Aruba has drafted a constitutional amendment that would make it the second country in the world to recognize that nature has inherent rights. The amendment also affirms that people are entitled to a “clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” reported Inside Climate News.
The draft bill was announced by the country’s nature minister Ursell Arends earlier this month. It would require the government to “take preventive measures to protect against the negative consequences of climate change.”
If the amendment is approved, Aruba will be the second nation in the world after Ecuador to recognize the rights of nature in its constitution. About 30 countries — including Uganda, Bolivia and Spain — have recognized the inherent rights of particular species or ecosystems.
The public will be able to submit written comments through April 4, after which time the draft of the bill will be sent to the country’s advisory council. The government will have the opportunity to revise it before a final version is sent to the legislature, where it must be approved by a two-thirds majority.
If the amendment passes, it will be the first time Aruba has altered its constitution since 1986.
“By incorporating the Rights of Nature, possibly within Aruba’s Constitution, it provides every citizen with the legal [basis] to be a voice for nature. Rights of Nature can become an environmental justice tool for communities unduly impacted by unsustainable practices and its cumulative impact on nature as well as the general wellbeing of local inhabitants,” the United Nations said. “If successful, the constitution will reflect changing social mores in the increased protection of the local environment.”
Arends expressed hope that a final bill will be drafted by this summer, Inside Climate News reported.
“Everyone in Aruba is aware of the magnitude of environmental destruction that has taken place and the importance of nature to our economy and island,” Arends said.
Two million tourists visiting Aruba’s white sand beaches and coastal ecosystems annually make up a large part of the country’s $4 billion economy.
“The ecosystems in Aruba that we rely on are degraded to such an extent that they can’t function like they used to,” Arends said, as reported by Inside Climate News.
An “Explanatory Memorandum” to the draft amendment said the legislation strives for a higher and more broad level of protection than laws like the country’s Nature Conservation Regulation, which protects individual species.
“In an ecosystem everything is connected,” the memorandum states, as Inside Climate News reported. “Protection at the system level is necessary because it takes into account the interrelationships between species and their abiotic environment.”
Humans have the right to an environment that is “clean, healthy and sustainable,” according to the memorandum, which depends upon healthy ecosystems as well. The memorandum referred to the recognition of the right by the United Nations General Assembly in July of 2022.
The right of humans to a healthy environment is now reflected in laws passed by more than 150 countries, and is being used more and more in litigation to force governments to address climate change.
Aruba’s constitutional amendment would also require that the government periodically look at the state of the environment and issue reports every five years.
“I want to thank all those who have worked tirelessly to protect our environment,” Arends said previously, as reported by Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. “Together, we can restore the balance between people and Nature, and [take] care of what belongs to us. We are not giving any rights to Nature. Nature has rights. This is a first step toward acknowledging that.”
The maple tree outside your bedroom window may be a pretty sight to see first thing in the morning, but it could also be helping you get a good night’s sleep, according to new research.
A global study conducted in 18 countries found a link between people who live within view of a green street or blue spaces and better, longer sleep. The study analyzed six different types of nature exposure to what is considered insufficient sleep, or fewer than six hours of sleep in a night, for more than 16,000 people.
The six types of nature exposure considered in the study included streetscape greenery, views of blue space from home, green space within one kilometer of the home, coast within one kilometer of the home, visits to green spaces and visits to blue spaces.
The researchers did not find that green space or coast within one kilometer of the home had any significant effect on insufficient sleep, but they did find that streetscape greenery and visible blue spaces as well as visits to green and blue spaces both were associated with fewer cases of insufficient sleep.
“People that lived in greener streets reported better mental health, which was the driving factor behind getting a better night’s sleep,” Dr. Leanne Martin, lead author of the study and a lecturer and postdoctoral research associate at the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Environment and Human Health, said in a statement. “Streetscape greening initiatives already exist in urban cities to tackle environmental risks like flooding and heat island effects, but our findings suggest policymakers should extend that to residential areas to support public health by promoting healthier sleep habits.”
