UK: Parents told not to terrify children over climate change as rising numbers treated for 'eco-anxiety'

Rising numbers of children are being treated for “eco-anxiety”, experts have said, as they warn parents against “terrifying” their youngsters with talk of climate catastrophe.

Protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, the recent fires in the Amazon and apocalyptic warnings by the teenage activist Greta Thunberg have prompted a “tsunami” of young people seeking help.

A group of psychologists working with the University of Bath says it is receiving a growing volume of enquiries from teachers, doctors and therapists unable to cope.

The Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) told The Daily Telegraph some children complaining of eco-anxiety have even been given psychiatric drugs.

The body is campaigning for anxiety specifically caused by fear for the future of the planet to be recognised as a psychological phenomenon.

However, they do not want it classed as a mental illness because, unlike standard anxiety, the cause of the worry is “rational”.

“A lot of parents are coming into therapy asking for help with the children and it has escalated a lot this summer,” said Caroline Hickman, a teaching fellow at Bath and a CPA executive.

“The symptoms are the same [as clinical anxiety], the feelings are the same, but the cause is different. “The fear is of environmental doom - that we’re all going to die.”

Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg rose to global fame this year as she supported the protests by Extinction Rebellion, which brought parts of central London to a standstill.

Thurnberg argues that the EU must cut its carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2030 to avoid an existential crisis - double the target set by the Paris Accord - while Extinction Rebellion demands the UK achieve net-zero emissions by 2025.

The G7 summit in Biarritz last month was also dominated by a row between France and Brazil over the Amazon fires after President Macron said the Earth’s “lungs” were burning. Ms Hickman said parents should talk to their children about global warming but should not say mankind is doomed.

“Parents need to find some words to talk about it that is age-appropriate and not terrifying,” she said.

“You need to separate what is fact from what is unknown: tell them some species are going extinct and some humans are being harmed, but don’t say we’re all going to die, because that isn’t true.”

“What you don’t want is that child to collapse in a well of depression saying “what’s the point in going to university”, or  “what’s the point of doing my exams”, which I have heard children say.”

The CPA recommends a four-stage approach to explaining responsibly climate change to children without scaring them.

Parents should first gradually introduce them to the known facts, then ask them how they feel, before acknowledging that the ultimate outcome is uncertain.

Finally, parents should agree practical steps to make a difference, such as by cutting down on non-recyclable waste and choosing food with a better climate footprint.

Eco-anxiety is steadily gaining recognition in the academic community. In 2017 a report by the American Psychological Association produced a report recognising its impact and calling for dedicated research into the mental health consequences of climate change.

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California experience raises the caution flag on ‘green jobs’

California’s mixed record of using public investments and environmental mandates to create “green jobs” raises serious questions about the promises of some Democratic presidential candidates to use economy-transforming investments in environmentally friendly technologies to put millions of people to work.

Many of the initiatives touted by the candidates in their environmental plans are already in place in California, and some of them having been promoted as important engines of job creation. But California stopped counting green jobs in 2013, struggling to separate truly new jobs from existing employment growth.

As California's experience shows, reality doesn't always live up to projections. And while some of the most conservative estimates, like Warren's and Steyer's, appear reasonable based on California’s record, the state’s experience also reveals just how modest — and unimpressive — those goals would be for a 10-year period.

Most of the proposals being floated by candidates have analogues in California, which is now a decade into its quest to prove that economic growth and greenhouse gases are not inextricably linked. Where Biden wants to install 500,000 electric vehicle charging outlets by 2030, California has a target of 250,000 by 2025. Where Washington Gov. Jay Inslee had wanted to make new buildings zero-carbon by 2030, California has net-zero energy efficiency standards that require solar panels on all new homes. Where Warren proposes a National Institute of Clean Energy to fund cutting-edge research, California has its state Energy Commission, which spends some $250 million per year on grants and incentives for everything from batteries to hydrogen stations to electric school buses. Warren, Steyer and O'Rourke's "buy clean" requirements for the federal government match California's 2017 law requiring public projects to use low-emission steel, glass and insulation.

