Could religion provide answers for climate anxiety?

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This week:

• Could religion provide answers for climate anxiety?
• Canada can't seem to quit thermal coal
• This scientist is calling for 'urgent optimism' in the face of climate change

Could religion provide answers for climate anxiety?

Climate grief is a growing issue among youth in Canada, and as extreme weather events become more frequent, universities such as Simon Fraser University in Vancouver are looking at implementing ways to tackle the accompanying anxiety.

The school's faculty of environment and its Multifaith Centre have collaborated on a pilot project to assist students with this problem. The Ecological Chaplaincy project, which was spearheaded by religious studies and environmental ethics lecturer Jason Brown, launched on Jan. 29. 

"My students have expressed just the sort of low-level and background anxiety about … what's happening when there's weird weather or wildfire smoke," Brown told What On Earth host Laura Lynch. 

"Some of them admit, almost flippantly, they don't want to have kids or they think it might be irresponsible to have children. Others feel hopeless and helpless, so they are almost not sure why they're continuing with their degrees if it feels like the future is kind of slipping between their fingers," said Brown, who is SFU's first appointed ecological chaplain.

According to a 2023 study out of Lakehead University in Ontario, young Canadians aged 16 to 25 are experiencing a sense of loss related to climate change. The study reported that more than 50 per cent of study participants experience fear, anxiousness and feelings of powerlessness. Meanwhile, more than 70 per cent claim the future frightens them and more than 75 per cent report the climate crisis is affecting their mental health.

The Ecological Chaplaincy project was born of Brown's need to support students in processing their climate-related emotions. But his students aren't the only ones. Ernest Ng, SFU's Buddhist chaplain, has heard similar sentiments from his students.

Ng believes religion helps people understand their relationship to themselves and the environment and is a useful device in tackling ecological grief.

"I think one important [Buddhist] teaching and one important perspective is to see our interconnectedness with nature in the world," Ng said. "Very often … we talk about nature or we talk about the ecosystem as if we are outside of it, like we are not part of it."

Ng maintains that humans are inseparable from the natural world and that we must become more aware of how our actions and behaviours affect the planet. Practising mindfulness is an essential part of reducing harm to the environment, he said.

Despite just launching in January, Brown is already thinking of ways to incorporate chaplains from other religious traditions to ensure the project is as inclusive as it can be.

"The interesting thing that we're seeing in our times is that a lot of people are letting go of labels and identifications with religion," Brown said. "And so one of the words that I use for that is an 'interpath' dialogue. That would include dialogue with Indigenous peoples, conversations about reconciliation, but also the unaffiliated or the none-of-the-above category."

Brown hopes to arrange talking circles with the chaplaincy program, forest walks in nearby Burnaby Mountain and other activities that incorporate mindfulness and encourage students to connect to a sense of place in the world, away from their desks and without phones.

Brown hopes these kinds of activities can help students process their climate anxiety and replace it with hope.

"Grief and love [for the planet] are deeply entangled and deeply intertwined," Brown said. "And so if we want to talk about climate grief, we have to talk about love."

— Dannielle Piper

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Reader feedback

Following last week's newsletter, which looked at how fungi can fight climate change, we received this note from Marie Christenson in Sackville, N.S.: 

"Your newsletter was practical and interesting today. Mushrooms are good for health as well (the ones you can eat, that is). I really liked the casket-free burial idea…. Us simple-minded folk get overwhelmed with the climate change language (especially seniors like me). Can you include a section of elemental, basic Climate Change 101?"

Actually, we do have a resource for people looking to brush up on the basics of climate change and language that might be overwhelming: CBC's Climate Glossary, which we are constantly updating. Please check it out!

In last week's newsletter, we also discussed how last year's annual global temperature record was surprising to many climatologists.

Tom Hann wrote: 

"The statement that 'it's unclear why 2023 was so hot' misses a key parameter behind climate change, namely the greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration in the atmosphere. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tracks GHGs in the atmosphere. Again, the 2023 concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane continued to set new year-ending record highs of 422 [parts per million] and 1,933 [parts per billion], respectively. Once compiled for 2023, the Annual Greenhouse Gas Index, which in 2022 was 1.49, will likely exceed 1.50: a 50 per cent increase over the greenhouse gas concentrations in the reference year of 1990. These increasing concentrations of GHGs are increasing the cozy warming atmospheric blanket around planet Earth."

Greenhouse gas emissions have greatly increased since 1990. But for many climatologists — armed with that knowledge — 2023 went above and beyond what was expected. And some feel that there were other factors at play that exacerbated the warming trend.

In an interview with CBC News for a story on ocean warming last month, Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit independent climate analysis organization, said CO2 emissions, along with other greenhouse gases, have warmed the planet by roughly 1.3 C since preindustrial times. And while "any individual year variability can add two-10ths of a degree Celsius on top of that … the temperatures [we saw last] year wouldn't be possible, or even in the realm of possibility," without outstanding factors. He cited record-breaking ocean temperatures, potential lingering consequences from the eruption of the Hunga Tonga submarine volcano in 2022 and the reduction of aerosols in the lower atmosphere that would have otherwise reflected the sun's radiation back into space as some potential reasons for the spike. 

Although 2023 was abnormally warm, it doesn't mean Earth's temperature will continue on that alarming path. However, even a more moderate trajectory will be a warming one unless we drastically reduce GHG emissions, as Hann notes.

