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Who’s financing deforestation in Papua New Guinea? A new report follows the money.

Papua New Guinea has one of the largest expanses of tropical rainforest on the planet. But in recent years the island nation just north of Australia has seen a surge in deforestation from logging and mining, which has threatened to release large stores of carbon into the atmosphere.

Deforestation has left behind patches of bare land across the country, and indigenous communities bear the brunt of the environmental consequences. Many are wary of companies that clear the land without providing something to the local community in return. So in 2017, when the Malaysian timber company Maxland secured a permit to clear rainforest on the country’s Manus Island, it promised to plant three to five million rubber trees and said it would benefit nearby communities through jobs, royalty payments, and improved infrastructure.

Critics say that Maxland is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. According to a new report released this month by the human rights and environmental watchdog Global Witness, Maxland has not planted a single rubber tree, despite being two years into its five-year contract. Instead, the report claims that the company has prioritized illegal logging and exporting the island’s valuable hardwood timber, raking in millions of dollars in the process.

What’s more, Global Witness discovered that the company is linked to some of the world’s most prominent financial institutions, including BlackRock — the planet’s largest asset manager — which announced in January that it would place sustainability at the center of its investment approach and divest from companies that present significant climate-related risks. The non-governmental organization’s investigation found that BlackRock is among the top 20 shareholders of the three banks financing Maxland’s “mother company,” the Joinland Group, a Malaysian conglomerate with a history of logging projects in Papua New Guinea.

Norway’s $1 trillion Government Pension Fund Global, which just last week decided to blacklist large coal-dependent companies from its portfolio, is also among the top 20 shareholders of those banks — despite the fact that it publicly divested from a slew of companies tied to deforestation last year. Other financial supporters include The Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price Associates, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). At the time of Global Witness’ analysis, these financial institutions had hundreds of millions of dollars tied to the banks that made Maxland’s Manus Island project possible.

“It’s broadly understood now that unregulated finance is contributing to climate change by propping up the fossil fuel industry, and the same is true of the financing of industries involving deforestation,” said Lela Stanley, the lead investigator for the Global Witness report. “Ordinary people whose savings are invested with these financiers may be unwittingly connected as well.”

Grist reached out to BlackRock for comment on how this fits into their sustainability goals but did not receive a response in time for publication. In an email to Grist, a spokesperson for the Norweigan pension fund said that, in 2019, it continued “dialogue with banks in Southeast Asia on their policies for lending to companies that contribute to deforestation.” The Vanguard Group told Global Witness it would incorporate the report into its “ongoing analysis with the companies in question.” T. Rowe Price did not comment on its specific investments, but it told Global Witness that environmental and social factors were key components in its investment approach. Meanwhile, CalPERS declined Grist’s request for comment.

Maxland’s Manus Island venture, the Pohowa Integrated Agro-Forestry Project, has frustrated the indigenous residents of Manus Island, according to Global Witness. The local villages are still in dire need of critical infrastructure and services such as major roads, as well as additional air and water transportation options. Some villages are nestled between the rainforest and the sea — and the only way to reach the main market in the island’s port and provincial capital on the opposite side of the island is by boat, which requires a fare and takes two hours each way.

Maxland promised residents that it would build a road to make their lives easier, while also culling the forest and replacing it with millions of rubber trees that would potentially open up rubber farming jobs. Many locals thought it was a good deal, but when Global Witness visited the site in October 2019, Maxland seemed to have failed to deliver on its promises. The investigators did observe a few thousand rubber seedlings on the far side of Manus Island, on a site that did not belong to Maxland, but they appeared neglected and were in poor condition. And by that time, the company had already exported nearly 19 thousand cubic meters of hardwood timber worth roughly $1.8 million to China and Japan.

Josephine Kenni, the head of Papua New Guinea’s National Rubber Board, which manages the rubber industry in the country, told Global Witness that 60,000 more rubber seedlings were expected to arrive from Malaysia by the end of May. However, Kenni also told Global Witness that Maxland was violating the law and the board’s project plan. As of April, Global Witness received local reports confirming that no rubber has yet been planted at the project site. However, a huge logging camp appeared to be operating in full swing, with water tanks emblazoned with Joinland’s company name and a petrol station to serve the company’s fleet of trucks.

Thomas Hah, a Malaysian entrepreneur and founder of the Joinland Group, responded to Global Witness by denying its findings and warning that the organization would receive “an official letter” from his lawyer. (Hah did not reply to Grist’s request for comment in time for publication.)

“For your information, all our projects in Papua New Guinea are granted by the National Forest Authority,” Hah said in an email to Global Witness. “We reserve our legal rights towards any baseless and false allegations.”

The approval of Maxland’s permits was initially rejected by the Provincial Forest Management Committee. However, Papua New Guinea’s National Forest Authority overruled that decision and issued a permit, as Hah noted, despite what Global Witness determined to be the company’s violation of the Forestry Act, which requires permit applicants to submit “evidence of past experience in any agriculture or other land use developments.” Maxland lacks prior experience with rubber plantations, according to the report. On top of that, an earlier Global Witness report documented Maxland’s parent company Joinland performing a similar logging operation on the island of New Hanover.

Since Maxland laid eyes on Manus Island, the company worked hard to court and gain the trust of major players and leaders on the island. The report found that Maxland bought houses for public officials in the area and paid police officers to perform private security functions (a relatively common practice for logging companies that set up shop in the country).

For now, Global Witness told Grist it hopes the report will spur the government of Papua New Guinea into action.

“We hope … that this report prompts the government to thoroughly investigate this instance,” Stanely said, “and to finally enforce its own laws that protect the land and forests that its rural communities depend on.”