In total, the study found that only about 17% of people who had streetscape greenery experienced insufficient sleep, while 22% of people without streetscape greenery did not get enough sleep. The results were published in the journal Environmental Research.
“Whilst a five percent difference may seem small, these findings are comparable to the difference in sleep between people who are coping on their present income and those under financial strain,” said Dr. Mathew White, co-author of the study and a senior scientist at the University of Vienna’s Cognitive Science HUB. “With money worries widely recognised as an important determinant of sleep, we think this demonstrates street greenness should be recognised by governments as an important public health issue.”
The research adds to existing studies on the benefits of green space, including that people living in neighborhoods with more green space tend to have better mental health and that living near greenery can improve cognitive functioning.
But the authors noted some limitations to the study, including how other factors like air pollution, noise and light pollution could impact sleep.
Further, it’s important to note the inequity when it comes to access to these spaces around the world; the European Environment Agency reported reported that in the EU, green space is generally less accessible in low-income communities. Sustainable Earth reported that Buenos Aires, a major city with relatively low green space, has about 0.2 square meters of green space per person in densely populated areas, while high-income areas in the city have about 22.9 square meters of green space per person. The study authors did include factors like coping on present income and population density as control variables.
The authors hope that initiatives to incorporate more greenery in urban areas to help reduce the urban heat island effect and reduce flood risks can also consider improvements for mental health and sleep for residents.
“If further evidence can corroborate that these associations are causal, then improved provision and maintenance of residential blue and green spaces may offer a viable strategy of improving mental wellbeing and promoting healthier sleep duration at the population-level,” the study concluded. “Further, more targeted nature-based interventions may be an appropriate strategy to assist people who are most affected by insufficient sleep.”
Out among a scattering of islands spilled like beads into the Indonesian shallows, an extended experiment in coral restoration has revealed something marvelous: With a tender touch and a community to care for it, a reef can fully recover from the devastation of blast fishing in just four years.
The Spermonde Archipelago, which lies a dozen miles off the coast of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, was long home to some of the most dynamic reefs in the world, where schools of fish rainbowed over coral blanketing the seafloor. But dynamite fishing turned swaths of those wonders into wastes. That was, until, in 2018, when academics, government agencies, nonprofits, and local communities came together to restore them with a novel approach developed over years of testing and refinement. Now, a team of marine biologists and reef ecologists has released the first results in a suite of studies investigating the program’s achievements. The study, published earlier this month in Current Biology, shows that the method can help reefs rebuild in just a few years.
“We do always refer to corals, in particular in reefs, as these slow growing ecosystems that take a long time to recover, which they are,” said Rebecca Albright, a coral biologist at the California Academy of the Sciences who was not involved in the study. “So showing that they can regain rapid growth within four years is very encouraging.”
Promoting this recovery in Sulawesi is particularly important because the island sits at the center of the Indonesian archipelago, and in one corner of the Coral Triangle. This region, and Indonesia in particular, is home to the largest concentration of reefs and coral habitat in the world. Yet, many of these vibrant ecosystems were pulverized by decades of fishers dropping explosives into the water to concuss fish they could then scoop out of the sea. With loose rubble then left to tumble in the currents, corals had little hope of recovering on their own. Any coral spawns that might settle and grow were liable to be crushed by errant rocks.
To overcome this, the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Program – a nonprofit funded by the Mars corporation known for M&Ms, Twix, and Snickers – brought together restoration experts who developed what they call the reef star: a six-legged steel spider coated in sand, to which coral fragments harvested from nearby healthy reefs or found rolling with the tides are strapped. Restoration workers, often members of local communities, deploy them across dozens of sites. These webs provide the protection and stability the transplants need to grow, while also settling the debris created by blast fishing. Without such help, researchers believe that corals – those strange yet essential sea creatures – might never have returned to the damaged areas.