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca. 

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The Big Picture: Should Canada ban exports of thermal coal?

Coal is the dirtiest and most-polluting fossil fuel, which is why Canada plans to phase out unabated coal-fired power plants by 2030. That change is well underway, but the same is not true for another 2030 pledge: banning the export of coal used for electricity generation, known as thermal coal.

In 2021, on stage at COP26, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would stop exporting thermal coal by 2030, and the Liberals campaigned on it. But recently released government data shows that thermal coal exports have instead shot up.

Exports of thermal coal from Canada and of U.S. coal moving through Canadian ports added up to more than 18 million tonnes in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. The government released the data in response to a question from the NDP's Laurel Collins, MP for Victoria, who last week tabled a private member's bill proposing a ban on thermal coal exports. Environmental groups praised the bill. 

Melanie Snow of Ecojustice called the federal government "painstakingly slow" in taking action on exports while global consumption of coal has hit an all-time high.

"If we aren't OK with burning coal in Canada, we shouldn't feed coal consumption overseas," said Julia Levin of Environmental Defence in a statement. 

The government reply to Collins's question, signed by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, said "ending coal-power emissions is one of the single-most important steps the world must take in the fight against climate change." 

As for the promised ban? "Canada continues to consider a range of possible options."

CBC News requested 2023 data on thermal coal exports, and further comment on a possible ban, but did not receive it in time for publication.

— Lisa Johnson

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• Many popular tourist destinations charge visitors a tourist tax or fee. Barcelona is planning to direct 100 million euros collected from its tourist tax to a fund that will install heat pumps and solar panels in schools.

• Petrochemical companies have known for 40 years that recycling plastic wasn't a viable solution to plastic waste, largely because recycled plastic was too expensive and low-quality to compete with new plastic, a new report finds. But it also found that plastic makers pushed recycling as a solution anyway.

• There's a "warming hole" in the U.S. southeast where temperatures haven't warmed or have even cooled, unlike the rest of the country. Scientists have now figured out why — and it has to do with trees.

• Los Angeles just got half a year's rain in three days. Infrastructure to make the city "spongier" didn't just prevent flooding but allowed it to collect enough rain to supply "locally produced" water to 106,000 households for the entire year.

This scientist is calling for 'urgent optimism' in the face of climate change

It's hard to be optimistic about the world when you see the devastating effects of climate change all around you. Hannah Ritchie, a data and environmental scientist at the University of Oxford, says that kind of pessimism gets in the way of progress.

Ritchie is the deputy editor and lead researcher of the online publication Our World In Data. In her new book, Not the End of the World, she calls for people to adopt an "urgent optimism" about climate change. 

The following is an excerpt from her conversation with As It Happens host Nil Köksal. 

As you started to write this book, you said you printed out a picture of your younger self and put it next to your computer. Who was that Hannah?

I am from a generation that has always grown up with climate change. I remember as ... a young kid, already being quite anxious about climate change. 

Then I went on to study environmental sciences at university, and it just got worse and worse. You're just bombarded with negative trend after negative trend.

I felt kind of helpless to do anything about it and to make the world a better place. The Hannah back then was very despondent and almost kind of paralyzed by the future that we might inherit.

Instead of despair, you write that the world needs more optimism. Urgent optimism, but not blind optimism. Tell me more.

I kind of wanted to give a slightly different message about climate and the other environmental problems. 

It's not to dismiss these problems or say they're not urgent, or they're not big, or they won't have really catastrophic consequences in the future. But there are ways that we can talk about them. And we are starting to see progress. We just need much, much more of it. 

I make the case for what I call urgent optimism in the book. It's different from blind optimism, which is kind of sitting back and saying, "Oh, I'm sure the future will be fine."

Urgent optimism acknowledges that there's a massive problem, but also has this level of optimism that there's something that we can do to tackle it. 

There was a turning point that you write about, and that was seeing the work of Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician, statistician and public speaker who teaches global development.

Hans Rosling would do these amazing talks [and] read you statistics and data to show how the world has changed over the last few centuries. 

When you look at the data … the basic [negative] assumptions that we have about the world are often wrong. He would show on almost every measure, things have gotten much, much better.

For me, that was a key turning point from this despair that everything in the world was getting worse to this realization that … we actually are making a lot of progress and we can find solutions. 

So the work isn't done ... but we've made some progress and that should give you hope?

We're very, very far from done. We still have massive problems in the world and massive inequalities. So showing this data isn't to pat ourselves on the back and say, "OK, it's fine, we can stop now."

It's to show that progress is actually possible. And by learning those lessons from the past on how we achieve these gains, you can actually drive momentum and drive much, much more progress in the future.

You write that accepting defeat on climate change is an indefensibly selfish position to take. You also underline that you're not going to debate climate science or concerns about climate change in this book. 

We're very, very far past the position of debating, "Is climate change real? Or humans causing it?"… Yes, it's real and we are the driver. 

It's more about solutions. We need to move past the "Is it happening?" to the "What do we actually do about it?"

There's such large inequalities in the world on who climate change will impact the most. It will predominantly fall on people [with] lower incomes in poorer countries who have done the least to cause this. 

In rich countries, in particular, if we step back and say, "Oh, this is too hard, we don't want to tackle this," to me, that's a selfish position to take because ... the adverse impacts will most heavily fall on the poorest that haven't really contributed to the problem.

– Sheena Goodyear 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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