environmental policy | Cathy's Class Blog

A Tale of Two Marches

May 14 2017June 29, 2017

Front banner at the March for Science in Washington, DC, on April 22, 2017.

Front banner from the People's Climate March in Washington, DC, on April 29, 2015.

Front banner on the left side of Pennsylvania Avenue at the People’s Climate March in Washington, DC, on April 29, 2015.

One banner from the People's Climate March in Washington, DC, on April 29, 2017.

Front banner on the right side of Pennsylvania Avenue at the People’s Climate March in Washington, DC, on April 29, 2017.

April is Earth Month – which under a Trump administration means a lot of environmental activism. This year saw two historic marches in Washington, DC, each with sister marches around the country: the March for Science and the People’s Climate March.

A denier dinosaur at the March for Science.

I had planned to go to the March for Science in Columbus, where thousands of people said they planned to attend, then go to Washington for the People’s Climate March. But when a family gathering unexpectedly pulled me to North Carolina, my husband, Paul, and I decided to go to Washington for both marches. It was a grueling but rewarding experience.

The weather at the two marches could not have been more different. On April 22, it was cold, rainy, and windy at the March for Science. I hadn’t brought an umbrella, and ended up buying one from a street vendor. Even so my clothes, shoes and everything inside my backpack got soaked.

Marcher at March for Science.

The rain didn’t seem to depress turnout. We arrived at the Washington Monument as the pre-march rally was getting under way. There was just one checkpoint to have bags searched, and the line to get in ran for dozens of blocks. Instead, we took refuge inside a tent that had wifi, where I plugged in my phone and watched the speakers through the live feed from Democracy Now.

When it came time to march, Paul ran out to get some photos at the front of the lineup. I lingered behind to take photos of people’s signs. The signs were unique and creative, based on specific areas of science or supporting science, facts, and evidence in general. These were people who had spent a long time studying in their fields and were proud of their accomplishments.

A sign left at the Capitol building.

Eventually I worked my way out of the crowd to find the march had already started. So I ran down Constitution Avenue for what seemed like forever, and got in front of the lineup at the intersection with Pennsylvania. There I was able to get a few photos of the parade banner, where if you look closely, you can see Bill Nye and climate scientist Michael Mann leading the charge. I also got 20 minutes of video of the march until my phone batter ran out.

The March for Science ended at the U.S. Capitol, where I continued to get photos of people and their signs. Despite the rain, the mood was happy and defiant. People gathered in drum circles to chant “This is what peer review looks like” and wore dinosaur costumes with signs saying “The meteor is a Chinese hoax.” Many signs were left on the fence of the Capitol building as a message to those inside.

You can see a slideshow of 142 photos I took at the March for Science below.

People’s Climate March

Whereas weather during the March for Science was cold and wet, it was hot and sunny a week later for the People’s Climate March. The temperature hit 91 degrees F, tying a record for April 29 in Washington, DC. Marchers were told to bring sunscreen, which we did. Despite using an SPF 70, the sunscreen sweated off, and I got sunburned enough to peel on my face and arms.

The Indigenous Rights banner at the People’s Climate March.

Still, it was an incredible experience. We arrived an hour before the march began and got to take lots of photos at the lineup on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol building. Environmental justice was a huge theme of the march, with the Protectors of Justice –indigenous communities and people of color who are at the frontlines of climate change – leading the charge.

The CO2LONIALISM wagon at the People’s Climate March.

Some particularly notable displays included the CO₂LONIALISM wagon shot full of arrows depicting sovereignty, language, reparations, and feminism; the 10-foot puppet of murdered Honduran environmental activist Berta Caceres; and the many colorful parachute banners.

The lineup wound down Pennsylvania Avenue, turning on Third Street in front of the Capitol, then on Jefferson down the Washington Mall. After the Protectors of Justice were

Creators of Sanctuary – immigrants, LGBTQUI, women, Latinos, waterkeepers, food sovereignty and land rights
Builders of Democracy – labor, government, workers, voting rights, and democracy groups
Guardians of the Future – kids, parents, elders, youth, students, and peace activists
Defenders of Truth – scientists, educators, technologists, and health community
Keepers of Faith – religious and interfaith groups
Reshapers of Power – anti-corporate, anti-nuclear, fossil fuel resistance, renewable energy and transportation
Many Struggles, One Home – environmentalists, climate activists, and more

Resist banner near Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC.