California’s experience is that jobs have materialized, but that it's been more trouble than it's worth to count them in the aggregate. While "green jobs" were the common argot in 2009, when Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act injected $790 billion into the economy, the term has fallen out of favor since — as has calculating its number.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped tabulating green jobs in 2013, as did California’s Employment Development Department after it found "no discernible evidence that green firms were more likely to create jobs than non-green firms." A 2008 California law required the creation of a "green-collar jobs council" and annual reports to the legislature, but they dropped off in 2010.

"'Green jobs' is a strange and somewhat elusive category," said University of California, Davis economist Dave Rapson.

That's partly because the term encompasses many existing jobs, so it doesn't reflect the job creation goal that politicians are after. "The green job classification hasn't been particularly useful because the work is distributed among so many traditional industries," said Betony Jones, an adviser to government agencies and nonprofits on labor issues who used to work at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center, which has done some of the most detailed thinking on the amorphous sector. "Where do you draw the line? Do you count recycling jobs but not garbage pickup jobs, and it's the same person?"

Some private groups have been the keepers of the green jobs flame. Over the 6-year period from 2013 to 2018, "advanced clean energy," including energy storage, hydropower, solar, nuclear, ethanol, alternatively fueled vehicles and building efficiency, added 130,350 jobs, according to figures compiled by a Steyer-funded think tank, Advanced Energy Economy. That's about 6.4 percent of California's total non-farm job growth of just over 2 million jobs.

Warren’s plan to create 1.2 million jobs over 10 years would add an average of 120,000 jobs per year, or about 5 percent of the U.S.'s annual job growth from 2013-2018. It would also lift GDP by 0.1 percent per year above a baseline assumption of 2.04 percent annual growth, according to an analysis of the plan the Warren campaign commissioned from Moody's. Steyer's plan to create 1 million jobs would add 100,000 jobs per year. While that's comparable to California's results, it's not exactly the economic "transformation" that Steyer touts.

"A million additional jobs over 10 years, that's not a very large number," said Rob Williams, an environmental economist at the University of Maryland and a university fellow with the think tank Resources For the Future who published a working paper earlier this month, which found job creation estimates are not a good rationale for making environmental policy decisions. "The natural amount of jobs created and destroyed every year are just enormously larger than that."

Larger estimates, like Inslee's and Sanders', likely don't reflect net job losses and gains from such labor market shifts, but focus just on the gains.

"In many cases, people are just trying to come up with the biggest number they can come up with," said Williams. "In many cases, what our modeling suggests is these are causing job shifts rather than net job creation. You create clean energy jobs, and you lose jobs in older industries."

Warren's plan, at least, has accounted for that. It assumes the oil and gas industry will lose 160,000 jobs over 10 years, according to Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi.

Sanders' 20 million figure doesn't include losses, according to the University of Vermont ecological economist who did the analysis, Jon Erickson. But he pointed out that Sanders' plan would help workers affected by ongoing declines.

"The economy is hemorrhaging jobs in the coal sector," he said, citing a nationwide decline in coal mining employment over the past 40 years from 250,000 jobs to 50,000 today. "Kentucky today has fewer coal jobs than it did when Trump took office. It's just heading that way, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to turn things around."

His analysis estimates 1.5 million jobs would be created in the wind industry and 3 million in home energy efficiency and weatherization.

"Certainly many of those jobs, you can be thinking of them as transition jobs that would replace losses that are already happening in other industries," Erickson said. "Rather than just let this naturally happen by market forces, the Green New Deal actually helps pay for the economic transition from a fossil fueled economy to a renewable energy fueled economy."

Overall, though, economists don't subscribe to theories of massive job creation. "The sort of standard economist take on all of this is pretty skeptical," said James Bushnell, another UC Davis economist. "Unless you're in a recession, creating jobs in one sector usually comes at the expense of reduced jobs in another sector." Indeed, California's oil and gas sector shrank by about 6,000 jobs from 2013-18, going from 21,000 to 15,000 jobs, according to state data.

