The Trump administration and federal agencies have left the American public juggling a handful of major climate and energy-related announcements within the last week. The Interior Department proposed a plan to allow offshore drilling in 90 percent of U.S. coastal waters, then backtracked on the proposal for Florida after the Republican governor expressed his concerns about tourism. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected Energy Secretary Rick Perry's plan to boost the coal and nuclear industries. NOAA data showed the U.S. was hit by 16 separate billion-dollar disaster events totaling $306.2 billion in damages—almost a billion dollars more than the previous record in 2005, the year Hurricane Katrina hit.
As I was gobbling up articles and jotting down story ideas, I thought of the millions of people in the South, and around the U.S., who hadn't heard this news. Maybe it was by choice, because they don't trust the media, or they can't handle hearing about one more regulatory rollback. Maybe it was the fact that they have no time: they run a farm in Arkansas, they're an undocumented immigrant in Memphis trying to figure out how to protect their family, they're still picking up the pieces of their Florida Keys home; they're busy searching for mining work in West Virginia; they live in rural Mississippi and lack access to the internet.
All of these ecological and political changes directly or indirectly affect all of us, though most people don't deal with the consequences until they hit home. Still, even after it's proven unrealistic, we often expect everyone to care, about everything, immediately.
No matter how closely we pay attention, it's impossible to understand everything that's happening, and how it all intertwines: how offshore drilling impacts global warming, how global warming impacts health, how sea level rise impacts offshore drilling, how disasters impact economies. That complexity gets lost in the uproar, the social media rants, the thinkpieces.
It's easier to digest on a local scale, when it's at our feet. For instance, I wrote a story on the health impacts of offshore drilling for the Daily Beast, and spoke to a restaurant owner in Virginia Beach who had spent years building a climate-friendly business. She was worried about her future, her restaurant's seafood supply, and beach tourism in the town, and that's how she got her customers on board with protesting offshore drilling. This week, a South Carolina Republican Congressman joined the House Climate Solutions Caucus because rising tides are drowning his family's farm. Florida fishermen are worried about their snapper catch being ruined by an oil spill.
There has been unprecedented bipartisan pushback against Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's plan. Local voices—rural voters, urban voters, Republicans, Democrats, fishermen, beachside restaurant owners, tourism outfits, conservation groups, seaside homeowners—spoke up. They probably wouldn't agree on much else, and many likely didn't pay attention to similar studies or announcements before this issue arose several years ago under the Obama administration. But now they're all in the same boat: no matter how many times Zinke claims "local voices matter" in his decisions, it's not the truth.
This shift didn't happen overnight, with one alarming study or one proposed plan. Understanding how people come to care about an issue is an exercise in patience. It offers lessons on information flow and knowledge gaps, and a glimpse into how to tackle these types of issues in the future—especially in a conservative region like the South.
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Stories worth your time
Louisiana says thousands of people should move from the coasts as sea levels rise, but can't afford to pay them to do it and hasn't publicly identified which houses are in zones that could take buyouts. According to an investigation by NPR, Reveal, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and PRX, the state has money to restore the coast, but most funds are restricted.
For decades, residents in the tiny Appalachian town of Minden, West Virginia have dealt with health effects from coal operation contamination. They've petitioned the EPA to clean up the creek and other spill areas, but say they can't get anyone to take their cancer problem seriously. “Every single neighbor I’ve had has died of cancer,” Annetta Coffman, a woman who can name 35 people in her neighborhood who have recently died from cancer, told Mother Jones.
Republican Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman who said he used to think climate change was "nonsense," is now the executive director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative. The Post and Courier details how Inglis spends his days traveling the world, trying to convince other Republicans that human-caused global warming is real and that conservatives can fix it.
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News flying under the radar
An unnamed international manufacturer of solar panels wants to build its headquarters and manufacturing plant in Jacksonville, Florida. "Project Volt” promises to create up to 800 jobs in the area.
Virginia concrete makers want to use Dominion Energy's coal ash, which sits in unlined ponds outside four Virginia power plants. Concrete companies say there's demand for it, but the energy giant says there isn't and proposed leaving the ash in place while taking steps to protect groundwater.
A new study suggests converging climate change patterns are leading to hotspots for "dead zones" where pollution and warming lead to oxygen-depleted areas of open ocean that can harm marine life. The research shows there are hotspots currently along the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, which could make future coastal storms more damaging.
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A quick correction: last week, I wrote that the International Trade Commission recommended a 35 percent tariff increase on solar imports to help U.S. makers compete. Actually, the ITC issued three separate recommendations; only one was a 35 percent tariff. Trump can choose any one of the three.
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