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Who’s financing deforestation in Papua New Guinea? A new report follows the money.

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Does New York need a new natural gas pipeline? It’s about to decide.

Last week, more than 100 protesters tuned into a virtual rally for a milestone push in a three-year battle against the Williams Pipeline, a controversial project that would bring a new supply of natural gas into New York City and Long Island. With individual pleas, homemade signs, musical performances, and speeches from the likes of Bill McKibben, Cynthia Nixon, and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, the protestors tried to summon the people power of a live event to tell New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration to stop the pipeline once and for all.

“We can’t pretend we are making progress on combating climate change if we continue to build out fracked gas infrastructure that will lock in emissions for years to come,” said Stringer, who is rumored to be considering a run for New York City mayor in 2021. “Let’s finish stopping this pipeline and move on to building out a cleaner, more sustainable city.”

The rally was held ahead of the May 17 deadline for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to rule on a key permit for the project. The pipeline would cut through northern New Jersey and then out about 23 miles into New York Harbor to connect with the existing gas system. One year ago, the agency denied the permit on the grounds that it failed to meet the state’s water quality standards. New Jersey’s environmental agency did the same. Both rejections were issued “without prejudice,” meaning Williams could reapply — which it quickly did.

National Grid, a gas utility that operates in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, would be the sole customer of the pipeline’s gas. As the fate of the project hangs in the balance, so do National Grid’s long-term plans — and, according to many observers, the fate of New York City and New York State’s climate goals. Both the city and state passed landmark laws last year that seek to drastically reduce carbon emissions by 2050. The city’s Climate Mobilization Act specifically aims to cut emissions from buildings — the majority of which come from natural gas heating systems.

After the Williams Pipeline permits were denied last summer, National Grid began rejecting new customer applications, claiming that it would not be able to meet future demand unless the pipeline was built. Real estate developments were stalled, new restaurants were left in limbo, and homeowners finishing up repairs couldn’t get the gas turned back on. The issue came to a head in November when Governor Cuomo accused the utility of extorting New Yorkers and threatened to revoke its license. The resulting settlement required National Grid to go back to the drawing board and come up with a slate of alternatives to make sure New Yorkers aren’t left in the cold if the pipeline isn’t built.

In February, before the novel coronavirus swept the country, the utility released a report with 10 ideas. One of them was the Williams Pipeline. The rest were smaller projects, none of which would alone solve the supply problem, the report said, although a scenario with some combination of them could. Most of the solutions involved building new gas infrastructure, like a liquefied natural gas terminal where gas would be delivered by tanker, or a smaller “peak shaving plant” that would store excess gas during the summer for when demand ramps up in the winter.

Some of the solutions on the menu were projects National Grid was already working on, like the construction of a new compressor station that will increase the amount of gas received through an existing pipeline. There were also three “no infrastructure” options that would expand existing programs that reduce demand for gas, like incentives for people to weatherize their homes and to replace their gas boilers with electric heat pumps. (National Grid is already required to offer these kinds of programs under New York State law.)

Critiques of the company’s report poured in from activists, environmental groups, politicians, and even the City of New York during a series of virtual public meetings the company was required to hold and in an online forum for public comments. During the meetings, National Grid President John Bruckner asserted that the company had not decided on any particular solution yet. However, some commenters felt the company’s report continued to make it seem like the Williams Pipeline was the only viable way for National Grid to avoid another moratorium, which could scare regulators into approving it. “If targets are not met, will have to restrict new gas customer connections,” the report reads, referring to potential scenarios with minimal to no new gas infrastructure.

Several groups, like the Environmental Defense Fund and NY Renews, an environmental justice coalition of more than 200 groups across New York State, criticized the company for failing to analyze the emissions impacts of each option, which would be necessary in order to evaluate whether they’re compatible with New York’s climate targets.

In comments submitted on behalf of New York City, lawyer Adam Conway wrote that adding new gas infrastructure runs counter to the city’s policies, and therefore only the “no infrastructure” options were viable tools for National Grid to address supply and demand gaps. An analysis performed by Synapse Energy Economics, a research and consulting firm, on behalf of the Eastern Environmental Law Center, alleged that National Grid’s assessment was flawed even prior to the pandemic, and that the company does not actually face an impending supply shortage. It found that the utility did not account for city and state energy efficiency and emissions reduction programs that will reduce demand for gas in the coming years.

At both the virtual meetings and among the online comments, some parties, like a nonprofit called Heartshare that provides utility grants to low-income households and the Community Development Corporation of Long Island, argued that the Williams Pipeline would be the safest option to ensure that low-income New Yorkers have an affordable way to heat their homes.

But National Grid agreed to play ball and evaluate its options again. On Friday, one week after the comment period closed, the company filed a supplemental report that incorporated some of its critics’ suggestions, including a greenhouse gas analysis and an update to the way the forecasted gap between supply and demand was calculated — which slightly reduces the projected gap. The new report narrows down the solutions and proposes two viable paths forward. Option A consists of the compressor station upgrade, a combination of “no infrastructure” measures to reduce demand, and a brand new option that was not in the original report — upgrading an existing liquified natural gas plant to increase its capacity. Option B is the Williams Pipeline.

If all of the criteria National Grid considered are given equal weight — safety, reliability, cost, compatibility New York’s climate targets — the report recommends Option A. However, if greater importance is placed on reducing risk and making sure the company can meet demand, “then the preferred choice is Option B” it says — the pipeline.

The company’s settlement with New York indicates that one of these paths will have to be decided upon by early June. Whether or not Option B is really on the table now sits in the hands of the Department of Environmental Conservation and Governor Cuomo.