Within a year of placing the reef stars, the fragments grew into colonies. By year two, the branches of neighboring colonies knit into a marine embrace. By 2023, the former fragments had grown into orange bushels, broad yellow pads, and twisting pink tentacles that trains of fluorescent fish explore.
A diver installs a reef stars in a degraded coral reef to stabilize loose rubble and kickstart rapid coral growth.
The Ocean Agency
Scientific analysis confirmed what the eye could see. By measuring something called a carbonate budget – a way of understanding how well a colony can grow its limestone skeleton in the face of erosive forces like fish, divers, and passing vessels – researchers found that the rate of growth for sites established just four years before matched that of healthy, undamaged coral growing nearby.
Studying this growth helps scientists to understand how well a reef fulfills its role as the star of a healthy ecosystem providing habitat for marine life. “The 3-D structure of the reef is basically the city where these animals live,” said Ines Lange, a coral reef ecologist and lead author of the paper. “So, providing an actively growing three-dimensional structure is the basis for this whole ecosystem.”
The rate and state of growth also reveals whether the reef can be expected to once again protect coastlines from storm surges and coastal erosion — and grow quickly enough to keep up with rising seas to continue doing that. The results show that won’t be a problem around South Sulawesi. Other restoration efforts, like those in the Florida Keys, tend to string up a few strands of coral fragments or pepper the seafloor with them in a way that felt, for Lange, “like a little tiny garden.” But, at the Mars program sites, “It’s like they put a forest there.”
“I think it was the first time I saw a restoration site that was a proper reef,” she said.
These sea groves are populated primarily by branching, arborescent coral sprouting from the reef star arrays in the coastal shallows. They’ve created a terrain flourishing with life that turns the aquamarine waters into a technicolor dreamscape. Overall, the method has proven itself even to those watching it unfold from afar.
“The Mars project has set the bar really high for how you can do evidence-based reef restoration,” said Lisa Bostrom-Einarsson, a coral reef ecologist with the University of Exeter.
Though not affiliated with the study, Bostrom-Einarsson has collaborated with two of its authors on a previous paper. Unsurprisingly, the world of coral reef conservation remains small, despite the great need for its work.
Four years ago, Bostrom-Einnarsson compiled a systematic and comprehensive review of reef restoration projects, which she is in the process of updating based on the progress made in such efforts globally in the intervening years. That background led her to conclude, after reading Lange’s paper, that “it’s a gold standard study on a gold standard project.”
A healthy coral reef in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Ines Lange
Still, Mars’ reef stars are suited best to sites like South Sulawesi where the trauma is physical. When reefs have been broken by widespread blast fishing or gored by ship groundings – of which there arehundredsevery year – the study shows the devices can help heal those injuries with startling ease. But in areas like the Great Barrier Reef marred by recurrent bleaching events that offer little of the reprieve reefs need to recover, they can only do so much; the repeated heat waves spurred by elevated temperatures make the water itself hostile to coral. Nonetheless, the Mars program launched an effort late last year to adapt its approach for Australia’s iconic reef. The kinds of coral most sensitive to warming are also those best fit for the Mars method.
In the waters of South Sulawesi, the restoration team favored branching corals both because they make up the bulk of the healthy reefs in the region and because they grow quickly — Bostrom-Einarsson called them “weedy coral.” But the tree-like Acropora can’t stand the heat the way their massive, slow-growing cousins the brain coral can; Acropora are among the first to bleach when temperatures climb. So, while the marine meadows at the restoration sites have prospered in recent years, more remains to be done to make them resilient to warming seas.
“You can put a bunch of coral back out into place, but that doesn’t mean you’re building a resilient reef,” Albright said. “You have to have diversity.”