At the least, California's forays into clean energy haven't dampened its juggernaut economy, which rebounded from the recession significantly faster than the national average. "What we know is California's economy has done very well, and we've invested a lot in clean energy," Bushnell said. "I don't know if we're at the point where we can point to causality there. I conclude from that that our investment in clean energy has not hurt the economy. I don't necessarily take it in the direction that it's stimulated growth."

One example that serves as an illustration of California's experience is an energy efficiency program that was put on the 2012 state ballot by none other than Steyer. While he is an outlier among presidential candidates in never having held public office, his decade of experience as the biggest self-appointed promoter of California’s energy policies is instructive.

"I think Steyer's probably the only one who knows what he's talking about who has experience with it," said Tom Dalzell, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, the main union representing employees of the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric.

Steyer, who entered the presidential race in July but has already reached half of the polling levels required to qualify for the fall debates, cut his political teeth in California's clean energy world. He rose to prominence by defending the state's climate policies against a jobs argument at the peak of the recession, bankrolling the campaign against an oil company-sponsored ballot initiative in 2010 that would have suspended the state's greenhouse gas target until the unemployment rate — then at 12 percent — fell below 5.5 percent.

Coming off of that victory, he sponsored a 2012 initiative, Proposition 39, that closed a corporate tax loophole and devoted half of the proceeds to energy efficiency retrofits in schools. The Clean Energy Job Creation Fund, which handed out $1.5 billion through last year, provides a real-world comparison to national hypotheticals.

While Steyer argued at the time that it would create up to 40,000 jobs, the program has resulted in just 8,700 direct jobs, and 19,800 jobs in total including indirect jobs and increased economic activity, according to an analysis by the UC, Berkeley Labor Center.

Steyer's campaign said that the Prop. 39 job count reflected the fact that only half of the new spending went to schools. The other half went to the state's general fund, "where it goes to other state programs that create additional jobs," spokesperson Ben Gerdes said in an email. As for Steyer's current Climate Corps plan, it's only one part of his broader jobs plan, which will "create a regenerative economy for all Americans" through additional spending on infrastructure and clean energy standards, Gerdes said.

Prop. 39 also created fewer jobs than originally expected because the initiative ended up spending a larger share of funding on schools than envisioned. Efficiency retrofits at schools inherently produce fewer jobs than large, new construction projects, according to one of the key architects of the measure, which was written to give the legislature control over the purse strings.

"The key thing about jobs analysis is you cannot do them without knowing where the money's directed," said Kate Gordon, who served as head of energy and climate for the Steyer-founded think tank Center for the Next Generation and is now California Gov. Gavin Newsom's senior climate adviser, as well as director of the state's planning and research agency. "There was a faction of people who wanted it to be used for commercial real estate and new buildings and upgrades. Those projects create a lot of jobs."

Gordon also previously served as co-director of the Apollo Alliance, the group of environmentalists and labor unions that came up with a plan to spend $500 billion to create 5 million green jobs. That jobs number made it into Obama's 2008 presidential platform, but didn't fully materialize — despite the 2009 stimulus package -- because it also included a national clean energy standard and a national carbon price, neither of which came to pass, Gordon pointed out.

California has both of those policies. And the biggest single clean energy job engine for the state has indeed been its renewable energy requirements for utilities, which UC Berkeley researchers have credited with creating 52,000 "job-years" from 2003-2014. That's about 4,300 jobs per year on average, but is more heavily weighted toward the later years, when installations accelerated to about 10,000 jobs per year.

There's been no recent analysis of the number of jobs created from Californnia's cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases, which has so far generated about $10 billion through the sale of emissions permits. But a quarter of the revenue has gone to the state's high-speed rail system, which last year trumpeted the creation of 2,000 construction jobs to date. A 2018 study estimated that the first four years of cap-and-trade proceeds — $2.2 billion — had created 19,700 jobs and an additional 55,900 jobs indirectly.

While the numbers aren't huge, the jobs are meaningful to the people who have them. "The Green New Deal says a bunch of things to a bunch of people and it means something different to everybody, but it was pretty strong about creating new work for union workers," Jones said. "And California has a pretty good track record on that."