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Does New York need a new natural gas pipeline? It’s about to decide.

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Harvard didn’t divest from fossil fuels. So what does its ‘net-zero’ pledge mean?

In the lead-up to Earth Day, two wealthy, world-renowned universities made historic decisions about their relationships with fossil fuel companies and commitments to tackling climate change. Oxford passed a motion to divest its endowment from fossil fuels. Harvard, meanwhile, decided to skirt divestment in favor of a plan to “set the Harvard endowment on a path to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050.”

Harvard’s announcement was both mildly celebrated and highly criticized by divestment advocates on campus and beyond, who have put increased pressure on the administration to divest over the last six months. In November, student activists joined their counterparts at Yale to storm the field in protest at the annual Harvard-Yale football game, disrupting the match for more than an hour. In February, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted 179-20 in favor of a resolution asking the school to stop investing in companies that are developing new fossil fuel reserves. And a student and alumni climate group collected enough signatures earlier this year to nominate five candidates to the university’s Board of Overseers, which has a say in who manages the endowment, which was valued at $40.9 billion last year.

In a letter explaining the net-zero portfolio plan to faculty, University President Lawrence Bacow said that divestment “paints with too broad a brush” and vowed to work with fossil fuel companies rather than demonize them. “The strategy we plan to pursue focuses on reducing the demand for fossil fuels, not just the supply,” Bacow wrote. The school says its commitment matches the decarbonization timeline set by the Paris Agreement — but it’s not yet clear what it will entail, and whether the school will be able to fulfill it.

Net-zero emissions promises can mean different things, and in many cases, the entities making the promises haven’t figured out how to make good on them. BP’s net-zero pledge accounts for the emissions from some, but not all, of the fossil fuel products it sells to the world, also known as its scope 3 emissions. Repsol, one of the first oil and gas majors to announce a net-zero target, has a plan that relies on technologies like carbon capture that the company has admitted aren’t viable yet. Even entities with more ambitious and transparent plans, like New York State, haven’t stopped letting utilities invest hundreds of millions in new natural gas infrastructure.

Despite these discrepancies, the concept of achieving net-zero for a company that sells products or a state that consumes energy is relatively tangible: They can invest in renewables, incentivize energy efficiency programs and electrification, try to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. But how do you reduce — or even measure — the carbon footprint of an endowment, which in Harvard’s case is made up of more than 13,000 different funds?

“I think the idea is, at the end of the day, all the companies in the portfolio would be net-zero,” said Georges Dyer, executive director of the Intentional Endowments Network, a nonprofit that helps endowed institutions make their investments more sustainable. While he doesn’t advocate for or against divestment or any other specific strategy, Dyer pointed out that Harvard’s net-zero target has the potential to address the climate crisis across the whole economy, including real estate and natural resources, and not just the fossil fuel sector.

A net-zero portfolio won’t be as simple as only investing in companies with net-zero pledges, since different companies have different definitions of net-zero. Indeed, in his letter to faculty, Bacow admitted that Harvard was not yet sure how it would measure or reduce the endowment’s footprint, explaining the plan would require “developing sophisticated new methods” for both. In a statement shared with Grist, the Harvard Management Company, which manages the endowment, said it would work to “understand and influence” each company’s “exposure to, and planned mitigation of, climate-related risks.” It plans to develop interim emissions targets to ensure success.

Harvard isn’t alone in trying to figure this out. The Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance is a group of institutional investors that was formed at the United Nations Climate Summit last fall. Its members have committed to net-zero investment portfolios by 2050, promising to set interim emissions targets in five-year increments and to issue progress reports along the way. But the group is still looking for answers on how to actually accomplish these goals.

In vowing to work with fossil fuel companies, Harvard’s commitment relies, to a certain degree, on shareholder engagement, a strategy that has seen mixed results thus far. Timothy Smith, director of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) shareowner engagement at Boston Walden Trust, an investing firm, told Grist that investors have made real gains in changing companies’ behavior, attitudes, and policies around climate. He pointed to companies like BP that have not only set net-zero targets but also said they will withdraw from trade associations that have lobbied against climate policy.

“I’m not saying we’re moving far enough fast enough,” he said. “We are not.” Smith acknowledged there have been some failures, notably with Exxon, which has lagged far behind its peers in climate action. Last year, Exxon successfully blocked a shareholder resolution that would have forced it to align its greenhouse gas targets with the Paris Agreement.

Shareholder engagement is not a new tack for Harvard: In September, it joined Climate Action 100+, an investor-led initiative pressuring oil and gas companies to curb emissions and disclose climate risk. But most of Harvard’s funds are managed externally, so its ability to participate directly in shareholder initiatives is limited. Instead, it provides “proxy voting guidelines” to its financial managers. Harvard’s voting guidelines for climate change generally instruct managers to vote in support of resolutions that request that companies assess impacts and risks related to climate change. Other institutional investors have taken a more active stance — the Church of England and the New York State public pension fund, for instance, recently said they will vote against reelecting Exxon’s entire board since it has failed to take action on climate change, as well as filed a resolution asking Exxon to disclose its lobbying activities.

To be clear, no one is implying Harvard should engage with Exxon, since it’s actually unclear whether Harvard has any investment in Exxon. The school only discloses its direct investments — about 1 percent of the total endowment — as required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The rest of the school’s portfolio, as well as how much of it is invested in fossil fuels, remains shrouded in secrecy. An analysis of Harvard’s 2019 SEC filing by the student activist group Divest Harvard found that of the $394 million disclosed, about $5.6 million was invested in companies that extract oil, gas, and coal and utilities that burn these fuels.