I tried again to take a video of the entire march, this time getting three 20-minute videos before running out of space. After clearing off a few things, I joined the march and quickly found myself among chants of “Hey hey! Ho ho! Donald Trump has got to go!” at Trump International Hotel – the same spot where people shouted “Shame! Shame!” during the Women’s March.

The next stop for the climate march was the White House. Marchers came up Pennsylvania Avenue, then turned up 15^th Street NW to Lafayette Square. On the way they encountered the large “Climate Change Affects Us All” chalkboard that had made its debut at the 2014 People’s Climate March in New York City, along with the large Mercy for Earth balloon and a display of members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as puppets of the oil industry.

The Climate Change Affects Us All chalkboard made its debut at the People’s Climate March in New York City in 2014.

By the time I got to Lafayette Square, I was exhausted. Everyone was sitting down, and I found a place in the shade to rest and put on more sunscreen. Finding my husband took a while, and finding water took even longer. I had long since consumed the water I had brought, and saw no water on the march route. Unfortunately there were only a few street vendors with water, all with long lines. Finally a police officer sitting in his air conditioned SUV gave me a bottle of water. He must have felt sorry for me – and might not have done the same for a person of color.

The climate ribbon display was also in Paris during the 2015 climate conference.

That water allowed me to finish the march and stay for the rally at the Washington Monument, full circle from where we had begun the week before at the March for Science. The rally featured indigenous leaders, music, and a long list of speakers including the children who had touched off resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline by running from Standing Rock to Washington, DC.

The climate ribbon tree that I saw at the climate conference in Paris was there, with people hanging ribbons for what they did not want to lose to climate change. Then everyone left their signs in front of the Washington Monument arranged to spell out “Climate Jobs Justice.” The crowd was buzzed a couple of times by low-flying helicopters from the White House.

You can see a slideshow of 170 photos I took at the People’s Climate March below.

An assessment

A marcher at the rally after the People’s Climate March.

What do these two marches mean? First, they show the widespread public support for policy based on science and evidence, and for action to address climate change. About 1.1 million people marched for science on April 22, with 100,000 in Washington, DC. Over 200,000 people marched for climate in Washington on April 29, with 370 sister marches around the country.

Polls show that the vast majority of people think science has improved their lives and support public funding for science, while concern for climate change is at an eight-year high. Large majorities of Americans, including a majority of Trump voters, support action on climate.

A sign left at the U.S. Capitol after the March for Science.

Will Trump or his cabinet to listen? Not likely. As of this writing, Trump’s administration has issued a series of disastrous orders regarding climate and environment, and he is close to pulling out of the Paris climate agreement.

Fortunately, we don’t need Trump to start taking action on climate. Some things you can do in your individual life include:

Bike, walk, or take public transportation to work
Trade your gas car for a hybrid or electric vehicle
Get an energy audit for your home
Ask your utility about energy from renewables
Eat less meat or eliminate meat consumption altogether

You can also act to change things on a collective level. Some ideas are:

Join the Sierra Club or another environmental group and sign up for action alerts. Sierra Club has a rapid response team to keep you posted on actions and events in your area.
Save phone numbers for your U.S. and state representatives into the favorites on your phone so you can call them quickly and easily when news breaks out.
Find and follow your local Indivisible or progressive group on social media.

A sign left near the Washington Monument after the People’s Climate March.

One promising front in the climate campaign is cities. Urban areas are responsible for 70% of carbon emissions, and 90% of cities are at risk from climate change. At the Paris climate conference, 1000 cities across the world pledged to go 100% renewable by 2050. Now that movement is coming to the United States with the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign. So far 28 cities and one state have committed to going 100% renewable, with discussions in dozens more.

Although things seem so bleak right now that scientists have to come out of their labs and Native American grandmothers into the streets, it’s times like this that show us what we are made of. I was heartened by the massive participation, creative signs, and visionary art at the March for Science and People’s Climate March. Millions of Americans are not going to let the current administration exploit the planet and destabilize the climate without a major fight.

A version of this post appeared in the July 2017 newsletter for Sierra Club Central Ohio Group.