California’s green-collar jobs council has since morphed into state training programs, which received $12 million in funding from Prop. 39 to train disadvantaged workers, including women, foster youth and formerly incarcerated people. The programs placed 1,721 people into jobs, out of 2,609 people trained. They're now getting funding from the cap-and-trade auctions, as well as the gas tax increase approved by lawmakers in 2017.

“We're going back to the old days of New Deal, big public investments and putting language in those investments,” said Tim Rainey, the executive director of the Workforce Development Board, which oversees the training programs.

The trainees are placed as apprentices in jobs being done by union members, including high-speed rail. A particular beneficiary is the Building and Construction Trades Council, which has been one of the most stalwart defenders of oil industry jobs.

The lesson California has learned is not to focus on big-picture numbers. "To the extent it's possible, it's really important to step away from the specific job number," Gordon said. "This is going to take a rethinking of the way we build infrastructure, buildings, transportation networks, grids, the way we do capital stock turnover of existing companies, infrastructure, everything."

But jobs are still a potent argument in the state legislature, where environmentalists are working to convince unions to stop lobbying against climate policies in favor of continued reliance on fossil fuels. Unions are a swing vote: Sometimes they side with environmentalists, as in their opposition to a bill this session, CA SB386 (19R), that would have let utilities count existing large-scale hydropower dams towards their renewable electricity requirements — with the attendant effect of reducing the need for new construction projects.

Other times, union workers ally with oil and gas companies, as they did to torpedo CA AB345 (19R), a bill this year that would have curbed oil production and jobs by establishing a 2,500-foot buffer zone between new oil and gas wells and homes, schools, hospitals and playgrounds.

Labor unions have also opposed a years-long effort by renewable energy companies and some environmental groups to coordinate California's electricity grid more closely with surrounding states, because it would enable renewable energy projects to move to right-to-work states. But IBEW 1245 agreed last year to shut down the state's last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, by 2025, and the union points to the labor agreements it secured as a potential example for how to transition away from fossil fuels. It's now working with other unions representing oil and gas workers to figure out a "just transition" for them.

On the national level, candidates are also envisioning "just transitions." Sanders' plan would create "millions of good-paying, unionized jobs" in steel and auto manufacturing, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms and renewable power plants. It would also guarantee fossil fuel workers' wages for up to five years and give them housing assistance, health care, pension support and either job placement or early retirement support.

But on the ground in California, Dalzell isn't optimistic about reaching a compromise with his fellow workers.

"Their on-the-ground reality is different than ours, and so they might have an approach some would consider to be 180 degrees out from ours," he said. "And then steelworkers who represent the refineries, they're very aggressive fighting anything about transportation efficiency, electrification of cars, and on other issues there are tensions."

Meanwhile, the jobs estimates will continue.

"Economists tend to be pretty skeptical that these effects are actually important, but they're clearly important for the politics, so there's this gap between the importance in the political world and the importance economists have paid to it,” Williams said.

SOURCE





EPA Touts ‘Accelerated’ Cleanup of Hazardous, Contaminated Sites

The Environmental Protection Agency has hit the acceleration button to clean up Superfund sites across the country on President Donald Trump’s watch, according to a new task force report detailing progress over the past two years.

The Superfund Task Force, commissioned in May 2017, developed a list of sites requiring the EPA’s “immediate and intense attention.”  Formally known as the “Administrator’s Emphasis List,” EPA officials released it in December 2017, less than a year after Trump took office.

The new task force report spotlights the sprawling Tar Creek Superfund site as one of several where the government has made “substantial progress.”

Tar Creek includes thousands of acres of lead and zinc mining areas in northeast Oklahoma, southeast Kansas, and southwest Missouri. Because of the site’s “complexity and size,” the report says, a cleanup that goes back to 1984 will take several more years to complete.

The work includes “plugging” abandoned wells and excavating contaminated soil in Ottawa County, Oklahoma. State and federal officials first became aware of potential environmental hazards in 1979, when water began rising to the surface from underground mines.

The EPA has joined with the state of Oklahoma and the Quapaw tribe of Native Americans in a yearlong effort to formulate a “strategic plan” for Tar Creek after it was added to the agency’s Emphasis List. The strategic plan, which will be released later this month, assesses cleanup needs, risks, and economic potential for the site.