The Harvard Management Company told Grist that it will report its progress toward the net-zero goal annually, with the first report to be released toward the end of this year, but it did not say whether it will disclose its fossil fuel investments.

Harvard’s success will depend, to a large extent, on transparent reporting from the companies it invests in. As part of its new commitment, Harvard announced its support for the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, a financial industry group that makes recommendations for how companies should report their climate-related risks to investors.

This piece is significant, as navigating the financial risks of the impending energy transition is likely a key motivating factor in Harvard’s decision to go “net-zero.” Bob Litterman, a financial risk expert and carbon tax advocate, said this means distinguishing between companies that are well-positioned for the rapid transition to a low-carbon economy — aka a world where policy decisions make emitting carbon a costly endeavor — and those that are not.

“I have heard a number of investors talk about aligning their portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050,” said Litterman. “You know, it’s not entirely clear what that means, but if what it means is that they’re trying to position their portfolio to do well in that scenario, that makes sense to me.”

But for divestment advocates, maximizing returns is beside the point. In an op-ed for the Crimson, the campus paper, alumnus Craig S. Altemose criticized Harvard’s net-zero plan for ignoring the question of responsibility for the climate crisis and the fossil fuel industry’s track record of spreading disinformation and lobbying against climate policies. He also argued that the plan is not aggressive enough to meaningfully help the world avoid the worst effects of climate change.

In a Medium post, the group Divest Harvard argued that “a good-faith effort to reach carbon neutrality would have acknowledged that divestment is the logical first step.” Oxford University ran with that concept: After its initial announcement to divest, Oxford instructed its endowment managers work toward net-zero across the rest of its portfolio.

Across the spectrum, divestment advocates and sustainable investing experts agree that Harvard’s net-zero endowment pledge represents a step forward. But how big a step? In an interview with the Harvard Gazette, Bacow framed the entire initiative in dubious terms, saying, “If we are successful, we will reduce the carbon footprint of our entire investment portfolio and achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions.” Harvard has a lot of questions left to answer if it wants to turn that “if” into a “when.”

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More words to describe a world gone nuts: Firenado, ecoanxiety, covidiots

Remember the first time you heard the phrase social distancing? Chances are that it was earlier this year, even though the phrase was coined in 1957, when it meant something akin to “ghosting.” After more than 60 years of stagnation, the phrase instantaneously wove its way into our everyday speech.

As the coronavirus pandemic tightens its grip on seemingly every aspect of daily life, our vocabularies are adapting at warp speed. Once obscure phrases are suddenly commonplace. The virus, nicknamed the rona, has spawned other creative coinages. A quarantini is a cocktail you drink in the isolation of your home. A covidiot is someone who throws a block party when everybody is supposedly sheltered in place. Technical acronyms like PPE (personal protective equipment) have entered everyday speech, as well as slang like WFH (working from home, a.k.a. working from hell). The most meticulous know the distinction between quarantine and isolation. Someday soon, we’ll all start gossiping about isolationships.

Language is trying to keep up with a world in upheaval, a time in which many see the planet as plotting against us, with fresh heat waves, punishing droughts, and wildfires. Every year brings new crises and new words to describe them, such as ecoanxiety, firenado, flight shame, and climate crisis. In an update last April, Merriam-Webster added all sorts of environment-related words to its online dictionary, including microplastic, “a piece of plastic that is five millimeters or smaller in size,” and omnicide, “the destruction of all life or all human life (as by nuclear war).”

Last month, Merriam-Webster announced its fastest update ever, adding COVID-19 — the shortened form of coronavirus disease 2019 — to its online dictionary a mere one month after the World Health Organization minted it. In the slow-moving world of lexicography, that’s a “rapid pace.” Super-spreader, self-quarantine, and patient zero were also included in the special update.

Dictionaries are simply giving the people the resources they want. The Oxford English Dictionary keeps track of the terms being used more frequently than usual, and in March, all 20 of the top keywords had something to do with coronavirus.

“Any new and widespread phenomenon always brings with it the development of new language to describe it,” wrote Fiona McPherson, editorial manager at the OED, in a statement accompanying the dictionary’s update.

Just four months ago, dictionary editors were picking their 2019 “words of the year.” The selections included climate emergency and climate strike (the global protests first started by Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish activist), more evidence that the urgency (or anxiety) around climate change was going mainstream. It seemed like everyone was talking about the Green New Deal, whether they loved it or hated it.

This year, the Word of the Year selections will undoubtedly be related to the novel coronavirus. But it’s by no means the only crisis we’ll face in the coming months. Scientists are predicting that 2020 will deliver devastating floods, hellish wildfires, and even more supercharged hurricanes than usual. Hey, at least we’ll have something else to talk about.

“Usual” is already a pretty high bar these days. Heat records are broken so often that they’re hardly considered news. Under a smoky-red sun, the wind has taken ash from burning forests and rained it down on cities. Holing up in your home for months while sewing face masks for your family? That’s definitely not part of the old normal, either.

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More words to describe a world gone nuts: Firenado, ecoanxiety, covidiots

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Is waging ‘war’ the only way to take on the coronavirus?

What do climate change, drugs, and Christmas have in common? The United States has supposedly been at “war” with all of them.

When facing any sort of crisis, big or small, Americans often frame the situation through the lens of a battle. So when coronavirus brought daily life in the United States to a halt last month, it seemed nearly inevitable that President Donald Trump would declare himself a “wartime president.”

“The world is at war with a hidden enemy,” he tweeted. “WE WILL WIN!”