Kleindorfer and environmental policy

February 12 2015April 1, 2015

This is a reaction to readings in ENR 8150 Advanced Environment, Risk, and Decision Making. The reading was Kleindorfer, P.R. Chap. 2, pp. 37-56 in Sexton, K., A. A. Marcus, K. W. Easter, and T. D. Burkhardt, eds, Better Environmental Decisions: Strategies for governments, businesses, and communities (Island Press, 1999).

I liked this article in that it made an attempt to systematically apply some of the decision-making concepts we have been looking at to the environmental arena. Kleindorfer listed five special aspects of environmental decision-making:

The relatively insignificant effect that individuals have on the environment, along with the perception that the individual bears the costs but society gets the benefits
The perception that the problem is with industry or government
The cost of environmental protections, and the difficulty of weighing costs against benefits
Long term effects of environmental improvement are hard to weigh against near term costs
Lack of scientific proof of causality between action and outcome

Kleindorfer looks at some strategies for addressing some of these issues. For example, if costs are perceived as high and benefits as low, regulation and an appeal to ethics is needed. If costs are low and benefits high, we need to make sure people understand the benefits. If costs and benefits are both high, people need to be convinced the problem is unacceptable and there is an alternative.

Kleindorfer classifies environmental problems into four types:

Easy, which the market or simple regulations can solve
Commons dilemmas, which require regulations and standards along with an appeal to ethics
Information problems, which require providing information and seeking participation and consensus
Tough problems, which require pretty much all of the above

Kleindorfer ends by arguing that an appeal to self interest won’t work to get people to take action on environmental problems. He thinks you have to appeal to social responsibility or a sense of ethics. This is what he calls legitimation, and he says it’s the foundation of all environmental decision making.

Individual vs collective

Since my main interest in this class is climate change communication, I want to explore how Kleindorfer’s concepts apply to this problem. First, I can see how all five of Kleindorfer’s characteristics of environmental deicison making apply to this issue. I’m especially interested in #2, because I don’t think it’s just a perception but a very valid concern. We cannot address climate change simply by individual actions. There have to be major structural changes in how dependent our society is on fossil fuels and on the realistic options offered to individuals, industries, and government to reduce their use. People cannot use public transit if there isn’t any in their area or if taking the bus would add a two-hour commute each way to work. Most people realistically don’t have time to grow all their own food. Most people don’t have $20,000 lying around to use for installing solar panels.

There are things individuals can do such as using energy-saving light bulbs and eating less meat. But it will take major structural changes before our society can kick its dependence on fossil fuels, and furthermore the fossil fuel interests are going to do everything in their power to delay this or keep it from happening. That’s where climate change becomes a real public policy issue, because without policies that encourage growth of renewable energy industries, we might never get beyond the talking stages.

To make public policy happen, we do have to be able to explain the other points of Kleindorfer’s environmental decision making tree, namely how benefits outweigh costs, how benefits will accrue now and not just into the future, and how action is scientifically linked to outcome.

The costs and benefits of averting climate change are both high — though the cost of doing nothing is no less than the extinction of humans and all other species. One of our best bets may be to argue that the costs of *not* addressing climate change are unaffordable, along with showing the solutions. Those may be investment in renewable energy and taxing carbon as a way to internalize the externalized costs of fossil fuels.

So far as the four types of environmental problems, climate change is pretty clearly in the “tough” camp. It’s going to require pretty much every tool to address — regulations, standards, incentives, subsidies, taxes, etc.

Social responsibility

Kleindorfer’s notion that environmental issues must be argued from social responsibilty rather than self-interest is interesting, but I am not sure I agree. On the one hand, more companies than ever have social responsibility units and want to portray what they are doing as good for society and the responsible thing to do. Animal protection groups have had a lot of success getting companies to sign onto animal welfare standards using this line of reasoning. On the other hand, most of those companies wouldn’t do it if they didn’t think their customers cared about such standards and that it wasn’t good for their bottom lines.

The same is true of environemental standards, maybe even more so. Most people care about clean air and clean water, and companies active use green programs as part of their advertising, to the point that “green washing” has become a term for companies that talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. Again, these companies would not be appealing to the consumer’s sense of environmental ethics if they didn’t think it would help their bottom line. For example, hotels that give you the opportunity not to wash your towels every day also save a ton of money in water, heating and detergent bills.