Lange said the Mars program is bolstering the ecosystems’ resilience, transplanting massive corals and providing the surfaces they need to establish, settle, and mature. This is just one area that reflects the responsive approach Bostrom-Einarrson said the Mars program has brought to its efforts by listening to scientists, considering their evidence, and tapping their expertise.
But to avoid what Bostrom-Einarrson called “scientific colonialism” – in which researchers from well-funded institutions visit under-resourced areas to collect data before scurrying home – the Mars program has built partnerships with local communities and universities. They are involved in everything from building the reef stars and installing them to maintaining and monitoring restoration sites, all of which gives them a sense of ownership over the project by making them guardians of the reefs.
And that may be one of the most important outcomes of a project like this. After all, coastal communities in places like South Sulawesi benefit most from rebuilding the reefs that protect them from the storms and surging seas that climate change brings. But the researchers acknowledged that restoration efforts like these are but band aids. They aren’t a substitute for abating emissions and mitigating climate change so reefs can escape the endless onslaught of bleach-inducing, coral-killing heat waves.
“We’re not saying we can repair all the coral reefs in the world with this method,” Lange said. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something on the scale that we can to change something for a local community, because it makes a huge difference for them.”
So, if for that reason alone, these efforts matter – even in the wake of a warming world.
But after a decade-long survey by the National Flying-fox Monitoring Program (NFFMP) — coordinated by CSIRO, along with state and federal environmental agencies — it appears that the grey-headed flying fox has been relatively stable since 2012.
“Despite the general perception that the species is in decline, our raw data and the modelled population trend suggest the grey-headed flying fox population has remained stable during the NFFMP period, with the range also stable,” the researchers wrote in the survey. “These results indicate that the species’ extreme mobility and broad diet bestow it with a high level of resilience to various disturbance events.”
While heat waves, bushfires and drought are all hard on flying foxes, their overall numbers have been consistent, the researchers said in The Conversation. However, they emphasized caution.
“While this study is good news for the species, we must not become complacent. Heatwaves are expected to become more frequent and intense as the climate changes. Only further monitoring can determine its effects,” they said.
Because of a 30 percent population decline over 10 years, the flying fox was first determined to be “vulnerable” in 2001. The assessment also found the potential for continued habitat loss in the species’ core range due to land clearing.
Flying foxes socialize and rest during daylight hours in roosts that can consist of more than 100,000 individuals. At dusk, they fly off to forage at distances as far as nearly 25 miles from their home base — sometimes traveling more than 186 miles in one night.
“Their food of choice is nectar from a wide variety of eucalypt, bloodwood and melaleuca species. In return, they play an important pollination role, as if they were nocturnal bees with a one-metre wingspan,” the researchers said in The Conversation. “They also feed extensively on native figs. In urban areas, they feast on the nectar and fruit of introduced species found in gardens and street trees.”
Individual flying foxes often change roosts, moving throughout their range where food can be found. The shifting of occupants makes calculating accurate numbers difficult.
Over the course of the program, 912 potential roots were visited and nearly 12,000 counts taken. The research team found grey-headed flying foxes at 469 of the roosts.
Between 2012 and 2022, the team counted 580,000 grey-headed flying foxes in each survey, on average. Their total numbers were from 330,000 to 990,000, depending upon the season, food availability and their reproductive cycle.
“Flying foxes pup late in the year. When those pups become independent, they can be counted. This results in a sudden increase in the numbers, typically around February. So while our data show peaks and troughs throughout each year, overall the population remained stable,” the research team said.
The model the team came up with allowed for seasonal changes in calculating overall population trends. The model found that grey-headed flying fox numbers stayed at roughly 600,000 adults during the survey period. The study determined that there was a 70 percent likelihood of a small increase in population and a 30 percent likelihood of the population declining slightly.
The research team pointed out that the flying fox population seemed to be stable even in the face of extreme events like severe heat waves and the megafires of 2019 to 2020.