Similar language has been invoked by leaders around the world. France’s President Emmanuel Macron deployed the phrase “we are at war” no less than six times in one speech last month. And in a rare special address to the United Kingdom last week, Queen Elizabeth II invoked the “Blitz spirit” of World War II, a time of shared sacrifice.

Wartime rhetoric serves as an aggressive moral appeal, drumming up emotion and calling people to action. But here’s the thing about the war on coronavirus: We’ve already lost it.

“I think war metaphors are best used as a mobilizing effort,” said Stephen Flusberg, an associate professor of psychology at Purchase College in New York. “And it’s too late in the United States. We’ve failed.”

If coronavirus were truly a “war,” the United States would be the best prepared in the world, with a so-called “defense” budget at $700 billion a year and climbing — more than what the next seven largest countries spend added together. What the country was unprepared for was a pandemic, something infectious disease experts had warned was eventually coming.

Warlike language has been part of our speech for so long, it usually goes unnoticed. When the Spanish Flu hit England in the summer of 1918, newspapers warned their readers to prepare “defenses” against the disease. Soon enough, they described the flu as a “new foe,” and people freaked out, panic-buying quinine. It sounds all too familiar to anyone who’s been following the news of coronavirus, which the New York Times first painted as a “mystery” illness in January, something to “combat” in February, and an “all-out war” in March.

Fighting words have their time and place, language experts say, but public discourse seems to get stuck fighting everything. Studies show that this framing can paralyze people with fear and limit our collective imagination about what can be done to fix complex problems. In times of pandemic, calling the virus an “invisible enemy” can evoke xenophobia and racism. The framing primes people to view problems like climate change as a battlefield — this side vs. that side — widening partisan divides while obscuring any common ground.

“When a metaphor is used again and again and again, it really makes people experience something in those terms,” said Veronika Koller, a linguist at Lancaster University in England. In other words, people start to feel like they’re living in wartime. This can help governments gain public support for short-term actions that would normally be unpopular, like closing borders or exercising emergency powers. But for a prolonged crisis, it results in fatigue, Koller said. From climate change to cancer to coronavirus, the struggle is not a matter of weeks, but months, years, and decades.

Researchers say that it’s clear we need a new way to discuss big problems, a broader repertoire of metaphors to choose from. “There’s a paucity of the imagination around insurmountable challenges,” said Brent Ryan Bellamy, an instructor at Trent University in Canada.

Last week, Trump tweeted, “The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat!” Though he didn’t mention the virus, no one seemed confused by what he was referring to — a sign that the war narrative has firmly taken hold. But others are already describing the pandemic in creative terms, comparing the government’s response to a storyline in a Harry Potter book, or practicing social distancing to a string section playing quietly (it only works, after all, if everyone does it). A group of linguists are attempting to #ReframeCovid, tracking international efforts to put new words to the crisis.

Flipping the usual script can lead to fresh critiques, new alliances, and eventually, if the new metaphors take hold, different ways to cope.

Coming next week: A look at efforts to use a new vocabulary to take on social problems.

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Is waging ‘war’ the only way to take on the coronavirus?

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Amazon fires employees who spoke out about coronavirus and climate change

Amazon is trying to establish itself as the most essential of essential businesses during the coronavirus outbreak. But the tech giant is struggling to keep a lid on internal turmoil, both at its warehouses, where workers say they’re not being adequately protected from COVID-19, and at its corporate offices, where a showdown between tech employees and management over the company’s climate policies reached a tipping point last week.

Last Friday afternoon, Amazon fired two of its tech employees after they publicly criticized its coronavirus policies. Those employees, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, both user experience designers with 21 years of service at the company between them, were among the leaders of an internal worker group formed in December 2018 with the aim of pressuring Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to commit to more ambitious climate targets. The group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), has recently widened its focus to embrace the struggles of frontline Amazon employees at fulfillment centers across the country.

Cunningham and Costa were fired after they wrote tweets criticizing the company for putting workers and the public at risk and offering to match up to $500 in donations to a fund for Amazon warehouse workers exposed to COVID-19.

In addition to firing Cunningham and Costa, AECJ says the company deleted an invitation to a virtual event that the worker group had sent to Amazon employees to allow them to “hear directly from Amazon warehouse workers as they talk honestly about the real problems they’re facing as well as solutions.”

The goal of the AECJ webcast, which was to feature author and climate justice activist Naomi Klein, was to explore questions like, “How are Covid-19, the climate crisis, and the struggles of warehouse workers connected? How are all of these issues tied to racism and inequity?” More than 1,000 employees had RSVPed to the event before it was taken down, AECJ said in a press release, adding that internal emails about the event had also been deleted by the company.

“Why is Amazon so scared of workers talking with each other? No company should punish their employees for showing concern for one another, especially during a pandemic!” Costa said in a statement. She and Cunningham say they still plan to host the virtual event with a new RSVP link.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Amazon spokesperson Drew Herderner said, “We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies.”

AECJ has been publicly pushing Jeff Bezos to reduce the company’s contributions to climate change for more than a year now. In the summer of 2019, the group called on the company’s shareholders to adopt a climate change resolution that was ultimately backed by more than 8,700 Amazon workers. It was voted down, but a few months later, Bezos unveiled a climate plan that aimed for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade ahead of the deadline laid out in the Paris climate agreement. AECJ argued that the plan wasn’t comprehensive enough, and on September 20, in solidarity with the youth climate strikes happening all over the world, thousands of Amazon employees walked out of the company’s headquarters in downtown Seattle.