“The work of the Superfund Task Force over the past two years is paying dividends for communities nationwide, including those near the Tar Creek Superfund site,” Regional Administrator Ken McQueen said in a press release.

“EPA will continue working with our partners toward a cleanup that will benefit the surrounding communities,” McQueen said.

The full Superfund Task Force report, released earlier this month, is available here.

EPA officials say they will continue to update the Emphasis List on a quarterly basis.

Related:  Trump’s EPA Outpaces Obama in Cleaning Up Hazardous Waste Sites

The Superfund program dates to 1980, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act. The legislation provides funds for cleaning up thousands of sites across the country laced with such contaminants as lead, asbestos, and dioxin-infused soil, as well as radiation.

Superfund sites include “manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills, and mining sites,” according to the EPA’s website.

Those sites with known or potential releases of “hazardous substances, pollutants, or contaminants” are placed on the agency’s National Priorities List.

In addition to its efforts aimed at what it calls expediting cleanup and remediation, the task force said it sought to reinvigorate “responsible party cleanup and reuse,” promote third-party private investment, boost redevelopment and revitalization among communities, and develop a strategy for stakeholder engagement. The EPA’s press release details how officials met some of these goals.

“Thanks to the hard work of EPA career officials, the Superfund Task Force has strengthened the program in numerous ways, from accelerating cleanups to promoting redevelopment to improving community engagement,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a written statement, adding:

The recommendations generated by the Task Force and applied by the Superfund program have directly improved the health and economic opportunity of thousands of people living near Superfund sites. We are taking concrete steps to ensure that the work of the Task Force continues to enhance the Superfund program moving forward.
The agency prepared an online storyboard highlighting the task force’s success stories across the country.

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The case against fracking is based on ideology, not science

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CASE against fracking crumbled years ago. The economic case for it is unassailable. So why are leading Democratic presidential candidates intent on shutting down one of the most beneficial US innovations of the modern era?

Fracking — short for hydraulic fracturing — is the drilling method that launched an American energy renaissance. Though the technology isn't new, its application to formerly impenetrable underground rock formations has turned the United States into the world's leading producer of oil and natural gas. US energy independence, which as recently as a decade ago was a pie-in-the-sky slogan, is beginning to look realistic. Last November, the nation reached a singular milestone, exporting more oil and refined fuel than it imported. It was the first time since the early 1970s that America could claim the status of a net energy exporter. And all thanks to fracking.

At the same time — also thanks to fracking — America's carbon-dioxide emissions have plummeted.

By unleashing vast quantities of clean-burning natural gas, fracking dramatically changed the economics of electricity production. As natural gas grew more and more affordable, fewer and fewer power plants continued to burn coal. Indeed, more than half of all US coal-fired plants have closed over the past 10 years. According to the Energy Information Administration, 35 percent of America's electricity in 2018 came from natural gas; just 27 percent was from coal. No one would have thought those percentages were possible in 2000, when half of the nation's electricity was generated by coal-fired plants and less than one-sixth came from natural gas.

Because natural gas releases only half as much carbon dioxide as coal, the sweeping shift to gas-fueled plants has led to a dramatic reduction in America's greenhouse gas emissions. So dramatic, in fact, that no other nation matches it, as President Obama observed in his 2014 State of the Union address: "Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth."

For anyone who worries about climate change and is intent on carbon reduction, all this should be cause for rejoicing. Fracking, which has made it possible, should be extolled as a boon to environmental progress.

Yet while many mainstream Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and former California Governor Jerry Brown, have expressed support for fracking, at least three of the party's leading presidential candidates — Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Kamala Harris of California — want to do away with it. Warren declares that on her first day as president, she would issue an executive order to "ban fracking — everywhere." Harris told CNN this month that "there's no question" that she opposes it. Sanders, for his part, came out against fracking in 2016.