“The flying foxes seem resilient to these threats for two main reasons. First, they are nomadic and well adapted to travelling long distances. This allows them to evade threats such as fires and droughts,” the researchers explained in The Conversation. “Second, grey-headed flying foxes are likely to benefit from a ‘human-modified landscape’. In other words, they may well be urban ‘winners’, as the urban areas we’ve created provide diverse foraging opportunities.”
All major cities in Australia had grey-headed flying foxes continually living in them during the survey.
“These urban environments offer a smorgasbord of flowering and fruiting species, especially palms and figs. Many of these species are exotics, with flowering and fruiting patterns that flying foxes can readily exploit,” the researchers said.
The team highlighted that long-term impacts on the grey-headed flying fox were not known, considering monitoring stopped just two years following the 2019 to 2020 bushfires.
While grey-headed flying foxes still face threats to their survival, including those caused by climate change, the research team said they are safe for now.
“After ten years of monitoring we can safely say the grey-headed flying fox is doing ok, for the time being,” they told The Conversation.
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has announced $6 billion in funding to decarbonize the country’s heavy industry facilities, including those that produce concrete, steel, iron and foods like cheese.
As part of the Biden-Harris administration’s Investing in America agenda, DOE has planned 33 projects in more than 20 states with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, revitalizing industrial communities and bolstering U.S. manufacturing, a press release from DOE said.
“Spurring on the next generation of decarbonization technologies in key industries like steel, paper, concrete, and glass will keep America the most competitive nation on Earth,” said Jennifer Granholm, U.S. Secretary of Energy, in the press release. “DOE is making the largest investment in industrial decarbonization in the history of the United States. These investments will slash emissions from these difficult-to-decarbonize sectors and ensure American businesses and American workers remain at the forefront of the global economy.”
The projects — funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — will create tens of thousands of jobs, as well as speed up the demonstration of commercial-scale emerging industrial decarbonization technologies that are essential to meeting domestic manufacturing and climate targets.
The focus will be on industries with the highest emissions where decarbonization technologies will make the most difference. Altogether, the projects are predicted to lead to an annual carbon emissions reduction in excess of 15.4 million tons — equivalent to that of three million gas-powered automobiles.
The new technologies will “set a new gold standard for clean manufacturing in the United States and around the world,” Granholm said, as The Guardian reported.
Many of the new projects will employ technologies that can be adopted throughout the sector and multiply the amount of emissions reductions, bolstering clean energy worldwide, the press release said.
Food manufacturer Kraft Heinz would receive as much as $170.9 million for the installation of heat pumps and electric heaters for operations like drying macaroni at 10 of their facilities across the U.S., reported The New York Times.
“It’s different from the electricity sector, where widely available alternatives to fossil fuels like wind, solar and batteries have come down dramatically in cost,” Morgan Bazilian, a Colorado School of Mines public policy professor, said recently in an interview, as The New York Times reported. “With industry, we haven’t yet seen clear winners emerge at the price needed.”
Almost 80 percent of the new projects are in disadvantaged communities, as defined by the Justice40 Initiative, providing a chance for investment in areas that have been subjected to divestment for years, according to DOE.
Nearly a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from the industrial sector. Projects supported by the new funding would reduce carbon emissions by 77 percent on average.
“The industrial sector’s unique and complex decarbonization challenges require equally unique and innovative decarbonization solutions that leverage multiple pathways including energy efficiency, electrification, and alternative fuels and feedstocks such as clean hydrogen,” the press release said.
The 33 projects chosen for award negotiations include seven having to do with chemicals and refining, six iron and steel, six cement and concrete, three food and beverage, three glass projects and involving one paper and pulp.
Mike Ireland, president and CEO of nonprofit Portland Cement Association, said U.S.-scaled concrete and cement technologies could be adopted by Global South developing nations and used to build more sustainable buildings and highways, reported The Guardian.
“I think the United States can be a leader here,” Ireland said.