Around the same time, the company updated its communication policies to require employees to seek approval from management before speaking publicly about Amazon. In October, when two of its employees, Costa and Jamie Kowalski, publicly criticized one of company’s climate policies, telling the Washington Post that it “distracts from the fact that Amazon wants to profit in businesses that are directly contributing to climate catastrophe,” the employees were warned that speaking out again would result in “formal corrective action.”

In response, 400 Amazon employees risked their jobs to publicly speak out about the company’s climate policies. “We decided we couldn’t live with ourselves if we let a policy silence us in the face of an issue of such moral gravity like the climate crisis,” the group said in a tweet in January that has since been deleted.

It took a few months, but the company finally made good on its threat. Doesn’t look like the fired employees are going to stop speaking out anytime soon, though.

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Shifting gears: The climate protest movement in the age of coronavirus

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For more than a year, just about every Friday at noon, Invaliden Park in downtown Berlin was transformed into a vivacious, noisy, swarming hubbub with teenage speakers, bands, and live dance acts — as well as Germany’s top climate scientists — all sharing a makeshift stage and a microphone. Several thousand mostly school-age pupils waved banners and placards proclaiming “There is no Planet B,” “School Strike for Climate,” and “We’re on strike until you act!” Their chants against fossil fuels and for swift, decisive action on global warming echoed against the granite facades of the federal ministries for economy and transportation, both adjacent to the square.

The happening was the weekly “school strike” in Berlin of Fridays for Future (FFF), the climate crisis movement that began in 2018 with the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg skipping school once a week to protest her country’s half-hearted response to climate change. The movement then ricocheted across the globe, mobilizing school-age young people — in wealthy countries as well as poor — as never before. Last year, the campaign culminated in international demonstrations of millions in cities and towns from Cape Town, South Africa to Anchorage, Alaska, all with the same goal: to force their nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions and become carbon-neutral by 2050.

“There was a brilliant logic to the school strikes that drew people in,” explains Bill McKibben, author and cofounder of the climate action group 350.org. “If [the adult world] can’t be bothered to prepare a liveable world for me, why should I be bothered to sit in school and prepare for that future? That basic idea really hit home.”

Fridays for Future can claim some significant achievements, including strongly moving public opinion in favor of climate action and helping Green parties in Europe make major gains in elections. Still, even before the coronavirus outbreak and the banning worldwide of gatherings and demonstrations, the momentum of Fridays for Future had slowed. Fewer young people were attending the weekly protests, and the movement was recalibrating its strategy and tactics, shifting to stepped-up election activities and direct-action campaigns against fossil fuel interests, with mixed success.

Now, the worsening coronavirus pandemic is forcing Thunberg and other leaders of FFF to further alter tactics. Fridays for Future in Germany and other countries has suspended all public demonstrations — until now the movement’s mainspring and source of its high-profile media image, as well as donations. “In a crisis we change our behavior,” Thunberg tweeted earlier this month, “and adapt to the new circumstances for the greater good of society.” The Global Climate Strike, an international demonstration scheduled for April 24, has been called off. Thunberg proposed that FFF go digital by blanketing the internet and social media with the movement’s message.

Thunberg’s tweets don’t hint at it, but the virus and the public lockdowns have thrown the movement — already struggling to build on its spectacular protests of 2019 — into confusion. How can it pressure governments or businesses when gatherings are banned? How can the movement attract media coverage in the midst of a global pandemic? Will ordinary people faced with children at home or sick relatives or no jobs care about the climate when the COVID-19 crisis has turned their lives upside down? And will countries now sideline climate protection in order to put all of their energy and money into fighting the pandemic?

“Last year climate change was topic No. 1,” says Volker Quaschning, a professor of renewable energy systems at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, and one of the German scientists who had lobbied officials to take decisive steps to curb climate change. “Today it’s corona.”

“They had an incredible media presence last year,” says Moritz Sommer, a sociologist at the Institute for Social Movement Studies in Berlin. “Now there’s next to nothing in the media, and I don’t see this changing this year.”

Luisa Neubauer, the 23-year-old face of FFF in Germany, was a constant presence on talk and news shows during the height of the protests in 2019. Neubauer, who is often referred to as “Germany’s Greta,” told Yale e360 that the movement is in transition, adding, “We’re trying to figure things out now. Beating the coronavirus is the first thing we have to do, but the fight to save the climate can’t stop. It will continue in other ways and when this crisis is over the climate crisis will look different. We may even have a better chance. We know that political will, when it is there, can move mountains. We are experiencing this right now in the corona crisis.”

As for Thunberg’s call for digital activism, Neubauer admits that it can’t replace what FFF had accomplished on the streets. “But our generation and the climate movement are already digital,” she says, “and there are things we can do.” Already, the German branches of FFF have an internet learning program on YouTube for the millions of children not attending school.

FFF has unquestionably enjoyed major successes over the past year-and-a-half. The protests struck a chord with people who until then hadn’t taken climate change seriously enough to have it impact their vote or lifestyle. The movement was strongest in Europe, but even in the United States the protests caught on and helped propel the Green New Deal, a proposal for tackling the climate crisis in the U.S., high on the agenda of Democratic presidential candidates. Last September, 250,000 people across the U.S. marched in the FFF’s Global Climate Strike — the largest number ever to turn out for a U.S. climate protest.

Luisa Neubauer, sometimes referred to as “Germany’s Greta.” ODD ANDERSEN / AFP via Getty Images

Outside of the U.S., the numbers of those prioritizing global warming shot up dramatically in the wake of the FFF demonstrations, opinion polls and elections showed. Before the coronavirus, people in Europe and in China identified climate change as the foremost challenge. And many European Green parties, which had campaigned for rigorous climate policies for years, have doubled their vote tallies in local, national, and European Union elections — a result also of the extreme weather in 2018 and 2019 that brought record droughts, heat, and floods.