It's hard to make sense of such blind hostility to the technology that has done more than any other to expand the supply of clean, affordable energy. The candidates' rejectionism clearly isn't grounded in science. Many fracking foes raise alarms about groundwater contamination. But when the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency exhaustively studied that issue, it reported that it could "not find evidence" that fracking was responsible for "systemic impacts on drinking water resources." Lisa Jackson, who headed the EPA during Obama's first term, told a congressional hearing in 2011 that she was "not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water."

Of course that isn't to say that fracking can never lead to problems. Like every technology or industrial process, it comes with costs as well as benefits. But that only means it should be carefully supervised and regulated, not banned outright. As it is, fracking is regulated by the states, though there are environmentalists who argue for stricter supervision. That's a position Warren/Sanders/Harris could adopt if their real interest was to craft a better energy policy. Their demand for a total end to fracking, however, is mere ideological posturing, unsupported by science.

To repeat, fracking has the support of many mainstream Democrats, some of whom actually are scientists. One of them is geologist John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado who recently quit the Democratic presidential race.

"Based on experience and science, I recognized that fracking was one of our very best and safest extraction techniques," Hickenlooper wrote in his 2016 memoir. "Fracking is good for the country's energy supply, our national security, our economy, and our environment."

A vow to "ban fracking — everywhere" may excite progressive extremists who hate the fossil-fuel industry and all its works. But it's the very opposite of a serious proposal, and the mark of a candidate unsuited for the White House.

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Water storage in Australia at risk of falling behind population growth

There is no shortage of viable dam proposals but fanatical Greenie opposition derails most of them

The failure by governments of the largest states to build dams has placed water storage at risk of falling behind population growth.

An analysis revealed by Water Resources Minister David Littleproud has found that at current rates, water storage per person in NSW, Victoria and Queensland will fall by more than 30 per cent by 2030.

“The states have been responsible for urban water since federation and should be taking the lead,” Mr Littleproud said.  “They’re just not keeping up with their growing populations.”

On a tour of the drought-hit Stanthorpe region in his electorate of Maranoa in southern Queensland, Mr Littleproud also announced a committee had been established to help deliver drought resilience and preparedness programs to communities.

As reported by The Australian, the failure by the Coalition to push ahead water infrastructure projects it wants the states to build with the help of federal funding means that at the end of this term in government, it will not have seen a single major dam built or likely even started construction after nine years in office.

Only minor dam projects in Tasmania have been built on the Coalition’s watch. “Since 2003, of the 20 dams completed in Australia, 16 of them are in Tasmania,” Mr Littleproud said.

“If NSW, Queensland and Victoria don’t start building dams, their water storage capacity will fall by more than 30 per cent by 2030.”

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, who holds the water infrastructure portfolio, has created a new advisory body called the National Water Grid to coordinate funding for water infrastructure projects.

Mr Littleproud said while the federal government had offered $1.3 billion for new projects through the National Water Infrastructure Development Fund in 2015, it “still had to drag most states kicking and screaming to build new dams.”

Apart from the decline in availability of municipal water to many towns, the lack of rain in the Murray-Darling Basin, couple with the federal government’s buy-backs of water licences from irrigators and more demand from horticulture, has sent the price of water for agriculture skyrocketing on the spot market.

“Building dams will make sure we still have clean drinking water in regional towns and bring down the price of water to produce food,” Mr Littleproud said.

“This is not just about agriculture, it’s about water security and food prices in our towns and capital cities.”

Mr Littleproud announced the Future Drought Fund Consultative Committee, describing it as “an important milestone in taking action on drought.”

The committee will develop the Drought Resilience Funding Plan for the fund, which begins with a $3.9 billion credit that will grow to $5 billion, he said.

“The Future Drought Fund was established to give drought-prone Australians the best tools to plan and prepare for drought and sustain their livelihoods and communities,” Mr Littleproud said.

The Consultative Committee will seek input directly from drought-vulnerable communities for the Drought Resilience Funding Plan.

“This committee is made up of people with track records of success in agricultural economics, managing climate risk, rural and regional development and natural resource management,” Mr Littleproud said.

Mr Littleproud said the committee’s chairman would be Brent Finlay, and the committee members Kate Andrews, Wendy Craik, Elizabeth Peterson and Caroline Welsh who would begin their work in Canberra later this month.

SOURCE 

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