Such concerns, however, don’t really translate to the individual who isn’t trying to sell you something or get you to do something. They are going to be motivated much more by self interest. If we could have gotten farmers to stop applying so much manure to their fields in Northwest Ohio simply by appealing to a sense of the greater good, Toledo’s water supply never would have been in danger.

Regardless of what motivates a company, government, or individual to do the right thing, it’s good when they do it. But we do have to know what motivates them in order to set up the right public policy programs to elicit the type of behavior we want, and to explain to them why they should support these policies.

Environmental policy in Costa Rica

January 18 2015January 25, 2015

It’s been a long time since I’ve been outside the country. In high school I did a school trip to Mexico to see various archaeological sites. Between college and my first round of grad school, I did a six-week visit to Europe. Half of it was spent visiting a friend and traveling in Germany, and the other half on one of those “If it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium” trips. It was exhausting but I did see a lot.

For one of my journalism jobs I attended a conference in Windsor, Canada, and later I visited my brother who was working at McGill University in Montreal. I don’t really count Canada as leaving the country, but at least you need a passport.

Now that I’m in a degree-seeking program at Ohio State, I decided to look at study abroad opportunities. Because of my job I needed something short term, and I wanted something related to the environment. So I picked a spring break service learning trip to Costa Rica, to find out more about what makes this country a leader in sustainability.

Here are some points about Costa Rica’s environmental policy:

Almost 30% of land in Costa Rica is in protected reserves, and the country produces more than 90% of its electricity through renewables such as hydroelectric, geothermal and wind. The government has long provided cash incentives for reforestation and sustainable timber projects. As a result, forest cover grew from 21% in 1987 to 52% in 2005. (source pdf)

In 1997 Costa Rica passed a carbon tax of 3.5% (pdf) on all hydrocarbon fossil fuels. It was one of the first countries to pass such a tax. The revenue goes toward the Payment for Environmental Services program, which offers incentives for property owners to practice sustainable development and conservation.

In 2009 Costa Rica set a goal of being the first carbon-neutral country in the world by 2021, though that has now been extended to 2025. The plan is to promote biofuels, hybrid vehicles and clean energy, and to offer a carbon-neutral label through which industry and tourists can pay $10 a ton to offset emissions. The money would be used to fund conservation, reforestation and research in protected areas. I would definitely pay this for my flight there and back and my time in the country.

One interesting thing about Costa Rica is its Biodiversity Law. The country is considered one of the Top 20 in the world for biodiversity. It has more than 500,000 species, or almost 4% of species estimated worldwide. Part of what makes this possible is its array of ecosystems from coasts to rainforests to mountains. The other part is the legal framework.

The Biodiversity Law passed in 1998 set up the National Commission for Biodiversity Management (CONAGEBIO), which works with the National System of 11 Conservation Areas to administer the country’s natural resources. The National Strategy for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity was created in 1999 to guide this management through a highly participatory process on the local and national levels.

One issue that has come up repeatedly is intellectual property rights. International pharmaceutical and seed corporations want to come in and collect samples of Costa Rica’s biodiversity to use in drugs or crops that they can patent and sell. Without property rights, they can’t make money, which is what they say allows them to develop and distribute these products.

Costa Rica’s Biodiversity Law, however, gives communities control over this intellectual property. Communities don’t want to give up this knowledge to international corporations because then they feel they have lost control of the resource for very little compensation. They think intellectual property rights don’t need to be granted for commercialization to take place.

However, this runs up against the WTO agreement which Costa Rica signed, which does allow corporations from other countries to take its biological resources. It’s hard to see how this conflict can be resolved to the satisfaction of all.

A final point about Costa Rica: It has no standing army. The military was abolished in 1948. For a country that sits next to some places with pretty high levels of violence (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala), that seems like an odd choice. But Costa Rica hasn’t had a coup since, and it has spent the “peace dividend” on education and the environment.

The country does have a pretty strong police force, which it needs to deal with a drug trade moving north from South America. It also has an ongoing border dispute with Nicaragua. But its spending on national defense is zero.

Maybe all of this – biodiversity, environment, and education – is why Costa Rica was recently named the happiest place on earth.