The FFF demonstrations “changed the whole landscape of the climate movement and the way ordinary people think about the climate crisis,” says Insa Vries of the German anti-coal group Ende Gelände, which had been occupying coal production facilities since 2015. “They were able to get through to much larger swaths of the population than we ever could, including unions, established NGOs, older people, and the world of pop culture.”

“The Fridays’ activists accomplished in just months what we had been trying to do in the halls of power for 10 years,” explains Quaschning. “The school kids were able to jolt the government into action. A year ago Germany wasn’t close to coming up with a CO2 tax, now we have one.”

Despite these achievements, the outbreak of the coronavirus has found Fridays for Future in a period of soul searching and experimentation. The group’s leaders were growing disappointed with FFF’s concrete results, most notably that the protests had not prodded governments to respond with the resolute, far-reaching measures that would enable them to meet the goals of the 2015 UN Paris Agreement, which would hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius below pre-industrial levels.

A seminal moment for the German FFF movement came on September 20, 2019, when in the largest climate demonstration of the year, tens of thousands of protestors clogged Berlin’s city center, and more than a million more took to the streets in 500 other German cities and towns. As the Berlin demonstration unfolded, just a stone’s throw away at the offices of German Chancellor Angela Merkel the government announced its long-awaited climate policies package. But the proposals fell far short of the students’ demands, which were that Germany set policies that would end coal use by 2030 and generate 100 percent of the country’s electricity with renewable energy by 2035. The activists had also demanded a tax as high as 180 euros-per-ton of CO2.

“It was bizarre, scandalous, how bad it was,” says Neubauer about the German climate protection package, which proposed a mere 10 euros-a-ton tax on CO2. “Despite all of the demonstrations and lobbying, what came out wasn’t even an attempt to meet the Paris Agreement. We had to explain to our supporters why we had expected results and didn’t get them. There was a shift in spirit [in FFF circles]: from hopefulness to outrage.”

The Germans weren’t the only climate activists rethinking things in the face of tepid government action. “We concluded that school strikes alone aren’t going to make governments change anything,” explains Vipulan Puvaneswaran of France’s Youth for Climate, the French ally of Fridays for Future. “We need a more radical change — the system has to change — and for that we need more radical protest forms.” In February, the group briefly occupied the Paris offices of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, covering its walls with graffiti.

The Germans, too, shifted course, moving away from school strikes to the targeting of businesses and intervening in election campaigns. “Businesses are more flexible, they can change faster than states,” says Neubauer. “They have to step up and help us make governments change.”

FFF Germany set its sights on the multinational giant Siemens, which had recently invested in a new Australian coal mine — a small investment for Siemens, but a tempting target for the climate activists. In January, FFF demonstrators besieged the company’s headquarters in Munich and other of its offices, delivering a petition with 57,000 signatures to Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser, who met one-on-one with Neubauer. Media coverage was intensive for a week, but in the end Siemens opted to proceed with the project.

“FFF has managed to mobilize enormous numbers of people and create a big buzz,” says Vries of Ende Gelände, “but we come out in the end empty-handed. Maybe we have to rethink how we pick our fights.”

FFF has enjoyed more success in targeting elections, which has greatly benefitted Europe’s Green parties. “Green parties across Northern Europe have been given an unbelievable push,” says Ellen Ueberschär of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, a German foundation close to the Green Party. In polls, Germany’s Greens have tripled their tally since the 2017 general election, turning the Greens into the country’s second-largest party.

Now, however, FFF’s path forward is unclear. If the movement is denied street demonstrations for months, it may find its resources drying up and activists demoralized. “I’m worried that their anger and frustration, which had generated so much positive energy, will turn into hopelessness,” says Ueberschär.

“At best, what can happen,” says Neubauer, “is that we turn the crisis experience into a crisis management experience. Because we are now tackling [the coronavirus] collectively, in solidarity and sustainably, we can learn how to cope with others. This can be helpful for the climate crisis.”

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Shifting gears: The climate protest movement in the age of coronavirus

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Coronavirus postpones crucial U.N. climate conference

COP26, the landmark United Nations climate conference of 2020 — originally planned to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November — will be delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“The world is facing an unprecedented global challenge & countries are rightly focusing on fighting #COVID19,” wrote Alok Sharma, the president of COP26 and a member of the U.K. parliament, on Twitter. “Due to this, #COP26 has been postponed.”

Policymakers and scientists have speculated for weeks about whether the conference, which would bring together delegations from almost 200 countries around the world, would be rescheduled due to the pandemic spreading across the globe.

Some had urged decision-makers not to delay the talks, saying that COP26 was a crucial step to advancing the goals of the 2016 Paris Agreement. “If it is going to be canceled, that should only be done at the last possible minute — in October,” Yvo do Boer, a former chief of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told the Guardian in mid-March. (The UNFCCC, the UN treaty responsible for preventing dangerous climate change, is the framework for the annual COP, or “Conference of the Parties,” meetings.)

But with national governments reeling from almost 900,000 cases of coronavirus worldwide, the possibility of a successful and productive COP26 looked increasingly slim.

The conference will be held instead in 2021, but the United Nations and the U.K. have not agreed upon a new date. This is not the first COP to experience logistical problems — last year, COP25 had to be moved abruptly from Chile to Spain due to social unrest — but the disruption in this case will be much more significant.