The European Union’s nature restoration law, which had set out to restore 20% of land and sea areas in the EU by 2030, has now been postponed indefinitely after a vote to pass the bill on Monday was canceled.
The nature restoration law was initially proposed in June 2022 and has spent the last several months going through the legal approval process in the EU. But following protests by farmers and a withdrawal of support from Hungary, the EU canceled the vote.
“It seems that we don’t have a qualified majority anymore because… Hungary has changed its vote. We have to understand why they do that,” said Alain Maron, a regional climate minister for Belgium, as reported by The Associated Press.
The European Commission had already previously weakened environmental regulations, including the proposed nature restoration law, because of the protests. Laws on sustainable farm practices, such as crop rotation and reduced use of pesticides, have been weakened or scrapped altogether, The Associated Press reported earlier this month.
“The agricultural sector is a very important sector, not only in Hungary, but everywhere in Europe,” said Anikó Raisz, Minister of State for Environmental Policy and Circular Economy of Hungary, as reported by Reuters.
The decision to cancel the vote to pass the nature restoration law also comes ahead of elections for the European Parliament that are to take place this June.
According to the European Parliament, about 80% of EU habitats are in poor condition. The bill would have worked to restoring 90% of these degraded habitats to a “good” condition as well as enacting protections to prevent further degradation.
“We condemn all Member States who are not supporting the law — at best, it suggests a deep failure to understand the situation we are in and what it means for the rights of citizens,” the #RestoreNature coalition, which includes BirdLife Europe, ClientEarth, European Environmental Bureau (EEB) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-EU, shared in a statement.
An online public forum on the law in 2021 showed “overwhelming support” from over 110,000 people and organizations, according to Carbon Brief. The law was agreed upon in November 2023 and passed a European Parliament vote in February 2024.
The vote that had been planned for Monday was to formally adopt the law via the European Council. This final step is typically considered a formality; however, in the case of the nature restoration law, environmentalists are concerned over whether it will come to vote again at all. The #RestoreNature coalition is calling for lawmakers to adopt the law before the EU Parliament takes its summer recess.
In Florida, the effects of climate change are hard to ignore, no matter your politics. It’s the hottest state — Miami spent a record 46 days above a heat index of 100 degrees last summer — and many homes and businesses are clustered along beachfront areas threatened by rising seas and hurricanes. The Republican-led legislature has responded with more than $640 million for resilience projects to adapt to coastal threats.
But the same politicians don’t seem ready to acknowledge the root cause of these problems. A bill awaiting signature from Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, relax regulations on natural gas pipelines, and delete the majority of mentions of climate change from existing state laws.
“Florida is on the front lines of the warming climate crisis, and the fact that we’re going to erase that sends the wrong message,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of the CLEO Institute, a climate education and advocacy nonprofit in Florida. “It sends the message, at least to me and to a good majority of Floridians, that this is not a priority for the state.”
As climate change has been swept into the country’s culture wars, it’s created a particularly sticky situation in Florida. Republicans associate “climate change” with Democrats — and see it as a pretext for pushing a progressive agenda — so they generally try to distance themselves from the issue. When a reporter asked DeSantis what he was doing to address the climate crisis in 2021, DeSantis dodged the question, replying, “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.” In practice, this approach has consisted of trying to manage the effects of climate change while ignoring what’s behind them.
The bill, sponsored by state Representative Bobby Payne, a Republican from Palatka in north-central Florida, would strike eight references to climate change in current state laws, leaving just seven references untouched, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Some of the bill’s proposed language tweaks are minor, but others repeal whole sections of laws.
For example, it would eliminate a “green government grant” program that helps cities and school districts cut their carbon emissions. A 2008 policy stating that Florida is at the front lines of climate change and can reduce those impacts by cutting emissions would be replaced with a new goal: providing “an adequate, reliable, and cost-effective supply of energy for the state in a manner that promotes the health and welfare of the public and economic growth.”
