some issues like ending the war, ending racism, cleaning up the environment that we could do things on. Well, you know, to that end, though, you did a lot. I mean, you helped get the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts passed. You helped create Earth Day, which was the same year that Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. And I think people would see that as lasting change. How did you get that done? What would you say was the key to that? This was definitely from the ground up. You sometimes bring change from the top down, but the environmental movement came from the 20 million people who turned out on Earth Day, and it came from presidential candidates like Ed Muskie running as the environment, being a core part of his ticket because he saw this constituency. All of those things came together, but it wouldn't have happened

without the 20 million people demanding a healthier world for themselves and their children. Jasmine, what about you? What do you see? Well, first of all, I'm just interested in what you see as the role of electoral politics and climate activism. And what else? What's your focus? Honestly, a lot of folks my age and myself included have really come to a place of kind of disillusion with electoral politics. You know, folks in previous generations have obviously made such huge strides, but we're playing in an entirely different arena and different actors. You know, big and dirty money wasn't as big and wasn't as dirty. You know, corporate interests weren't quite as powerful. Fossil fuels weren't, you know, ruling the world as strongly as they are now. So a lot of folks my age are truly turning to a point of, well, electoral politics isn't

quite getting it done yet. And so a lot of folks my age are looking to see, you know, what else can we do? So an example of that coming up in October 11th and 15th, there's this coalition of folks called People vs. Fossil Fuels who are actually heading to Washington, D.C. with some very specific demands for Biden and the executive branch specifically for the things that are completely in his power. So for example, some of the demands are that he put it into Line 3, one of the pipelines that folks have been fighting for for years now that is about to get started, as well as declaring a climate emergency, again, fully within his power, and that opens up an entire, you know, arena of funding and opportunities to take action. And these are, you know, things, again, that are in his power and, you know, around the

things that he's made promises on, but simply has not moved on. Let me jump in with kind of a serious thought, and it's mostly for Jasmine, Michelle. It's that when we were doing things in the past, if you pass a Clean Air Act and you start putting catalytic converters on automobiles, the air cleaned up pretty quickly. The difficulty with regard to climate is that everything that we're doing is slowing the rate of deterioration.

I mean, you don't start seeing concrete improvement until you've gotten the entire planet to carbon neutral, and then you start pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. It's hard to claim a victory when things are still getting worse the next year. And Jasmine, how does that sit with you? For me, it really is something, it makes me think of all the things that nowadays, again, are deemed as radical or a little too far far or our politicians would never go for that. It's like, no, in 20 years, you'll thank us weird radicals just like the hippies of your day. You'll thank us for demanding so much better of us because we know that we can do better.

You look at these statistics and you look at these polls and you show how discouraged a lot of people are. What keeps you at it? Absolutely. I definitely feel the doom and the despair some days. But for me and a lot of folks, subscribe to this concept of revolutionary optimism, which basically means like if you're doing something about it yourself, you feel entirely different about the state of things. So for me, you know, individualism obviously isn't everything, but a lot of quelling that, you know, really large anxiety and doom for a lot of us looks like being active and being involved in organizing. You know, you heard Dennis say earlier that he feels a sense

of failure. Do you feel that way about us, like our generation, that we failed you? I will say that your generation is large. We're so grateful to folks like Dennis and other folks who took on that fight so early and were some of the earliest, you know, whistleblowers around climate change and reminders that those things are important. And also you're very much have so many, you know, oil CEOs and conglomerates and, you know, politicians who really don't care about their constituents who are also in your generation. So I definitely can't say that's a one size fits all, but I definitely, it's frustrating sometimes we're fighting against the same, you know, monsters in the closet that you all were. So, Dennis, I think Jasmine forgives you.

Thank you, Jasmine. What's keeping you going, Dennis? I've seen the odds stacked overwhelmingly against us. The opposition to the Clean Air Act included the oil industry, the gas industry, the coal industry, the electric utility industry, the automobile industry, the steel industry, And we passed it unanimously in both chambers of commerce because we had Congress scared to death that they would lose their seats if they didn't come out for clean air. And as Jasmine is just sufficiently determined and energetic and uncompromising and willing to push and push and push and push, you won't get everything that you're pushing for,

but you'll get a lot more than you would if you hadn't done that. Climate activists Dennis Hayes and Jasmine Butler. They spoke to NPR's Michelle Martin. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.