Countries were expected to present updated national emissions targets at COP26, and there was hope that many countries would pledge to reduce their emissions to net-zero by 2050. The world is currently far off-track to meet the goals set by the almost 200 countries that signed onto the Paris Agreement four years ago.

While the coronavirus may have slowed global emissions for the moment, experts worry that the pandemic will hinder the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy in the long run. And the COP26 delay could drive attention away from the need to reduce fossil fuel use as quickly as possible.

“COVID-19 is the most urgent threat facing humanity today,” Patricia Espinosa, U.N. executive secretary for climate change, said in a statement. “But we cannot forget that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity over the long term.”

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At least the coronavirus stimulus package isn’t bailing out the oil industry

After more than a week of squabbling over what should go into the third coronavirus relief package, the White House and Senate leaders reached a compromise on Tuesday night. And while no climate-friendly provisions made it into the $2 trillion stimulus bill, it wasn’t necessarily bad news for the planet either.

In the days leading up to this near-final bill, much of the debate centered around Democrats’ attempts to include certain green provisions, like support for the struggling renewable energy industry, and a requirement that a bailout for airlines be contingent on emission reduction promises.

The fight broke down into a sandbox tussle on Monday when Mitch McConnell accused Democrats of delaying relief for hospitals and struggling Americans in their pursuit of the Green New Deal, while Democrats argued that if the government was going to bail out the oil industry by purchasing $3 billion of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, why not help other hurting energy industries, too? The clash seems to have ended in a draw, as neither the oil bailout nor any clean energy or emissions reduction measures are in the most recent version of the bill. The only thing that stuck was $32 billion for the airline industry — no strings attached.

In the midst of the negotiations, a coalition of scientists, academics, and advocates from the environment, justice, and labor movements penned a letter to Congress with their own “menu of solutions” to make the stimulus a win-win for the economy and the environment.

The letter criticizes the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the stimulus package signed by President Obama during the Great Recession, for centering companies over workers, and it offers almost 100 policy interventions to improve on that model. If you’re someone who thought the Green New Deal sounded nice but weren’t sure what it meant in practice, I encourage you to check this letter out. The proposals are highly specific and cover everything from creating jobs to reducing emissions to shoring up communities that are vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

The ideas range from the familiar, like creating green jobs in clean energy, construction, the food system, transportation, and manufacturing, to the creative, like expanding funding for the National Endowment for the Arts to support out-of-work artists and makers. There are layers of proposals within each of the umbrellas I just mentioned, like providing direct funding to transit authorities to help them through the slowdown, changing zoning regulations to promote dense development, providing no-interest loans for local governments to build parks, supporting indigenous farming practices and protecting native seeds, and ending fossil fuel subsidies and directing those funds to help workers transition to new jobs.

The letter’s authors aren’t the only ones thinking about how the country could bounce back from coronavirus while getting ahead on climate change. Grist staff spoke with seven experts with more ideas for a green stimulus. While most called for short-term measures similar to the ones Democratic senators fought for, in the long term many wanted to see major investments in clean energy infrastructure with a focus on hiring from and serving under-resourced communities and communities of color.

Even though the $2 trillion stimulus that Congress is voting on this week is void of consideration for the planet, experts are saying it will probably only get us through the next few months. That means many of these ideas could still come into play in future legislation.

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At least the coronavirus stimulus package isn’t bailing out the oil industry

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One state just banned reusable shopping bags to fight coronavirus

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu announced last week that reusable bags will be temporarily banned during the COVID-19 outbreak, and that all retail stores will be required to use single-use paper or plastic bags.

The move is a dramatic reversal of the recent trend of states and municipalities banning single-use plastic bags. Over the past few years, Hawaii, California, and more recently Oregon and New York have prohibited the use of plastic bags. The bans are an effort to reduce plastic pollution, which is driven by single-use plastics like shopping bags and has taken a terrible toll on ocean ecosystems.

“Our grocery store workers are on the front lines of COVID-19, working around the clock to keep New Hampshire families fed,” said Sununu, a Republican, in a statement announcing the executive order. “With identified community transmission, it is important that shoppers keep their reusable bags at home given the potential risk to baggers, grocers and customers.”

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New Hampshire isn’t the only state to revisit its plastic bag policies due to COVID-19: Maine has postponed a plastic bag ban that was set to go into effect on Earth Day, and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has said it won’t take any enforcement actions against retailers who violate the state’s new ban until May. But New Hampshire is the first state to take the additional step of banning reusable bags.

So will the reusable bag ban make grocery store shoppers and workers safer? The science on that is somewhat shaky. It’s highly unlikely for the virus to spread from one person to another via a reusable cloth bag or another fabric, Vineet Menachery, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told Grist earlier this month. While the novel coronavirus, like previous coronaviruses, has been shown to survive for up to three days on plastic and stainless steel surfaces if left undisturbed, it’s easily destroyed with soap and water, or rubbing alcohol. So washing a cloth bag with detergent would stop the virus in its tracks.

That said, grocery store workers obviously don’t know whether a person bringing a reusable bag into a store has cleaned it recently or not. Sununu is right that grocery store workers are on the frontlines of this public health crisis, and we should all probably be doing what we can to make their lives easier and less stressful these days. And the climate impact of plastic vs. paper vs. cloth bags is actually more complicated than you might think — although reusing a bag you already own is always a more climate-friendly option than creating demand for a new bag.

So eco-conscious New Hampshirites shouldn’t feel too bad about obeying the governor’s order for now. Just make sure to keep tabs on your reusable bags so you don’t have to buy new ones once the pandemic is over.

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One state just banned reusable shopping bags to fight coronavirus

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