Water floods part of a street that runs near the Strait of Florida during the seasonal king tides in October 2019 in Key West, Florida. Researchers say the Florida Keys will see increased flooding as sea levels continue to rise. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Florida politicians have a history of attempting to silence conversations about the fossil fuel emissions driving sea level rise, heavier floods, and worsening toxic algae blooms. When Rick Scott was the Republican governor of the state between 2011 and 2019, state officials were ordered to avoid using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” in communications, emails, and reports, according to the Miami Herald.
It foreshadowed what would happen at the federal level after President Donald Trump took office in 2017. The phrase “climate change” started disappearing from the websites of federal environmental agencies, with the term’s use going down 38 percent between 2016 and 2020. “Sorry, but this web page is not available for viewing right now,” the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change site said during Trump’s term.
Red states have demonstrated that politicians don’t necessarily need to acknowledge climate change to adapt to it, but Florida appears poised to take the strategy to the extreme, expunging climate goals from state laws while focusing more and more money on addressing its effects. In 2019, DeSantis appointed Florida’s first “chief resilience officer,” Julia Nesheiwat, tasked with preparing Florida for rising sea levels. Last year, he awarded the Florida Department of Environmental Protection more than $28 million to conduct and update flooding vulnerability studies for every county in Florida.
“Why would you address the symptoms and not the cause?” Arditi-Rocha said. “Fundamentally, I think it’s political maneuvering that enables them [Republicans] to continue to set themselves apart from the opposite party.”
She’s concerned that the bill will increase the state’s dependence on natural gas. The fossil fuel provides three-quarters of Florida’s electricity, leaving residents subject to volatile prices and energy insecurity, according to a recent Environmental Defense Fund report. As Florida isn’t a particularly windy state, she sees the proposed ban on offshore wind energy as mostly symbolic. “I think it’s more of a political kind of tactic to distinguish themselves.” Solar power is already a thriving industry that’s taking off in Florida — it’s called the Sunshine State for a reason.
Greg Knecht, the executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Florida, thinks that the removal of climate-related language from state laws could discourage green industries from coming to the state. (And he’s not ready to give up on wind power.) “I just think it puts us at a disadvantage to other states,” Knecht said. Prospective cleantech investors might see it as a signal that they’re not welcome.
The bill is also out of step with what most Floridians want, Knecht said. According to a recent survey from Florida Atlantic University, 90 percent of the state’s residents accept that climate change is happening. “When you talk to the citizens of Florida, the majority of them recognize that the climate is changing and want something to be done above and beyond just trying to build our way out of it.”
Driving on Interstate 215 south of Salt Lake City in late January, I couldn’t help but notice the bumper stickers on the pickup truck in front of me. One featured a rattlesnake and the classic motto “Don’t tread on me,” which dates to the Revolutionary War but has been co-opted by many right-wing ideologues. And the other featured a map of a shrinking lake and the words “Keep the Salt Lake Great,” the motto of a local environmental group focused on protecting Utah’s rivers and ecosystems.
Those dual views perfectly capture the ethos of Utah, a deep red state whose natural beauty is being threatened by more intense heat waves and extreme drought. A proud coal- and oil-producing state, it’s led by conservative lawmakers, and recent national surveys show it’s one of the most Republican states in the country. Back in 2010, the Utah Legislature even passed a resolution that essentially wrote climate change denial into state policy by urging the EPA to “cease its carbon dioxide reduction policies, programs, and regulations until climate data and global warming science are substantiated.”
But since then, Utah has been impacted by climate change more than most states — over the last 50 years, temperatures in the state have risen at about twice the global average, and it has faced worsening drought, wildfires, flash floods and extreme heat waves. The impact has been devastating on the health and well-being of residents, with decreasing productivity of farms and higher rates of respiratory disease and asthma, along with other heat-related diseases.
And climate change has seriously damaged one of the state’s natural wonders — that map on the truck driver’s bumper sticker reveals how climate change has shrunk the Great Salt Lake’s footprint by half in the last decades due to the reduced flow of mountain streams that feed the lake and higher demand for freshwater for new development and agriculture.
The crisis has also increased climate awareness in the state, with half of residents in a recent survey saying that climate change is an extremely or very serious problem and 64 percent saying they’ve noticed significant effects from climate change over the past 10 years.
“For voters, climate has become a bigger issue than it has been in the past,” said Josh Kraft, government and corporate relations manager for Utah Clean Energy, a public interest group that launched a historic compact in 2020 that brought together more than 100 of the state’s political and business leaders to stimulate support for clean energy and energize conversations on climate action and clean air solutions.
That bipartisan concern with climate change is now impacting politics in the state — where two self-professed climate candidates are running to replace Mitt Romney in the U.S. Senate. In total, there are five GOP candidates polling higher than 3 percent and three Democratic candidates running in the June 25 primary.
In the Republican primary, the frontrunner, U.S. Rep. John Curtis, is highlighting the need to address the climate crisis, pushing for more support for clean energy. He founded and leads the Conservative Climate Caucus in Congress and blames his party for not taking climate change seriously.
“We want to work together as Republicans and Democrats, because at the end of the day, we all care about leaving the Earth better than we found it,” Curtis recently told the Sierra Club. “That’s how I talk about it — who doesn’t want to leave the Earth better than we found it?”
But climate activists are doubtful, claiming that Curtis is too reliant on industry-friendly solutions such as carbon capture and opposes some of President Biden’s signature climate accomplishments, including the Inflation Reduction Act.
In the Democratic primary, mountaineer and environmental activist Caroline Gleich has made climate action and air quality a key focus of her campaign. She rallied lawmakers in the state to take action to increase water flow to the Great Salt Lake as part of a larger climate agenda that includes cutting subsidies for fossil fuels, taking advantage of Inflation Reduction Act funds aimed at increasing the use of renewable energy in the state, and protecting public lands. “Our mountains, our air, our rivers and lakes, our lives deserve respect,” Gleich has repeatedly said.
Yet she sees a disconnect between public support for climate action and the policies pursued by the state’s political leadership, noting that the Legislature recently voted to increase the tax on EV charging and to reduce the tax on gasoline. “And when you look at who’s funding these candidates, you see there’s a huge amount of oil and gas and fossil fuel companies giving money to them,” Gleich said.
Indeed, Curtis is a major recipient — his district includes an area known as Carbon County due to its abundance of coal and natural gas, and he has accepted $265,000 from oil and gas industry-linked political action committees since 2017. Curtis did not return calls from Capital & Main for comment.
Gleich’s view is echoed by Zach Frankel of the Utah Rivers Council, an environmental group that distributes the Great Salt Lake bumper stickers. “We’re in a state of climate change denial — politicians might say that it’s real in an election year, but if we start asking them if we should embrace climate adaptive policies, they say no. They assume that any crisis is decades away.”
Frankel is encouraged by the growing public concern over climate issues, such as the shrinking Great Salt Lake — the largest remaining wetland ecosystem in the American West — and the growing frustration with the lack of action.
“The state of Utah has refused to embrace any kind of meaningful policy plan to raise lake levels,” he said, predicting that “it will have to get worse before it gets better.”
As elsewhere in the country, younger voters in the state seem to be more galvanized than older voters about the issue and demanding action. At a climate strike on the steps of the Utah state house last year, activists condemned the Legislature for not making serious efforts to reduce emissions. A legislator’s move to slash emissions at U.S. Magnesium, which harvests lithium and magnesium from the Great Salt Lake, was scaled back to a mere study of the effects of pollutants created in the process.
“Young people are disproportionately affected by eco-anxiety because it’s their future,” said Gleich, who at 38 is the youngest candidate in the Senate race. “That is what is on the line in this election.”
